"I don't sleep," Leo says helpfully.

"Still," Sasha says, and he was going to continue the sentence but then he starts coughing again. 

"I don't think you should go to school today," Leo says. "I can stay home with you?"

"Yeah. That'd be good, thank you." 

"I'm going to go to class, one of us should." He kisses Sasha's forehead. "I love you, hummingbird. Please eat." 

Sasha ducks his head and smiles. "I'll try. I love you." 

"When Marlo gets back, I'll look up what you should do with humans who don't want to eat food so they don't get sick." He snuggles up with Sasha. "Eventually they'll have to give you some way of going to school that doesn't mean you have to leave the bed."

"They don't have to do that and in fact probably won't," Sasha says, but he snuggles up with Leo. 

"But you're going to be too tired to go to school."

"And they'll probably just fail me, because I won't have been in the hospital and it's not life threatening and I won't have a doctor's note." 

"...Or Marlo is going to take me to school and then I am going to sing at people and then they're going to find themselves with a compulsion to... give you a tutor? Whatever humans do for humans who are too sick to go to school."

"You're sweet." He pets Leo's head and back. 

"I got you cursed in the first place."

"Ex....plain?" 

"If you didn't know magic existed, Lilith would probably have ignored you forever."

"And Marlo would have kept ignoring his pain and thinking he was delusional for who knows how much longer, and I would still have met a vampire, and, and. I'm glad I have you." 

"I don't like that you got cursed doing something that was at least a little bit about trying to keep me safe. I'm supposed to try to keep you safe."

"...she cursed me for the high crime of saying something she didn't like. She was going to keep hurting people and hurting people and hurting people until we stopped her." Does Leo want cuddles. Probably the answer is yes but it never hurts to check. 

He does like cuddles!

"Growing up with Sunnydale Syndrome is really really bad."

"Growing up without it seems pretty bad too." 

"I think growing up without it is bad because you might get eaten, and growing up with it is bad because... everyone you know is constantly lying to you about basic things you see about reality?" Leo curls up. "I wonder what Lilith would have been like if she'd grown up with people who knew."

Sasha keeps petting him. "Cruel is cruel, plenty of regular humans manage to be sexual harassers and bullies." 

"I don't think being traumatized helps."

"I don't either. I just — keep thinking about Marlo, nine years old, being told his ankle couldn't really have been broken or it wouldn't already be healed and he'd been crying about nothing, and believing it — and it's hard to be sympathetic to Lilith when I look at him. 

I know not everyone can be Marlo but if you rape people because you think everyone's attracted to the fairy princess and they just need convincing I don't care how many times you've been told you were just wrong about reality." 

"Sorry." Leo summons up all his best ability to model humans. "You don't want me to wonder about why Lilith is the way she is because that feels like it's saying it wasn't her fault and it was her fault really? And she sexually assaulted you and cursed you? And the same thing that happened to Lilith happened to Marlo and Marlo isn't raping anybody and-- this is the part where I am confused--"