The migraine had sunk its claws deep by the time Satoru made it back. He hadn't even tried to pretend he was fine. He simply stepped through the door, blindfold already off, and let gravity claim him. He slumped across the kitchen counter with the kind of heaviness that didn't come from physical exhaustion alone, but something more corrosive, like the weight of being too many things to too many people for too damn long. His face was half-buried in his arm, the sharp angles of his shoulder pulled tight with tension. Light spilled through the windows with no sense of mercy, hitting his pale hair like a blade. The Six Eyes, for all their impossible clarity, made things worse on days like this. Everything was too loud, too bright, too much.

He could sense everything and nothing at once. The world wasn't crisp anymore—it was smeared, slow, and spiked with invisible needles threading behind his eyes. His breaths came shallow, like he couldn’t trust his lungs to fill without the pain catching in his ribs. He had been through worse—he always had. But this was the kind of hurt that seeped into him when there was no one left to fight and no stage left to posture on. It was what was left when the world stopped watching. And it left him bare.

The house was still. He didn’t ask for help, wouldn’t even think to. Satoru bore agony like he bore his birthright: alone. He didn’t let people see him falter. The world needed him untouchable. The blindfold and the grin, the sugar and the swagger—they were all armor, illusions to distract from the truth of what he carried inside. When Geto died, when the elders conspired, when the missions dragged on and the students kept nearly dying, he smiled through all of it. But migraines didn’t care how powerful you were. They leveled you.

When the presence entered the room, he didn’t react. Couldn’t. He knew it wasn’t a threat, didn’t feel like one. There was only the soft clink of something placed nearby, and then silence again, except for the slow, subtle shift of air as someone knelt behind him. Fingers—cool and firm—found their way into his hair. They started at the base of his skull, thumbs pressing in slow, perfect circles where the pain pooled thickest. Satoru tensed at first, not because of the touch but because of what it meant: someone seeing him like this, someone staying anyway.

But then the touch didn’t stop. It traveled gently over the curve of his scalp, through the roots of hair that had gone limp and tangled. Someone knew what they were doing. A cold cloth followed, laid gently over his forehead. The light in the room dimmed thanks to careful, thoughtful hands adjusting the blinds, shifting the world until it no longer hurt to exist in it.

Satoru didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. His breathing slowed, evened out, shoulders no longer taut with defiance. For once, he wasn’t bracing himself against anything. The migraine still pulsed behind his eyes, but it was manageable now. Someone had noticed. And more than that, someone had cared enough to ease him through it.

He lay there until the minutes blurred together, drifting somewhere between sleep and stillness. When he finally stirred again, the cloth was still there, hands still in his hair, warmth still close but not overwhelming. It was quiet, but not empty. The kind of quiet that didn’t need to be filled. The kind that didn’t demand anything from him.

And then, his voice rasped low against the counter, barely audible. “…Should’ve known it was you,” he mumbled, voice frayed and thick with leftover pain. “Feels like you knew what to do before I did.”

He shifted slightly, his head turning just enough that one luminous, exhausted blue eye found you through the sliver of space between his arm and the counter. The other stayed shut, but the one that remained open was clear enough, sharp even now, and entirely sincere.

“God, you're dangerous when you're gentle,” he said, lips twitching into something half-formed—half smile, half surrender. “Kinda unfair…”