learning about love

Part 1

Raon Miru was an excessively happy child.

At least, over the course of the past few months, the once quiet and withdrawn four year old had become a bright and cheerful five year old that could gleefully take on anything the world had to offer.

These were the sort of things you noticed when you were a kindergarten teacher.

There were all sorts of children who entered school, as wide a variety of children as there would be adults in the future, and amazingly despite their short time on this earth, they all had different stories to tell. They were each unique and the first five years of their tiny lives were full of so many formative events that it really brought into focus how important time was.

It's easy for an adult to begin to dismiss spans of time like months and years. The more time on this earth, the less that time really felt like it mattered as much as it should. It was just a shorter segment of the overall expense of a person's time.

In some ways it made adults more realistic and patient with their time, in other ways it eased them into decades of procrastination that ought to have been avoided altogether.

For children, especially ones as small as kindergarteners, there hardly seemed to be a time that was more valuable than the now. It was a strength and weakness that filled the immediate future with so many possibilities and also crippled the strengths that virtues such as patience had to offer.

Children that were patient were the ones that you really had to keep an eye on.

Choi Han had come to the realization in his time as a kindergarten teacher that the reason that some children knew patience and others didn't was normally linked to those five years.

The years that a happy child could easily set aside as a meaningless past and a traumatized child couldn't help but be weighed down by.

They knew, sometimes more than adults, how truly long and short a year really was.

Children who knew the actual time in a year and hardly even had the strength to even imagine a 'future', much less strive for one.

Choi Han had been teaching for the better part of ten years. In that time, he'd made more than one call to child services, seen more than one child failed by the system, failed by every relative, and fallen into such despair that it really did break your soul apart bit by bit just to witness. He'd also witnessed some of those same children become saved by the institutions that failed others.

It was one of the reasons he could never give up despite the despair it brought.

Raon Miru was a child who Choi Han had immediately clocked as another heartbreak waiting to happen.

He'd never even met a child who appeared quite so traumatized. Honestly, during orientation he'd wanted to immediately make a call to child services but he'd lacked evidence.

Long sleeves, flinching at adults, and severe emotional dysregulation didn't actually count as evidence of abuse. They were just signs that helped any sensible adult to pay extra close attention to the child in question.

Choi Han remembered hating the man who stood behind Raon during orientation.

He didn't know anything about him and he had a job to do, but in most cases abuse came from the primary caregiver and whoever this man was, he was the one who accompanied Raon to the kindergarten. He felt that it affirmed his suspicions that Raon appeared to be cautious and apprehensive of the man as well.

Choi Han hated him. He'd always wanted to be a teacher, albeit he'd actually been more interested in becoming a sword instructor than a kindergarten teacher but life took you to strange places, and once he'd become one he'd learned just how horrible some people truly were.