Despite shame competing with a whole lot of self disdain Ulf looked at the girl he had just confessed his love to. It was real. He felt it in his very bones. He’d always admired honest persistence, and somewhere down the road that admiration had grown into affection and later into what he had to admit was love. When that happened he didn’t know. During the summer that was about to end soon probably.

He saw Noriko take a seat with Kyoko, and the girls spoke softly with each other. On his shoulder he felt Yukio’s hand and on his head one unfamiliar yet so well known.

“You’re Akane’s boy. I don’t know how, but I know.”

Yukio’s hand tightened its grip. “Man, we need to talk.”

“Aunt, it seems my friends need me for a while.”

The hand in his hair stiffened.

Bloody hell! I forgot where I am.

“Akane’s boy,” she said and left the room. “Kanto! What horrid luck. When the kid learns Japanese he speaks Kanto dialect.” A receding giggle accompanied her foot steps.

And how the bleeding hell am I supposed to explain this? Ulf shook the thought away. “OK, you’ve got my attention.”

Yukio grabbed a chair and sat down. This close Ulf began to get a grasp of what the man his best friend would soon grow into would look like.

“Urufu, we need to go to Sweden.”

“Huh?”

“I know you don’t have a passport, but some day.”

Ulf blinked away his confusion. “Sure, I’ll be happy to bring you back home for a visit.”

“Yeah, that as well. Man, I’d love to, but that’s not what I’m talking about.”

Across the table the girls had stopped talking.

What’s going on?

“When I get older I hope to marry Kyoko.”

If the room had been silent when he held hands with Noriko that was still a deafening cacophony compared to the absolute stillness that hung over them now.

“If you want to,” Yukio added in a voice that surprised Ulf by its utter lack of hesitation.

The man he’s already begun to grow into, Ulf accepted. Damn you’re so cool!

“If you want to,” Kyoko responded. “I can’t have children, remember?”

An indrawn breath told Ulf Noriko hadn’t wanted that to be spoken out aloud.

“Not in this world you can’t,” Yukio said, and Ulf’s head swam from the shock of listening to those words. “Urufu’s got scars from his high school years, or rather, he no longer has them.”

What on earth are you talking about?

“Oh. Oh! Yes, I’d very much love to marry you. Twice if that’s needed.”

Twice? Ulf could take it no longer. “Guys what the hell are you two going on about?”

“Yukio,” Kyoko began, “is pretty certain people are, eh what should I call it… transiting from this world as well. To a downstream world he calls it.”

Yukio nodded, and before Ulf had a chance to edge a word in he added to Kyoko’s words. “Urufu, you had a restart in this world. I believe we can as well.”

“I never asked for it,” Ulf said as if by reflex. He’d been torn away from a perfectly good life. One, he glumly admitted, that more and more became part of his memories rather than reality.

“You didn’t, but Kyoko and I might have to one day.”

Slowly what Yukio and Kyoko had said started to form a pattern in Ulf’s head. Lemme see, if what they…

“So just like Urufu arrived here from his old world you’re saying you can transit and arrive in another?” Noriko broke in.

And she’s so much brighter than I am. Did I fall in love with her or her brains? Both, Ulf decided and settled for listening to her making sense of the insanity.

“And since both Kuri and Urufu were fourteen when they arrived you expect to be fourteen as well?”

Yukio nodded.

What?

“In bodies where Kyoko was never stabbed?”

Kyoko clung to Noriko and nodded as well.

Oh!

“That would explain the people who dragged Ryu off to that interview he mentioned,” Noriko continued.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Ulf had heard about it, but he never reflected on its potential meaning.

“And you want to be seen as important, or unlucky enough to be sent, what did you say, downstream?”

“Not today, or anytime soon, but one day, yes,” Yukio said. “At least as long as I have Kyoko. Without her I don’t care.”

“Yukio! I love you!”

That reaction from Kyoko told Ulf everything he wanted to know about the bond they shared. Some people just get it right from the beginning. I’m happy for you, and a little envious.

“I think you might be right,” Noriko said. She seemed deep in thought. “I think they forced Kareyoshi to rescind the expulsions. Yeah, you’re right.”

Expulsions or no expulsions didn’t really have anything to do with this, or did they?

“I am, am I not,” Yukio said and laughed. “How else could people from Sweden force anything at all to happen here?”

Neither of the men Ryu spoke with that day were Swedish. Ulf knew as much, but Ryu was adamant they came from Sweden, or represented Sweden in one way or another. Pieces in a jigsaw puzzle slowly fell in place, and he stared at Yukio with open admiration. A string of worlds connected like links in a chain.

“Can I go back?” he heard his own voice say.

The look Noriko gave him cut deep into his heart.

“I don’t want to. Not any longer,” he added, both for her sake as much as for his own. That life was gone. Even if he could go back it was a life once lived. He’d never be able to go on with it and pretend the life he lived now was just a short episode he could discard. This was his life now.

Memories from a day in Odaiba rushed to him. Sano-san, I understand. I finally understand.

With that Ulf accepted his old life had ended, and that a new one had begun, that where there was a transition there was also a restart. He’d become Hamarugen Urufu, who called himself Ulf Hammargren. He was both the man who had once been as well as the teenager with the memories of that man. He was both less and more than he had once been, and more importantly, he just was.

***

They stayed the night. Yukio and Kyoko shared one room, and she and Urufu another. They didn’t sleep with each other, not even the way they had at the hotel. That was one of Urufu’s conditions. At least he didn’t demand that they separate their futons, and when morning came Noriko woke hugging Urufu through the linens.

Breakfast was a sombre affair with questions hanging in the air. Urufu spent most of it in silent conversation with his aunt who wasn’t his aunt, so Noriko didn’t get the time she wanted with him.

There would be other days. A lot of other days if she was to decide, and so she let him have the time he needed. She had promised him after all, even if they were a couple now. She intended to keep that promise. Reeling him in and caging him were two different things. He’d always need his own time, or she’d lose him forever.

Yukio and Kyoko were immersed in their own world of hopes and plans, and Noriko left them to it. Instead she looked out the windows at a landscape as alien to her as Urufu’s old world. Tokyo was Tokyo, a world of its own, and most of Japan was nothing like it. In ways, she suspected, that faraway city where Urufu grew up would be less alien. At least it had to be a cityscape, even if on a much smaller scale.

I wonder what Himekaizen is like now. It scares me to go back.

Not all of them would. Far from. The four of them, she knew. For most of those admitted to Irishima High there was little reason to return to the school that had abandoned them though. To the madman.

She had her own reason – he spoke with his aunt, and her brother very much a similar one. Kyoko and Yukio were bound by ties of friendship, and they had each other. And Sato-sensei. Urufu’s guardian scares me, but she’s on our side. Not everything scary was bad. But her other friends? The other club members? Why when Irishima High was a much better school?

Noriko admitted she was an idiot, but she didn’t care. As long as she had Urufu she’d make do, and he needed her. He was still broken. Healing, but broken. That probably meant Kuri was broken as well. Part of her, Noriko suspected, never left that locked classroom where a sixteen year old girl lay shuddering in tears she had brought on herself.

I moved on, or so I thought. Kuri, why? Suddenly Noriko couldn’t breathe. Urufu, where did you leave part of your soul? Because somewhere a sixteen year old boy lay whimpering in pain as well. Somewhere, but Noriko couldn’t even begin to guess where.

Accepting that he wasn’t her perfect hero had taken some time, but accepting just how deeply flawed he was would take some more. Older didn’t automatically mean better.

Somehow Noriko was happy she’d been left to her own devices. A bit of silence, a slice of strangeness and an ounce of pure joy around her was exactly what she needed to make any sense of the tumultuous last week. Sure, she’d been pushing hard for months, but everything fell in place the very last days, and despite planning for it she couldn’t cope in the end.

Not everything had gone as she planned. Definitely not the part where Kuri and Urufu shared their bodies with each other.

But.

In the end.

He was hers.

A tinge of heat reached Noriko’s cheeks. Does that make me his? Because she had heard Kuri and him that night, and if Noriko was his, then one night... Noriko slammed a mental door on that line of thought. She refused to connect what she had heard with her fantasies about her own first time.

A few steps brought her to a strange outdoors that was still indoors.

Most girls my age have already done it. And another mental door had to be closed. She could worry about that later.

Noriko admired her surroundings. Originally designed to keep the cold out. Here it kept the heat out. A little wood, and a whole lot of glass. And sun shades. Just like at Himekaizen. Whoever once built this wanted a space that defied any definition of what was indoors and what was outdoors.

Construction? He can’t have been in construction. This is the work of an architect.

Her grandfather on her mother’s side had been one as well. Cheating winter wasn’t all new to her, but she’d never seen anything on this scale in a home.

There was some kind of commotion behind her, and Noriko left the room to find out what it was all about.

“It’s too heavy for you. If you give us a ride I’ll take care of it.”

Take care of what? Noriko looked at Urufu, and then at the huge sack at his feet. What’s that?

“You sure. You look like a city boy.”

“Look, aunt, I’ve done this before, OK?”

Urufu! For being so bright he was surprisingly stupid sometimes.

“I guess you have, after all,” their old host said. There was something awestruck in her eyes, and also something sad. “Fine, take it to the car and I’ll drive.”

“Yeah,” Urufu said and hoisted the sack onto his shoulder.

Urufu!

Stringy muscles on his arm, neck and back hardened and relaxed in a show of gorgeous efficiency. For a moment he struggled under the weight, far more than half her own, but then he slid one foot to the side and made for the door.

“It’s heavier than I remembered,” he said and turned his head over his free shoulder. “And I’m a bit skinnier now.” His entire body followed after his head. “But I’ll manage,” Urufu added and shot her a grin void of any sorrow, hesitation or regret. For the first time in half a year he was just a mischievous boy playing a friendly prank on her. “Thank you, Noriko,” he added, and her heart jumped.