“Ayumu-san! Ayumu-san! Look what I found!” Jun cried as he darted into camp.

Sho looked up from the harness repair he was doing, curious what had caught his son’s interest. Hanae and Jun had decided to ‘help’ Ayumu by scavenging sticks and feathers from the cleared zone for the Adventurer to turn into arrows. Their efforts had been of… mixed success, but Ayumu looked more perplexed than bothered.

(Well. Maybe he’d just never interacted with young children before.)

(Sho could hope that was it.)

“Ah, thank you?” Ayumu set aside his knife and slowly reached out towards Jun. He blinked at the long feather Jun laid across his palm with exaggerated care, lifting it up and tilting it to and fro in the firelight.

It gleamed in the flickering light, a brilliant rainbow of color that was mesmerizing to watch. Ayumu’s eyes lit up in fascination, childish wonder creeping in the more he played with it.

“Dazzle-bird,” Sho said before Ayumu could ask. Though the fact that an Adventurer didn’t recognize the signature feather of a common monster was… concerning. What else did Ayumu not know? “They flock around here when the building is empty, but they’re mostly harmless.”

“Huh.” Ayumu lowered the feather and ran it gently through his fingers, smoothing out the barbs to make it uniform once more. “I’ve fought them before, but… I’ve never seen one up close like this.”

“Why not?” Hanae asked as she trotted up to Ayumu and thrust out her handfuls of much plainer feathers at him. “Will you use it to make your arrows?”

“Ah… maybe not now,” Ayumu said, setting aside the tail-feather and accepting Hanae’s offering. He scattered the feathers across his lap and began to sort through them, arranging them by size and quality. “I… turning that into fletching on plain arrows seems like a waste, doesn’t it?”

Jun pursed his lips, ears flattening a bit and tail drooping, before he huffed. “Yeah, that’s true.”

“A-ah, uhm,” Ayumu cast a panicked look at Sho, leaning a bit away from Jun as he did.

Sho took pity on the young man, setting aside the harness and rising to his feet to move closer. “Why don’t you and your sister sit down and have some dinner?” he asked as he ruffled Jun’s hair and shooed his children away from Ayumu.

Tension drained from Ayumu’s body as the two obeyed, before his shoulders pulled in and he ducked his head to stare down at the feathers in his lap. “Sorry about that,” he muttered, fair skin tinging red.

“What’s there to be sorry about?” Sho asked as he picked up the Dazzle-bird feather and settled on the log next to Ayumu. He twirled the feather between his fingers and watched the tiny sparks of monster magic shimmer in the air, beautiful but harmless. “Not everyone is used to children, after all.”

Ayumu stilled and cast him a wary look out of the corner of his eye. “I… you don’t mind?”

Sho huffed and shook his head. “Why would I mind? You clearly care about our safety and don’t mind the kits.” He smiled warmly and leaned over enough to nudge Ayumu with his shoulder, lowering his voice to murmur, “Tell you the truth, I panicked the first time Kiku laid Hanae in my arms. She was so tiny and defenseless, I was afraid she’d break if I even breathed on her wrong. No one starts out good with children, Ayumu-kun, it’s something we have to learn as we go.”

A strange expression crossed Ayumu’s face, confusion-disbelief-uncertainty all rolled into one. “I guess,” he said as he gathered the feathers up and tucked them away in his magic bag, still not meeting Sho’s gaze.

Osamu cleared his throat then arched an eyebrow when Sho looked over at him, holding up a plate of food. “Before either of you forget, how about some dinner?”

“Probably wise,” Sho agreed dryly. He considered the feather in his hand, then smirked and reached out to tuck it into Ayumu’s hair just so… “There! Now you look the part of a gallant Adventurer.”

Ayumu jerked back and stared at him with wide eyes, clearly uncertain how to take Sho’s teasing. It made Sho’s heart ache at the evidence of Ayumu’s inexperience with people; he had a sinking suspicion that Ayumu had agreed to travel with them simply because he had no friends, nothing to tie him to Akiba, and a Lander offering him a quest was familiar ground in a suddenly uncertain reality.

(Were Adventurers just… called into being like the legends said? Did they even have friends?)

(He… couldn’t remember if he’d ever heard anything about Adventurers having as much personality as Ayumu was currently displaying. As any of the Adventurers in Akiba had displayed.)

(How odd.)

(What in the world had happened?)

Discarding speculation as wasted effort, Sho fetched two plates of food and returned to Ayumu’s side, handing the young man one and sitting down to eat. He wouldn’t ask Ayumu questions like that, not openly at least; whatever the cause, Ayumu was acting like a lost child and Sho wasn’t going to make it worse by prodding.

If Ayumu had only just gained awareness as a person, one wrong step could make him retreat into himself.

(Were all the Adventurers in Akiba like this? Lost and afraid and uncertain how to suddenly be?)

(Was that why Ayumu didn’t recognize a Dazzle-bird feather?)

Ayumu picked at his food, barely eating any of it before he set the plate aside and rose to his feet. “I’m going to look around,” he said when Sho gave him a questioning look. “I’m… restless. And a bit curious,” he said as he cast a look over his shoulder at the overgrown and partially collapsed building they were using as shelter.

“It’s mostly stable, so nothing important should collapse if you decide to climb it,” Sho told him, seeing a touch of Hanae’s irrepressible desire to climb things in Ayumu’s expression.

“Thanks,” Ayumu murmured as he hopped over the log, wandering off without a backwards glance.

Sho cast a look at Kiku and Osamu in concern, wondering what his partners thought of Ayumu’s mood.

Kiku pursed her lips and stirred the food on her plate around a bit, tails coiled about her legs and ears slightly back. “We overwhelm him,” was her verdict as soon as Ayumu was out of hearing range. “He doesn’t know what to think about us and the friendliness we have shown him.”

“I think he’s overwhelmed by everything right now,” Osamu added with a grimace and a glance at Ayumu’s distant figure.

“Why?” Hanae asked, frowning up at Osamu. “We’re not being weird or anything, so why’s he overwhelmed?”

“Remember the last few Adventurers we hired, love?” Kiku asked, continuing only when Hanae nodded, “That’s how all Adventurers are… or were, if what we saw in Akiba holds true elsewhere.”

Hanae’s face scrunched up in a look of fierce concentration. “So because he’s not acting like a golem anymore, we overwhelm him?”

“He was never acting, love, he was a golem, albeit one with the capability to understand and react to a much wider range of situations and keywords than usual.” Kiku smiled at Hanae’s surprised look and Jun’s thoughtful one. “The magic that gave birth to the first Adventurers was more powerful than almost any magic before or since, and it continued to generate them for over two hundred years without change.”

“So… so… he’s big but he’s… a kit like me?” Jun asked softly, chewing on his thumbnail and staring out into the forest. “And we just…” He made grabbing motions at the air with his free hand. “We did that. To him?”

Sho exchanged startled looks with his partners. He’d not considered the Adventurers kits — some of them had been around for almost a century, after all! — but… but Jun was right. If Adventurers had only just gained awareness by some unknown spell, then all that experience added up to very little when it came to interactions and being people.

“We don’t know for sure that he’s a kit,” Osamu cautioned them all as he drew Jun against his side. “He could just be a solo-type and that’s how his experiences translated over when he became aware.”

Jun stopped chewing on his thumbnail long enough to give Osamu an unimpressed look. “Kit makes more sense,” he declared gravely.

Osamu chuckled and ruffled Jun’s hair. “Kit or not, we need to give him a bit more space than we have been, alright? Like how Kenzou needs a bit more space and extra warning before you touch him, remember?”

Jun and Hanae both nodded, expressions adorably serious.

“We remember, father,” Hanae said, then looked between Osamu and Sho in curiosity. “Is papa going to stop, too?”

“He doesn’t seem to mind it,” Sho defended with an exaggerated pout, pleased by the giggles it pulled from his kids. “But I am going to be a bit less… me about it,” he admitted once the giggles had died down, starting an entirely new round of giggles at his expense.

There was no point in lying to his kids, after all. Even if Ayumu didn’t mind, it was clear he didn’t know how to react. And not knowing how to react led to him feeling overwhelmed.

Sho refused to do that to the young man.

“I don’t think we have to change much,” Kiku agreed, leaning back to stare up at the night sky contemplatively. “We need to get better at reading him, though. And make sure we give him space and a quiet place to gather himself when it’s all too much.”

He hummed and set his empty plate aside, turning his interactions with Ayumu over in his mind. The way Ayumu had slowly leaned into him during the afternoon indicated that he didn’t mind, he just wasn’t accustomed to it and needed time to process. Which made a terrible sort of sense; Sho had never seen Adventurers do much in the way of touching. Combat and some rough-and-tumble shoving, certainly, but nothing like what Sho had been doing.

So… he’d need to ease Ayumu into casual touch, try not to startle him like he’d done with the feather, and make sure no one teased the young man about his reactions.

He could do that.

“Alright, enough of this gloomy subject. Who wants a story?” Sho asked with a grin, dragging his mind away from Ayumu and to his kids. He couldn’t do anything about the young man for the moment, so it was time to distract Jun and Hanae so that they’d be more inclined to sleep when bedtime came.

(Maybe if he was lucky they’d only fall asleep an hour late tonight.)

(If he was lucky.)