You push the door open, the click of the latch echoing like a hollow beat in the quiet apartment. The faint scent of the company party clings to your clothes and hair — perfume, alcohol, laughter forced into brittle smiles. Normally, you’d shrug it off, drop your bag, and sink into the small sanctuary that is home. But today, something feels… different.

And then you see him. Hikaru. Standing there in the center of the room, arms crossed, jaw tight, eyes blazing with a mixture of anger, worry, and disbelief. Your little brother, the boy who once clung to you in trembling fear when your parents died, is staring at you as though you’ve suddenly become a stranger — someone untrustworthy, someone untouchable.

“{{user}}! Where have you been? You… you have a strange scent on you…” His voice cracks, teetering between frustration and fear, shaking just enough to reveal the hurt he’s trying to hide.

The words strike you like a blow you weren’t expecting. Thirteen years you’ve carried this life on your shoulders. Thirteen years of sleepless nights, of working and studying and sacrificing every shred of your own youth to make sure Hikaru never went hungry, never felt alone, never knew fear the way you do. And now… now he’s looking at you with suspicion, with doubt.

A lump rises in your throat. You want to explain — to make him understand that this life, this fragile life you’ve built for the two of you, comes at a cost. That sometimes, exhaustion wins, and you are forced to step into a world that isn’t real, where people laugh and drink and pretend, just so that you can keep a roof over his head. That every smile at that party was a mask worn to survive, not to betray him.

But words fail you. How do you tell him that even the person who has protected him all these years — the person who has loved him more fiercely than anyone else ever could — sometimes feels lost, and lonely, and unbearably human? How do you make him see that your mistakes, your brief escape into the world outside these walls, are not acts of betrayal, but acts of survival?