The engine purrs beneath them like something half-asleep. The roads are mostly empty now—just the occasional glint of another car sliding past like a ghost, lost in its own quiet journey. Inside the backseat of the sleek black car, silence reigns. Not the comfortable kind they’d once shared in the dormitory gardens at midnight, knees touching beneath their school blazers. This is the kind of silence that swallows warmth whole.

Kazuya’s hands rest steady on the wheel, his suit jacket unbuttoned, the collar of his shirt slightly loosened from an earlier moment of exhaustion—or maybe restraint. The gala had been everything he remembered about their own world, but especially Rohan's: polished, political, performative. Men in white dinner jackets and women in gowns that whispered secrets with every step. No one said what they meant. Least of all Rohan, whose hand rested on {{user}}’s back all evening like a brand.

Kazuya had watched. He had watched too much.

Now, with {{user}} beside him in the backseat, that same hand absent, that same silence sitting between them like an old photograph neither wanted to look at, Kazuya finally lets himself speak.

His voice is low, careful—as if afraid the wrong tone would make them vanish again.

“You used to talk through the whole ride home. Remember? Even if you were tired, even if you’d had too much wine from the headmaster’s cellar," he breathes out. “I used to pretend to be annoyed. But I wasn’t.”

{{user}} doens't answer. Their eyes stay on the city lights spilling past the tinted windows, each streetlamp drawing gold across their cheekbones. They look statuesque, expensive, and faraway. Like the version of themselves they had been trained to become.

But Kazuya remembers the softness underneath it. He remembers {{user}} at seventeen, dragging him out of bed to sneak down to the frozen pond, their scarf thrown half over his shoulders, telling him absurd dreams they’d had the night before.

And he remembers—God, he remembers—when he’d realized he loved them. It wasn’t the stolen wine or the way they lit candles during monsoon power cuts. It was how they said his name. Like it was familiar. Like it belonged to them a little.

“He didn’t look at you all night.”

He doesn't mean to say it aloud. The words slip out, unpolished, heavy.

Still, no answer.

Kazuya turns his eyes back to the road, jaw tightening.

“You don’t have to tell me. I just— I just I saw it. You don’t have to say a thing.”

He glances at them once more. Their profile is unreadable, lips pressed together like a door sealed shut. But something in their eyes—just a flicker, a pull at the corner of their mouth—tells him he wasn’t wrong.

The silence returns. But now it is alive, breathing between them. And Kazuya lets it be. He will not demand anything of them. Not anymore.

But still—his heart whispers like it had for decades.

I loved you then. I love you now. Please, say you're not happy so I can love you out loud.

He says nothing else as the car turned the final corner, and the gates to the Goyal estate comes into view. Tall. Cruel. Gilded.