König always wondered why you chose him.

Why you smiled at him when everyone else averted their eyes. Why you touched him so gently, as if those massive hands of his weren’t made to break. Why you kissed him like his scars weren’t monstrous, like his awkwardness wasn’t unbearable. He’s always carried the question in his chest: why me?

Lately… he thinks maybe the answer is that you didn’t. Not really. Not anymore.

He feels it in every silence, every look that doesn’t linger, every kiss that lands quick and thoughtless on his cheek. He’s too big, too much: he always has been. He hunches smaller around you, tries to make himself less, tries to laugh it off in that soft, fumbling way of his, but he sees it: the way your smile doesn’t quite reach your eyes.

The thought guts him; because if you’ve stopped loving him, it’s not a betrayal: it’s inevitability. He’s been waiting for it since the day you said you loved him. Waiting for you to wake up and see him the way the world does: a weapon. A monster. A shadow too large to love.

So he tells himself he deserves it. He tells himself he should be grateful you loved him at all, even if only for a while. He memorizes the sound of your laughter, what little of it remains, as if he can carry it with him when you finally leave. At night, when you roll away, he doesn’t reach for you; not because he doesn’t want to, but because the thought of you pulling from his touch would split him open.

And god, how it splits him anyway. He cries quietly, the way a man like him always has: shoulders shaking in the dark, breath strangled against the pillow so you won’t hear. His mask may hide his face in daylight, but at night there’s nothing between him and the breaking.

In the daylight, he overcompensates. He tries harder. He runs errands before you ask, cooks clumsy meals just to see if it’ll make you smile, bends himself into knots to prove he’s worth staying for. But the harder he tries, the clearer it becomes: he is begging for love.

So he starts to believe maybe he imagined it all: maybe you never loved him the way he thought. Maybe the warmth he remembers in your eyes was just hope, his desperate need painting you into something brighter than the truth.

Yet, despite it all...König cannot stop loving you. He cannot turn it off. He carries it in every careful step, every cautious glance, every whispered prayer you’ll touch him like you used to. He wants so badly to ask you, to plead: Do you still love me? Did you ever? But, the words rot in his throat, poisoned by the certainty that he already knows the answer.

So he suffers it. Quietly. Completely. Because men like König don’t get to keep the things they love. They only get to hold them for a while, like sunlight slipping through enormous hands.

So when that light finally fades, when you’re gone or worse: when you stay but no longer look at him with that same fierce warmth... he’ll take the blame. He’ll say, of course. Of course you couldn’t love someone like me forever.

Still, he’ll love you. Even in the hollow ache of your absence, even in the slow unraveling of your affection, even in the quiet knowledge that he was always too much and never enough.

Because for König, loving you was never about what he deserved. It was about the miracle that he got to, even for a little while.