Chapter Text
There’s a lot of talk about people gaining consciousness as a child after having a realization that shook them down to the core, and it’s not like Finn’s didn’t do that.
He was six years old and it was snowing outside. Finn had always liked the snow.
It was dark, in that area that could be considered late night or early morning, and Thallo and Wilbur were asleep on the couch behind him, and Bel was in the kitchen making tea and praying that it would calm Finn down enough to get him to sleep.
Finn was sitting on the floor, watching old hero videos.
He had liked heroes as far back as he could remember, and really, what young child didn’t like heroes, but there was something about the older ones that interested him.
He’d watched every documentary there was on any decommissioned hero he knew about, whether they died, retired, or just fell off the face of the earth one day.
He’d always wondered what happened to the ones that just disappeared. One of the documentaries had said at least two heroes had been found in Villain bases, and a third one hadn’t been found, but had been cloned, and there was a nice lady who lived near the beach in Finn’s city that everyone knew was Charybdis, but she was especially kinder to those who didn’t bring it up (Other than the little kids, who were met with free cookies and winks and Charybdis asking them to ‘Keep her secret for her’).
And then there were the ones who were never found. As soon as Finn got the concept (Which had been so helpfully demonstrated to him by Wilbur and Thallo, and had resulted in one of his toys being found in the garden a year later), he swore to himself he’d find out what happened to at least one of the heroes who disappeared all on his own.
The Angel was an interesting hero to Finn. He much preferred the elemental ones, but a video on The Angel had auto-played once, and Finn was hooked.
Finn wondered what it was like to have wings like that. He wondered if The Angel could still feel the feathers he used as blades, cutting through the air, wings outstretched and sharp feathers detached from his wings cutting through the earth and enemies below.
It must be powerful.
The last video of The Angel is of him fighting off a cackling, unknown villain whose face had a blank white disc of a mask over it. It wasn’t quite clear what powers the masked man had, but it was enough to put The Angel out of commission.
The camera angle is from below, a civilian recording from a basement level through the windows, praying they wouldn’t be found. The camera is focused on The Angel. And just like the last twenty million times Finn had watched this video, something shiny and silver cut right past the camera, The Angel brought a wing up to block the object to no avail, the silver thing cutting straight through his wing and up through his face, right cheek to over his left eyebrow.
And then in a flash, there’s monstrous noise coming from neither The Angel nor the masked enemy, and ice coating the window and a fair amount of the basement the civilian had been in.
And that was the last time The Angel had been seen. The ice had covered almost half the city, thick and hard to melt. Every ice hero had been asked about it, but it wasn’t theirs, they hadn’t been responsible for that freeze.
Finn grabs the remote and starts hitting buttons, looking for another video while the person in the background of The Angel video starts rattling off facts about the case. Finn had them memorized.
Bel came in with the tea, holding Finn’s favorite raccoon mug, the one Thallo described as ‘Devilish’ out to him, “Trade you.” Bel says, nodding at the remote in Finn’s hands.
Finn handed Bel the remote, and Bel set the mug down on the coffee table in front of him, taking the remote and turning the TV off with a faint sigh.
It was then, drinking his tea, looking up at Bel, who was staring at the blank TV screen for lack of better things to do, that Finn truly looked at the scar on his father’s face.
Right cheek to over left eyebrow, a deep scar that Bel had never really explained in any clarity.
Finn stared at it for a bit longer.
Right cheek to over left eyebrow.
Finn’s eyes widened and he almost dropped his mug, and Bel sighs again, now looking down at Finn and knowing exactly what he just realized, and that neither of them were going to get any sleep that night.
“I’ll take you to Kita’s tomorrow if you don’t bring it up for a bit,” Bel says, looking too tired for his own good.
The list of things Finn wouldn’t do to go to Kita’s bakery is not long, even though they went multiple times a week.
And Finn felt proud of himself, for finding out what happened to a decommissioned hero all on his own.