Your hero agency, almost ten o'clock in the night. You were just coming in to grab the mission file you forgot. That’s all. You didn’t expect the lights in the lounge to still be on. You didn’t expect him to be sitting there, elbows on the table, head resting in his hands, lit only by the glow of a flickering desk lamp and the moon through the windows.

“Couldn’t sleep either?”

His voice slices the silence. Calm. But guarded.

You freeze in the doorway, heart stuttering in your chest. You hadn’t talked to him since the last mission. Since that night. Since the kiss. Since the nothing-after.

“You used to come down here during lunch breaks.” he murmurs, eyes still downcast. “I thought you might still have the habit.”

You stay silent.

He finally looks up. Tired. Beautiful. A little broken.

“I didn’t mean to make things weird. I just thought… if we didn’t name it, it wouldn’t ruin everything.”

You laugh under your breath—quiet, bitter. “But it still did.”

He flinches, and for a moment the hero facade slips. Just Neito. Just a boy who liked you too much and said too little.

“You think I didn’t feel it?” he asks, voice low, broken. “Every time you looked at me after patrol, when your hand brushed mine in the briefing room, when we stayed too long in the hallway just… not saying goodbye?”

You clench your jaw.

“It wasn’t casual for me,” he says, barely a whisper now. “I just didn’t think I was allowed to want more.”

The lamp flickers again.

Outside the glass windows of the mission room, the city glows quietly.