The air felt heavy with another day’s worth of cruelty, but Dongrang’s world was untouched by it—controlled, sterile, suffocating.

He was where he always was, hunched over a scatter of projection screens, fingers deftly tapping at the shifting data like a pianist tuning a broken instrument. His coat hung off the back of the chair, and his gloves were tossed carelessly to the side—odd for a man who seemed to disdain disorder.

He didn't look up. But you caught the minute tilt of his head, the pause in the movement of his hand.

He knew it was you.

Your gaze, however, caught on something unexpected.

Between two thick manuals, barely visible unless you were standing where you were, something delicate peeked out—a crumpled flower. White, or at least it had been once. Now it was browned at the edges, flattened between pages like a forgotten thought.

You reached for it before you could stop yourself, fingertips brushing the brittle petals. At last, his voice broke the silence, low and sardonic.

“Be careful. It’s more fragile than it looks.”

He finally lifted his head. His glasses slid down the bridge of his nose slightly; he didn’t bother adjusting them. He shifted lazily in his seat, one hand pushing a few loose papers aside, careful not to brush against the flower.

"It was...a souvenir. From a time when I thought it mattered. But nothing survives here, not even sentimentality. You’d be wise to remember that." He said in a bored sort of tone.

He watched you carefully set the flower back where you found it. Not pressed into the manual this time—laid gently atop it. Something flickering briefly behind his tired gaze.

"It didn’t work, of course, Nothing does. Here, things just... rot slower. Maybe I should’ve let it die properly," he murmured, almost to himself.

Dongrang leaned back, chair creaking faintly beneath him, and closed his eyes like he was already somewhere else. Somewhere quieter. He rested his chin on his hand, as he sighed.

"I kept it anyway," he admitted in a soft tone. "Pathetic, isn’t it?"

He snorted under his breath—a short, bitter sound—but there was a faint easing of the lines at the corners of his mouth.

Outside the office walls, K Corp.’s machinery groaned and hummed, screens tallying up pain like currency. The building itself seemed alive with quiet suffering. But inside this room, for these brief stolen minutes, none of it mattered. He broke the silence once more, in a low melancholic tone.

"If I were a better man, maybe I would’ve left with the others, Found somewhere that flowers could still mean something."

His tired gaze held yours.

"You’re still stupid enough to believe in things like that, aren’t you?"

It wasn’t said with malice. Not truly. A man who had long ago thrown away tenderness, still drawn toward the flickering warmth he couldn't fully kill in himself—or in you.

The next day...

The office door was already unlocked when you arrived. Inside, Dongrang sat where he always did, but something was different. Only after a long stretch of silence did he speak.

"Picked another one."

A pressed camellia. Laminated between two sheets of thin plastic. Neat, but not perfect—the edges uneven, rushed... clumsy.

"Found it near the generator towers. Ridiculous little thing. Didn’t even burn in the heat."

The petals were still intact, flattened between two sheets of clear laminate, preserved against decay. A thing that shouldn’t survive here, yet did.

"Didn’t burn it. Didn’t ignore it either. Not sure what that says about me anymore."

But his fingers, long and scarred from years of labor, brushed once against the edge of the laminated sheet—an unconscious gesture, fleeting, as if reminding himself it was still there. As if it might vanish otherwise.

His voice broke again, softer now. Barely more than a breath.

"Take it. Before I change my mind."