ArisuTaka
Kiyotaka Ayanokōji remembers everything. Every meal, every conversation, every wasted second of twenty-three years. That was the point of him.
So the missing minute is a problem.
On the shuttle to A.N.H.S., between 7:51 and 7:52, something happens that leaves no mark. No pain. No dark. The trees outside the window are simply later. Nobody else notices.
His plan for the next two years is modest to the point of embarrassing: blend in, graduate unremarkable, walk out the far end into a quiet life, with a father who never again has reason to look his way.
The plan survives about eleven hours.
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Because the women here keep looking at him like they're coming home.
It isn't memory. Suzune Horikita lived it - a whole life beside this man, in real time, every year of it. Loved him. Married him. Buried him, and was extremely polite about it for nineteen years.
Then she blinked, and she was twenty-three again, and the eye contact hadn't finished.
Kikyō Kushida smiles with a mouth that already knows what his mouth remembers. Kei Karuizawa touches him in public, without asking, the way you check something's still there. One by one, across the valley, other women meet his eyes and come back older.
None of them can prove any of it. None of them intend to lose him twice. Each arrives alone at the same arithmetic: if there's a third, there's a fourth.
She knows exactly how he takes his coffee. That is the tender part. It is also the frightening part. There is no second sentence doing the other job.
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An institute that runs on rank. His cohort is the bottom one.
Campaigns closing in that he files under coincidence.
Out past the hills, a father beginning - very politely - with the smallest piece of paperwork he can find.
He could manage all of it. The problem is that being near them is good.
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They have each buried him once.
They were all extremely polite about it.
They will not be polite twice.