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Her mind and soul awoke in a strange place. For fifteen years she was new, a blank slate yet to be written upon. She remembered nothing of her former self.
Dreams began to invade her sleep. Dreams of a red, dying world, a golden light, a pale face framed by blonde hair. Giant mechanical wonders that lumbered about, swift-moving craft that dove through the air, rending explosions, blue sky and white birds. In the unguarded fog of sleep, these images came to her constantly.
This world was nothing like the one she saw in her dreams. It was green and growing. Quiet. Full of peace. She thought she rather liked it that way. She had never been one for wars and conflict. This life of tranquility and gentle hard work, using her skills to heal and mend, to tend flowers and make poultices… it seemed to suit her. The long red hair that whipped behind her was shocking and unfamiliar every time she saw it, despite the years it had grown with her, but the soft linens of her clothes and the feel of moist dirt on her hands felt so right she chalked her feelings about her hair up to self-consciousness and ignored them.
The dreams grew more vivid the older she got. Some days they almost seemed to intrude upon her waking thoughts. Like a distant light glimpsed through the fog; when she turned to look for it, it was gone, lost to the darkness of her memory. She felt certain she was trying to remember… something. Something important. Something precious to her. But her mind couldn't grasp it, couldn't wrap its hands around whatever she was supposed to know.
And so things proceeded until the day she had to cut her hair and flee, slip away from the schemes of the prince and run away to freedom. Something about the situation—troubled by the frivolous petty whims of red-robed nobility—seemed all too terribly familiar to her. She wondered about the feeling as she stewed in the courtyard garden, arms wrapped around her knees, enjoying the warm sunlight on her soft white hood.
A rustle caught her attention and she looked up just in time for a surprise sight. A boy her age, white-haired and handsome, leaping over the stone wall without a care in the world.
Her chest wrenched. She almost gasped. A dizzying rush filled her cranium, roaring in her ears. There was some strange, exhilarating feeling inside her… like her heart remembered something her head did not.
Her green eyes widened, her expression of shock matching his and she wondered if he felt it too.
But the next moment he was sprawled out awkwardly on the grass, groaning in pain, and the glimmer of clarity she'd glimpsed through the dark was pushed to the back of her mind, left to fester and gnaw at her waking thoughts like a creeping creature slipping in and out of the gaps in her memory.
She forgot the flash of heartache and desperate remorse she'd felt and was only aware of the freshness of growing new love.
-AZ-
She'd been in his thoughts from the moment he came to awareness in this new world, this new body. Visions of her danced at the corners of his mind. Her vibrant green eyes. Her braided blonde hair. The white dress spinning around her. The specter of the girl he knew but didn't know tormented him constantly.
Who are you? he'd often growled to himself in frustration. Why do I remember you?
She must have been important to him somehow. That was the only reason he could think as to why she plagued his dreams, drove him to distraction, called out to him from the ghost of a world he couldn't recall.
He saw her in every movement the beautiful red-haired girl made. Every smile. Every laugh. The very touch of her hand.
Her fingers were coarser than he thought, than he'd felt they should be. Calloused from hard work, not dainty and thin from a life of ease and comfort. But his heart still beat with a familiar thrill whenever he was close to her, his lungs still forgot how to breathe right when he beheld her.
He knew, somewhere in the back of his mind, that she was the one he'd been searching for all this time. The one he remembered. The one he had loved.
But he didn't know it consciously, not for certain, until that day in the tower, with the sunlight shining in her smiling face.
He gasped.
Like a dam breaking, everything came rushing back to him. Mars. Aldnoah. The Orbital Knights. An orange kataphrakht. And the Versian princess to whom he owed his life, his loyalty, his everything.
His hands trembled reverently as he looked at her, truly looked at her, and knew her for the first time.
Asseylum… Her name resonated in his thoughts with so much clarity it was an almost audible ring. His hand drifted up towards her cheek. No, he corrected himself, Shirayuki. That is her name now.
Whatever she was called, whatever she wore, whatever she looked like… she was here. He'd found her. For good this time.
Swept up by a wave of emotion, he cupped her cheek and, before either of them realized it, had kissed her sweetly.
The damn broke in her mind as well. The light swept away the fog at last, and filled the space between them with golden brilliance.
She was home.