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CHAPTER FIFTEEN bottom of the barrel
⋆*✧･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:*✧･ﾟ:
WHEN SHE WAS YOUNGER, Kadence was always expected to give up everything for her siblings. Her toys, since Marcus had broken his with his own inhuman strength and hers were still intact; her desserts, or else risk Jayme telling on her for being the one that broke the window last week; her talents, because she could turn glass into sand and wood into steel; and even her disobedience. Apparently, she'd been a mischievous baby, crawling around and turning her father's war medals into wax and her own crib into water. And she'd been an even worse toddler, because this time, she'd actually understood what she was doing—and thus her siblings' stuffed animals hardened into stone and her nanny's clothes crumbled away into dust. By the time she turned three, almost everyone was at their wit's end with her, and daddy dearest had proposed a solution.
Namely, beat it out of her.
Not literally. Her father's abuse—and a part of her, the part that wanted to see a therapist and wondered why she was twenty-nine years old and still let her siblings boss her around, knew it was abuse—was more subtle than a backhand to the face and a cane to the jaw. Reginald hurt his children, too, but his number one favourite way to do so, a way that didn't even require the tedious process of getting his hands dirty, was to get his children to do it for him.
Already, Kadence was just lowly Number Eight, the last-place member of the family that had been plucked up almost as an afterthought. When you quite literally give your children rankings from the day they're born, the formation of a pecking order is inevitable. Marcus is Number One, so he's the leader. Alphonso is Number Four, so he's in the middle. And Kadence is Number Eight. She's the lowest rung of the ladder.
At first, the Hargreeves siblings didn't understand this. Chubby-cheeked and little, all they knew was that the other screaming toddlers that occupied the walls of their household were their brothers and sisters. Fei and Sloane used to share a crib when they couldn't sleep. Ben and Christopher became fast friends, babbling to each other in a language foreign to both human and psykronium cube (if another one existed) ears. Kadence and Marcus giggled with each other during bath time.
But, as they grew up and began to understand the world for what it was—namely, that they were different than everyone else, that they were destined for greatness, and that some people were just better than others—they began to realize that they had an order. And that order, said their father, would dictate the rest of their lives.
This, of course, changed things. What had once been a close-knit, bubbly family slowly drifted apart in an attempt to maintain this order. Marcus (and Ben, though his reign didn't last nearly as long) took up his mantle as leader. Fei let herself be third in command. Sloane, Jayme, and Christopher all began to regress a little bit.
