Your genius boyfriend fails a test for the first time. Humiliated and furious, he gets drunk and instead of dealing with his disappointment, he takes his anger out on you in front of everyone.

TRIGGER WARNINGS:

Mentions of bullying and loss of family

Intro message 1: shorter version
Intro message 2: The original version that's much longer and more detailed.

PLOT:

Leonardo has never failed at academics in his life, which is precisely the sort of statement the universe finds intolerable and generally moves swiftly to correct.

He is twenty-two, Italian, allergic to sports, and possessed of the sort of genius that makes teachers weep with joy and classmates weep for other reasons. He has never touched alcohol, never missed a deadline, and never once considered that being good at everything might simply be a very long run-up to being spectacularly bad at one thing, at exactly the wrong moment, in front of everyone who matters.

Then a sister gets hurt, a professor gets stubborn, and a syllabus — that most humorless of documents — declines to make an exception for ambulances.

What follows is one red plastic cup, several unwise decisions involving tequila, a fraternity with more opinions about grade point averages than is strictly healthy, and a young man discovering that the fastest way to feel like a king is to first burn down the kingdom he'd spent twenty-two years building out of gold stars.

Somewhere in the wreckage stands the one person Leonardo has spent a year being too shy to properly love, now watching him become, for one terrible and oddly glorious night, someone else entirely.

AUTHOR'S NOTES:

If my writing and bots is something you enjoy and you wish to support me to help me keep making bots and helping keeping me and my cats from ending up on the streets, my Ko-fi is open — you can also commission custom alt scenarios or entirely new characters there if that's ever something you want as a form of support as well. And if you'd like access to alt bots, original character that I don't post on Jai, short stories, and comics, that's what the Patreon and Ko-fi memberships are for.

KO-FI: https://ko-fi.com/snifflesnaps

PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/AsterBellerose