"How do you feel about my brother?"

Lucius' eyes pop up from the ground towards his brother. No, not that. I don't want to hear him say it. He is mentally begging Blake to retract his question, or for Shi-shi to decide to not answer. Neither happen.

"I feel affection for him. I do not know if it is love, but I wish to keep him in my life no matter what." It can't be real. Luce's tears won't stop. His eyes are sure to be glowing by now, but he removes his glasses to wipe at them as he turns to his fake boyfriend.

"No, you're not allowed to fall in love with a monster like me." He can't let Shi-shi be trapped by him. Lucius looks directly into Sato's eyes and says as forcefully as he can, "you do not feel any kind of affection towards me."

Sato smiles in response. "Sorry, Luci, but that's not going to work on me right now." Planting a kiss on his forehead, Shi-shi continues. "It seems my prototype works, so I'm immune to your powers for the next three hours." A part of Luce registers his relief.

"S-so it really wasn't my persuasion abilities making you treat me so kindly?"

"What are you going on about?"

"I-I thought you were being so affectionate b-because I w-was subcon-consciously ordering you to…"

"Negative. It was solely my choice. Is that woman the one who gave you that idea?"

"N-no…. She said something about it, but…. I-if I want something enough, my abilities could activate without me knowing, so..."

"So, I'm something you want enough to be worried about unintentionally using your powers to get me? I like the idea of that..." Luce is finally starting to look like his usual bubbly self instead of a bad impression of a hermit crab.

"Well, I guess now you know. You're pretending to date a freak who can force you to do things against your will."

"Yeah, about that…" Luce knew this was all too perfect to be real. "Would you be willing to date another power user for real, even after how that woman treated you?"

"What are you talking about?"

"... Maybe we should take this to my office. You might understand better if you see something first." As Shi-shi helps him get up, Luce finally notices that they're the only ones still in the living room. The other two left without him even noticing since he was so involved in his own thing.

Sato doesn't let his hand go as he leads Lucius into his room. He heads straight towards the door to the bedroom's tiny closet and Luce gets a worrying thought. Maybe he was faking the emotions to trick Luce into trusting him so he can use the ineffectiveness of Luce's powers to lock him up in the closet. No one else is around so he probably could figure out some way to not let the others know about what really happened to him.

Lucius slows his pace as they near the door, but Satoshi keeps going. He fiddles with the handle before opening it and dragging Luce in with him. Luci stops dead in his tracks, though it's no longer fear that stalls his feet.