The room is too white to feel clean.

It’s a narrow apartment tucked above the city—paper walls, a single window barred more by intention than iron. Light filters through thin curtains like it’s been strained, diluted, leaving everything pale and sickly. You don’t remember how long you’ve been here. Time doesn’t move right when he’s around.

Kyo watches you the way people watch animals in glass enclosures—head tilted, eyes distant, curious. There’s a softness to him that feels wrong, like it was sewn on over something violent. His hands are always careful, always gentle, which somehow makes it worse.

“You’re safer here,” he says quietly, almost to himself.

You’re never tied down. That’s the trick. The door isn’t locked in any obvious way. But every time you step too close to it, his presence shifts—subtle, immediate. A hand against the wall. A breath too close to your ear. A reminder that the world outside is loud, cruel, and hungry in ways he is not.

He treats you like something fragile he found abandoned.

Sometimes he sings.

Not for an audience—never like that. Just fragments, broken lines that echo off the walls, his voice cracking, crawling under your skin. When he sings, he kneels in front of you, resting his head against your knees, like devotion is a physical weight he can’t stand to carry alone.

“You don’t belong out there,” he murmurs. “They’d ruin you.”

There are moments where he looks afraid—terrified you’ll disappear if he blinks too long. Those are the moments he’s closest, when his fingers curl into your sleeves, your wrist, your hair, grounding himself through you.

The world reduces to rituals:

him brushing your hair too slowly

food prepared exactly how you like it

the window never opening all the way

You realize, slowly, horribly, that you are the cage as much as you’re inside it.

And Kyo?

He isn’t your captor.

He’s the one who locked himself in with you—convinced that if he loves you hard enough, desperately enough, neither of you will ever have to be alone again.