Shiratori Haruto

“You… regained your memories?” Hina asked. She frowned a little in doubt as she heard my words. She then walked to the seat at the front, moved it up, tilted it to the back facing me, kept it down on the ground with a thud, and then sat in front of me. I too turned my face from the corridor on my right to her. With a huge grin on her face, she said, “So, tell me what you remember!”

“Well…” I turned my head down.

I remembered the time when Itsuki and I were playing games in the tiny bedroom of his house, with his figure sitting up, his legs crossed, his eyes fixed on the console, and my figure lying on the ground, scrolling down on the internet.

“It’s… not really something worth telling, but…”

I remembered the image of the nine year old Itsuki pushing the figure of Ichika as she sat on the brink of the well with a cassette in her hands.

“All the rumors… were true.”

“The rumors… were true?” Her eyes opened wide. She was shocked as she sat in front of me on that chair, her lips wide open. She then moved her right hand up to cover her mouth. She then snapped in again, turned her head down, tilted her eyes here and there in dismay, then she turned her eyes up at me again. I was glaring at her. She knew from my expressions that I was telling the truth. She then turned her head to her left at the corridor, then turned her head to her right, and stood up from the chair again. “I can’t believe I… I was playing friends with the friend of a killer,” She said as she stood up from the chair. Then, she turned to her right as was walking away.

THUD. THUD. THUD. THU—

“He’s not a killer.”

Hina’s legs stopped. She turned her head to her back, glaring at my angry eyes silently.

“Itsuki… Itsuki did… kill her by mistake… but he’s not a killer.”

Just as she was looking into my eyes, she asked, “What does that mean?”

“We were kids. It was just the innocence of the child that killed her.”

“You know what… I should have never talked to someone like you… someone who befriended a killer… someone who is so… so miser that—”

“You’re crossing your line, Miyamura-san. The one you’re talking about is like a half-brother to me, so—”

“YOU’VE ALREADY CROSSED THE LINE, SHIRATORI-KUN!”

My frown faded little by little as I looked at her eyes slowly turning emotional and teary.

“I… was hoping against hope… that they were just rumors.” She shook her head. “They were not…” She then turned her head away and started to walk away angrily.

I was still sitting on my seat, glaring at her back walking away.

“I never… really thought of her as a friend or anything, right? If it were Itsuki, my mom, or anyone else I loved in this universe, I would have stood up at that point, and… ran at them… wiping their tears… and… a-and telling them the complete story. But…”

Hina turned to her right at the front of the class toward the door and walked out in just seconds.

I was still sitting silently on my desk, glaring aimlessly at the front.

All the students of the whole class had their eyes turned at me as they stood scattered here and there in groups, looking at me seriously.

“I… I never thought of her as my own. Maybe, she still was a stranger to me by heart. I wanted to tell her so much. I wanted to tell her the whole story… about how it all happened, but… I let her go… let her go into her illusion that I was the wrong one in the whole episode that happened years ago.”

I turned my head to the left, noticing how everyone has frozen. I then turned my head to the right, and looked at all the students in the corridor walking and standing and having lunch frozen completely just in the middle of their actions of either taking in food, talking, or just walking.

TWITCH!

I turned my head to the front, looking at the little circular white logo with a really light shade of blue as its outline. Inside the circular rim of the logo, there was a little letter of ‘I’. The logo was rotating as it stood in front of me.

“A-Assistant…?”

“Hey, kiddo. What shit are you up to now?” The coarse voice came out of the logo.

“I…” I sat silently in front of him for a second.

“You’ve regained your memories, right?”

I gulped in, and then deliberately nodded.

“I magically erased them all, but I knew that there were chances that you’d eventually get them back. But, now that you have your memories back, I wanna ask you a very important question, kiddo.”

“Y-Yeah?” I hesitantly replied.

“Will… Will you return to the adventure?”