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“Who did this to you?” The words were low in his throat, cold and carved with anger.
Jason looked up from Leo’s arm in his grasp, turned to show the long overlapping scars beginning on his bicep and stopping somewhere underneath his shirt. He looked Leo in the eyes, icy blue where Leo’s were scared and brown, worn down and burning like old leather. Jason waited for Leo to respond, but he didn’t dare budge. He held his body still and locked his eyes and then Jason said, once more, deeper and fiercer now, “Who hurt you?”
Leo could bear his confinement no longer. He blinked and when he opened his eyes everything was blurry. He stepped back and shook his head, emitting a physical response before he could a verbal one. “No one,” he said, not daring to look at Jason. He wanted this conversation to end. “No one, it doesn’t matter.”
Leo looked up to see Jason looking down. The welder followed his gaze, looking at his scars and trying to see them the way Jason did, but he couldn’t feel anything about them. They weren’t Jason’s to dwell over, though, they were his. Jason wasn’t supposed to see, wasn’t supposed to know, ever. Leo hadn’t worked out the logistics yet because he never thought about the future like that, didn’t even expect it for himself, really. It was bad enough dealing with the present, and what would the future bring besides more of what he had to deal with then?
Jason bit his lip and looked at Leo’s face and it was over. When you know you know. And who had ever really known Leo, besides Jason and himself? Jason hadn’t known everything though, and here he was intruding on Leo’s habits and deepening the wounds, Leo’s wounds, and trying to make something out of them.
Leo said, “We get attacked by a lot of monsters, I can’t keep track of every scar I get.” Shrugged. Pierced his palms with his nails.
“Leo,” said Jason, a plea, a whisper. And then Leo shrugged it off, and Jason hardened again.
Fear is a fickle thing, and Leo was never a match for Jason. “Don’t do that with me Leo, I thought I was different to you, different than everyone else.” And Leo wanted to say, You were, you are! You’re closer than anyone has ever been before but now you’ve backed me against a cliff and there’s nowhere else to go.
And so he said, “I told you, Jason, they happened in monster attacks,” because how could Leo even think of dragging him into this when Leo could not even explain it himself. How could he bear himself to Jason knowing he couldn’t even fix himself? He had little appeal whole, but letting Jason see him broken would shatter him.
The son of Jupiter looked at Leo with fire in his icy blue eyes. “Yeah, Leo, tell me how a chimera came at you with knives that left careful cuts the width of razors, and never so deep they couldn’t be staunched. You want to tell me that you told it where to cut you next? Really?”
But Jason had no right, not really, to say any of that. Leo didn’t owe him anything, and surely not his best kept secrets. Why was Jason angry? If anyone, it should have been Leo. And he was angry, so angry that he would slice his skin and bite his lips and pierce his palms with his nails. The dog at my homework. The monsters left the scars.
Opening up would be losing control, losing the only thing that was his. Hurting wasn’t bad until someone said it was, until Jason looked at his arm and his eyes watered. Hurting didn’t need accountability, only served as a relief or punishment, until Jason looked at his arm and asked who did it to him. I did. And you’re looking at me and I wish you wouldn’t, I wish you’d turn away and let me hit myself again, hurt myself for making it possible for you to see the inside of me. I don’t even know me, why did I let you in and let myself believe that you would understand?
But he didn’t, and he wouldn’t, so Leo took another step back and said, “I don’t know what you want from me.” Then, he left the room.