The scene, rendered in tight close third-person past tense from Touma’s point of view only:

Mio looked away too quickly. Touma saw the flinch and understood it at once: she was not afraid of him. She was afraid of being classified—of people looking at her and deciding she was a mistake, a symptom, something wrong that needed fixing or removing.

The exchange that followed was not normal. They phrased it like the careful removal of a nervous system, each word tested before it was allowed to land. Nico, already uncomfortable, found a reason to leave. The room immediately felt smaller without him, the air conditioner humming quietly against the cheap safehouse walls, the chair by the desk and the edge of the futon suddenly too close.

Touma offered the chair. Mio sat. The chair squeaked under her weight, a small ordinary sound, and relief moved through him harder than it should have: the furniture had not rejected her. The room was still making space.

“Don’t make that face,” she said, but the sarcasm was thin. Underneath it he could see the fear she was trying to joke past.

“Can you eat?” he asked, realizing in the same breath how many body-shaped unknowns still sat between them. He almost reached for her hand and stopped himself. She noticed the unfinished motion.

Nico tried to exit again, was briefly blocked by the doorway, then allowed to go. Alone with her, Touma said the thing he had almost asked earlier: “I was going to ask if it hurt.”

The room did a weird half-glitch thing—nothing visible, just a pressure, as if the space itself were trying too hard to hold a shape that still made sense. He noticed her finger twitch.

They began setting ground rules, quiet and practical. No surprise touching. Tell me if something hurts.

“I don’t want to be a problem,” Mio said.

“People are problems,” Touma answered. “Humanly.” Then, more carefully: “If you say something is wrong, I will listen.”

It was not trust yet. But he saw her want to believe it might be possible.

That was when the support tech walked in—the wrong kind of miracle, the accidental public witness, the person who would turn this into a story.

“Who is that?”

Mio went perfectly still. Touma stood too fast.

“Not your business.”

Embarrassment and fear arrived together. He watched the shift in the tech’s face: recognition, already calculating the gossip.

“Leave.”

The door closed. The humiliation was public, visible, already irreversible. Too many eyes. Too late for the rumor not to start.

“What do we do if people start asking?”

They would lie. The idea sat between them with equal parts disgust and reluctant affection.

Mio’s voice came out quiet and absolute: “If I am going to be seen, I refuse to be seen as a mistake.”

“You are not a mistake,” Touma said, the sincerity dangerous in its directness.

She gave a small, shaky laugh. For one second the room became bearable.

Then soft scraping started outside—not footsteps, not a door. Something like a fingertip dragging along the other side of the wall, pressure moving through the plaster. A colder limiter pulse answered it, a warning.

“Don’t let the system decide what I am,” she said.

The wall answered with a deeper scrape.