Chapter Text
To humans, witches were a tall tale. Something mentioned once in history class, or during a certain day in October, but regarded with no real truth to the subject matter. Just like vampires, werewolves, and other things that went bump in the night.
But Buck can tell anyone for certain: magic is definitely real.
He knows that more than anyone; his very existence is made up of it.
Magic has been around since the creation of the universe, and took a liking to the beings on Earth that made it feel just a bit less lonely. So, it started giving parts of itself to the death-prone, fragile creatures so it wouldn't be alone ever again.
And over time, it created many creatures with a wonderfully paradoxical existence. Humans with the wings of butterflies and friendship with the sun, birds made of fire capable of endless rebirth, and those who could change shape to be able to walk alongside any animal.
But as human society took shape and progressed, the magic had noticed that its creatures still possessed the greedy and sometimes wrathful nature of their human relatives. The world had to find a balance to sew the divide magic had unknowingly created between the gifted and those defenseless against them.
In an effort to fix the divide, magic let the creatures still keep parts of itself but started to take away some more obvious traits away over time. The fairies would still keep their light, but the butterfly wings would wilt and fall off shortly after birth. The phoenixes were given a new and more human and infallible form and made it harder to escape the clutches of the cruel mistress of death. And new families of weres were limited to one secondary shape once every moon cycle to keep human deaths from growing. While creatures didn’t go against their natures, they made more effort to blend in with humans to smooth over their differences.
After a new, better order had been established, magic had decided to stop interfering with the affairs of Earth for good and be content to watch from a distance.
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But what if the magic wanted its own children? Creatures simply not just the biological relation of humans with magic running through their blood, but a being entirely made up of itself and not just a fraction?
The weres were a gift to the moon, the mermaids and selkies to the sea, so why not just something belonging to itself?
And so magic created witches. An existence made up purely of magic, channeling it into something tangible on Earth. Something it could even communicate with fleetingly from time to time—maybe encourage them to be good for the balance while letting them keep their agency intact—but keeping their numbers low to keep a close enough watch on them to make the gift was not misused.
And that’s the way it was for many rotations of Earth around the sun. Witches were the helpful neighbors that would help crops grow to keep families away from famine and hunger. Witches were the ones who made a humble and careful livelihood off of remedies they created when they combined their gifts with nature. And witches were the ones that were the knowledge-keepers and compiled lifetime's worth of libraries for the wellbeing of all species and their future generations.
Witches were goodness and love. They picked humans and all creatures up when they fell and welcomed them with open arms. Magic could look the other way if its children tipped the scales on the side of light ever so slightly just by existing.
But the nature of man had never yet failed to spill itself over and manifest in the cruelest of ways, and neither had their blueprints.
Eventually, slight misunderstandings morphed into flesh being burned off bone in the town square. Fear won over fact, as it had proved to every time, and witches were hunted and tortured to extinction.
While the humans had taken the lead in their crusade to take them down, the supernaturals turned on their fellow magic-users either out of self-preservation or misplaced and festering jealousy.
In magic’s eyes, they had all played a part in murdering its children. In its grief, it twisted some into monsters and beasts on the inside. Made tragedies into the common story and the neighbors that had been previously cared for and loved by the witches turn on each other.
Supernaturals fully went into hiding, not revealing themselves to humans anymore out of borrowed fear. Some children of magical parents were born human, born Scorned. Magic was very, very slowly withdrawing from those it loved unquestionably before. Enough to be noticeable, to send a message, but not enough to drive them anywhere near extinction for another some odd centuries.
And that became the new rules of the world. Seeds of discord sowed into both fabrics of society, until it was just “the way things were”.
History became forgotten.
Witches aren’t just fable to humans; they’re believed by the supernatural themselves to be well and truly myth now too.
Although it’s not agreed upon whether or not unicorns actually existed at some point–perhaps just a fleeting experiment of magic–, they are to humans as witches are to the magic-born. They’re most likely gone, but a few of them could still be out there. Not wanting to make themselves known out of fear for the repeat of the past like humans would have done to the horns and blood of unicorns.
In the modern era, witches–if there really were any, like unicorns– had been treated like Huguenots. Given a generations old apology and a promise to do better to assuage the guilt passed on from great-great-grandparents to great-great-grandchildren. Try to appease the invisible force taking the birthrights of their children.
Everyone else moves on, falls back on what they know reality to be.
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Or, at least, that’s how the story went to the best of Buck’s knowledge.
His formal education on the topic of the supernatural wasn’t much; pieced together by some stray books his dad left out when he was younger and Bobby wasn’t yet familiar with his new son’s more curious nature.
But informally, Buck knew the story had some truth to it because of the way the wind had blown in the otherwise still room of the study when he read those pages all those years ago.
The wind that has been around his entire life, blowing this way and that, telling him short things without words to keep him out of danger or nudge him in the right direction. But more obvious than the wind had been the bright blue light that he was able to hold in his hands for as long as he could remember.
The lady he remembers vaguely to be his birth mother had said he was born wrong , so Evan, before he was Buck, had long accepted the blue light was an unchanging part of himself without much question. Because when he asked about the mark on his face above his eye, his mother had called it wrong, too, and told him with a resigned sigh and face contorted in disgust that there was nothing they could do to change it.
He assumed that the light was the part that his mother had said was wrong with him this time, so he kept that part of himself away from others; just like he did with his birthmark and a hat when he could.
He also knew that his birth family was different, too.
When his brother was still alive, a tiny Evan would inexplicitly spend one night a month in an empty house (that everyone would deny, deny, deny). Or sometimes when he had dragged a dining room chair over to the freezer for a popsicle, he would instead find large quantities of raw meat stored away.
Probably the most damning of all, though, was the time when he was seven and had accidentally walked into his sister Maddie’s bedroom one night to find her writhing in pain in front of the bright light of the moon one moment, and a white snow leopard in her place the next.
Maddie sat Buck down later that night when she was back on two human legs— “Buck” , she had said with a giggle, “Like that one deer in the backyard that has the same bug-eyes you do” —as a stuttering mess, trying to explain that her and the rest of their family were actually not just big cats disguised as people (which was apparently an offensive assumption), but magic beings called werecats.
He had scrunched his nose at that, “You mean like that kid Mark in my class that came to class for Halloween dressed as a weird dog called a werewolf?” Which quickly earned him a light smack on the back from Maddie.
Buck would look back on this conversation later on in life and be thankful that she had taken the care to make him feel normal, and not any more alienated from his family. Maddie had explained that he was born a human— “Scorned”, as she called it.
He remembers wanting to tell his sister about the blue sparks more this time than any other, and can only assume it was out of fear that his sister would become disgusted with him in the same way their mother and father did.
The very next day after that, Maddie had sat both Buck and his brother Daniel down in her room so they could further air out the truth of what they were.
And sweet, caring Daniel didn’t get mad like Maddie said their parents would. It took him only one look towards his kid brother to pick up on the beginnings of his hurt before he gave Buck into one of the warmest hugs he’d ever received and mumbled quietly into his shoulder that it “didn’t matter what they were, because we’re always going to be family. ”
A few months later, when Daniel had finally succumbed to the sickness Buck had known him to have as long as he’d been the youngest Buckley, he clung desperately onto the words and easy smiles Daniel had given him that day as his mother and father screamed at him for being wrong again. Scorned, cursed, and wrong is all that he knew how to be.
It was then his parents told him he failed to save Daniel, the only reason he was born, because his biology had differed from theirs.
But in the days following Daniel’s death, Buck found that the growing ache his parents had opened up in his chest wouldn’t matter too much anymore.
Buck remembers waking up, not being able to breathe through the heavy veil of smoke that permeated his bedroom. Coughing and gasping out the names of his family in the loud, high-pitched voice fitting his age.
He remembers stumbling out of his bed in his car-themed pajamas and trying to walk towards the door through burning and teary eyes, and a few steps in he felt the wind shift ever so slightly towards the direction of the window instead. Not knowing any better than to trust what he knew was a part of him, he doubled back towards his bed and didn’t stop until he reached the window instead of the door.
The outside reflected a scene of big trucks washing the street in colors with big flashing lights, but nothing like the ones he can hold in his hands. With lungs as on fire as the ceiling above him, he banged on the glass as hard as his child-sized fists could and called for help.
And he remembers the men in the big coats snapping their attention up to him, and then suddenly running to the truck and doing things that made the big ladder on top stretch towards him. A man had reached his window and had prepared to breach it, and then it all went black.
Buck’s not sure, even as an adult, if he had passed out from the smoke inhalation, or if his brain had simply blocked out the trauma of realizing he was the only one who made it out of the house.
Because after he woke again—this time in a hospital bed with a weird plastic mask giving him air not infected by the fire—nine-year-old Evan Buckley was told for the very first time that he was all alone in this world. That truth had settled against his soul so deeply that not even the blue light he had hidden from the world could soothe the ache.
It became a fucked-up mantra that he eventually accepted was a part of him, too. For many years afterwards, Buck wondered if there was a hat big enough to hide the loneliness, too.