Her voice cut through the silence like a knife, sharp and unwavering.
It came without warning--no shift in the air, no rustle of fabric, no clearing of the throat beforehand. Just words. Heavy, precise, and filled with a weight Mansh couldn't dodge.
He flinched, barely, but enough to feel the sting of it. Her tone wasn't just laced with anger--it was heavier than that. Buried beneath the sharpness was something deeper… weariness, maybe. Concern twisted too tightly around exasperation.
"I don't know what's gotten into you these days," she began, her arms still crossed, her eyes pinning him like a nail to a board. "You leave without telling anyone, you ignore my calls, you don't even send a single message."
Each word struck like a stone falling into still water. No yelling. No raised voice. Just disappointment, measured and careful, as though she'd been rehearsing it in her mind all day.
"You never eat breakfast. You don't come home for lunch. And now… dinner too?"
The words hung in the air like smoke, curling slowly into the corners of the room. Mansh stood still , his hands at his sides, fingers curled slightly inward--not quite fists, not quite relaxed. His eyes were fixed somewhere near her feet, unable to lift themselves any higher.
He could feel the sting of her gaze without looking at it. It was familiar--this version of her. Not the playful one who sometimes ruffled his hair absentmindedly. Not the distant one who scrolled through her phone in silence while dinner cooled on the table. No. This one--the one who stepped into his silence and cracked it open with words--this version was rarer. But when she arrived, she didn't hold back.
"You don't take care of yourself," she continued, voice taut. "You don't eat. You don't sleep. You disappear for hours. What do you think that does to me?"
There it was. The shift. Her voice had faltered--only slightly, but enough for Mansh to catch it. The words had stopped cutting, and now they just sat there. Heavy. Tired. Real.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
The silence that followed was different from the one before. Not the stillness of a room waiting to be filled, but the hush that comes when everything that needed to be said had already landed. Her arms slowly lowered, the tension in her shoulders loosening--not in forgiveness, but in exhaustion.
Mansh still hadn't moved.
His eyes remained fixed on the floor tiles--those same off-white, slightly cracked ones that led from the front door to the rest of the house. His mind had drifted somewhere far away, but her voice--her presence--kept pulling him back to the now.
He wanted to say something. Anything. An apology. An explanation. Some lie that would smooth over the jagged edges of the day. But his mouth wouldn't cooperate. His thoughts were too knotted, tangled up in everything that had happened--at the hospital, in the corridors, in the eerie silence of room 969.
What would he even say?
Would she believe him if he told her? Would she understand the things he himself couldn't make sense of?
No… probably not.
So he stood there, letting her words settle on him like cold rain, seeping in slowly until the chill reached his bones.
He noticed, distantly, the way her breath trembled when she exhaled.
Not anger.
Worry.
Real, unfiltered, anxious worry. The kind that crept in late at night when a parent imagined the worst and had no answers.
And that guilt… that overwhelming sense of having caused it, even without meaning to--it dug into his chest like invisible claws.
Still, he didn't speak.
His throat felt like it had closed up completely, dry and aching from everything he hadn't said that day. His heart thudded against his ribs, not fast, not panicked--but with the slow, heavy rhythm of someone who was simply… tired.
He wasn't sure how long they stood there. The seconds seemed to stretch, thin and taut like a thread about to snap.
Finally, she let out a long breath--half sigh, half surrender. Her posture shifted. She seemed… smaller, somehow. As if the weight she carried had pressed her shoulders just a bit lower.
When she spoke again, her voice was quieter. Not soft enough to be tender, but less sharp than before.
"Go eat dinner," she said, not looking at him.
Just like that.
No lecture. No threat. No long, dramatic pause.
Just those three words.
She turned away before he could respond.
And that, somehow, hurt more than anything else she could have said.
***
A/N: she was worred for him.
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