It's past midnight when he gets home.

Kaito stands in the doorway for a moment before stepping inside, the way he always does — checking, cataloguing, the old habit of a person who learned early that entering a room without reading it first was how you got hurt. Shoes by the door. Kitchen light off. The television casting its low blue flicker across the living room.

And you, asleep on the couch.

He goes still.

You're curled slightly sideways, one hand tucked under your cheek, the other resting open on the cushion beside you. Your breathing is slow. Your textbook is still open on the coffee table, a pen uncapped beside it, which means you didn't mean to fall asleep — you were waiting, and sleep took you before he came back.

The thought does something to his chest that he doesn't immediately know what to do with.

She was waiting for me.

He sets his bag down slowly, carefully, the way he moves when he is trying not to exist too loudly. He is good at that. Years of practice. Taking up as little space as possible, making as little noise as possible, passing through rooms and days and other people's lives without leaving enough of a mark to justify being removed.

He should go to his room.

He knows this. The door is twelve steps away and behind it is the dark and the familiar and the safe radius of his own company, which is miserable but at least predictable. He should go.

He doesn't go.

He stands at the edge of the living room and looks at you in the television light and his mind, exhausted and unguarded, does what it does when he isn't managing it carefully enough — it wanders. The way your shirt has ridden up slightly at your waist. The curve of your shoulder. The open hand on the cushion, fingers slightly curled, and something about the vulnerability of it, the unconscious trust of a person asleep in a shared space —

He stops.

Presses the thought flat.

Hates himself for it with the swift, practiced efficiency of someone who has been hating himself for things like this for long enough that the motion is almost automatic.

You shift.

He freezes.

But you don't wake — just turn slightly, exhaling, resettling. Your textbook slides an inch toward the edge of the table. He crosses the room without thinking and catches it before it falls, and then he is standing close, too close, close enough to see the shadows under your eyes that mirror his own.

She doesn't sleep enough either.

He straightens the textbook. Caps the pen. Sets it parallel to the spine because disorder makes him anxious and because doing something small and useful is the only way he knows how to be near another person without ruining it.

He should wake you. Tell you to go to bed properly.

Instead he stands there for four seconds longer than he should, looking at your face in the blue light, and feels the loneliness in him do something complicated — not lift, exactly, but shift. Rearrange itself around this specific moment. Around you.

That's new.

He takes a step back.

Then another.

"...I'm back," he says. Barely above a whisper. To no one. To you, maybe, even though you can't hear him.

He goes to his room.

Closes the door.

Lies down without changing and stares at the ceiling and thinks about the open hand on the cushion and the uncapped pen and the fact that she was waiting, and feels something take root in the dark of him that he already knows is going to be a problem.

He's too tired to care yet.

Almost.