Yoru sat cross-legged on the cold floor of the storeroom, The nightlamp making enough light only to see the walls. Only the faint metallic click… click… click of the stapler filled the air. It wasn’t the office kind. It was the heavy, rust-flecked, industrial kind — built to bind wood, misused by him.

He pressed the steel mouth of it to his inner thigh — slow, measured.

Click. The staple punctured him — muscle twitching, skin folding around it. He exhaled. No scream. Just a tear rolling sideways, disappearing into the dusty floor.

He traced lines of metal up his leg, over old scar tissue. Then moved to his forearm.

Click. Click.

Veins throbbed beneath the crisscross of silver pins.

It was methodical, almost surgical — as if he were sewing himself shut.

As if closing the wounds would keep the memories from spilling out.

Maria found him in the storeroom, slouched, his arms wrapped around his knees, He thew off the stapler to the side as he heard her footsteps.

Maria rushed to him. "Yoru—what did you—"

He turned his head, slow. His sleeve slid down.

A silver spine of staples marched up his arm like twisted armor.

“I just… didn’t want to come apart today.”

Her eyes fell to his legs — the skin pinched, raw, tight with blood caught between steel. Some of the staples were old — already rusting into his flesh. She pressed her hand against his back, trying not to shake.

One by one, Maria removed the staples. She used tweezers. Yoru winced but never spoke. His eyes didn’t blink.

The wounds didn’t gush. They wept — slow, sticky red like the house was crying with him. She brought a shot of Tetanus vaccine, and plunged it on his forearm.

She cleaned every hole, wrapped him in gauze like he was a child again.

Then sat beside him, like the day was over.