Chapter Text
Most people are raised the same. They are taught to crawl. Just a small thing for when they’re just learning and only beginning to face small, reasonably stupid ordeals. Next, they walk, and if someone who cares about them is there to see it, then they’re most likely being cheered on the whole way through. Allowed and encouraged to fall even. In no time they’re running. Pounding their feet into the earth below as they pick up speed, and the risk of tripping and falling to the harsh is so much more likely. Yet they keep running, cause they love the way the wind feels whipping their hair around your face and the adrenaline pumping through you.
Even then they’re just getting used to life’s get problems, but as a child, just overcoming challenge after challenge, they don’t feel them so intensely as they will. And then those people start jumping. Maybe it’s only a little hop when they start, or maybe a few starts of bounding from place to place, but they’re beginning this next part of their life. That’s when things start hitting harder though. People begin tripping so much easier on things so much easier than before. Their leaps turn to falls when they don’t realize the stone that lays just in the way of their landing foot.
These people don’t stop though. They keep jumping and jumping, leaping and falling and tumbling, but they’re getting up. Soon enough their knees stop hitting the ground though and just like before the punches that keep coming at them become softer and not because they’re easier, but because they’ve learned. Then people combine the running and the bounding together so that they can dance with elegance and grace that would seem unfathomable to the younger person they were that was tripping with every brave jump. If they keep learning, they may even end of flying.
That was not the way my life was. I had a moment to learn how to crawl, a second to walk, and a minute to begin running, all without falling before my father forced me to jump and then to fly.
I was introduced to magic at the measly age of one. My father taught me through silent lessons, teaching me the specific hand motions. His only reward to me, if I did good, was that he wouldn’t escape to his room and leave me alone in our dungeon of a home.
I like to think that had my mother still been with us she would’ve taken care of me when I was alone. Her appearance and even her voice was a void to me though and I was left to cry every night that I managed to screw up his “easy” lessons.
I had no mom. I don’t even really think I should still give him the title of dad, but he was all I had. It quickly became my instinct to please him as I got a sense of what I was doing so that I wouldn’t have to be lonely on the tattered couch.
The days that he would be forced to leave to get us food I spent practicing enchantments over and over in my head until I knew them so well that the moment I needed them I could easily conjure up my magic. I read books throughout the night. Asgardian mainly and some from the sorcerer temples on Earth, of which my father never told me how he got them. I advanced as quickly as possible in order to make him happy. By the time I nearly knew more than him.
He pushed me harder than ever those last weeks before my birthday, being surprisingly nurturing even when I messed spells up. Every day he would keep me out of school unlike the rest of the year when he would force me to juggle all my responsibilities. I loved it. I loved his kind face that remained even when I forgot the movement. I loved when he’d lovingly look at me when my spells were perfect and my face was bright.
Then I woke up the next day, on my tenth birthday, to an empty house.
He left without so much as leaving a note. My father forced me to fly and left me up in the sky. I didn’t search for him though. I didn’t cry. All I did was get ready and go to school. Every single day for six years. Only focusing on school and magic and not the hole he left in me. Conjuring up fake parents for every stupid conference and high school enrollment day. Not once focusing on how I did everything; every task, every challenge, and how I took every punch life threw at me without even a grimace on his face, and my dad left.