❛ you're not by yourself, alright? i'm right here with you. ❜ (tender)toomin...
min-chul was just a child the first time he experienced a loss so permanent as to be remembered. it was a story he’d heard countless of times in his earliest days at the church— both from other kids, older than him at the time, and the kind, soft-eyed sisters tasked with their care— and though no one told him the truth for many more years to come, he had always, for a reason unbeknownst to a child who had no true way of knowing, likened their stories to himself. even then, he felt it; that he had been born abandoned, alone, perched on a doorstep, reliant on strangers’ short-lived kindnesses, and that it was how it had to be.
the truth, then, when he learned it one mundane afternoon years later— spilled from the lips of a boy several years his senior in a fit of misplaced resentment-fueled rage— didn’t come as that big of a surprise.
“ that’s, ” not a lie, obviously, but— the emotion that flits across his expression is easy to miss, and he averts his gaze, intentional in his avoidance, but not intending to be cruel. he doesn’t know what it means, for tooru to offer him these words, to placate or to possess? he told min-chul once that he can’t feel emotions, none of the rage, offense, mistrust most other humans do, and min-chul never lets himself forget, never lets himself be lulled, so what can it mean, for tooru to promise him this now?
he wonders if tooru himself knows.
“ i - i know, ” he says at last, as sure of this as he is of most other things, admission pressing heavily against the shell of his heart. it’s a scary thing, he thinks— still focused on something far, far away— to not be by yourself. “ i see you. ”
