The living room table had become a warzone.
Not literally. But the energy was there — two laptops open, a programming book splayed between them with a cracked spine from overuse, a notepad with a score written in the top corner that Alex kept glancing at with the quiet satisfaction of someone who was winning.
Currently: 6-4, her favor.
"Next one," Leo said.
Alex was already flipping pages. She had that look — trying not to seem pleased with herself and failing at the edges. "Reverse a string."
Leo opened a new file. "Easy."
"You said that about the last one."
"The last one *was* easy."
"You got a compile error."
"I forgot a semicolon. That's a syntax thing, not a logic thing."
"Leo. The semicolon is the minimum. It's punctuation. It's the period at the end of the sentence."
"I *know* what a semicolon is."
"Your compiler disagreed."
He started typing. The gaming laptop hummed under his fingers — the one he'd campaigned for with the patience of someone who had all the time in the world, eventually presenting his parents with a full spreadsheet comparing specs and prices until they'd looked at each other and quietly given up. It was objectively overkill for writing Java. He did not care even slightly.
Across from him Alex typed on the house laptop, which was fine and functional and had absolutely no personality. She typed faster than him. He'd noticed this on day one and had been quietly working on it since without mentioning it.
He wrote the function, ran it, watched the output print in the terminal. Clean.
"Done," he said.
Alex looked up. "I finished a minute ago."
"A minute is nothing."
"In a race it's everything." She wrote 6-5 on the notepad. Slid it across so he could see. "Correct output though. That one's yours."
"Thank you for your generous ruling."
"Don't make it weird."
He leaned back and stretched. The living room was quiet in the mid-morning way — his mom at work, Michael at school, Angelina somewhere upstairs with music Leo could just barely hear through the ceiling.
"Next," he said.
Alex flipped a page, read, made a small sound. "Fibonacci. Return the nth value."
He opened a new file and started typing. The logic he knew cold — the recursion was straightforward, he'd understood Fibonacci since he was nine. The problem was Java kept requiring everything to be wrapped in a class and a method and a public static void main that felt like being asked to build a room just to put a chair in it.
"This language," he muttered.
"What about it."
"It's so ceremonious. I just want to write a function. It wants me to declare a class, declare a method, announce myself formally to the compiler—"
"That's object oriented programming. Everything lives inside a class."
"In Python you just write the function."
"We're not doing Python."
"I know we're not doing Python. I'm saying Python had the right idea."
Alex finally looked up. "You picked Java."
"We picked Java."
"You said and I quote, *Java is more hireable, we should do Java.*"
"That is still true and I stand by it."
"Then stop complaining about the syntax."
"I can stand by a decision and also have feelings about it."
She went back to her screen. "You're going to love C++ even more."
He grimaced. He'd read enough to know C++ was Java's stricter older sibling who'd never once relaxed in its entire life.
He finished the function, ran it, watched the terminal spit out the correct sequence. "Done."
Alex glanced at her screen. Then at the notepad. She marked it 7-5, her column, and capped the pen with a precise little click.
"Seven to five," she said.
"I can read the notepad."
"Just making sure." She leaned back and crossed her arms, which was her victory posture. Leo had catalogued it. "For someone who beat me academically—"
"Once."
"—by *four points*—"
"A win's a win."
"—you are genuinely struggling at the thing we came here to do."
"I'm two points behind. That's not struggling, that's *competitive*."
"It was six-four twenty minutes ago."
"And now it's seven-five. The trajectory is in my favor."
She opened her mouth, paused, because she genuinely couldn't argue with the trajectory. She looked at the notepad instead. "You're better at the logic than the syntax."
"Obviously. The logic is real. The syntax is just rules."
"All syntax is rules."
"Yeah but some rules feel like they came from a sensible place and some feel like they were invented by someone who wanted to watch people suffer." He looked at his screen. "Java is the second kind."
"You'll get used to it."
"I'm already getting used to it. That's literally how we went from six-four to seven-five."
"Or I was going easy."
Leo stared at her.
She looked at the book with complete serenity.
"Alex."
"Next question?"
"You were not going easy."
"I was taking my time."
"On a timed race."
"I'm a very relaxed competitor."
He laughed. She was so committed to it. No expression, no tells, just the complete and total performance of someone who had definitely been trying her absolute hardest and was simply that good.
They ran through two more. Leo took one cleanly — a loop problem, output correct on the first run, and he spun the laptop around to show her the terminal before she'd finished typing. She took the other with a margin that he decided not to dwell on.
Final score. 7-5.
Alex wrote it on the notepad, underlined it, set the pen down.
"I want it noted," Leo said, "that you've been doing this longer."
"Noted. I've also been doing academics longer and you still beat me."
"That was one test."
"This was twelve questions." She closed the book. "You're catching up fast though. I'll give you that."
He looked at the notepad. 7-5. Then at both laptops, both terminals showing correct output. He'd gotten faster over the last hour — he could feel it, the syntax starting to sit more naturally, the class structure feeling less like a formality and more just like how the thing was shaped.
He spun his pen between his fingers.
"Hey," he said.
"Mm."
"What if we made something. Like actually coded something ourselves."
Alex looked up. "Such as."
"A game." He leaned forward. "Simple one. There's a bird. It's falling constantly — gravity. You press a button and it flaps, gains a little height. Pipes come in from the right, top and bottom, with a gap between them. You guide the bird through the gap. Hit a pipe or the ground and it's over."
Alex was quiet. He could see her building it — she went still in a particular way when she was actually thinking versus when she was pretending to think.
"That's the whole game?" she said.
"That's the whole game."
"No levels."
"No levels. Just you and the pipes and your score going up."
"And it's hard because—"
"Because one tap too many and you overshoot the gap. One too few and you drop into the pipe. The controls are simple but the execution isn't. It's all timing and feel."
"The physics would need to be right," she said. "If the gravity's too heavy it's impossible. Too light and there's no tension."
"Exactly. The feel is the whole game."
"Collision detection for the pipes."
"Straightforward once we know how."
"Procedurally generated pipes so it doesn't repeat."
"Yeah." He watched her working through it. She was already past the concept and into the components, which meant she was interested. Alex only broke things into parts when she was actually considering them. "It's simple enough to be a real first project. But it's a finished thing. An actual game."
She was quiet a moment. "It could work as an assignment submission. For school."
"We could do that." He paused. "Or we could package it properly. Put it out there. See if anyone downloads it."
Alex looked at him. "Package it."
"Yeah. Clean it up, make it feel finished, actually release it."
"As in publicly."
"As in publicly."
She turned back to the laptops. The particular silence of someone running numbers. "We'd need to be considerably better than we are now."
"Obviously. I'm not saying next week."
"The physics engine alone—"
"I know."
"And we'd need a proper UI, not just terminal output—"
"I know, Alex."
"I'm just saying it's not a small thing."
"I know it's not a small thing. That's why it's interesting." He leaned forward. "We get good enough, we build it, we put it out. It's a goal. Something to work toward."
She looked at the notepad. At the score. At her laptop screen. He could see the moment she decided — just a small shift, her shoulders settling slightly differently.
"Fine," she said. "But we do it properly. No half finished product."
"Obviously."
"And I'm lead on the physics."
"Sure."
"Because you'll make the bird feel like a brick."
"That's probably true."
"It's definitely true." She picked up the pen and wrote at the bottom of the notepad: *Flappy Bird project — when ready.* Underlined it once. "Thursday, same time?"
"Thursday," he said.
---
Thursday became a rhythm. Then the rhythm became three weeks. They had been working on the flappy bird project for this time and mostly , the work was completed with only a few final touches required . They planned to take it easy and complete it in the next week and launch it.
The mornings were Leo's. Had been since he was six, would probably always be. Up before the neighborhood, out in the cool air while everything was still quiet, running through the calisthenics routine with the focused patience of someone who understood exactly what he was building and why.
Back day. The one he liked best if he was honest — pull-ups, muscle-ups, the kind of work that showed up in your lats and your grip and the way you carried yourself. He'd set his phone on the small ledge of the park structure, angle checked twice, and was filming himself between sets.
Alex finished her last set of pull-ups on the bar beside him — five clean reps, no kip, dead hang at the bottom — and dropped down breathing harder than him but with her form intact. He'd watched on the third rep, ready to say something if her shoulders started compensating, but she'd held it together.
She walked toward her water bottle and glanced at his phone propped on the ledge. "Why are you filming yourself."
"Content."
She picked up the bottle. "That's not an answer."
"It's exactly an answer."
She gave him the look. "Content for what."
"I made a YouTube channel. Few weeks ago. Posted my first video."
"About what."
"Why ab workouts don't give you abs." He moved to the bar for his next set. "Caloric deficit. The actual science of it."
Alex was quiet. He gripped the bar, dead hang, and pulled — twelve reps, slow and controlled, full range every single one. No kipping, no rushing. Chin clean over the bar on each rep, full extension at the bottom. The last three were work but he held the tempo anyway.
He dropped and picked up his water.
"YouTube," she said, like she was tasting the word.
"Yeah."
"Nobody really uses YouTube."
"People are starting to." He rolled his shoulders out. "There's no good fitness content on there. Nobody who actually explains the physiology. It's all thirty day challenges and miracle workouts." He shrugged. "Figured someone should fix that."
"And that someone is you."
"I know the subject."
She looked at the phone, still recording, then back at him. She was doing the thing where she was interested but didn't want to perform it — the slight stillness, the way she didn't immediately move on.
"Channel name?" she said, like it was a mildly administrative question.
"Leo Fitness."
She blinked. "That's what you went with."
"It's clean."
"It's lazy."
"It's memorable."
"So is stubbing your toe."
"It's the same name I'd use across everything. Consistent branding."
"Across what everything, you're thirteen."
"Doesn't mean I'm not building something."
She looked at him for a moment with that particular expression — the one where she was recalibrating something and hadn't decided what yet. Then she nodded once and reached for her towel.
Leo pulled the hem of his compression shirt up to wipe his face — sweat was getting into his eyes — and when he dropped it back down Alex was studying a very specific and apparently fascinating point somewhere in the middle distance.
Her ears were pink.
He didn't notice. He picked up his phone and stopped the recording.
"Good session," he said.
"Yeah," she said, to the middle distance.
They walked back.
---
[Confessional — Alex Dunphy, filmed in the Dunphy living room, sitting with her arms crossed and her chin up]
"The muscle head works hard. I'll give him that. He's been at it since he was six and it shows." She glances sideways. "Not that I was — I wasn't looking. I just. Objectively. You can tell when someone trains consistently. It's just. Physiologically obvious." A pause. The tips of her ears are visibly pink. "Also he's like— what, five-eight? Which is… statistically speaking, among the taller range for our age group." She clears her throat slightly. "Not that that matters. Height is a completely arbitrary metric." Another pause. "Anyway. He started a YouTube channel. Leo Fitness." A beat. "Lazy name. The content is probably actually good though." She turns the other direction. Her lips curve. Just slightly. "Not that I've watched it. Whatever."
[End confessional]
---
**A/N:** In my personal interpretation, Leo's growth — both physical and emotional — was stunted in canon by years of psychological suppression courtesy of Beverly Hofstadter. The emotional neglect, the constant undermining, the way his accomplishments were made to feel irrelevant — that kind of chronic stress affects cortisol levels, sleep quality, and yes, physical development. So in this story, raised in an environment where his birthday is celebrated and his efforts are acknowledged, he grows. He hits 5'7" at thirteen. Taller than canon Leonard ever got. Make of that what you will. Is it scientifically precise? No. Is Beverly being a complete monster also precisely depicted in canon? Also no. We're even.