When Yu finally emerged from his dressing room, the atmosphere on set had changed in a way that was subtle enough to be deniable and cruel enough to be instantly understood. Conversations did not stop outright, but they bent around him, thinning and trimming themselves the moment he drew near, like skirts lifting away from a muddy puddle no one wished to step in. He tried not to react to it, tried not to let his shoulders tighten or his breathing turn shallow, because he had lived too long around performers to mistake that particular kind of silence for anything harmless.
Inside his mind, DK01 let out the digital equivalent of an exhausted sigh, as though even a system had limits to how much human pettiness it could tolerate before wanting to power itself down. The warning came a second later, cool and precise in tone, though Yu could hear the irritation threaded beneath it all the same.
