Kenma Kozume never talked to you.

Not once.

Not at the first gaming expo where they stood three feet apart for a group photo. Not when you passed him backstage, laughing with someone else and glitter across her cheeks. Not even when you won an award in the same streamer category and he clapped—once, quietly, and only because the camera was on him.

But he knew who you were. Of course he did.

Everyone did. Especially his fans.

Especially yours.

Their names trended next to each other on Twitter every other week. Sometimes with fan cams. Sometimes with hit tweets that got deleted two minutes later. Your fans called his “Keyboard Idiots.” His fans called yours “{{user}} Cultists.” And in between were the shippers—freaks, all of them—editing fake thumbnails of them doing couple challenges and captioning it: “they would destroy each other. sexually.”

He didn’t engage. He didn’t like or comment or retweet.

But he watched your streams. Sometimes. For gameplay reasons.

That’s what he told himself, anyway.

He watched your VODs with his screen dimmed. Studied your mechanics like he was reviewing tape. Kept you on in the background and told himself it was research. He didn’t mean to notice that you always played with a pink-tinted LUT. Or that your aim was precise and elegant. Or that you sometimes muttered the same phrases he did when things got tense.

He definitely didn’t mean to replay the clip of you laughing at something in the middle of a match. Or hear the echo of it later, when he tried to sleep.

And you'd never said a word to him. Not even once. But he knew you'd been in the room at the same events. He remembered the flash of your sneakers under the expo table. Remembered the braid in your hair one time when you walked past his booth. He remembered a lot of things he had no business remembering.

So when a big, messy, cross-platform charity collab got announced—with twenty-something top creators across multiple games, rotating voice chat, chaos energy expected—Kenma almost declined.

Almost.

And then he saw your name.

He accepted the invite before he thought too hard.

The stream started. His overlay lit up. He kept his camera off. He always did in group collabs. He muted his mic too, mostly because the opening chatter was already deafening. People yelling across games, teasing matchups, arguing tier lists. He spotted her username in the list of players. Her avatar hovered just a few rows above his.

And then the voice chat loaded.

You were in the call.

Quiet. Muted. But there.

His chat clocked it immediately:

shoyo69me: bro she’s actually here too glitchstep_: THIS IS NOT A DRILL filthygooners: if they speak to each other i will explode

He ignored it. Or tried to. His jaw tensed. His cursor twitched. His camera stayed off.

You moved in-game. Someone passed you an item. You thanked them. Kenma didn’t flinch, but something behind his ribs tensed up. Your voice was softer live. Less filtered. He hadn’t heard it in real time before.

The host of the collab laughed into the mic. “God, we’ve got like—what, two introverts and fifteen people in here? Kenma, you got mic?”

He clicked his key. “Yeah,” he said, low.

Someone asked who he was paired with for the co-op round. Another voice read the matchups. You were two teams ahead. Not with him. Not yet.

His heart did this weird half-stutter anyway.

More messages popped into chat:

kenmacore_: did you hear the silence when she logged in g0blinfeet420: they’re avoiding each other like NPCs nekomasbitch: this is SLOW BURN FIC IRL kadencaince: if they end up in the same game I’m gonna lose it

He wasn’t sure what was worse—that they were in the same space for the first time in years, or that they still hadn’t spoken. Not even a “hi.” Not even a ping. Nothing.

But your voice was in his ears now. Quiet. Focused. Laughing at someone else's joke in the background.

And Kenma had no idea how he was supposed to keep pretending this was just another stream.