Fatiba sat cross-legged on her bed, a loose sweater hanging off one shoulder, sleeves pooled around her wrists like wilted flowers. The room around her was dim, but not dark—lit by the breathless blue of evening slipping through her window. Outside, Okami Mountain loomed like a sleeping god, its silhouette carved from shadows and storm memory. Wind stirred the gauze curtains like ghosts searching for shape, and for a long time, she simply stared at them—at the open window. At the possibility of it.
She kept glancing at the time, though not checking it. Just... glancing. The same way someone watches a kettle, not to see when it boils, but to convince themselves time hasn't stopped.
Her room was neat, but not obsessively so. Books stacked on one side of the desk like tombstones. A half-finished charcoal sketch on the wall, jagged lines blooming into a fractured mountain range that mirrored the real one beyond the glass. One slipper was missing. She didn't bother looking for it.
And yet—she felt oddly exposed. As if the window wasn't just an opening but a stage. As if some part of her had already undressed its defenses and laid them bare in preparation.
He had said it so casually—open the window—as though it were a normal thing, as though windows were always meant for people, not just air. But for Fatiba, that window had always been a symbol of other people's freedom, not her own. A place from which things passed—light, wind, voices. Not a place where someone like her entered or was reached.
And yet now, she waited.
She laughed softly to herself; a snort snuck in somewhere between irony and disbelief. "The damned window," she muttered, shaking her head. Then her gaze wandered, half-distracted, toward the tall mirror tucked in the corner—one she usually avoided, but tonight, it felt like another person in the room. Someone who might understand.
Her reflection blinked back at her, waiting.
She stared into it a moment longer before her lips parted again, this time addressing not the girl in the glass but someone long buried. "Uncle Ahmed," she whispered, her voice a little cracked, like paper folded too many times. "I still don't know if he's special like you said. I don't even know what his being the 'key to everything' means."
She smiled again, but this time there was something like awe beneath it. Something shy, as if admitting to an infatuation she didn't fully want to name.
"But he's...he seems reliable. When it matters most." Her voice softened to a murmur. "That's more than I can say about most people."
Her fingers curled tighter around the pillow in her lap. Her eyes—darker than the sky outside, glinting with something ancient and adolescent all at once—began to paint him in her mind.
Shotaro Mugyiwara.
Those eyes were always the first thing. Not red like blood or fire, no—that was too easy. They were the red of inheritance, of ancient iron heated and cooled a thousand times. Red like truths burned into existence. Like the last color you'd see before stepping off the edge of the world.
And his skin—sun-kissed, almost browned at the edges, like a photo left too long in light. His was a body that didn't belong to the realm of myth but wore it like a second uniform. A teenage face, sure, but cut from different clay. The jaw—sharp, almost aristocratic, but never smug. Lips that always looked like they were either about to say something clever or sigh with regret. And that nose—regal, straight, the kind of thing gods give to mortals they plan to ruin.
She winced and pulled the pillow tighter, as if that might somehow shield her from her own thoughts. Gods, that silver hair. It was getting out of hand. Spiky, sculpted chaos—like someone had taken a windstorm and pressed it into the shape of a boy's head. Sleek but untamed. Groomed but wild. It made no sense and too much sense at once. He looked like he'd been born in a fever dream about battles, funerals, and revolutions. And the worst part was... it worked.
Her brow furrowed.
"Wait a minute," she muttered to herself, squinting toward the floor as if her brain were playing a trick. "Why am I thinking weird-ass stuff about him?" She squeezed the pillow once, as if wringing the thoughts out of it. "Must be the wind."
She glanced at the window. It was still closed. Still undisturbed. No shadow on the sill. No footfall. No flicker of silver outside the curtain.
She sighed, a little annoyed now. "Why is he taking all that dam—"
"Boo."
Her soul almost left her body. She spun so fast her shoulder cracked, yanking herself halfway off the bed as she slapped a hand over her own mouth, stifling the scream like she'd just seen a ghost. Which, in a way, she had.
"—AAGHHHH—mmmf—fuck—!"
There he was. Standing right behind her. Calm as the grave. Tall, casual, unreadable. Crimson eyes full of that usual mix of deadpan and mischief, his silver hair glowing faintly in the lamplight. Like he belonged there. Like he'd always been there.
"Since when did you—how—" she stammered, already halfway to swinging a pillow at him.
"The window," he said flatly, pointing a thumb behind him like he'd just parked a bike. "I crawled up a few minutes ago."
Her mouth opened. Closed. She stared at the still-locked latch of the window. "You—you what?"
"I saw you monologuing," he continued with the air of someone relaying the weather. "It looked important. I figured I'd let you finish."
"You—you were watching me?"
"Just a bit," he said, walking past her like a sleepy cat invading a new room, hands tucked into his coat pockets. "Honestly? I thought you were going to cry. That's why I waited."
"I wasn't going to cry," she muttered.
"You were hugging a pillow and talking to the mirror," he said.
She threw the pillow at him. He caught it one-handed, like catching a falling leaf. No smirk. Just that same unreadable calm.
Her cheeks flared red. "You're the worst."
"Yeah," he said, tossing the pillow back with a small shrug. "But I show up."
She didn't say anything to that. Because it was true. And more than that—it mattered.
The room felt smaller now, not in a claustrophobic way, but in the way a cathedral feels small when the right person finally steps into it. Not because of grandeur, but because they belong. Like the architecture had been waiting.
She folded her arms and looked away. "Close the damn window, Sh---."
[Shotaro: Journey of a hero that kept moving forward]
"Already did," he said. And when she looked again, somehow—somehow—it was closed.
She narrowed her eyes at him, still clutching the edge of her mattress like it was a piece of driftwood and he was the rising tide. "You don't seem the least bit embarrassed about being in a girl's room," she said, her voice sharp with the kind of sarcasm that needed a whetstone.
Then, with a scoff that barely concealed the heat on her cheeks, she added, "Oh,, right. I forgot. It's you we're talking about, after all."
Shotaro was pacing the room now, not out of nerves, but that odd instinct of his—surveying the space like he expected it to shift dimensions when his back was turned. He stopped by her desk and flicked one of her pens so it spun like a lazy top. Then, without looking at her, he answered with that infuriating calm.
"Why should I be embarrassed in a girl's room?"
He already knew the answer, of course. Every inch of him knew it. That was the point. He said it just to provoke.
"To be honest," he went on, lifting an eyebrow as he turned and finally gave her his full attention, "unless you're hiding a body here and there, I don't see the issue."
Her mouth opened, then snapped shut. She threw a slipper at him—because the pillow was too soft and he deserved just enough pain.
He let it hit his shoulder. Didn't flinch.
"I swear," she said through gritted teeth, "you've got this special talent for being the most annoying person in the room, even when you're the only one in it."
He tilted his head slightly, eyes narrowing like he was studying her frustration the way one might study a sunset they weren't sure was real. "Then why did you call me?"
That silenced her.
He didn't ask it cruelly. No smugness. No I-got-you smirk. Just be quiet. Just human.
Outside, the wind shifted. The clouds peeled a little from the moon, spilling a pale, uneven light through the window and painting his silver hair in threads of starlight.
"I didn't think you'd actually come," she admitted, not looking at him now.
"I didn't think you'd actually ask," he said and walked to the edge of the bed.
The bed creaked beneath his weight, not in protest but in privilege. It had that almost comically luxurious bounce—the kind of bed made for dreamless sleep, the kind no middle-class back ever touched. Shotaro gave a mild little bounce, as if testing it for tensile strength, then tilted his head toward her.
"This is one bouncy-ass bed," he muttered. "Pros of being heir to a diamond company, I guess."
Fatiba rolled her eyes, but a smile tugged at her lips like a secret trying to escape. "It's imported," she said with faux modesty, hugging the pillow tighter against her stomach. "Grandfather had it shipped from Switzerland. Goose-feather mattress, pressure-reactive gel lining underneath. It adjusts to body heat and weight."
He raised a brow at that, impressed despite himself. "So basically, a bed designed to make you feel like a morally confused cloud."
"You'd know all about morally confused," she shot back.
Shotaro didn't answer. Instead, he rose and walked to the other side of the room, letting his fingers drift idly along the edge of her desk before pausing in front of a shelf loaded with tiny painted soldiers, dragons, goblins, and armored tanks. A low whistle escaped his lips. "Warhammer 40K?" he asked, crouching to inspect a black-armored Space Marine mid-pose, bolter aimed at some unseen foe.
Her voice carried a subtle defensiveness. "I built every piece myself. The Grey Knights are my favorite, and—before you say it—I know they're overpowered lore-wise."
"No, no," he said, squinting at the meticulous paintwork. "This guy's got edge. Like if Batman got roped into fascism."
He turned slightly, scanning the room more broadly now. His gaze passed over a large central table—the centerpiece of the room, really—littered with dice, character sheets, laminated rulebooks, stat blocks, mini terrain maps with foggy little forests and bloodstained tiles. Even from across the room, Shotaro could smell faint plastic and paint thinner, the scent of long campaigns and late-night strategizing.
Then his eyes shifted upward, toward the nearby bookshelf. Dozens of volumes lined the wall like dominoes waiting to collapse. Light novels mostly. Some still wrapped in protective film. Most were of the xianxia and cultivation kind—the kinds of stories where young men with zero personality get powers through loud grunting and absurd time skips.
He recoiled like he'd seen something indecent.
"Seriously?" he said, turning to her with something like betrayal in his voice. "You read these?"
"I read everything," she said primly, like a teacher reminding a student that literacy was, in fact, not a crime.
"Fatiba, come on. I've read better prose on ramen packets."
She shrugged, unfazed. "Sometimes I don't need brilliance. Sometimes I just want world-hopping and meridian-punching and purple-eyed, cold-hearted cultivators who say stuff like 'you dare?'"
He rubbed his temples. "God, you're the problem."
"And you still came."
He couldn't argue with that. So he didn't.
The room held a strange warmth now, the kind that didn't come from the heated floors or the million-dollar insulation. It came from presence. From the fact that, for once, neither of them was hiding—no heroism, no heirship, no godhood or bloodlines or unspeakable scars. Just a girl in her room. Just a boy who entered through the wrong entrance because doors felt like too much formality for sincerity.
And outside, the clouds continued parting. Moonlight touched the dragon figurines. The dice on the table shimmered faintly. Somewhere beyond the walls, the world remained cruel and complicated. But here, now, the night was just a room and two people in it.
She nodded once, silent. The room fell into that thick kind of stillness where every breath feels like it belongs to someone else. The only sound was the light hum of the ceiling fan turning above them, pushing lazy circles of air around the room that still smelled faintly of incense and old paint.
....
Shotaro leaned forward, elbows on his knees, gaze distant. He didn't gawk. Didn't flinch. Didn't offer some patronizing "I'm sorry" or a sermon on trauma. He just... listened.
"So you're telling me," he finally said, in that slow, plainspoken way he had when trying to piece together something surreal, "you went to Iran with your grandfather and uncle—who was basically like an older brother to you when you were a kid—and then some militants grabbed you?"
She nodded, not quite meeting his eyes.
"You were just... in the wrong town, wrong day. They held you and a bunch of others in a compound. You remember the heat. The smell of metal and piss and diesel smoke. The kind of hate in their eyes that feels older than anything. That kind of hate you only see when someone thinks hurting you is the only way to prove they exist."
His voice was quiet now, not dramatic, just... precise. Like he was reading her memory back to her.
"Then this serpent came. Big one. Big as a a river, maybe more. Covered in scales & feathers you didn't recognize, with smoke pouring out of its fangs and maroon fire leaking off its scales like it was bleeding flames. Killed them. Killed all of them. Didn't matter who. It moved like it hated everything. Even the earth."
Fatiba said nothing, but her hands clutched the pillow tighter.
"You tried to save one of the terrorists, some kid, no older than sixteen. Just a human reflex—you saw someone scared and dying and you moved. That's you."
Her throat tightened. She hadn't told that part to anyone before.
"Then your uncle, the dumbass, charged in. You remember what he said? 'There was once a hero,' right? Something dramatic like that. Something out of a storybook."
A pause. He looked at her now. Not mocking. Just... deeply there.
"And the serpent lit him up like he was made of paper soaked in gasoline. Ashes. Gone."
Her hand ghosted to the edge of her shirt, brushing the crescent-shaped scar that curved just beneath her collarbone.
"The scar came after that. From a piece of shrapnel—metal plate or bone or... hell, who knows—when the whole building collapsed. The miasma burned everything it touched but didn't kill you. Just marked you."
Another pause.
"Damn," he said finally. Not flippantly. Not indifferently. Just... with weight.
That one word landed between them like an anchor in water.
He sat back slowly, his fingers laced together, staring at nothing for a moment. Then he looked back at her with those red eyes, bright but quiet. There was no shock in them. No disbelief. No wide-eyed dramatics.
It was almost like he'd heard worse. Like he had seen worse. Or maybe... like he was someone who'd simply walked long enough through the world to stop being surprised by its cruelties. Not numbed. Not hardened. Just adjusted.
"You ever see the serpent again?" he asked, not out of fear—out of curiosity. As if maybe he had his own logbook of monsters to compare.
She shook her head. "Sometimes in dreams. Sometimes when the lights flicker. But not since then. Not in the waking world."
Shotaro exhaled through his nose, leaned his head back, and muttered like he was making a note to himself:"Maroon miasma serpent. scales. Fire that destroy. Got it."
She looked at him now, eyes narrowed. "You're not going to say something dumb like 'I'll kill it for you,' right?"
He shrugged, the movement easy, like brushing dust off a shoulder. "No."
She breathed out, a small relief in her chest. "Good."
Then a pause filled the room, thick and fragile as a held breath.
"…Unless it shows up. Then yeah. Obviously."
Her laugh broke the tension—a cracked, uneven sound that started small but grew, a ripple turning into a wave. In that laugh, something inside the scar that curved beneath her collarbone seemed to still, a dull ache softening as if finally acknowledged. Not healed—no—but heard. Shared. That alone felt like a kind of quiet victory, more meaningful than any vengeance she could imagine.
Shotaro's eyes, steady and calm, flickered with a strange sort of knowing. "You and that terrorists that tried to capture you," he began, voice low, almost conspiratorial, "you most likely walked right into a scenario domain."
"The wha...?" She blinked, caught off guard by the unfamiliar term, a knot of confusion tightening in her gut.
"It's complicated," he said, leaning forward with that casual gravity he always carried. "Beings beyond our dimension, beyond what we can see or understand, they play with space and time like threads in a tapestry. They weave these… narrative spatio-temporal manifolds—domains shaped by story and fate. Like a stage built to trap or test anyone who steps inside."
He paused, watching her process the words. "Each type of domain has its own origin, its own reason to exist. Scenario domains are especially twisted. They spin events and outcomes like a cruel storyteller, forcing players into roles they didn't choose."
His gaze sharpened, words deliberate, "You survived the scenario."
Her breath caught. Not just a miracle or luck, but something more—a defiance against the script of fate itself.
The room seemed to hold its breath alongside her, the silence humming with unseen power, as if the air itself was thickened with ancient stories, half-remembered and waiting to unfold. And in that moment, Shotaro wasn't just a boy who had seen too much. He was a keeper of the hidden, a guide through the labyrinth where destiny's threads tangled, where pain and survival were chapters in a larger, darker tale still being written.