Title: "Run, Run, Run"
Rating: T
Genre: Romance, Humor
Character(s): Leo and an OC, mainly, but Adam, Bree, Chase and the family are in here, too
Pairing(s): Leo/OC, some Donald/Tasha, and some Douglas/Janice
Summary: A love story in three chapters—equal parts romantic, equal parts confusion, with a hearty side of creepiness. Hey. Who said all love stories have to be perfect?
Notes: This actually started off as a standalone story that stemmed from a song cover, but then as it went along it began to develop a plot hole the size of Texas. Then an idea from the forty-sixth chapter of The A-Bionic Chronicles sounded like a good fit, so I decided to merge it with this. Long story short (no pun intended), this is a loosely complementary fic to the Chronicles and so can stand by itself.
Anyways, I have to give a shout out to the lovely 88keys because one of our conversations actually prevented this entire idea from being vaulted. ;)
Just a fair warning: this story involves a break-up of a canon pairing and so has a running theme of moving on. If it's not something that you think's for you, that's okay. I'll understand. :)
I hope you enjoy!
i.
If Leo is to be very, very, very honest with himself, he can admit that he's not as much as a looker as his older brothers. He doesn't think this because he has low self-esteem, no. In fact, he knows he can hold up his own when it comes to the area of physical appearance like them. It's just that, he also knows that he's no knockout like Adam, whose tall, dark, handsome and muscular gifts constantly leave girls swooning behind him whenever he passes by. He's no Chase either, who, despite being a little shy and awkward, actually have a number of the female kind secretly crushing on him (like four of the girls in Bree's Alpha Girls group who always make it a point at lunch to walk by his table as a herd to wave at him then giggle when he greets them back).
He's just…Leo. Tall-ish, lanky, and often mistaken as a pre-teen Leo.
That's why it catches him by surprise when he notices her staring at him. She's gazing at him from the other side of the room, her bright, blue eyes oddly closing a bit of the gap between them. He thinks at first that they just accidentally looked at each other at the same time, so he smiles politely at her before turning his attention back to the board to pretend to listen to Chase while he continues his rather fervid discourse regarding mechanics of bionic technology.
He waits for a minute or two before looking back at her to see if she's still staring.
She is.
Unlike the first time, they linger in their looks a little longer. She's still not smiling, but she's also still not hostile. She only looks at him as if he's more interesting than anything else in that room – which kind of frazzles him and makes him nervous at the same time. He almost thinks it's creepy, but then again what guy in his right mind would find a stunner like her staring at him creepy?
Out of courtesy and instinct, he looks away again.
Well, he thinks, maybe she's not the typical type that people think of when they hear the word 'stunner.' She has gorgeous features, no doubt, including those blue eyes and those killer cheekbones of hers. But her hair, indecisively blonde and dark brown, is a slight mess of waves cascading at either side of her face down to her waist. Her brows, too; they're not plucked to the death like the ones those runway models have. They're a bit on the…well, on the normal girl side. They're not perfect, and that's what makes them beautiful.
He guesses this is why he thinks she's a stunner.
He looks back at her again, and he finds her still staring. He frowns at her this time because now, he really doesn't get it. He's also a bit offended. Why would a girl like her, beautiful in her imperfection and formidable with her bionics, be staring at a boy like him? For this long, he should add?
The class finishes a few minutes later. As the rest of the class make a beeline towards different directions, he approaches her. He thought she would have moved away, but she doesn't. She waits for him and manages a smile in the process. "Hi," he starts awkwardly. "So, uh, you're staring at me."
Her smile only stretches farther. She doesn't say anything.
He blinks. This is really getting terribly uncomfortable, he thinks. It's also starting to drive him nuts. So, for the sake of his own sanity, he jokes, "Please don't tell me it's because I'm beautiful, 'cause I'm seriously going to flip."
Her smile stretches wider until it breaks into a chuckle. She stands up, picks up her tablet, and then says, "Then I won't." She spins around towards the Training Center and heads there.
As she walks away, leaving a warm scent of coconut and lime in her trail, he is more puzzled.
It happens a few more times during the week, him catching her staring. It mostly occurs during Chase's class, but once or twice during lunch it happens, too. She keeps looking at him with the same kind of expression. It always sends him in an emotional tilt-a-whirl: it'll make him feel curious, then self-conscious, then anxious, then flattered, then embarrassed, then curious again. He doesn't want to make a big deal out of it, mostly because he doesn't want to be known as paranoid, but he's been tempted to approach her again and ask.
After it happens again for the fourth time, he comes to, not her, but his older sister. "Bree?"
"Yeah."
"What does it mean when a girl stares at you?"
Bree frowns guardedly. "Staring at me?"
He nods.
Bree searches around the lunchroom intensely. "Who? Which one?" she asks.
"No, not you," he assures her. "Me."
Bree looks back at him. "You?"
"Yeah."
"Staring at you."
"Yes."
Bree thinks about it. "Hm. I don't know," she says. She picks at the salmon on her nearly empty plate. "There are many reasons why girls stare at guys. Could be what you're wearing at the time. What did you have on?"
He shrugs. "What I normally wear around here: the you-can't-be-a-mentor uniform," he says casually.
Bree eyes him drily. "Could be too that you were being a smarty pants," she returns.
"No. Chase was taking care of that part."
Bree clucks her tongue in irritation. "You know what I mean," she says.
Leo shoots a quick wide smile at her before saying, "Yes, I do. And no, I wasn't. I was just sitting in class, and she's just staring. Every time."
The frown comes back on Bree's face. "Maybe there was something on your face."
He thinks back on it. "I hope not," he says, slightly bothered by the suggestion. "I mean, she wasn't laughing or anything."
Bree thinks it over. When a possibility occurs to her, she smirks. "Maybe she did see something," she says knowingly.
"What."
"Your face," she says with a chuckle. "She likes it."
"What? That's not even – I don't – I mean, no," he says. He shakes his head, almost at the brink of laughing because what Bree said is just ridiculous. "No."
Bree scoots closer to her little brother, and it makes him feel a little bit more embarrassed. "Oh, come on. What's so impossible about that?" she asks.
"She's bionic," he says. "I don't know if you've noticed, but with the exception of you? All the girls in the Academy are either on Adam's fan club or Chase's fan club. And they're all pretty devoted."
"You're exaggerating."
"I wish I was," Leo sighs. He hunches over his cold plate of food. He shrugs. "It's probably just a prank that they're playing on me, see how I'll react to it. Maybe she'll stop staring if I ignore her."
Bree watches him with concern as he takes a bite out of his turkey sandwich, because she finally understands. "Leo, you're not…saying no because of what happened to you and you-know-who, are you?"
Leo's chewing slows down to a stop. He glances at Bree then says, "You can say her name, you know."
"I know I can. I just don't want to," Bree says indignantly. She breathes in air then exhales sharply when her brother doesn't say anything because she feels sorry for him. "You never really talked about it," she prompts kindly.
Leo continues eating. "There's nothing to talk about," he says quietly.
"Dude. You're going through a break-up."
Leo spins towards his sister and says, "It's not a break-up." He regrets it immediately afterwards, because he didn't mean it to come across as angry. He knows his sister's just trying to help, but after two months since it happened he's still not completely sure what to do or how to react. So, in a gesture of apology, he turns back to his sandwich. He picks it up but doesn't eat it. "A break-up suggests that the two people involved were in a relationship. Apparently, we weren't really," he explains. "So we didn't break up. We just stopped being something."
Bree stares at him. She wants to say something, he knows she does, but she doesn't. Instead, she smiles. "Well, the beauty of having a sister is that we're good with things like these," she said. "Space movie marathon at eight?"
Leo slowly looks at her. "I have been wanting to see 'Interstellar'," he muses out loud.
"I'll have two pints of mint chocolate chip ice cream ready."
Leo thinks about it. "Make mine cake batter?"
Bree chuckles. "You got it."
For the following week after that, Leo doesn't notice the girl anymore. He's not completely sure if it's because she hasn't been in class or if it's because he's feeling much better that small things have started to forego his attention. Surprisingly, that movie night with Bree did help. The sugar, the yelling at the TV and the tearjerker moments in the films did wonders. Adam and Chase even commented on his better mood. Of course, when they asked how that came to be, he didn't tell them. Bree told him not to because it will ruin it.
Admittedly, what happened still hurts. To find out that the special girl in his life, who had been with him for three years, doesn't like him 'that way' – well, it's a heart crusher. And for her to be his first love? It surprises him that he hasn't crawled under a rock yet and died.
But he's learning that it's going to be okay. He just needs to get himself together, focus on his trainings, and move on.
He guesses getting constantly excluded helps in taking his mind off of things; it gives him a convenient excuse to be sulky and sour. It also gives him the space he needs.
Though, he wishes those kids wouldn't do it so brutally.
His stepfather had generously rented a movie theater that Friday so that the Academy students could have their first movie night in the city. They were terrifically excited, of course, and had promised to follow Adam's, Bree's and Chase's instructions. The group is big enough that even he was also delegated some directing rights over the students.
But as always, as soon as the Academy's Founder was out of sight, the bionic teens utterly disregarded that part about him having some control at the helm. They ignored virtually everything he said. He had to leave five minutes after the movie began because he had to look for three people in his group, all of whom had gotten lost and had gone into other theaters because they didn't listen.
When he came back with them, he found that someone had decided to take his jacket from his seat as a prank.
Now, as they're all making their way to a restaurant to eat, he's walking a few yards behind everyone, shivering from the chilly San Francisco evening. He watches them unhappily as the pack laughs at something that one of his siblings probably said. He wouldn't have minded this lone wolf situation if he has his jacket. At least he can just turn around and wander off on his own.
"The key to fit in is not to fit in."
Leo sharply turns towards the speaker with a gasp. He slaps a palm on his ribcage when he sees her. "You scared me," he says to the girl, his heart racing madly inside his chest. His brows wrinkle. "How long have you been standing there?"
Her bottom lip juts upwards. "Since we got out of the movie theater," she says.
He stares at her. "You know, if you keep doing things like that, the other students will start thinking that you're weird," he points out.
"Everybody in the Academy is weird," she says. "By the way…" she holds up what has been in her hand.
"My jacket!" He snatches it from her then puts it on quickly. As he zips it up, he asks, "Did you take this?"
"Yeah. From Bob," she says. "He found it on the floor while we were walking out."
He looks at his jacket with disgust, especially as he imagines the sticky things that had probably gotten on it. He's tempted to take it off, but he doesn't since it's too cold. Maybe, he decides, he'll just shower later. "Thanks," he tells her.
She shrugs.
"Your name's Amaranth, isn't it?" he asks.
"Yeah."
He smirks. "Didn't want to be a Donald, did you?"
"Nope," she says.
"Okay," he says. "I'm Leo, by the way."
"I know."
An awkward silence befalls them for a while, him not knowing what to say and her probably not caring to say anything. As an inversion, he turns his sights ahead to look for the group and finds them turning the corner four blocks away. "You still have time to catch up to them," he says.
"What about you? Where are you going?" she asks.
"Ah, I think I'm going to walk home."
Her brows rise. "Your house is nearly eighty blocks away from here," she points out.
"Well, I was thinking of walking the first twenty and then riding a taxi the rest of the way due to budget," he says. He then looks at her. "Unless you have super speed."
She shrugs. "I'll walk with you."
He hesitates for a second. He doesn't think it's a good idea at first because he's not really in the mood for an awkward walk home at the moment. He also doesn't want to be accused of influencing another student to separate from the group when his stepfather specifically told them to stay together. Plus, he just wants to be alone right now.
But he reconsiders, mostly because it's Friday night, and he supposes it won't hurt to hang out with somebody for a change. "Okay," he says, nodding towards the opposite direction of where everybody else is going before he begins walking.
She follows suit.
As the distance between them and the busy business areas increase, the more the city around them darkens. It's pleasant how the artificial lights slowly fade as they walk by, decreasing in brightness one by one, while the light from the moon, silver and white as it bathes the earth below, wins out. He tries not to be too taken by his thoughts and to be conscious of her being there. San Francisco is not a terribly bad city when it comes to crime, but he knows the world well enough that ten o'clock at night is not the safest time for teenagers to roam the streets by themselves.
No doubt, the two of them are more than equipped to hold up their own should the situation call for it. However, after being repeatedly taught how to be a gentleman growing up by his mother, he understands that it's his responsibility to protect the girl and to look out for her safety.
While they wait at their third pedestrian stop light, he asks, "So…color or flower?"
She tilts her head towards him questioningly. "Hm?"
"'Amaranth,'" he clarifies. "Did you choose it as your name because it's a nice color or because it's a pretty flower?"
Her features clear as she thinks about it. She smiles. "Both, I guess."
He nods ponderously just as the light tells them to walk. "What'd you think of the movie?" he asks.
She takes a deep breath as she forms her opinion. "It's good," she says. "The storytelling was done well, and I enjoyed the characters. I would have darkened the lighting on scene thirty-eight a little bit, maybe choose an acoustic accompaniment there, too, but it still works. Scene fifty-four was my favorite."
His wrinkled brows rise questioningly. "Scene fifty-four?" he repeats.
"Oh! The scene with the boy not wanting to let go of his friends," she says.
He blinks, still incredulous. "You were really counting the scenes as they went along?"
"Yeah." She frowns at him. "Weren't you?"
"No," he replies. "I was trying to focus on what's happening."
"Oh."
He looks over at her and sees the thoughtful look on her face, deeply ingrained as something she is processing confused her. For whatever reason, he laughs, and it's the kind of laugh that makes him feel light and unhinged. When she looks at him with a mixture of surprise and confusion, he waves it away. "I'm sorry," he says. "It's just – It's okay. It's your first movie. Next time, when we watch another one, just keep in mind that movies are mostly there to be enjoyed and not studied."
She says nothing. She just returns her eyes to what's ahead and keeps walking.
He continues on, too, since she doesn't seem offended. They walk for two blocks without speaking, until he finally says, "You said the key to fit in is not to fit in."
"Yeah."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, just be your own person," she says. "You're trying so hard to be one of the popular kids in the Academy that you're not acting like yourself."
He smiles wryly, because her words offend him. He stops. "Not acting like myself?" he asks.
She stops, too. She looks him straight in the eyes, her bright blue orbs piercing him straight through. "You're not happy," she clarifies.
Any thoughts of disputing what she said earlier evaporate, and he is left staring at her blankly.
"You don't seem like it anymore to me, at least," she says.
He smiles a small smile at her. He doesn't agree with her, not one hundred percent, but a small part of him can't deny that what she said rings somewhat true. So, he just asks, "Really?"
She walks closer to him. "You don't laugh as much," she says. "And, when we first met you, you talked to everybody. Now you don't. You're just…withdrawn."
"Well, it's kind of hard to talk to people who don't want to talk to you, don't you think?" he asks.
"It is," she agrees. "So why are you trying to fit in with them?"
Leo thinks about it. A grin begins to stretch across his face, because she got him with that question. He chuckles. "I just don't like the idea of being alone again," he tells her honestly.
"Well, you're not alone now," she says finally.
Leo narrows his eyes. "So, you – Are you saying you actually want to be friends with me?"
She smiles. "Okay."
He thinks about the new development incredulously, because in no way is she really willing to be his friend. Then, when an answer comes to him, he nods. "Oh. Oh, okay. I get it," he declares.
She frowns. "Get what?"
He smiles conspiratorially. "You want me to put in a good word for you, don't you?" he says. "Okay. Since you walked with me this far and since you got my jacket for me, I'll do it. Who did you want me to talk to for you, Adam or Chase?"
"What?"
"Do you like Adam better, or do you like Chase better?"
"Uh, neither?"
"Oh, come on. You have the Alpha Girls as your pack," he explains. "You must like one of them."
"What does that have to do with the two of us?"
"They're gonna make fun of you if you befriend me," he says with a chuckle.
"Um, my sisters don't decide who I will be friends with, I do," she says sassily.
He holds up his hands. "Okay? I'm sorry?" he says, not quite sure how to maneuver around a situation that involves a spunky teenage girl. He thought she was the quiet girl of the group? "So, this is for real. We're really going to be friends?" he asks. "No fine prints?"
She says nothing, only stares at him.
He still doesn't believe her, but he decides to play along on the chance that she does mean what she says. Plus, he does like her company. He could use a rest from being the social outcast for a bit, even if this 'friendship' turns out to be a complete sham in the end. "Well, if you insist," he mutters and then walks ahead.
They continue on in silence for a few more blocks. The cold breeze whipping past them causes him to shiver a little bit and urges him to start counting how much farther they have to go before they can hail a taxi. While counting up from where they are, he remembers to glance at Amaranth to see how she's doing.
He feels bad when he sees that she has fallen behind. She still has the stubborn, displeased look on her face as she frowns toward the ground, but with her arms crossed tightly in front of her, hugging as much warmth as she can to herself to combat the chill, she looks quite fragile and small. He feels worse then, because he also sees that the jacket she has on is not as thick as it should be.
He stops walking then and waits for her.
When she catches up, she finally notices that he's looking at her. She stops, too.
Leo unzips his jacket, pulls it off of himself, and then drapes it over her. "Just make sure none of the stuff that got on it get on you," he says with a sad smile, because he remembers when he used to do something like this for Janelle. He watches her pull her hair from underneath the jacket then gratefully look up at him as she pulls his jacket closer to her. He adds, "You don't want to smell like the floor of a movie theater."
She smiles at him, like she understands exactly what he's thinking.
He feels pathetic and discouraged, because he can't believe he's still not over it. It's been months, and here he is again moping. He must reek of lameness right now for being like this. He nods ahead. "Five more blocks, and then we can get a ride home," he tells Amaranth, desperately schooling his features to make him look okay.
She holds out a hand. "Here," she says. "Take it."
He stares at her empty palm and then blinks at her.
"You look like you could use a good break-up playlist to sleep to tonight," she says. "And I have just the thing for that."
His brows wrinkle. "Where are we going?" he asks.
She grins. "You'll see," she says.
He looks at her with a cautious look. Nonetheless, he takes her hand.
As soon as they touch, he feels a spark.
He hears it, too.
He shakes his hand to rid it of the sting. "Static electricity," he explains bashfully.
"Okay," she says, somewhat confused. She holds out her hand again. "Take two?"
He holds onto her hand. He notes that it's slightly calloused but soft. Her grasp is warm, and it makes him feel at ease. "Now what?" he asks her.
She looks at him with a suspicious smirk before the city around him dissipates in particles of black.
When the colors and everything materialized, he finds both of them standing at the capsule dormitories.
"You have geo-leaping?" he asks as she walks towards a table.
"You asked me if I had super speed. See? I didn't lie to you," she says as she pulls out an earphone and her tablet from a compartment. She hurries back to him excitedly then ushers him out the door. "Come on. Let's go to the cafeteria. There should still be some leftovers from lunch that we can snack on while we listen."
They huddle together by the fridge at the lunchroom as they put together the ultimate break-up playlist. Leo starts off distantly, not wanting to participate, but after having to deflect Amaranth from trying songs with bad words in it, plus getting involved in a rather heavy discussion of lyrics and music, he ends up enjoying everything.
Two and a half large bags of Sun Chips, a bag of gummy bears, and seven cans of iced tea later, a finished list of forty-eight break up songs sit in Amaranth's tablet. They listen to the first eight together, discuss it, laugh about it, before she unplugs her earphones to hand her tablet to him. She tells him to take it for tonight and give it back tomorrow.
He says okay. Then, after placing it inside a bag that they find at the kitchen, he tells her it's time for him to go.
He comes back to the quarters that night with almost everyone in his family yelling at him. He guesses he enjoyed the walk and the playlist building so much that he neglected to check his phone, which, in its silenced state, didn't really do well in alerting him to the dozens of missed calls and quite frantic text messages from his siblings asking him where he had gone to.
He just apologizes, because he didn't mean to worry them by doing what he did.
When he settles down to sleep that night, he pulls out the tablet and plugs his headphones in.
He falls asleep after the sixth song, his consciousness ebbing out with a happy thought and none at all of his heartbreak.
to be continued.
