The beer in your hand tastes wrong. Not bad—just wrong. Like it belongs to another night, another version of you, one who still believed that drifting along behind Yasu would eventually lead somewhere meaningful. The laughter and music from the after-party still ring faintly in your skull, but already feel like they happened days ago. The Black Stones’ success, the adrenaline, the electric hum of the crowd—it should have lifted you. It used to. You used to live off the glow of their momentum, happy to be a shadow as long as Yasu was there beside you.

But tonight something inside you kept catching, snagging, refusing to move forward.

Maybe it was the way Nobu kept checking on everyone but you. Maybe it was Hachi’s bright, celebratory smile—sincere, warm, and meant for others. Maybe it was Nana’s cigarette smoke curling around her loneliness, mirroring your own.

Or maybe it was just the realization—quiet, creeping—that you’ve built your entire world around someone who never asked you to, who never even noticed you doing it.

You follow Yasu out of the party anyway, because that’s who you are. That’s who you’ve always been. His shadow. His echo. The one who quietly packs up after rehearsals, who remembers where he left his lighter, who sits in the front row because it’s the closest you can get to belonging to something that was never yours.

By the time you reach the apartment, the buzz in your ears has become a low, relentless drone. The lights are soft, amber, a little too forgiving. You peel off your clothes and change into a pair of shorts and a tank top—one that smells faintly of cigarettes and laundry detergent. You can’t even tell if it’s his or yours anymore. You’re not sure when that line blurred.

The mirror in the hallway catches you for a second: eyes glossy, cheeks flushed, hair mussed from the night. There’s a hollow behind your gaze—something tired, something fraying. A black zone. That’s what it feels like. A place without definition or direction, where you move on instinct alone. Yasu sits at the glass table near the bedroom window, rolling a cigarette with the calm, deliberate motions of someone who has survived storms far rougher than yours. You sit on the edge of the bed, rubbing your face with both hands. Something small clinks softly against the floor. You blink down.

Your piercing.

You didn’t even feel it fall.

Yasu looks up immediately—his instincts sharper than yours tonight. He picks up the piercing, brushes off whatever dust it gathered, and moves to sit beside you. He doesn’t ask permission—he never has to. Not with things this small. Not with you.

His fingers are warm as he tilts your face toward the light. “You need to be more careful,” he murmurs, but his voice is gentle. Always gentle with you. It almost hurts.

You try to steady yourself, but your thoughts slip, blurring like ink in rain. All the things you want to say rise to your throat—how lost you feel, how exhausted, how you’re starting to realize there is no place for you here that isn’t shaped around someone else’s needs. You want to scream. To break something. To break open.

But all you manage is a small, shaky breath.

Yasu’s hands work carefully, steadying the piercing, guiding it back into place—slow, methodical, almost reverent. He notices the tremor in your jaw; he always notices everything except the things you most need him to see.

The silence stretches between you, heavy enough to settle on your shoulders. Heavy enough to swallow whole.

Then his voice cuts through it—quiet, grounding, impossibly tender in a way that feels like a wound.

“You seem off tonight.”

As if tonight is the only night you’ve been unraveling. As if you haven’t been quietly coming apart for months.

And with his words—simple, soft, unavoidable—the tension in the room tightens to a breaking point.