Why punish the girl for simply trying to console him?
"I didn't want her to think I was feeling unsettled," he says, a little too easy to be right. Because he had been, because it must have been obvious, but it wasn't only that. It was (and he can't look over, can't raise his gaze from just beyond his shoes, voice getting softer, as he tears from some place still fragile and flimsy even years later, like something broken that never fixed) -- "I felt like she was intruding on my feelings or something, and I hated it."
The helpless assumption that someone knew what it was to have all these feelings inside of him. What they felt like. How they circled. That someone felt they could just step in and fix it somehow, fix him, by boxing him in even further, and adding themselves to the pile. That made him feel even more useless and less capable of carrying it all than he'd already felt.
It'd sat with him for so long after. Whether he was unsettled, was even more so because of what he'd done.
"But, then, I realized Minako-sensei, Nishigori, Yuko-chan, and my family never treated me like a weakling." Even far away, half the world and several years, and some more, so much more on the worst nights. "They all had faith I'd keep growing as a person, and they never stepped over the line."
They'd let him be himself, still. Hadn't demanded that he find a way to stop being himself. To let them fix it.
no subject
The one anyone sensible and sane would ask.
Why punish the girl for simply trying to console him?
"I didn't want her to think I was feeling unsettled," he says, a little too easy to be right. Because he had been, because it must have been obvious, but it wasn't only that. It was (and he can't look over, can't raise his gaze from just beyond his shoes, voice getting softer, as he tears from some place still fragile and flimsy even years later, like something broken that never fixed) -- "I felt like she was intruding on my feelings or something, and I hated it."
The helpless assumption that someone knew what it was to have all these feelings inside of him. What they felt like. How they circled. That someone felt they could just step in and fix it somehow, fix him, by boxing him in even further, and adding themselves to the pile. That made him feel even more useless and less capable of carrying it all than he'd already felt.
It'd sat with him for so long after. Whether he was unsettled, was even more so because of what he'd done.
"But, then, I realized Minako-sensei, Nishigori, Yuko-chan, and my family never treated me like a weakling." Even far away, half the world and several years, and some more, so much more on the worst nights. "They all had faith I'd keep growing as a person, and they never stepped over the line."
They'd let him be himself, still. Hadn't demanded that he find a way to stop being himself. To let them fix it.