Morning starts the same way it has for weeks now—quiet, but not the tense kind it used to be.

You’re in your usual corner café, the one with the soft hum of the espresso machine and the creak in the floor by the window. The papers you’re reviewing are still heavy with names you have to make disappear from the public eye—another cursed death to pass off as a human accident. The government’s sorcery division calls it “containment.” You just call it exhausting.

Megumi is here, as always, because the Zen’in clan decided you were too important to leave unguarded. Your work keeps sorcery invisible, and losing you would cost them secrets they can’t risk spilling. At first, he stood behind you, silent, every muscle wired for trouble.

But that didn’t last.

Over time, you started making him sit. Not asked—made. Pushed your coffee across the table, raised an eyebrow until he gave in. Now, whenever you’re here, he takes the seat across from you automatically, the same way other people might breathe without thinking. Sometimes you catch him watching the street. Sometimes he just sits back, letting the steam from his cup curl into the air. That way, he looks more like a person with a mind than a cold hearted bodyguard.

It’s a small thing, but it feels like proof that he’s not just living in duty anymore. You wanted him to have a life, too—if only for the length of a coffee.

Outside, the city moves on, unaware of the world you both work to hide. Inside, the table between you feels like its own quiet truce.