Prologue:

The origin of a name

I have never complained about my life.

I have never needed to. I have been perfectly happy with the life I have been leading (Well, at least for the past year). And I have never wanted to change it for the world.

I was just a normal fifteen (soon to be sixteen) year old with certain dreams that I hid from my best friends for my own, personal reasons.

Normally, I was the most open of people, never hiding anything from anyone who called themselves my friends and genuinely cared about me, but this one thing was way too hurtful for me to reveal them.

Only my mother knew what happened, but she didn't know about my dream.

Nor did she know about my dream dreams, the dreams you have when you're asleep.

It had all started when I recalled the story she told me when she was in a particularly bubbly mood and locked up in her own fantasy world.


"Yuu-chan! Do you know where you name comes from?"

"It comes from somewhere?" the seven year old me had asked when my mother had burst into the room with figurative flowers dancing all around her head.

"Mama was in a real bind at a street corner in Boston and I was about to have you. I was thinking: Oh no! What am I going to do? Am I going to have to give birth right here? - you see, your mama was trying to hail a taxi and no-one was available. Then, this super-cool young fencer who didn't look must older than eighteen was kind enough to share his taxi with me." she had said this with an even more dazed expression on her face.

Mom had been twenty three when she had had me, so the thought of her crushing on a guy five years younger than her was a little creepy.

"He was so comforting." my mom continued. "He told me: 'A child born in July are blessed. Weathering the summer makes them grow up strong and just as warm as the season.' and then, he a looked up at me and said: 'In my hometown, the month of July is pronounced Yuuri.' and his smile was so kind, genuine and sweet that the name just stuck with me." with her fingers woven together, my mother looked down at me again. "So you see, your name doesn't have anything to do with the Lily flower or anything along those lines, of course I couldn't name you something like that!"

I had actually been wondering weather or not that had been the case because I had just recently discovered that my name was spelled exactly like the Lily flower, some of my classmates were even teasing me because I was apparently a flower in my parents eyes. To think that the name had been given to me by a seventeen year old stranger was actually a little more unnerving.

"So you see Yuu-chan." mom continued. "You were born in July, and that is why you are Yuuri." her smile had brightened even more (if that was even possible). "Don't you think it's adorable? Can't you feel all of Mama's love for you?" I have never been able to fully understand that part, as the name had been given to me by a stranger, how did that translate to mom loving me any more than I already knew she did? "Yuuri, born in July... isn't it lovely? Don't you think it's a little like the sort of name a dreamy beauty would have in a romance novel?" I remember that I didn't understand what she meant then, and I had tried to ask, but she had been too caught up in her own day-dreams to notice it. "Yuuri." she just mused. "Ah, it's so wonderful I feel all glowing whenever I say it." and that was the end of the conversation.


About a week ago, I was suddenly reminded of that conversation, and from that moment on, I have been plagued by the strangest of dreams.

Dreams that, for some reason, believes that I'm a teenage boy.


A/N: Please tell me what you think.