No.

It was all Aya had ever told him.

Nonononono.

No, because she loved a man named Tooya (even when he lay cold and dead and buried deep beneath the earth), and there was no room for a boy named Yuuhi in her heart (even when he was all she had and she was the only one left he loved).

And so Yuuhi carried the burden of nothing with him as he walked away, and wished he could forget about loving.

---

He had been certain, of those he had known once upon the truest fairytale, she was the one he would never see again, and perhaps the one he never, ever wanted to see again.

Fate has a cruel sense of humor.

---

She was exactly the way he remembered her.

Long black hair hung loosely by her sides and honey-brown eyes were fixated into a jaded glare. She was world-weary and always suspicious of one’s motives, and claimed she didn’t believe in love and never would.

Only this time around, Ceres was free. She had no hagoromo, sought no vengeance, and never had to share a vessel with another.

Yuuhi might have been happy for her.

---

He treated her to lunch, though she never once thanked him for it.

Instead, she showed her appreciation by accusing him of lust and a desire to win her over (because she said she knows what all men are after), and shooting down everything a boy named Yuuhi believed about living and loving.

Yuuhi was no longer a boy, so he listened and said nothing.

---

They met whenever they had a spare moment (not as often as they wanted) and went to places where it wasn’t too crowded, where not too many people would find them.

She talked, he listened. Sometimes (almost never) he added something to their one-sided conversations. Yuuhi wasn’t sure what he believed anymore, so he preferred to say nothing at all.

---

“You’re different from the others, aren’t you?” she asked him once.

“...I don’t know.”

I don’t know anymore.

---

He laced his fingers through silk-like black hair as he pressed his own lips hers. Feeling desire and pain and lust and loss all at once, he kissed her even more fiercely in an attempt to drown out the voices in his head that had been there ever since she left him.

---

“Why?”

Because I need you.

“Why?”

Because I’m selfish. I need someone after all.

He thinks maybe she had known who he really was from the start.