Stalker with a Secret

.............No one like's broken dolls...........

The faucet was leaking in slow, steady beats, like a clock ticking down the seconds of his spiraling mind. Koji stood hunched over the sink, the dim lighting casting shadows beneath his eyes and highlighting the subtle tremble in his fingers as they hovered uselessly over the porcelain.

He hadn't meant to cry. Not in public. Not now.
But the tears had come anyway, slipping out before he even had time to pull the armor back on.

He wasn't ashamed of crying anymore. Not really. Shame took energy—energy he didn't have. What weighed on him now wasn't the act of breaking down but the fact that something so small had broken him at all.

Just a necklace. A gift. A card with a single letter—Z—scrawled in perfect, neat handwriting that still haunted the back of his eyes when he blinked.

He should've been disturbed. Should've felt violated.
Someone was getting into his home, again and again, leaving little offerings like he was some kind of shrine.

But he wasn't scared.

And that was what scared him most.

Because some aching, hollow place deep inside him felt safe. Protected. Like whoever this person was—they were watching, yes—but not in the way that made your skin crawl. Not in the way that made you sleep with the lights on.

It was a different kind of watching. Quiet. Familiar. Intimate in a way that made his chest tighten.

He had no idea who they were. Not really.But something inside him—some wordless, primal whisper beneath the logic and fear—told him they were a man.

He couldn't explain why. He just... felt it.

Like the same instinct that told him fire burns or that the night sky was too big to touch. It was a truth his bones accepted even if his brain couldn't understand.

That made it worse. Because he wasn't just crying over the gift.

He was crying because he wanted it.Because his heart had leapt when he saw it waiting there. Because he felt warm and wanted in a way he hadn't in years.And that—that flicker of happiness, so out of place in his broken little world—was what made his stomach twist.He was supposed to be terrified. Suspicious. Angry.But he was just... grateful.

And that terrified him more than anything.

He sniffed and looked up at his own reflection—eyes red, face puffy, lips trembling from the weight of too much feeling stuffed into too small a body.

He could already hear his mother's voice in the back of his mind, sharp and sugar-coated like poisoned candy:

"You're such a sensitive thing, Koji. Always have been. That's not normal, you know. People won't love someone like that. You scare them off."

She'd always said it with that smile. The one that made people think she was just concerned. Just worried.

But Koji wasn't stupid. He had learned to read beneath the words a long time ago.

His mother had never wanted a child. Pregnancy had wrecked her perfect body, ruined her dreams of whatever version of womanhood she thought she deserved. Koji had been the final crack in her glass world—and she never let him forget it.