the unsung.

UNiversity. - Maximo (Interlude)

His first word was tatay.

It was spoken in a cold nursery where the walls were chipping paint like eggshells and lined with Magimortium-laced steel. There were no windows, no light apart from the menacing laboratory fixtures which swung delicately above his cradle, day and night. On occasion, though, a hand hovered there, casting a craved darkness between his little eyes and the light which shone upon them, tirelessly.

The hand was large and strong, lined with weathered, dark skin that filled with a jade-colored blur. It was his maker's Aura, but he couldn't have recognized it at the time—just knew it as the mist that came to strengthen him, to bring warmth to tiring bones and settle the uncouth magic under his skin. That hue of green would come to shape his life far more than it already had, from birth to adolescence, abuse in the shape of nurture.

The nurses would tell him stories of how it happened. How he was barely seven months old when he strung it together, the sound, the word that would tether him to one man's bidding. If he could take it back, he would—because names have power in the world of Magicals, but so do words, for he would've never been named so surely were it not for his earliest utterance.

"Tatay," He'd called, when the Supremo made to leave, disappointed with the lack of improvement in his experimental subjects. But there it was, the glimmer of hope, the word to doom all his cursed children. And it came again, hoarse and grating against an infant's throat, "Tatay."

Father, he'd said, begging for rest, for mercy. Father he'd called the man who would one day defile his thoughts, lurk in his nightmares.

And tatay obliged, pride flooding his chest, bequeathing a name, with such insistence.

    "We will call this one Maximo," He nodded to the attending doctor, "For he is the greatest among them."

His siblings were given names, eventually. But those words were fragile, fleeting things with no real value, save to tell them apart — there was Paco and Belay, who were born with no real Auric prowess. Paco was sickly, always confined to the medical wards. Belay was stronger, but ordinary and fragile. There was Kaloy, who looked enough like tatay to claim some nominal similarity, but was entirely plain beyond that. And there was Neneng, second-best, who tired quickly and could never quite keep up. Still, she looked like ate, a peculiar thing.

    "You have her nose and her chin," He told her one day, when the others teased, "Nothing more."

    Despite her smile, Neneng looked at him with a soulful ache. They both knew she looked like ate. Maybe her eyes didn't shine the same, maybe she was smaller and less powerful, but ate was everything tatay hoped Neneng could be. So much so that he gave her the same face.

    "Do you think she'd like me?" Neneng asked sometimes, when daydreams got the better of her. She'd only speak of these things when they were alone, sitting by Isla Amihan's desolate shoreline, when nanay was fast asleep and none the wiser. It was always nighttime, and Creede's distant city lights always looked as beautiful as they did out of reach.

    "Sino?" He'd return, hoping it was somebody else, but already knowing the answer before it came.

    Neneng would look up at the moon. Response enough.

    "You know it's not true, right?" He broached it with hesitance, "Ate didn't really put the moon up there."

    "Maybe," Neneng shrugged, "But nanay said so. And that means she said so for a reason."

    "...I think the moon is beyond our understanding. But I also think ate would love you."

    Neneng would take his calloused, bruised hand in hers. Lean her head on his shoulder.