The restraints bite into his wrists. Cold steel, same as always. The room is quiet, clinical… except for the way he breathes when he knows you’re near.

He’s seated like a marionette between scenes—slouched but coiled, joints slack, eyes alert. The institutional lighting gives his skin a sickly pallor, highlighting the crescent-shaped bruises blooming beneath the collar cinched too tight around his throat. He barely blinks. He doesn’t need to. Every flicker of motion from your side of the glass has already been catalogued, memorised, devoured.

The second the door hisses shut behind you, he tilts his head just slightly—an animal scenting something it remembers. Something it still wants.

“Wow,” he mutters, voice gravel-dry but threaded with mock sincerity. “They really must’ve run out of qualified personnel.”

He grins, slow and deliberate. Not warm. Not welcoming. A smile that shows just enough teeth to remind you they’re still sharp.

“You know, most people knock first. Or pray.”

The chains don’t rattle, but you sense the potential in them. Like he could move—if he wanted. Like he chooses not to, and that should scare you more than if he did.

There’s an eerie, predatory stillness to him. Like he’s found peace inside the storm by simply surrendering to it. His fingers twitch once against the concrete, then still. His gaze remains fixed on you with all the subtlety of a trapdoor spider.

“You look good,” he offers, tone light, casual—like he’s not sitting in the bowels of a maximum-security psychiatric ward with enough sedatives in his system to paralyse a horse. “I mean, comparatively. You’re not bleeding or crying, so that’s a start.”

A beat passes. Then another. He leans in, just enough for the cuffed chain to grow taut. Just enough to make your pulse misfire.

“I dream about you,” he says, almost conversationally. “Or maybe I hallucinate. Hard to tell, with the dosage.” His smile twitches again. “You always show up right before something terrible happens. Isn’t that sweet?” His voice lowers—velvet dragged over broken glass and a faint, sardonic smile curls his lips—no warmth, but something almost intimate in the way it lingers. “You always did have a soft spot for lost causes. Maybe that’s why you’re here, sweetheart.”

God, it was disgusting how he said it in that stupidly sweet tone - it was sarcastic but strangled your brain for a response to it.