This is a tiny little seven- part drabble series, written for the Mamoru Chiba Week 2007 Drabble Challenge over on tumblr

I'm taking you a little bit through time with this series. How did Mamoru become the person he is until we meet him? What were his struggles, what were his motivations?

Mixing canons as I go, as I always tend to do ;)

Also, I realise drabbles are ACTUALLY supposed to be quite short, the classic 100 words or else up to a 1000 words. I'm trying to stay short on these, but as I neither work well with rules NOR brevity, I'm not gonna get too hung up on it. If it works in short, it'll be short, if it doesn't, it won't ;).

And here's the disclaimer, where I vow not to try and make money out of characters and things that aren't mine ;)

1

Orphan

„Don't you want to go and touch the rabbit, Mamoru?"

The caretaker on shift that day was a pretty and chubby, auburn-haired woman, face young, smile open and tentative, as she leaned her soft face down and right into his vision.

She was one of the new ones – she still tried to get him out of his shell, unlike the others.

Yet Mamoru crossed his arms more tightly across his chest, and leaned a little away from her.

She sighed, straightened her back, and shrugged, a little helplessly. "Well, it's going be here for a while… you can go play with it whenever you want," she said, a hopeful expression lighting her smooth and creamy face, as she turned around and went to assist the other kids with the fragile little animal.

He was eight, one of the bigger kids in the orphanage… Not that he remembered ever having been a young kid, here. When he was first brought to this institution, at six, he had already been amongst the oldest.

Most kids were transferred to foster homes within the first three or four years of their lives. Families somehow didn't want kids that were older, or at least not the ones who came here. And those that did take them in didn't choose ones that never smiled…

So, he was one of the big kids. He and a smattering of older boys whom he didn't get along with – they were mean, and spiteful, and they kicked and bit and stole, and whenever he got too close to them he could feel all that sadness and hurt and anger that made his throat close up, so he didn't go.

One of them had beaten him once – saying how lucky he was to have parents who were dead instead of parents who were drunk. Another had tried to make friends with him once – his parents were gone, too, died in an accident similar to his, and the boy had hoped to have someone his age to cry and grieve with… just that Mamoru had no grief, not really, not like that. He didn't have the memory of anyone to grieve over…

And so his chance at a friend had gone, in a flurry of bewilderment and refusal.

He'd learned his place, quickly. Out there, people didn't trust orphans… didn't treat them nicely. So he was silent. In here… people didn't trust orphans that didn't cry. And so he kept away.

He did cry, but not for his parents, just for the loneliness. But he never could when someone else was there for it.

One of the caretakers had read a story to them once. Of a little turtle that retracted into his shell whenever things got too much, when the little turtle got too sad or angry. And in his shell he'd been protected, safe. He remembered how he envied that little turtle… to have somewhere to go to, when all the feeling got too much.

But mostly it felt so numb. There was so much emotion, here, around him. The other kids couldn't hold these emotions in like he did. So he felt them all the time. Always… So much anger, and regret. The kind of feelings he barely felt in the grown-ups.

Everyone here was grieving.

Everyone, it seemed to them, but him. The strange, blank, grumpy little boy that people tended to keep away from. Even most of the caretakers. They liked the kids they could cheer up… Or at least the kids that kicked and screamed.

Nobody knew what to do with him.

He stayed sitting on the bench off the side of the common room, watching the chubby, auburn haired woman with the open smile turn her smile towards children who returned it. She laughed, as one of the younger kids – Mia, who was three, turned big blue mesmerized eyes up at her and started gushing about how soft the rabbit's fur was.

Button. That was the name they'd given the rabbit, collectively. It had been a lively discussion between the kids in which he hadn't participated. It had been a gift from the local animal shelter, and had moved into the common room two nights prior.

Button was small – tiny, in fact –, white, and impossibly fluffy. The most adorable thing he'd ever seen in his life, and he yearned, so badly that his chest ached, to go and touch it, but he didn't.

His throat had constricted the first time he'd seen it. He'd been there when the man in the green overall had arrived with it, while all the other kids had been out in the playgrounds while he'd sat in the common room on his own and read. The man had held Button out to him, had allowed him to be the first to hold him.

But when Mamoru reached out his hands for it, something almost like a smile ghosting across his lips in anticipation, he'd felt how frightened tiny little Button was, how it shivered and trembled.

He'd retracted his hands as if he'd been burned, before he'd ever touched its shiny fur, and vowed to never, ever touch it, however much he wanted to.

He couldn't let his sadness touch something so pure.