Title: Grow Up
Character: Aerrow
Rating: K
Summary: They keep telling him to wait until he's grown up; Aerrow sees things differently.
Disclaimer: I am not the people in ownership of this awesome show and I have no money, so suing me will really only get you my collection of yarn.

People spent their lives wondering what they'd be when they "grew up." Young children were prone to grand dreams, because when you're young, the obstacles simply don't exist. You could do anything, and when the old people scoff or, worse yet, trade amused glances with other old people, the young merely brushed it off. What did the old know, anyway? They made things too difficult.

Of course, the older people knew better. They knew what difficulties waited in the road ahead, and they'd learned to change their dreams as time had passed them by. Even still, adulthood didn't grant a person any sense of unshakeable certainty. Even adults sometimes didn't know what they wanted to be when they "grew up."

Aerrow had never wondered what he'd be. In fact, he had barely been patient enough to wait long enough to finish "growing up." Most argued that he should have waited even longer, for what kind of childhood could he have had to have already come into possession of the skills and techniques that he did, at such a tender age?

Aerrow never put it into words, but he always thought of it like this: you never finished growing up. That was the tricky thing about it all. You didn't stop growing up until you were dead, and so what was the point of waiting some undetermined amount of time before becoming what you wanted to be? There was no logic to it, and so he didn't feel he had to abide by it.

The problem was, of course, that he had started too soon by traditional standards. People his age weren't meant to be ready to take to the skies. Not in the eyes of adults, who seemed to think that people Aerrow's age should still be busying themselves with the business of learning. Aerrow might have argued that learning should be a continual process, engaged in throughout the span of one's life, but it was a notion that rested in the back of his mind, not really something he was yet consciously aware of. Besides, he did know that any argument he put forth would fall on deaf ears. Adults were notoriously gifted at not hearing what they didn't want to. It was rare that they wanted to listen to someone his age.

It didn't matter that he'd passed the trials, and that he was already knighted. It was, when he thought about it, frustrating. What was the point of having the trials if completing them wouldn't lend a person a certain amount of credibility? He may be a teenager, but he knew what he was doing, and he knew how to lead his squad. More than that, he knew how to lead them and bring them back alive (despite some of their rather skilled attempts at thwarting him).

No, when it came down to it, they didn't see what he was--what they all were--capable of. They didn't see what they'd proven they could do. They remained steadfastly fixated on his age, and in the end, there was nothing he could do except accept it, and grow up.

But he wasn't going to wait. He knew what he was meant to do, and he knew they could do it. He walked away from the Sky Knight Council, his squad at his side, determined to prove the old men wrong. Not out of any vindictive feelings, not to spite the council. No. It was simply what they were meant to do. They may not have finished "growing up" in the eyes of everyone else, but they weren't going to wait that long in order to be what they wanted to be. What they were meant to be.