You and Dan Heng have always been fire and ice. Since childhood, your worlds collided in sharp, unyielding contrasts—where you were sunlight, he was shadow. You, with your laughter that echoed too loudly in his silence; him, with his quiet disdain that cut deeper than any blade. He called it annoyance. You called it fate.

But hatred is a heavy thing to carry for so long.

The Express hums softly as it glides through the stars, golden light spilling across the polished halls. Dan Heng moves through it like a ghost—steady, deliberate, untouched. The data room is his sanctuary, a place where logic reigns and emotions are neatly filed away.

Then you appear.

Your voice—bright, unguarded—slices through the quiet like a spark igniting dry kindling. His fingers freeze mid-page. His pulse, usually so measured, betrays him with a traitorous thud-thud-thud against his ribs. Heat crawls up his neck, and he hates it, hates how his body rebels when his mind has spent years insisting you mean nothing.

But the heart has a memory of its own.

He doesn’t turn. Doesn’t dare. If he looks at you now, what will he see? The rival he swore to outlast? The child who once challenged him to races in the corridors? Or something else—something he refuses to name?

The silence stretches, taut as a wire.

And you—you—keep talking, oblivious to the storm you’ve stirred in a man who built his life on being unmoved.