Chapter Text
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PROLOG
Even after all these years, the darkness was still a vivid mnemonic. How it was filled with noise: constant, violent banging around him—just a fragile boy, trapped inside a small metal box and from the outside a herd of ogres was trashing down on it with heavy clubs. His hands and feet pulled so tightly toward his own body that he might as well have turned into a ball. So terrifying it became his very definition of fear.
The fear of his box bursting under the assault.
And also the fear of the box never bursting.
The fear of what would have happened when the banging stopped. Because nothing good ever happened while he was in that darkness. Usually, someone was gone by the end of it and how many people had he lost this way already?
At first, he had been too young and too naive still to see the correlation. That came a little later. And with that, the beating had stopped as well. The box had disappeared and eventually, he had just floated in an endless room of black and nothing else, his arms and legs stretched out to all sides. He had understood that there had never been a box, to begin with. No ogres and no clubs.
All he had to do was wait until the other one allowed him to come forth.
As he grew older like that, he had been drowning in the guilty consciousness of knowing that he had never actively attempted to combat him. Him, who was incontestable. It was better to be quiet and hope for it to eventually stop. Surely, one day, there would be no one left for him to take away.
And so the boy had spent the past years waiting for that moment that never came.
Instead, he had found someone who—against all expectations—was strong enough to stand victorious against this spirit assailant. And thanks to that someone Ryou would go home tonight and be all himself for the first time in a long, long while. Where he would understand that he didn't even know what that meant.