fanfic; cultivation; part 9

[acperience]

▶ Part 8

—

It’s midnight, and, needless to say, Minato isn’t asleep.

Moving past the walls of blood, moving in the darkness that he’s been familiar with for so long—he walks down the halls without a sound. That said, even ignoring what kind of person he is, silence is hardly difficult to achieve nowadays.

Everything feels quiet with Guriko gone.

Waving his flashlight around with one hand and carrying a teddy bear in the other, it takes Minato a while to find a chair. He places the end of the flashlight in his mouth, before placing the teddy bear on the chair and attempting to lift it. He freezes when he accidentally drops it, fearful of the noise, but as he waits, no one comes. It seems they’re all sleeping, locked away in their coffins.

All except one person, he knows. He doesn’t even know why he feels the need to be here, to see him—but something from within is urging him. It’s strange, he thinks. He’s never felt such a need for—longing? To be with someone?

Whatever it is, Minato can’t seem to ignore it, even though he knows how utterly pointless this is.

After placing the chair down in the proper spot, he climbs on top of it, stretching to reach the tile above. It takes a bit of jumping and a few attempts, but finally, he manages to push it loose. For a few moments, he stands there, unsure of how he’s going to get inside—

(“Why is Minato so tiny?” Guriko asked)

—but fortunately, that problem resolves itself. Tiir’s visage pops out above him, looking down at him with a surprised expression.

“Minato?”

“… Can you pull me up?” Minato asks. Tiir blinks, before smiling softly and reaching down to grasp Minato’s outstretched arms. With one, strong tug, Tiir manages to pull Minato into the area up above. As Minato expected, the room is lit dimly by candlelight, looking almost just as he’d last seen it.

—Just almost, though. Minato sees the sketchbook lying on the rug, presumably left abandoned when Tiir heard the noise. Rather than comment on it, however, he looks at Tiir.

“Kuma-san too…”

Tiir smiles. “Of course.”

Tiir climbs out of the room, before re-emerging through the hole shortly after, Minato’s teddy bear in one hand. Brown with a red ribbon tied around its neck, it’s a bit non-descript and not all that high-quality, given that Lafra is not exactly wealthy, but it’s still one of Minato’s prized possessions. Consequently, when Tiir hands it to him, Minato makes sure to wipe the dust off his hands before taking it—and making sure to wipe the dust off of the bear as well.

Meanwhile, Tiir heads back to sit down on the rug. Minato follows suit, hugging Kuma-san to his chest. A brief silence passes, before Tiir speaks.

“Is there something you wanted to talk about, Minato?” he asks, his tone as gentle as ever. Vaguely, it occurs to Minato that he’s grateful for the compassion that Tiir has shown him. Other people, by this point, might have gotten tired of him. Tiir still hasn’t, however.

—Just as Guriko hadn’t either.

“… Nothing,” Minato says. He still doesn’t quite know why he’s here, and he didn’t think about what he’d say to Tiir. It’s hard to explain a feeling, especially when he doesn’t understand it. In a way, it’s familiar—and that alone is almost frightening—but he still doesn’t understand. Perhaps this is loneliness, but even so, he can’t wrap his mind around why he would come here, seeking solace from Tiir. He’s used to being alone. He’s always been able to handle it by himself.

Holding Kuma-san more tightly, he looks away. Still, out of the corner of his eye, he can almost see Tiir pondering. A couple of seconds go by, before he sees Tiir smile.

“It’s not the end of a connection, you know,” Tiir says. “When someone leaves, that is. Guriko will still come by and visit. And, on my days off, we can go see her together. I know where she’s living now.”

Turning to look at Tiir again but not quite, Minato simply nods. He doesn’t tell Tiir that it’s not the same—and he gets the feeling that Tiir already knows—but there isn’t much else to do in this situation. It’s not like he can say “Guriko is gone”, even though, as far as he’s concerned, she is. It’s not her fault, and Minato’s happy that she could find a family to love her, but in the end, she disappeared from his life.

She found happiness. As for Minato—he has what he always has.

—Minato wonders what Tiir has.

Tiir smiles. Tiir says with complete sincerity that he never wanted to be adopted—that he’s happy with what he has now (but that can’t last). Tiir has always seemed confident.

But Tiir was a problem child. Tiir gets into fights. Tiir ripped a letter wishing him a happy birthday and offering an apology.

More than ever, with Guriko now gone and it all being too late, Minato wishes they could’ve celebrated Tiir’s seventeenth birthday.

“Happy…” he begins, before trailing off. He doesn’t know whether to finish or not—will Tiir be angry? No, Tiir doesn’t get angry with him, but he wonders if he’s going into a territory best kept secret. This was easier when Guriko was with him, leading the way, unafraid of what she might uncover. Minato knows that nothing will change how highly he thinks of Tiir, but something is holding him back.

Tiir tilts his head, apparently waiting for him to finish.

Minato takes in a breath, before releasing it. He might as well, really. Accomplish Operation Learn about Tiir-nii’s Past—for Guriko, if not for anything else.

“… Happy late birthday,” he says, watching as Tiir’s eyes widen. For a moment, he thinks he can see Tiir’s eyes flash red, before Tiir relaxes, smiling wryly.

“You and Guriko forgot to clean up after yourselves, by the way.”

“I’m sorry.” He and Guriko had realized their mistake the next day and rushed back to the room to hide the evidence, only to find it all gone. Neither of them had particularly wanted to ask Tiir if he’d been the one to clean it up.

Tiir shakes his head. “It’s fine. It’s part of my duty to clean up after everyone, anyway…”

He looks slightly to the side as he speaks—enough to seem like he’s looking at Minato when Minato realizes that, in reality, he isn’t. Undoubtedly, just as Minato is, Tiir’s thinking of the letter.

“… Who was it from?” he asks quietly. Tiir doesn’t answer immediately, instead striking a match and lighting an unlit candle as another one dies. In the soft glow, Minato can see his expression, though perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he can’t. Tiir’s face is unreadable, full of too many things and nothing at once.

Finally, Tiir sighs in what almost seems like a laugh, turning to Minato again.

“You’re honestly that curious?”

Minato nods. Tiir shrugs lightly.

“You would call him my father.”

… Ah. Then Guriko’s guess was correct. A relative—the one who’d left him here.

“Your father…?”

Tiir smiles sadly (bitterly?), staring into the candlelight. Minato realizes that his eyes have turned red.

“That’s right. I suppose you could say I’m not fully an orphan,” Tiir says. “Obviously, he’s still alive, or at least was at the time of my birthday.”

Minato gets the feeling that even if Tiir’s father had passed away since, Tiir wouldn’t consider it much of a tragedy. Still—

“Then why are you here?” Minato asks, even though he has a sinking suspicion he knows why. It’s all but confirmed when Tiir lets out a brief, sharp laugh, in which it almost sounds like he’s crying.

“That…” Tiir stops himself, looking to the walls of the room. He can’t see the blood as Minato does, but Minato gets the feeling that he’s still seeing something there. “I don’t think that’s an appropriate bedtime story, Minato.”

It’s a dismissal, Minato knows. Tiir doesn’t want to talk about it, whether for his own sake or for Minato’s or for both. And yet, Minato realizes that if he doesn’t persist now, then he might never get the chance.

—No. He knows very well that he won’t get the chance, even if Tiir doesn’t know that just yet.

Summoning the stoniness he had back then, when that man insulted Guriko and Tiir, Minato speaks.

“I want to know.”

Tiir looks at him in surprise, before staring up as he leans back, his arms supporting his weight. Again, his expression is unreadable.

“… I’m here because he was deemed unfit to raise a child,” Tiir says, apparently talking to the ceiling. His eyes narrow. “It’s probably just as well—I’d either still be under his care, thinking that was all entirely normal, or dead if he hadn’t accidentally sent me to the hospital that one time.”

There’s nothing gentle about Tiir’s tone now, though Minato thinks it’s probably better that way. To have Tiir talk about his father like this and act as if it didn’t matter—he would prefer that Tiir be honest.

“The hospital?” Minato repeats. He doesn’t like what he’s hearing, but he wasn’t expecting anything happy from the start. Besides, this is all he can do for Tiir right now. More than that, it’s the last thing he’ll be able to do for him.

Tiir nods, looking at him with distant eyes. Minato doesn’t think he’s even entirely aware of his surroundings anymore.

It may have been twelve years, but he doubts that Tiir has forgotten.

“I despise hospitals,” Tiir declares. “They’re far too white and clean with people touching you and asking if you’re all right with the most useless kind of pity. I didn’t want sympathy back then and I still don’t want it.”

Minato listens silently while Tiir frowns at the wall.

“… I’d been dealing with it since I was born,” Tiir says, his voice a bit more quiet now. “I didn’t need to be treated like I was made of glass. I survived, didn’t I?”

Physically, maybe. Granted, Minato doesn’t know anything about how Tiir used to be like before being sent to the hospital, but he gets the feeling that not much of him survived emotionally. He tries to think about what it would’ve been like, being abused, even if Tiir hasn’t put it so explicitly. He can’t picture Tiir now, headstrong and seemingly self-assured, putting up with that for years. He can’t picture Tiir not fighting back, instead accepting it because he didn’t know he had any other options.

Tiir always fights—though now, Minato has a good idea of why that is.

“… Why did he…?” Minato asks, unable to finish the question. As if reconnected with reality again, Tiir meets his eyes.

“Humans don’t need a reason to be cruel,” he says, before pausing. “Though for my… father specifically, I heard that he was also deemed mentally ill. My mother died giving birth to me, so I suppose he couldn’t move on. Or perhaps he blamed me for her death, or hated my eyes. Whatever the reason, he clearly held no love for me, in spite of me being his son.”

And with that, Minato understands.

“… But you loved him?” he asks—almost rhetorically, and sure enough, Tiir elects not to answer and instead looks away. “Even if you don’t now…”

Because he was Tiir’s father. He was all Tiir had, so of course, Tiir had loved him.

Minato knows—it’s painful to love and not have it returned.

It seems that Tiir couldn’t handle that.

“I didn’t want to hear from him again,” Tiir says bitingly, his eyes far away again. He’s sitting cross-legged now, his hands in his lap. “And yet he sends me a letter and thinks that an apology will be enough? And which part exactly, pray tell, is he apologizing for?”

Staying quiet to allow Tiir this chance—this chance to talk about everything he never felt he could—Minato is quiet once more, connecting the pieces in his mind.

A ripped letter, a birthday he never spoke of. A desire to stay in the orphanage, to never be adopted.

Perhaps it isn’t that Tiir feared the possibility that others wouldn’t care. It’s simply that he doesn’t believe in such a possibility to begin with. He’d responded to cruelty with cruelty. He didn’t want to give himself the chance to fall to delusions.

—Almost like how Minato knew from the beginning how futile this all was, and yet he still couldn’t help but fall, nevertheless.

And in the end, it seems that Tiir couldn’t help it either.

Without a word, Minato stands up, walks over, and places Kuma-san in Tiir’s lap. Tiir looks up at him with bright red eyes, startled, but Minato merely offers a smile in return.

“… I like you,” he says. “I like you, Tiir, even if you’re not sure if anyone does.”

“Minato—”

“Guriko does too. And Lafra and Pueka. We all like you. So please…”

—So please like yourself a little more.

This is the only chance Minato’s ever going to have to help him, after all.

Tiir stares at the teddy bear for a few moments, before looking up at Minato, still with a surprised expression. He then looks away, as if trying to find the right words, before smiling.

“Thank you,” he says. “I always knew—that you were kind. You and Guriko both.”

“You’re kind too,” Minato replies, sitting back down. Tiir tries to hand Kuma-san back but Minato pushes it back into Tiir’s hands.

Tiir smiles grimly. “Not as much as Guriko, it seems. I don’t know how she found it in her to forgive her family—both of them. Her birth parents abandoned her and her second family treated her poorly, to put it lightly. And yet she…”

“But she wasn’t happy,” Minato says, thinking of how avoidant Guriko was at the start. “You made her happy.”

By inviting her to dinner. By giving her candy. By being her brother, just as he was to Minato.

“You made her happy as well,” Tiir says. “And we’ll continue to make her happy, right?”

—And there it is.

Minato looks down. He wishes he didn’t have to say this—because he really does like Guriko, and he really does like Tiir. He doesn’t want to say this, and be driven apart. And yet, it has to be said, sooner or later.

There won’t be a ‘later’, though.

A candle dies, casting the room further into darkness. It might be better that way, as Minato isn’t sure that he wants to see Tiir’s face.

“… You’ll have to go by yourself,” he says quietly. “I can’t come.”

“Eh? Why not?”

“Miss Kirijo spoke with me,” Minato begins, and even in the dimness, he can see Tiir become tense. “Some of my relatives can take me in. So… I’m going with them.”

A pause, before he says it, even though he knows there’s no need to. The message is clear:

“I can’t stay here.”

Even though he wants to—truly and utterly wants something, for once. He didn’t ever think he’d prefer an orphanage to a family, even if it was a family that couldn’t keep him for long, but it’s as Tiir said: he has a family here.

He has a real family again for the first time since his parents died, and he can’t even stay with them.

“… I’m sorry,” he adds, because Tiir isn’t saying anything. The silence stretches on, and he starts to wonder if Tiir will speak at all—when suddenly, Kuma-san is dropped into his lap, before Tiir reaches over and hugs him.

And softly, by his ear—

“I’ll be sure to visit.”

—

▶ Part 10