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Leo's dad brings him to kindergarten every day and leaves him there for a long time, but Leo doesn't mind because he likes the place enough. Every classroom is painted in a different shade of blue or green and there are nice toys he can't afford to have at home, including his favorite: a radio-control car that can really go on any surface like the army all-terrain vehicles patrolling the city.But most of all, he likes to come to kindergarten because Adam is there. Adam is Leo's favorite person in the whole world and they have been best friends since he can remember. Adam is very good at sports, so he's been accepted in several different Youth Centers and he's always very busy training while Leo only has to go to the mandatory courses as he hates sports and can't be bothered with it. When they are at school, though, they can spend all their time together and that is what they do.Leo's favorite activity is usually exploring. He likes storytelling time a lot, and would sit listening to the teacher reading for hours at hand, but no tale you can read to him can really beat the thrill of adventure. He and Adam always go exploring after lunch, when they are supposed to be sleeping. They go and lie down on the cots with all the other kids and even close their eyes, pretending to be asleep, until after the teacher has come checking on them. Then they sneak out of the room and take nice walks around the facility, looking for secrets passages.They have discovered none so far, but they refuse to give up. Today they're exploring the garden, mostly because it's too hot to stay inside, but also because they have never taken a proper look around at the yard. There were too many kids whenever they've been here. “We should go back inside and try the boiler room downstairs,” Adam says for the second time in ten minutes. He didn't agree with today's location and only followed Leo to prevent him from getting hurt like he usually does when he's alone. “There must be at least a fire escape there.”“Maybe tomorrow,” Leo finally answers as they leave the safe area of the swinging set to venture into the bushes a few feet from it. “Let's check the garden first.”Adam knows that if Leo never wants to go to the boiler room is not because there are no cool things to see – there are plenty – but because he's scared of the dark. But Adam never brings that up because that is what best friends do. “Where would a secret passage in a garden would go anyway?” He asks, frowning.“Anywhere,” Leo shrugs. “There's always a secret passage in a garden, I've seen it in a lot of movies.”They're industriously swiping with their hands a bunch of fallen leaves that seem to be hiding some hatch on the ground when they hear the laughter. A tiny, fairy-like laughter, followed by several clinks. Those are the sounds girls make when they play with their tea sets, but the girls wing of the kindergarten is on the other side of the facility and girls rarely do things outside. Leo and Adam have tried to go check the girl school a few times, but boys are not allowed in there and it's really hard to sneak past the guards at the door.“I don't think it's a good idea,” Adam says right away when he sees the sparkle in Leo's eyes. He always gets that right before doing something really dangerous, really stupid or both. “Let's go back inside. We can go to the attic, instead. There's still time before sleeping hour is over.”“Later. I want to check this first.” Leo has never given the wall in the kindergarten's garden a second thought until five seconds ago, when he decided to climb over it. “Are you not curious to find out what that was?”“Not that much,” Adam says. And yet, when they hear a second laughter, he's quick to follow him to the nearest tree. “Do you think it's a girl?”“Sounds like one.”“But why would a girl be on the other side of a wall in the boys garden?” Adam tries to make sense of it. “I don't know. That's what I want to find out.”They have never climbed a tree so tall before, but it's not that hard because there are a lot of handholds. Adam lets Leo go first, so if he falls down, he'll be able to catch him. Adam always thinks about those things because Leo never does, and between the two of them, he's always the one who gets hurt. One of the tree branches extend over the wall, and they can easily sit on it to take a peek at what's there on the other side.The other garden is nothing like theirs. First of all, is unkempt. There are shrubs and weeds everywhere and the rain of two days ago formed a huge puddle underneath the only sad swing that there is, making it impossible to use it. And there are no slide or monkey bars either. Secondly, it's a very small garden and it doesn't look like it was designed to have kids play in it at all. In fact, it's only a tiny piece of their garden that was cut away and left there to itself when they built the wall, but Leo doesn't know that at the time.But what catches Leo's eyes is not the garden at all. There's a kid sitting at a sad excuse for a table in the middle of the garden and he's playing tea party with a bunch of stuffed animals. Leo is four and he has not seen many things in his life, but he's pretty sure that kid is the most awesome of all. In fact, he's so unlike anyone he has ever seen that Leo is not even sure it is a boy. He's playing with a tea set after all, so she might very well being a girl. And yet, Leo doesn't think so. There's something in that kid that tells Leo he is a boy, even though Leo doesn't know what it is or how that is even possible when he's wearing a pink tutu instead of pants and a sparkly headband on his head, with a unicorn horn and ears, like girls do.“I don't think he goes to our school,” Adam says, trying to remember if they have ever seen him at recess.“I want to talk to him.”Adam doesn't have time to protest, because Leo is already climbing down the wall and into the other garden. He obviously has to follow him before he can make a disaster. The strange kid, startled, finally looks up and he stops playing the moment he sees them. He reminds to Leo one of those white little bunnies that are too scared to run away when you get too close and they just sits there shaking like mad. The kid is not shaking, but he is white and delicate like a bunny. And he has big rounded eyes like them too, except that they are blue and Leo has never seen a bunny with blue eyes before. “What is your name?” he asks him.The kid's cheeks turn a nice shade of pink as he looks down. He doesn't say anything though, as if even saying his own name was too difficult for him. Leo and Adam have not that kind of problem – they are pretty straightforward kids – but they have seen other kids do girl things like that before and being scolded because of that. His dad says is called being shy and boys are not supposed to be that. But maybe the kid is acting like this only because they are strangers, so Leo decides to introduce himself properly first. “I am Leo and this is Adam. We go to school on the other side of the wall.”“Cody,” the strange kid says after a while in the tiniest voice. “And I go to school here.”“This is a school?” Adam asks, skeptically. Cody nods quickly, but say nothing else.“Are you a boy or a girl?” Leo has to ask because now he's confused. From up the tree, Cody definitely looked like a boy with a bit of a girl in him. But from up close, he looks like a girl and he smells like one, but he still feels like a boy.Cody holds the hem of his tutu tight. “I don't like that question,” he says nervously and Leo can swear that he sounds on the verge of tears.“What are you playing at?” He asks then, trying to make it right.Cody looks down again. In fact, he even takes a step back, hiding one of the tea cup he was still holding in his hand behind his back. “Nothing,” he whispers, embarrassed. He looks self-conscious now and, most of all, wary of them. Almost like he's expecting them to do something bad, even though Leo doesn't really know what that is. Leo doesn't feel like doing something bad to him, though. If anything, he wants to get closer and play with him, his longing for adventure quickly forgotten. “It's a tea party, right?” He gently moves away a teddy bear and makes it sit with a friend on another chair, then he takes his place at the plastic table. “We've never had one,” he declares. “How do you play that?”Cody seems surprised by the fact that they want to play with him but, after a moment of confusion, he finally finds his voice again. “It's Mrs. Buttercup's birthday party,” he explains, nodding towards a scruffy pink doll sitting next to Adam. “She's turning five like me today. Blaine said we can have a party outside since it's her birthday.”“Where are the other children?” Leo asks. He has no idea what to do with his empty cup, so he waits for Cody to use his.“There aren't that many of them,” he says, pouring them all invisible cherry blossom tea from his toy teapot. "But it's sleeping time right now, so they are all sleeping. I don't like sleeping, so I have a special permission to play by myself if I am very quite."Adam frowns, even more confused. None of this makes any sense to him. “Why don't you go to our school then? We have sleeping time too and you can skip it. We do that all the time. It's nicer there and there are way more toys too.”Cody serves them a plate of little wooden chocolate cookies. They take one each and then they pretend to dip them in their cup, mimicking what he does. “I'm not allowed to go to your school because I like wearing skirts and paints my nails,” he explains, shrugging. “That's what Blaine says.”Leo grabs his hand to inspect it. Cody's nails are painted a glittery blue and they seem to sparkle when they catch the light. “I like your nails,” he declares, eventually. “They are super cool.”Cody pretty pink lips open in the cutest smile Leo has ever seen. “I can do yours if you want.”Leo is about to say yes when someone comes outside in the garden, walking towards them. “Maybe next time, pet. Alright?” He says, smiling tenderly at him. He doesn't look angry to find them there. In fact, he only pauses to give Cody's head a stroke and ruffle his hair a little before offering his hand to the two of them. “My name is Blaine and you gentlemen are...?”Leo looks at his hand for a moment and then he decides to shake it as he knows that it's the polite thing to do. “I'm Leo and this is my best friend Adam,” he says for the second time today. He has never introduced himself so much in one day. “We go to the school that's behind this wall.”“I had thought as much,” Blaine chuckles, amused. “Nice to meet you, Leo and Adam. You have done a very brave but also a very dangerous thing climbing that tree. One of you could have fallen and get hurt.”“We are very good at climbing trees,” Adam informs him, in case he didn't know. Or at least, he is. Leo sometimes does fall down, but Adam is always there to catch him or, more often than not, to break his fall by acting as a pillow.“Can they stay for a little while? Pretty please!” Cody asks, the urgency in his voice makes Leo's heart hurts in a weird way. He suddenly doesn't want to do anything but staying here and keep Cody company, and have him paint his nails all the colors of the rainbow for the rest of his life.Blaine sighs and picks Cody up in his arms, holding him tight to his chest. Cody seems to sense that the answer will be no before Blaine even says it – Leo senses it too, after all – but he doesn't throw a tantrum like Leo expected, he just lies his head on Blaine's shoulder. “They've been here a very long time and their teachers are probably looking for them, don't you think? And we don't want to get friends in trouble.”Cody shakes his head sadly. “No, we don't want to get anybody in trouble.”“Right. But here is what we are going to do,” Blaine goes on, lulling him a little in his arms. “I'm going to put a nice step ladder under the wall for them to use, so they can come visit you whenever they want. What do you say?”Cody beams, his whole face lights up. “Can they come tomorrow?”“Yes.” It's Leo who answers before Blaine can say anything. “We can come every day and also bring you things. Everything you want.”Blaine chuckles. “I think bringing yourselves will be enough.”Leo strongly disagrees. Based on what he has seen in this place, he's already thinking about things Cody doesn't seem to have and that he would surely like. Pink things and sparkly ones. Cody asks to be put down and, once his feet are on the ground again, he runs to hug Leo tight. He smells very good, like something sweet, and decides right here and there that he will never let him go, even if he doesn't have the vaguest idea of what any of the feelings he's feeling right now means. He just thinks Cody is cute and he wants to be with him.He keeps going visiting him every day until halfway through elementary school; Adam, of course, coming too. Then, one day of three years later, Cody just disappears.And Blaine and the school along with him.
*
That was more than ten years ago. Leo doesn't recognize the nice kindergarten teacher in the man in front of him, not right away anyway. He only remembers Cody.In these past fifteen years, life has gone on but the image of the cute boy, who often wore skirts and liked to paint his nails, has never left him. His sudden loss has carved a hole in his heart that has never really closed, despite all the beautiful things that has happened to him since then.Leo will never forget the pain of climbing over that wall one day only to find out that Cody was gone forever and nobody knew where he was. He spent the next few months looking for him everywhere, asking anybody who could know something if he had seen him or had any idea where he could be. People would either have nothing to say to him or tell him to mind his own business. Eventually, his father told him that Cody had left the city with his family and Leo had believed him. He had no reason not to. Besides, he was eight at the time and he wouldn't have had means to keep looking for Cody even if he had wanted to. He never forgot him, but eventually he gave up trying to find him.Growing up, he realized that Cody's special school had actually been an educational center for unusual children, as kids who didn't conform with the national gender standards were called back then. And, of course, he learned about the Rehabilitation Housing Complexes – or the ghettos as they are colloquially called – separated neighborhoods in every city where all non-conforming adult individuals are required to live in order to facilitate their rehabilitation. But for some reason, he had never put two and two together until Blaine told him that that's where Cody went that day.“But he was a kid.” That's the first thing Leo manages to say. The ghetto is something he has been educated not to make any reference to. It's bad manners to talk about it. It's not a subject that would easily come up in any conversation, formal or otherwise. You learn about it in school and that's about it. Still, he knows that back then children were either sent to educational centers or relocated to normal families if they happened to be born inside non-conforming families. Only teens an adults were admitted in the RHC, and it's still like that today.“He was nine at the time,” Blaine confirms. “The ordinance officially stated that young people aged twelve to fifteen were required to join the other non-conforming people that were being relocated in the ghetto. I thought he was safe for a few more years, but unofficially the government order was to take anyone that would fit in the weirdo category. There was a raid at my educational center and Cody's way of being was already so deeply set that it was unlikely that he would ever be like they wanted him to, so they put him in the group. I tried to argue and offered to keep him with me until he was the right age, but the soldiers became aggressive and I was afraid they would hurt him, so I let him go.”“No, that's not possible,” Leo shakes his head in confusion. He wants to become a lawyer, so he knows everything about the legal reformation wanted by the NCP, the National Conservative Party, that has been leading the country for more than twenty years now and that completely changed the political landscape of the United States. “The Non-Conforming Act only addresses teen and adults who need to be rehabilitated and requires them to live in a Rehabilitation Housing Complex. Children who needs it are housed in educational centers.”“First of all, do me a favor and never use the name Rehabilitation Housing Complex while speaking to me as those people don't need to be rehabilitated and, even if they did, no rehabilitation has ever been done in that place. If there's one thing you people have ever done right is to call it a ghetto, because that's what it is,” Blaine says, failing to keep his annoyance out of his voice. “Secondly, the discriminatory laws wanted by the NCP were just the tip of the iceberg of a capillary hushed reformation that addressed anybody who was not-conforming regardless of age or sex.”Leo shakes his head again. This makes no sense to him. He studied those laws. He has proofs of their actualization ever day; except that he has never taken a step inside the ghetto and his last visit to an educational center dates back to when Cody still lived there. The only way he has experienced these places recently is through the news. “I don't believe you."“There are more than 2,500 kids currently living in the ghetto,” Blaine goes on, completely impervious to Leo's shock. “The media have been ordered not to talk about that and about many other things. The living conditions in there are ridiculous. The government only does the bare minimum to avoid epidemics. And get rid of the mental image of these state-of-the-art facilities where smiling people are magically cured from being gay. That's the commercials the government have been fed you to make you believe everything is fine. But guess what? Nothing is. There is no cure for something that is not a disease. Those people have been brought there and left to rot. Trust me, kid, you don't know the half of it because this government has made everything in its power to keep the citizens in the dark.”Leo would like to repeat that this is not true, but Blaine shows him photos, thousands of them, and he can't deny what's in front of his eyes anymore. He had this idea of the ghetto as a colorful, happy place. That's how it is showed on the history books and on TV, the rare times they talk about it. A place where people can get medical attention and get better. But there are no colors in Blaine's pictures, everything is gray. The nice little buildings he has in mind are actually nothing but cheap trailers, lines and lines of them. Everything is guarded by armed men in uniform like in detention camps. People look sad and emaciated as if they didn't eat properly. They bring to his memory other pictures of other horrors of which he only had a brief glimpse when he was in high school, something that happened a long time ago in a country far away from his own.“And he was there?” Leo asks eventually, after a very long silence. He's browsing the photos over and over, almost hoping they will change if he looks at them enough times.“He still is,” Blaine tells him. “When he was brought in the ghetto he was one of the youngest kids there, and he's been living there since then. He's nineteen now.”Leo slowly sits down, trying to take in all these information. In the past few weeks, since he met Blaine again, his life has drastically changed, but this right here is the point of no return. He can never go back to his old life now that he knows this. “How do you know all this? How did you stay in touch?”“I'm a spy.” Blaine says it just like that, as if it was normal. He should sound funny because you never expect to meet a dashing man in a suit and hear him really saying that he's a spy. Shaken not stirred, that kind of thing.But Leo doesn't feel like laughing at all. “For whom?”Blaine doesn't answer right away. In fact, he seems to think about it. He stares at Leo for a very long time, probably trying to decide if he's really worthy of the information. Leo wouldn't know what to answer if he asked him that question. As a matter of fact, Blaine made abundantly clear that he doesn't know anything anymore and he probably never did. “So far, I haven't told you anything you couldn't find out digging just a little bit deeper than you have been trained to do your whole life. But if I keep talking now, everything I will say can put you in danger. Knowing it or not is up to you. You can either promise me right now, on your life, that you won't say to anybody else what I'm about to tell you or you can walk out of that door and just forget about anything I've said to you today.”“I don't think I could ever forget that.”“But can you promise me that you will keep your mouth shut?”Leo doesn't need to think about that. Whatever piece of information Blaine is still withholding won't change the fact that the life as he knew it doesn't exist anymore. He can't just leave this place and pretend he doesn't know what he knows. “I swear on my fiancee's life that I won't tell a soul.”“I'm going to save her from that oath and say that you swear on your own life, because we're actually going to need her,” Blaine says with a little chuckle, so inappropriate for the moment that Leo is even more confused. “But alright, I believe you. So, there's a plan to destroy this political party that's making most of the people in this country miserable, including you. The Liberation Front is a rebel group that has been working towards this very goal since the NCP took power a little before you were born, by infiltrating operatives on every level of society and profession. We have men in any place that counts, except one.”“The higher levels of the government.” Leo seems to catch up pretty quickly. He has seen this happening in a lot of movies – and it simply makes sense that they want to be inside the government to take it down – he just didn't think it was ever going to happen to him.“Exactly,” Blaine confirms. “That's where you come into play.”Leo looks at him with pure horror in his eyes. “I'm no spy,” he says right away. “I'm physically unable to lie, you can read me like a book. I'm probably your worst option at the moment. If you sent a toddler in there, you would get better results.”“I don't need you to lie. I only need you to listen and tell me what you hear. Names, dates, anything that could be important to the cause. I know you spend a lot of time at Meredith's house and any piece of information could be really useful.”“His father doesn't talk much about politics with me."“I'm not asking you to bend over backwards to get intel. Just do what you would normally do and if you hear something, give me a call.”“And this is to help those people, right?” Leo says after a long pause. It's been a long couple of weeks and he had woken up every morning with thoughts that were already there before, but way less clear and less strong than they are now. “I don't know much about... sexual orientation or anything, but I know that you can be confused and that you might not be exactly the way they tell you to be. And I don't think that should be reason enough to lock you away.”Leo had never said this aloud before, not even to Meredith, who knows things about him that nobody else does. They've been covering for each other's quirks since they were teenagers, so that they could live their life the way they wanted to, but they have never said to each other what was weird in them. They just accepted it and worked around it, because words were scary. The fact that he felt he could say them to Blaine, it has to mean something and he wants to believe that it's because the cause he's fighting for really is good.Blaine laughs. It's an open, happy laugh that makes Leo feels a little mocked, but not completely in the wrong way. “You are something, kiddo,” he says, mysteriously. “I knew they couldn't really have changed you that much.”“What do you mean?”“You were fearless and completely crazy,” Blaine chuckles. “You wanted something, you went for it. It didn't matter if it was on the other side of a wall and you were a four years old and had tiny legs. You climbed that wall and came to see what was chuckling so nicely. You were exactly what a boy your age should be, according to the government: self-entitled, ruthless and strong-headed. Maybe only Adam fit the description better than you. So, when I saw you next to Cody, I was scared you were going to make fun of him because of how he was. You were being taught to do that in school, to consider people like him wrong and ridiculous. I was ready to defend him and send you away. But you just sat down with him and asked him how to play tea party. And when he offered you to paint your nails, you were ready to do it. You were a good boy, you were sweet and you didn't care if Cody wore skirts. I had seen a lot of kids your age already ruined by that sick education, but you were not. There was something in you, a sparkle, that I hope would never go out.”“And... that makes me a good spy?” Leo asks confused.“Probably not. But it makes you a good person, and I was counting on that because we need a lot of those right now.”Leo sighs. “I will do it,” he accepts, eventually. “But at one condition.”“I'm open to negotiations.”“I do this, but you take me to Cody,” he says. “I want to see him.”Blaine sighs dramatically in relief. “Oh, I was worried you were going to ask me something I hadn't already planned! And I guess you want to see Adam too?”“He's in this too?” Leo asks, his eyes comically huge. He lost Adam a little while after losing Cody. Two pieces of his heart gone lost in the space of a few years. He wasn't expecting to have them both back.“Let's say that, in a way, he was the one sending me to you.”Now Leo knows he can't back out from this, even if he wanted to – which he doesn't. When he was eight, he made friends with a kid behind a wall, who had nothing of what he had. And, when he was taken away, Leo could do nothing to save him. Now he found out there is an even taller wall and he won't fail the people behind it. He won't make the same mistake twice.