Leo woke up at seven, which was late by his standards and felt like a gift.
He lay there for about thirty seconds doing nothing, which was also unusual, and then got up because lying in bed past the point of being awake was something he'd never been able to make himself do regardless of how much he theoretically wanted to. His body had been trained out of it years ago and it wasn't coming back.
Bathroom. Brush teeth. Shower.
He caught himself in the mirror while he was brushing and did the thing he sometimes did where he just looked for a moment. Not out of vanity — or mostly not out of vanity — but because even after seven years it occasionally still caught him slightly off guard.
He had to admit it. Objectively. The face was better than what Leonard Hofstadter had been working with in the version of events he'd inherited. The jawline had come in clean as he'd grown into it, sharper than he'd expected when he was six and first realized what he was working with. The curly hair sat the way curly hair sat when you actually took care of it. Brown eyes, decent bone structure, and seven years of consistent training and clean eating had done the rest.
He looked, not to put too fine a point on it, like someone who had their life together. Which he did, mostly, in the ways that counted.
He wasn't going to apologize for noticing. He'd earned it.
The physique was leaner than it had been even a month ago, the $200 challenge having shaved the last bit of softness that a thirteen year old's metabolism occasionally tried to put back. The muscle ups were at nineteen clean reps. The cardio was where he wanted it. The body he was looking at was the product of six years of showing up every single morning regardless of mood or weather or circumstance, and standing in front of a mirror and acknowledging that was not vanity. It was accounting.
He thought, not for the first time, about Muay Thai.
In his past life he'd picked up the basics the way a person picks up most things when they're an orphan with too much time and not enough money — online, from videos, from repetition in a small room with no one watching. He knew how to throw a shin kick. He knew the basic striking combinations, the stance, the way to rotate the hip into a kick so it had something behind it. He'd learned it for self defense because being alone in the world meant you thought about self defense.
But he'd never learned it properly. Never had a coach, never had a gym, never had someone watching his form and correcting it in real time. Every time he'd been about to look into actual classes something else had come up — work, study, the general relentless logistics of keeping himself afloat.
This life was different.
He had parents. He had stability. He had, for the first time in two lifetimes, the infrastructure that made proper training actually possible. He'd been meaning to look into gyms that offered Muay Thai in the area and had kept putting it off because there was always something else on the list. He should stop putting it off.
He filed it.
Michael knocked on the bathroom door with the specific rhythm of someone who had been waiting longer than they thought was reasonable. "Leo. Come on."
"Two minutes."
"You've been in there like twenty minutes."
"I have not been in there twenty minutes."
"Dad said to tell you breakfast is ready."
Leo finished the last step of his skincare routine — cleanser, moisturizer, SPF, nothing elaborate, the minimum required to have clear skin without making it a whole thing — and opened the door.
Michael was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed in the posture of someone practicing being aggrieved. He was eleven and already very good at it.
"You look the same as you always do," Michael said.
"Thank you."
"That wasn't a compliment."
"I know. Thank you anyway."
He went to his room and got dressed. Dark jeans, a clean white fitted tee, a light grey open button-down over it left loose, and his good sneakers — the ones he kept for situations that were not working out. Simple, put together, the kind of outfit that looked like he hadn't tried without requiring him to actually not try.
He looked in the mirror once.
Good.
Breakfast was eggs and toast and the particular Saturday morning atmosphere that came from Alfred being in a good mood and Beverly being in a calm one, which was the best possible combination the Hofstadter kitchen had to offer.
Leo sat down, picked up his fork, and then remembered his phone.
He'd uploaded the video at 9:53 the night before. He'd checked the count before bed and it had been moving but nothing extraordinary — a few thousand views, reasonable for the first hour, and he'd closed the app and gone to sleep because checking it compulsively was a habit he was trying to break.
He opened it now.
Looked at the number.
Looked at it again.
Put the phone down.
Picked it up.
Five million, two hundred and fourteen thousand views.
Comments: fifty-three thousand.
Likes: one hundred and eight thousand.
Subscribers: one hundred and fifty two thousand.
He stared at this for a long moment. The eggs on his plate went temporarily unacknowledged.
"Leo," Beverly said, without looking up from her coffee. "You're not eating."
He looked up. Looked at his family. Looked back at his phone. Something was happening in his chest that he didn't have an immediate word for — not quite disbelief, because the numbers were right there, but something adjacent to it. The specific vertigo of something you worked toward actually arriving.
"The video," he said.
Alfred looked up. "The challenge one?"
"It has five million views." He said it out loud to see if it sounded different that way. It did. "Since last night. Five million views in one night. And—" He looked at the subscriber count again. "I had ninety thousand subscribers yesterday. I have a hundred and fifty thousand right now."
The table was quiet for a second.
Then Michael said, "Wait, seriously?"
"Yeah."
Michael grabbed for the phone. Leo let him take it. Michael looked at the screen with the focused assessment of an eleven year old who understood numbers better than he let on in most contexts. "That's — okay that's actually a lot."
"I know."
"Like a lot a lot."
"Michael I know."
Leo became suddenly and acutely aware that something was going to happen and had approximately no time to prevent it before it happened, and then it happened — a sound came out of him that was not quite a yell and not quite a laugh but was somewhere in the middle, loud enough to bring Alfred fully upright in his chair and Beverly's coffee cup down on the saucer with a sharp click.
"Leo," Beverly said.
"Sorry." He wasn't sorry. "Sorry, I just — a hundred and fifty thousand. That's the silver play button from YouTube, that's—" He looked at his parents. "YouTube sends you a physical award when you hit a hundred thousand subscribers. A silver button. It's — that's a real milestone, that's when channels start being taken seriously as—"
"You're getting an award," Alfred said.
"Yes."
Alfred smiled. The quiet, genuine kind. "For what you built."
"For what I built," Leo confirmed, and saying it out loud did something unexpected to the back of his throat that he was going to ignore.
Beverly was looking at him with the expression she'd developed over the past seven years — the one that had replaced the clinical assessment she used to default to. It was warmer than that. It was something she'd learned to do rather than something that had always been there, which made it mean more, not less.
"We're proud of you," she said. Simply, directly, in the way Beverly said things when she meant them without qualification.
Leo nodded. Picked up his fork. Ate his eggs.
"Can I be in a video," Michael said.
"No."
"Why not—"
"Because you'll make it about yourself."
"I would not—"
"You absolutely would."
"I'm very likable on camera—"
"The answer is no, Michael."
Alfred was smiling into his coffee.
He was helping clear the plates when he remembered the movie and remembered that he hadn't mentioned it yet and then opened his mouth and said, "Oh — Alex and I are going to see Up this afternoon, Alfred can you drop me at the Landmark on Pico at quarter to two—"
He heard himself finish the sentence.
There was a pause.
Michael's head came up from the dishwasher with the speed of a predator detecting movement.
Alfred's expression did the thing where it went very neutral very quickly, which was how Leo knew he was composing himself before reacting.
Beverly set down the plate she was holding with the deliberate care of someone buying herself a second.
"Alex," Michael said.
"Yes."
"You and Alex."
"Yes, Michael."
"At the movies."
"It's a movie, it's not—"
"Just the two of you."
Leo pointed at him. "Don't."
"I'm just clarifying the details—"
"You are not clarifying anything—"
"So it's a date," Michael said, with the serene confidence of someone who knew exactly what it was.
"It's a movie. People go to movies. It's a completely normal Saturday afternoon activity—"
"With Alex."
"With Alex, yes, who is my friend—"
"Your friend," Michael said, nodding very slowly. "Right."
"Dad," Leo said, turning to his father with the focused energy of someone trying to establish a beachhead in a conversation that had already gotten away from him. "Can you drop me at the Landmark on Pico at quarter to two."
Alfred looked at him for a moment. The neutral expression had not fully resolved but there was something around the edges of it that was not neutral at all. "Of course," he said. "Happy to."
"Thank you."
"It's a nice theatre," Alfred added. "Good for a movie."
"Yes."
"With a friend."
Leo looked at him.
Alfred looked back with the expression of a man who was having an excellent Saturday morning.
"A friend," Leo confirmed. "Yes."
Beverly picked the plate back up and resumed what she was doing. "Wear the grey button down," she said, without turning around.
He was already wearing it.
He did not point this out.
Michael caught his eye from across the kitchen and smiled the smile of a person who had all the information he needed and intended to keep it indefinitely.
Leo pointed at him once, silently, in the universal language of don't.
Michael's smile got slightly wider.
Alfred pulled up outside the Landmark Theatre on Pico Boulevard at 1:43 PM, which was two minutes ahead of schedule and exactly the kind of outcome Alfred Hofstadter produced when given a destination and a time.
"Here you are," Alfred said.
"Thanks Dad."
Alfred put the car in park in a way that suggested he wasn't in a hurry to pull away. Leo had his hand on the door handle.
"Leo."
"Yeah."
Alfred looked at him with the particular expression he used when he was going to say something he'd thought about. Not a lecture. Just a thing, considered and placed carefully. "You built something real this week. The channel, the video — that's not luck, that's work. I want you to know I see that."
Leo looked at him for a moment. "Thanks, Dad."
"And." Alfred's mouth did the almost-smile thing. "Have a good time at the movie."
"It's just a movie."
"I know."
"With a friend."
"I know that too." Alfred looked straight ahead through the windshield. "She's a good one."
Leo got out of the car.
He heard Alfred pull away behind him and did not turn around because Alfred would absolutely be smiling and Leo did not need that information right now.
He looked up at the theatre front. 1:44 PM. One minute early.
He went inside.