Arguably Pretentious

- prologue -

Corrina Kensington and Orion Campbell met one afternoon at an art exhibit honoring a young Hungarian artist touring throughout Europe, almost instantly catching each other's eyes. They're the ever-so-cliche trope in a love at first sight story. They went on to have a happy relationship full of late-night dinner dates and picnics in the park, get happily married, and have 5 "happy" children. Cameron Carter Campbell, Harper Hellena Campbell, Jordan Jacob Campbell, Roman Roland Campbell, and Elias Ensel Campbell, in that order. It's quite the funny stunt that Corrina and Orion pulled, the way they named the children with all the alliteration. And the timing, each child being about two years apart, except for Elias.

Little Elias broke the pattern. He was the last child for a reason. He was born a month and a half premature, causing his heart to be underdeveloped. Even into his adolescent years, he had some troubles with it. Apparently he's the black sheep of the family. The odd one out. All of the other children were overachievers with a tight bond, each of them doing great in school and other extracurricular activities.

Cameron was a genius, always getting near-perfect marks on his end of year exams and planning on going to Oxford. His older sister Harper was an excellent gymnast with hopes of going into the Olympics. Roman was an exceptional writer of all types, continuously winning writing contests across the country. Research papers, poetry, book reports... you name it. Jordan was fantastic at art. He had a way of making drawings and paintings seem like a reality, which was sentimental to his parents due to the location in which they first met and their own professions.

Then, there was Elias. He couldn't become any more strange in his family's eyes. There was obviously something off with the boy. The way he couldn't sit still or how he would count steps and ceiling tiles. He had virtually no sense of humor. He cried if the seams of his shirt sat wrong in his armpits while trying to sleep. The feeling of felt made him want to scream and if his food touched other food on his plate he wanted to curl up into the fetal position. The woman in long green robes and a large pointed black hat showing up at their doorstep on the day of Elias' eleventh birthday just had to make it worse. She began to explain to them, in detail, the special abilities that Elias held. All the while, she stirred sugar into the tea that Corinna had offered her with the flick of a funny little stick. A wand. Beautifully carved wood which never once met the cup.

Surely him being a wizard, as she claimed, would make them proud of him, right? Wrong.

His siblings already blamed him for getting them pulled out of their schools and hidden away from the world at the announcement of Elias' queer cabailities. Locked in their home which had become a prison of sorts. Cameron was just glad he had already left home to attend Oxford by the time that it had happened.

The word "freak" was a common one in the household. Elias was always the recipient. His parents had even gone as far as to say that they wouldn't allow him to go the strange school named Hogwarts. That was until Minerva McGonagall, the aforementioned woman in the odd attire with the magic stick, told them the consequences of this. That if he never learned to control his abilities, it would only cause severe complications that would only draw more wandering eyes. More prying and intrusive questions. Reluctantly, they agreed.