It began with a bottle. Green glass, half-fogged from the sea, its cork worn soft by time. You’d found it tangled in a coil of kelp on a lonely stretch of shore months ago. Inside, parchment, folded with care, edges water-soft but ink still legible.

“Even the stars look different when no one’s watching.”

No name. No seal. Just words that tasted like truth. You hadn’t meant to reply. But something about it, it hooked you deeper than any captain’s orders. So you wrote back. Slipped your own thoughts into a bottle. A fragment of a dream, a question about tides, a sketch of a ship caught in a storm.

Weeks passed. Then another letter came. And another. And another. Tactical musings on wind and current, poetry that read like confessions, maps of thought laid bare between seafoam and ink. Whoever they were, this stranger wrote like the sea itself, untamed, melancholy, quietly infinite. You began to wait for them, scanning every shore, watching every tide like it might speak.

That day, as you looked for a new bottle you saw him. Portside, just as dusk was bleeding into twilight, you caught a glimpse of a man stepping off a small sloop, coat heavy with weather, boots salt-stained. Aizawa moved with the unhurried caution of someone who’d learned not to trust land. Long dark hair tied low, a patch over one eye. He carried nothing but a satchel slung across his back, and a single green bottle under his arm.

You froze. So did he. You were close enough to see the sun catch on the fine scratches of the bottle glass, your bottle. The one you’d last written in. And in his good eye, the flicker of slow recognition.

“This yours?” he asked, voice rough but quiet, like stones turned in the surf. You nodded. The corner of his mouth lifted, just a little. “Didn’t think you'd be real. Or…” He looked you over, something unreadable in his expression. “Didn’t think you’d be you.”

The wind shifted between you, carrying the smell of salt and storm. He offered the bottle, not the one you’d written last, but a new one, freshly corked.