STA: I'm not a big believer in things that contain spoilers, and I find the majority of 'triggers' to reinforce fear of stimuli rather than actually help with functioning post-trauma, but I do know a few that all sources I've scene agree are legit. Therefore, as my non-spoiler trigger warning, if you need trigger warnings, There's a decent chance this fic will be a problem for you. Just a heads up.

-x-

They called his old man home from Germany.

Not his father. There was only one Father. This was the man who sired him. The sperm provider. If you wanted to get technical, he was even the man who Motoyasu was raised by up until starting middle school, as well as the man who gave Motoyasu his allowance after that to pay rent and buy food. But Motoyasu was at a loss for what to call him, because he wasn't Father.

"I'm not sure how to describe our relationship," ended up being the first thing Motoyasu said after having gone nine years without seeing the man.

Nine? It was nine by earth's standards. When Filo-tan's world was saved, he'd found himself in a hospital bed, one stab wound in his chest and another in his side. His old phone was on a bedside table. While Father's name didn't appear in any searches, Motoyasu had found his own in a story dated back only a day from what the phone's clock read, reporting on an attempted murder-suicide.

One of those pigs had been successful at killing the other, but neither managed to kill him. Almost no time passed on earth, but it had been more than a year away from earth for him. At least ttwo, with how long he spent moving between time lines.

"I'm sorry," the man said. "I know I haven't been around as much as a father should."

"No."

That was wrong. Why was he calling himself that? Father was the only Father Motoyasu needed, and Father must have returned to his own version of Japan.

"I'm here to make it up to you."

Or had Father stayed behind in Filo-tan's world? Both ideas made Motoyasu nauseas. There was a way for him to return to Filo-tan. There had to be. If he could be transported to that world once, he could go there again. But was there was a way to reach the other Japans? If Father returned to his own world, then Motoyasu had no idea how to reunite with him. If Father had stayed with Filo,-tan then Motoyasu had no idea why he hadn't been given that option.

"Motoyasu? Motoyasu!? What's wrong? Why are you making those faces?"

Everyone was so sensitive to his movements. He thought that once the stab wounds healed, the hospital would let him go. He would return to school even though nothing mattered if there was no Father or Filo-tan or any of his beloved filolials to enjoy life with. Instead, they led him to another ward where no one was injured, but the doors were locked so they couldn't get out, and everything he said and did was scrutinized more closely than the healing of those stab wounds had been.

All the pills they gave him changed. The painkillers that helped numb his brain so he wouldn't despair over his exile from Filo-tan's world were gone. The new ones the nurse said were to help his mood, but they only made him feel sluggish.

"We haven't worked out the right mix of medications for him yet," a nurse told the man. "His psychosis hasn't improved at all, although his outbursts are more or less contained."

The hospital staffed primarily pigs. Perhaps the selfish creatures that they were liked exploiting the vulnerable, and that was what drew them to such jobs. It had caused Motoyasu a great deal of trouble in the first few days of his recovery, as pigs constantly pawed at him while he was weak. When a doctor and a police officer both came to talk to him about an incident where he had to defend himself from the disgusting things, he had explained how he repulsive it was to be touched by swine. Since then, they had made a sincere effort to only give him human nurses.

His new ward had only a single human nurse. Only for eight hours a day, five days a week, could Motoyasu talk to the person to give him pills. The rest of the time, he would ask the security guard who stayed on the ward to explain to him why pigs were squealing at him.

"Does he have any past mental health history?"

"No. None. I… Not that anyone ever reported to me, and he always seemed normal over the phone."

"Sometimes a person is able to hold it together for short conversations in order to keep others from noticing anything amiss."

They both cast doubtful looks at Motoyasu, as if something unlikely had been said. Did they think him too inept to know how to use a phone properly? The nerve.

"If this is his first mental break, then it may be a one-time thing. We haven't tried everything yet. It's possible that once we stabilize him, he won't have any more episodes. But most often with one-time episodes, drugs are involved. LSD. Spice. Anything you might find at a wild party. But he came to us for stab wounds, not an overdose. It's entirely possible the trauma from that just… made something snap up there."

"But you can still fix him?"

"You don't fix a chronic condition. You manage it. And we'll do our best to find the right treatment to help him manage his illness. But… I don't like telling people this. Sometimes, a person's baseline is such that, even at their highest level of function, they're never properly oriented to reality. His outbursts have stopped. Our next focus is to get to the bottom of his hallucinations. The general psychosis doesn't seem as critical right now, and it's been the least responsive symptom to treatment, so while we're trying to addressing it at well, it's not our primary focus."

The man fell silent, and stood still as the nurse excused himself and went to harass another patient.

There was very little to do on Motoyasu's current ward. There was only a single TV, which was locked behind a thick sheet of plastic, and another patient played the same two children's movies on it all day long. There was one computer, but you only had thirty minutes to use it. He'd been forbidden from installing anything on it that would let him play Emerald Online. Explaining that he used to live in a world similar to the game had only made the staff less obliging. There were no books, and the art equipment was rudimentary and had to be used under supervision.

In short, Motoyasu had nothing better to do than stare at the man and wait.

How much older the man looked. In Motoyasu's mind, the man was still only in his early thirties, but his gold hair was dusted with grey, and there were hints of wrinkles around his eyes.

"You're going to get better," the man told him.

"I'm fine now. See?" Motoyasu lifted up his shirt to show the man where he'd been stabbed. His chest was still tender, but both wounds had scarred over, and the bruising around them was gone.

The man smiled and nodded, but when he spoke, he sounded like he'd been convinced of nothing. "I've looked into the doctors who work here. They're top notch. It's important that you follow their advice."

"I, Motoyasu, am a good listener! I always do what Father tells me, I say!"

The man chuckled at that. "I'm pretty sure I told you to stop messing around with so many girls once you started college."

"I wasn't talking about you."

"Then who were you talking about?"

"Father. Who else would I mean?"

"Motoyasu, I am your father. I am your father. Who else would you call father?"

Technically, that counted. "The man who raised my love. What more important father is there?"

"Of all the—fine. If you have a father-in-law in mind, then I suppose it's good you're finally settling down, but I'm still your birth father, and you still have to do whatever the doctors says, understood?"

"Hm…"

"Understood?"

When he spoke so firmly, Motoyasu's birth father showed hints of the Father Motoyasu so dearly missed.

"Understood, I say!"

"Good." His birth father patted his shoulder. "Now let's cross our fingers and hope you can return to school like none of this ever happened."

"Why?"

He cherished his time in Melromarc more than any other part of his life. It was because he was brought there that he was able to realize what a fool his old self had been, and how glorious the existence of Filo-tan was. Pretend all of that never happened? It would be like chopping off both of his legs.

But his birth father rudely ignored his harsh suggestion and moved on with his inane speech.

-o-

All meals were expected to be eaten in the dinning room. The utensils were plastic and doled out by miserly pigs who watched everyone chew and diligently counted the forks afterward before disposing of them behind a locked door. Everyone was encouraged to speak with one another. Apparently this was therapeutic. Motoyasu had refused initially. Eating among pigs spoiled his appetite, and he was tired from the drugs they gave him. But he had said he'd do as the doctors instructed, and the doctors told him to eat with everyone else, where he wouldn't have to be served finger food to excuse how no one could make sure he didn't stab himself with a plastic fork.

Thus, Motoyasu found himself listening to a fellow patient who also had no obvious injuries or infection to warrant his continued hospitalization

"I'm here because they want to shut me up," the man told him, too loudly, like he wanted the rest of the dining room to hear. "I know all about the plot to poison our water, and the prime minister couldn't let me warn everyone, so he had me kidnapped and brought here. These bitches think I'm some sort of loony. They're too deep in the propaganda to question it. They don't even realize they're being used."

Oh, Motoyasu thought. The man was insane. He was locked in a ward full of crazy people.

But why was he looked up with a bunch of loonies? Was it madness to love as deeply as he did? No. It was joy. It was enlightenment. The next time the human nurse came around, he would try to explain it. Even if the pigs could listen to them—and none of them approached him without a security guard present—they were mere pigs. For such lowly creatures to understand true and pure love was impossible.

"Pearls before swine, I say!"

"Yes! Yes exactly! No one heeds my warnings!"

"Well, you do speak nothing but nonsense."

The man flipped his tray of food and rose to storm off. Motoyasu ignored the pigs as they ran to talk to the man, as if their squeals would calm him.

One pig even squealed Motoyasu's way, although a fellow pig nudged it in the direction of the crazy man with quiet oinks and snorts. He'd been on the ward for five days now, and they knew better than to waste his time with their disgusting noises.

Other patients (other lunatics?) paused what they were doing to watch the circus, then conversed about it. One pig patient even came up to oink at Motoyasu.

"Go away, piggie," he told her. "Your squeals are annoying, and your stench is intolerable, I say!"

This only started more squealing, both from the patient and the nurse pigs.

After that, Motoyasu was required to wait for everyone else to finish their meals before he could eat his own. He argued that he should be allowed to eat in his room if he wasn't to socialize, but was refused. Even if he didn't socialize, it still demonstrated a higher level of function to be able to go to the dining room to eat.

It got tiresome, eating things that were always cold.

-o-

"I heard you stopped taking your medicine."

Motoyasu cast his birth father a glance, then returned to staring out the window.

He was taking some of his medicine. The pills that made him so tired that he didn't have the energy to lament his situation. All the others, he'd rejected upon learning the intentions behind. Pills designed to make him percieve pigs as gorgeous women and make him more susceptible to suggestion that Melromarc—that Filo-tan's world—wasn't real. Even if it made returning to Father and Filo-tan harder, he refused to lose faith in her. And he wouldn't make himself vulnerable to swine a second time.

"Motoyasu?" His birth father grabbed his hand, and Motoyasu was too tired to be mad at him for it. "Motoyasu, I know this is hard. You're not happy being here, and I'm not happy seeing you like this either. Please, listen to the doctor. The staff here want to help you. You're sick, and this is what you need to do to recover."

"Can one recover from love sickness?"

His birth father smiled at him as if he said something profound.

Normally, when he voiced his thoughts, people misunderstood him, or acted as if he was speaking nonsense at random despite the clear train of thought from one idea to the next. Motoyasu had written his birth father off as someone too distant to ever go to for advice or support long ago. By the time he began college, his parents were people he exchanged pleasant small talk with over the phone and reported grades to in order to receive his allowance. Any assertions like 'I love you' or 'We're so proud' rang hollow when they never managed to visit, and he had enough support from friends that it didn't matter.

Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps his birth father could be called a father without any qualifiers to explain why he only technically merited the title.

"Now there's a hint of the son I know."

Never mind.

That fool thought he was motivated by pigs to get out of the hospital? If they had any influence at all, it was in his desperate wish to get away from the pigs who kept asking that he swallow their poison!

"You're on the road to improvement. You'll be back to your old self soon."

"There's no thought more horrifying, I say…"

He was so tired though. He'd gotten the male nurse to explain which pills were to keep his behavior in line and which were to treat his so called 'hallucinations', and obligingly continued to take everything that sedated him while avoiding the poison that would distort his mind. He thought that if he at least behaved, then they'd let him go even if he didn't take every pill, but everyone was still unhappy with him. For his efforts, his sole reward was to be trapped in a constant state of lethargy.

"So you'll take your pills?"

"Mmf."

"Take your pills," his birth father insisted. "All of them. You can't go back to school and return to your old life until you're well. Do you want to be stuck in the hospital forever?"

No.

What an absurd question.

To have to chose between drugs that distorted how his eyes perceived pigs or imprisonment such that he might never find a way to return to Filo and Father's side. He knew what Father would snap at him to do. Even the kinder versions of Father still asked him to do terrible things in the short term in order to escape a more devastating future. But that didn't make the situation any less wretched.

And here his birth father was, telling him to do the painful thing for long term gain.

"Perhaps you're more like Father than I thought."

"Motoyasu, do you know who I am?"

His birth father sounded sincerely concerned. How annoying.

"You're the man who scored with the swine who gave birth to me."

"That's not… Well… I suppose. Who taught you to put it that way?"

Reality did. Even his birth father couldn't deny it was true.

"I won't take the pills," Motoyasu said. "Leave me alone. I'm tired."

His birth father made a face like he was cruel for stating the facts, but that man was crueler for telling Motoyasu to swallow poison.

-o-

It turned out that even if the hospital thought you were sick, they would still get rid of you if you proved too difficult to cure. Naturally, there was no curing someone who was healthy, so Motoyasu had 'showed no signs of improvement' according to the doctor and 'would best be served in a more therapeutic environment with loved ones who could talk with him more about treatment options.' Also, it seemed that his insurance found his stay too long. So he was let out of prison.

When Motoyasu finally stepped out of the hospital doors, he was delighted to recognize an immediate landmark. The hospital couldn't have been more than a fifteen minute walk from his old apartment. What a relief, when he felt like he only had ten minutes of walking in him anyway.

It wasn't home, per se. He missed his house and the filolial stable in Rock Valley terribly. But his apartment did have his gaming computer, and with it, he could enjoy Emerald Online with the highest quality graphics. Until he figured out how to get back to the real Melromarc, he could block out all the unpleasantness of the old life he was expected to revert back to by immersing himself in the virtual Melromarc.

He made it four steps before his birth father grabbed his arm and pulled him the opposite direction.

"Where are you going?"

"My apartment."

"Motoyasu, you were stabbed there."

"That was years ago."

Wait.

No, it had been… two months? Three? Most of his time in a normal hospital room was a blur of pain pills and other drugs that kept him asleep almost around the clock, but he was sure he spent more time there with the stab wounds than he understood to be normal. At first, he'd put it down to the number of times he popped stitches. Having seen how tightly regulated the loony bin was, he knew better. It seemed they not only had no intentions of releasing him to a lower level facility—much less home—once the wounds were no longer critical, but that they also tried to delay in putting someone with his injuries near all the crazies. To say nothing of all the time he spent in the loony bin.

"Motoyasu…"

"Months. That was months ago. I know how long it was."

"The last time you were there must have been traumatic. If you want to return eventually… Well, if your psychiatrist thinks it could help, we'll do it. For now, I think it would be best for your health if you didn't go back there."

"But my computer—"

"I'll fetch it on my next day off. The focus today is getting you home."

A dozen warning bells went off in Motoyasu's head. 'Home' was a seaside town that, while hardly small, wasn't as big and anonymous as the city. The proximity to the ocean might be similar to Rock Valley, but he would only make it a day or two without running into someone who knew the old him. Less, if the pig who lived next door still thought she could lure him into her traps by making him meals. His birth father wanted him to be the foolish former Motoyasu again, and the other people from his past would make similar demands.

Come to think of it…

"Will that other pig be there?"

"Motoyasu, I hope you don't mean your mother."

"Who else would live in your house?"

His birth father sighed. "No. When the hospital got in touch with us, they were very clear that it would be better if I came to see you instead of her. She's still in Germany. The company doesn't have many people they can send out there, so only one of us was approved to return. If your psychiatrist thinks its a good idea, we'll return to the old arrangement once you're fully recovered. If not, I suppose I'll buy an extra ticket and you can come to Germany with us."

Motoyasu intended to be long gone before that point. For one, if everyone summoned came from Japan, could he even reach Melromarc from another country? But at least he had one fewer people from the past to deal with.

That aside, it had surprised Motoyasu to think that his birth father would actually take time off from work to return to Japan. Of course that had been a false assumption. The man was still working, and still planned to leave again with no regard for his son's life plans.

But that was nice. It explained why the man hadn't been at the hospital every single day to badger Motoyasu. It explained why he only came when the hospital said he was too crazy to turn loose, rather than when he was in the ICU with a knife wound in his chest. And it meant there would be plenty of reprieve at home as well. Best of all, that his father already hoped to return to his sonless life in Germany meant Motoyasu had been right from the start in thinking his family wouldn't be too deeply affected if he were to be spirited away to Melromarc and never return.

He started humming a tune he learned from listening to Filo-tan's flawless singing, but by the time he'd crossed a single street, the tune had died.

His birth father took him past the first train station, and expected him to walk all the way to the next. In Melromarc, as the Spear Hero, Motoyasu could have run a lap around Tokyo if Filo-tan asked it of him. No longer liberated by high stats and love, and bogged down with so many drugs and weeks of confinement, he found his vision growing blurry before they were even halfway there.

"Can we get a hotel for the night?"

"We'll be home in time for supper, but we can stop wherever you want for lunch."

Couldn't they stop then and there? It was too much walking to reach the train station that his birth father wanted.

Motoyasu's attention wandered, and his gaze with it. His birth father had to take him by the hand and lead him forward, lest his feet wander as well. It was bothersome, but Motoyasu put up with it until they crossed a pedestrian bridge running over a busy street, and curiosity compelled him to pull away and walk up to the edge.

It was a low traffic time of day. Not too many cars, but they drove past at a good speed. He leaned over the edge of the rail to get a closer look, an idea forming in his head. The last time he was injured and thought he'd surely die, he woke up in Melromarc. It was dying that let him meet Filo-tan once. Would it let him reunite with her now? Itsuki had been brought to Melromarc after he was hit by a truck, hadn't he?

"Motoyasu!" his birth father yanked him back from the bridge's edge. "What were you doing?"

It took a moment to put his thoughts to word. "I thought life would be wonderful if I died again."

His birth father turned white, eyes wide. Was wanting to improve one's life such a frightening thought?

"You want to die?"

Oh! He missed the part about it being a way to return to living in Melromarc.

"Not permanently."

"Motoyasu, you can't temporarily kill yourself."

Motoyasu gave it some thought and determined this was true. Killing himself had no precedent for working. Naofumi was summoned without dying, and there was a common theme in how he and Itsuki and Ren died.

"I don't know if it would work if I killed myself. I think someone has to kill me."

"That's still… never mind. You won't kill yourself?"

"No. What would that accomplish?"

His birth father sagged against the rail. Was the man happy or not? Some people were ridiculously hard to please.

"Let's hurry up and get home, and we can bring this conversation up with your psychiatrist at your first appointment. But Motoyasu, if I see you too close the the tracks, we're going straight back to the hospital, understood? While we wait for the train, I expect you to seat yourself on a bench along the wall and stay there until the train doors are open."

Had his birth father always been so neurotic? Why make so many unnecessary threats and demands?

"Do. You. Understand?"

"Yes, yes."

The train station was much closer than the hospital by that point, and Motoyasu wanted to be done with walking already. Whatever got him to a bench faster.

He let his father resume leading him, collapsed onto a bench at the station when they at last reached one, and groaned when he had to drag himself off of it half a minute later to board the train itself. Once aboard, he collapsed again, and grudgingly obliged his birth father's request to rest his head on the man's shoulder while he dozed.

It wasn't a bad idea, save for who it entailed. If he ever saw Father again, he would ask for a lap pillow.

Motoyasu's eyelids drooped, and he couldn't tell if the scenery out the window blurred from their speed or his fatigue. He shut his eyes, and tried to stay awake long enough to make plans for a future where he could enjoy that lap pillow.

There was no evidence that temporarily killing one's self would work. It was temporarily being killed that did the trick. Motoyasu didn't think he'd get so lucky as to have someone shove him in front of a train with his birth father watching, but he would have plenty of free time while the man was at work. He could start looking up ways to put himself in danger and let others give that final push as soon as he had his computer back.

-x-

STA: I spent a lot of time waffling on one of four directions to take this story, and had to sort through lots and lots of scenes, many of which that were written with different directions in mind, once I settle on one.

Honestly, there's another direction I like more, but it didn't feel as compelling. Most of the scenes were written with that ending in mind and it still feels like the "real" version to me. Maybe, if I decide to develop it more, I'll even post it. But for now, enjoy the "alternate" version, in which some scenes have been cut and others have been altered to steer the story in the direction I thought would be more interesting for the amount of writing I currently want to devote to this project.

So anyway, I know I'm not the only one who's ever stopped to think about how utterly non-functional post-development Motoyasu would be if he ever tried to return to his own Japan. But I haven't seen any other fan approach that concept in English, and I'm not literate in Japanese yet, so I had to get my fix on this somehow.
Fun fact by the way! There's some debate over whether Motoyasu losing his marbles as he stumbles off the rocker in his mission to grab a screwdriver and loosen all the screws in order to get those hinges undone is caused by him just, you know, going crazy, or if it's the effects of the Lust Spear messing with his head. I am fully in the "he went crazy" camp for the following reasons.

1) He demonstrates his insanity prior to the Lust Spear ever being shown, and the reader is also witness to the moment when he snaps. In fact, he's mentioned to drop in off-page multiple times while crazy before the first occasion that Naofumi sees him with the Lust Spear. The other heroes only have their behavior significantly warped by their curse weapons while said curse weapons are equipped.

2) The only exception to that above point is the curse Itsuki's bow afflicts him with. But Naofumi's shield use sets the precedent that curses are a consequence of using curse series skills, which Itsuki is observed doing prior to her personality sealing curse setting in. Motoyasu has, remember, not so much as displayed possession of a curse series at the point that his behavior shifts, much less tossed any curse skills around.

3) Aneko stated on his/her blog that the curse for using the lust series skill is that it decreases one's libido (except Motoyasu has so much libido that there's no noticeable effect when he inflicts this curse on himself, letting him functionally use lust skill for free). Decreased libido, it should be noted, is not the same as erratic behavior in defiance of logic and hallucinating most women as pigs.