We've all got bruises. (Leico)

....and spills out

Nico laid out the photos of him, Bianca, and her friends.

"She was my protector. Anytime I came home crying from school, or scraped my knees on a bike ride, she was there. She'd just tilt her favorite hat down on her head and look at me with fire in her eyes and say 'Wait right here' in a tone she reserved only for me. And she'd fix it."

Leo ran his index finger down the girl's face in a photo. "She sounds amazing," he said softly.

"She was amazing," Nico agreed in a reverent voice. "And she wasn't just like that with me. She was like that around everyone she met. I guess that's why she..." His voice cut off abruptly. "Why she sacrificed herself."

Leo reached out slowly and rubbed his back. "Hey- um. There there?"

Nico laughed shakily. "You suck at comforting people, Leo."

"Hey man, I'm better with machines. There's a reason I'm better at wood shop than therapy, I suppose."

"Yeah, you somehow built a dragon in one class period? How does that even work?" Nico said, somewhat relieved to get off the subject.

"Well, growing up, I didn't have a lot of opportunities to see animals. So I kind of created this mega-pet for myself. It was a dragon, named Festus. I actually built a complete model and carried it everywhere for months."

"What happened to Festus?" Nico asked softly.
"Well, when I say I took him everywhere, I do mean everywhere. I'd be taking a bath and Festus would be sitting on the toilet. I slept with him on my pillow. He was like my security blanket, you know? I took him on a car trip once and my Aunt Rosa said he took up too much space, so she threw him out the window."

Nico gulped. "And here I am, complaining about my problems like some ass, when you've probably had it worse."

"Woah there, slow down, Nico. Talking about painful experiences doesn't have to be a competition, you know. You can just share past experiences without trying to measure your pain against someone else's, okay?" Leo clammed his mouth shut after his unexpected rant, and Nico gave him a rare, thin smile.

"What happened?"

"Excuse me?"

"To Festus. And you. After he got thrown out of the car."

He supposed, if you were trying to pinpoint it, the moment Nico referred to Festus as a "he" and not an "it", that is, the moment he seemed to recognize that an object can mean just as much to you as a person, was the moment Leo started to fall a little bit in love.

"Well for starters, I cried nonstop for about five hours," Leo confessed, slightly flustered. "And I'm not talking quiet sniffles, either. I'm talking full blown heaving sobs, so hard I almost puked, and snot everywhere. Not pretty. The next day Aunt Rosa signed the papers to put me in the foster care system."

Nico's eyebrows shot up. "What? Just like that?"

Leo nodded sheepishly. "Yeah, just like that. I was just a little kid, and my mom had just been killed in a fire. And like Mrs. Dodd's said, they thought I might have done it for a while. I ran away a lot, and spent some time on the streets. I ended up here after a colleague of my dad's saw me and arranged to dump me here. My old man doesn't exactly deal with 'organic life forms' well," he finished. "So how did you end up here?"

Resting himself against the edge of his bed, Nico stroked a strand of his hair.
"After...ya know...after I got out of the hospital, my dad couldn't deal with a broken son. He was always away with my stepmom on business trips, if you can call them that. More than likely the only reason I convinced him to let Hazel stay with us was because he figured she could watch me."