Chapter two, 2017, ends and beginnings, segment five

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.

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.