charlie fray. one.

You're three going on four, birthday looming on the horizon, and your father is drunk more often than he's not but you never realize.

With you, he shines. He's haloed in light in all of your memories, a shadowy figure coated in gold. A lion by any standard, an angel by yours. With you, he's the one who whispers in your ear about the buried treasure underneath the willow tree out back. Tells you that an explorer went into the mountains of One and  brought back treasure galore, hid it long ago and never got to come back to collect it. You need only go find it in the woods and dig it up. He mesmerized you, enchanted you. He is the one who starts weaving stories for you first, teaches you the magic of creation.

It was a distraction, you'll see in hindsight, him sending you away over and over and over again because he couldn't handle you standing in front of him for too long.

You're too stubborn to realize it.

For now, it's this; old, worn out hats that flopped down over your eyes, obscuring your vision. X marks the spot, he'd say, scrawling a makeshift map of the entire property into a notebook. It's spending hours outside in the sun, alone and content to entertain yourself. This is what your siblings get for leaving you to your own devices. If they wanted you to hate him, they should have talked about him more. 

Hayden is more gracious than any of you really deserve.

They are hellions, the lot of your siblings; even at age five you understood that. With their already warped sense of reality, and your mother crawling deeper into the holes that your father had dug, Hayden didn't have any business trying to sort your lives out.

Much less make himself responsible for them.

You think he's why you see your father the way that you do, still, because he has always done for you what you thought your father would do. What you thought your father was doing. He doesn't make you do anything that you don't want to do, and while all your cousins and siblings around you are picking up weapons and hitting the training mat, he doesn't say anything to stop you when you pick up your textbooks instead. He accepts you without thought, without hesitation, at least as far as your eyes can discern, and that's really all that matters.

Your mom used to look at you like a failing champion.

You were supposed to be the pretty, tinier version of her. All of her daughters were; you as her, but only twisted and made better.

Hayden never looked at you like that.

You never had to worry you weren't what he dreamed of. He didn't dream of you at all. 

When Baz is in the games, you sit in front of the television for days on end. You refuse to eat. You refuse to sleep. You miss school, pass out exhausted in front of the screen, wake up to watch him explode like he's been trying to do his entire life.

Hayden begs you to bed, starts to tuck you in, and you cry until you make yourself sick.

Why is there a voice in your head saying you should have helped your brother more? Dark tendrils of anxiety reach in for the first time, find purchase, make it harder to breathe, and you have your first panic attack curled up in your big brothers arms.