He moved again.
Just his hand, curling slightly like a dream had tugged at it. But it was enough. The spell had broken. The stillness that had filled the cram school for days—thick as fog, heavy as sleep—it thinned. Not gone, but different.
I didn't say anything.
Neither did she.
Kiss-shot sat across from me, her small form folded neatly on the couch. She had her arms wrapped around her knees in a way that looked far too natural for someone who'd once towered over cities. Her golden hair hung around her like a veil, and her eyes glinted faintly in the dark.
I watched her, and she watched him.
But she spoke to me.
"I forget what silence sounds like before it ends," she said.
Her voice was quieter tonight. Not tired, but… hollowed out. Like someone who had been listening to echoes for so long she started missing the sound of actual voices—even when they hurt.
I rested my chin on my hand and stared at the floorboards beneath us.
"I think you're used to silence that obeys," I said. "This kind doesn't."
She glanced at me—not with suspicion, not quite with interest. Just with that cold, evaluating look she gave to everything she hadn't decided how to feel about yet.
"Explain."
I took a moment. Not to think, but to choose what not to say.
"The kind of silence you get from power," I said. "It's a kind that stays quiet out of fear. Deference. Respect, if you're lucky."
"And the kind you prefer?"
"Silence from understanding. Or even boredom. The kind that lets people exist near each other without performing."
Her mouth twitched. A reaction. Slight, but it was there.
"Then you've misunderstood me," she said. "I don't want obedience. I want control."
"You think those are different things?"
"Of course they are," she said. "Obedience is reaction. Control is choice."
I leaned back against the wall, arms folded. "And here I thought you didn't care about choice."
"I don't. But humans do. And that makes it a useful illusion to uphold."
I looked at her for a long time, searching her face for something that might slip—an old wound she didn't cover as well in this smaller body. But her face was unreadable. Distant, yes, but not cold. There was something in her that had been carved too many times and too deeply to freeze over completely.
"You talk like you're still above everything," I said. "But you're sitting on a secondhand couch in an abandoned cram school with a dying boy and a stranger who won't leave."
"Isn't that what makes it tragic?" she said. "That I know exactly where I am… and I still can't escape the instinct to pretend I'm not."
That caught me off guard. It didn't sound like a line. It sounded like a slip.
Kiss-shot blinked slowly, watching me the way predators sometimes pause when they aren't sure if they're looking at prey or something else entirely.
"You're not what I expected," she said.
"I don't think I'm what anyone expected," I muttered.
"You knew what was coming. You knew how things would play out. And still you stayed."
Her tone wasn't accusatory. If anything, it was... closer to bewildered.
"You never asked why."
"You never offered an answer."
"Would you believe me if I said I don't know?" I asked.
She didn't reply.
But she didn't dismiss it, either.
Instead, she shifted on the couch, pulling her knees in tighter like the air had gotten colder and she hadn't noticed until now.
"Three days," she said softly. "And you've watched him like you were waiting for something that didn't belong to you."
I didn't look at Araragi.
I kept my eyes on her.
"I'm not waiting for him," I said. "I'm watching you."
That made her flinch.
Barely. A breath. A flicker.
But it was real.
"You said you hated being seen," I added. "But you haven't told me to stop."
A beat.
"I haven't decided if I like the way you look at me," she said.
I smiled faintly.
"That's alright. I haven't decided if I like being here yet."
Another pause stretched between us, fragile but full.
And then, for the first time in what felt like hours, she lowered her head—not in defeat or shame, but something smaller. Something closer to admission.
"He's going to wake up soon," she whispered.
"Yeah."
"And once he does... things will shift."
"Yeah."
She didn't say what she was really thinking.
Neither did I.
But in that moment, under flickering lights and hollow walls, I realized something painfully clear:
She had been lonely for a very, very long time.
And I wasn't ready to become another person who left