It was a cool spring day in the Valley.  Birdsong chirped throughout the air as the smell of grass, flowers and fresh wind filled acrid, tired winter souls.  The laughter of children, of play, echoed in the daisy fields and cool lakes, wistfully watched by adults, as they thought the grass grew just a bit greener, the sun just a bit brighter, and the children just a bit more like them.  All the children perhaps, except Leo Gallant, who being the odd boy, was talking to himself and swinging an imaginary sword completely alone.  When boys tried to approach him with prospects of wrestling and play-fighting, they found themselves forced to watch a 15-minute monologue of a six-year old desperately trying to form the rousing and poetic speeches of a general tearfully leading his men into a doomed charge.  Most boys absently picked at the grass and stared off when this happened until most of them simply got up and left without a word.  Gallant took very little notice of this, it was just the leaving of another temporary actor in a vast, spellbound world that never ended and, he hoped, never would. The closest Gallant came to interacting with another child (or person) was when Sarah Gupy wandered into the little area of the woods he had claimed for himself, a tree beside a small brook.  She had just walked into one of his usual “looks”, where the Hero looked solely at the skyline, thinking of lost loves, hard losses, and the friends who had left him.  Sarah, being a normal six-year old girl, didn’t seem to understand the immense depth and importance of what Gallant was doing, and so she giggled and pushed him into the water.  If one were to slow this scene down and measure the expressions at work in the wronged boy’s face, they would see a fierce rage, a deep sadness, and the look of someone who had just been roused from sleep with a splash of cold water.  When the boy broke the streams edge, sputtering, wet and cold, he glared at the creature who had offended him. Sarah Gupy laughed the shrill nervous squeal of young children who have done something wrong, showing her missing front teeth in the process.  As Leo stared into the ever encroaching blackness of the space between her teeth, he felt water between his eyes and began to pout.  “Wh-wh did you d-d-o that? N-now I w-wooont- “Leo sniffed mournfully, “B-be a h—herooo- “. The boy started baling uncontrollably at this latest law of the universe and moaned with the force of a baby’s cry.  Along with the tears came an uncontrollable and mindless primal urge of frustration as he began to kick and pull out the grass on the ground in need and frustration enduring the agony of living by hurting the earth he stood on. Sarah Gupy, an adolescent girl who puts sucky toys into her sister’s mouth and cheers up her little brother by doing somersaults and faces, put her soul around the fallen hero.  Leo froze at the foreign presence of another heat signature, his tears stopped as he stared ahead, held firmly in the grasp of his tormentor and savior.  It was the first tantrum Leo Gallant ever had.