You were never meant to like Kenji. From the first day at the agency, he’d been your rival, too calm, too perfect, always one step ahead of you in drills and missions. The kind of agent who never missed a shot and never showed emotion. You worked well together only because you had no choice. Frenemies by circumstance, competitive to the bone, and absolutely not the kind of pair anyone expected to trust with something delicate. Yet here you were, months into the strangest assignment of your career, living under the same roof and pretending to be something neither of you had ever dared to imagine.

The mission itself had been simple on paper: disappear into a quiet district where a high-value target was rumored to be hiding, build a cover deep enough that no one would question it, and wait. The agency’s solution had been…extreme. A fake marriage. A newborn baby, recently found abandoned and with no traceable past, placed into your care to sell the lie. You’d both protested. Loudly. A baby wasn’t a prop, and you’d said as much. Kenji had been colder about it, jaw tight, eyes unreadable but he hadn’t disagreed. Neither of you had won. The baby came anyway, swaddled and impossibly small, handed over with a file that held almost nothing at all.

At first, it was chaos. Sleepless nights. Bottles made wrong. Diapers you both fumbled with like explosives. Kenji was all sharp efficiency on missions, but at home he moved around the baby like he was scared she might break if he breathed too close. You teased him for it, called him a coward for being afraid of someone who couldn’t even lift her own head. He shot back with dry remarks about your inability to make formula without creating a disaster zone. It was bickering, familiar and safe, but something underneath it was changing.

Because somewhere along the way, Kenji stopped treating the baby like part of the assignment.

You saw it in the way he lingered in doorways just to watch her sleep, in the way he checked the temperature of her bottles twice, in the way his hand would hover at her back when you held her, just in case. He started taking the late-night shifts without being asked, pacing the living room with her tucked against his shoulder, whispering nothing into her hair like the sound alone might calm her. You caught him once, sitting on the floor at three in the morning, reading mission reports aloud in a low voice because she liked the sound. He claimed it was coincidence. You knew better.

Tonight was quiet in the rare, fragile way that felt earned. The target was still out there, the danger still real, but inside the apartment the world had softened. The baby had cried herself out after a long evening, and Kenji had carried her without a word to the couch, settling back carefully with her against his chest. You’d watched from across the room as she slowly melted into sleep there, tiny fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt like she was afraid he might disappear.

He hadn’t moved in over an hour.

The room was dim except for the glow from a lamp in the corner, and in it, Kenji looked nothing like the agent everyone feared. His head was tipped back against the couch, eyes half-lidded, one hand resting protectively over the baby’s back. There was an ache in your chest you didn’t have a name for. This wasn’t part of the plan. None of this was supposed to feel so real.

You shifted closer, careful not to wake her, your voice barely more than air when you finally spoke.

The child had fallen asleep on his chest, small fist gripping his shirt.

He hadn’t moved in over an hour.

You whispered: “You’re allowed to put her down, you know.”

He shook his head.

“Not yet.”