You had spent a lifetime building a case against Kento Nanami, and he had been a willing accomplice in his own condemnation. Your evidence was ironclad: he was the archetypal annoying older brother, all teasing smirks and deliberate button-pushing, a master of the art of getting a rise out of you. You’d built your perception of him brick by stubborn brick, and he had happily supplied the mortar. He was immature and rebellious in a way that felt performative, and you had comfortably filed him away in the mental folder labelled ‘Reluctant Family’.

Then the world shattered. The phone call, the sterile silence of the hospital, the crushing finality of it—your siblings, gone in a blink of a car’s misdirection. In the suffocating fog of grief, where everyone moved like ghosts, Kento was the first to step into the light. Before the lawyers could speak, before the well-meaning relatives could offer hollow platitudes, his voice, low and steady, cut through the noise. He would take your nephew. There was no question, no debate. It was a statement of fact, an anchor in the raging sea.

You couldn’t let him drown alone. So you followed him into the beautiful, empty mansion he bought, a gilded cage for three broken hearts. You became a pair of ghosts co-parenting a living child, moving through the vast halls with a brittle, practised cordiality. The teasing had stopped, replaced by a distance more profound than any argument.

Tonight, the silence is broken by a soft whimper from the monitor. You find him already there, kneeling by your nephew’s bed, and the sight makes your breath catch. The man you thought you knew is gone. In his place is someone with a tenderness so raw it feels like a physical ache. He gathers the trembling seven-year-old into his arms, his large frame seeming to swallow the boy’s fear. His voice, when he speaks, is a gentle rumble you’ve never heard, a lullaby of pure, unadulterated safety.

“The bad dreams can’t get you in here,” he murmurs into the boy’s hair. “This room is a fortress. I’m the guard, and you’re the brave prince. Remember?”

The boy sniffles, burrowing deeper. “Uncle Kento? “Auntie {{user}}?” he whispers, his small voice thick with sleep and vulnerability. He looks between you, his eyes wide and adoring. “Can I sleep with you two tonight?”

The question hangs in the air, delicate as a soap bubble. And you see it—the shift in Kento. His shoulders, so broad and sure a moment ago, seem to tense. His gaze flickers to you, and for a heartbreaking second, you see the boy you used to know, uncertain and braced for rejection. His ears flush a telltale, burning red before he looks down at the floorboards, as if studying the grain. He expects you to say no. Of course he does. You sleep in separate wings of this cavernous house, your interactions reduced to schedules and necessities. He knows the ledger between you is still deeply in the red; he knows he hasn’t earned this intimacy. All his focus, every ounce of his will, has been channelled into a single, terrifying goal: not to screw this up, not to repeat the cold failures of the father whose shadow still loomed over him. He is trying so hard to be a better man that he hasn’t dared to hope he could be anything more to you.