It’s gonna be so delicious to watch the monkie family squirm without their eldest. Not only with the obvious grief and terror that comes with one of your own children being abducted, but also with the cracks in the family dynamic that Y/N really held together fully unraveling. Without Y/N to stave off MK’s tantrums, to take care of MK, or to do whatever emotional labor they were doing before the abduction, the family is in big trouble.
They scramble to talk to anyone that was close to Y/N- only to come up short. Every. Time.
Teachers remark that either Y/N is excelling or failing, either option was something both of the pair failed to notice. Y/N’s “friends”- if they can even remember who Y/N WAS friends with- are distant at best, uncomfortable at worst. They don’t know Y/N that well, they say, they were always too busy to hang out with. 2 grown men realize how much stress they’ve put onto their eldest. And now they’re gone.
Nonnie, I want you to know how much of a delight it was to read this right after waking up.
This is exactly why I wrote “Unbeloved Beloved”! It puts Sun Wukong and Macaque into a difficult situation and gives them a bitter wake up call, but only after their eldest child is already gone.
Naturally, at first, for MK’s sake and their own, they wanted to find their child. Just because Reader wasn’t their top priority like MK, doesn’t mean that they won’t be worried sick for them. Reader is still part of the family, they’re still Sun Wukong’s and Macaque’s baby, they are still MK’s favourite family.
Like you have said, with their absence, there is a visible, gaping hole left.
Finding them gone one day with no note or any trace was jarring and completely out of character for Reader, who was always an attentive, responsible child.
As they start searching and asking around for Reader from their teachers and peers, the realisation really starts to kick in after they learn that most kids in their class don’t really talk or hang out with them.
They’re baffled by the fact that kids dislike them for ‘their attitude’, not enough to bully them (no one wants to bully Great Sage’s kid, mind you), but enough to not want to hang out with them.
Reader has a small circle of friends from other classes and even they don’t usually see them much outside of school.
And with that now known, both of the fathers wonder why their kid never brought up that they had a hard time in school?
Why did they never mention that other kids called them a bore or ungrateful?
When their teacher also mentions that they just assumed that Sun Wukong and Macaque had decided to home-school them because Reader had hard time socialising with their peers, the two pause to look at each other.
At the same time, they think about how uninvolved they were with the Reader’s life.
Just how much didn’t you tell them? Just how much didn’t they know?
