you're everything you hated

are you happy

• he is an older brother with too many younger siblings and too-absent parents - they work and work and work to put food on the table and clothes on their backs,
  but theo is the one who cooks the food and cleans the house and makes sure each younger sibling is warm and happy. he is the one who changes diapers and reads bedtime stories and tucks his siblings into bed; he is the one who comforts them when they cry and teaches them their letters.[break]
• he is blond haired and lanky, a child falling headfirst into adolescence with no one to keep him afloat and nothing to hold on to save the heavy chains of responsibility that bind him home; his sisters and brothers smile less and less as his parents become scarcer and the bags under his eyes become more and more pronounced; he studies until his eyes bleed and the flickers of phantom lights dance at his fingertips, he throws himself into illusions and magic and dazzling displays of spectres until their eyes light in laughter once more.[break]
• he grows up too tall and too skinny and far too alone - bright enough to draw in people but not enough to make them stay; there are bullies because of course there are, this is life and life is never fair - but he can make it more fair; he sets a trap with glitter and dye and too much pink and he succeeds to the sound of laughter filling the air. satisfaction wells up, vicious and vengeful - and he hates it, hates it - but the darkness in his chest demands to be satiated and he pranks and pranks and pranks until all those who have troubled he and his siblings knows not to trouble them anymore.[break]
• he joins the helios knights as soon as he is able, his eyes hard even as his smile is friendly; he stretches himself thin to bring home money but he takes painstaking care to always be there if he is needed - he is not his parents, after all, and he never wants to be. ( but his parents do not return more even with his contribution, and theodore, theodore wonders - are they really wanted? ) [break]
• for his sisters, his brothers, his parents, theodore forges himself into everything he hates - but still he cannot bring himself to regret it.