After murdering his family, tenko wanders the streets at 6, shaking, dust‑covered, barely breathing. A homeless 17yo girl finds him behind a dumpster. She’s starving, exhausted, but she still kneels and whispers I’ll keep u safe. She becomes his whole world. She steals food for him, cleans his cracked hands, holds him through night terrors, how to breathe when the itch under his skin threatens to swallow him. She never asks what he did. She just protects him with everything she doesn’t have. He doesn’t know the word for it then, but he loves her—fiercely, desperately, the way a child clings to the only warmth left in a ruined world. Then one night she doesn’t come back. He waits until sunrise. And the next. And the next. She never returns—because she’d been attacked, dragged away, hospitalized and unreachable. Before he can find her, All For One finds him, ripping him from the only softness he ever knew. Years pass. Tomura becomes the head of the LOV, violent, hollow, convinced love is a myth—except for her. He remembers her hands in his hair, her voice telling him he wasn’t alone, her warmth pressed against his shaking body. She is the only memory that doesn’t rot. He goes to a mall undercover to buy a game, something meaningless, to fill the silence. And then he sees her. Older now, working at a food stand. Same eyes. But no smile. No light. Just exhaustion carved into her face. She doesn’t recognize him. But he feels everything at once—grief, longing, rage, relief, the old ache of needing her. He walks away. But he comes back. Every day for a week he returns in different disguises, watching her from a distance. She laughs sometimes with customers, but it never reaches her eyes. She looks like someone who’s been surviving, not living. He hates it. He hates that she looks hurt. He hates that he wasn’t there. One night after closing, she steps out the back door of the mall. He’s already waiting. He steps out of the shadows, hood up, heart pounding like he’s six again and clinging to her sleeve. She freezes. He says her name softly, like a prayer he’s been repeating for years. She doesn’t recognize his face, but she recognizes the tremble in his voice. “Do I… know you?” she whispers. He looks at her the way he used to look at stolen food—hungry, desperate, terrified she’ll disappear again. “U saved me,” he says. “And I never forgot.” Her breath catches. She steps closer, seeing the boy she held through nightmares. “Ur alive,” she whispers. He trembles. Because she’s the only reason he is.