This story is dedicated to Sixty-four K, a good friend on here. She's a wonderful person, and you should totally go read/review her stories. It's her fanfic anniversary today! Congrats on lasting this long with all of this insanity, 64K! *piles presents at your feet*
There was a house on the hill.
No, no, it wasn't that kind of house. It wasn't a terrifying house, something you might think comes from stories people would tell to scare their children. No, it was a quite cheery-looking house, accompanied with gardens along the sides, a sprawling two-acre lawn in front, and stables in the back.
It was an estate, to be simple.
Ten years ago, a family had moved in, their servants and housekeepers coming along with them. They were rich, to the reckoning of those who lived nearby, but they didn't act much like it.
The husband and father was tall, his hair dark and bearing noble. From the rumours that had spread of the family coming from England (and that they were related to royalty in some way), it wasn't that hard to believe that he was a Lord. His wife was fair, blonde-haired and elegant, and she smiled all the time, it seemed, but there was a hardness to her that seemed as though her life hadn't been quite as nice as it appeared to be now.
Their children were...different. There were two boys and a girl – well, they weren't exactly children now. The boys were completely identical, dark-headed and energetic, and it was impossible (to the ones that lived nearby) to tell them apart. They seemed to be in their mid-teens, but it was hard to say for sure. The girl, definitely in her early teens if not pre-teens, was dark-haired as well, but had a small face like her mother. She smiled a lot as well, but she didn't when she thought no one was looking.
The stables in the back of the estate weren't just for show, it seemed. The family regularly rode the multiple horses, either going far back into the land that went with the house, vanishing into the small forested area, or riding along the road, all together.
The strangest thing to be sure, though, was the two main servants the family employed. There were others, of course, the groundskeeper and the stablemaster, but these two seemed to be the most...important.
The first seemed to be a housekeeper of sorts – he regularly came to town with other servants, directing them to fetch groceries and supplies, though he did other things as well. His hair was black as midnight, his gaze hard whenever someone met his dark eyes, but he did smile sometimes. It wasn't much, but he did.
The other was the stranger one – he always seemed to accompany the dark one, and was as friendly as the other wasn't. His hair was – the only way to describe it would be golden. It spilled down his back in glorious waves, and it was only rarely that anyone saw it pulled back in a braid. Usually that was only when he was working.
And that was the oddest thing about all this whole group. Every single one of them – even the servants – had silky hair, long and straight (except for the golden-haired one and the Lord's wife; theirs was wavey and curled at the ends). The children had shoulder-length hair, the boys' a little shorter than the girl's, but still. It was...different. It kept them apart from the others in the town – besides the fact that they were obviously well-off.
They were an oddity, that's what they were.
And so it sparked the interest of a very curious young boy.