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He is a sweet boy, his little brother, and a crybaby too. The kind that cried when he was put down, or when he wasn’t getting enough attention.
Steve had to hold Matt constantly.
When he was a toddler, Steve was able to sneak out before he woke up. And Matt would smile so wide when he’d come home from school. All excited babbling and clinging to his leg like Steve would disappear again if he didn’t. After hours of classes and extracurriculars, they’d build block towers together on Matt’s demand.
He didn’t mind. Steve doted on him, really.
Which is why Matt took it so hard when Steve went to live with his dad for a while.
It would be better, he’d be closer to the castle, to joining the Emperor’s Coven. It was for the best.
And Matt would be starting school soon anyway.
He expected the witchlet to react badly, pictured Matt as that one child in the baby class that cried for hours after their parent left. There was always one after all.
But the next time Steve saw him, he was prattling on about a girl named Bria, and Steve thought everything would be okay.
Glandus is a tough school. Steve doesn’t look back too fondly on those days, but it toughened him up for his future of coven training, he supposes. On the other hand, Steve couldn’t find a benefit for Matt’s attendance.
His little brother was a scrawny kid. Steve almost expected him to be bullied.
He didn’t however expect Matt to do the bullying.
That Bria girl, for as much as their mother fawned over her, didn’t seem like too much of a good influence. She was a strong witch from an experienced family. Matt’s parents were proud of him for befriending her.
But Bria seemed to had stomped over some bodies to make her way to the top, and Matt was eagerly crawling after her.
He worried.
Like a pack of animals, Steve would watch as they circled another witchling to tease and torment after school. He’d whoop for Matt, watching as the crowd dispersed and the boy jumped into his motorcycle seat quickly. Matt ducked away from his glare, like he had as a child when he just got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
Except now Steve didn’t look on fondly. Just with pursed lips and a shake of his head as he drove off.
He couldn’t entirely blame Bria’s influence, though.
It was unfair of him, to blame another kid when their mother was right there. Steve and her were never close, and he spent more time with his dad. But Matt.
He was a momma’s boy. The same one that would insert himself between midnight screaming matches, only to be berated by the same woman he was defending.
During one visit, Steve had come home to a particularly bad argument. At first, they stopped, faces once flushed with anger now flushed in embarrassment. But once Steve left the room they went right back to it. He went to check on Matt.
The screaming match becoming fainter as he came upon Matt’s closet, where he’d find the little boy curled up behind a wall of building blocks.
Steve started declining his friend’s hangout invitations to take Matt to his stepmom’s house on the weekends.
He didn’t really know what else to do, at that age.
Matt’s dad was always rough around the edges, but Steve didn’t fathom how bad it was, not when he spent so much time away. He stopped visiting when he became a scout, he thought they’d gotten better. He was wrong.
Matt dealt with it alone. And school wasn’t turning out to be much of an escape.
He already knew and had visions of Matt being the aggressor, shoving kids into lockers and stealing lunch money. Based on the stories his mom told him.
But lately when he’d see Matt coming home, it’d be with red rimmed eyes and tattered clothes, clutching torn and ripped up books. And maybe he wasn’t just a bully. Steve didn’t knew what side of the spectrum he’d prefer.
By the time Matt was ten, his visits were greeted less with happy faces and inquiries on his training, and more pinched brows and a complaint of the most recent call home about Matt’s misbehavior.
His stepfather spent more time at work to get away from it all.
-
Coming on teen years and early witch puberty did nothing for Matt’s temper. He came to greet Steve with venom spilling from a split lip.
“Leave me alone!” and “Go away!” to “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!”
He’d apologize later. He always did. Albeit after throwing what could only be considered a tantrum as he trashed his bedroom for the third time that week.
It pissed Steve off a little, to see broken colored pencils he wasted half a paycheck on, but he didn’t say anything.
”I hate you! I hate you!” The words echoed in his head. It ate up at Steve, distracted from work and orders. His coworkers worried about him. They didn’t even see his face underneath the helmet so he knew his body language must’ve been just as loud as Matt’s screams.
Matt was pulled out of Glandus after a brawl so bad his father had to be called from work.
All three of them gathered around the injured child, all blissed out on a variety of healing potions and Steve had to finally say what they were all thinking.
”He can’t handle Glandus.”
and it was the first time Matt’s parents agreed on something in a long time.
His first day at Hexside came a week later.
Matt still hung around Bria and her friends for a few weeks after the transfer, but eventually Matt’s prattling was less about Bria and more about a boy named Gus.
He was tentative, to be honest. But meeting the kid at Matt’s 13th birthday “party” (nobody but Gus showed up) soothed his worries.
-
Steve thinks Matt is doing better, really. He seems happy, less destructive influences and more time out of the house. He joins the illusions track.
His mom says he’s up on the scroll all night, trying and failing to whisper and muffle his laughs. She talks about the illusionist boy and the graveyard they hang at. Steve thinks they’re dating, but Matt would rather suffer a thousand noogies than admit such a thing.
He’s kinder now. He hexts Steve drawings and talks to him about Blademage. Steve tries to answer Matt as much as he can, but work is getting harder, the emperor seems to have a big project underway. Steve is changing into his uniform when his scroll buzzes with a hext and a smile comes to his face.
He is a sweet boy, his little brother.