fuxking up what matters :: [ hatchet x leo ]

[L△LIA]

^{freshman year. september 9th.}

"Huh?" "I said, Miss Laveau: are you listening?" There's a ringing in her ears and her brain is slowwwly rolling itself over in her skull — moving at a pace plodding enough that she can autopilot her body in a way that's perceived as alive or whatever, but unstable to a point of ensuring that she still feels sick despite heaving into the Principal's trashcan at the start of this attempted conversation. What the fuck is happening? Hatchet drops her head into her hands, groaning faintly at the ear-piercing whine of the fluorescent lighting. Or maybe it's the pipes in the walls. Or both. It's like electrified wire-thin nails being hammered into her skull. They vibrate. They make each thought feel like it's being individually electrocuted and now there's a mass murder happening inside her brain, each one floating to the top as they die. Like twisted, burnt, rusted scrap metal bobbing once, then twice at the surface of the quarry lake they quickly sink back under, plummeting to the unseen depths. She feels some of them hit bottom in the soles of her feet, but most of them get stuck somewhere else along the way. With all those sharp, stabby edges it's easy for them to get lodged in her throat or ricochet against each other and spin off into her arm, shredding through muscle and bone before getting stuck in the wall of her elbow or flaying straight on through one of her knuckles to exit her body entirely. "I understand that you and Leo Wordriff have spent a lot of time together, but with a record like yours," this is the knowing pause of someone who has witnessed decades of Rockfall students come and go, "a disciplinary hearing needs to be held." Hatchet isn't different. Hatchet isn't special. He's right; he has definitely seen countless Dugout kids exactly like her before. "You have a long history of assault. Were it not for your age at the time of these previous incidents, you'd have already been expelled. Bullying. Theft. Drugging an entire class of third graders with psychedelics. It's a bad pattern. You aren't in middle school anymore, Miss Laveau. You've reached an age of consequences." There's a booming SMACK! as the folder of her student records claps shut. It's definitely not the only one he has. A standard sized folder wouldn't be enough to hold the writeup for the Valentine's Day incident. She's seen the piles of paper for that one. All those kids? It got its own box. The paperwork for today won't be as much, but it deserves to be. "I'll be interviewing your teacher and classmates. While this incident is under investigation, you are advised not to contact Miss Wordriff. In the event that this escalates to legal action against you —" Seriously. What the fuck is happening? Digging her fingers into her braids, Hatchet pushes in until the hair pulls so tightly that she definitely uproots more than a couple of strands. The tension on her scalp helps to counter the tension inside her head. The more she pushes in, the more the already too-tight braids scream, the more she feels like maybe she's a little closer to being able to focus enough to think at least one final thought before they all die their gruesome deaths. This wasn't — She can't hold onto it. The principal clicks a pen and the thunderous sound wrenches her bones apart at the sockets, like a crowbar crammed through flesh into cartilage and when it's pushed back it cracks the joint to wreckage. Jagged chunks of body snap off and flap around, held on only by torn skin. It's a whole fucking mess. "Normally we ask that parents be brought in for meetings. That does not seem..." He trails off, audibly frowning as he slides yet more paperwork around on his desk. The sheets scrape against each other like sandpaper into a microphone. "— productive in your case. For now, you'll be required to check in with me personally at the beginning and end of each day of classes. Sign in. Sign out. Do you understand?" No. She doesn't understand. Can't he see how obvious it is that she doesn't understand what the fuck is happening? Is he an idiot or something? Hatchet's body nods, despite her head still being cradled in her hands, because her autopilot understands that this is the expected response and that she won't be allowed to get out of here if she doesn't go along with whatever he wants. It doesn't matter what it is. She doesn't need to be able to process the full extent of this situation in order to know that she's on the edge of expulsion or even juvie, apparently. That must be what happened to those other kids that the principal sees when he looks at Hatchet. It's too many things. She fucked up big this time. Leo's in the hospital. The acid wouldn't stop eating her hand or something — she doesn't fucking know, no one fucking knows. Everyone just knows it's bad. It didn't look bad, but something happened after she left the classroom. Not understanding is fucking terrifying. She didn't come back and so Hatchet is left to fill in the blanks on her own. She imagines Leo spilling out of her body. She imagines that her hand looks like watching a bridge collapse in real time. She imagines the pain like electrified nails hammered into flesh and jagged scrap metal bursting from her knuckles and a crowbar prying apart hand bones at the joints. What got so bad that Leo didn't come back? She said it was itchy. That was it. She even waited in line behind some other kid who'd been getting help with their homework before taking her turn asking Mrs. Collier what she should be doing. So why the fuck is Leo in the hospital? Because of Hatchet. And because Rockfall's science department is severely underfunded. But mostly it's her fault, because no matter what happened, this wasn't like the other times. This time Hatchet meant to do it.

_{dear reader by taylor swift.}

[L△LIA]

^{fifth grade. november.}

Hatchet wakes to the sound of tambourines and rustling papier-mâché. An impromptu sunrise unity communion is underway, two dozen or so deadheads humming in discordant harmony as they share their personal frequencies with one another. The varied off-key notes sound out their interconnected places in the universe or... something like that. Despite growing up in MYcelium, Hatchet doesn't care about whatever nonsense the deadheads are always on about. They do a lot of shrooms. Once she was old enough to understand what psychedelics are, that was all she needed to know. She gets it. They like drugs. They made a church about it. Churches get made about dumber things, but it's still pretty fucking stupid. She has better stuff to devote her brain space to, like literally anything else. A six foot tall praise puppet with a cascade of tattered plastic soda bottles for hair greets Hatchet as she sits up in her sleeping bag, her quiet corner behind the back pew no longer as secluded as it was when she set up camp last night. Unfortunately, rubbing her eyes doesn't make the wide-mouthed humanoid garbage pile go away. With a head made from some type of large fleshy-painted gasoline canister, the twin pits of its cut-out eyes gawk at her. "Go away," she scowls. Shrugging, it shuffles off to rejoin the main event, cozying up to someone wearing one of the papier-mâché cat heads with a sack-body stitched together out of mismatched floral fabrics, and Hatchet immediately starts rolling up her sleeping bag before any of the other deadheads decide to lumber over and greet her good morning. Taking advantage of everyone being up in the sanctuary to welcome the sunrise, she stashes her sleeping bag in the basement and begins sniffing at her armpits. It's been a few days since she was able to shower at Leo's. Between a pull-up contest on the monkey bars last recess, her and Leo's hard won dodgeball victory in gym class, and the long walks to and from the Dugout, Hatchet could definitely smell better. Grabbing the bottle of dish soap from the kitchenette, she squirts some into her hair and grabs one of the communal towels from a shelf next to the big laundry bucket. Weaving through the elaborate bucket-grow setup that takes up the entire central area of the basement — a dense cluster of floor-to-ceiling columns with an array of mushrooms flourishing out from perforations cut into the bucket sides — she finds a hose piled up with the cultivation supplies and drags one end back over to the utility sink to screw it onto the faucet. The water only warms up so much in November, so she cranks the hot tap and hopes for the best before retracing her steps to stand over the floor drain where she left the other end of the hose. Sucking in a deep breath, she scratches the soap around her scalp and pretends that it burns until she convinces herself that it actually does. False worries about her hair falling out if she doesn't follow through with rinsing it clean make it easier to flip her hair forward and hold the hose nozzle over her head, no matter how icy the water is. Her teeth are chattering by the time she finishes washing up, but she definitely smells better. Rummaging around her mom's bunk, Hatchet steals the cleanest smelling clothing she can find — a loose green crop top and a pair of way too big shorts that still reach halfway to her ankles after belting around her waist — and sets to work speed braiding her hair. It won't be long until the deadheads start getting bored of humming at the scraps of morning light that manage to reach this far into the Dugout. There's a cliff ridge that keeps most of the deep quarry in shadow until the sun is further overhead, but the strip mall MYcelium rents is on the upper edge of the neighborhood and just central enough to catch a glimpse of sunrise on clear days like today. The shuffling footsteps overhead grow notably more restless as the too stretched out rubber band she's tying her second braid off with snaps. Quickly knotting it back together, she finishes wrangling her wet hair and drags the hose back to where she found it. Grabbing a roll of duct tape from the cultivation supplies, she pops it over her left hand like an oversized bracelet and goes to rummage through the fridge in the kitchenette, just in case. There are a few things that she's able to identify as safe to eat and there are several more things that she doesn't trust, psychedelic or otherwise. The thing that seems most like "food" today is some kind of vegan mystery loaf that looks like Jan's handiwork — which means it's equal parts safe to eat and untrustworthy. Hatchet whines in complaint to herself, her stomach turning just looking at the mushy gray texture and the way the loaf crumbles into awkward chunks at the corners; even it doesn't want anything to do with itself. Accepting defeat, she shuts the fridge and settles for tearing a chunk of fresh mushrooms off the side of one of her least hated buckets: pink oyster mushrooms. Force feeding herself bites as she trudges back upstairs and skirts around the edge of the sanctuary, she heads back to last night's sleeping spot to retrieve her sneakers from beneath the adjacent pew and sets to work re-patching an ever growing hole in the left heel with the duct tape she scavenged. Good enough. If she leaves now and sprints part of the hour-long trek to school then she'll still have time to pick Leo up; Leo's always running late. Hatchet smiles to herself. The novelty of having something to look forward to is a way better motivator than simply being excited to get out of MYcelium each day. "Bye, mom," Hatchet calls out absently as she passes by a particularly toothy praise puppet on her way out the door, a few telltale ratty curls of hair jutting out from a tear in its cloak of browning newspaper and rags. The response is little more than a snort of laughter before it resumes humming at the sunrise. What a weird kid, always calling her mom for some reason. By the time Hatchet realizes her stolen shirt says SHOW ME YOUR DOOBIES in bright white lettering across the front, it's way too late to turn back. She and Leo make bets on how long it'll take for Mr. Guy to give her detention for it. The answer is: about as long as it takes Leo to get detention for disrupting class because she can't stop laughing about it.

_{peace & quiet by kesha.}

[L△LIA]

^{freshman year. september 9th.}

It's late by the time the first day of exy tryouts wraps up, dusk tugging at the shadows as Hatchet picks a handful of small stones out of the gravel alleyway behind Leo's apartment building. Ducking into the central courtyard, one pebble after another is tossed at her best friend's bedroom window. She can't risk knocking on the front door — she isn't supposed to be here. Even if she hadn't been warned about the potential for Leo's family to press charges against her, she still wouldn't want to see them right now any more than they probably want to see her. Leo's parents are nice enough. They don't complain about Hatchet always being around: sleeping in their home, eating their food, showering in their bathroom. With how much they work, most of the time it's just Hatchet and Leo on their own and they like knowing that Leo isn't alone. The two of them watch out for each other. But that doesn't mean that Leo's parents care about Hatchet; it means they tolerate her. Even if the principal hadn't warned her off, Hatchet would still be throwing stones to knock on the window instead of the front door. She doesn't belong in the Wordriff apartment without Leo. She's not their kid. As the pebbles bounce off the glass and ricochet onto the cracked cement at her feet, Hatchet comes to terms with the reality of Leo not being there. She couldn't help hoping that the rumors were lies, but there's no denying it after she takes a running start to jump high enough to get to one of the larger brick ledges and climbs her way up a drain pipe until she's within reach of Leo's windowsill. Even before she knocks the box fan in to crawl through, she can tell that no one is home. It's a lonely kind of quiet inside. Righting the fan and flicking on a light, she takes a long look around the room as if assessing something complicated. It's not. Not really. Hatchet knows where all of her things are tucked away and there's not much, but sorting her t-shirts out from the folded stacks inside Leo's dresser still feels like an ordeal. It's hard to resist adding one of the Bingo Bonanza tees or the extra soft checked flannel to the stack of things she separates out, so used to borrowing them that it feels like leaving belongings behind. Everything is like that. She rolls up her sleeping bag, but leaves the foam pad that lives beneath it. Only one jacket gets pulled out of the closet and it feels wrong to take it, the worn denim a more familiar sight on Leo these past few years than on herself. She hangs it back up and takes it down again several times before finally resolving to shove it into her duffel bag with the rest of her clothes. It's still hot out, but September can turn chilly in the blink of an eye and, other than the jacket, the only sleeved thing that Hatchet owns is a hoodie. Well. That's not entirely true. She eyes the black puffer coat pushed into the back of the closet. It's more hers than the flannel button-up, but she didn't buy it. It's like the roll of foam. She's the only one who uses it, but — She tugs it off the hanger anyhow. Maybe she's spoiled now, too used to this cushy Cad life to go back to trudging through winter storms in her mom's old denim jacket. She tells herself that it's something like superstition: if she takes it then she won't need it, because everything will blow over before the snow sets in. If she doesn't take it then she'll be putting a curse on herself. Sure. She almost laughs. Like things could get any worse. The school principal thinks they will. He looks at Hatchet like she was born with handcuffs tattooed on her wrists. People used to look at her like that all the time. She was starting to forget what it felt like, but now that it's happening again she doesn't know how this feeling ever slipped her memory. It's an expectation of no expectations. Only now it comes with an extra layer of judgement for taking a Cad kid down with her. She wants to brush it off: Whatever. Fuck him. But she can't. Not when the stuff he says is all the same stuff that Hatchet thinks about herself inside her head. Today, more than ever before. Turning her eyes up to the ceiling, she follows the winding wire of the string lights until they go out of sight behind the top of the bookcase. She hasn't even made it through today and time already feels impossible to survive. The idea of leaving Leo to go lay low in the Dugout is miserable. Hatchet doesn't pity herself for the mess that she made, but she still wishes she had anywhere else to go. She's gonna lose her mind being back there again. Staring at the bookcase a while longer, she moves to press her ear to Leo's bedroom door to double check that everything is as quiet in the rest of the apartment as it is in here and slips out to nab a box from the storage room. Stack by stack she pulls the Xena: Warrior Princess comics from their shelf and carefully packs them up. Honestly, they've been Hatchet's comics since that first night she and Leo unboxed them and she needs one thing to think about that isn't everything that's going wrong. Leo will understand. It's the same way that Hatchet knows Leo will understand that she has to leave for a little while. Either the principal will have a meeting to tell her all about how she should stay away from riff-raff like Hatchet or Leo will ask around about Hatchet the same way that Hatchet has been asking about her. Then she'll hear about the disciplinary hearing and the threats of expulsion or juvie and she'll understand that Hatchet hates this. That this whole not seeing Leo thing is some bullshit. That Hatchet didn't think that the acid would actually hurt her like this because Hatchet wouldn't ever hurt her like this on purpose, even if everything was technically... on purpose. Goddamnit. She was just stupid and desperate, the same way she's been this whole time — all these years together and her whole life before that — because she's never had choices the way that other people do and so she's never learned how to make them. Hatchet trusts that Leo knows her well enough to understand that if all this bullshit is happening, then it must be for a reason. Something bigger than them, because the Leo that Hatchet knows always sees the best in her and the Hatchet that Leo knows wouldn't fuck off and leave Leo at a time like this unless there was a good reason. Propping open the doors to the apartment and the building, Hatchet carries the box of comics out back before returning inside to lock everything up again. The sleeping bag and the duffel get tossed out the window and Hatchet jumps out after them, skinning her knee when she botches the landing. It's just a little blood. It could be worse. The blood oozes down her shin as she loads everything she owns into a stolen Corner Value Store shopping cart and trudges in the direction of the Dugout, thinking about Leo. Despite imagining the worst about her hand, Hatchet can only imagine the best about everything else. No matter what, they'll be okay. Because they have to be. They have to be.

_{why am i like this? by orla gartland.}

[aya]

^{freshman year. september 10th.}

Leo wakes up in the middle of the afternoon, still curled up in a ball and shoved under her bed. Disoriented, her face feels puffy and her eyes are grainy and her tongue takes up too much of her mouth, rough and dry like a wad of cotton. It's the sharp stab of pain driving through her hand and echoing up through her elbow that strings all the pieces together. She must've cried herself to sleep down here. It was a long day, an awful one, but what was most excruciating wasn't the chemical burn being poked and prodded, or the dragging hours in the hospital — it was the uncertainty. She tries to focus on the good news, but when the good news is most likely gets to keep all her fingers the bright side doesn't feel very bright. It's hard to find comfort in it. Slowly wiggling herself out from under her bed, Leo is greeted by the absence that sent her spiraling down there in the first place. In the light of day with six hours of sleep to erase some of the disorientation, she feels a little stupid for the meltdown, even though she knows she should cut herself some slack. Yesterday was so stressful and so exhausting, of course she unraveled. Her head wasn't on right. She jumped to conclusions. It makes perfect sense that Hatchet would have come to grab her sleeping bag. No matter how much Leo wanted to be welcomed home with a big hug and an exchange of assurances that everything was gonna be okay and a rundown of everything that happened at exy tryouts to take her mind off of the open question of her hand, it probably would've been too weird for Hatchet to stay here alone. She wasn't going to be snoring on Leo's bed with a comic book folded open in her hands, waiting for Leo to get home. She must've just grabbed her sleeping bag and found somewhere else to stay for the night. She'll be back. It's not like she moved out. Stomach growling — it's almost 2pm and she missed a few meals with everything going on — Leo plods into the kitchen in search of food. Her parents are both out of the apartment; they must be trading off shifts at the diner. She can't remember the last time she was home alone like this. It's weird. The apartment has never felt big before, but now it seems gaping. Even the kitchen, barely big enough for one person, is cavernous. Leo doesn't like it. There are no leftovers in the fridge — of course there was no time or thought put into stocking them yesterday — so she rummages around for something to make one-handed. The options are PB&J or instant ramen. She opts for the ramen, chicken flavor, already anticipating Hatchet's teasing about both the superiority of instant noodles and the extremely basic choice. They don't have a lot of options in the house — no point with the Cornet Value Store two buildings down — so it was that or the barbecue shrimp flavor, which Hatchet likes better. They're probably going to be eating a lot more ramen while Leo's hand is messed up. That or Hatchet's knife skills are going to get a lot better. Probably both. The chicken ramen is basic — nowhere near the level of the instant noodles Hatchet made her that time Leo had the flu — but they're easy to scarf down and surprisingly filling. Hatchet probably had ramen last night, too, wherever she went. Hopefully. Hopefully she's got something for lunch today — at least it's Tuesday so no matter what it can't be as bad as mystery casserole. Eating instant ramen with her left hand is harder than she thought it would be. She should've made herself the sandwich instead. Leo tries a fork and two different pairs of chopsticks but mostly she ends up dropping the noodles back into the bowl, splashing broth all over herself and the counter, and dropping them on the front of her shirt. It's a mess. She settles for waiting until it cools down enough to dig them out with her fingers. Watching the green numbers tick up on the stove clock is a slow way to pass the time, but she can't come up with anything better to do. School's almost over by now. Third period ended a few hours ago. Before she can stop herself from doing the math, Leo realizes it's the longest they've been apart since fifth grade. Since before Hatchet moved in. Since before Leo gave her that panic attack so severe they ended up skipping school the rest of the day to go play with the lizards. She didn't mean for it to happen, but Leo felt really bad about doing that to Hatchet anyway — even after Hatchet brushed off her apology to point out that Leo didn't know. She also didn't know that it would turn into a bunch of really good things. It did. Her friendship with Hatchet is the best thing that's ever happened to her. Hatchet has to feel terrible about Leo's hand. She always feels bad enough any time she catches Leo across the knuckles when they're stick-fighting in the park, or after shoving her a little too hard when they're roughhousing, or when a bad hop sends the exy ball bouncing over the top of Leo's racquet and directly into her face. Lately, Leo doesn't even have to call a time-out; Hatchet starts assessing the damage without being asked, more concerned about whether or not she's okay than Leo is. Leo couldn't even talk her out of dropping everything to inspect that scrape on her arm from when they broke the lightbulb in the murder basement, no matter how much she tried to downplay it. A chemical burn isn't a cut. Leo can't imagine how awful Hatchet feels for accidentally sending her to the hospital. Fishing a clump of soggy noodles out of the lukewarm broth and gobbling them down like a goose, Leo wills the stove clock to count faster. It's a really inconvenient week for exy tryouts. The extra hours until she can talk to Hatchet are already excruciating, and school's only been out for a couple minutes. She needs to talk to Hatchet. She needs to tell her it's okay and she's not mad — it's not like Hatchet knew the acid would do all that, Leo's been in charge of doing their science homework for years and she didn't know either. She'd've asked Hatchet to come with her if she did. Then she wouldn't have to worry so much about where Hatchet is and what she's doing and how much she's probably worrying about Leo. Leo needs to tell her that too. Not to leave next time. To stay. She really needs that hug.

_{all you had to do was stay by taylor swift.}

[aya]

^{freshman year. september 10th.}

Like everything else, wriggling out of her shirt is an ordeal. The painkillers are wearing off, a low-grade throbbing radiates up to her elbow even when she keeps her arm still; moving her hand accents the aching with lightning bolt needle jolts, bright flares of pain that fade from sparks to embers then simmer for too long. For such a simple, mindless task, undressing is a process that demands patience and attention that Leo is incapable of mustering today. It takes so much concentration just to figure out a starting point — maneuvering her left arm out of its sleeve — that Leo flops down on the floor for a few minutes to rest before strategizing the next move. The collar and the remainder of the shirt make it over her head without too much struggling, which is good because trying to get it off her injured hand with its bulky bandage quickly depletes the rest of her energy and exhausts her composure. It's the sleeve. The fucking sleeve snags on the bandage that wraps her hand, the clip catching the cotton and ripping her entire soul out of her body when she tugs the tee back onto her elbow. Tipping over, each muscle clenched, breath coming in short gasps between the rolling waves of nausea, sweat prickling over every inch of skin, eyes squeezed shut, she waits for the searing to subside. It takes a long time; knowing that the pain has to stop eventually doesn't make it go by any faster. Then she's stupid enough to try it again. Snot and tears leaking down her face, Leo hauls herself into the desk chair, scattering the disorganized debris on the tabletop as she rummages around for scissors. A lot of the shit gets knocked to the ground — a handful of pens, an exy ball, a half-empty H8ERADE bottle, a deck of cards, a candy wrapper, her geometry textbook — and she doesn't notice, let alone care. The scissors turn up under the stack of bargain bin comics they got as a consolation prize on the latest hunt for the elusive missing Xena issue. It's fucking impossible to use them backwards — they're too short and dull and the cutting edge is on the wrong side and the thumb hole is too small for her fingers and the finger holes are too big for her thumb and her left hand is infuriatingly uncoordinated — but it's not like Leo has any other option. Not when there's only one functional hand in the entire apartment. All on her own, she clumsily hacks at the shirt hanging off her right shoulder until there are enough holes in the fabric to tear the sleeve in half. Triumphant, she slams the scissors onto the desk, guides the mangled cotton over her mangled hand, and discards the remnants of the old Bingo Bonanza t-shirt on the floor. Leo takes a moment to bask in her victory, easing back into the chair and rewarding herself with a few deep breaths, feeling as though she set a new personal best at the mile. Sleeves are the worst. Hatchet's right. When she gets home, Leo's going to retract every time she teased her friend for immediately cutting them off of every shirt as soon as it comes into her possession. She couldn't be more grateful for that habit today. In this moment, nothing could be as helpful as having a stash of cutoff tanks with a variety of hole depths to pick from. She'd let Hatchet get away with hours of smug told-you-sos about the various shortcomings of sleeves if she wanted, but Leo knows the gloating will be concise and objective. Shirts with sleeves are worse. That's it. Now she gets it. Reinvigorated from the relief of having just one easy thing today, Leo saunters over to the dresser and opens the top drawer. She'd been thinking about borrowing Hatchet's rec league all-stars shirt, its arm holes cut the lowest for ventilation, but the only bright orange tee she can find is hers. Brow furrowed, she thumbs through the rest of the tops. She can't find any of Hatchet's cutoffs in the neatly-folded stacks — not even when she pulls shirt after shirt out of the drawer, setting them one-by-one on top of the dresser. There's no sign of Hatchet mixed in with her things. It was a stupid thought. When the drawer is empty, she realizes that. Hatchet doesn't have very many. Of course she'd take them with her when she came to grab her sleeping bag. She didn't know how long Leo would be in the hospital and running out of clean clothes would suck. It makes sense. It doesn't mean anything else. Leo contemplates settling for one of her own tank tops, but they're clingier and won't be as comfortable for all the napping and lounging around pathetically that she has planned for the rest of the afternoon. Instead, she dumps their laundry bag out in the middle of her floor and sifts through the pile in search of the bright red Cad Park Creatures cutoff that Hatchet wore on Sunday. It'll be a little sweaty from practicing in the park in anticipation of Monday's tryouts, but Leo's still decidedly disheveled and smells like the hospital, so the shirt won't be any grosser than she is. That's not a big deal. Or it would be no big deal if she could find it. Double-checking the usual spots where dirty laundry collects — under the bed, under the desk, tucked between the dresser and the bookshelf, on the bathroom floor — is as useless as Leo knew it would be. She's the one who leaves things strewn about wherever she happens to be when she's done with them, not Hatchet. Hatchet makes sure everything ends up where it belongs. Picking through the rest of her wadded up shirts and half-inside-out track pants and dirty socks, Leo reassures herself that Hatchet's wardrobe is small. It makes sense that she hasn't found anything yet — like the dresser, most of the clothes in their laundry pile are Leo's to begin with. When she finds a pair of cutoff jorts, she almost relaxes until she remembers they're actually hers; it's just that Hatchet usually wears them. She gets her hopes up again with some gym shorts. But it's fine. Hatchet taking her laundry makes sense for the same reason taking the rest of her shirts does. It doesn't mean anything else. She can't think about it meaning anything else. It seems like a dumb amount of effort to fish out her dirty clothes instead of just grabbing the checked flannel or the oversized sweater or any of the other things she borrows so often that Leo makes sure Hatchet doesn't want them before wearing them herself, but maybe she didn't want to take them without asking. Hatchet's always doing considerate stuff like that. Even when it's stupid, it's really sweet. That has to be what happened, Leo decides. It has to be. Settling for one of her tank tops after all, she sits on the edge of her bed to contemplate taking the nap that she'd planned on. She doesn't need to close her eyes to know that it isn't possible anymore. Just the idea of lying down and counting the string lights while she waits for Hatchet to come back home has Leo ready to jump out of her skin. She's thinking too much and she's trying too hard not to. No matter how exhausted her body might be, her restless brain started running laps around the inside of her skull and now there's no stopping it. There's nothing to distract herself with but the wreckage of her room laid out in front of her, and focusing on that doesn't help one bit. The things she tries not to think about pile up like stacks of t-shirts haphazardly reconstructed on top of her dresser until they collapse and spill over the edge and into the sea of dirty laundry and hacked up fabric scraps and abandoned shoes and garbage below. It's a mess. It's easier to look at than the empty space on the floor that she's been doing her best to ignore since she woke up, desperately hoping that keeping the sleeping bag's absence out of sight means she doesn't have to think about it, because thinking about it makes it a possibility, and she can't consider it. It's too scary. It's too scary to think that Hatchet — She's coming back. She is. She lives here. She lives here and Leo needs her and she cares about Leo. She wouldn't — She just didn't want to stay here alone. She's staying somewhere else for a couple days. That's it. She didn't know how long it would be until Leo was home. Dr. Ames will have told Coach Q and Coach Q will tell her and she'll come back home tonight. She'll come home and everything will be okay. It's stupid to think anything else. Leo's getting all worked up over nothing. She knows Hatchet wouldn't leave her. Sniffling, she gets up and kicks the scattered laundry into an organized pile. It's a little shitty to expect Hatchet to clean up the remnants of her meltdown, but in Leo's defense the chemical burn means she can't hold the bag open and load the dirty clothes back into it at the same time. Hopefully how much of a mess she is without Hatchet is more endearing than annoying. And Hatchet will think how much Leo worried about her is cute. Hopefully. Leo shuffles the dirty clothes into the corner behind the closet door where they keep the laundry bag. Killing her last shred of doubt before she goes back for her well-earned nap, she opens the closet. The hangers screech against the bar as she rifles through the cardigans and hoodies, dresses and skirts, swishy things that don't fold well, jackets and coats, suits, vests, and the tee with the possum graphic that Leo kept losing track of in the dresser drawers. She must've flipped past what she was looking for, so she goes through a second time, more slowly. She still doesn't find it. Item by item, Leo dumps the contents of the closet, frantically tossing everything to the ground for the crime of not being Hatchet's jacket. When the closet is empty, it's still not there. Digging through the new pile in desperation, as if she could've possibly missed the light blue worn denim, as if she could've possibly missed the painted puffer coat, the panic comes flooding back tenfold. Hatchet isn't coming back tonight. She didn't leave for a couple days. It's September. She won't need her coat for months. She's not coming back for months. She's not coming back. She's not coming back. She left. That's it. She's gone.

_{coat on a hook by the national.}