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───────────────────────── with a beating heart at its centre
AZALEA BATES WAS A MISTAKE FILLED WITH FLAMES, WAITING FOR A MOMENTS NOTICE TO ENGLUF HER ENTIRELY.
Her family was perfect at first glance. The doting mother and well-mannered father with three children, all within a respectable age range for a small town family. First her eldest brother Aster, a brunette boy attending law school. He was smart and driven, a good student and good son. Thomas, her youngest brother who had just turned fourteen was athletic, already having scouts for all the school sports he played in his free time. She was the outlier despite being the middle child, not having the trademark dark hair and hazel eyes. Azalea was bronze skinned and her hair was a dark dirty blonde, not at all fitting into the picture perfect portrait of the family.
Though her mother would always deny it, and her father would refuse to comment on the subject, Azalea knew her proclaimed father wasn't hers biologically. As the year she was conceived was also the year the perfect couple nearly had a not so perfect divorce. Azalea was the bastard love child to a nameless man, and Thomas had been the child to fix the marriage that Azalea nearly broke.
It was perhaps this reason that her father treated her differently than the boys. More cold, less loving. Like a wet blanket being draped over a small fire is often how she felt in his presence; snuffed out and suffocated. He didn't love her not as a father should, it wasn't unconditional or reliving, but burdening and hard to live with.
He dampened her spark of life in a way she never knew possible.
There was no way around the fact that she didn't belong in the previously perfect family; from her genetic makeup to her less fortunate attributes. After all, a perfect family had no need for a broken child suffering from Dyslexia and ADHD. With the prefect boys and then the broken middle child, it wasn't surprising how ostracized she was from the family. She didn't belong. Despite it though, Azalea tried her hardest to please her father and mother in any way she could.
That was her first mistake.
When she was younger she had always held an affinity for flames, so when she created a spark with her fingertips she couldn't help but show her parents her thought to be greatest achievement. Except in their eyes she was a cursed child, a spawn of Satan. So she was forced to daily church sessions with the Pastor of the local church to end the labeled blasphemy. Azalea didn't question it, not wanting to upset her parents anymore than she had at four years old, So her peculiarly was never spoken of or used. Her mother had made sure of that when slapping her hands so hard with a wooden spoon that they bruised a deep purple-black.
