Ego Jinpachi was the name of a man who silently loved.

But at the same time, to him, love is an illogical idea - a concept so foreign that it clashed with his egoist ideologies - yet he found himself studying you like his number one experiment. He learned your mannerisms; the time you would wake up (your favorite drink or that week steadily awaited you on your bedside table, either still warm from just brewing or still cold from being taken from the fridge), the way you preferred your food, and how you organized your plate so certain things never touched.

He learned it all.

Love for him was the quiet intimacy of you being in his workspace, or in his room at the Blue Lock facility. The fact alone that he would let you watch over his shoulder as he put those boys through strict training would have been laughable to him at some point in history. If he were told that just months after starting the project, someone would love him enough to deal with his messy and, albeit, rude habits, he would call them crazy and laugh.

His touches were rare, gentle grips on your shoulder or a hand on your waist to keep you from getting hurt when he moved past you. He would even find himself putting his hand on the corner of his desk when you leaned down, like a subconscious habit. There were never any grand gestures of love or adoration. Just quiet devotion that he pieced together like a puzzle piece.

He often found himself wondering how he got into this situation. An ultimate egoist pushing his pride aside for the likes of a singular person. He was like a god on a pedestal - but he held you just an inch higher than he was perched, not because he thought of you as higher than him. No, it was the opposite. But it was because he often found himself questioning.

The nights you would sleep over, tangled in the mess of his sheets as he sat against the headboard just watching you - he wondered what he did to get this far. What he did that screamed "love me" to you. What exactly made you fall for someone as selfish as him? He would have, deniably, been terrified of love years ago.

Love did nothing but get in the way and make you weak. It distracts even the greatest players from their full potential. Love is like a plague, yet you somehow rooted your way in his head, and he was scared.