"You know if we get caught like this, it'll cause a scene," Fatiba said, the words half-buried under the weight of unspoken rules. Her cheeks, already tinged with warmth from the meal, reddened further—this time not from the spices or the steam, but from the quiet vulnerability of the implication. A boy. In her home. In the dead of night. In the kitchen. Laughing with her like they were just two human beings, not chess pieces in some silent war of legacy and expectation.
Shotaro didn't even glance up as he fumbled with the kettle, pouring water into the dented steel pot like he'd done it a thousand times before, though this house was not his. "I know that," he said, utterly unbothered. "It's common sense. Having a child caught with the opposite sex does raise some eyebrows."
She blinked at how casually he said it. How simple he made it sound. Like this wasn't a marble-cold mansion where every whisper carried weight, where even the scent of rebellion could stain reputations like ink.
"You're not taking this seriously," she muttered.
"I am," he said, flicking the stove on with the same hand that had once punched through temporal anomalies. "I just don't care."
That stopped her. The honesty of it. The absurd, clean truth in his tone. There was no arrogance in his words, no hidden need to provoke or tease—just a simple rejection of fear. He didn't mean to offend. He just lived as though permission was something he'd long stopped asking for.
She leaned against the counter, arms folded, her body angled just enough to watch him without seeming to. "You know what happens in houses like this when a girl's caught laughing with a boy in the dark."
"But it was either this or hearing your belly roar the whole night," he said. "And I know which one sounds worse."
The pot began to boil. Tiny bubbles forming, rising, collapsing.
Fatiba swallowed.
Because she did know. More than anyone.
She knew what silence could do to a person—not just the absence of noise, but the kind of hollow hush that followed you from childhood, the kind that turned every dinner into theater. The kind that told you not to speak unless you had the right words in the right tone with the right face. She knew what it meant to sit at long, glossy tables across from glass-eyed servants trained to smile without sincerity, to eat meals prepared without affection, and to be cared for without being seen. It was more than loneliness.
It was erasure. A slow, methodical deletion of self.
And yet here he was—Shotaro Mugyiwara, barefoot and absurd, standing in her kitchen like a misplaced god of mischief—boiling water for instant noodles with the reverence of a monk preparing incense for prayer.
Like this mattered.
Like she mattered.
"Do you think it's wrong?" She asked, her voice soft and sudden, as if the question had tripped and fallen from her chest before she could catch it.
He didn't look up at first, just tilted his head as he stirred the water, as if giving her room to walk it back. But when he turned, his eyes were clear, his face stripped of its usual mischief. Gone was the boy who joked too quickly, who dressed down divinity with casual hands.
"You are normal," he said, with the calm finality of a sealed envelope. "You breathe oxygen, your DNA is carbon-based, and your chromosomes are XX. You have two arms, two legs, and, by the look of it, no wings or horns or cyclopean eyes. You're a normal sixteen-year-old female Homo sapien."
It should've sounded like mockery.
But it didn't.
It sounded like a grounding wire. A reminder that underneath the palace of expectations and whispered condemnations, she was still flesh, still human, still allowed to be.
And somehow, that was enough to still the world again. The chandelier above didn't sway. The ticking clock didn't intrude. The night held its breath, as if even the darkness around them wanted to listen in.
Fatiba exhaled. A quiet, shaking kind of breath.
"That's not what I meant," she murmured, tucking her hands into her sleeves like the words had exposed her. "I'm not normal… according to people."
"Why?" he asked. "Because you have a scar on your forehead?" He rolled his eyes, his voice slipping back into its usual sarcastic rhythm. "That's practically a fashion trend nowadays. Very edgy."
"It's not just that—"
"What is your religion?" he interrupted, almost idly, as if they were discussing favorite snacks and not the kind of thing that divided nations.
She blinked. "Islam."
He nodded. "Okay. So that's a god you follow. No problem."
She blinked again. "You… don't follow a religion?"
"Nope," he said, pulling two mismatched bowls from a cabinet like a man rummaging through the ruins of a forgotten kingdom. "But I have faith."
"Wait—you have faith but not religion?"
"Yep. In my perception, they're very different."
He placed the bowls down with the same care he'd use setting bones into the earth.
"'My god is great'—that's faith. It's gratitude. It's a wonder. It's knowing you're not the center of the story," he said, his voice slower now, not so much talking to her as talking with something ancient inside her. "But 'my god is greatest'—that's when the poison leaks in. That's when you start comparing, quantifying, and owning. That's when it becomes arrogance. That's when it becomes religion."
Fatiba didn't know what to say. She just… looked at him.
A boy too wild for temples, too soft for wars. A creature half made of contradictions, barefoot and cooking, his breath fogging up her kitchen windows.
There was still fear. Of course there was. Fear of what the house would do if it caught this. Fear of her mother's eyebrows tightening, of the servants whispering, of the legacy she wore like a second spine cracking under strain. But somehow, here—under flickering stove light and late-night steam—it felt okay to be afraid, as long as it didn't stop her from being here.
The kettle let out a thin whistle, not quite a scream. Shotaro poured the water like a ceremony, like a prayer.
And the kitchen filled with steam again—not just warmth, but memory. Like something old and human had been awakened in the room. A smell that had no name, only emotion. Belonging.
Fatiba sat down on a stool, barefoot now too, as if her body had decided without her that she was allowed to feel the floor. Her braid had come a little undone. Her sleeves were pushed up. Her voice was gentler than it had been in months.
"What are you going to add?" she asked, nodding to the noodles.
Shotaro's grin came back like moonlight after a cloud passed.
"Watch closely, my apprentice," he said, already grabbing spices and sauces with reverent flair. "Tonight, I show you the sacred art of kitchen alchemy."
And she did.
She watched. Not just how he stirred or seasoned, but how he moved—like the air obeyed him, like gravity was a friend and not a law. How he breathed—soft and steady, a rhythm so human it felt borrowed from some better world. His hands, once the same hands that had cracked ancient marble and thrown back the weight of myth itself, now reached awkwardly, fumbling with the soy sauce bottle like it was a grenade made of glass. She watched like you might watch a ghost remember its name. Like someone memorizing a miracle they didn't think they'd be allowed to keep.
And in that house—ancient and overbuilt, lined with history polished into sharp corners—where paintings watched like sentinels and every hallway whispered something judgmental, something old—a girl and a boy sat barefoot in a kitchen past midnight, the air thick with steam and the fragile smell of cumin and scorched butter. And for one breathless hour, it felt like that alone could change the world.
But the world, even when tender, remains a world. And the smell—it betrayed them.
A floorboard creaked.
A door eased open with the patience of a man who had learned to move softly even when waking from the deep reaches of sleep. A voice followed—familiar, dry like old paper, but not without weight.
"Yo, Fatiba," Abbas called, voice cracked with weariness and bemusement. "I thought you didn't know how to—"
He paused.
Stared.
"—Damn," he said.
Shotaro didn't flinch. He looked up, one eyebrow lazily raised, as if he'd been expecting this visitor since the second the kettle had begun to boil.
"Your grandfather," he said, without a shred of tension. "Can't say I didn't sense him waking up."
Fatiba nearly dropped the chopsticks in her hand. The ends clattered against the edge of the ceramic bowl, tilting dangerously before falling back with a hollow tap. "You sensed him?" she whispered, like it had just occurred to her she wasn't alone in the house with this barefoot anomaly of a boy.
Shotaro gave her a side glance, so relaxed it bordered on insolent. The light hit his face in half-shadow, his silver hair catching steam like dust in cathedral light. "Of course I did," he said, like it was the most obvious thing in the universe. "Superhuman senses, you know."
Her voice pitched, a soft mix of panic and outrage. "Then why didn't you say anything?! Or—or better yet, hide?!"
He straightened, casually setting the spoon down with exaggerated delicacy, the faint clink of metal on ceramic sounding almost sarcastic. "Hiding," he said, "would've made me look guilty. And I've done nothing that requires hiding. Not in this house."
He paused. His smirk returned, slow as boiling water. "Unless, of course, mixing wasabi into the steak is a felony under this roof. In which case…" He raised both hands in mock surrender, his voice rich with faux-piety, "I stand guilty as charged. Please let the elders be merciful in their sentencing."
It was then that Abbas stepped fully into the light.
His robe trailed behind him like fog sewn from memory, and his eyes, even clouded slightly with age, still cut through the kitchen like they were forged from old judgment and older love. He said nothing for a moment, simply surveyed the scene—noodles curling with steam, eggs gone golden and crisp at the edges, the barefoot posture of two children trying to pretend they hadn't been caught being human. The silence that followed was not empty; it was surgical. Evaluative. A silence only men who had lived too long and seen too much could master.
Fatiba's voice caught in her throat. Her hands twitched. Her smile bloomed desperately—too fast, too sharp, like a flower forced to open under threat of frost. "H-he… he is our new recruit," she stammered, tripping over her own alibi like it had grown legs and started kicking back. "I—I was testing his cooking skills. Father hired him without telling you. Which is bad, right? That's bad, really disrespectful—I'll talk to him. I'll make sure it doesn't—"
Abbas raised a hand. Not in anger. Just… weight. It landed on the counter like the slow placing of a stone. "No need to lie for him, girl," he said. His voice was soft, but it reached every wall like incense.
Fatiba froze mid-sentence, eyes wide. But Abbas wasn't looking at her anymore. His gaze was fixed squarely on Shotaro now—not with suspicion, but with the calculating stillness of a former soldier recognizing another beneath the uniform of youth. He wasn't seeing a barefoot boy anymore. He was measuring the unspoken, the kind of danger that wore laughter like perfume.
"You're not a servant," he said, with the dull certainty of someone reading from an old prophecy.
Shotaro didn't miss a beat. "No shit, Sherlock," he replied, in that infuriating, irreverent way only he could. "Quite the elderly wisdom right there. Really blew my mind."
Abbas let out something like a grunt, half-amused, half-exasperated. But then he did something unexpected. Something so gentle it almost startled the moment. He pulled out a third stool—the creak of it dragging across the tile sounded like furniture waking from a dream—and sat down at the edge of their midnight world like he had always belonged there.
"You're a tall one," he said, squinting at Shotaro through the low haze of steam. "Broad shoulders too. Your age?"
"Fifteen," Shotaro replied.
Abbas huffed, almost to himself. "Fifteen," he repeated. "You're damn near scraping eight feet. That's a grown man's build, not a boy's. You look like something out of the Book of Kings." He paused, eyeing him again. "But that fire in your chest—that's still a child's."
Shotaro's grin widened, sharp at the edges. "Scary, perhaps not bad," he said, leaning forward on the counter with both elbows like a man about to start a bar fight or a bedtime story. "Maybe I am your granddaughter's special someone. Ever think of that?"
Fatiba made a noise that could only be described as existential horror manifesting into sound. "EKKKKK—!!" she cried, her whole body jerking as though her soul had just tried to leap out her skin and escape the room through the ventilation shaft.
Shotaro Mugyiwara always did this. He prodded people on purpose, poked where it hurt or embarrassed or exposed. He believed, deeply, that people's real faces only showed when they were angry. That fury burned the masks off. That rage was a kind of honesty no performance could fake.
"Hmmm…" Abbas leaned back slightly, stroking his chin, the old sage now replaced by a philosopher halfway to a smile. He looked like he was enjoying this far more than he should.
"Grandfather—" Fatiba began, utterly mortified, trying to salvage the shrapnel of her pride, "there's nothing going o—" She swung her foot and kicked Shotaro in the side of his stomach with all the force she could muster. "This retard!" she hissed, red-faced.
Shotaro just let out an "oof" and laughed.
"Let him speak," Abbas said, still watching the boy. "There's something curious about this one. And God Almighty may have taken the sharpness from my eyes and dulled my ears, but He never took the ones I keep in my heart."
His hand touched his chest, briefly.
"If there was something wrong—something shameful—I wouldn't have found you two in the kitchen. I would've found you somewhere else entirely."
He looked pointedly at the stool, at the warm food still steaming, at the shared mess between them.
He smiled faintly.
"Trust me, your father was far worse. At fifteen, Rashid was a damn menace. Sneaking girls in through every crevice in the house—schoolmates, teachers, sometimes even other students' sisters or mothers." He chuckled, shaking his head. "By comparison, you're the Muslim version of Mother Teresa."
Fatiba's mouth fell open, the weight of disbelief dragging it down as if some ancient lock had been sprung. "What?" she gasped, the word falling out of her like a dropped heirloom.
Her mind stumbled. She had only ever known her father as a precision instrument of adulthood—silent in the mornings, always freshly shaven, eyes unreadable behind square glasses, hands never idle and never tender. He had seemed less like a man and more like an extension of the house itself: made of stone, bound by routine, carved by responsibility. And yet, here was Abbas, weathered and amused, casually tossing a story into the air like it was common family trivia—girls, teachers, mothers, chaos. Youth.
Shotaro gave a long, theatrical whistle, the kind that dragged just enough to irritate. "That's one hell of a father," he muttered, grinning with all the irreverence of a fox in the royal pantry.
The air shifted. The kitchen, thick with steam and cumin and unspoken things, exhaled with them. In that moment, something cracked—not a loud shatter like a plate dropped or a scream let loose, but a softer, subtler sound. Like the long-sealed drawer of an old desk quietly unsticking. Inside were things untouched for decades: laughter that had never been permitted, shame gone soft with time, the odd comfort of realizing the people you feared were once just as foolish as you. Truth rose in the steam, mixed into the scent of spice and old floor polish, into the air that clung to their skin and made it warmer.
Then, of course, Shotaro ruined it. "Wait," he said, leaning in with the idiotic confidence of a man courting death for the sake of a punchline. "If you're the Muslim version of Mother Teresa, does that mean you also go around converting the miserable to Is—"
He didn't even get to finish. Fatiba's elbow drove hard and merciless into his diaphragm, cutting his breath in half like a guillotine through fruit. He choked on the last syllable, eyes widening, body folding slightly with the impact.
"AGH—!"
She glared at him, not with real hatred but with the sharp affection of someone who had long since given up trying to explain the boundaries of acceptable speech to a natural disaster in human form. Her cheeks were red—not just from the heat, not just from the joke, but from the closeness of all of it. The honesty. The possibility.
Shotaro wheezed, straightening slowly, one hand still on his ribs as he winced theatrically. "So violent," he muttered, flashing her a crooked grin. "Mother Terorisa is more like it."
Abbas let out a dry chuckle, the sound carrying the fatigue of too many years and the amusement of someone who had stopped taking the world too seriously long ago. He looked between the two of them—the simmering affection beneath the sarcasm, the hesitant nearness, the stubborn way they remained in orbit despite themselves—and said nothing more. He didn't need to.
The moment lingered, wrapped in that warm kitchen light, sealed in the scent of garlic and broth and old, melted walls. It was a fragile thing, but real. Like breath on glass, there only as long as you dared not wipe it away.
And the house—this house that had felt, just for a moment, like it had been reminded how to breathe.