𝙒𝙄𝙇𝘿║𝙁. 𝙃𝙖𝙧𝙜𝙧𝙚𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙨

PROLOGUE

Childhood is something to be cherished. Playing in dirt, skidding your knees and palms, kicking around a ball, sticky ice cream running down your arm, and boundless energy of running, skipping, and jumping all day long. Day after day of running, skipping, and jumping. Over and over, running, skipping, jumping.

He certainly knew about running. While others did it to play tag, he did it for stamina training. Children would run when engaged in soccer, he ran when pitted against his siblings in a race for the best.

Skipping was something else, it was universal but he managed to make it different. Children skipped during hopscotch, jump ropes, and while arm locked with their friends. He skipped after setting fire to the wooden horn on the fireplace that Reginald used to wake them up at the crack of dawn. Some skipped in glee after receiving good news, he skipped because he was told that he and his siblings were having their allowed one dessert a month that night. Even though the children most definitely snuck out every week to Griddy's Donuts for a night treat.

Jumping, he did more often. He was naturally an excitable person, he jumped as part of his training to build up range of motion and reaction training. But he also jumped when he was enacting a particularly devious deed with his siblings.

It was strange, childhood was known to be more innocent than his was. More fuzzy and warm instead of polished mahogany and painfully clean corridors with rich, tasteful, don't-touch-that décor.

But he couldn't complain, he had all he needed. His siblings, his loving robot mamuska, the monkey butler who was always his stand-in dad while his adopted one was a disappointment, and, of course, his Five.

No, he had more than what he was expecting when he found out that he was cursed with powers. Feliks Hargreeves couldn't complain.