Kingston was born on the sixth of June in the early morning. His mother always told him that she had held him for the first time just as the night dissolved into sunrise, bathing the room in a soft glow.
Perhaps the newly risen sun had instilled something godlike into him, because his hair burned with the golden light of Apollo and his eyes shined warm and wise, like the wood of an ancient tree that had seen civilisations rise and tyrants fall.
They named him something fit for a king who walked among men, and that was just what he was.
~
Ever since he could remember, people had loved him.
He wasn't quite sure why, but something about his smile, his bright demeanour, drew them in easily.
That was fine. He loved people, or at least, he had at first.
His first few years of life sparkled in his memory like diamonds in the rough. What he remembered, though vague, was beautiful - laughter and warmth and love. He remembered picnics with his mother in the sun, and falling asleep under the trees as she read him stories. The sun was quite present in his memories of that period of time, the symbolism he didn't know much of, but he knew it symbolised something. He remembered his father taking him to see the circus once, cotton candy warm in his mouth, high above the sticky masses of bodies on his father's shoulders.
Then his parents had divorced, and his world was plunged into darkness.
(The sun had disappeared, so he had no choice but to become it.)
~
It was the fourth argument that week. The sixth argument, if you counted someone telling their son how stupid he was without allowing a word in his defense as an argument.
"This has got to be the stupidest shit you've ever done!"
"Come off it, Dad," Kingston mumbled, watching his father's eye twitch with rage. "You're going to blow a blood vessel."
"And it will be your fault if I do," he hissed back, shaking the box. "My own son - fucking around like some sort of prostitute!"
"They're for my art class," Kingston replied simply. "They're sketches. It's nothing - "
"And what about the cigars?"
"You smoke them too, I don't see the - "
"Issue? The issue, Kingston, is that you're only seventeen! And you're stealing - are you fucking listening to me?"
"Of course, of course."
"Don't you take that tone with me! I won't have my son turning into some kind of - some kind of - "
"Fag?" Kingston supplied quietly, and his father's eyes snapped to him.
"Exactly."
His voice shot through him like ice, the coldest it had ever been, and Kingston felt like he was choking on air, because fuck, what had he expected him to say? He swallowed harshly, then forced eye contact with the man and his words went out slowly and clearly.
"Look, I don't see what the big deal is about the cigars. I'm almost eighteen anyway."
There was silence, with an exception of the barely controlled breathing of his father. And then a plate smashed above Kingston's head and a stream of curses fell from his father's mouth -
(if you're so fucking adult then leave)
And so he did.
