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He'd walked into your room teary-eyed, crawling under your sheets as soon as you offered. He was freezing to the touch, despite this year's April being a warm one. Another nightmare, most likely. At least it didn't take long for him to get back to sleep, your body heat lulling him to sleep like a baby.
Sometimes you forget how young he is, until nights like these. He's only twelve years old, yet he's seen more horrors than most adults could imagine. No amount of therapy can give you your childhood back, but you're all trying for his sake. You owe him that much and more. More than you can physically give.
Sometimes you desperately miss being a child. Not because you desire emancipation from your mistakes, nor because you think you deserve to be. You just desire the lack of responsibility, the mere idea of your biggest burden of the day being as simple as whether to have an umeboshi or tuna in your rice for lunch.
Nowadays, that's one of the easier decisions to make; Ken can't stand anything sour, even though he'd never admit it. Some things never change.
Adulthood is something you never exactly anticipated reaching. After all, Castor was the mortal brother in the myth. The truth of it is, you did die, just temporarily. Your heart stopped for six minutes, and then you spent six months in a coma, narrowly missing Kotone's actual death. An eye for an eye, measure for measure, tit for tat. You could always see a bit of yourself in her.
(Six months later, Ken and the dog moved in with you. Six weeks after that, Akihiko joined you all.)
At some point, when you know you’re dying, you begin to mourn yourself. It becomes the only thing you can think about, all thoughts of the future are disregarded, rendered pointless. You'll never live to see them.
Once you outlive your expectations, all you can do is mourn the time you’ve wasted waiting for it. You find yourself perpetually lost, with no map for where to go next. When you spend your formative years preoccupied with your mortality, it’s only natural.
That doesn't mean it isn't frustrating, or isolating, to see your childhood friends take strides towards making a future you never expected to see.
Your childhood was hardly happy, and there's not much of what you actually lived that you miss. Maybe it's the idea or the concept of a normal childhood, of a comfortable, warm childhood, with a white picket fence and a loving family. Of Miki's smiles and pancake days, like living in an unfamiliar, Hallmark movie utopia. It's almost as fantastical as summoning demons.
You know Ken has felt similar from an even younger age, and it hurts to think about it as bad as being shot point-blank did. So, you try to be there for him, make him a new childhood. Take him to try new things, new places. Hold him as he cries, even though it embarrasses him because he doesn't need to be that strong little boy anymore. Let him sleep in your bed when the horrors keep him up.
There was a family of spiders living in Ken's room for a while. Somehow, despite seeing monstrosities straight out of a horror movie from a young age, the kid was flat-out terrified of them. Two adults and a child, all fairly small, but creepy enough to be unnerving. He'd begged you to kill them for him, and you were going to, but as soon as you went to hit the smallest, the adults immediately went to take the hit for it, protecting it from any harm.
It didn’t matter how scary they were after that, you both decided to let them be. They weren’t trying to hurt anyone.
You don’t regret taking the bullet for him, even on your worst days. Even when the scar aches like it’s fresh, or when you wake up with a scream trapped in your throat. You’re not perfect, and you still feel bitter, but you know who to blame and it isn’t Ken.
You couldn’t ever regret it.
Mitsuru once expressed that Ken decided to live for your sake, to honour what you'd done for him. At the time, you scoffed and said that it was pointless, no matter how at fault or not you were for his mother's death. You understand the sentiment now.
One of these days you should move out of your Kirijo-stipended 2K apartment, into somewhere Aki can have a room for his boxing equipment instead of it taking up an entire corner of the living room, where Ken can 'secretly' use it in private when he thinks no one is looking, somewhere that there's no spiders to scare him.
The kid is going to outlive you unless the Kirijo Group somehow manage even more medical miracles than they already have. The pills took years off your life, and you've grown to accept it. But despite not being religious, you pray to God that it's no time soon, that you can still see this child grow up. You're not his family, really, but you're the closest thing to it. He's lost enough in life.
Maybe it's a bit selfish, a part of you just desires companionship, as strong and compelling as your guilt. Haven't you earned the right to be by now? It's symbiosis, mutualism through cohabition; a net benefit for all parties.
Like most things in life, you just have to accept it, and there's nothing more you want to do. The whims of fate have led you here, or maybe just the result of your actions.
So even if he claws at you in his sleep, reaching for you in desperation, even if his dog sleeps on your bed when you've told it multiple times not to, even if your partner snores like a freight train and comes to bed at ridiculous times at night, none of that matters.
There's a warmth in your chest you haven't felt since you were a young child, since before summoning Castor, since before those godforsaken suppressants, since before dying.
You know you'll die (again) eventually, memento mori and everything. As you hug your son closer to your chest, you're simply relieved it's not today.