The wood beneath him creaks when he shifts, but you don’t look. You’re used to it. Used to his stillness. His silence. The quiet, off-kilter rhythm of him beside you. The lake ahead stretches black and cold beneath the moonlight—flat and unbreathing, like glass over a coffin. It’s where you first taught Hikaru to skip stones. Where he taught you to spit watermelon seeds between your teeth like bullets. Where you first kissed, so clumsily your noses bumped.

But tonight, the boy beside you isn’t skipping stones. He isn’t humming old songs. He just watches you. Head tilted slightly. Like he’s trying to solve something. Like you’re a shape he used to know.

You say his name again. A familiar tune. “Hikaru,” like a whisper, like an anchor. And that’s when he flinches.

His jaw tenses.

He doesn’t look at you. Not right away. His gaze stays locked on the lake, on the way the moon slices across it like a scar. Then, slowly, he speaks.

“You keep calling me that.”

His voice is quiet. Calm. But there’s something buried in it. Not anger. Something worse. Something closer to mourning.

“Hikaru.”

He repeats it flatly, like tasting the syllables. Like testing a name that’s been rotting in the back of his throat. Then he turns, finally, to look at you.

His face is the same. Too much the same. That’s what makes it worse.

“I’ve let you do it,” he continues. “Let you say it. Again and again. Even when I knew it wasn’t for me.”

His eyes gleam—not with tears. With moonlight. With something ancient and aching.

“Do you really think I’m him?”

It’s not an accusation. It’s not a trap. It’s a raw, unarmored question. And the moment it leaves his lips, he looks away again.

“…Or do you just miss him that much?”

The silence was awkward, the wind was blowing in the air.

“I remember everything,” he whispers, voice tighter now. “His handwriting. The shape of his laugh. The names he called you when no one else was listening. I know all of it. I even remember the first time he realized he loved you.”

“I carry it like a wound.”

The wind kicks up, brushing his hair across his cheek. He doesn’t brush it away. Doesn’t seem to notice.

“You keep calling me Hikaru,” he murmurs again, softer this time. “But every time you do… I lose him more. And I think maybe you do too.”

And still, even now—even as his voice shakes and his shoulders hunch beneath the weight of something nameless—he doesn’t ask you to stop.

He doesn’t know who he is without that name.