The armoured hearts

Closer than ever

Tankhun was a disaster.

He wasn’t complaining anymore about the clothes they made him wear but he was discovering the hardest thing about what it meant to live in one of the poorest parts of the kingdom. The streets were sad and the sky looked darker than in any other parts. He was surprised to still witness people smiling, still greeting sometimes and the children running and dancing as if nothing of their poverty was happening around. He wasn’t shocked to be among those people, he was shocked of seeing them, he always had too much money to even taste an inch of what he was put under now and knowledge out of words or out of views was different.

He was innocently a comedic relief for their trip. Tankhun had one million questions and Porchay was the one to answer them, also giving information on what had been his life for years with Porsche and years alone: not eating, not being able to sleep inside, not being able to wash yourself if the river was too far away… A lot of things which would have never crossed Tankhun’s mind if it wasn’t for the tenderness he had for the boy. And he understood him better, how he didn’t care to be hurt , how he was this bold and not always thoughtful of his actions. Everything had an experienced explanation and it made everyone grow up, Kim from listening and opening his knowledge, Tankhun by realising how humanity could survive and Porchay by opening himself up.

He would recognise that it was making him feel better to not hide what he had gone through and to not try to act as someone he wasn’t. He had a part of his personality which had been protected by Porsche, and another one which got developed when his Hia disappeared. And those sides were who he was now. If the boy didn’t feel lonely when he had met Kim, he felt even less now that he could talk with his heart open, not scared that a stab would let him bleed and become a corpse, not even a body, a corpse because there was even a word to describe the state where no one would care anymore for him. No one because he would just have been a naughty boy, a thief, who died and no one would mind, but not now, not now that he wasn’t alone anymore.

Tankhun was falling more and more in love with Porchay to the point that Kim began to feel jealous, jealous of them talking, jealous of them laughing, he was joining most of the time but there was also some conversation where he couldn’t follow. Porchay tried his best to include him but it wasn’t always easy, Kim still needed to learn a lot about how the world worked, to be fair this trip was exactly what he needed.

Like a child, but not being a child, he was looking at his surroundings and learning from it, as easy as a child could do. A huge part of living was just learnt by staring at others and reproducing without even realising what someone saw. Kim had been deprived of it. He couldn’t reproduce anything and he just followed what he could read, but now that he was in the middle of a population, that he wasn’t with just four people, that he wasn’t restrained from anyone, Kim was evolving with the world, he was just embracing it and rejecting everything which looked bad.

He could understand better what behaviour was to condemn and what should be cheered on.

“That’s good, right?” Kim often asked Porchay to be sure that his thoughts were not wrong, he just needed a little push, a little more confidence to analyse it all.

“It is.” Porchay would simply answer, squeezing their hands they had hidden under their clothes, walking mostly glued to each other because they never knew how the world would look at them, they preferred to be careful.

Even if it was basic, even if it was just a woman dancing on a stage, Kim would ask and Porchay would answer with the same sincerity, he wasn’t the one who would try to hurt or shame Kim for not knowing and it just pulled the boy up, asking even more because it was obvious that he could just talk and not blush from the fact that he wasn’t knowing.