"But it's not the serpent I want to talk about," she said, her voice quieter now, not fragile, just… less armored. "It's my parents."
He didn't react at first. Just let the words sit. Let them be.
Then, as if pulling a line of dialogue from a well-worn script, he said, "Let me guess. The usual? Rich girl with parent issues?"
She didn't even bristle. "Yeah," she admitted, nodding once. "Honestly, it's good that you can guess it."
"No, actually," he said, sliding down beside her on the bed, elbows on his knees, body language loose. "This is a trope in, like, a thousand fictional mediums. Movies, books, and TV. Anime, especially."
She gave a half-smile, one part resigned and one part amused. "Quite cliché, if you ask me."
"Yeah, but clichés exist for a reason," he replied. "They come from somewhere. Real people. Real pain. Nobody makes a trope out of thin air. There's always some girl out there—just like you—waiting for someone to listen, waiting for someone to not call her ungrateful just because she has a platinum bathtub."
That earned a real laugh from her. Not loud, but full-bodied. It sank into the soft mattress beneath them and curled into the corners of the room like smoke.
She looked at the wall for a second, at nothing in particular, and said, "It's like… I was born as a checklist. I tick every box. Looks, grades, lineage, manners, piano lessons, fencing, diplomatic etiquette. My parents designed me, not raised me. I'm a brand, not a daughter."
Shotaro didn't answer immediately. He let her voice carry. Let her take her time. He knew how it felt to unwrap memories slowly, like knives wrapped in silk.
She kept talking, quieter now. "My mother doesn't yell. She just… rearranges me. Like I'm a painting she's not quite finished with. My father doesn't talk. He sends money, attendants, and drivers. He's… not cruel; he's just distant. But that kind of distance—" she shook her head, "it's worse than cruelty. Because cruelty is at least bothered with someone."
The room had that kind of hush that settles only after a heavy truth is spoken. The sort of quiet that feels earned—thick, not empty. It wasn't the silence of forgetting but of listening. Of letting a wound be seen and not turning away.
Fatiba's lip trembled just once. A flicker of vulnerability crossed her face like a cloud over the moon. But she mastered it fast. She always did. That was the problem and the miracle of her—how quickly she could reassemble herself. How fast she could remember her role.
"My grandfather was the only one who talked to me like I was a person," she said. Her voice was steady but too practiced. Like someone speaking through glass. "My uncle, too. Before… everything. But the rest of them?" Her hands tightened slightly on the hem of her sleeve. "I'm more valuable to them inhumane and miserable than happy and confused."
Shotaro didn't flinch. He didn't rush to comfort or correct her. He just looked up at the ornate ceiling—a web of dark timber and delicate molding, faintly catching the moonlight—and let the thought settle.
"It's weird, huh?" he muttered. "How so many parents want perfect children. But they never consider how flawed everything else in the world is. They raise you like you're meant to be a lighthouse but forget they're building it in a storm."
He paused, his voice quieter. "There is no perfect human. Flaws are our ID cards. Take those away, and it's just a robot made of flesh and bones."
That line hit differently than she expected. She blinked slowly. Not because she was shocked—but because it was true. And no one had ever said it out loud in her presence. Not like that. Not without pity or prescription.
"Do you think they'll ever love me for real?" she asked.
It wasn't dramatic. It wasn't said to provoke. It was the kind of question a child asks in a cracked whisper, long after the bedtime stories are over and the lights are off.
Her voice cracked just slightly—like porcelain where the glaze had worn thin.
Shotaro didn't flinch. Didn't wince. Didn't try to wrap it up in a clean little bow.
"I don't know," he said honestly, and it landed with more gravity than any promise could. "But honestly... that won't matter."
He sat up straighter, elbows on his knees, voice clear now—calm but solid. "They brought you into this world. That makes it their job to care for you, make sure you're on the right path... maybe even punish you when you mess up. That's parenting. That's the basic floor of it."
His red eyes found hers, unwavering.
"They're not doing any of that," he said. "So stop asking for their approval. They're failing. Not you."
She exhaled sharply, not quite a sob, but close. It wasn't release—it was recognition. That was worse sometimes. Realizing someone else saw the thing you'd kept buried, and they didn't look away.
"God let mankind spread like a plague across this planet for a reason… right?" he said after a beat, his tone dry but not unkind. "No asteroid. No divine reset button. Just... us. Screaming through it."
She gave a small, teary laugh. The kind that doesn't come from amusement. The kind that comes when something inside you shifts a little closer toward breathing.
"You can always find someone who cares," he said, softer now. "Not everyone. Not always. But sometimes. That's enough. That's the ember you guard."
The room had gone dim with quiet, like a cathedral just after the hymn—when the music fades but the feeling lingers in the stone. The scent of night air drifted in through the slightly cracked window, a breeze that didn't chill so much as remind you of the world still turning outside.
Fatiba's voice came low, as if she were speaking to the room itself, not just to him. Or maybe to herself. Like a confession meant to dissolve in the air.
"People cannot be perfect," she said. "They need to accept that."
Shotaro didn't respond right away. He simply watched her as she spoke—not staring, not analyzing, just present. The way people rarely are.
Her gaze drifted toward the flickering candlelight catching on the edges of her Warhammer figurines, the soft glint off a little paladin's blade. The shadows that danced behind it looked like something deeper than plastic and wax.
"In a hypothetical sense," she continued, "wouldn't a perfect person be someone who can't change? Someone who doesn't grow? Who doesn't adapt doesn't... move?" She looked at him now, eyes thoughtful but distant. "Like God?"
It wasn't blasphemy, not really. More like a philosophical ache. The kind that lingers behind all great theology—this question of what it means to be complete. What it means to end in your development. She didn't say it like a challenge. She said it like someone who'd wrestled with that question in the quiet, alone, while the world kept mistaking her for something finished.
Shotaro leaned back slightly, arms resting across his bent knees, his silver hair catching the light like mercury. The expression on his face wasn't surprise. If anything, it was familiarity. Like he'd thought the same thing a thousand different ways, in a thousand different rooms, with no one brave enough to speak it aloud before now.
"That's exactly it," he said eventually, voice low. "Perfection is stagnation."
He tilted his head up, letting the moonlight brush across his jawline. "To be perfect means you can't evolve. You can't screw up and learn from it. You can't get humbled, or hurt, or even be wrong. You just... are. Unchanging. Untouched."
"And if you can't be moved," he added, "how the hell can you ever move anyone else?"
Fatiba looked down at her hands. Her thumb was unconsciously tracing the faint ridge of the crescent scar beneath her sleeve. It was faded now, but never gone. A ghost of pain, a fossil of a younger her who had tried—against all instinct—to save someone, even as fire fell from the sky.
"I used to want to be that," she admitted. "Untouchable. Flawless. The diamond girl. I thought that was strength."
Shotaro gave a faint smile—more in his eyes than his mouth. "Nah. That's just insulation."
She looked up again, lips parted slightly. He met her gaze.
"Strength," he said, "is letting the world touch you and not letting it change your heart into something cruel."
For a long moment, neither of them spoke. And there was a weight in the air—not heavy like grief, but dense like meaning. Like the atmosphere right before the sky splits open and rains truth.
She sat back against her headboard, exhaling softly. She didn't feel fixed. Not better. Not healed.
But she did feel seen. And not as an idea. Not as a projection or a product or an heir.
Just a person.
That was rare. That was holy.
In the quiet that followed, something unspoken settled in the air—like dust that hadn't been disturbed in years finally learning to dance again. The figurines on the table, once frozen mid-battle, seemed less like miniatures meant for fantasy and more like relics of someone's survival. Totems that had watched her cry when no one else did, that bore witness to the girlhood no one allowed her to mourn. Each chipped wing and bent sword had a weight now, like time. Like faith that refused to die.
Her wrist, where the crescent scar curved like a dying moon, no longer felt like the aftermath of tragedy. It had become something sacred in the low, golden light—a story coiled into flesh. It held the shape of a question never answered. It held the silence of everything she didn't say that day. And right now, in the presence of a boy who didn't try to fix it, it felt less like a wound and more like punctuation.
And the boy beside her—Shotaro, the impossible, the errant, the one-who-should-not-be—was strangely ordinary for once. He wasn't glowing. He wasn't mythic. He wasn't a walking apocalypse or a crack in the godhood ceiling. He was just someone who sat with her. Someone who let the silence do its work. Someone who didn't look away.
That, somehow, made him feel more dangerous than ever. Because kindness from a being like him could never be simple. It was layered in lives, braided in power, carved with the sharpness of someone who had survived too many ends to believe in beginnings. Yet here he was. Not telling her how to heal. Just waiting. Present. Human.
And then—
"GRGRGRGRGRGRRRRRR—"
The beastly gurgle shattered the sacred atmosphere like a rock through stained glass.
Shotaro's brow rose. "You're hungry?"
Before she could even respond, he gave a knowing smirk and tapped his chin. "Well, well. Looks like the demon of the stomach has finally awaken—AGHHH!!"
He didn't finish. Because a second later, he was horizontal in midair—dropkicked off the bed with zero ceremony.
Fatiba had launched herself at him, foot outstretched in one fluid, ninja-dramatic motion that defied all laws of posture and politeness.
He hit the floor with a loud thump and a groan that sounded almost comedic.
Fatiba stood over him, pillow in hand like a hammer of divine retribution.
"DON'T narrate my hunger, bastard," she hissed. "You think you're smart just 'cause you fell from the sky and have red eyes and monologue like a theatre kid?!"
Still flat on his back, Shotaro looked up at her, a hand to his chest like he'd been mortally wounded. "I wasn't narrating," he wheezed. "I was prophesying."
A beat.
Then she snorted.
Then he did.
And then they were both laughing—ungraceful, unrehearsed, raw.
The kind of laughter that doesn't erase pain, but gives it a break. The kind that lets the world feel livable again, even if just for a little while.
And the figurines on the table, the scar on her head, the myths in their blood—they could all wait.
The laughter had barely finished echoing off the walls when Shotaro, still sprawled on the carpet like some fallen celestial misfit, turned his head toward her and lifted a single brow. His silver hair spilled across the rug like threads of moonlight, eyes glowing with that usual crimson calm—serene, unreadable, and just a bit too theatrical.
"You have a kitchen?" he asked, voice airy, laced with that particular Shotaro-brand sass that always landed somewhere between charming and annoying. "I will make you a treat."
Fatiba narrowed her eyes. "…You cook?"
"Cook. Clean. Wipe. Massage. Everything," he said, ticking each one off his fingers like bullet points. "Quite a desirable bachelor minus the mental illness."
She blinked at him, frozen. Her face twisted as she tried to compute the sentence.
"…HUH?!" Her entire posture jerked as if the air itself had slapped her with that revelation. "You—Wait—You actually know how to do all that?!"
He sat up slowly, brushing invisible dust off his shirt, clearly offended. "Yes. Why are you surprised?"
"You fight higher dimentional beings every tuesday!"
"And I also iron my own bedsheets," he shot back, voice sharpened now with the edge of someone defending their honor. "Just because I can fly & shoot lasers out f my eyes doesn't mean I don't know how to sauté a goddamn onion."
His voice made sure to remind her he has no insecurities about it, he is just stating.
There was something oddly sincere about how he said it. No arrogance. No flirtation. Just deadpan irritation—like he genuinely felt insulted that she wouldn't believe he could dice garlic properly.
Maybe it was self respect than pride that got hurt.
Again this man has no shame about anything else so it's complicated when it comes to cooking.
The hallway to the kitchen was long, too long—its ceilings arched like cathedral vaults, chandeliers dimmed to the color of candlelight. Their footsteps, though soft, echoed faintly across the marble floors, like secrets pacing behind them. Fatiba moved like she always did when in her own home: silently, cautiously, as if still expecting to be scolded for breathing too loud. Shotaro followed a few paces behind, barefoot, hands in his pockets, his red eyes flicking around with a hunter's precision—not out of fear, but curiosity. He was learning the contours of the place, mentally mapping it, as if the very walls held meaning.
"Every servant is asleep. Including Grandfather," she whispered as they reached the threshold of the kitchen. "Make sure to make little noises."
The kitchen itself was almost too pristine—like a showroom untouched by fire or hunger. White marble countertops stretched in long, empty lines. The silver handles on the cabinets caught the faint light like polished armor. Every appliance looked designed by some minimalist cult of culinary elites—sleek, quiet, intimidating. It was a kitchen made for magazine spreads, not meals.
But Shotaro walked in like it was his war tent.
"Alright," he muttered, tying back his silver hair with a rubber band he pulled from his wrist. "Where's your spice rack? And don't tell me it's alphabetical—I can already tell from the energy of this kitchen that no one here knows how to flavor properly."
Fatiba opened her mouth to retort, then closed it again. She leaned against the pantry door, arms crossed, watching him like someone spotting a fox in the drawing room. "Why do I feel like you're about do something wild"
Shotaro said nothing at first. He was too busy opening drawers, cabinets, inspecting tools like a blacksmith evaluating a stranger's forge. Every movement had that practiced grace of someone who'd done this hundreds of times—not flashy, not rushed. Efficient. Grounded. There was something strangely reverent in the way he held a chef's knife, the way he rolled his shoulder before lifting a cast iron pan as though it were a holy relic.
"I've cooked in temples," he finally said. "I cook dinner for the entire red light district once a week"—he gestured around—"This is easy mode."
She blinked. "…You cooked inside a—no. I'm not asking. I don't want to know."
"Good," he said, reaching for a lemon. "You'd cry."
She didn't answer. She was too busy watching him crush garlic with the side of the blade like a professional. Or the way he swirled oil into the pan with just enough flair to make it look like muscle memory rather than performance. It smelled like something real, something mortal. Warmth and fat and spice.
"You're full of surprises," she murmured. ""
He looked up, eyes crinkled with dry amusement. "I'm just one. Unfortunately."
The pan hissed.
Time passed differently in kitchens. Minutes folded into smells. Into sizzles. Into the dull rhythm of chopping. He didn't speak much after that—just worked. And that was maybe the strangest part of all. Shotaro Mugyiwara barefoot in a cold mansion, making scrambled eggs with cumin and leftover chicken like it was the most sacred thing in the world.
She didn't stop him.
Not when he plated it gently, with a sprinkle of fresh mint. Not when he set it on the counter and handed her a fork like it was a peace offering.
"Eat before I do it for you," he said.
Fatiba took the first bite. And for a second—just one, clean, precise second—it was like the war in her head paused.
In the beginning, there was only the plate. The fork. The smell. That smell—holy, invasive, ancestral. Like the memory of being fed by someone who once truly loved you, but now only exists in blurred recollection and ghost-thought. Fatiba glared down at the meal as if it had insulted her bloodline.
The steak gleamed, a piece of culinary blasphemy laid bare under dim courtyard lights that had no business making it look that good. Golden crust, glistening fat on the edges like it had been lacquered in sacred oils. The eggs were weaponized perfection—sunny-side-up, yolks round and molten like miniature suns. Even the soup, in that unassuming little bowl, steamed with a broth that smelled like childhood, rainy days, and mythic tenderness passed down from ancestor to ancestor.
Her eye twitched. Violently.
Because she knew exactly what this was. This wasn't food. This was a statement. This was Shotaro Mugyiwara—barefoot, arrogant, smiling like a choirboy who'd just punched a seraph in the face—saying I can do it all. I can fight gods, I can cook, and I can make your high walls look like sandcastles. Her pride demanded she throw the plate off the railing. Hurl it into the moonlight. Scream some indignity about boundaries and manipulation and emotional warfare disguised as scrambled eggs.
But hunger… oh, hunger is the oldest betrayal.
With a growl that sounded almost primal, she snatched a strip of bacon.
Crunch.
Time broke.
Her body went rigid as the flavor detonated on her tongue, rewriting not just taste, but memory, reality, existence. The salt, the smoke, the precise alchemy of crisp and fat and heat—it wasn't bacon. It was divine communion. It was the flavor of forgiveness. Of being understood by a universe that had always otherwise kicked her in the teeth.
She felt her pupils dilate, her heartbeat slow, then spike.
Then—
A BOOM ripped through her body like the wrath of creation itself.
Her pajamas exploded off her in a radiant blast of golden energy, torn apart not by impact but by enlightenment. Her hair flared behind her, each strand catching the glow like haloed silk, and the courtyard became a cathedral of heat and heaven. A beam of light shot skyward, parting clouds, shaking stars loose from their stillness. Her arms flailed, her spine arched, and her soul—her very soul—was launched from her flesh with all the grace of a myth finally fulfilled.
She screamed something incoherent as the world around her shattered into surreal euphoria. She was no longer in the courtyard. She wasn't even on Earth.
She floated—weightless—in a dreamy skyscape made of pastel clouds and glowing orbs. The ground below her shimmered like liquid honey. Strange, celestial music played somewhere far away, like whale-song filtered through harps.
And then she saw them.
Capybaras. Angelic, slow-blinking capybaras, wearing white feathered wings and gold-threaded halos, drifted around her in gentle circles. One approached and gently nibbled the tip of her finger. Another crawled onto her lap, humming a tune from the Book of Genesis probably deleted for being too holy.
Fatiba sat there, still half-bound in the afterglow of culinary transcendence, her breath catching in strange hiccups between awe and restraint. The angelic capybaras faded back into their imagined ether, the gold light dimmed, and the universe gently closed the gates it had briefly opened. But even as reality returned in the form of the cool tile beneath her feet and the quiet drip of soup settling in the bowl, something inside her didn't quite come down.
Because that had been real. Not just the food. Not just the flavor. But the act of it. The intent. The care.
She looked at the plate. Empty now, except for the flecks of mint, a small oily thumbprint of yolk, and a few steam-soft crumbs that glowed faintly in the low kitchen light like embers of something more sacred than fire.
Her mouth was still tingling. Her body was warm. But it was her chest—her ribcage, specifically—that felt foreign, like something had been cracked open there. Not broken. Just… breached.
Shotaro didn't say anything. He moved like a ghost with muscle—quiet, swift, drying a pan with the confidence of someone who knew what to do in a kitchen because he had been a kitchen. he had also folded napkins. Stirred soups. Wiped down counters. And not for performance. Not for show. But because someone had once mattered enough to feed.
She stared at him for a moment, unsure of how to articulate the swell behind her sternum.
She had never eaten her mother's cooking.
Not once.
Her mother didn't cook.
She performed. At charity galas. In boardrooms. In front of the camera. A sculpted woman, always just a little too busy, always full of love in the way diplomats are—technically correct, emotionally bankrupt.
Her grandfather had cooked for her on occasion. In the years before his hands shook. Before time wrapped its cold vines around his spine and sapped the muscle from his arms. She remembered those days like old songs—quiet, fragrant, hummed under his breath in Farsi as he boiled rice or ground saffron with mortar and pestle.
And before that, before things began to unravel, there was Ahmed.
Uncle Ahmed.
He made real food. Slow, deliberate, with a mouthful of old stories and bad jokes peppered in. His stews were sermons, his rice carried nostalgia, and his kebabs made you feel like Iran still meant something. But Ahmed was dead, and the kitchens that followed were cold and clinical.
Her servants cooked for her after that. They made good food. Better than good. Technically perfect. But their smiles were thin paper, and their eyes never lingered. They worked like wind-up toys in uniforms too clean to be honest. They served without salt in their blood or love in their craft. No mistakes, no heart. Just plates on a schedule and poisoned glances if they thought she wouldn't notice.
She could never taste them in the food.
But this. This mess of fried eggs, seared meat, and leftover chicken—hacked together by a barefoot lunatic with silver hair and a grin like rebellion—this was different.
Because this meal had his fingerprints.
His weird, brilliant, reckless humanity.
And that mattered.
It meant something to her in a way that even she couldn't fully name. Not love. Not friendship. Not pity or playfulness or romantic subtext. Just… human contact. Not the kind with hands or words. But the kind that lingers in heat and spice and intention.
He cooked because she was hungry. Not because it made him look good. Not because he was told to. Not because it fulfilled a duty.
But because he was there. And she was there. And that was enough.
Shotaro set the last plate on the rack and wiped his hands on his shirt with theatrical grace. "So?" he asked, not even looking at her. "Was that the best orgasmic breakfast of your life or what?"
She didn't answer at first.
She just looked at him, long and strange, like she was trying to see past the skin and jokes and bravado to the boy who lived underneath it all.
Then, very softly, almost too softly for the kitchen to hold, she said, "Thank you."
And even Shotaro—god-puncher, cloud-rider, chaos incarnate—stilled for just a second. He turned his head slightly, the shadow of a smile gentling across his cheek, not amused, but something quieter. Something real.
He nodded once.
Then—
"Wanna see what I can do with instant noodles?" he said, already grabbing the kettle like a lunatic.
Fatiba laughed. Not just with her mouth. But her ribs. Her lungs. Her hands.
And somewhere in that cold, inherited house of stone and silence, something finally began to thaw.