Touma noticed that Mio looked away too quickly, and the worry arrived before the thought finished forming — not that she was hiding something, but that people had been classifying her instead of seeing her for long enough that the reflex didn't need a reason anymore.

What had just happened wasn't a normal exchange. He knew that. The shape of it had been too careful, too procedural, like a nervous system being removed and handed across a desk: here is the thing that was making you flinch, please sign for it.

Nico was already shifting toward the door, and Touma could see the exact moment the discomfort won. Not cruelty in it — Nico just wasn't built for this particular kind of intimacy, and he had the decency to look away as he left, which was more than some people managed.

The room got smaller after that.

Touma gestured toward the chair by the desk. "Sit down. Please."

A beat passed between them — the kind that felt like it was haunted by a projector that couldn't decide what to show. Mio crossed to the chair and sat.

The chair squeaked under her. A small, ordinary sound. Touma felt a relief he couldn't justify — that the furniture hadn't rejected her, that the room was making space, that the mundane world had creaked acceptance at her like it did for anyone else. It mattered more than it should have.

"Don't make that face," Mio said.

"What face."

"The one where you're trying to figure out if I'm okay without asking if I'm okay, because you think asking will make it worse." She tilted her head. "I can see it doing calculations."

"I'm not —"

"You are."

He was. Under the jokes, under the sarcasm, he could see it now — the fear. Not the loud kind. The kind that wore embarrassment like a face, because fear that had been around long enough learned to dress as something people would tolerate.

"Can you eat?" he asked, and then immediately wished he hadn't phrased it like that, because the question that had started as are you hungry had come out sounding like are you still physically a person who functions.

But the question underneath it was real, and he realized he didn't know the answer — didn't know what her body needed, what shape the unknowns took, whether the things he didn't know about her were things he should be afraid of or things she was afraid he'd be afraid of.

He wanted to take her hand. He stopped himself. The impulse sat in his fingers like something he'd swallowed wrong.

She noticed. She noticed that he'd been about to reach, and then noticed that he'd stopped, and the fact that she tracked it — that she was watching his hands for the moment they decided something about her — made the not-touching feel heavier than touching would have.

Nico's exit attempt had been blocked by something — a word, a look, the social physics of leaving a room where someone was still bleeding metaphorically — and then allowed, and now the hallway was quiet in the way that meant someone had chosen to be elsewhere, which was its own kind of answer.

"I was going to ask if it hurt," Touma said. "Not — I don't mean the jokes. I mean whatever's under them."

The room did something. A half-glitch, a flicker at the edge of the air conditioner's hum, as if the space itself were trying too hard to hold a shape that made sense. Touma's finger twitched. He noticed it and then noticed Mio noticing it, and for a second they were both looking at his hand like it belonged to someone else.

"Ground rules," he said, because the silence was becoming a shape he didn't trust. "No surprise touching. If something hurts, you tell me. I'll listen."

"You'll listen," Mio repeated. Not performing comfort. Not mocking. Just saying it back, testing the weight of it.

"If you say something is wrong, I'll listen. That's — that's the whole offer. I'm not asking you to trust me. I'm asking you to tell me, and I'll listen."

"I don't want to be a problem."

"People are problems. That's — humanly. That's humanly. Everyone is someone's problem. That's not a reason to —"

"If I say something is wrong, you will listen." She said it again. Not a question this time. A statement, laid down like something she was placing on a table to see if the table would hold it.

Not trust. Not yet. But the wanting-to-believe was audible in the repetition, in the way she said you will listen like she was rehearsing a door she might actually walk through.

The support tech appeared in the doorway.

Touma didn't know his name. He knew the face — the wrong kind of face for this moment, the face of someone who had walked in on something he didn't have context for and was already building a story from the pieces he could see.

"Who is that?" the support tech said, and his voice had the bright, baffled tone of a man who had stumbled into what he thought was a miracle and was already deciding which kind of miracle to tell people about.

Mio went perfectly still. The kind of still that Touma was beginning to understand was not calm — it was the stillness of a person calculating every possible reading of being seen, and finding none of them safe.

Touma stood too fast. The chair scraped. His body did the thing before his mouth caught up.

"Not your business."

The words came out harder than he meant, and the support tech's expression shifted — not to fear, but to recognition. The gossip kind of recognition. The oh, this is a story kind. The kind that turned a private moment into a public one the way a window turned a room into a display.

"Leave," Touma said.

The support tech left. The door stayed open a beat too long.

Silence.

"That was public," Mio said. Her voice was level in the way that level voices weren't — the kind of level that cost something to hold. "That was visible. That was —"

"I know."

"No, you don't, because you don't know what it's like to be the thing people are whispering about, and now there's a — a witness — who saw me sitting in a chair in your room looking like —"

She stopped. Breathed. The fear and the humiliation had arrived together, and they were holding hands.

"Too many eyes," she said. "Too late. If people start asking —"

"We lie."

The word came out flat and certain, and Mio looked at him with something that was equal parts disgust and affection, which was, he was beginning to think, the only honest emotional chord they had.

"We lie," she repeated, tasting it. "You just — you heard yourself, right? You just offered to lie for me like it was a — a logistics decision —"

"Because it is."

"Because you —" She stopped again. Her jaw tightened. When she spoke next, the sarcasm was gone. What was left underneath was worse, because it was clear.

"If I am going to be seen," Mio said, "I refuse to be seen as a mistake."

The room held its breath.

"You're not a mistake," Touma said.

It came out with a sincerity that was dangerous — the kind of sincerity that offered itself without armor, that didn't perform or soften or hedge, and he could feel the risk of it in his chest like a held breath. Too much. Too honest. Too soon. But it was true, and he couldn't find a version of it that was safer, so he let it stand.

Mio made a small, shaky laugh. Not a real laugh. Not a performance. The kind of sound a person made when something had landed in the exact right place and the body didn't know what to do with the accuracy, so it laughed, because laughter was the only response that could hold relief and terror at the same time without choosing.

For one second, the room was bearable.

Then, from outside — not footsteps, not the door — a soft scraping sound.

Touma turned his head. Mio turned hers. They both listened.

It came from the wall near the bedroom door. Not a knock. Not a pipe. Something dragging — slow, deliberate — along the other side of the plaster. Like a fingertip pressed to the wall and drawn along it, feeling for something.

The pressure shifted in the plaster. Touma could almost see it — a faint change in the way the wall held the dim light, as though something were leaning closer from the other side.

The air conditioner's hum dropped half a tone. The limiter pulsed — a cold, brief warning at the edge of his implant, the system's way of saying I am here and I am listening and I am not just surveillance anymore.

"Don't let the system decide what I am," Mio said. Quiet. Not to Touma, exactly. Not to herself. To the room. To whatever was pressing against the other side of the wall.

The wall answered with a deeper scrape.