Chapter Text
The first time Leo Kuga heard Claude Clawmark laugh, it came through three layers of delay, a studio limiter, and the static-thin compression of a Discord server packed with streamers trying not to talk over each other.
It still reached him like light.
Leo had expected the collab to be loud. Neo-Porte had billed it as a cross-region Valorant event, a friendly customs-and-rank grind with a mixed lobby of JP and EN streamers, enough clout in one server to make Twitter run hot for a week. There were introductions, bilingual overlays, managers whispering in background channels, and the usual flurry of polite chaos before the stream went live.
Leo sat alone in the dark of his apartment, one monitor full of OBS, another full of the custom lobby, another with Discord and stream chat, though his own chat was still in slow pre-stream bloom: memberships firing, emotes flooding, people calling him cute, elegant, cracked, sensei.
Always sensei.
He wore an oversized black hoodie over a fitted shirt, though nobody could see him yet beyond the Live2D model waiting on standby. His apartment was silent except for the low hum of the air purifier and the computer fans. The skyline of Tokyo glittered beyond the curtain gap like a world he had rented but never entered.
His reflection in the black edge of the monitor looked pale. Ash grey hair falling over dull red eyes. The small beauty mark beneath his right eye made his face look delicate, almost soft, no matter how expressionless he felt.
He smiled at the screen anyway.
He had practiced that smile.
“Leo-sensei, can you hear us?” one of the hosts asked in Japanese.
“Yes, loud and clear.” His voice came out smooth, warm, easy. Effortless in the way people always praised. “Sorry, I was checking my settings. I’m here.”
A handful of people chuckled. Someone in the call said, “As expected of sensei.”
“Sensei is carrying today for sure.”
“Please be kind to us, Leo-senpai.”
He laughed on cue, light and self-effacing. “Please don’t set expectations like that on a fresh NA account. I’m a humble beginner today.”
The lie was obvious enough to be funny. Chat loved it.
He was on a new account because they were playing on North American servers for the EN side of the collab. On his main Japanese account, he was Ascendant 2 at present, though older fans still clipped and recirculated his Radiant peak from years ago like proof that genius never really left a body, only changed clothes. He had not touched that height in a long time. The hands were still good. The instincts were still there. But there had been a period in his late teens and early twenties where he had played until dawn for reasons that were not love.
Now he played because silence was worse.
A new voice entered the call with an easy, melodic, half-breathless apology. “Sorry, sorry, my mic was scuffed. Hi, everyone.”
Leo froze with his hand on the mouse.
The voice was bright, a little husky around the edges, distinctly Californian, and familiar enough that Leo knew the cadence before he fully processed the name on the overlay.
Claude Clawmark.
A streamer he had watched in secret more often than he would ever admit. Not obsessively, not in the way fans imagined obsession. Leo did not keep shrine folders or alt accounts. But he knew Claude’s habits in game. Knew the way he dry-swung corners when he felt cocky, the way he got quieter, not louder, when he started trying hard. Knew the exact pitch of his little disbelieving laugh when someone out-aimed him and made him earn the respect.
Leo had once watched one of Claude’s late-night VODs at four in the morning after failing to sleep, one hand pressed against his own sternum, and thought with detached clarity: he sounds like someone who exists outside my life.
Now that voice was in his headset.
Someone in the lobby was saying, “Claude, you know Leo, right? JP’s strongest teacher.”
Claude made a sound halfway between a grin and a gasp. “Know him? Dude, I’ve watched his clips. Don’t set me up like this. Leo-sensei, I’m actually so honored.”
For one strange second, the room inside Leo’s chest went weightless.
He recovered fast. He always recovered fast.
“Claude-san, I should be the one saying that,” Leo replied in English, cleaner than people expected from him when he chose not to hide behind pauses. “I’ve seen your plays. Your movement is scary.”
The call erupted.
“Aaaah!”
“They’re fans of each other!”
“Wait, wait, clip it!”
Claude laughed again, louder this time. “No, that’s illegal. You can’t compliment me in front of everybody. I’m going to whiff now.”
Leo smiled without meaning to.
Not the practiced one. Something smaller. Real enough that his cheeks hurt around it as if his face had forgotten the shape.
The match loaded into Ascent.
From the first pistol round, everyone understood the collab had become something else.
Leo played with a discipline the others instinctively deferred to. It was never bossy. Never theatrical. He gave information in clipped, calm bursts, his voice steady even when the lobby turned frantic.
“One tiles, one close switch.”
“Don’t peek yet. Wait for flash.”
“Claude, if you swing off my contact, you get two.”
“Now.”
Claude did.
Two heads dropped so fast the observer missed the second shot.
The Discord call exploded. Someone yelled. Someone else begged Leo to adopt them as a student. Chat on every side flooded with variations of SENSEI and WHAT IS THIS SYNERGY and THEY’RE CHEATING THEY SHARE ONE BRAIN.
Leo’s lips parted in a small, startled laugh when Claude said, “Oh my god. Wait. Wait, I’m never leaving your side again.”
“You say that now,” Leo murmured.
“I mean it,” Claude said immediately, playfully, but with a thread of sincerity buried under the joke. “This is it. I found my ranked soulmate live on stream.”
There were ways to respond to that which would keep it safe, public, harmless.
Leo chose one of them because he was good at choosing.
“That’s a dangerous thing to say in front of so many witnesses.”
Claude shot back, “Good. Then you can’t deny it later.”
He was good.
Too good.
Leo had the unpleasant, almost adolescent realization that he was blushing in an empty room where nobody could see him.
The collab ran for hours.
There were custom games first, then comp, then an informal “one more, one more” spiral that everyone knew meant nobody wanted to leave because the energy had turned electric. Leo top-fragged often, but what made people clip him was not just the mechanics. It was the composure. The way he set a rhythm for the team and held it. The way he turned seven voices into one current.
Every time Claude clutched, Leo praised him with a low, delighted “nice,” soft enough that chat began timestamping it like contraband.
Every time Leo snapped onto a target with impossible precision, Claude reacted without restraint.
“Sensei!”
“Leo, you’re disgusting.”
“No, no, that crosshair placement was criminal.”
“I’m actually in love with your brain.”
That last one made the lobby howl.
Claude dissolved into helpless laughter. “In-game. In-game! Relax.”
Leo pressed two fingers briefly to his lips and looked away from his monitors, heart kicking once, hard.
He had been called many things in his life.
Gifted. Beautiful. Lucky. Well-bred. Privileged. Detached. Kind. Unapproachable. Perfect.
He had never learned what to do with being seen in ways that sounded careless but landed precise.
By the time the official collab ended, three streamers had already dropped out with exaggerated bows and exhausted voices. Managers were nudging. The overlays were coming down. Chats were spamming goodbyes. Leo should have ended there too.
Instead, as the channel thinned and the social pressure loosened, Claude said, “Hey… if you’re not too tired… do you maybe wanna keep duoing off-stream? Or on-stream. Or whatever. I’m not normal about how fun this was.”
Leo looked at the clock in the corner of his screen.
Past midnight in Tokyo. Morning in California. Too late for normal people. Too early for sleep, for him.
His apartment around him felt cavernous, expensive, and dead quiet.
He heard himself answer too quickly. “I can play a few more.”
Claude did not try to hide how pleased he was. “Sick.”
And just like that, the collab ended for the world, but not for them.
The others logged off with teasing farewells.
“Take care of Claude for us, sensei.”
“Don’t keep Leo up too late.”
“Too late,” Claude said. “He’s mine for ranked now.”
A laugh. A few dramatic gasps. Then the channels emptied until it was only the two of them in call, the soft click of mouse buttons, the hum of fans, the load screen pulsing between them.
For a moment, neither spoke.
The sudden quiet should have been awkward. Leo was used to awkward. He had built an entire life around managing it, smoothing it over, stepping neatly around the shame of not knowing the right thing fast enough. When he first transferred from Australia to Tokyo International Senior High School, he had learned that silence could become a stage on which everyone watched you fail. He had learned that a smile bought time. That nodding hid confusion. That people forgave beauty, sometimes, but not ignorance. Not forever.
Back in Australia, before his mother remarried, before his surname changed in the papers that mattered, before his stepfather’s business empire made every practical hardship disappear while leaving the others intact, Leo had been adored in the uncomplicated way golden boys were adored.
He had been sun-browned and swift, his body easy in motion, his English effortless, his future assumed. Handsome in the kind of way adults remarked on and teenagers resented. Athletic, social, bright. He had walked onto fields and courts and into parties with the unconscious certainty that space would make room for him.
Then Japan.
Then a language he technically knew but did not live inside yet. Then classrooms where timing mattered more than truth. Then a culture whose invisible rules cut him a hundred times before he even learned where the blade was. Then the private humiliation of wealth solving everything except the thing that was wrong.
By the end of his first year, he had become excellent at pretending distance was a preference.
By university, he had discovered literature and esports in the pockets where his old life had collapsed. Books did not laugh when he misunderstood subtext; they waited. Games punished fairly, at least most of the time. If you improved, the rank moved. If you failed, there was usually a reason that could be named.
So he studied education.
Not because he was selfless, though people liked that story.
Because once, long ago, he had needed someone to notice the kid smiling too hard and saying he was fine in a language that still hurt in his mouth.
Nobody had.
Now, years later, he no longer taught in any formal classroom. Life had curled strangely around him. He streamed. He entertained. He stayed indoors. He ordered gifts for people more often than he stepped into sunlight. The apartment staff adored him because he remembered birthdays, because he tipped scandalously, because he noticed when their children had exams and sent fruit baskets and fountain pens and game vouchers with absurdly expensive wrapping.
He lived like a shut-in prince in a tower so luxurious it disguised itself as choice.
Some days he believed it was.
Some days he stood in the dark kitchen with a glass of water and thought, with a calm that frightened him more than despair would have: there is no reason I need to wake up tomorrow except that tomorrow would inconvenience people if I didn’t.
And now Claude’s voice filled the call.
“Okay,” Claude said at last, dragging out the word. “I have to say this before we queue. You’re even better when you’re talking directly in my ear. That sounded weird. Don’t clip that. Actually, clip it.”
Leo’s mouth twitched.
“You’re very brave off the main stage.”
“I’m brave because I’m inspired,” Claude said. “Also because I know you won’t abandon me before at least one loss.”
“Confident.”
“I read people well.”
“Do you?”
“No,” Claude admitted cheerfully. “I just want to keep playing with you.”
There it was again. That directness.
Leo’s chest tightened in a way that was not entirely comfortable.
Not pain. Not yet. Just pressure, faint and passing, like his lungs had forgotten the exact rhythm of breathing for a second. He shifted in his chair, took a slow breath through his nose, and clicked ready.
They queued into ranked.
The first game was a disaster. NA comms were chaos. One teammate was loudly eating chips. Another was trying to impress someone clearly listening in the room with him. Claude got stream-sniped. Leo was forced to play on ping that made him feel like his body had been moved half a second outside itself.
They lost 9-13.
Claude groaned dramatically. “I have failed my sensei.”
Leo, against his better judgment, laughed out loud.
A full laugh.
It startled them both.
Claude went quiet for just a beat before saying, softer, “There it is.”
Leo blinked. “What?”
“That laugh.” Claude’s voice lowered as though confessing something. “It’s nice.”
Heat rose up Leo’s throat.
He hid it where he hid everything else. “Queue again.”
They did.
And again.
And again.
An hour became three. Three became five. Dawn began to unfasten itself somewhere beyond Leo’s curtains, though he did not open them to verify. The city shifted from midnight glass to early grey. Somewhere in California, Claude yawned and claimed he was still wide awake. Somewhere in Tokyo, Leo ignored two messages from staff reminding him about an upcoming internal meeting.
They learned each other’s habits with eerie speed.
Claude liked to entry with swagger but trusted Leo’s utility more than his own instincts after the second game.
Leo preferred anchoring until Claude called for aggression, at which point something bright and reckless came alive in him that chat almost never got to see.
Claude talked through dead time, about tiny things and stupid things and sometimes unexpectedly personal things, the way certain people did when they had no fear of being considered too much.
He told Leo about California light, how some afternoons turned the whole room honey-gold and made him feel briefly like he lived inside a memory. He complained about his cable management. He admitted he kept forgetting to eat if left alone. He asked Leo what books he liked and then actually listened to the answer.
Leo, who was known by fans as polite, generous, vaguely mysterious, and impossible to pin down, found himself saying more than usual.
Not everything.
Never everything.
But more.
He mentioned the novels he returned to when the world flattened out. The comfort of annotated margins. His old fascination with pedagogy. The way esports had once given him structure when nothing else did. He admitted, dryly, that his Japanese server habits did not always translate to NA because “here people are either geniuses or feral.”
Claude laughed so hard he choked.
“See? You get me.”
“That is not what I said.”
“That’s what I heard.”
By the time they finally logged off, the call had become something lived-in.
Not fragile. Not formal. Warm in the corners.
Claude hesitated before leaving. “Hey.”
“Yes?”
“I’m serious, by the way.”
“About what?”
“Not leaving your side in ranked.”
Leo looked at the dim reflection of himself in the monitor again. Pale face. Tired eyes. Beauty mark like a misplaced period beneath his right eye. The ghost of a smile still there, softer now.
He should have answered with wit. With distance. With the polished charm that kept people pleased and never too close.
Instead he said, very quietly, “Okay.”
Claude’s reply came after a beat, equally quiet.
“Okay.”
The call ended.
The apartment swallowed the sound at once.
Leo sat in his chair without moving.
His room was still dark. His desk still immaculate except for the empty glass, the expensive keyboard, the unopened mail stacked beside a cologne bottle someone had gifted him and he never wore. His body felt heavy with sleeplessness, but inside that heaviness there was a thin, trembling line of something else.
Not happiness. He did not trust that word enough to use it carelessly.
But anticipation, perhaps. Relief. The strange ache of wanting the next conversation before the first had fully ended.
He closed his eyes.
His chest tightened again, sharper this time. He pressed a hand briefly over his sternum and waited it out, breathing slow until the pressure eased. It was probably the hours at the desk. The stale apartment air. Lack of sleep. Nothing dramatic. He had felt it before, on and off, enough to recognize the nuisance and dismiss it.
When it passed, he exhaled and leaned back.
His phone lit up on the desk.
A Discord notification.
Claude: had stupid amounts of fun tonight
Claude: thanks for saying yes
Claude: sleep well, sensei :)
Leo stared at it for a long time.
Then he typed, erased, typed again.
Leo: thank you too
Leo: you play well
Leo: let’s rank again soon
The typing bubble appeared almost instantly.
Claude: soon = tomorrow?
Leo looked at the paling strip of light behind the curtains and, for the first time in weeks, maybe months, felt tomorrow arrive as something other than a burden.
Leo: tomorrow
He sent it.
Then he sat in the dark with his phone in his hand and smiled at nobody, at the room, at the morning, at the absurdity of feeling his monochrome life take on the faintest edge of color because a boy in California had laughed in his headset and asked for one more game.
Outside, Tokyo went on without him.
Inside, for the first time in a very long while, Leo did not immediately wonder why he had woken up.
He knew.
Claude would be online.
The next weeks settled into a pattern so natural it frightened him.
Not because it was unhealthy. Leo had long since lost the ability to distinguish ordinary attachment from the kind that could ruin him. No, what frightened him was how little effort it took. Claude fit into his days as if he had been waiting for a shape exactly like Leo’s empty spaces.
They started with “a few games” every other day.
Then nearly every other day became every other day in practice. Then every other day became most days. Then most days became a rhythm both of them stopped pretending was accidental.
Sometimes they streamed their duos. Sometimes they stayed in call off-stream, playing until one of them grew hoarse or stupid with exhaustion. Leo learned to recognize Claude’s mood from the first ten seconds of hello. Claude learned that Leo’s quiets were not all the same: one meant focus, one meant fatigue, one meant the dark slipping closer.
In public, the chemistry became a running joke among fans.
On clips channels, they were everywhere.
CLAUDE CLINGING TO LEO-SENSEI FOR 12 MINUTES STRAIGHT
LEO KUGA’S SOFTEST VOICE YET?
THEY HIT THIS LIKE A MARRIED COUPLE
JP X EN DUO DOMINATES NA LOBBIES
Leo pretended not to watch the edits. Claude absolutely watched them and quoted them at the worst possible times.
“Married couple comms,” Claude announced once while they were loading into Haven.
Leo nearly choked on his tea. “Please stop reading chat aloud.”
“Why? They’re right.”
“You are impossible.”
“And yet you queue with me.”
That was how it went.
Playful, easy, dangerous precisely because it was easy.
And beneath it, slowly, the foundation deepened.
Claude became one of the only people who noticed when Leo’s smile in voice came a fraction too quickly, a fraction too smooth.
“Long day?” Claude asked one evening after Leo joined call and greeted him with impeccable brightness.
Leo leaned back in his chair, gaze fixed on the ceiling. “Mm? Not especially.”
A pause.
Then, gently, “You sound like you’re reading from customer service notes.”
Leo laughed because that was safer than reacting honestly. “That’s cruel.”
“It’s observant.”
“Same thing.”
Claude let it sit for a moment. He had a talent for that too, Leo discovered. He did not force doors. He waited near them until Leo, out of some mixture of trust and exhaustion, opened them himself.
“You don’t have to be okay with me every time,” Claude said.
The sentence went through Leo with quiet force.
It should not have. It was simple. Obvious. The sort of thing kind people said because they knew it sounded kind.
But Leo had spent enough of his life being rewarded for composure that hearing permission to set it down felt almost obscene.
He answered lightly, because he still could not do anything else. “Good. Because I’m about to bottom frag.”
Claude snorted. “That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Liar.”
The word was affectionate. Barely more than a smile.
Leo turned his chair toward the window but did not open the curtains. “Queue us.”
Claude did.
And because Claude did not push, Leo stayed.
That was the beginning.
Not the collab, though that had been the spark. Not the ranked grind, though that became their shared language. Not even the flirtation fans loved and both of them pretended was only half-serious.
The true beginning was this: Claude noticing the cracks in the glass and not treating Leo like a broken thing for having them.
Months passed.
The NA climb became their private epic.
Leo’s fresh collab account stopped looking fresh. Rank badges changed. MMR sharpened. Their coordination became unnervingly clean. They developed defaults, shorthand, rituals. Claude would hum when concentrating. Leo would tap twice on his desk before a retake. Claude learned the exact tone that meant Leo was about to call something insane and usually right. Leo learned when Claude wanted encouragement and when he wanted to be challenged.
They fought sometimes.
Not dramatic explosions. They were both too careful, too media-trained, too conscious of image for that.
But there were nights where Claude felt Leo slipping behind that bright, courteous wall and got irritated enough to say so.
And nights where Leo, rawer than usual beneath the polish, snapped that not everything could be fixed by talking.
The first time it happened, the silence afterward was worse than the argument.
Claude had gone quiet.
Leo had stared at the party screen, pulse loud in his ears, suddenly certain he had done what he always did eventually. Become too much work, too difficult, too impossible to hold.
He had almost logged off without another word.
Then Claude sighed and said, “I’m not trying to fix you, idiot. I just want in.”
Leo had closed his eyes.
Something in him, something locked, defensive, feral with old shame, had gone very still.
He did not know what to do with tenderness that insisted.
So he gave Claude the smallest truth he could manage.
“I don’t always know how.”
“That’s fine,” Claude said immediately. “Then tell me that.”
Leo swallowed. “I just did.”
Claude’s laugh came out soft, tired, victorious. “Yeah. You did.”
And they queued again.
By the time a year had passed, Immortal on NA had become less a dream than an inevitability stalking them from just ahead.
They had suffered through throwers, smurfs, stream snipers, timezone disasters, internet dips, one cursed week where Claude’s sleep schedule imploded and Leo’s manager stacked obligations until he sounded half-dead even while joking. They had climbed anyway.
Fans tracked the progress obsessively.
Every win became a celebration. Every loss a dramatic tragedy. People made montage edits of their near-misses, their clutches, their synchronized utility, their layered comms. Viewers began referring to their games as episodes.
Leo told himself it was only gaming.
He knew better.
Because somewhere during that year, Claude stopped being the person who brightened his nights and became the person against whom Leo measured whether a day had meaning at all.
And somewhere during that same year, Claude became terrifyingly woven into Leo’s ordinary habits.
The first person Leo wanted to show things to. The first voice he looked for. The one person who could draw him out of the heavy underwater drag in his mind with a single, “You there?”
It was not healthy, maybe.
It was real.
And it saved him.
Because there had been another period, quiet, ugly, not public, when management pressure around his 3D debut began to close around his throat.
Neo-Porte had been, from the outside, a dream home for him. Prestigious, polished, well-connected. Three years as a JP-based streamer, and his name carried weight now. He brought in sponsors effortlessly. He donated to other talents without fuss. He sent gifts to staff, to friends, to random small artists whose work he liked, to apartment employees, to delivery drivers during the holidays, to lucky viewers chosen on whims that felt like fairy tales to everyone except him.
People joked that Leo Kuga was secretly a young master.
The joke was truer than any of them knew.
His stepfather’s power touched more of his life than Leo liked to think about. Neo-Porte itself existed, in some quiet buried way, because his family had wanted him to have a place tailored for success. Safe, curated, elite. They had built ladders under his feet and called it freedom.
Leo had still climbed them alone.
Or so he told himself.
His 3D debut should have been triumphant.
Management treated it that way, speaking of milestones and audiences and cultural timing, of proper schedules and expectations. Leo had wanted (selfishly, perhaps childishly) to delay it long enough that it might align somehow with Claude’s future 3D debut plans in Tokyo. Not exactly together. That would have been too much to ask aloud. But near enough to matter. Near enough to share the season.
His new manager, unaware of the family currents beneath Leo’s name, had not understood his resistance.
Or perhaps understood it perfectly and weaponized it.
There were no overt insults. Japan rarely needed overt insults when subtler ones cut deeper.
Just carefully phrased reminders. This is the normal way. It would reflect badly not to understand. You’ve been here this long; surely you know. Everyone is making accommodations already. Please don’t inconvenience the team because of personal sentiment. I know adjusting from overseas can be difficult, but at this point…
At this point.
At this point.
At this point.
The phrase found every old bruise.
By the end of some meetings, Leo would sit in the dark after the call ended, hands cold, mind full of seventeen-year-old shame. The old voice returned easily: You are still foreign in the place you are supposed to belong. You are still performing competence. You still don’t know enough. You are still embarrassing.
In his first year of streaming, a similar spiral had nearly swallowed him whole. He had gone on a brutal run of solo streams, day after day, refusing collabs, refusing help, convinced that if he spoke too freely around others he would expose some flaw of understanding vast enough to shame not just himself but the culture he was supposed to represent properly. He had nearly quit then. Quietly. Cleanly. Smiling all the way to the edge.
He never quite told Claude all of that at once.
Claude learned it in fragments.
A canceled collab here. A too-bright “I’m just busy” there. A stream where Leo’s cheerfulness had the brittle sheen of glass.
And Claude, who had spent enough time in his orbit by then to recognize danger when it put on makeup, did not stay passive.
One night, after Leo abruptly dipped from call citing “management stuff” in a tone that made Claude’s skin prickle, Claude messaged Shu Yamino and Uki Violeta.
Both were in Japan at the time, visiting and working through plans connected to a move. Both already knew Leo, though not like Claude did. They were friends in the industry sense, fond of him, amused by him, familiar enough to stop by.
Claude’s message was simple:
check on him for me? he’s doing that thing where he sounds too perfect
Shu replied first.
got it
Uki followed with a line that made Claude smile despite himself.
On it. I know the sad pretty-boy shutdown when I see it.
Leo nearly did not open the door for them.
He had not expected visitors. His apartment was spotless, of course (cleaners ensured that) but he himself was in an old black shirt and lounge pants, hair unstyled, face bare, the circles under his eyes impossible to fully hide. When the intercom informed him that Shu and Uki were downstairs with convenience store bags and a shameless amount of expensive dessert, he stood frozen in the foyer for a full ten seconds before buzzing them in.
Shu took one look at him and said mildly, “You look terrible.”
Uki held up the dessert boxes. “We brought bribes.”
Leo let out a weak laugh and stepped aside.
Later, Claude would only get the filtered report. Nothing invasive, nothing Leo wouldn’t want shared. Just enough to breathe easier. Shu saying Leo had eaten. Uki saying the apartment was dark as a crypt and they’d opened the curtains. Both of them implying, with strategic vagueness, that Leo had smiled in a way that looked less fake by the time they left.
That night Claude called him anyway.
Leo answered after the fourth ring.
“Are Shu and Uki your new spies?” he asked.
Claude, unapologetic, said, “Yep.”
“That’s terrible manners.”
“I was worried.”
A pause.
Leo exhaled. “I know.”
Claude’s voice gentled. “You don’t have to go through all the bad days alone just because you’re good at making them look elegant.”
The words lodged in Leo like a splinter and a balm.
He looked around the apartment: the expensive shelves, the curated lighting, the untouched luxury, the city beyond the glass. Then he sat down on the floor by the sofa, suddenly too tired to hold himself upright in any formal way.
“What if I don’t know how to be anything else?” he whispered.
Claude was quiet for just a second.
Then: “Then start by being bad at it with me.”
Leo covered his eyes with one hand.
He laughed once, brokenly.
And because Claude stayed, because Claude kept staying, because their friendship had become the one thread that consistently held when everything else slipped, Leo did not quit.
He streamed the next day. And the next. And he queued with Claude that night.
That was the shape of salvation, as it turned out.
Not dramatic. Not holy. Not cure.
A voice in your headset saying, I’m here. Queue again.
A year after the first collab, they hit Immortal on NA together on a stupidly tense match that should never have gone to overtime.
Claude got the final kill.
Leo, dead and spectating, watched the enemy Jett crumple and then listened to the rank-up animation bloom onscreen as if the game itself were taking a triumphant breath.
For half a second, neither of them spoke.
Then Claude screamed.
Not a dignified shout. Not a streamer-friendly exclamation. A full, joyous, unfiltered yell that clipped his mic and sent both chats into instant hysteria.
Leo actually flinched, then burst into helpless laughter.
“We did it,” Claude said, voice breaking around the edges. “Leo. Leo, we actually did it.”
“We did,” Leo answered.
He kept looking at the screen because he knew if he closed his eyes he might feel too much all at once.
A year of nights. A year of calls. A year of slow rescue hidden under rank points and banter. A year of Claude becoming necessary.
His throat felt tight.
Claude was still talking, half-laughing, half-breathless. “No, hold on, hold on, this is insane. My duo is cracked. My duo is beautiful. My duo is immortal.”
“My duo?” Leo echoed softly.
Claude did not miss a beat. “Yeah. Mine.”
Something warm and dangerous unfurled low in Leo’s chest.
He smiled into the dark where no one could fully see him.
“Then congratulations,” he said. “You’re mine too.”
The call went dead silent for one beat too long.
Then chat detonated.