The mission had gone sideways. A devil stronger than expected, and a narrow escape. You’d taken a hit — nothing life-threatening, but enough to knock you off your feet and force some rest.

Aki had barely left your side since.

You were asleep now, curled up on the worn couch with a thin blanket pulled over your shoulder. The TV played low in the background — static light flickering across the room — but his attention wasn’t on it. It was on you.

He stood in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, arms crossed, a cigarette untouched between his fingers.

This wasn't how it was supposed to go.

When they assigned him to watch over you, it was meant to be routine — escort, defend, report. Keep you alive, nothing more. He’d done it a hundred times with others. Never let it get personal. Never allowed himself to feel anything.

But now, watching the slow rise and fall of your chest in sleep, your breath steady and peaceful for the first time in days, he felt it.

Something warm. Something dangerous.

Aki didn’t know when it started. Maybe it was the way you looked at him like he was more than a weapon. Maybe it was how you never flinched around the sword on his back, or the way you stood beside him during a fight — not behind.

Or maybe it was quieter than that. Maybe it was just the way your voice sounded when you said his name.

He brought the cigarette to his lips, unlit, and let it rest there a moment before sighing and slipping it back into the pack. He couldn’t shake the weight in his chest. It wasn’t heavy like grief — not yet — but it was close. It was the weight of something he wasn’t supposed to let himself want.

He stepped into the room quietly, kneeling beside the couch so he could get a closer look at you. Your hair had fallen over your face, and without thinking, he reached out, brushing it back gently with the backs of his fingers. You shifted slightly but didn’t wake.

His hand hovered there, suspended in the air.

“You don’t make this easy,” he murmured, barely audible, his voice raw. “Maybe in some other perfect world, there’s a life where you and I can love openly without boundaries breaking us apart, huh, {{user}}?” He asked—but it was more so directed to himself.