Walking Towards the Dawn

Sometimes he thought about that night – the night where everything changed. The night he fucked up massively and lost his old life, his parent, the world he use to know. He didn't want to let it show, but even now it weighed on him. There was that feeling that if things had happened just a little differently the outcome would have been different, perhaps his old man would still be around.

Mostly he pushed those thoughts to the back of his mind, mostly when they surfaced he hid them behind a mask that hid the bulk of his grief and regret. He just wasn't the type to want to bother others with things like that, not to mention he just flat out didn't like dwelling on things like that... even if he couldn't completely put them out of his mind and sometimes they refused to be pushed to the back.

He didn't like thinking about those little thoughts, wrestling with them and trying to push them back. He wasn't good at thinking, he'd always been more for action and he knew if he let those thoughts stew in his head and tried to pick them apart and make them easier to handle they'd just turn into a swarm of bees and still be too much to handle. The only thing he knew how to do was keep moving forward, to keep on smiling even when it felt like tears would be more appropriate for how he felt.

That's not to say the only thing he felt was that sorrow, that regret, but when those feelings did come forth they had a sharp bite that could sometimes come perilously close to cracking his mask even when he was amongst his friends. Some moments it seem almost unbearable to act as if he was handling everything okay, after all, his whole world had been turned upside down and what he'd learned that day sometimes made him wish he could have remained ignorant to the truth. But then again it wasn't like him to try to do anything to make others worry, even if he could mess up trying to do that as spectacularly as he could mess up trying anything else.

But he had a reason to keep moving on, to keep living as best he could. Right up until the very end the only one he'd even truly think of as his father, even after he had said those hurtful words to him that lead to his end, had tried to give him the chance to live his life as best he could, to try and live a happy and fulfilling life despite who, and what, his biological father was. The only way he could even begin to apologize for those words was to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to keep looking for reasons to smile, to tough out the hard times when everything weighed down on him. That was something simple enough even he could understand it on some level, and it took enough action that trying to do that came natural enough to him.

Right now it still may seem like he was stuck in the middle of the night, but he could at least try to keep walking until he found the dawn breaking before him.

NOTES:

This came out rough and sad and somewhat hopeful at the same time. I tried to find a balance between my writing style and how Rin's thought patterns would probably work and I don't know how well I did that.

In the end this was written as much for handling my own emotions as trying to figure out how Rin's mind works and how his emotions would be. I've gone thru some loss myself, and soon I'll be celebrating my birthday for the first time since my mom passed away. It all started with my own little nagging emotional thoughts, wondering if things would have been different if I'd checked on my mom sooner, feeling like I'd somehow epically screwed up because of it, and from there I began to wonder how Rin felt when Shiro died, how he must have felt because of it, how he felt trying to move on... and from there this came out.

I'm not marking this as complete because I may do a companion piece to this sometime.