Chapter Text
Figueroth Faeth knows she's strange, she always has been.
First of all she was a cryptic pregnancy. Sandra-lynn had no idea about Fig's presence until she was rushed into hospital, and hours later out Fig came - a 7 pound mass of wailing pink flesh. The doctors had thought the pinkness would go away in an hour or two. It did not.
Fig likes to consider the ages of 1 to 13 the only normal peices of her life. But even then there was something wrong about her. They had assigned her male at birth, the doctors, but Figueroth wanted nothing more than to play with dolls and play dress up with the other girls in the playground while other parents watched with knotted eyebrows over the strange little boy declaring he was a wizard princess, no matter how many times Sandra-lynn would try and shush her around the other adults.
Maybe that's why Fig liked Gilear more when she was younger.
He wasn't as pushy with that sort of thing, murmuring a soft 'Of course, Figueroth, I'll play tea parties with you.' when asked, which ultimately ended in Gilear in a face full of Sandra-lynn's makeup and Fig giggling delightedly as she made him gossip with the teddybears lined around the plastic table they'd brought her for her 6th birthday.
She grew out of that phase, eventually, like most toddlers do.
She became normal, kept her hair above her ears and tried out for the football team at her middle school. It made her wanna be sick, everytime she stepped into that uniform, everytime she was tackled to the ground simply because she was trying to focus on her feet hitting the ground over the fabric on her skin. She eyed the cheersquad with a deep burning envy, a need she could not quite place.
When one of her team mates had asked which one of the girls she was interested in, Fig had just blinked dumbly and said "None of them?" which earned her a round of mockery.
She quit the football team after that. Let her hair grow out, to her shoulders, brushed it off as a new fashion trend when Gilear or Sandra-lynn dared to approach the subject.
When clothes from the girls section appeared in her closet, Fig didn't say anything. She was just greatful she was transferred over to Oaksheild Middle School under the name Fig Faeth, and showed up to the first day wearing a skirt without facing harassment from former team mates. She joined the cheer team too, and finally felt like she fit in.
Then a week before her 13th brithday, Figueroth noticed how hot she always felt.
Blankets were always too heavy, too hot, made her clam up in a way that would leave her sleepless for nights on end. She tried crawling inbetween Sandralynn and Gilear once, under the premise of a bad dream, but that made it so so much worse to bear. The heat must have come off her in waves that night, because Sandralynn rushed to take her tempreture.
"She's sick." Sandralynn had muttered, right outside of Fig's bedroom door.
"Ah. Do you want me to take the rest of the week off of work to take care of hi- her?" Gilear had responded, the same amount of concern in his voice he seemed to have Fig's entire childhood.
"No, Gilear. I'll stay, I need to spend more time with her." Her tone was irritated. Fig never quite figured out why.
Figueroth learned to deal with the heat. Keep a fan on, stop using her thick duvet. It wasn't so bad when cool air was being blasted onto her skin, which seemed to redden as the days passed.
Then the migrains started.
Deep, throbbing, burning pains that lay dormant in her skull for years began to awaken, keratin bursting through pinkish-reddish skin in a way that made Fig scream into her baby pink, slowly turning crimson, pillow. As horns pushed their way out of her head and settled themselves into her hairline, Fig came to an understanding through the pain and the blood and her parents screaming at eachother over her bed while she wailed in agony.
Being different was not a good thing.
The idea only became cemented in Fig's head when, during a moment where the aches had cooled to what felt like frostbite gently lapping at her skin, Gilear had looked at her with a gaze as cold as her pain, and uttered one single statement:
"You are not a Faeth."
He had stormed out of her room, out of their house, after that leaving Sandra-lynn with a screaming and sobbing pre-teen whos pretty pink bedsheets were slowly turning red with her own blood.
Having horns was a new thing. Having a tail was an even newer thing, which hurt no less than the tiny stumps that had appeared out of her forehead. Sandra-lynn had brought her kids horn cream, with tiny elephants and giraffes on a white band wrapped securely around a slightly see-through green plastic tub.
The age on the tub says 3 to 5 year olds.
Fig is now 13.
She moves out of her childhood bedroom, away from the stuffy unicorn patterned walls and into the much chillier and plainer attic. It was full of Sandra-lynn's adventuring gear, which Fig had thrown onto her mother's, and once what she had thought was her father's, bed in a fit of rage. Sandra-lynn had yelled at her for that, and Fig had countered her by demanding to know who her father was.
Sandra-lynn had slammed the rickety attic door on the way out, leaving a now vermillion skinned, horned and tailed Fig not-Faeth answerless.
Her friends stopped talking to her, slowly but surely. No one wanted to catch what Fig had caught, the condition of being the daughter of a devil. Her coach had, as politely as an adult can while hiding a sneer behind the honey sweet tone all teachers have, told her she had to leave the cheer team. That the other girls thought she'd hurt them, catch themselves on her horns during throws and things.
Fig, as most 13 year olds who just realised they are the reason their parents got divorced, promptly flipped the coach off and told her to kiss her ass.
Sitting in the principle's office later that day, hunched up in a chair that had no space for her tail to rest somewhere that was not in her lap while the cranky ancient human man prattled on and on about how her language was 'unbecoming of a young lady' and that 'Fig needed to learn some respect for her elders' was probably worse than the daggers Sandra-lynn shot into her shoulder with every glare.
"She didn't do anything to respect me." Fig had argued, and could only scowl as Sandra-lynn held a hand up to her face in an attempt to get Fig to shut up. Fig had swatted her hand away, and had pointedly ignored the hurt look her mother gave her.
"I don't understand you, Fig." Sandra-lynn muttered when they had gotten into the car, not yet in Gilear's possession because the court proceeding just hadn't happened yet. "What happened?"
"Tell me who my dad is." Fig had responded, without batting an eye. She refused to engage, refused to let Sandra-lynn get a word in until she knew. She had just wanted to know.
"It's Gilear-"
"No, my real dad. Not a man with no biological relation to me."
"He raised you, Fig."
"I'm no longer his daughter, he said so himself!"
They had pulled to a red light on a fairly empty road, Fig vaguely remembers the deep hot rage that had settled in her stomach. Like hell itself had wiggled it's way from her heritage into her heart and into her blood. The smell of burning cloth had hit her nose, and Fig gripped the handle of the car door even tighter. It sizzled under her grip, but she has far too focused on glaring out of the car's front window to care.
"-ig let go of the damn handle!" Sandra-lynn's hand reached over to grab Fig's wrist, yanking hard until Fig let go. A burnt in hand-print was left behind, a deep brown black against the car's cream colouring.
That handprint was still there the first day of her Freshman year of highschool, when she donned her mothers skin and tried to weasel her way out of school. It didn't work and Gilear, who now owned the car because they had finally gotten the stuff split between them in court, looked at her with all the pity in the world as she clambered out the car with a scowl on her face and fangs on display. A beast wearing his daughters face.
Hours later, she would be fighting for her life against a lunch lady she thought was cool with a bunch of other 14 year olds had gotten detention for stupid reasons just like her. No matter how much Fig would go on to insist that she was awake the whole fight, she was knocked down in the first few rounds of combat.
"So, you're a teifling right? Are you from hell?" Kristen Applebees would ask later on, swaddled in a Owlbear's sweater with doubt and wonder in her eyes. Someone who had seen something that made them realise.
"No. My dad is, though." Fig had answered, tail twitching as she absentmindedly wondered where Riz had gone off to. She covered for him to Goldenrod, so he better appreciate it later.
"Oh, that's cool. Is he cool?"
Fig thought of a gruff voice, of the noise of a motorcycle fading off into the black as she was yanked back awake after the lunch lady was dead and the corn was gone.
"The coolest."