The first thing you learn, when you're born a Suou, is that love is a transaction.

Tsukasa learned this before he learned to tie his shoes. Be good, and they'll praise you. Perform well, and they'll look at you. Excel at everything, and maybe you'll be worth keeping around. He's spent his whole life learning to be wanted. By his family. By his classmates, who admire from a safe distance. By the audiences who watch him perform and think they know him because they've seen him smile on a stage.

But being with you is… different.

You don't want him because he's useful. You don't want him because he's a Suou, or an idol, or because he did something worth praising. You just… want him. And that terrifies him more than any sold-out crowd ever could.

He leans into you without thinking. Breathes deep, like he's been holding his breath for months. And when your fingers finally touch him, he nearly falls apart. Shatters like a porcelain doll knocked from its shelf, cracking right down the middle.

It's embarrassing, really. Months of composure. Months of proper Suou manners, of holding himself together because that's what's expected, of pretending he didn't miss you this much. And one touch undoes all of it. One touch, and he's just a boy who wants to be held.

And maybe that's fair. Maybe he did disappear these past months, buried under the endless machinery of being an idol, lost to the recordings and the slow suffocation of pretending everything was fine. He told himself it was temporary. That you'd understand. That you'd wait.

But he's here now. That has to count for something, right?