Sleeping Beast - Chapter 6-1
“… What?”
The child tilted his head to the side.
“You’re pretty, so you should smile more. But I don’t want to see you laugh with him. What’s wrong with me?”
“What are you…”
Rafi opened his mouth thinking it was nonsense. It was small, so he couldn’t see it well, but Halion’s expression was similar.
“So… Did you pull my hair because you didn’t want to see me like that?”
“Yes.”
“You …!”
He wanted to shout at him, but he found himself speechless.
It was for a simple reason–it was because Rafi didn’t know the child’s name yet, and he couldn’t call him a child or a kid in such a serious situation.
The word ‘child’ usually has the power to soften the human mind, after all.
“What kind of nonsense are you talking about? Halion almost got hurt! Don’t you know that?”
“That’s Halion?”
He pointed to Halion, who was patting down his chest in surprise with the other hand that wasn’t gripping on to Rafi.
“He’s a fairy and his name is Halion. Apologize right away. It’s your fault.”
“What about me?”
“What?”
“What am I?”
“…”
His way of thinking was thoroughly self-centered. It was difficult to find a way to be properly angry at a child when one barely had any parenting experience.
“Do you really have to ask that now? Do you think that’s important now?”
“Hmm.”
The boy thought for a moment before nodding his head once.
“When you get mad at someone else because of me.”
“What?”
“Then you have to have something to call me. Like you have for him.”
“…”
Rafi still couldn’t keep up with his ideas. What the hell did he do to Halion that made the kid upset? In the midst of reflecting on what had just passed, Halion’s voice interrupted his thoughts..
“Don’t give him a name.”
“…Yes?”
“Once you make one for him, it’s over. He’ll hold on and drag you down for the rest of your life. You gotta kick him out before that.”
“Someone will pick him up. It hasn’t been long since he got lost, so you might not know yet….”
“Tsk. You’re a human being, do you not understand human nature? How do you know whether he’s lost or if he’s been intentionally abandoned by the others?”
“Halion!”
He had said it on purpose. Rafi’s face turned pale.
The only thing in this world that a child should have never heard was that his parents abandoned him.
“The kid is listening. That’s a little…”
“Oh, what kind of kid is that? You can go if you don’t want to listen–I’ll go home on my own. I won’t talk to you until you throw that boy away, just so you know.”
Halion jerked away from Rafi’s hand and sat down. For a moment, Rafi thought he was lighting a new cigarette, but round smoke blew from the cigar instead. Knowing that it was a signal to call a woodpecker bird that communicated with the fairies, Rafi sighed.
“Halion…”
“Just get out of here.”
The cranky and stubborn fairy believed that what he once said should be kept until the day he dies. Because of that, even if he had known the witch for a long time, the time he spent in person with her was short.
“……I’ll be going. Take care.”
“The bird is still in the middle of nowhere. That’s why it hasn’t arrived yet. Simply, I can’t go out on my own.”
Halion said something else instead of a goodbye.
It wasn’t like he hadn’t said the same thing once or twice, but Rafi turned around in thought. His heart was heavy.
“Was I abandoned?”
No, maybe the boy’s voice felt heavier. Perhaps the walk with the fur slippers that were inappropriate for the season was more difficult than Rafi had imagined.
The wiser people are, the less sensible they are.
“That…”
Rafi thought about calling out the boy’s name, but without a name to call, he had no choice but to speak ambiguously.
“You don’t know that. Someone can come tomorrow at least. They may still be searching for you in the woods.”
“If they don’t come.”
Having lost his name and memory, he stopped walking and grabbed Rafi’s hem.
“Then they really abandoned me.”
“…”
Rafi swallowed dryly.
His expression, though not much different from usual, was stinging like a thorn now.
Even if he was big, he was still a child. Rafi knew exactly how the child felt when he learned that he was abandoned .
Because he was like that, too.
The witch did not take the newborn baby from a poor couple who had no money to buy a few bottles of rapunzel.
It was the opposite. The parents who stole the rapunzel sold their child to the witch who came to pick them the next day.
At first, the witch, who had little affection for the newborn baby, did not hide the story, and it was already late by the time she realized it would have been better to hide it.
Rafi had become a child who relied more on cranky old witches than humans.
“Are you going to abandon me?”
Perhaps I seemed to have grown a little bit more in the meantime.
“…No.”
He suddenly understood a little bit more of the witch’s heart, who screamed at him to stop growing after puberty.
“Someone will come. I’ll wait with you until then.”
Rafi grabbed the boy’s hand clutching the hem of his shirt. Just as a parent with their child, he gently warmed the boy’s hand with his own.
“If you keep doing this, it’ll be uncomfortable, so let’s give you a name.”
“If you give him a name, it’s over.”
The old fairy’s words rose bluntly like cigarette smoke and disappeared.
* * *
