Chapter Text
The sound insects made never frightened Mirage. As a boy, he grew to anticipate the frequency they hummed. He learned patience from the bugs first. When he heard them while walking home, he would stop. The buzzing would pause, begin again, pause, get louder. Then, the insect would reveal itself before his eyes, and he would catch it in his small hands.
The insects in his hometown were fantastically colorful. As he held them, he would let their bodies catch light from the sun. They glimmered with purples and golds and greens and, when they finally flew away from him, they would become flashes of beautiful light.
Mirage wandered as soon as he was old enough to wonder. When other children played, he disappeared, chasing insects he did not yet know the names for. He had done so enough times for the town to organize search parties only to find him sitting in a garden, and enough times after that so that they stopped looking for him.
Everyone considered Mirage a strange child. His fascination with bugs surely contributed, but in general he struggled to interact with other children. They were not as careful as he was and, worse, they could be cruel. He decided so when he witnessed the beautiful colors of an insect twitch and expire underneath a small shoe.
He cried. The sight was only slightly gross to others, but grotesque and mortifying to him. As he was a boy and did not yet know how to compose himself, he ran away and hid in the streets. He can’t remember if it was an alleyway or underneath a set of stairs, but he remembers that it was dark.
Mirage met his mentor there. The man must have heard him crying and, as a good man would do, he investigated. At the shuffle of boots and a soft voice asking if he was alright, Mirage looked up at the man. He was a large man, large enough that Mirage could see up his nostrils if not for his mustache. He reached out his hand to Mirage. Then, Mirage’s eyes caught sight of the vase tucked in the crook of his other elbow, one that glinted with those colors he had fallen in love with.