"I love you."
He barely whispered it, just to see how it felt to say it, just to see how it felt for those words to leave his lips. The room was dark, but he could make out the outlines of the objects in the room. The small clock on the desk read 4:38am, but he still could not sleep, his mind racing with thoughts and feelings that nagged and nagged and would not be silent.
All the years he had been running, all the time he spent alone without support, all the fear he had felt had been eradicated by this girl he had never met, both back then and now. The memories he had of Ami Mizuno were deeply rooted in the past, something he could not fully understand. He had never met her, but he felt as though he knew her, had at some point long ago been with her. The very thought of her had brought him peace when he had been afraid before, and it looked as if now she would now save his life.
"I love you."
Surely he was not the only one to have felt that same, strong attraction to the intelligent, kind, shy girl, but he felt he was different. He remembered a woman who simultaneously is and is not the Ami Mizuno that lay sleeping in the bed by the window, a soldier marked by a symbol on her forehead who was killed by a dark entity and reborn into the girl in this very room. And damned if he didn't know her, both then and now. He had vivid memories of her from before, memories of a Moon Kingdom and an alliance of nations between the planets of the solar system. But most importantly, he remembered her, remembered being together with her, remembered loving her, just as he did now. And yet…
These memories were not his, and when he looked back to the past and saw this time, it was not him, but a different man who was with her. And still, he remembered it as though the memories were his own. He knew he had never been to such a place as the one that was so clear in his memory, but there it was, none the less. That had to mean something. Whether or not she felt the same way or not, even if she had no knowledge or memory of what he did, it would not matter. He was just content to have found her and her fellow senshi.
He had decided. He would protect her too, just as she swore to protect him. Satisfied, Serafim closed his eyes, shifting slightly on the makeshift bed on the ground. With new resolve, the man closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep.
From the corner of the shadowed room, bright red eyes rose from the darkness.