Naru Henituse

Part 1

He never thought he'd know this feeling again.

Four years old and holding a crying baby with no idea how he was going to cope.

The sound of his fathers crying.

His mothers still body.

The gentle warmth in his arms, so fragile and so small.

It was an unforgettable memory. One that he was still haunted by, even into adulthood.

A memory of his baby brother's pink and wrinkled face and servants rushing around while the chaos of the countess's unexpected death unfolded.

He backed up a step and bumped into a familiar set of legs. He looked up into the benign smile of the only servant who remained by the children.

Cale hadn't remembered this part.

It made sense though. Ron wasn't the sort of person to get wrapped up in the confusion and forget about his young charges.

"Is he heavy, Young Master Cale?"

Cale only then realized his arms were trembling.

His brother wasn't heavy, he hardly weighed anything at all, so much that it scared him. But Cale also recognized that he was four and probably in shock. Carrying a fragile baby was foolish. He nodded to Ron's question and allowed the disloyal servant to prise the baby from his arms.

It was a wise decision, Cale nearly collapsed under his own weight.

Was it the shock of watching his mother die again?

Or just the shock that he'd gone back in time?

It couldn't be real but all of his senses proclaimed loudly that it was. He was really here. The sights, the smells, the sounds, they were all too vivid for a mere memory.

Cale reached down and patted his stomach, mindlessly searching for the festering wound that had ended his life.

He only felt the soft fabric of his clothes and warm skin beneath. The feeling made him wince.

How many years had it been since he'd last felt such luxury?

A broken sob wracked out of his fathers raw throat brought him back down to reality and he stared at the bed with shaking pupils.

Jour Henituse was dead.

It would still be a few hours before Deruth, his father, accepted this fact. He would summon doctor after doctor, even going so far as hiring mages, and all throughout the day chaos would overtake the Henituse household.

Cale remembered all of it vividly. It had been the day he'd attributed to ruining his life.

The tiny baby now cradled in Ron's arms had been his enemy. The harbinger of his mothers death. The cause of his family strife.

It seemed so foolish now.

Vibrant red curls framed Jour's body lifelessly and Cale felt strange looking at her.

In his memory, she was his mother. His only mother. The person who could make his life better. The person who'd loved him more than anyone else ever had or ever would.

He'd built her up to be so much. Looked at her portrait more times than could be counted. Mourned her loss throughout his whole life. He'd even taken on her maiden name after the fall of his family. To him, she was the paragon of familial love.

So why was it that she looked like a stranger to him right now?

He didn't have a single surviving memory of Jour Henituse aside from this moment.

Cale had seen so many people die in the thirty years before his own death. People he knew. People he cared about.

He'd watched every single person in this room die.

When he'd seen his fathers mangled body, Cale had thought of all the memories he had of the man and mourned that there would be no more in the future. Mourned a flawed relationship that would stagnate entirely with death.

It was the same with every body.

The memories of the person were, in essence, what made them so difficult to let go of.

Jour was just his mother.

That was all.

The realization was like a punch to the gut and Cale really did collapse beneath the weight of it. She was probably a wonderful woman but he didn't know her.

He didn't remember her.

Yet he had framed his entire life around the idea that his life would be so much better if she was there for him. If she had lived. There were even wretched days where he'd thought it would have been better if his brother passed away instead of her.

Cale felt nauseous.

"...aster Cale?"

The voice sounded distant and Cale dimly registered the sound of the baby crying harder.

It was distressing.

His brother had never been one to cry very much.

That thought didn't make sense. Babies cried. Children cried. Cale knew that. He had cried when he was a child too.

But he'd always cried in secret.

...had his brother been the same...?

There was pandemonium around the room as Cale fainted. The focus from the dead countess immediately redirected towards the feverish eldest son of the Henituse household.

Thirty years of memories condensed quite suddenly into the body of a four year old boy during one of his most traumatic memories.

It was simply too much for him to cope with and the normally healthy boy fell prey to illness.

Red rimmed brown eyes watched as Cale was carried out of the room, memorizing but not capable of perceiving. The middle aged servant cooed at him gently but the baby paid him no mind.

Naru Henituse, the second born son of the Henituse household, was a sickly boy who died young. A child resented by his brother and ignored by his father until the day of his death and even then, he'd never been able to feel the full warmth of family.

A tragic existence that was easily forgotten.

Naru sniffled, the thought flowing past a mind that was incapable of object permanence.

He couldn't even fully focus on the spot that once contained his brother.

His memories were scattered but he knew that something bad had happened. All that his tiny body could do in response was sob into exhaustion.

Painful and vivid.

The memory of this day would live on inside of him, the same as it had for his elder brother.

Scared and alone and lost in a world that never wanted him.

He closed his eyes and behind his lids he could see a lifetime of memories.

The panic that filled the household as young master Cale collapsed tripled when it became apparent that young master Naru also had a dangerously high fever. All of the doctors and mages that Deruth summoned redirected their attention to the children rather than the corpse of the countess.

It was a wretched day.

On the eighth day of the eleventh month, Naru and Cale Henituse regressed twenty six years into the past and relived the death of their mother.

Surely, that could only be a cruel joke of the gods.