#[bc leo would spontaneously disintegrate into dust if he had to deal with like. space taxes. that's not what he got his training in]

[tiredassmage]

Not sure if you want these as ask, or in the comments of the post, but here: 🖊️ + Leo.

Send me a “🖊+an OC“ and I will talk about that OC!

Leo's hiding quite a bit of insecurity and uncertainty underneath a fairly casual veneer - which in and of itself isn't exactly a secret to most of us ooc viewers anymore, I think, but I've been really in my feelings about what, exactly, those kind of... worries and fears are lately, so I think I'll take this opportunity to try to put some of it into words.

Just dipping a toe into Chapter Two of the class story for Seasons related objectives brought back around that the war between the Empire and the Republic isn't quite so cold and distant anymore. Things are starting to heat up, and Leo's about to spend a lot more time in warzones than he'd ever like to do again.

Part of it is definitely still nerves about what little he's managed to start to get together about his life unraveling if his family ties back to Ziost made it back up the Imperial food chain. But the other half of it is just... the trauma from having been in the fighting before. While I don't expect to dig too graphically deep into what all those issues entail, we'll pop the rest of the post under the cut and talk a little bit more about where, exactly, Leo's army-related ptsd is coming from.

A lot of it is from losing his unit - the last deployment he had before Begeren and meeting Dash easily could've killed him as well, but it did kill essentially all of the squad he'd grown used to serving with, save for a couple upper level, less frontline officers that remained to... try to reign him back in the aftermath, but we're getting a tiny bit ahead of ourselves with that.

So this is the point where it feels kinda important to establish there's nothing Leo would ever consider 'heroic' about himself. Quite frankly, he has a... less than stellar self-image that usually runs more along the lines of selfish, short-tempered, and... a bit of a general mess who doesn't really have a grasp on what he's doing with life. And he wasn't ever happy in the Imperial Army, but that doesn't mean he wasn't close enough to some of the other people he ended up serving with. Leo has a really difficult time vocalizing it, I think, but the part that troubles him the most about that deployment was that he wasn't able to do anything to save his squad. A Sith's orders aren't to be questioned - and he tried, tried to get anyone to see a little reason instead of sending them headfirst into a problem well over their heads. But none of them were exactly keen to test that Sith Lord's patience - Leo included - and... it got a lot of people killed. It very easily could have also killed him. In the grand scheme of things, he's lucky he just came out with scarring and damaged hearing that the family's money was able to treat with some cybernetics.

Leo isn't particularly good at speaking up in general, I think. For all the times he was shut down trying to reason with family, and for all that Imperial loyalty is taught to be pretty absolute without questions above your own station, I think he still tends to expect he's going to be shut down, so he doesn't even tend to reach for the language to try to talk about things until it's... kind of bubbled over and he can't really run from his feelings anymore about it. It's easier to cover hurt and doubts with a lighter sense of humor that isn't as likely to get him examined from every angle.

Of course, Dash and Liv know him better than most... And they've seen more of those uncertainties - whether he really spoke to them or not at the time. So they're a little better equipped to know what kind of buttons need pushed, so to speak, for him to start unraveling his own tongue.

He's no revolutionary though. And he's no patriot. He isn't really out here to pick sides in the war - because that's terrifying to get involved in. He knows the Empire really shouldn't be winning any sort of galactic control, but... Leo's still a little more concerned with the little picture aspects. He's barely got his own life together, so he's no model citizen. He's worried about his sister. He's worried about Dash. He's worried about this weird little hodgepodge gang that's started to attach themselves to him and his freighter like a bunch of uninvited barnacles (they're... growing on him. In the metaphorical sense and in the sense that, yes... they're starting to feel more like friends than happenstance business partners). These are the kinds of things Leo needs to prioritize for himself. If he happens into helping the Republic along the way, then so be that, so long as it doesn't involve a whole extra haul's worth of unnecessary risk to this little band of people he cares about. He's not really sure he's willing to shoulder that risk and lose any of them for 'a cause.'

And that, too, admittedly, kinda scares him. And shames him, in some measure. In his eyes, Liv holds her ideals with both hands with a steady grip. He knows him and Dash aren't perfect people, but if Leo had to pick out of the two of them who was better, it'd be Dash without hesitation.

Life's better with some feelings out in the open about him and Dash's relationship and some progress with his own crew, but there's still a fair amount of elements and ways that Leo still feels like he's sort of just managing to keep his head above water about, and that's something only to really be remedied with by time and a bit of patience - more experience on what life looks like now with these sorts of changes in play. He's got people he doesn't want to disappoint in his life again and coming back around to that makes it a bit easier to fight the more negative and anxious memories and thoughts floating around up there in that head of his.