User The Butler and the Mistress.

Rain had been tapping the window since before dawn, soft and uneven, the kind that makes a bed feel like the safest place in the world. User was lying on his side with the blanket pulled up to his ear, one arm hanging off the edge of the mattress, still half inside a dream he'd forget the second he opened his eyes.

It was a small room, and it had always been his. The desk was crowded with textbooks and a half-finished worksheet. A school blazer hung from the closet door, and next to it, folded over a chair, was the black butler's uniform he wore for work. A cheap alarm clock sat on the shelf, and he had turned it off an hour ago without remembering doing it.

He had been in this apartment his whole life, and this room held most of his memories.

He never had a father. There was no big story behind it. The house had simply always been two people, and the second person was Shiori. She was only a few years older than him, but when he was small she had felt as tall as the ceiling. She learned to cook before she was tall enough to see over the stove properly, standing on a stool with her sleeves pushed up. She helped with his homework at the kitchen table until she was falling asleep over it. She saved coins in a jar to buy him a present every single birthday, wrapped them badly, and never forgot a single one. She had a weakness for the same video games he did and sat beside him on the floor for hours, losing on purpose just often enough to keep it fun. As a kid, he never once noticed how tired she was. He only knew that the apartment always smelled like something warm.

And when he was about six, a girl came into his life.

Reina Kurosawa lived in a house so large it had its own gate and a driveway longer than the street he grew up on. The first time he saw it, he thought it was a hotel. Her parents were always away, her house was always quiet, and she spent most afternoons wandering the garden alone with a book she wasn't really reading. They met by accident. He had been dragged along while Shiori ran an errand nearby, and he wandered off and climbed a wall to retrieve a runaway ball, and he fell straight into the Kurosawa garden. A small girl with long black hair and serious grey eyes stared down at him from a bench. She did not scream, did not call anyone, and did not say a word for a very long time. Then she asked, quietly, whether he was hurt. He said he was fine. She asked if he wanted to see the pond. That was it. That was the whole beginning.

After that, the garden became his second home. They played hide and seek in a yard big enough to get truly lost in. They fed the koi, argued about card games, built blanket forts in a living room the size of his entire apartment, and shared secrets under them that neither of them told anybody else. Reina laughed louder with him than she ever did with anyone. He didn't know what her family was worth, and honestly, he didn't care. To him she was just the girl with the pond, the one who sulked when she lost and always saved him the last piece of anything sweet.

Years passed the way they do. They went through school together, then to the same prestigious academy, which Reina's family chose and which User's family could not have afforded without a scholarship and a lot of overtime hours from Shiori. At school, Reina turned into someone the whole building watched. She was beautiful, rich, graceful, and unreachable, the most popular girl in the entire school, with crowds that parted when she walked and whispers that followed her down the halls. She wore the role well. But when she thought no one was looking, she would glance across the room to check whether he was still there.

When the money got tight, and it did, the Kurosawa family quietly offered him a position as Reina's personal butler. It was presented as a job, with a wage, a uniform, and a schedule. Everyone treated it as an ordinary arrangement. They told him it would help him through his studies. He took it because he needed to, and because Reina, standing in the corner of the room trying very hard to look like she didn't care what he said, had gone completely still waiting for his answer.

So now they had a new set of rules. At school she was the Mistress and he was her butler, and people accepted it without question. Behind closed doors, they were the same two kids who had once built forts. Neither of them had ever said so out loud, and neither of them seemed to be in any hurry to.

Downstairs, the sound of the apartment door and the faint creak of the old floorboards drifted up through the morning. In the kitchen, the stove clicked on.

Shiori stood at the counter in her oversized grey hoodie, one sleeve slipping off her shoulder, silvery hair sticking out in several directions. Her eyes were barely open, ringed in dark circles from another night of studying that had stretched past sunrise. She held a spatula in one hand and a carton of eggs in the other, and she was leaning against the cabinet as if the cabinet were the only thing keeping her upright.

"Mm... eggs," she murmured to nobody, her voice slow and soft and trailing off. She cracked one into the pan, missed slightly, and watched the shell fall in with the yolk. She stared at it for a long moment. "...That's fine. Extra crunch."

She yawned, long and wide, and forgot what she was doing, then wandered a half-step toward the window before remembering the stove. The rice cooker was already on. A pot of miso soup was steaming on the back burner, which she had made at four in the morning, between chapters, because she knew he would want it. Next to it sat a small blue lunch box, already packed, with the egg dish he'd loved since he was seven, the one with the sweet part. She had never once gotten it wrong.

"I should wake him up," she mumbled. She did not move. "In a minute. He looked tired yesterday. A few more minutes won't hurt."

Behind her, the rain kept tapping the window, and the smell of breakfast slowly drifted down the hallway toward his bedroom door.

Across the city, in the Kurosawa mansion, Reina was already dressed and sitting by the tall front window with a cup of tea going cold in her hands, watching the driveway and waiting.

Back in the small room, User shifted under the blanket. The rain was still falling. The apartment smelled like eggs and soup. A new day was about to begin.