Yo! say

Alioth is the only son and eldest child of Ranmaru and Chilka, and has a younger sister named Alhena. He often puts too much pressure on himself, trying desperately to ‘live up’ to the legacies of his fathers, but they just want him to be himself, and happy. Although he presents much like a Lux fairy, he inherited powers of darkness from Chilka, and is currently poor at controlling them. He takes Chilka’s birth surname.

Honami is the only child of Homura and Uruu, and a fairly well-adapted boy. He is very prideful of the unusual way his powers have manifested as an Aqua-Ignis child. He finds himself caught between the still somewhat rocky relations of his parent clans, but it doesn’t seem to bother him all that much. He has a protective nature, something instilled in him by Homura, but is a bit dense at knowing when to take a step back. He takes both of his father’s surnames, alternating depending on which lands he is spending time in.

Ranmaru’s thoughts and feelings are kept secret to the viewer, and I theorize that it is because otherwise we would know everything that had occurred in the past. Takara talks to him in a way to bait him into saying something incriminating— bait he does not take, but only after a moment’s hesitation. He is acutely aware of Sirius’s presence since episode 2, seeming surprised and bothered by it. He is never shown questioning the strange things Sirius says to him, even as they grow far more personal.

Then we reach episode 11, and while it could be surmised that his memories are returning on their own after being triggered from seeing Sirius again in person, there is something very… suspicious in that when things go wrong, he knows right away exactly where to go and who to look for.

If we are to suppose that Ranmaru still has his amnesia, it seems absurdly strange that he would not only know where the source is of all this dark energy, but also the very person causing it, as the two of them have never ‘met’ before in these bodies.

Perhaps it’s an instinctual thing, perhaps Ranmaru can naturally sense dark magic where the others can’t… or perhaps he never really forgot, and recognized that it was a message from Sirius to come see him. Something to tell him that Sirius was done ‘playing games’ and would start causing far more severe problems for humans if Ranmaru did not come to him personally.

The place they meet again is not a location Sirius would think is meaningful for them together, —rather it is far more meaningful for Sirius specifically, being the place he met and lost the woman he loved—  but it is still a very significant place for them to reunite.

Of course, it is meaningful to Betelgeuse too, albeit in a horrible, upsetting way. But Sirius was never aware that Betelgeuse had been with him on that day all that time ago, and Ranmaru knows that.

Betelgeuse in the past seemed to already be aware that it was a place that Sirius liked (or perhaps had simply followed him the whole way when Sirius wanted to propose to his girlfriend), and with it being one of the only more private places shown in the flashback, yet still a place where it wouldn’t be unusual to run into another person, it would be obvious for Sirius to choose it as the place to call Ranmaru back to. And Ranmaru, knowing the location’s importance to Sirius, would naturally gravitate towards it when going to seek him out.

And Ranmaru never says anything to Sirius during their encounter. Beyond uttering his names, Ranmaru doesn’t say a single word to him throughout the whole thing, he doesn’t even physically do anything until he reaches up to touch Sirius during their kiss. All of this sounds improbable, when you would think that Ranmaru would at this point, after everything that has happened in the past few episodes, start asking questions first.

You would expect some manner of hostility, of caution, after Sirius’ blatant acts of violence and even outright threatening him the episode prior, but there is none. Ranmaru in these scenes does not act like someone who is missing his memory and wants to know what lay underneath himself.

In fact, he never has. The concept of his past and memories seem to mean remarkably little to him, he is never truly questioning anything that might have occurred in the past… but this could all be very normal if he simply wants to pretend those things never existed. He has no interest in his ‘memories’ and ‘past’ because he chooses to ignore them and live in the present, with the life he wants to have over the one that only means trauma and suffering to him.

Instead, Ranmaru listens, throughout this whole scene, as Sirius recounts their past together. From the moment they arrived in the human world, until the moment they separated, seemingly for good. And despite the firm but collected way Ranmaru has held himself through their whole encounter, it is when Sirius brings up the woman he loved that Ranmaru’s expression changes, just the slightest. His eyes begin to waver, and if you take it from the perspective that he already knows everything Sirius is telling him, it is that he knows what comes next in the story, and doesn’t want to have to endure it again.

Maybe Ranmaru’s silence through all of this isn’t that he wanted to know about his ‘missing’ past, but that he wanted to know what Sirius’s perception had been of their life together.

He wants to know what Sirius thought of him.

But in the entire episode, their close friendship is barely shown during flashbacks. When told from Hojo’s perspective, it is irrelevant to mention this aspect while talking with the others, but with Sirius, who wanted to just ‘talk about the past for a while’?

Ranmaru could very well be sorely hurt by the fact that Sirius does not talk about how the two of them had been to each other, but does go into detail to tell him about the woman he loved, whose presence inadvertently caused Betelgeuse so much pain.

After their kiss it is assumed that Ranmaru’s memories have come back to him, and whether or not he already had them is irrelevant from this point on, but the curiosity still stands. Perhaps Ranmaru really didn’t know anything, and perhaps he knew everything.

And in the end, who is Betelgeuse, and who is Ranmaru? It’s a difficult question to answer, because they are different people, but also the same. They are not separate personalities in the way one might traditionally think, rather in this case I would believe that ‘Ranmaru’ might not have existed initially, where all along throughout the story it has just been Betelgeuse with a new name and a slightly different body. But in the end, he has become ‘Ranmaru’ in his entirety, allowing himself to put his past as Betelgeuse to rest to begin his new life, finally as the person he wants to be, living the life he wants to live.

He will always be the man that loved and suffered, nothing can change his past as it panned out, but he is allowed to change his future.