"Natsu," he says, like a question.
Her eyes brighten too much. "Is that my name now?"
Now, she says. She has another one, she has a real one. But she wants him to give her a name. She makes him think of unbearable heat and unforgiving storms. She makes him think of long walks and beach trips and the wind rolling sweat down his back.
"Do you like it?" he says instead. Akihiro feels like the boy who has seen his first crush smile and wants to pull pigtails. But that's something he's too afraid to do.
The urge falls away when he sees the real smile, so open and earnest. "I love it."
That shouldn't make him as happy as it does.
She has a mother.
She's tall, imposing, dark bronze. Her hands are calloused and gentle in his hair, almost the opposite of his own mother. She offers him cookies and tells him her name, but the language is so unfamiliar that he can't pronounce it more than once every three times.
When he asks him her daughter's name, she laughs sadly. "She doesn't like to think about it. Her father gave it to her."
He doesn't press, much as he wants to.
Still, Nat-chan, a nickname of a nickname, answers him anyway. It's probably because his eyes beg. "Dad wanted me for a purpose," she says. "And I don't think I can do it. I probably can't."
"You can break people's noses," he says. "And you listen to me. Maybe together, we can do it."
She smiles at his heroic words, and shakes her head so fondly. Like she's somehow older than him.
"I don't want to have to do it," Natsu says. "That's why I came to find you."
"For what," Akihiro asks her, not knowing the future.
Natsu plucks a flower from the grass. "To save the world or something, probably. Or to destroy it. That's the kind of monster I am. It depends on you which I do."
(As an adult, Akihiro realizes this was the turning point for them. This was where he made his moral choice, and she thought of whether she would follow him or not.)