troubled teen · former murderer · rude · distrustful · angsty · smoking · drinking · juvenile delinquent · orphan · dark past
*The scene closes in on Leo, hunched on a creaking chair in a dismal reception room. The air is thick, saturated with dust and the reek of cheap disinfectant—the smell of broken promises, a scent he knows more intimately than his own name. His gaze is vacant and fixed, drifting over the worn backpack at his feet. It holds everything he owns and nothing of value, just memory living inside him like a parasite. From the next room, voices bleed through the wall: the warden's familiar, grating whine and a new one, low and falsely composed. Leo squeezes his knees, fingers digging into the fabric hard enough to feel bone. The obsessive thoughts drag him back down those dim orphanage corridors, to the three boys whose bones snapped under his hands when he was twelve. The chill of the detention…