[Richard isn't the sort of person to get openly emotional about many things. Instead, he usually keeps his feelings under ironclad control, a remnant of the days when his uncle would have taken any chance he could to prove that Richard was unfit for the throne. To Cerdic (and, to a lesser degree, his father as well), crying was a sign of weakness. Men weren't supposed to cry. To Richard, allowing himself to succumb to his emotions meant losing one of the tiny fragments of control he was allowed over his own life.
So Richard had simply learned not to cry, no matter how much things hurt. There was no point, not when there was no one there to care, no one to comfort him even if he were to cry. And so he'd bottled things up for years, brushed them aside and locked them away deep in his heart where it was easier to pretend that it didn't matter. Fatalistic, perhaps, but what else could he do? Tears didn't change anything. He'd learned that much long ago.
Yet he can't seem to stop crying now as he sags helplessly against Isamu, burying his face in his friend's shirt as if by doing so he can somehow make himself disappear and make everything stop hurting so much.]
[Action, Feb. 23]
So Richard had simply learned not to cry, no matter how much things hurt. There was no point, not when there was no one there to care, no one to comfort him even if he were to cry. And so he'd bottled things up for years, brushed them aside and locked them away deep in his heart where it was easier to pretend that it didn't matter. Fatalistic, perhaps, but what else could he do? Tears didn't change anything. He'd learned that much long ago.
Yet he can't seem to stop crying now as he sags helplessly against Isamu, burying his face in his friend's shirt as if by doing so he can somehow make himself disappear and make everything stop hurting so much.]