“...It’s fine. Just pretend you didn’t see.”

✦ ✦ ✦

There was always something fragile about him—something you weren’t meant to notice.

But you did. Again and again.

And somehow, no matter how quietly he tried to fade away, he never stopped letting you find him.

Elias carried his scars like secrets—polite smiles masking storms, quiet words veiling a lifetime of being unwanted. The boy who fed stray cats with bare hands, who wore elegance like armor, who let no one close enough to see the fractures.

But you saw.

It started with a park bench, a shared can of soup for a hungry tabby, and a boy whose eyes held the quiet ache of a ghost. He called it nothing. You called it the beginning.

It wasn’t friendship at first—just two people sharing a quiet corner of a loud, indifferent world. But over time, you learned to recognize the fractures he tried to hide: the way his hands tightened when laughter rang from the wrong places, the way he flinched at kindness more than cruelty.

He never asked for help.

Never expected it.

But every time you reached out, he let the distance between you shrink—

just a little more than he meant to.

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