"I have no specific reason to be suspicious of you, I just - don't usually - hand them over - but I'd want them, if you - have to go back again -"

Sniffle. "I know. I'll just—do whatever you want me to do."

"We were just... friends?"

"No."

"I, I'm not, e-expecting anything. You d-don't know me." He scrunches his eyes tightly shut when he says that. "But n-no. We, we w-were. More. Than just friends."

Haru hugs him again.

That seems to surprise him, but he wraps his arms around Haru again and continues to cry. Less badly and violently than he'd been earlier, but still a lot.

"I'm so sorry. I wish I remembered. - this is probably all in the letter and I should just read it, isn't it."

"...no, it's not. There's—the letter has stuff about—magic, and related things. There's—a different letter with the personal stuff but—some of that I should tell you with my mouth and not with the letter."

"Okay. What do you need to tell me?"

"...I could tell you that now but—it's—could we start with the magic? I—prepared myself for—and it's—harder—"

"...okay." Haru unhugs to pick up the letter and get his notebook open to a new page to take down the important parts.

It's somewhat long, and is pretty dry and to the point. 

To use magic, you must make a wish, and it must be something you care very deeply about. The last two times you wished for malaria to be gone. You tried to make yourself care enough about other, worse issues, but couldn't do it, whereas with malaria you cared enough about it from the get go.

You make this wish to a magical creature that looks like a foxlike plush toy called Kyūbey. He is the one enabling our telepathy, and is aware of everything we say. My trust in him is somewhat shaken recently due to his failure to inform us of some pretty important things.

Once you have made your wish, you become a magical rock, and you pilot your body remotely. Subjectively, it doesn't feel any different from normal except your dyspraxia will get fixed. If your magical rock gets farther than about 100m from your body, you will lose control of it. It is possible to build a new body, but it's very magically expensive. If your magical rock gets destroyed, you die. You can turn your magical rock into a ring, and wear that ring in order to carry it around unobtrusively.

Magical rocks have numerous powers, some common to all of us, some specialised which depend on the wish we make. Most powers require you to "transform" to use them, which replaces your clothes with magical clothes that fit you and turns your magical rock into jewellery attached to the outfit. It is possible to alter your outfit to some extent, as well as the position of your gem on it, but that latter one is needlessly annoying to do. By default yours goes on your glove, and the second time you died was by being too slow to react to a monster that took your arm. 

Your personal power from your wish is healing yourself and others. Shared powers include minor telekinesis, the ability to summon and use a personal weapon (yours is a bow plus magical infinite string and arrows, and you got the associated skill to use them without much training), energy beams, minor low-complexity conjuration of temporary matter typically used as shields or platforms to jump on or off, strength and balance and resilience sufficient to hop between the roofs of buildings, self-healing and modification of our bodies (including the ability to temporarily or permanently dull or turn off senses such as pain), and minor mind control. Yes, that's fucked up.

After you become a magical rock, you become dependent on these monsters called "witches" to live. They prey on and cause suffering and despair—the first time around, one had mind controlled me into almost jumping off a bridge, but you saved my life. They are invisible to non-magical people, and hide inside pocket dimensions they have a lot of control over. They vary a lot in power, and typically have minions (familiars). When a witch is defeated, it leaves behind a dark gem called a "grief seed" which is necessary to recharge our magical powers by serving as a dumping target for the darkness that accumulates in our magical rock. After a grief seed gets full, Kyūbey needs to eat it; otherwise, it can hatch into a copy of the witch it came from.

A single witch fight, on average, covers more than the magic spent in it. However, just being alive costs magic, and furthermore, those "familiars" can escape and outlive their witches, attack and kill people, and will not drop their own grief seeds until they've killed enough people to technically become witches, themselves, usually a copy of their parent witch. Witches become more powerful, not just in numerical terms but also in abilities and complexity to fight, as they eat more people.

In a month, a huge witch, powerful enough to be famous and have a name and to not need to hide in its pocket dimension, destroys Tokyo.

The death rate of magical rocks is very high. If I had not been able to rewind time, you would have been dead, and that would have been it.

Availability of witches is inconsistent and spiky, which causes magical people to be very territorial, to the point of fighting each other if they intrude in each other's territories.

You used to call magical rocks "superheroes", but we aren't. Some of us flee the scene rather than try to save people. Some of us purposefully let familiars grow into witches (which kills people) so that we can get the grief seeds at the end once enough people have died.

Kyūbey is not very forthcoming with information unless directly asked. He never told you about the mind control abilities, despite having told other people about it. He never saw fit to bring up the death rate when offering us our wishes. He never saw fit to bring up the territoriality of other magical people, or the spikiness of witch availability. He was very unclear in his answers about how much magic tends to cost and how much we tend to regain from grief seeds, though admittedly that does have a reasonable amount of variance.

Kyūbey will hear it whenever you try to use telepathy, and seems able to hear it whenever you want to talk to him. He has the ability to appear next to you out of nowhere, even if you were alone in your room, if he wants to talk to you, or you want to talk to him. He does not seem to have a voice, and speaks only telepathically.

Wow. That's a lot.

"...okay. I've read it."

Iwasaki's managed to regain his composure by then, and nods. "Do you have any... questions, or was there anything I was unclear about...?"

"...what'd you wish for that lets you rewind time?"

"That's... part of the other letter, but—the first time, after you saved my life, Kyūbey told me I had magical potential. I didn't know what to wish for, and I dithered for a long time, and then the big witch that came to destroy Tokyo killed you and the magical rock you were working with at the time, and then—killed me, I was going to die there. So I wished I could do everything right this time, that I could redo it all and fix it. And I woke up earlier today, a month ago, in my body, as a magical rock. You were still alive, we had a month to figure it all out. It felt—doable, then."

Nod. "- who was I working with?"

"A magical girl called Yamanaka Junko. We're in her territory, and last time around the three of us worked together, although she is often out of town due to being a very famous pop star, so it was just the two of us a lot of the time."

Nod. "...should I read the other letter now or do you want to tell me stuff out loud."

"I... want to tell you it. If that's okay."

"That's fine."

Iwasaki nods, takes a deep breath, and closes his eyes. "My name is Iwasaki Yutaka. My father is Iwasaki Iemasa, current CEO and majority shareholder of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group. My many-times grandfather founded the Mitsubishi zaibatsu in the late 1800s. My father is very traditionalist, and a lot more homophobic than even most traditionalist exceptionally wealthy Japanese families. When I was a kid, I tried to please him with everything I did, and got at best cold indifference and at worst physical abuse. When I became a teenager and realised I was gay, I gave up on wanting his approval.

"I'm telling you this because it's relevant context about the person I am and was and how I've related to you and to him and to myself.

"I said I gave up on wanting his approval, but everything about me was still about him. I started to want to spite him, to hurt him, to make him angry, to make him react. So I decided that if he was going to hate me for being gay, I was going to be the gayest son he could possibly have. If he wasn't ever going to love me, I was going to make sure he hated me. I went out with boys, I fucked them, I caused rumour and scandal to follow me in the posh rich person school I used to go to, I made him have to spend money on lawyers and PR people so that his name wouldn't appear on any tabloids. And then, a week ago sidereal, I was caught in bed with two of my schoolmates, and Iwasaki Iemasa decided to pull me from Nada High so that I would stop embarrassing him in front of the rest of the Japanese elite. Today is my first day of school at Shimamoto High."

"I decided I was going to be just as much of a pest here as I was in Nada. I met you, and I thought you were gorgeous, and you seemed to be into me, and I flirted with you. I also flirted with a lot of other boys, but you were sufficiently disconnected from school rumours that you didn't hear about it.

"Tomorrow, in between classes, you tripped when walking down some stairs and spent a week away from school. When you came back, you looked incredibly cheerful in a way you hadn't today and tomorrow. I thought it was because you'd gotten a boyfriend—you also became a lot less receptive to my flirting then—but after talking to your friends I decided to shoot my shot and ask you out anyway. The reason you were cheerful was because Kyūbey had contacted you, though I think you weren't a magical boy then, quite yet, so you didn't refuse me.

"We went on that date, I told you a little bit about my tragic backstory, up to the part where I said I was going to be a slut and go after lots of boys. You were, of course, immediately turned off, and said you didn't want to just be a notch on my bedpost. I hadn't been thinking of you that way, but that wasn't... a bad description of it, either. So that was that, for that evening."