Caelum, non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt (COWT10, week 6, m5)

[hakurenshi]

 

Fandom: originali
Prompt: Caelum, non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt (non mutano il loro animo coloro che attraversano il mare, ma muta il cielo sopra di loro) (m5)
Rating: verde
Parole: 469
Warnings: //

Every year, the winter comes and when the first snow falls, Isen can't help but remember. It might be because the country where he grew up the first few years of his life is, in fact, a very cold one to the point that snow and ice are not rare at all; or it might be that the memory will always be the most vivid one, because the coldness almost freezed him to death when he ran away.

It's still weird for him to wake up every morning and find himself in a big, spacious bed, with a warm body next to him - and, sometimes, a tiny body clinging to him when Sihan decides she wants to share the bed with Isen and his father. Despite the differences, Isen knows that the most intimate part of him has never changed (and probably never will) since that day when he was only ten and Henry found him in the streets, half dead, and took him; nothing will ever allow him to shake off the sense of despair, abandonment, the hunger and the loneliness. Part of his mind is still that child who thinks nobody will save him, his body remembers a journey he thought would never end.

Tokyo is immensely different from the glacius earth of Island. They are separated from the sea and a very, very long distance by earth. Sometimes, when he's almost asleep, Isen hears the sound of the waves and then, when he opens his eyes, the sound is nowhere to be found and waves are far away from him.

When winter comes there are nights when his partner is busy with work and Sihan is already asleep; Isen takes his time to be alone, look outside. It's hard to see the stars clearly, in Tokyo, so different from when he looked up at the sky when he was barely ten, just before running away. 

You will be alright, they told him when they helped him leaving. And Isen never believed them because how can a child hated and almost killed by his mother, heavy wounded as he was, survive and not become a dangerous, evil person? Yet he managed to. He thought that he would change, yet he didn't.

«You still awake?» the small voice - that is rarely small, in fact - of Jin calls for him. When Isen looks back, he finds him in the room and almost next to him «Everything alright?»

Isen observes him for a few seconds, recognise Jin as the man who gave him everything; he is quite similar to the sky Isen was able to look at in Iceland.

«It is. I was stargazing. The sky is very different from the one I could see in my homeland.» he replies. 

That's not necessarily a bad thing, right?