amour coriace ( five hargreeves! )

031

( it feels like flying, but maybe we're dying, a cosmic confluence of pyramids hologrammed )

chapter thirty-one !

AS THE POETS SAY, EVERYTHING GOOD COMES TO A VIOLENT, HORRIFIC END. Everything good, with its highs and its lows and its bright and its dark, was nothing more than painstakingly temporary. Vincent Leblanc knew this. He knew this because it was the way his life had progressed since the day he was born.

He was born in France, and his mother had no idea she was pregnant, just as every other mother on that October 1st did. His father was angry, as his father often was, and his mother was quietly disappointed. They had never wanted children in their loveless marriage. They had made that very clear to Vincent for a very long while.

Vincent grew up somewhat normal, for a while. They lived in a townhouse in a suburban part of France amongst a heavily wooded area residing beside a massive nuclear plant. It was easy to disappear there.

His parents never loved him, but they had tolerated him for a while. The first seven years of his life were fine until his powers were revealed, to their utmost horror. They ignored him after that, unless it was to call him a name or shove him into a closet and lock him up. Vincent convinced himself their behavior was justified.

He taught himself how to speak English and how to use his powers. At the time, he had only been dimly aware of a few abilities. His parents disapproved and threatened time and time again to send Vincent to a facility for the mentally deranged, but they never dared get too close. They were afraid of him. Vincent had despised that fact for too long of a while, but after years and years and years of evaluation, the idea of his parents cowering before him was a dream he woke up feeling incredible about.

School was not kind to him over the years. He was one of the only openly gay students at his school, and that earned him an unbelievable amount of scrutiny. He was called names a lot of the time, names that he really didn't mind at all. Sometimes he'd get a punch thrown at him, but Vincent was a much better fighter than any of his peers. Most times the teachers never believed his claims of self-defense because, really, Vincent always got carried away. Self-defense doesn't hold up all too well when the boy you beat the shit out of is being wheeled to the hospital, who knew?

Though, while school was bad, Vincent gained the attention of quite a few closeted boys. They were fun to mess around with most of the time, desperate and blindingly angry with themselves. Vincent knew the feeling quite well. Sometimes the boys were nightmares. The boys who didn't know how to pull away, the boys who claimed they were straight and it was all a fluke, the boys who called him a fag at the end and earned themselves one last kiss from Vincent's fist.

Then Vincent went missing that decadent morning all those years ago while running from the Southern man, who he later got to know as Boneman. (Vincent had to hold in his laugh when he was introduced at the Commission. Apparently, for whatever reason, the Boneman was respected there for his ventures. Even if he was a total bonehead.) Vincent couldn't decide whether he despised that day or not.

There he sent himself into the apocalypse, where he met Five Hargreeves decades into his run with pure bad luck. Then, as the story goes, Vincent abandoned the boy he had come to love and went to work as a professional hitman for the Commission. He was damn good at it, even with his big mouth. Then the torture that came with the work on occasion became too much for even someone like Vincent and he stole Five's stupid equation and booked it to present day, where he was stuck as a visibly fifteen-year-old. And, now knowing everything we know, Vincent's use of the equation had effectively fucked up his genetic makeup and mutated him into a killing machine. So fun.