Everchanging

Patroclus

!!TW!! Flashbacks to child abuse/neglect

Quote from: THE SONG OF ACHILLES by. MADELINNE MILLER

Kyojuro sighed, of all days for the copier to be jammed it had to be exam day. Thankfully, he was alone in the copy room, so he was free to be as pissed as he wanted about the inconvenience. He didn't know why but his nerves had been on ten all day. He had even snapped at Senjuro this morning when the boy repeated a question one too many times.

Of course, Kyojuro had apologized but he still felt guilty for getting upset at his baby brother, especially after the rough time he's been having lately. A lot was changing, and Senjuro had never been a very adaptive person. And the day with their father seemed to really push both Rengoku brothers to an unforeseen edge.

If he was being honest, Kyojuro hadn't expected Senjuro to outright reject their father like he had. It was different from his own experience. And, sure, he knew full well that he would probably never truly understand Senjuro's inner thoughts, but Kyojuro figured that maybe they could fix things. That they could be a family.

But Senjuro didn't want that.

And Kyojuro somehow felt cheated. It was stupid, selfish even, but Kyojuro felt cheated out of having a family. He had wanted, deep down, to go back to how things were before. But the thing is, there was no before for Senjuro. There was only one for Kyojuro.

So, it was impossible to go back to something that never existed for his baby brother. But...he wanted to keep their family together. It was what their mother would have wanted. It's what their father wanted. It's what Kyojuro wanted.

And Shinjuro was trying, he could see, to be a better person. He was becoming more and more like the man that Kyojuro had grown up with.

"You always told me that you hated me. That I should have died instead of mom. You said I should have been aborted. You told me that I was the reason mom died."

But Senjuro never knew that man. So, it was unfair to expect Senjuro to consider becoming a family again when he had never really had one. It was odd, painful, to think back on his baby brother. To really think back. To remember the photo frames that never showed the boy or recall how his tiny hands held on for dear life so someone wouldn't leave him.

Kyojuro had thought, foolishly, that Shinjuro had been the only one to hurt Senjuro but really, that wasn't the case. So many things had hurt the boy. Too many to count. His father beat him and Kyojuro couldn't protect him forever. And on top of that, the boy's mother had died, and no one cared to think about how it had affected him.

Kyojuro, in his immature thinking, figured that you couldn't miss a person you never met. He thought that Senjuro was immune to Ruka's death because he held no memories of her.

"She was my mom. She was my mom too. Sure, I didn't know her, and I might not remember her, but she was my mom. I lost my mom too."

Of course, he would miss the woman he was born from. The woman who smiled in every picture and tainted every punishment he received. It was dumb to think that Senjuro wasn't capable of missing Ruka when all he ever heard about was his mother. He heard her name from his father's drunken slurs as her death was placed in his small childish hands. He learned more in the late nights when Kyojuro would reminisce of their late mother.

"And...And I lost my dad. I never even got to meet you when things were good. I never got to know the good you and I never got to know mom. Instead, all I got was the drunk you and a dead mom that you blamed me for."