Title: "Prose and Cons"
Rating: T
Genre: friendship, mystery
Character(s): Bree and Leo, mainly, but there are OCs and the regulars
Pairing(s): none, I think...?
Summary: Leo is gradually losing interest with the classes, the academy, and the bionic world in general, and Bree wants to know why. As she digs deeper, she discovers a side of his world that is pun-filled, a little alliterative, consistently contradictory, and – is someone sending him cryptic messages?
Notes: There's a hidden intent in this, and it has a lot to do with what's coming up in a few weeks. I won't reveal just yet what it is, but here's a clue: this is to stir interest. Interest in what exactly, you guys will find out soon enough. Don't worry, it's nothing bad. It's actually pretty fun! It's something that will be going on in Shadowplay.
This is also written because there are a few things about Leo that seemed to have been buried as the seasons went by. This is just to bring it back to the fore in addition to featuring the really good friendship that Bree and Leo had once upon a time.
Okay, with that almost full disclosure out of the way, hope you guys enjoy!
Disclaimer: Anything publicly recognizable is not mine. (Actually, there will be a Works Cited note at the very end of this story.) All I own here are the plot, the OCs, and a few original works. :)
round one.
Bree watched her brother with a mild frown as she held onto her stopwatch. It was the third class of the day, a training period, and all the students were preoccupied with the activities that their mentors had given them. Leo seemed to be the exception. Or, at least, he had made himself become one. Whereas his peers focused on the dummies, shields, and other protective gear, he was focused on his phone, a grin on his face as he read something.
Given, that he wasn't assigned to any mentor was partially their fault. It didn't even come to her that none of them had taken in their younger brother until lately, and Adam and Chase had yet to notice. She guessed it was because they were carried away by the excitement of it all. For the first time in years, they were going to be the teachers! And to a group of teenagers like them, no less! There were so many lessons to plan and so many acquaintances to make that everything else sort of faded into the background.
Still, Bree didn't get why he would be this disinterested in something that the rest looked forward to. He used to like trainings. He usually took this as his platform to prove that he should be more than just a beginner in rank. Now he would just sit in a corner, either typing on his tablet or texting on his phone. It was as if he didn't want to be bothered anymore.
"Bree? Bree? Excuse me."
A light touch on her arm jolted the speedster out of her thoughts, making her flinch.
Kate immediately drew back her hand, afraid she had done something offensive. "I'm so sorry," she said.
"No, no. You didn't do anything wrong," Bree told her. Looking around, she saw that her students were eyeing her warily and worriedly. To assure them, she said with a small smile, "I'm sorry. I got distracted. Where were we again?"
"Stealth. How fast we can tie up the bad guys without our speed," a student named Holly answered. "We're supposed to time Dev and Toby."
"Oh, um…" Bree glanced down at the stopwatch. The numbers were still climbing. She clicked on it, and it froze. She was moved to tell the two boys to try again, but she decided she wouldn't be able to pay attention. "Please untie Dev, and then let's take a ten minute break, okay?"
Her students, though puzzled, did what they were told.
After they had left the training area, Bree resumed watching her brother closely. With his phone put away, he had redirected his focus to a book she vaguely remembered him bringing back from when he left the island. Once again, he was oblivious to the world around him.
That made her brows furrow. What could be more important than training?
It was then that Adam walked up to her, closely followed by Chase. "Hey, why did you release your students already? The class had barely started," her older brother asked. He shrugged then added, "Not that I'm opposed to breaks or anything, but the bros are kind of looking at me and waiting to see if I could let them go for a break, too."
"Yeah, same with my class," Chase agreed.
"Do you guys notice anything different with Leo?" Bree asked.
Taking a long glance at their stepbrother, Adam shook his head. "Nope. I don't," he said.
Chase, however, said with a frown, "Well, he does complain less lately."
"He complains a lot less lately," Bree pointed out. "He barely talks to anyone, and he doesn't participate as much."
Leo suddenly closed his book then picked up his belongings and left. "Is that so bad?" Adam asked after he was gone. "He doesn't whine as much about his rank. Isn't that good?"
"Yeah. Maybe he's just learned to accept it," Chase said.
That's not what it seems like to me, Bree thought but didn't say.
Knowing what his sister may be thinking, Chase patted her on the shoulder. "He's gonna be okay. Let's enjoy the silence for the meantime," he said. He smirked. "Don't worry. Soon enough he's gonna find something to complain about."
When her brothers returned to their students, Bree was left wondering when the three of them had started drifting so far away from their younger stepsibling.
"Man, I'm so pumped. This is so exciting!"
"Yeah, yeah. New activity, your idea, it's exciting. Settle down."
Bree stepped out of her capsule after getting changed into the new training suit, one that their father specifically designed for the Capture the Flag game that Adam (Adam!) came up with. She chuckled as she watched her older and younger brother also step out in their new outfits, checking it out while still managing a little banter. She had to admit, the layout of the new game had her looking forward to it. That their students felt the same way, maybe even more, added to the thrill.
Chase looked up after his exchange with Adam, and quickly what he saw wiped the grin out of his face. "Leo?" he said with a frown. "What are you doing? Why aren't you getting ready?"
Leo looked up from his book, uninclined in the slightest to move away from his cozy couch-slash-bed. "'Cause I'm not going," he said simply.
That he was not wearing his new suit but his favorite jeans and shirt instead didn't escape Bree's notice.
"Why not?" Adam asked, puzzled.
Leo hitched his shoulders and went back to what he was reading. "I don't want to," he said.
"You know this counts towards your rank, right? This could seriously help or hurt you with your level," Chase reasoned.
Leo smiled. "'Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.'"
Chase crossed his arms. "Albert Einstein."
"Except this time, instead of stripes with plaid, it's wearing yellow patches."
"Why are you reading anyway?" Adam suddenly asked.
"What do you mean?" Leo asked. "What's wrong with reading?"
"Nothing. Just – Reading just seems to be Chase's thing."
"Reading can be anyone's thing, Adam. A person doesn't have to be a genius to like it." He smirked. "This is not Divergent, you know." Pulling off the throw covering him, he got up from the couch. "You guys enjoy the game," he said sincerely, walking off towards a quieter place.
"What was that about?" Chase asked as the doors closed behind Leo.
Adam shrugged, his mind already on the activity that was set to start shortly.
Bree, on the other hand, was more convinced than ever that something was going on that they didn't know about.
She caught him sneaking out one night. Thinking that everybody was asleep, he slinked out of the academy, a shovel in one hand and a flashlight in the other. She waited until he was far enough before following him. She was very careful in trailing. He seemed to be extra wary of his surroundings, so she had to be more cautious than he. When he stopped, she hid behind a dense conglomeration of palm trees.
He dug for a good ten minutes before stopping. Peeking out from her hiding place, she saw him kneeling by the hole, reaching downwards and pulling something out.
It was a box, a sizeable one. He dusted it off before opening it, took out something from his pocket, something she couldn't quite see, and then placed it inside. For a moment, he only stared. "It's just a matter of time," she heard him saying quietly. "You're not going to be buried forever."
Then, he closed the box, replaced it under the shadows a few feet under, and then pushed back the load of the cold sands above it.
He came back to the Quarters a few minutes after she did, still under the impression that the rest of the island was ignorant of what he had done.
Even long after he had gone back to softly snoring, she was still awake. What was happening with her brother? Besides the truth about Marcus, he had never hidden anything from them. At least not until now.
She was honestly concerned. What was he keeping from them?
A few weeks later, loud, terrified screaming from one of the classrooms interrupted her and Adam's training session. Concerned and on high alert, she and the oldest rushed out to see what was going on, only to find a half ring of students slowly backing away from something on the floor. "What's going on here?" she asked as the two of them broke through the front of the mass.
On the floor, they saw a small shoe box, the box and the lid a good three feet from each other. Not too far from it was a pitch black creature with pinchers and a stinger, wriggling as it attempted to get off its back and into its legs.
"Whoa," Adam said under his breath, stepping back just as Chase and Leo joined the commotion.
"What's going—oh," Chase said, staring at the arachnid. He looked up with furrowed brows, searching the faces of the students closer to it. "Who brought that in here?"
Spin shook his head fervently when the mentor looked at him. "No one! It was inside the box that came!" he said, terrified of both the creature and the teenager.
"A box? You opened someone's package again?" Bree asked.
Spin only looked away.
"What is it?" Bob asked, leaning towards it.
Adam held him back. "It's a big cockroach. Believe me, it's not as cute as it looks," he said.
"Who was this for?" Chase asked Spin.
Spin didn't answer, only turned his eyes guiltily on Leo.
Soon enough, everyone's attention was on the youngest of the four siblings. "Why would Tasha send you a cockroach?" Adam asked.
"It's not a cockroach, Adam," Bree said.
"It's a scorpion," Chase finished. He nodded at Spin. "Was there any card or message on the box?"
"There was a small card. It just says 121."
Instead of clearing the matter for the super genius, it only complicated the puzzle further. He sighed. "Alright, everyone head on—"
"Did you say 121?" Leo asked, a ponderous expression on his face.
"Yeah?"
Leo's brows furrowed further as he quickly took out his phone from his pocket then quickly typed in something. Half a minute later, the frown on his face was gone. "In cauda venenum," he said.
"'The poison is in the tail.' I know," Chase said, slightly irritated. "That's why everyone needs to head on out. We'll let you guys know when it's been taken away."
The students took this as their signal to clear out. Leo, however, did the opposite: he went towards the creature.
"What are you doing?" Chase asked, the slight panic in his tone causing others to turn back around.
Unfazed, the teenager picked up the animal by the tail. It continued to wiggle, but only in the same way it had been doing the past five minutes. A number of students gasped as Leo sat it on his shoulder. He only grinned at it. "Aw, is everyone afraid of you?" he asked it, nearly laughing.
"Leo, that thing is gonna sting you!" Bree said angrily.
"No, it's not. It's just dancing! Besides, it's just a toy. At least I hope so anyways," Leo said, giving the lifelike item a cautious, sideway glance. He then smirked at Spin. "There are no guarantees it won't be alive the next time," he said before walking off, a content look on his face, the scorpion still wriggling on his shoulder.
Bree knew she shouldn't be reading his messages. Doing so would be breaching into his personal space and breaking his trust, but he had just been so uninterested with almost everything lately.
It was just one message. She wasn't even going to go through his phone. It was on the coffee table, where she – or anyone, for that matter – could easily see it. She was just going to read the one that he had received, the one that was up on the screen.
You have done very well. I am pleased with your work. Your next assignment will come shortly.
It was from someone nicknamed K.
K? No. It can't be Krane. Krane's dead, she thought. Isn't he?
It came to her then that they never found a body.
"Roses are red, violets are blue. Candy is sweet, and so are you."
Spin narrowed his eyes. "That sounds way too close to the original," he noted.
Bob shrugged, pocketing the piece of paper. "I don't know. I kinda like it," he said. "Chase said that those dead guys wrote what they knew of and how they felt. Candy's sweet, Bree is too. You never know. She'll probably like it. Won't you Breezy?"
Bree only rolled her eyes and kept her focus on the campfire ahead.
They decided that Friday night to let the students spend some relaxation time by the beach. With their father's approval, they made three separate campfires, big enough to sit at least a group of ten and to sufficiently light the area. She and Adam had been assigned to keep watch over the students, what with Chase being engaged in another project with their father, but her brother immediately forgot his duties after someone suggested a game of volleyball.
"You're criticizing Bob's poem. What about you?" Charlie challenged with a chuckle. "What did you come up with?"
"I didn't come up with anything," Spin simply said.
"Why not? It's due Monday," one of his sisters, Penelope, pointed out.
"Because, I don't get the point of it." With the awkward pause that followed, he scoffed. "Come on, I can't be the only one who thinks it."
"Well…" Ray said hesitatingly after another exchange of glances, "I mean, yeah. I kinda don't see the point of it either. The poems we've read are all, you know, complicated and rhyming. I don't understand it."
There was a mumble of agreement, with someone even saying, "No one talks like that. At least not anymore."
"See?" Spin said. "We're all on the same page."
"Maybe you're just not reading it the way it's meant to be read."
The group at the campfire, even Bree and some of the girls in her circle, looked up at Leo.
"What do you mean? How else is it supposed to be read?" Spin asked disdainfully.
The teenager, who stood at a distance with a powered off game console in his hand, replied, "You need to read it slowly, take time to understand it."
"That kinda sounds lame," one of the boys said.
"And sappy," someone added.
"Maybe that's why his girlfriend broke up with him. He's sweet," came another comment, cuing giggles and laughter.
Leo rolled his eyes and then turned to head back inside.
Bree was about to chastise the group when Bob stood up and said, "Dude, where are you going? You can't just leave us hanging." When Leo swiveled back towards them, he asked, "How do you read it?"
Leo glared at the students that laughed before saying, "I don't think anyone else is interested in my opinion, Bob."
"I'm interested," Kate said, her hand raised.
"You know, oddly enough, I am, too," Donovan said with a smile.
At first, Leo didn't seem very motivated to share his thoughts, especially with all that made fun of him on the ready to pounce again. Soon, however, he decided to acquiesce. He turned on his game console and then typed in something. "Here. Read this," he said, tossing the gadget to the student that made the derisive comment.
The boy read the first line. Immediately, he made a disgusted face. "What?" he said. "See, this is what we're talking about. These people don't just say what they mean. It's dumb."
Leo gestured for the device, and the guy tossed it back.
"What does it say?" Heather, one of the girls in Bree's group, asked.
"I do not love you, except, because, I love you," Leo read. He held up his hand firmly before another negative comment could be made. "I go from loving to not loving you, from waiting to not waiting for you. My heart moves from cold to fire. I love you—only because it's you the one I love. I hate you deeply, and hating you – bend to you – and the measure of my changing love for you is that I do not see you but love you blindly.
"Maybe January light will consume my heart with its cruel ray, stealing my key to true calm.
"In this part of the story, I am the one who dies. And I will die of love because I love you." He looked up after turning off the game console. "Because I love you, Love, in fire and blood," he finished with a long glance at the watching crowd.
"That sounds…legit," Charlie commented with a nod.
"Yeah, but what does it mean?" a student named Steven asked. "Like, does he love this girl or does he hate her?"
"Both." Leo scratched his head before further explaining, "Um, well, sometimes being in love is complicated. You find this person that you like, and then you start to really like them. It just grows and grows until it gets to the point that you're just finding reasons not to fall in love with that person. But then it happens, and you end up with that girl – or boy, whatever – and you think it's all happy. Even when you see that she doesn't love you the way you love her, you convince yourself that it's okay, you can just overlook it. You'll have times when you realize that it's so stupid, hoping for someone who doesn't care for you very much to care, but then you just get stuck in that, in hoping."
Leo sighed, and Bree could tell from the sadness in his eyes that he was thinking of Janelle. "Then it all ends, and you feel like a loser because you've always known it wasn't going to happen. The worst part is that you never stop loving her, even if she had forgotten about you," he said. A broken smile came to his face. "That's the part that kills. To that person it never happened, but you it never ends."
Seeing the sad and sympathetic expressions on the others' faces, he feigned apathy and only said, "Anyways, the point is that poems don't always have to rhyme, so you have no excuse for not doing your homework."
"Have you done yours?" Penelope asked.
"Maybe," Leo cryptically said before going back inside the building, engaged once again with the racing game he was playing earlier.
Two girls were waiting at the entrance of the Living Quarters the next morning.
"Heather, Shelby. May I help you girls?" Bree asked with smile.
Heather peeked in before replying, "Is Leo here?"
Bree looked back and saw him lounged on one of the beach chairs, sunglasses on, Adam and Chase on either side of him as they painted on his face. He really does sleep like the dead, she thought. "He is, but he's unavailable at the moment," she told the girls instead. She frowned. "Why do you need to see him?"
The two girls exchanged knowing glances. "Oh, we were just wondering if he could help us with something," Heather said. "Can you please tell him we stopped by?"
"Yeah, sure."
"Thanks." And with that, they were gone.
Bree's brows quirked as she looked at Leo again. Then, she smirked.
She had a strong feeling that Janelle would soon be a thing of the past for her little brother.