Naïve to the Bone (lgbt)

time 01 | scarface

👍

Ignore the part where this is my fourth time rewriting this.

( pic is kind of a reference of leo's scar, song is Saint by Fox Academy ) ( yes that's anakin skywalker lmao sry it was the one that matched best )

sensitive topics :
- bullying (specifically about weight and skin color)
- blood / violence 

Leo was twelve when Theo broke the camera on his face.

It had already been a rough day. An argument over breakfast, Theo jabbing him with his fork under the table, Zoe crying her little baby head off. Then they took a trip to the grocery store, which was bad enough as it was; the family being together always led to problems. 

This was before the divorce, and their parents' disdain for one another was constantly looming over their heads. Their energy was charged -- things could go wrong at any second, it seemed. Still, his dad could never let go of his macho bullshit, always had to be the one making the decisions — "How are you thirty-five years old and still incapable of choosing a good chicken." He'd rip the pack of meat out of his wife's hand, trading it for a near-identical one he somehow deemed better. It's fucking chicken, Leo internally rolled his eyes and inched closer to his mom, hoping that maybe the people passing by would think he wasn't related to his father and brother. He had a feeling they wished the same.

In the dairy section, Theo kept pointing to pre-made packages of biscuits and cookies, taunting "Look, dad! It's Leo! The Pillsbury Doughboy!"

His cheeks burned. A woman pushing her shopping cart past the family cast a pitiful look at him before turning down another aisle.

His mother swatted Theo's hand away from the packaging and told him to shut his mouth, but he kept snickering. His father got a kick out of it and laughed along, "No, it's not dark enough. Maybe once it's toasted." 

Consuelo swatted her husband's arm, too. She was wearing that mama-bear look Leo had grown used to her using for him. "Nikolai, stop."

"You're always so goddamn sensitive!" He retorted. "We're just playing." They all knew that wasn't true, though. He had made fun of Leo's weight and skin color since he was a baby. Leo and his mother were blatantly not white. Theo and baby Zoe, also latino, were white passing, and their father took a disgusting sort of pride in it. 

The boys were fraternal twins: incredibly similar in the face, but their body types and skin tones were entirely different. Every perceived thing wrong with Leo, his father blamed on his mother and her heritage. "He gets his weight from your side of the family, Consuelo," He'd say. "He gets his autism from your side."

Leo sometimes wondered why his father, a white man, would marry his mom in the first place if he hated her skin color. He hadn't yet come to realize that you could hate something and fetishize it anyway.

+

After a silent drive home, Theo went outside to play basketball in the driveway. Consuelo offered to have Leo's best friend, JoJo, over for a sleepover to boost his mood, knowing the jokes his family made tended to get to his head. Thirty minutes later, his friend was knocking at the front door. Leo could hear his brother yelling from the yard "Your boyfriend's here!"

The two friends barreled up the stairs into Leo's room where he excitedly showed JoJo the camera his grandmother had recently given to him. It was super old, one she'd used in her own youth -- she trusted him to take care of it, knowing he had a special interest in photography. His father refused to buy him a camera, and his mother couldn't afford one on her own. (He'd received it ecstatically, immediately running to the bathroom with it where he set it down so he could do his happy wiggling dance without being seen or damaging his new present.) "Want me to show you how to use it?" He offered. JoJo nodded excitedly. They scrambled back out of the room and down the stairs to take photos in the yard.