The rain had stopped by the time they reached his apartment: a narrow room of mismatched shelves, dusty windows, and sketchbooks stacked like quiet witnesses along the walls.
Elara hesitated at the threshold, breath catching at the sight of so many worn covers — each spine marked with charcoal smudges and faint dates.
"All of these…?" she whispered.
"They're yours," Ciel said softly. "All the faces I couldn't forget."
They sat cross-legged on the wooden floor, knees touching. Outside, evening pressed against the glass, streetlamps flickering to life in slow gold.
One by one, they opened the books.
Pages whispered under trembling fingers: portraits of Elara — not always exactly as she was now. Sometimes her hair was shorter; sometimes her eyes carried an older sorrow.
In the margins, words repeated in rough script:
Elara. Tuesday. The fig tree.
And again:
Don't forget.
Elara traced a date at the corner of one sketch.
"This… this was months before we spoke," she whispered.
Ciel nodded, throat tight.
"I didn't know why," he admitted. "Only that I had to keep drawing. Every Tuesday I felt… pulled to that café. As if something terrible would happen if I didn't go."
They kept turning pages.
Drawings of the same fig tree from different seasons. A train window streaked with rain. A hospital corridor under buzzing lights.
Elara's hand trembled over one sketch: herself sitting on the river steps, hair damp with mist.
"You drew this," she whispered, "before we ever met."
"I did," Ciel murmured. "And every time I finished, I felt… relief. Like I'd kept something alive."
At the bottom of the page, scrawled faintly:
"She doesn't remember yet."
Elara's breath caught, chest tightening painfully.
"You knew I might not remember," she whispered.
"I always knew," he said, voice cracking. "But I kept hoping… that when you saw me, something in you would remember first."
They moved to another sketchbook, older still.
Inside, the same symbols repeated in charcoal: a circle broken by a single line, a spiral at its heart.
"What does it mean?" she asked.
"I don't know," Ciel murmured. "I've drawn it since I was a boy. Sometimes it shows up in dreams. Sometimes I wake and it's already there, half-finished."
They copied the symbols into a shared notebook — black ink on clean pages, a talisman against forgetting.
Outside, the rain began again, slow and gentle on the windows.
Elara looked up, eyes rimmed with quiet fear.
"What if," she whispered, "all of this means it's not really our choice? That we're only repeating what the story demands?"
Ciel met her gaze, voice soft but firm.
"Then let it be both," he said. "Let it be the story… and let it be us choosing it anyway."
Their fingers brushed across charcoal lines older than memory.
In the hush of that room, surrounded by shadows of other Tuesdays, two hearts dared to hope that what bound them wasn't just fate —but the stubborn, human choice to remember, even when the world conspired to make them forget.