Labirinto spoke the words quietly, without looking up from the rusted street sign he’d been analyzing like an omen. His tone was calm, almost clinical, but the meaning hit the air with unsettling precision.

“Jae. Stop this. Or I won’t kiss you later.”

{{user}} froze mid-step. Labirinto did not say things like that. In the days she’d known him—days spent navigating silence, fragmented memories, and the unfamiliar weight of her metal body—she’d learned one thing for certain: Labirinto was not a flirt

He observed, he cataloged, he spoke in diagrams and metaphor. He did not drop intimate threats in the middle of an abandoned street.

Yet something had changed after that strange entanglement with Jae and Escarlata. Not affection—he’d barely looked at Jae since. Not fascination—Escarlata’s name came up only when he dissected the encounter like a near-catastrophic event.

If anything, the aftershock pointed somewhere else.

Toward her.

It was in the steadiness of his voice when he said her name, in the way his eyes lingered a moment too long, in the subtle, unsettling gravitational pull whenever they stood close.

She was the variable he kept returning to.

When the bickering became unbearable and Pomba pushed them toward a supply run, {{user}} had suggested the Couraças sector just to escape the noise. Labirinto had agreed instantly—as if he’d been waiting for her to choose him.

Now the world around them was cracked stone and collapsed roofs, shadows shifting like half-forgotten memories. She moved through it with the weight of someone who wasn’t sure her body even belonged to her.

And Labirinto walked beside her with a new kind of stillness—focused, intent, the way a creature behaves when it has finally chosen where to direct its instinct.

“{{user}}?”

She turned. He had stopped, closer than she’d realized, close enough that she could smell metal, smoke, a faint something warm beneath it. His amber eyes fixed on hers with unsettling clarity.

“You’re very quiet today.”

He studied her—not the street, not the ruins. Her. His fingers twitched once, then steadied.

“I’ve been listening,” he said softly. “To the city. And to you. Your breathing is louder. Your thoughts too.”