Chapter 70: Chapter 69 — Not the Prince
It surfaced, as it often did, during something small.
A campus event — a senior showcase Haruka had agreed to participate in, a panel discussion about student leadership that several professors had specifically requested her for, citing her "exemplary composure and presence" as a model for incoming students.
She’d sat through it with practiced grace, answering questions about discipline and confidence and the particular pressures of standing out, and had walked away from it feeling, as she often did after these events, like she’d performed a version of herself rather than actually been present as herself.
She mentioned this to Kaito that evening, almost in passing, the kind of comment she might once have kept entirely to herself.
"They asked me to talk about confidence," she said, sitting on the floor of their shared room, back against the high wall she’d come to love. "I gave the same answer I always give. Posture, presence, the things people expect from someone who looks like I look." She paused. "I don’t think anyone there actually wanted to know what I think confidence really feels like. They wanted the prince. The performance."
"What does it actually feel like," he asked. "To you."
She considered the question seriously.
"Honestly? Like constant management," she said. "Making sure I take up the right amount of space. Making sure I don’t seem too tall, too composed, too anything that might make someone else feel small." She looked at her hands. "I’ve been managing that since I was twelve. I don’t actually know what it would feel like to just exist without calculating the effect."
He listened, the weight of this settling into him with the particular seriousness he gave things that mattered.
"Do you think that’s what I love," she said suddenly, the question surprising even her. "The performance? The prince? Sometimes I wonder if that’s what attracted you in the first place — the same thing that attracts everyone. The composure, the height, the thing people project onto me."
"Haruka—"
"I’m not trying to manufacture a problem," she said quickly. "I just — sometimes I worry that even you, even here, even in this house where everyone’s supposed to actually know each other, fell for the version of me that’s easiest to see from outside. Not the actual, complicated, uncertain person underneath it."
He was quiet for a long moment, taking this seriously rather than rushing to dismiss it.
"I need to show you something," he said finally. "Not tell you. Show you. Will you trust me?"
She looked at him, something in his expression steady and certain despite the uncertainty she’d just confessed.
"Always," she said.
He didn’t tell her where they were going.
They drove for nearly an hour, the city giving way gradually to quieter roads, until they arrived at a small, unremarkable building on the outskirts of a residential district — a community center, the kind of place that hosted evening classes and neighborhood meetings, nothing about it suggesting significance.
"What is this," she said, looking at the building with confusion.
"Come inside," he said.
The main hall was empty except for a single chair set in the center of the room, the lights dimmed except for a soft spotlight angled toward it.
"Sit," he said.
She did, uncertain, watching him with growing curiosity as he moved to a small projector setup at the back of the room.
"I’ve been collecting these for weeks," he said. "With help from people who know you better than I sometimes do. Watch."
The projector clicked on, the wall ahead of her filling with an image — a photo, slightly grainy, of Haruka at nine years old, sitting alone under a tree at recess, drawing something in a notebook with intense concentration.
"Where did you—" she started.
"Your mother," he said. "She had old photo albums. This one’s you at nine, apparently drawing dinosaurs because you’d just decided you wanted to be a paleontologist. According to her, you stayed up three nights researching the correct number of teeth in a T-Rex’s jaw before a school presentation, because you refused to present anything you weren’t certain was accurate."
The image changed.
A slightly older Haruka, maybe thirteen, standing awkwardly at the edge of a school dance, clearly uncomfortable in a dress, her height already a source of visible self-consciousness even in the photograph’s stillness.
"Your aunt sent this one," he said. "She said you told her, that night, that you hated being tall because boys looked scared of you instead of interested. She said you cried about it in the car ride home, and she didn’t know what to say to make it better."
Haruka’s hand had come up to her mouth, watching her own childhood unfold across the wall.
The images continued — Haruka at her first track meet, gangly and uncertain before she’d grown into her height properly. Haruka at sixteen, her composure visibly beginning to harden into the protective shell she’d carry forward. Haruka receiving some academic award, her smile careful, measured, already practiced.
"I asked your parents, your aunt, a few old classmates I tracked down through Satsuki’s help," he said. "I wanted to see you before the prince. Before the management. I wanted to understand the actual person underneath all of it."
The final image appeared — recent, taken without her knowledge, a photo someone in the house had apparently captured during the rainy day weeks earlier, Haruka laughing genuinely at something Hana had said, completely unguarded, her composure entirely absent, replaced by something open and real.
"This is who I fell for," he said, the projector light catching her face as she stared at the image. "Not the prince. The girl who researched dinosaur teeth for three nights because accuracy mattered to her. The girl who cried in a car about feeling too tall to be loved properly. The girl who, on a rainy afternoon in our living room, forgot to manage anything and just laughed."
Haruka was crying now, the careful composure she usually maintained completely abandoned.
"I never told anyone about the dinosaur teeth," she said. "How did my mother even remember that."
"Because it mattered to her," he said. "The same way every single thing about you matters to me. Not the height. Not the presence. The actual, complicated, particular person who exists underneath all of it."
He knelt in front of her chair.
"Tachibana Haruka," he said. "I’ve spent weeks tracking down proof that you’ve always been more than what people see from outside. I want to spend the rest of my life being the person who actually sees the rest of it — the uncertainty, the dinosaur facts, the version of you that exists when you forget to manage anything at all."
He produced the ring, the stone simple, the band slightly wider than the others’ — deliberately substantial, refusing to be delicate in a way that might have suggested he wanted her to be smaller.
"Will you marry me," he said. "Not the prince. You. Specifically and completely you."
Haruka slid from the chair onto her knees in front of him, no longer caring about composure, about height, about managing anything at all.
"Yes," she said. "Yes, you absolute— how did you even find half of this, yes, completely yes."
She kissed him there, on the floor of an empty community center, the projector still humming quietly behind them, the image of her laughing on a rainy day frozen on the wall, watching over the moment like proof finally made visible.
"I’m going to call my mother," Haruka said eventually, laughing through tears. "I can’t believe she gave you the dinosaur photo."
"She cried when she found it," Kaito admitted. "She said she’d always hoped someone would eventually want to know that version of you too."
Haruka looked at the ring, then at the frozen image on the wall, then at him.
"I think I just learned what it feels like," she said quietly. "Existing without calculating the effect."
"How does it feel," he asked.
She considered this, the question landing somewhere genuinely new.
"Terrifying," she said. "And good. Mostly good."
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