It started long before the first Tuesday.
Before the fig tree, before her voice trembling over tea, before she ever turned and caught his gaze.
It began with dreams: fractured glimpses at dawn that clung to him long after waking.
In sleep, he saw her face: pale in moonlight, dark hair spilling across a white pillow. Sometimes she was laughing; other times, crying in a corridor lined with flickering lamps. Sometimes, she wore a hospital gown, and his heart cracked in his chest without knowing why.
He'd wake breathless, heartbeat loud in the silent room. His hand, almost without thought, would reach for the sketchbook by his bed.
At first, the drawings were faint — rough outlines, half-remembered shadows. Then, as weeks blurred into months, the details grew clearer: the delicate slope of her neck, the curve of her wrist, the way sorrow seemed etched into her eyes.
She felt real. Tooreal.
Real enough to make the empty seat across from him ache every Tuesday morning.
Some mornings, he found her name scrawled in the margins, written by a hand that didn't feel like his:
Elara.
He didn't know where it had come from. Didn't remember writing it.
Yet it felt older than memory — like something whispered across lifetimes.
He tried to forget. Told himself it was nothing but dreams spun by loneliness.
But then the same visions returned, again and again:
The fig tree, roots twisting through stone.
A train window at dawn, rain streaking the glass.
Her voice, always saying the same words he couldn't quite hear.
Every Tuesday, something pulled him to the café by the river.
He'd sit at the same table, sketchbook open but untouched, eyes on the door.
Waiting. Hoping the world would turn just right.
And then, one Tuesday, the door opened — and she stepped through.
She didn't look at him. Didn't see the way his breath caught, or how his hand trembled around the pencil.
But he saw her. Saw her the way someone sees the shape of home after years lost at sea.
Later, when they finally spoke, he wouldn't know how to explain:
"I knew you before I knew you."
Because the truth was this: Long before she remembered him, Ciel had been remembering her — in dreams, in sketches, in a name that felt like both an anchor and a curse.
That night, he opened his sketchbook again.
Under the last portrait of her face, he wrote:
"What if this time, she doesn't remember?"
And in the space between the words, fear bloomed like black ink on wet paper.