Chapter Text
To be honest, Tybalt felt that something was terrible wrong at the moment when his cousin, Julia, stated that she had exchanged a room with somebody else from the next semester, which was the case with her boyfriend. Romeo—the boy who was hatted by Tybalt, even though there was not a simple reason for that. Their families never got along, even if they handled the situation with more grace in recent years. They weren’t barbarians, and the prison is not a very appealing place. But Tybalt hated even more the way he and Julia managed their relationship. They stuck together all the time! As the girl's former roommate, Tybalt tried to be very tolerable and pretend that he was blind, mute, and deaf (especially at night), but it became more and more uncomfortable for him to handle the lovebirds' billing and cooing. For a very short minute, he felt happiness and only felt bad for those unlucky fellows who would be in his neighbor’s room...
But then he realized: if Julia moves away, that means he'll get a new roommate. Him. Basically, he didn't like sharing a room with someone else because he needed his own space, but he and Juli had known each other their entire lives, so he wanted to live with her. And now all of this is falling down. It doesn’t even mention the fact that who will be this very mentioned somebody else?
"And who is coming to your place?" he asked the question, while he felt the ominous feelings become even stronger inside him.
Julia bit her lips and this gesture made her look like a 14-year old schoolgirl — who she was just a few years before and who wanted to die for her actual new big love...
"Please don't freak out!"
That was the moment when Tybalt saw his destiny accomplished.
If life is really a theater, he's currently playing the role of the duped loser.
...
"Well, hello, dear roommate!" The red-haired moron greeted him with a big smile and seemed so happy if they wrote Black Friday.
Tybalt had the energy to just wave back.
Mercutio – one of Romeo’s best friends, the foolish, conceited, childish idiot whom Tybalt tried to shake down in his almost entire life but never succeeded. Both of their families moved to the upper class — Mercutio's, maybe even higher —, so they have known each other their entire life. Their parents socialized together very often, and, while Tybalt’s parents sucked up to Mercutio’s relatives, they gave the order to their son to be nice to the stupid redhead and play together.
Yeah, and how the grown-ups imagined it!
Mercutio's extravagant, "I don't give a damn!" personality and never-ending babble always irritated the dark-haired, grumpy boy. After he became old enough to pull himself out of these forced visits, Tybalt tried to avoid the meeting with the other boy, but unfortunately, his every effort proved to be useless. For some reason, the red-haired kid wasn’t able to leave him alone; it started when they were kids and continued through their teen years to high school graduation. When he left their hometown to move to college, Tybalt hoped to throw off Mercutio forever: he wouldn’t get on his nerves, he wouldn’t force him to be his friend... Anyway, the dark-haired boy never really understood the other boy’s reasons: Tybalt never really treated him very kind, but Mercutio never took anything for himself. He just laughed at everything and caught every opportunity to exchange words with him.
And now his fate has played another joke on him, sending this fool to his neck.
The last thing he needed right now.
"Are you not even happy to see me, kitten?" Hearing the pet name (which was a hint to a Reynard story’s character, whose name was also Tybalt, and he was the Prince of the Cats) made Tybalt exhale very deeply while he counted inside up to three in English (than in French, Italian, German, Russich, Hebrew, and Hungarian; he spoke a lot of languages, anyway) and decided, no, he would not kill the other boy ritually with a meat tenderizer (not that he kept something like that in his browser...).
Instead of that, he tried to give a proper answer:
"Sure, I am over the moon!"
He said this sarcasticly – or at least he tried – but Mercutio started to laugh again, as if Tybalt had just offered him the secret of everlasting life.
Tybalt noticed with a lot of distress how some warm, pleasant feelings overran him inside.
"What the heck?! We've only been roommates for 5 minutes and I'm already going insane. "
And he had no idea yet what was waiting for him.