Chapter 87: The Cracks in Memory's Dam

Natsuki’s confession, a quiet three-word earthquake, echoed in the pre-dawn stillness long after he had drifted back into a peaceful, healing sleep. I sat there, frozen, his hand still holding mine, my divine mind which could comprehend the birth of stars completely failing to process the beautiful, impossible catastrophe that had just occurred.

“I think I’m falling in love with you.”

He had said it. He, the ghost of my first and only true love, had looked at me, a complete stranger, a clumsy, amnesiac girl he had just met, and had somehow, through the fog of reincarnation, found his way back to the same feeling. My carefully constructed world, my entire ridiculously reckless plan, had just been both validated and completely destroyed in a single, whispered sentence. The divine rules were screaming in my head, a chorus of cosmic alarms warning of the impending doom of a goddess falling for a mortal. But a louder, more reckless voice, the voice of the girl who died on a Tuesday, was sobbing with a joy so fierce it was painful.

The journey back to Aeria was a surreal, dreamlike affair. The truce held. Kaelen, having seen Natsuki’s willingness to die for me, now treated me with a gruff, begrudging respect, like a strange, unpredictable weapon she had decided was useful. Lirael’s coldness had thawed into a wary, professional courtesy; she was focused entirely on Natsuki’s well-being, and since I was now inexplicably part of that, I was included in her circle of care. Elara was the most unnerving. She was quiet, but her eyes followed my every move, her gaze filled with a terrifying, academic curiosity. She wasn’t just watching a person; she was studying a phenomenon.

Natsuki, despite the gravity of his injury, was in remarkably good spirits. He was weak, but the light had returned to his eyes, and it was almost always focused on me. Every time I helped adjust his position as Kaelen carried him, or handed him the waterskin he’d given me, his fingers would brush mine, and he would give me a small, tired smile that made the other girls exchange pointed, weary glances. The cold war was over, but a new, even more complicated political landscape was forming in its place.

Back in the cottage, his recovery was unnaturally fast. Lirael’s potent elven healing, combined with the secret, tiny trickles of my own divine energy that I channeled into his food and water, worked wonders. Within days, he was out of bed, walking with a slight limp but otherwise looking hale and hearty.

But as his body healed, his mind began to show the cracks. The familiarity he had spoken of at the campfire began to manifest in strange, specific, and heart-stopping ways.

It started subtly. I was sitting at the table, trying to help Lirael sort medicinal herbs, a task at which I was utterly useless. I was concentrating, a small wrinkle forming between my eyebrows as I tried to distinguish between Gillyweed and Gilly-root.

“You do that thing with your eyebrows when you’re thinking,” Natsuki’s voice said from behind me. I jumped, dropping a handful of very expensive herbs. He was leaning in the doorway, watching me with a fond, thoughtful expression. “It’s… familiar.”

My blood ran cold. “What thing?” I asked, my voice tight.

“That little scrunch,” he said, tapping the space between his own brows. “It’s cute. I feel like I’ve seen it a thousand times.”

Lirael’s hands stilled over the herbs. From the corner, I heard the faint shing of Kaelen pausing in the sharpening of her daggers.

“I… I have a very scrunchable face?” I offered weakly.

It kept happening. One afternoon, he found me trying to hum a tune I remembered from my first life, a catchy, annoying pop song from a forgotten decade.

“I know that song,” he said, his eyes going distant. “I can’t remember the words, but… it makes me think of rainy days. And… ramen?” He shook his head, a confused smile on his face. “That’s weird. Why would it make me think of ramen?”

I just stared at him, my heart a frantic hummingbird in my chest, and quickly changed the subject to the weather.

The other girls noticed. Of course they did. They were a party of highly perceptive adventurers, and their leader was acting stranger by the day, his attention fixed on the new, mysterious girl with an intensity that went beyond a simple crush. I would catch them whispering when they thought I wasn’t listening.

“…it’s more than just a crush,” Lirael’s voice would murmur. “He looks at her like he’s trying to remember a dream.”

“It’s creepy, is what it is,” Kaelen would grumble. “One minute he’s fine, the next he’s staring at her hair and talking about ice cream flavors. The pixie broke his brain.”

“The anomaly is affecting his cognitive state,” Elara would state, as if reporting a scientific finding. “The variable is proving to be… influential.”

My life became a tightrope walk. I was desperate for him to remember, and terrified of what would happen if he did. Each flicker of recognition from him was a spark of pure joy and a jolt of pure terror. I had to constantly deflect, play dumb, and pretend his moments of impossible recollection were just the strange ramblings of a man recovering from a near-death experience.

The dam finally broke on a quiet evening, a week after our return. We had all just finished dinner. I stood up to clear the table, gathering the empty bowls. Natsuki was sitting by the hearth, idly sharpening his spirit blade’s hilt, a habit he had when he was lost in thought. There was a loose floorboard near the table, one I had tripped on at least three times already. My mortal clumsiness, for once, was not an act.

As I turned from the table, my arms full of ceramic bowls, my foot caught on the edge of that same, treacherous floorboard.

The world tilted. My feet went out from under me. The bowls flew from my hands, and I flailed, my body twisting in a comical, desperate attempt to regain my balance. For a split second, I was no longer Aki Amakawa, the magical girl. I was Akane Suzuki, the high school student, my feet slipping on a discarded piece of fruit, my life ending in a slapstick tragedy. The angle of my fall, the look of surprise on my face, the specific, helpless way my arms pinwheeled in the air - it was a perfect, horrifying echo of that final moment.

I hit the floor with a hard thud, the ceramic bowls shattering around me. But I barely felt the impact. Because a sound from across the room had frozen my very soul.

It was the sound of a sharp, indrawn breath, followed by the clatter of a sword hilt dropping to the stone floor.

I looked up. Natsuki was on his feet, his face as pale as death. He wasn’t looking at the broken bowls. He was staring at me, at the way I had fallen, but his eyes were seeing something else entirely. They were wide with a dawning horror and a recognition so profound it was like a physical blow.

He clutched his head, his knuckles white. “The… the banana peel,” he whispered, his voice a choked, broken sound.

My world shattered.

“The argument…” he gasped, stumbling forward, his eyes locked on mine. “Mint chocolate chip… you were yelling… the rain…” Images, feelings, sounds from a life lived an eternity ago were crashing over him, a tidal wave of memory breaking through the divine amnesia I had so carefully constructed.

Lirael, Kaelen, and Elara were on their feet, their expressions a mixture of shock and alarm. “Natsuki, what’s wrong?” Lirael asked, reaching for him.

He didn’t seem to hear her. He just stared at me, his eyes filled with a century of lost time. “The truck… the funeral… I… I looked for you,” he stammered, his mind clearly struggling to reconcile two completely different realities. “But you were… gone. And now… you’re here.”

He took another step, his gaze so intense it felt like it was peeling back my mortal disguise, seeing the ancient, lonely goddess cowering underneath. He saw it all. The lie. The truth. The impossible reality of it.

He looked at me, his face a mask of agony, confusion, and a love that had somehow survived death itself.

And then he whispered a name. A name no one in this world should have known.

“Akane?”