Luka Couffaine can distraughtly say that he has never been in love.
As passionate as he was, and as kind he tried to be to the others, he's never felt this strange emotion before. For love, a yearning. Some sort of emotion that drove his family apart, that seemingly drove their father away to disappear when he was still a kid. The way his mother seemed to keep begging him to come back, yet still so silently held on. The same love that even his little sister brandished proudly on her sleeve, and how proud he was of her.
He was the oldest, and yet his only intention was to make sure that everyone else around him was happy. That's all that mattered.
Luka gawked in their mothers mirror as she sat down on her bed, a needle and thread spinning in her hands as she watched her children speak quietly to themselves.
"Green looks good on you." Juleka said. Luka sat in a rough chair before the mirror, a plastic tarp draped over his shoulders as he watched his sister play with his hair, like they always did when they were children. "Why don't you try something new?"
"It'd be weird to see something different." He replied. "I am so used to blue. It's my favorite color, you know."
"Of course it is." She hummed. He watched her dip the brush into the pot of hair color, and he watched as she began to apply it to his hair. This time, all over. His naturally coarse hair stuck to her gloved hands as she spoke, focused on staining his hair blue.
"Well, your last year of school. Excited?" His mother spoke first, picking her head up behind her favorite book.
"Nervous," He said honestly, looking to her figure in the mirror, a faint smile on his lips. "But of course. I'm almost out."
"Look at you, all grown up. You have a job, a car and everything." Their mother teased from her bed, not looking up from her content stitching.
"Well, not everything, yet. I don't have my diploma yet."
"All in good time, I hope."
It's been years since he's transferred to the public Collage in the area, the same one Juleka attended herself. Only a year ahead of them, he's seen as the older brother figure to his classmates. At the age of nineteen, only the night before they went back to school after the summer break, sitting before the long mirror in front of him with the people he loved, and with a girlfriend he cared for.
He couldn't say he loved her.
Not after Marinette, not after his father, not after Lila's advances, and definitely not after his mother, who worked so hard still to provide for them both kept the tragedy of his fathers disappearance when he was so young
He cared for Kagami, but he can't say that he loved her.
Not with the sister he loved painting his hair blue, and with the mother behind him playing with her stitching, humming a soft tune he acquitted to his childhood, and to the last night of his teenage freedom, Luka Couffaine, at the age of nineteen, was ready to learn what love was, and he was ready to learn how to love someone else in return.
Who knows. He heard that there was going to be a new transfer student starting tomorrow. It'd be nice to broaden his friendship circle, too.