Hide-and-seek

1.Memories

Edit: Thank you all so much for 500 reads!! I hope you enjoy my little fanfic :)

Prompt: memories
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“Brett!”- A tiny boy was running through a huge paddy.

“Brett! Where are you?!” the child shouted again. He was slightly panicking.

“Brett, you know- This is not funny anymore! Don’t hide from me any longer!
I’m so afraid…” he added quietly.

His brown, almond-shaped eyes were darting through the scenery which surrounded him.

There was barely something else than paddies; just a few trees with rattling leaves stood beside a narrow stream.

Actually there wasn’t one single good possibility to find a proper hiding place. But he couldn’t see Brett anywhere. His friend was simply too good at camouflaging.

They had to be back in time for dinner! Otherwise their parents wouldn’t let them play in the afternoons at all anymore.

The boy seemed to tear up.

At noon, the little boy and Brett had been eating a bowl of rice together, it had been all good.

They had been joking around, giggled and laughed, though they had been exhausted from the hard work on the paddies.

But with Brett, the work wasn’t that bad.
Just to have Brett around him made the little lad feel better.

Labour wasn’t boring with Brett, they told each other tales which they imagined, they played guess-the-animal, they made a competition: “Who is the fastest worker?”, they sung traditional songs together or they composed spontaneously new ones.

Brett was just fun to be with.

On top of it, he was nice, he was almost always in a good mood, he was honest and you could trust him.
He knew how to behave (most of the time), he could work hard, but he also had uncountable ideas for games or how to avoid boredom.

To sum up, he was the most important and most loved person in the life of the petite boy, besides his parents.

Brett was like a brother for him, or even more because siblings fight, but the two friends never did.

The small boy couldn’t remember that there was a time before Brett. He had known him for almost as long as his short life lasted.

Today, the two boys were allowed to play together in the afternoon instead of working.

This was a rare chance, since usually there was so much to do at the farm that the parents couldn’t abstain from their children’s help.

But especially their moms were pretty worried about their sons’ health and their lack of education, as they probably wouldn’t be able to choose another job than becoming also paddy farmers like their parents used to be ones.

Brett’s mother also wanted him to play more often, and so did Brett.

The only problem was that, regardless of the huge amount of work, there was no place for the children where they could play really safely.
They hadn’t much more than their fields and their huts.

The children weren’t allowed to leave their furrow slice because if the owner of the adjacent slice noticed them, he would chase them away if they were lucky but if they weren’t, he would catch them and take them to the liege lord who would probably enslave them.

The only reason why the two children could play together was that their parents reached an agreement about unifying their slices for the sake of their children not growing up without peers.

The two families were very poor peasants because they had to give a huge amount of rice to the emperor each year.
They could hardly make a living from the paddies and they couldn’t put any money aside. Their living conditions were quite miserable; they lived in two small, self-made cabins which stood next to each other.
A hand pump well was positioned in front of the two hovels and a few ginkgos casted their clouds over the small place.

It was a pretty nice location, especially for such poor people as they were.

However, it was very cold in winter as they hadn’t got an oven. They could only make an open fire to warm themselves, which was quite dangerous since the huts were made of wood and straw.

In summer, it was hot and stuffy inside the cabins and it wasn’t easy to fall asleep at night.

Their food wasn’t much diversified either. They rarely ate something else than rice or sometimes vegetables so the children were pretty thin and undernourished.

If one of them had got seriously ill, they couldn’t have gone to a doctor or got medicine. Luckily, they were rarely sick.

The little ploughboy now started to cry. The tears were slowly running down his cheeks and he sniffed quietly. He slumped down on the grass and burrowed his head in his hands.

“Brett… Where are you? I’ve been searching you for two hours now!

Please come back…

I’m so scared for you! Maybe something grave happened to you!

And I can’t help you…

And if you get hurt, ill or even die… It’s my fault!

Because you are such a good hide-and-seek player! And I’m a really bad one.

So Brett, if you can hear me, I beg you, please come back. Stop hiding! I…,

I don’t want to lose you, Brett.”

The boy seemed fairly exhausted from his monologue. Some sentences he screamed out loud, others he told low to himself.

He looked around with misty eyes, but he didn’t perceive anything in fact.

And Brett was still gone.

The boy decided to return home; maybe Brett was already there. He picked himself up and ran through the paddy while his tears were gently falling down on the ground like raindrops.

He was so alone.

Again. It was like a déjà vu. Except this time, they weren’t playing hide-and-seek.
It wasn’t a game. He HAD to find Brett this time. His best friend wouldn’t appear to dinner, as nothing had happened.

He wouldn’t come back because the idiot he was, he had made a terrible mistake.

The most awful mistake you can make as a friend.

Brett could be anywhere. In every single place of the whole entire, fucking world.

Brett was still as good as he was as a child at playing hide-and-seek. And he, Eddy, was still pretty bad.

Eddy broke down on a chair and started to cry.

He was so alone.