Archive of Our Own ^beta

To Be Enough
by: natsume rokunami

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Ash Echoes | Midas/Director | T | Hurt / Comfort / Fluff | English

Notes:
This is my first Ash Echoes fanfiction, I am sorry.

I do not gain any material profit from this fanfiction. Ash Echoes belongs to Aurogon Shanghai and Noctua Games.

The café smelled faintly of tea leaves and polished wood, the kind of scent that clung to the walls and softened the hours. Afternoon light spilled through the tall windows, scattering across the tables in pale gold. Voices drifted here and there—familiar and half-muted—but my attention was elsewhere.

Midas stood alone by the window. His frame was straight, his posture rigid as though discipline had carved itself into his very bones. Light traced the edges of his uniform, gilding the threads on his shoulder. He did not move. He only watched the world beyond the glass with that stillness of his, a stillness that seemed to draw every gaze and yet repel them in the same breath.

The others looked, of course. They lingered on him, curious, uncertain. But no one approached. Perhaps they mistook solitude for strength. Perhaps they were afraid of disturbing something sacred.

I could not leave him like that.

With steady hands and a heart that felt less so, I prepared a glass of tea myself. Not anything grand—just something plain, something mine. When I stepped to his side and set it before him, his eyes flickered toward me: violet, watchful, heavy with things unsaid.

“You look as though the window might answer you,” I said quietly. “But even windows need company.”

He regarded me for a moment, then turned his gaze back outward. His voice came low, almost fragile despite its roughness.

“You shouldn’t waste kindness on me. It has a way of turning to ash.”

The words pressed between us, like smoke curling in the air.

I did not move away, “Kindness doesn’t vanish that easily,” I replied softly. “Even if it burns, the warmth lingers. Long enough to reach someone else.”

For the first time, his expression shifted—barely, but enough. A flicker of something that might have been sorrow, or longing. His gloved hand hovered above the glass but did not touch it. Instead, his gaze drifted, as though drawn into some far horizon I could not see.

“I remember,” he murmured, voice caught between confession and memory. “The day they gave me the name Garu. A god of war, they said. A title meant to terrify, to inspire. I thought … if I carried it, I could protect them. That boy on the border who had nothing … I thought I could become more than him. But every step toward that godhood, I lost something. Faces. Voices. A girl who pressed a jar of light into my hands and asked me not to forget her. Do you know, Director, what it is to carry a soul inside glass and still fail the one who entrusted it to you?”

His jaw tightened, the words seeming to weigh against his very breath.

“They told me it was salvation. Artificial divinity. But what god is born without blood? What divinity leaves only graves in its wake? I feared myself. I feared what I’d become. That is why I walked away. Better to be no one at all than a god who ruins everything he touches.”

His voice fractured, then fell into silence.

I stood with him, watching the shifting light on the floorboards. At last, I said gently, “You are not ash, Midas. You are the one who remembers. That is enough.”

For a long while, he did not move. Then, almost reluctantly, his hand touched the rim of the glass. He lifted it, took a careful sip. When he set it down again, his eyes looked heavier, not lighter, but something in his gaze had shifted.

“Director ….” The word trembled with too many meanings to unravel—warning, gratitude, grief. He left it unfinished.

We remained there until the café air grew soft with dusk. At last, his eyes turned toward the door. “ … Walk with me?”

I followed.

The streets outside glowed with the fading light, the kind that stretches shadows thin across the cobblestones. He walked beside me, measured steps, his hands folded neatly behind his back. Though he said little, I could feel the tension wound into him, the silence thick and restless.

“To walk freely like this,” he said at last, his voice low. “It feels … strange. When I was Garu, every eye was on me. Every street, a stage. Now, no one looks. No one calls my name. And yet … ” He paused, watching pigeons scatter from the square, “ … the silence weighs heavier than the praise ever did.”

“You miss it,” I said softly.

He did not deny it, “… Perhaps. Not the blood. Not the power. But the illusion. To believe I mattered. That I was more than a boy who lost everyone.”

We stopped at a corner where the last of the sunlight touched his hair. For a moment, he looked unbearably young—no god, no soldier, only a boy who had carried too much. The sight stirred something tender in me, sharp as grief.

“Then let the illusion go,” I whispered. “Let today be enough. Walking here, beside me, let that be enough.”

He looked at me, truly looked. His eyes held no armor, no command, only the rawness of someone both afraid and aching to be seen.

“Enough,” he repeated under his breath, as though the word itself might crumble if spoken too loud.

We went on. The street narrowed, and his sleeve brushed mine. He did not move away. Neither did I. The silence between us was no longer heavy—it was fragile, warm, like the faint heat of embers carried carefully in one’s palms —

— and in that small, unremarkable closeness, I thought: if sorrow was the thread that bound him, then perhaps tenderness could be the hand that held it without fear of being cut.

[End]