a/n: for nif drabble challenge week 1.
Prompt: Home, that's where the hurt is. (jingrui picks up the pieces)
take your time; you are coming home to yourself
There is a certain rhythm to the process of healing, one that requires you to carefully bandage your wounds before ripping them off before bandaging them and ripping them off again –
Jingrui stands within the walls of his own house in the aftermath of the fateful party and realizes with a sudden clarity that the hallways and corners and rooms he thought he called home are too foreign, too cold for him now. Here, there is nothing but a mass of pain, confusion, doubt. The walls are closing in, cornering him.
It has been a week and he still cannot look his mother in the face, denying all her requests to see him; he cannot speak his father's (not through blood, not through love, but still his father in name and in ink) name without betrayal cutting deep into his bones.
But you see, Jingrui has never been the kind of person to let self-doubt and fear paralyze him from grasping the reins on his own life so he picks up his sword and saddles his horse and says to the young girl who calls him brother: take me to your home (because maybe, maybe he will find a place that doesn't hold secrets underneath the floorboards and between the walls).
When he leaves the city proper, thundering past the gates and onto a well-worn path heading south, he does not look back. He will, after all, return once more (for home is not so easily uprooted and destroyed, no matter the blood spilt on its grounds).
For now, the only way is forward. So forward he goes.
