03 October 2020

Prompt: Youth

Character/Pairing: Dingo King (OC), Luka Couffaine

Rating: K / G / All Ages

Notes: I kinda went in a 'here's a look at Young Dingo' for this one, but I like how it turned out so I'm not entirely sorry for making the prompt vague. xD

Dingo King is five the first time he hears it. The W word. Weird.

And it's from the coolest person in the world. His cousin Connor, who's gotten a lot less cool since he started learning about appearances and responsibilities and being the Man of the House. He isn't as cool as he used to be, back before his dad went to live with the angels.

"Why are you so weird?" Connor asks, and Dingo just spits at his feet and wipes a sore hand across his mouth. One of the other kids – a girl, it sounds like, but it could be Malcolm – screams when blood and a tooth mix with the spit on the pavement. Brady just tugs on Connor's shoulder and tells him to leave it.

Connor's been leaving Dingo a lot lately.

"Go on!" Dingo shouts, the angry words lisping with his missing tooth. It had been loose, anyway. Mum won't worry until she sees the split lip and the bloody nose, but Dingo's the kind of boy that climbs trees and fights wallabies and chases koalas. It isn't the first time he's gone home bloody, and it certainly won't be the last. "I hate you, anyway! You're weird!"

If he's hurt Connor with his words, the older boy doesn't show it. He just shoves Dingo back into the dirt, tells him to leave him alone ("I'm too old to play with babies!"), and leaves with his friends.

…Dingo doesn't have any other friends. His parents spend too much time moving around, and he spends too much time running through the bush, and Connor's the only one in the family who never looked at him like some wild, rabid animal left at the door.

Dingo sits there like his favorite cousin's dismissal doesn't hurt. Starts drawing in the dirt by the road, picking at the wildflowers Aunt Tilley planted there so that when the old lady from down the street stops and asks him if he's ok he can say he's making mud pies. That's not unusual for him, and if not for the bloodied face she might have believed it.

They leave Melbourne that night and camp by the road halfway to Wodonga when Dad gets too tired to drive. Dingo's already asleep by then, anyway, and doesn't hear the heated conversation between his parents about family and Connor and weird.

– V –

He's eight and is called weird so much he really doesn't notice it anymore. Not really.

But it does hurt a little when Abigail turns her nose up, her lips twisting in a grimace when he offers her the wriggling worm he's dug out of the dirt under the big tree.

"You're weird, Perry," she sniffs, and then Katrina's calling her away and she's leaving him in the shade to play in his dirt. He looks back at his little friend before putting him back on the ground.

Abigail wasn't that cool, anyway. She always calls him Perry like their teacher, and she doesn't like bugs, and she wears too much yellow. Girls are supposed to like pink, aren't they?

– V –

He's ten the first time he realizes it bothers him. Being called weird. He tells Mum this, after the other boys at school left him to play rugby again and he didn't want to. He's good at running, and he's great at kicking, but he's never been one for team sports. So he climbed the tree by the field, and Tommy had told the other boys to lay off.

"That's the weird kid," Tommy had said, just loud enough that Dingo could hear him from the branches. "He never plays with us anyway."

Well. Maybe he would if they actually wanted him to.

"Being weird isn't a bad thing, Perry," Mum coos, brushing his blonde bangs out of his face. He looks up at her with uncertain eyes, and she drops a kiss on his forehead. It doesn't make him feel as good as it used to, back when Mum's kisses were magic and solved everything. "Your dad and I get called weird all the time. You don't think we're weird, do you?"

He wants to tell her no, that he loves her very much and would never say something so hurtful, but then he remembers seeing her dancing in the yard under the full moon in all those scarves and bells and thinks, at least to Tommy and the other boys at school, she might be a little weird, after all.

She's not weird to him, though. She's just Mum.

– V –

He's thirteen the first time someone calls him weird and it doesn't sound like an insult.

"…you're so weird," the blue-haired boy Mendeleiev has him sit next to laughs. He smiles and raises his knuckles. Dingo hesitates only a second before he's bumping his own against them. "I'm Luka."

It's the first time Dingo thinks he might actually make a friend. That he might actually be sad when Dad inevitably says they're moving again and he has to leave him behind.

"Dingo," he says, and Luka laughs again like it's the greatest thing he's ever heard. Dingo hopes Dad doesn't say they have to move for a long time.