❝ ...so we can maybe, hang out for a little while? ❞
╚═══*.·:·.☽✧ ✦ ✧☾.·:·.*═══╝
THUNDER RUMBLES MENACINGLY IN THE distance as Xiao watches the sky. He stands under the school's overhang and lets out a sigh before he zips up his guitar case. It's going to be a very wet walk home from the looks of it, and all he can do is hope that his guitar survives the flood. Perhaps if he's lucky, the boy won't end up completely soaked by the time he reaches the front door.
As someone who avidly refuses to ride the bus (mostly due to the fact that most of the people who ride it are people that he's fought), Xiao always enjoys walking home by himself -- often taking a detour to the gas station boba shop on the way there. Sometimes he'd stay out until the next morning. Hell, he can't even count the number of times that he's skipped going home completely to just hang around the city until daybreak.
And it's not like his foster parents actually notice when he's gone. Even if they do, they probably don't care anyways. Whenever he is home, they make it clear that he's a burden to them, and that he's better off spending time anywhere but near them. He's treated as some kind of lost puppy that had been abandoned on the side of the road.
Oh, how he hates it. He hates how they treat him like a burden, all when they were the ones who chose to take him in in the first place. For the past eight years that he's lived with them, Xiao has always asked himself the same question: why did they do it? If he's such a problem for them, why did they make a big deal out of adopting him in the first place once his parents died? Was it to make themselves look good? Or was it a spur-of-the-moment act of pity?
The answer he realized a long time ago is that yes, it was a decision made out of pity. In fact, it was such a spontaneous choice, that they didn't even realize the responsibility of taking in a child, much less one who is severely traumatized and had everything he once loved ripped away from him. They just heard about what had happened and thought of how sad it must be.
The moment his whole world was turned upside down they decided to interfere for their own selfish gains -- to make their hearts ache a little less at the thought of liberating him from his loneliness and pain. The words "tragedy" proceeded to follow Xiao wherever he went once he came home with them. They liked to remind him just how tragic the event was, as if he couldn't figure that out for himself.
And perhaps that's all they see him as. A tragedy. A lost puppy. A child.
It's as if he's lesser than them. Something inferior.
