Rationally, Hachiman Hikigaya was one hundred percent certain that, with Yukino Yukinoshita's pride and resilience, she would never allow herself to live in the shadow of any "other person's" story, whether it was another "herself" from a Parallel World or anyone else's expectations.
But emotions were sometimes unreasonable.
That was why he worried.
It was like knowing that a fledgling eagle would eventually soar, yet still holding one's breath when it first spread its wings; like knowing that ice and snow could blanket everything, yet still worrying whether that excessively biting cold would wound her instead.
He recalled the Yukino Yukinoshita of the beginning.
Beautiful, proud, and upright, yet also sharp in her innocence of the world. She had clumsily charged through interpersonal relationships, convinced of an absolute and lonely "correctness."
Back then, she, like him, had many obvious "flaws": her lack of frankness, her excessive seriousness, her inability to express herself, and the way she could easily hurt others while isolating herself.
They had been drawn to each other, collided with each other, and without realizing it, had been shaped and changed by those "flaws."
The Yukinoshita of the beginning had also possessed many "flaws." It was simply that neither he nor she had truly cared about them then.
Through the tempering of time and their adjustment to one another, some of those "flaws" had settled into unique charms, some had been gently accepted, and some had quietly transformed.
They had not become perfect. Rather, as they accepted each other's imperfections, they had built a strong bond that belonged to them alone.
What worried him was that the emotions born from knowing of "another possibility" would be like an ill-timed seed falling onto the soil of her heart before it had fully unfolded. Even if she was determined to