Scene packet (tight close third on Touma, past tense)

Mio looked away too quickly.

The worry sat plain on her: not that people would see her, but that they would classify her—slot her into the wrong category and stop seeing the person. The exchange that had just happened was not normal, not private, and not safe. She tried to phrase it the way someone might talk about having a nervous system taken out and replaced, clinical and distant, as if distance could keep the fear from sticking.

Nico left because the intimacy of it made him uncomfortable. He was decent enough to look away, but he was not built for this. Once he was gone the room felt smaller. Touma offered her the chair by the desk.

She sat. The chair squeaked under her weight, ordinary and accepting. Relief hit him harder than it should have: the furniture had not rejected her. The room was making space.

“Don’t make that face,” she said, catching whatever expression he was wearing.

He saw it then—the fear running under the sarcasm, the jokes she used like cover. He asked if she could eat. The question opened a whole set of body-shaped unknowns he had not fully faced yet: what this form needed, what it could tolerate, what might hurt. He almost reached for her hand and stopped himself. She noticed the aborted motion.

Nico tried to leave again, got blocked for a moment by the awkward geometry of the doorway, then was allowed through.

“I was going to ask if it hurt,” Touma said.

The room did a weird half-glitch thing—air or light or the edges of the space refusing to settle—as if something were trying too hard to hold a shape that made sense. He noticed a small finger twitch. Ground rules started forming between them, quiet and necessary.

No surprise touching.

Tell me if something hurts.

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

People are problems, he thought, humanly.

“If I say something is wrong,” she said, “you will listen.”

It was not trust yet. But she wanted to believe it might become possible. He said yes, repeated it without performing comfort.

Then the support tech walked in—the wrong kind of miracle, accidental public witness, already half-building the story that would travel.

“Who is that?”

Mio went perfectly still. Touma stood too fast.

“Not your business.”

Embarrassment and fear arrived together. He saw the recognition shift in the tech’s face: gossip vector, social story starting.

“Leave.”

The door closed. The damage was already done. That had been public. Visible. Humiliating. Too many eyes, too late to stop the rumor.

“What do we do if people start asking?”

They would lie. The idea carried both disgust and a strange, reluctant affection for the necessity of it.

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

“You are not a mistake.”

The sincerity was dangerous. She gave a small, shaky laugh. For one second the room became bearable.

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

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

The wall answered with a deeper scrape.