Worse Than His Bite

Chapter 12: Big enough to eat you with

It should not have been a disguise for Phineas to discover that Leo was a highly capable person. He didn't mean it to sound rude or that he previously believes that Leo was somehow incapable of looking after himself. For all his qualms and issues with Leo, he and never thought him incompetent in the definitive sense. When he thought that Leo was highly capable, he meant that in the sense that he was more capable than the average person, somehow more capable than he should be.

Without Sebastian's presence Phineas found himself noticing Leo more and not just for being annoying. Leo had a strange obsession with details, Phineas had come to notice. It was no good for one piece of bacon to be more cooked than the other, one boot to be more polished than its counterpart, or for the nails on one side of his hand be longer than his other. They had to be the same. They had to be equal. Phineas watched him as they sat together that morning. The burns on the bacon perfectly uniform within the batch, his boots both shining and matching a long scratch down the inner parts that crossed over the zipper, and he watched Leo as he actively grinned down his fingernails to create a mirror image on both hands. Every few seconds he would lift his hands, look at one, look at the other then be displeased with what he saw and go back to his grinding. He'd been working on his perfection for so long that he was beginning to irritate the tips of his fingers that had turned red with the rough movements of the nail file.

"Are you okay?" Phineas asked.

Leo huffed. "Why do you ask?"

"Because you're trying to grind your fingers to nubs."

Leo's hands stilled. With his left he felt the damage he did to the tips of his right, then he did that in opposite. "You're so dramatic." He said. He'd definitely done the most damage to his middle finger on his left than on his right, it was as red as a tomato and damn near to bleeding. Leo seemed to realise this as well as he took the file and scraped down the skin on the middle finger of his right hand.

"What are you doing!" Phineas reached forward, stretching over the collection of coffee tables they had to bunch together to make a makeshift dining table after the last one was mysteriously shattered. He touched Leo's hand for but a moment before he was swatted away like an annoying fly.

"You're so dramatic." Leo repeated. "I've had worse than this."

Phineas had no idea what he was talking about. Leo hardly exposed his own skin. He was always wrapped in his thick black army trousers, leather boots and dark turtle necks. Even without all those, Leo had yet to even see him without that strange looking patchwork jacket on. Perhaps Phineas could be persuaded that Leo had an obsession for symmetry, but that coat proved otherwise. There was no rhyme or reason to it. The patches ranged in sizes from obscenely large to so small your wouldn't have noticed it's place within the noise. The patterns ranged as well. Some were just bold colours, patches of pink or blue or yellow. Others were patterned: tartan, spots, stripes, floral. They even ranged in material, every material the human mind could conceive. Whatever there was to be imagined between silk to corduroy existed somewhere on that coat. It was Frankenstein of a jacket, an amalgamation of every fabric on earth. There was no symmetry to it. It could never be called a pretty thing and Leo's handsome face could only do so much to save it. Yet Leo wore it all the same.

Phineas conceded. He sank back into the chair he'd fallen asleep in last night. "How long will Sebastian be gone?"

"Why? You worried about him?"

"Stop answering my questions with questions. Just give me an answer."

Leo tilted his head. "Why?"

"Oh my god." Did people not know how to answer questions these days? Leo couldn't answer any of Phineas' questions, Lizzie still hadn't gotten back to him yet in regards to the email he sent, the company they both worked for hadn't a answered any of his questions about the excavation, and Sebastian didn't say anything about leaving. After last night and the moment they shared —not that there was anything particularly special about that moment and Phineas definitely wouldn't have done anything even if there was— he just thought Sebastian might mention leaving.