Prologue: Beyond Memories
Early one morning, in the spirit folk village...
In the house where Miharu was living together with Latifa and the others, Miharu was sleeping alone in her room. However, from the look on her face, she seemed to be having a bad dream.
“H-Haru-kun?!” After a moment, she let out a frantic yell and moved her hands as though to hug someone, but the person she was trying to hug wasn’t there.
...What was I doing? Miharu returned to her senses with a gasp and looked around the room, confirming where she was. It was a familiar room — the room she had been sleeping in every day since coming to the village.
Was I... dreaming?
Right... it was a dream. She recalled seeing a dream. A very sad dream...
...I can’t remember it. Miharu frowned in frustration. It was an extremely important dream, wasn’t it? Someone had been in pain... That’s why Miharu had tried so desperately to hug the person in the dream. She knew she couldn’t be separated from them, because, if she were, that person would go somewhere far away.
“I have to remember...” Spurred on by a vague compulsion, Miharu desperately tried to remember the dream she had just moments ago. It wasn’t too late to recall something yet. There should still be something there, somewhere...
“...Haruto?” At the back of Miharu’s mind, the faint image of Rio holding a sword from behind resurfaced. Rio was watching something with an extremely stern expression in the dream. He glared at someone, before swinging his sword down on them... perhaps.
But upon further consideration, hadn’t Miharu said the name of a different person when she woke up? The nickname of the boy she was always with when she was young...
“Haru... kun?” Miharu whispered softly. The nickname of her childhood friend, Amakawa Haruto...
Was that a dream... about Haru-kun? Miharu frowned sadly at the doubt she felt. Then, she suddenly recalled her past with Haruto and clenched her fist around her nightgown.
Back in those days, Miharu had thought it was only natural to be with Haruto. It was a given that she would grow older with Haruto, and those days they spent together would continue forever naturally. She had been seven years old when she learned that it wasn’t meant to be — nine years ago. It was why Miharu could remember those days she spent with Haruto so clearly, it was as though they had only happened yesterday. Because Miharu liked Haruto — because Miharu loved Haruto, she was devastated to be separated from such an important person. It was so painful that she would never forget it.
She still remembered the promise they made when they parted, too. There was no binding power at all behind it — a fleeting promise between two children. Her feelings now could be different from love, but even so, that promise was still something sacred to her.
That’s why Miharu would occasionally remember Haruto, even though she had grown older. While she felt very sad that Aki had nothing but prejudice towards Haruto, every time Miharu remembered him, she felt warmth in her chest that supported her, as though he was beside her.
She wondered how Haruto had grown up. Did he still remember the promise like she did? If he did, and they were ever to reunite like they promised, what would they do? Miharu thought about those things every time she remembered Haruto.
The answer was the same every time: it was possible she would fall in love with Haruto once more. It’d be a wonderful thing if that happened, she thought. But recently, whenever Miharu remembered Haruto, she found her chest tightening in pain instead. And she knew the reason why: it had started after she began living in this world with Haruto.
Haruto and Haruto. Their identical names could be part of it, but Miharu occasionally found herself feeling a sense of déjà vu as she went about her days living with him. She had started overlapping the two — Haruto, and Amakawa Haruto.
Miharu wasn’t very good at interacting with the opposite gender to begin with. She was fine with the younger Masato since he was still a child, but she sometimes found herself in an awkward silence around Aki’s older stepbrother, Takahisa. That was why the only same-aged boy Miharu could spend time with without any objection was Haruto, who she had grown up with from a young age.
Until she came to this world and met Haruto, that is...
For some reason, from the moment she had met the Haruto in this world, she had never felt nervous around him. It made Haruto one of the few people Miharu could interact with without feeling particularly uncomfortable. If she didn’t count Haruto from her childhood, then he might’ve been the first.
The reason she felt so comfortable around him was because the feeling that Haruto and Amakawa Haruto gave off was similar. She wasn’t able to explain it in detail, but the feeling of reassurance when they were together was the same. Miharu started to realize that as she spent more time with Haruto, and before she knew it, she was overlapping Haruto with Amakawa Haruto.
However, she didn’t think that was necessarily a good thing, as it was rude to compare someone with someone else like that. It was a feeling Miharu had hidden in her heart... until she heard the story of when Rio first visited the village from Orphia and Alma.
According to Orphia and Alma, Rio had muttered “Mii-chan” when he’d been unconscious in a cell. It was the nickname that Haruto had once called Miharu by. Of course, it could’ve been a coincidence, and there may have been nothing behind his sleep talking; not to mention the fact that Haruto had previously said he died a university student. Even so, Miharu couldn’t help the seed of suspicion growing within her. It was possible Haruto’s previous life was as Amakawa Haruto.
That couldn’t be, Miharu said to herself, but the suspicion remained.
I can only remember it vaguely, but the person in my dream looked like Haruto... Miharu’s instincts were telling her the dream was about Haruto. As though insisting that the two men were the same.
“Then...” Miharu whispered quietly. “Does that mean Haruto is Haru-kun...?”
Her anxious voice echoed softly in the quiet room.
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