Arlen had been having a good week.

That wasn't to say that he was better, of course. He didn’t know if people really recovered from the sorts of things he had suffered, if there was ever really going to be a day when he would be able to say he felt “healed”, but that was okay. He could live with that.

Because Arlen had been having a damn good week. And that was more than he could say for himself in any week prior for the past… well. Several hundred of them.

He had to take the good as it came—hold onto it as tightly as he could manage, for as long as he could manage, so that maybe it could carry him through some of the worst of the pain of bad.

But he had been making new friends, he had seen more traffic in the library, he had been drawing again, which he’d thought he’d never do—

He had spent so long convinced that this was the best his life was ever going to get. That he was going to live in isolation and paranoia for the rest of his life. That he was going to suffer, because it was just what the world had intended for him, and there was no point in fighting it.

But recently… well. Recently he had rediscovered a part of him that he had long since thought buried. The part of him that liked to draw. The part of him that liked to sing. The part of him that liked to meet new people and smile and go out for coffee and—

And live.

Because that’s what he was doing, wasn’t it? That’s why he felt so much better. He wasn’t just surviving every day, trying to trudge from one second to the next. He was living. Experiencing life in a real way that brought him joy.

Who would have thought that it could have been so easy? He had just needed to step outside his small, confining circle, and he had found a whole world, just waiting for him to allow himself to be embraced by it.

It hadn’t been nearly so frightening as he had—well. Feared. In fact, it was kind of beautiful. In a different way than the stories in his library liked to paint, perhaps. But not bad. Not even “worse”, per say.

Just… more real. And maybe that was just what Arlen needed. Maybe he needed to step outside his fantasies, and allow himself to feel real again.

Allow himself to be more than the ghost that haunted Ye Bochord’s halls.

He wanted that. He wanted friends, he wanted a life outside of his solitude. He…

Wanted to belong to something. To be a part of something bigger than himself. To make a difference.

He glanced at his henshin pen.

Gods, was he really going to be doing this?

He huffed helplessly, and picked it up.

“Alright, Arlen,” he mumbled to himself, “guess it’s time to be a hero.”

Hopefully he wouldn’t let anyone down.