What It Means To Be King

Chapter 68: Heart Stretched So Thin It Was Carried By Others

The last time Leo felt....overwhelmed.....about a person was when he met Shao Long. Anubis could hardly count as overwhelming. With Anubis, he was already expecting to be surprised, but Shao Long had caught him off guard in almost every possible way within the first hour they got to know each other. 

After that, no one else had managed to be this....startling. 

He had studied every single person in his class, deleting the faces of those he considered to be normal and boring, keeping it in a junk file somewhere in his mind. The princes weren't one of them. Ethan wasn't one of them. Alex was nowhere near that category. 

And Chris certainly wasn't there either. 

And that's the thing. Chris had a somewhat attractive face, like many of the students in Momosu, and his family background was similarly noteworthy. Not anyone could make successful films in Hollywood, rivalling tons and tons of other movie directors and screenwriters. And Chris was also one of those people who had already started on their ambition, writing novels and poetry, as far as he was concerned. He had a few odd streaks about him that made Leo feel unnaturally uncomfortable around him, and hence subjecting himself to be outside of Leo's junk file. 

He certainly wasn't on the highlighted file, though. 

Or at least, not until that night. 

Leo was a writer. He writes things, he imagines things. Things that could not be seen, could not be heard, could not be touched, but felt real all the same. It was a given that no writer was ever as sane as others of the community, but they were usually harmless. 

Until you read one of their novels. 

That was when you know if the writer was harmless or not. 

And when Leo had first texted Chris that night after he got his number, after a brief back-and-forth greeting session between them, Chris has sampled him with a chapter from his unfinished first draft novel, asking for his opinion. 

And for the second time that day, Leo's perspective of Chris crumbled once again. 

What looked to be a listless, quiet, uninteresting person had turned out to be a....

Leo didn't know what to call it, actually. Or rather, he was afraid to categorize him as a demon for fear of offending the object of discussion. He'd then realized why Chris had initiated contact with him first, and a wave of rare embarrassment washed over him for a moment when the understanding dawned onto him that Chris hadn't been trying to flirt at all. 

Chris only apparently needed advice on writing a logical injury trope. Or at least, that was what he said. 

Because the said injury currently being discussed was that of a mutilation that involved a vital organ that had Leo actually pausing to think about it before responding to his questions. A few questions later, Leo asked why he wanted to write such a violent and complex injury for his character, wondering if maybe the character being written was the villain and therefore deserving of such .... fate.