It pours out of him like so much blood, and it hurts just as much, but he can’t stop bleeding and he can’t stop loving people, and he wonders which one will kill him first.
There are so many people he loves, and he resents them just a little for how easy they make it to love them. It shouldn’t be easy, with how much it hurts. But Leon keeps loving them anyway, because if he’s going to bleed either way, it might as well come with the sparks of joy that catch him off-guard, that twist of something that feels like hope that he might survive this.
It hurts, it hurts so much he can’t breathe sometimes, when he lies awake at night, staring at the ceiling, scrolling through the names and numbers in his phone, clinging to them like a lifeline to keep him from drowning beneath the weight of everything that’s happened to him, all the names he couldn’t save. He did save some of them. They’re alive because he did something good. It tastes like sugar mixed with ash.
A photo and a name pop up on the screen, the phone buzzing in his hand. A lifeline. He smiles, easy as he bleeds, and answers.
I will go out of my way to find something sexually suggestive about your perfectly innocent art of this fictional character, and then berate you for being a gross monster who is sexualizing this character. No, YOU’RE the problem!
