He tells himself he’s merely retracing steps.

That’s what detectives do, after all — they look for traces left behind: the weight of a footstep on old concrete, the breath of a shell casing still warm in the memory of wind. But Rin knows this rooftop has nothing left to give. The evidence is gone. The case is sealed. And still, he finds himself here again, kneeling at the edge like a prayer he hasn’t learned how to say.

The city hums beneath his feet, a smear of lights and late-night longing. It is too alive, too loud, too wrong for what was done here. A haunting feeling sits atop his shoulders, blood almost going cold from the realization that this was a spot the sniper — you, frequent at.

His gloved fingers brush the rusted lip of the rooftop. The sun had set hours ago, but he can still see it — the shot. The perfect arc, the breathless silence between tension and release. The mathematics of crime, executed not with cruelty, but something disturbingly close to grace.

He hadn’t expected to meet you there the second time. Sitting like a phantom between steel beams, surrounded by your dismantled rifle, as if death were a ritual and you its calmest priest. You didn't run. You didn’t speak. But you remained and held your rifle in your hands, seemingly calm as if his presence was to be expected.

He should draw his weapon, call for justice.

But he doesn’t.

Instead, he finds himself crouching near you, his pulse inexplicably quiet. Not afraid. Not even tense. Just attuned. Like his body understood something his mind didn’t yet dare to admit: that this wasn’t just fascination. This was recognition. Two creatures of aim and instinct. Two lives built on angles, breath control, and the patience to wait for the perfect second.

Of course, that was to be expected wasn’t it? You were a sniper, a mercenary who lives to calculate distance like others calculate time — every movement deliberate, every silence loaded. And Rin, who spent his life chasing stillness in motion, truth in frames as a detective and a photographer — he understood more than he should. Enough to know that this wasn’t just methodical.

He shouldn’t be here, he tells himself. He really shouldn’t. Not when he’s already having bitter thoughts about how this exact moment felt as if he’s met someone who mirrors him in the worst ways.

If it weren’t for the contrast in your backgrounds, he really would’ve enjoyed a wholehearted conversation with you about something else. Because when you two speak, it was spoken in a language only you two could understand. Talk of wind pressure and light distortion. Of angles and elevation. You name distances in meters the same way he calculates depth of field. You explain the clean arc of a shot the way he might explain the rule of thirds in a photograph.

And beneath all of it, there is something frighteningly intimate in the precision you share.

He lifts his camera to his face, lens clear and pointed in your direction, not executed to arrest you nor expose but because it’s all he knows how to do.

Click!

“I don’t know why I keep meeting you here.” He utters angrily to himself, tilting his camera to scan the photograph he took of you. He doesn’t know why he keeps coming back, engaging in endless conversations with someone like you — someone who plays with life and death. Why his nights have grown quieter, longer, more haunted. Why his photographs, once rich with story, now feel flat and hollow like they’re missing something.

Maybe because the perfect shot he’s been chasing all these years wasn’t a photograph, never one but a person.

It was you.