✎ academia ✐

♡ i ♡

EPISODE I: "Baby."

Baby Delgado-Dang has been late only once in her life, and she'd very much like to keep it that way.

In the sixth grade, her twin brother, Blake, made a mess of her closet in search of some fifty-dollar nail polish. How Baby could even afford to purchase a fifty-dollar nail polish, let alone hide one from her twin, didn't matter—Blake was, and is, a demon.

With the kind of gender conformity that can only be attributed to senile age, Abuela had Baby clean it all up by herself. Blake only watched, stuck out his tongue, and took pictures for his Snapchat story. This led to a screaming match so extreme that Mama refused to drive them to school.

So they took their bikes, which certainly helped to sneak in an elbow jab here and there, rendering them precisely three minutes tardy—or it would've, if not for a self-taught, Charming smile. The teacher didn't even put it on record, was too distracted by the pretty lights in Baby's eyes.

But Los Angeles is not London, and any normal American public school is just about the furthest thing from the MagiCourt School. Baby's mind tricks might have worked then, but they won't today. The teachers at the Academy are sure to be less susceptible to amateur Charms, and so one more tardy moment might stain her impeccable record. But another brother of hers is tattling on, murmuring worriedly into her ear, persistent—

    "You've got your notebooks?"

    "Yes," Baby groans.

    "Your schedule?"

    "Yep, laminated and everything."

    "What about your phone?"

    "You know phones won't work in there, right?"

    "Huh?"

    "They've got all these Spells and stuff reinforced between walls to stop kids from using magic in classrooms."

    "Aren't they teaching you to use magic in there? That doesn't make sense."

     "Most classes are lectures, they keep 'em magic-free to avoid mischief. Others are practical classes, so we're allowed to use magic. Aura just messes with technology anyway, so no matter what, there's no cell signa—"

    "Okay, but what if there's an emergency? You might have to ditch the place and call me so I can come get you."

    "Gege..."

    "Mama would never forgive me. I don't think I could ever forgive myself."

    "Beck!" Baby stops. Heaves in a deep, hurried breath. Looks straight at her brother's wide, teary eyes through shade lenses that might as well be windows.

Beck is a six-foot-two, Afro-Latin-Chinese-American. This makes him very hard to miss, even without his recently added status as a budding supermodel. With head down, hood up, sunglasses oversized, he's hiding from the paparazzi. Or fans. Baby wishes it didn't have to be like this, with his newfound fame just about to hit its peak on social media.

Beck is nervous and somehow, unbelievably, more sensitive than ever. But he did manage to make all the arrangements by himself; got her a proper passport, had her legally Registered at the MagiCourt, enrolled at the Academy to boot.

Maybe he's just trying to be a good gege. He always has been, even given their age gap and the fifteen or so years he spent doing God-knows-what in China. To that end, maybe he's just trying to make up for lost time.