This one is for Gem, who gave me the og prompt, and bounced ideas back and forth as he heard me bemoan having to write this for a whole month. Also to milangakokoros on tumblr, for organizing HyoShunWeek2023 bc I've always wanted to participate in a week for HyoShun~ The inspirations are many, though mainly LowlyWriter's "Survival Guide to UA" on Ao3, a lot of Master of Death Harry Potter fanfictions, some wuxia/xianxia and overall my desire for a fic where Shun talking to ghosts was the central theme.
As for canon… I follow mostly manga canon bc this was already getting too long, but I do mention some things from the anime. Don't look at the timeline too closely, you might fall in a hole. I tried writing it in the 90's instead of the 80's (bc if Kurumada is allowed to retcon his temporality three times without anyone calling him out on it, then I can too), but well.
There's also lots of PoV shifts in the beginning and time skips bc I wasn't expecting this to grow like it did :') I eventually settled into Shun's PoV, but I thought I'd put a warning since I heard it can throw off some people.
hmu on tumblr princesandromeda and twt princesandrmeda! I've been talking abt this fic for a whole month over there hehe.
For bonus day of HyoShunWeek: Ship dynamic (friends-to-lovers) [crossposted from Ao3 november 6th 2023]
the ugly duckling
Despite his mother's best efforts, there were very few words in Japanese Hyoga was acquainted with.
Gaijin was one of them. I don't know him was another one. He heard both from his father in the same sentence within only moments of meeting each other.
"Baby?" Hyoga's eyes instantly went to the source of the voice, a boy his age with shoulder-length brunette hair.
"You speak Russian?" The boy's eyes widened almost comically, like a- what was the phrase, bambi caught in the lights? when he noticed Hyoga had heard him. He let out an 'eep!' sound before moving as if to hide behind someone, except there was no one to hide behind.
The boy looked at Hyoga, then up behind him, then at Hyoga again before admitting, "A-a little."
Hyoga blinked. The consonants were very soft, the vowel sounds very awkward, was that what he sounded like in Japanese?
"I thought everyone here was Japanese." He tried to keep his resentment out of his voice, but he wasn't quite sure he succeeded based on the boy's slight flinch.
"They are…" then, "we are…"
Hyoga held out his hand. "My name is Hyoga."
"Shun."
Maybe he could make a friend in this prison.
It didn't take long for Hyoga to figure out why Shun was so skittish.
His Japanese wasn't very good even after two weeks, but he could sometimes catch words like creepy, crybaby, talks to himself. He'd actually been a witness to that last bit, after all. Shun would sometimes talk to himself, especially at night, when he thought nobody could hear him.
Sometimes the other kids looked like they wanted to beat him up, but then they'd shiver all over and decide they'd rather play somewhere else. Even the little miss Kido, who loved to gloat that she was leagues above all of the orphans, would just look at the way Shun's gaze always hovered a little behind her and go bother some other poor devil.
Shun would also talk to him whenever he could. Mostly in that weirdly accented Russian where he had to say the same phrase twice to be understood, but sometimes he'd try to teach him Japanese, and maybe it was because he missed her so much, but the way Shun taught reminded him of his mom.
On the nights he missed her too much, he'd cling to the cross she gave him with two hands, and tried really hard not to let a single tear fall. He was training to be a Saint after all, no matter how unwillingly.
By a stroke of luck, he had been sent to train in Siberia, the very same place his mother drowned. Shun was sent to Andromeda Island.
On the day they were to be sent to their training places, Shun intercepted him.
"Become a Saint for yourself," he said, wise words looking awkward on his baby face, "your mother wouldn't want you to waste away trying to see her." He handed Hyoga a handmade book and left for his own transportation.
Hyoga had never told him about his mother, in the way Shun never shared what made him laugh out of the blue sometimes. Could it be that he was a mind reader?
In the boat that would take him back to Siberia, he opened the book Shun gave him. The stitching of the pages was rather crude, and the way they were cut in half looked rough even after he probably tried to smooth it over with a knife, but inside were a couple of stories his mother had told him when she was alive, in Russian and Japanese, and in the end a Western story about a duckling who was bullied because he was different from the rest, and then it turned out he was a swan.
"Next time we meet, you'll be a swan! :)"
Hyoga would forget about Shun for the next six years.