Chapter Text
Eric Richard Bittle (junior) was only six years old when he discovered that he wasn’t exactly like most other children his age.
It all started with one little duck.
Eric, or Dicky as his mama called him, was playing hopscotch down the road with some of his neighbours, carefree, when he suddenly noticed something lying in the gutter a few feet away.
Being a six-year-old, and a curious one at that, little Dicky decided to walk over and investigate, much to the horror of his friends, who refused to go beyond one hundred metres of their houses.
He pushed aside the bush that was obstructing his view, and to his horror, discovered the body of the resident mama duck that lived nearby, and that he always fed and cuddled with. He couldn’t see any of her chicks anywhere, and judging by her injuries, she appeared to have been unfortunately shot by some careless person.
He could feel the tears pooling in his eyes, and even though he tried as hard as he could to ‘man up’, as Daddy always told him to, he was a sensitive sort, and couldn’t help but sob helplessly at the sight of his lifeless friend, or ‘Fluffy’, as he’d named her. She’d been coming over to his house ever since he was a little toddler, and as tiny children do, he’d almost adopted her, and she in return had become a very close, if not communicative companion.
He patted her smooth feathers, remembering how she loved to cuddle up to him in the evenings, and buried his face in her now cold feathers, crying loudly.
Until inexplicably, in his sorrow he felt something soft moving against his face, followed by some soft quacks and flapping
He shot back, shocked, and to his extreme surprise, saw that Fluffy was now suddenly up and about, preening and trotting slowly around him before burying herself in his lap, accompanied by some soft quacks. Although she still had a gash across her side, she was most definitely alive and kicking.
It was like he’d never seen her in those bushes.
He immediately got up, jostling Fluffy, and ran home to his mama to tell her about what had happened, with Fluffy waddling along behind him.
Suzanne Bittle didn’t believe her son’s seemingly impossible description of events at first, but it wasn’t until the little wood duck stepped inside the house, still bleeding slightly from her wound, that she finally realised that what had happened was indeed the case. Along with Dicky’s seemingly prodigious talent for baking and cooking, far beyond anything any normal little child’s capabilities, even her own, she was beginning to have some inkling of what might be in the future.
She made a quick sign of the cross, dumbfounded and amazed, before giving her little Dicky a kiss on the forehead, sending him to shower and making arrangements for the recovery of their new little resident, before bolting to the phone and calling up her own mama. Lord knew that such kind of powers were beyond her, but she’d be damned if she and her family didn’t raise their little munchkin right, in all senses of the word.
As little Dicky grew, his powers only seemed to grow as he was slowly trained by his indulgent but strict Moomaw and his beloved Mama in the little time he had away from school and figure skating practice. His Moomaw taught him all her little kitchen secrets and tricks, both magical and non-magical, helping him to hone and perfect this craft until his skills were beyond even hers, while his Mama, with a fair amount of trepidation, taught him the skills of healing, helping and eventually reliably resurrecting the tiny creatures he so loved, of which he had now adopted many, until he was assisting almost every single animal and plant in his entire town. Otherwise, his life went on as normal- school, TV, pop music, fantasising about the boys on MTV, reading and comics- and he quickly adapted to this double life he had, as fast as would normally be expected of a ten year old boy. He was happy as a little clam.
His Dad, a perfectly normal human man, wasn’t supposed to find out his little son’s secret, but like most secrets, he stumbled upon it eventually. In this case, it was when Eric, getting impatient for an apple-caramel pie to bake for his coterie of friends who were at his place for a sleepover, stealthily enchanted the pie to become crisp and golden in a matter of minutes, before grabbing it out of the oven, hastily cooling it again with a wave of his fingers and running full-speed back to the living room to the sounds of cheering and whooping, unaware that anybody had seen his unique antics.
To be sure, he was shocked at first, sending a silent prayer to the Lord above that his son hadn’t been marked by the Devil with his witchcraft. But with unusual tact, he realised that instead of direct confrontation, he should talk to Suzie about this first, as he was sure that she knew about this, considering Dicky told her every single thing about his life. He was relieved when he did eventually discuss it with her later that night when Dicky was fast asleep, and after knowing that this was a skill that was being harnessed and utilised for good, and after a long discussion with the kind, open-minded pastor at their church, Coach Bittle was assured that his little boy was, in fact, deeply blessed by the Lord, not cursed. And after talking with Dicky about it, he knew everything was going to be absolutely fine. His family was just a little unusual, that was all.
But dark clouds started coming up on the Bittles’ rosy horizon when Eric got a little older. Junior high was tough on the now not-so-little Dicky. His darling Moomaw passed away when he was twelve. At the very beginning of junior high, many of his friends had moved away to other schools and even to other states. Figure skating under Katya became more and more intense as Eric’s true talent began to show, although he loved it nonetheless. And as it became more obvious that the bright, chatty and somewhat slight blonde boy was not your normal Southern boy in every sense of the word, he became the target of relentless bullying and prejudice, relentless all the way from the beginning of junior high to its dark climax at the very end of his last year at junior high, with the horrible outcome of Eric being locked in a dark, tiny supply closet for an entire night, injured, defenceless and powerless by a particularly mean faction of the football team. They had tossed his brand new iPhone in the toilet and smashed it to tiny pieces, taken away his Beyoncé and Taylor Swift posters and ripped them to shreds, broken his right arm and fingers so that he was unable to free himself neither conventionally nor using his gift, and in their jealousy and rage at his skating abilities, had tossed him roughly into the closet, bruising both his legs.
He cried and screamed and uselessly flailed for hours and hours in the dark confines of the closet, hungry and thirsty, wondering whether he’d ever see the light again. He honestly thought he would die in there, and once he fell unconscious after an eternity of trying to attract attention, thought that this was the end of his suffering.
Thankfully, the hard working janitor found him just before it was too late, unlocking the closet at almost midnight to find the exhausted young man tumbling out into the hallway, beaten and bruised, but still mercifully alive, clutching the tiny crucifix he always wore on his neck until the edges had cut his swollen fingers.
When waiting with him at the hospital, Eric’s parents thanked him again and again, sobbing profusely, and wondering how exactly he had saved their son. They were, once again shocked when the janitor said that he had noticed a soft, flashing golden light coming from the closet when the rest of the school was otherwise dark and deserted. They both looked at each other and made the sign of the cross. It was just then when Eric, clutching his mother and fathers’ hands, slowly began to wake up.
After his son had recovered completely, a long and slow process, resolute, Coach Bittle put his foot down. He would not and could not tolerate the lies, the prejudice and the scaremongering anymore. He got every single member of the football team involved in that fateful incident suspended or expelled and dismissed from the team, ruining their chances at college football. He became one of the founding adult members of the PFLAG team in this town where he had grown up. And finally, he handed in his resignation and moved an hour away to the much more tolerant town of Madison, where he became the high school football coach. It was hard for all of them, especially Dicky, but Eric Richard Bittle, senior knew that he was doing the right thing.
In Madison, Eric slowly but surely settled in. He started by coming out to his parents, who although had suspected this, still took some time to get over all the toxic, negative things they had been taught by their Southern culture and their religion, although these had been tempered a lot by their open-minded church. They fully accepted him, in the end, and their love and care melted all of Eric’s fears. He formed a small farm for his little menagerie, and saved an abandoned pet rabbit who had become a road casualty, resurrecting him before delicately nursing him back to health, and who had now adopted Eric and become his new son. Upon learning he would be taking Spanish at school, he named the cream coloured ball of fluff Senor Bun. He started high school, where he was much happier and most importantly, accepted for who he was, and quickly gained a large group of friends with his kindness and sunny nature. He made leaps and bounds in his magical education with his mother, who had taken over this aspect of his life. And he made such strides in his figure skating, despite the now long commute, that he made it all the way to the Southern Junior Regional competition, where he took took out third place, much to his surprise and to his parents’ and Katya’s joy. Katya told him that he could even reach Olympic level if he kept up his training.
But the extreme hours and long commute were getting to him. He had so much more than figure skating to look forward to in his life now, and now that he could, he wanted to have a more normal teenage life.
Most importantly, however, he saw that while his dad was always proud of him, figure skating was not one of the, to his father, ‘manliest’ sports. So he made a tough decision- he left figure skating.
But he had a backup plan. There was an ice rink not a ten minute drive from his house, and after sitting in on the hockey practice sessions, and after some thought and his parents’ approval, started playing on the co-ed team. He ended up loving it almost as much as he loved figure skating, and was one of the team’s most popular and skilled members being an excellent skater and a diligent, rule-abiding player. His popularity was at least partly due to his exceptional pies, which he baked friendship, amity and acceptance into and brought to every single practice, but he was such a lovely boy that even without them he would have still been, undoubtedly one of the hearts of the team. Meanwhile, he became so skilful at this new sport in fact, that in his junior year, he was made captain from a unanimous vote, and even in a non-checking league, began to bring scouts coming from Division 1 colleges come to his little town to check him and some other talented members of his team.
And in his senior year, in the haze of SAT’s, hockey practice, starting his vlog channel, advanced magic classes from the most talented kitchen witch in Georgia and his internships at the nearby bakery and the vet, just before his graduation, everything suddenly came to a head when his application to Samwell College, his dream school, an LGBT+ friendly, Division I hockey liberal arts school far away in Massachusetts, a mere episode of wishful thinking on his part, was successful, and with a scholarship for hockey, no less. His parents were thrilled, and despite the distance, they willingly allowed him to go. And just like that, he was now a college student.
In the hours after he submitted his application, he went and sat in the nearby church for a long while, thumbing his long-neglected crucifix, and praying properly for the first time after that dreadful incident all those years ago. He talked to his kind, gentle youth pastor properly for a long time, and realised that no matter what had happened and what people had said about him, God had never abandoned him. God loved him for who he was. God would always have his back.
He returned home, gave all his pets some extra food, put a batch of chocolate chip cookies in the oven and started making a list of what he’d need to pack for Samwell. Always good to be prepared.