Ted & Tir - Under the Same Sky
There are times when he sits up quietly in the middle of the night and hears a soft sobbing that no one else seems to hear. He points it out once to Gremio, who merely describes it as a nightmare that doesn't seem too bad - Pahn and Cleo don't reply either, and Tir knows that his father would never, ever do that, so that leaves Ted.Ted's a mystery to Tir sometimes, how the older boy can switch between happy and solemn faces in the blink of an eye - he can tell Ted's hiding something but he doesn't really care, so long as he has his best friend with him by his side, nothing else had ever mattered.
Ted tells him stories, of a Prince named Lazlo who never knew he was a Prince and led a Kingdom to freedom - he's heard about the same story from Gremio before, only the one Gremio named had been situated in a Kingdom of Obel, and the story Ted told involved a Prince who never knew he was a Prince. They laugh at some of the characters Ted brings up - a man obsessed with red roses, a man who always believed he was sick and thought flour was a perfectly well-made medicine(though Tir pitied him for being tricked) and ongoing wars of mint and mushrooms. The stories are vivid and interesting and Ted tells them with so much zest, Tir finds it hard to believe that everything's just make-belief. He asks, one day, if Ted's been there before - and the latter just looks at him and smiles.
He still hears the sobbing every once in a while, even past his gaining of the Souleater, even past Ted's death. And when he finally figures that those stories weren't just stories, but memories of a boy who had been alone for so many years, Tir whispers that exactly into the rune.
When the nightmares eventually come for him, he does not sob like Ted once did, because Tir knows that Ted is watching him, protecting him and he knows he is not alone.
owari.