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Harry lies in her bed, staring at the ceiling. The room is mostly dark, only the blotchy dark silhouette of the bookshelf barely discernible in the light filtering into her room from outside. She’s thinking about their dueling practice that afternoon.
She’s thinking about tripping: Her legs not where she imagines them to be. Leo catching her. A bitten-out mutter, with exact words she can’t remember, saying just how much she hates this new body.
She’s thinking about Leo quirking his lips at her and saying it has its advantages.
At the time, she’d barely even processed his words. Just pulled herself back to her feet and tucked a loose curl of hair behind her ear before demanding a rematch. She’d thought, then he’d meant something about size—about opening up new opportunities for speed and agility, or about the advantage of being smaller than your opponent is used to fighting, or something.
Staring at her ceiling now, darkness fuzzing in her vision, she doubts.
Leo had caught her with one hand around and under her back and one on her bicep. In the moments where she’d still hung half-fallen in the air, off-balance with only one foot on the ground, his arms had been warm. That, she also hadn’t noticed. She notices it now.
“It has its advantages.”
His eyes had sparkled like he was just a little too in love with the moment for his joy to stay contained behind his eyes. In her bed, as she plays the moment over and over—the tilt to the corner of his mouth, the playful lilt in his tone, the sparkle—it’s all too obvious that he hadn’t been talking about dueling. That he’d been calling her pretty.
Harry’s not entirely sure what to do with the idea that Leo—maybe definitely finds her pretty. She thinks it would make her uncomfortable, if it was new, but it isn’t, really. The way he looks at her hasn't changed at all, since she’s come back to the alleys. She’s just Harry, to him. New face, new body: no difference.
It has its advantages.
(The room is dark. There is no light to filter through her skin and make her cheeks red, but she feels the heat, like standing too close to a fire.)
She’s not sure if he’d said it because he just felt more comfortable now, with so many fewer secrets between them, or if it had been because he wanted her to feel more comfortable. She knows either way, he’d said it because he wanted her to know she was beautiful.
She squeezes her eyes shut and twists her body onto her side, burying her face in the covers. Thanks Leo, she thinks, I. I really don’t care if I’m beautiful.
She’s sure Leo’s reaction doesn’t tell her much about the objective attractiveness of her altered appearance, anyway. Only that he likes it.
She wants to push that knowledge away, too. It shouldn’t matter to her, not at all, but it lingers, along with the heat, and she thinks maybe, to her, it matters more.
And it’s odd, because, lying alone in her bed at night, Harry definitely remembers Leo at his most lovestruck. Remembers the look on his face when he’d first confessed to her, and how it had made her shrink away. Too much. It had felt heavy, almost. Harry hadn’t known what to do with love.
But there was love—big, capital, letter L, romance novel love, and there was this: a sunlit courtyard, and the two of them. A soft smile and steady hands. An unspoken you’re beautiful that has nothing to do with her face or the shape of her body. There is love, and there is Leo, there to catch her when she falls.
(Harry has never wanted to lose her mind to someone, never wanted to have her heart in freefall; sharp wind, cymbals, fireworks. She has never wanted to fall in love. But Harry is going to keep falling, no matter what, and she thinks—
—she thinks she might just want to be caught.)