Chapter Text
“I don’t know man,” you sighed, picking at the very oily chow mein noodles in the already soaked cardboard box. They were drenched in mild chili and other indistinguishable spices melted together, pieces of vegetables, some more cooked than others, stuck to the pasta. “he’s just… I don’t even know. Too normal.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?” your friend, Kazuha asked as he popped a spring roll in his mouth, the fried rice paper no longer crunching under his teeth. You were sitting in your favourite, cheap Chinese diner, run by people of questionable ethnicity, hidden by the dumpsters of downtown. It was a cosy place, as long as you looked at your partner’s face and not the health hazards running around the kitchen floors. Cheap, white plastic tables and uncomfortable steel chairs were the only things inside, sometimes a box of napkins, golden fortune cookie wrappers and coke bottle caps on the tiles. The smell was nothing to write home about. The place reeked of whatever that was being cooked at the moment and an overpowering amount of Szechuan and burnt oil lingered in the air. It was everywhere. In your food, on the tables, on your face.
And it was loud, despite you being the only guests sitting in a corner, the furthest from the counter. The owner, a short but still tall looking guy in a white polo shirt, was arguing with your server, someone you’d always assumed to be his son or at least some kind of relative. It was a common occurrence, something always seemed to piss the man off, rendering him to a yelling, wildly gesturing mess, much like those red-yellow air balloons at petrol stations. They were speaking a language you didn’t understand, and by the way he spat each word at the younger male, you decided that it was the best that you didn’t know. It amazed you, how they never really cared that you were sitting in the diner while they were sorting out their differences.
The older man let out a loud and undignified ‘Ha?’ as he knocked the ladle against the metal soup container, splashing the sticky, sweet and spicy thing on the rice and the exotic chicken that you were eating. It made you shudder a wee bit, and you looked at Kazuha, completely losing your train of thought, your coarse, wooden chopsticks unsteady in your hands.
“I mean…” you started, desperately trying to remember what he had said, while trying to drown out the voice of the owner, now hitting the already out of use terminal. It suddenly popped in your mind. “Yeah, he’s normal, but it’s like… He’s too normal. So normal that it’s weird.”
Kazuha was chewing his roll away idly, probably trying to separate the shredded vegetables in his mind, the zucchini tasting too much like cucumber. Or was it carrot? You could see his thought roll over with each movement of his jaw, the oddly yellow thing disappearing in his mouth not long after. He placed his chopsticks on the paper plate, grey in some places, and tried to wipe the corners of his mouth with a crinkled napkin.
“What did he do again?” he asked, his mind now dead set on dissecting a roll, debating whether to try to roll it out (which he probably knew was impossible), or just smash it in half with the wooden stick. Horizontally or vertically, that is the question. The owner had a remote controller in his hand, and you suddenly heard the radio turn on, the cheap loudspeakers cracking under the volume of the latest hits.
“Nothing... Or, I mean, nothing out of the usual for him.” you slumped back in your seat before leaning closer to him again so that he could hear you. “He… he bought himself an armchair. A fucking armchair.” you were gesturing like an Italian, your face full of distress.
Kazuha snorted, almost inhaling his half-a-roll, coughing around before looking at you, a little red-faced.
The topic of the conversation was, the same for the past two months, your new flatmate, Scaramouche. Even his name was funny, in your opinion. You had posted an advert for a room in your flat, which finally became unoccupied after you had managed to convince the landlord to kick the previous tenant out. You had to beg him for months, but it was worth it. She was loud, left a mess everywhere, constantly reeked of alcohol, microwave pizza and three week old laundry. You were more than certain that she was high off her ass most of the time, and every neighbour shot you dirty looks because her name was still on the lease. After she had left, you realised that the rent would be too high for you to pay alone, even with your freelance jobs, so you decided to look for someone new. You posted an advert all over the Facebook groups of Sumeru, every flat-sharing site you could find, even putting up posters around campus, which was most likely against the rules. Many had contacted you, but none of them followed through after having heard the price, which, to be fair, was ridiculous. You split it 50-50, but even then, your flat was nowhere nice enough to cost this much. There was no one even visiting the thing for five weeks, driving you to the pit of desperation, until one day, you got a call. A call that would save your wallet for the upcoming semesters.
Two months had passed since an alien moved into your home. An alien with indigo hair had invaded your personal space, your sacred privacy. When you thought about it rationally, it was dumb of you to feel like he was thorn in your side, when you put up the poster in the first place, but having him exist in the same flat as you felt so wrong on so many levels. Every little thing he did drove you crazy, and you were looking for excuses to get mad at him, much to Kazuha’s entertainment.
“Who buys themselves an armchair? What is he? A grandma?” you asked, frustrated, stabbing your chopsticks into the herd of noodles and broccoli. Kazuha was laughing quietly into his hand, his face full blown red. “More importantly, who buys themselves an armchair in that shithole? What’s the point of a cosy chair when the wallpaper is melting off the wall because of mould?! It’s like getting a king bed for a rusty, disgusting, broken down…”
Kazuha coughed even harder, overpowering the music.
“Get a load of this guy.” you muttered angrily, shoving a piece of cabbage in your mouth, chewing aggressively. It always went like this. After classes, you’d try to do anything as to not go home and coexist with Scaramouche, avoiding him at all costs, somehow always ending up in this crappy diner, where food always made you break out. You didn’t understand why you couldn’t tolerate him, when you had every reason to like the guy. He was quiet, almost too quiet, never talked unless absolutely necessary, sometimes even ignoring your questions or hellos. He cooked for himself, which was very odd to you, but separated his stuff from yours, into the lower half of the fridge, emphasising the growing vacuum on your side. A sad looking kale rotting quietly behind a carton of discounted alpro, next to his cornucopia didn’t look like a whole lot. It was almost mocking your presence in the kitchen.
And he never brought anyone around, which peer-pressured you into shadow banning Kazuha from hanging out at yours. You were used to being loud with him, blasting old pop from your laptop’s speakers, since you knew your former flatmate was probably passed out on her bed, high as a kite for the past two days. You could always just tell the neighbours that it was her and her sidepiece, they never questioned you about it. But now, with Scaramouche being dead quiet in his own room, his own, deserted kingdom, you felt like a guest in your own home, tiptoeing to the kitchen even though you had no reason to. You were used to smashing your heels against the wooden floor, for God’s sake. And you were used to movie nights and other dumb shit with Kazuha, but now your living space was limited to this one crappy diner half the city away from the rest of your life.
Him living there made you more miserable than the previous tenant, and that’s saying something.
“Have you tried… talking to him?” Kazuha asked innocently, already knowing what the question warranted.
“Yeah, but he’s doesn’t want to talk. He just… exists. I don’t even know what major he is! Like, I tried talking to him two days ago, asking him how he was and all that, and he just… ignored me. Like I wasn’t even there. He’s the most infuriating person I’ve ever met.” you let out an exasperated sigh, putting your chopsticks down on the napkin, your appetite gone with the wind, with Lizzo’s wig out the window. Her song was pouring from the loud speakers, awfully unfitting for the situation.
“Maybe you should ignore him too. You don’t have to talk to him, you know.” he said, quickly finishing his own food before leaning back, his head bobbing side to side with the rhythm of the music. You stood up, putting the greasy paper into the overflowing metal rubbish bin that held the door open, the sounds of the street overpowering the angry huffing of the owner, now the only one behind the counter.
“Kazuha, I came to vent, not to hear actual advice.” With that, you both left, bidding goodbye to the man, who didn’t even seem to notice you. The air was cleaner here, although not by much, maybe a bit colder than the frying pan sauna inside, but still just as smelly. Rotting watermelon heels sat next to black rubbish bags hurdled on top of each other at the side of the road. It was no longer summer, more like middle of September, but this was still a common sight around downtown.
“You could start by asking him what major he is.” he ignored you and recommended, earning another dead pan from your direction. You were kicking rocks as you roamed the streets without a goal in mind, looking at the hot asphalt under your sneakers, glistening from water, maybe sewage, making it seem like it was melting. There were white spots everywhere, much like foam bubbles, and you couldn’t decide whether they were from gum, cigarettes or bird shit. Probably none of those you’d like to be standing on.
“Probably CompSci,” you said, grinning to yourself as you listened to Kazuha with one ear and two hammered homeless men with the other. They were sitting on the entrance stairs of a long-closed pharmacy, its windows boarded up, the walls graffitied. By their legs lay two empty plastic bottles, traces of cheap red wine staining the bottoms, a cigarette bum swimming in one of them. They were arguing about relatives, it seemed. “He could be one of those stuck-up STEM majors as well…” you mused to yourself, tossing change into their paper coffee cup, but they were so invested in their argument that they didn’t even notice you. “He doesn’t seem to have a life so he fits the criteria.”
“I don’t see you too often at parties either.” he chuckled and you blushed in the embarrassment of being called out. You couldn’t hold your alcohol that well, so you didn’t really go clubbing. And the fact that the weekly parties at your university were on Thursdays was equally discouraging. Who even parties hard on a Thursday? The first two lectures on Friday were so empty that the professors started promising extra credit for those attending. Being sober wasn’t even a criterium.
“Don’t wanna get high with your friends.” you huffed, shoving your hands in the pockets of your trousers. Kazuha had an interesting friend group outside of you, he somehow managed to unite the weird kids in the music majors. His instrument was the flute, but he got along with bassists and folk musicians as well. They would spend their spare time, if they had any, in hookah bars, their mouths eternally stuck to the mouthpieces, as if they were still practising on the winds. They were a queer bunch, understanding each other without words but still rambling on for ages. You wouldn’t be surprised if they had a secret Catan or DND club either.
Kazuha was a little bit different, moderately weird, and you never understood why or how you had become friends. You were a tone-deaf economics major, striving for greatness and wealth while he was studying music, preparing to live on the streets once he has finished university. Opposites attract, maybe.
You hung out for an hour more before saying goodbye, and you decided that it might be time to make it home, beelining on the longest route to your block. Your flat was in a complex, buried in the forest of other concrete giants, only distinguishable by a red clothes line and inflatable pool on the third story. And an assigned number, but the delivery guys wouldn’t find you unless you pointed out the former two things. It wasn’t in a very nice part of Sumeru City, the industrial district with a lot of smoke and fog in the mornings, old buildings and a powerplant or electricity distribution centre for a landmark. Tucked away in the north-eastern corner of the district was your little home, the block, with all the same looking flats and small, cheap stores on the bottom floors, seemingly giving home to already extinct jobs. You weren’t sure if you’d ever seen a lathe anywhere else in the city.
It was also home to a bunch of rowdy kids from the neighbouring blocks, playing football or cycling together in smaller groups around the playground in the middle of the complex, the sacred grounds, so to speak. They formed gangs and became hilariously territorial, throwing rocks and sand at each other when someone from a rival gang dared to set foot in their own land. It was their own little world, their own place in the Sun, and you always loved to watch them from your small, 0,5 sqm balcony that opened to the dried up patch of grass.
Moving past them now, they seemed to be having another argument, this time, between members of the same gang that called themselves ‘the Bikers’. It was silly, knowing that these were a bunch of 8-10 year-old kids. They didn’t care about your presence, fully immersed in the experience of stripping one of the younger kids of their title in the gang, for treason, no less.
You could see the entrance from here, the beginning of the miniature football pitch, you could even make out the numbers written on the side of the building, a large, black ‘7’ printed neatly on white steel sign. You approached the door with dread in your stomach, hitting the numbers on the keypad by memory, since the stickers had disappeared from too much use. The door let you in with a familiar jingle and an ear-piercing buzz, the inner mechanics unclamping loudly. You pushed inside, relieved to not find anyone in the stairways, just some dried up cat piss in the southern corner, even though animals were strictly banned. You dragged yourself to the fourth story, your mind fuzzy as you stood in front of your door, hesitating. You pushed your key in, turning it counter clockwise until it hit the bottom, and you turned the knob. You stepped inside, the scent of something heavenly hitting your nose.
It was apples and cinnamon emanating from a scented candle on the small kitchen table, a candle that you didn’t buy. Must’ve been Scaramouche. He stood near the counters, behind the fridge, chopping up some kind of vegetable on a wooden board. He seemed to be unbothered by your presence, completely aware of it, but not saying anything. You closed the door behind you, taking your shoes off before putting your keys on the cupboard, a habit you knew he disliked. Whenever you placed your clutter there, he moved it to a small wooden basket on the other end, your keys mingling with his.
“Hey there.” you said, your voice coarse, making you clear you throat. He hummed, focused on the task at hand, trying to force a blunt knife to slice a tomato. In a small, clear bowl beside his hand were other cubed greens, the watery tomatoes soon joining the salad bath. He washed his hand and moved to the fridge, taking a pack of tofu out before diving hand first into 5 bottles of hot sauce, all of them similar in colour but different in flavour. You never understood his obsession with the taste of pain. Drowning perfectly good food in this mess should be punishable by law.
You stood around before silently excusing yourself and booking it to your room at the end of the narrow hallway. You flat was pitifully small, and technically speaking you were living in a modified living room, walled up from prying eyes, and the furniture changed for good measure. You were fine with this arrangement, the less shared space you had with your flatmates, the better. The kitchen only had a tiny wooden table in the corner, perfect for a single person and incredibly awkward for two, almost as if it was designed with you in mind. Honestly, the entire kitchen was much too small, and you often had to wait for him to finish his business before being able to come up with something for breakfast. The counters were maybe a larger person’s arm span in length, and he didn’t exactly have the slimmest shoulders, although he had a pretty slender build. You swore it felt like hours while he mingled in the kitchen, on his phone half of the time.
Proper pissed off, you threw your bag on the floor next to your bed and sat in your swivel chair, turning side to side with your head thrown back. Your stomach grumbled, now that you weren’t in motion, and you groaned, knowing that you’d forgotten to buy food on your way home. You knew that Scaramouche wouldn’t make you any, his condescending scowl forever burned in your mind. It was starting to be late, but the sun was still up, so maybe the small store behind the fifth block was still open. It was run by an older woman living in the block, whose habit was to close once the sun has set. If you got up now, you thought, your ass glued to the chair, you could reach it and buy yourself some maggi dinner or ramen, enough for tonight.
These times, you usually had sleep for dinner, but you had a paper due in two days, so going to bed wasn’t an option. If you got up now, you thought, swinging from left to right, you could even get a can of Monster, Hell if you were being cheap. You had run out of coffee two days ago, your shopping list was expanding exponentially. Amused, you thought about making some kind of a diagram about it.
But if you got up now, you thought, your eyes peeled on the pink horizon, you could even get quick oats for tomorrow morning, and you even had the ‘milk’ for it. You groaned loudly and got up, your legs feeling tired from the amount of walking you had done that day, your feet dreading to be confined to small trainers again. You fished your wallet out of your bag and slid some outside slippers on instead, throwing on a light jacket and going out again. Scaramouche seemed to have finished cooking, a bowl of pasta salad on the counters as he leaned on the wood, scrolling on his phone. He looked up, scrutinising you before speaking.
“Where to?” he asked, and you were surprised he had deemed you worthy of being spoken to. He never really asked you anything, never meddled in your business. You were certain that if you had a stroke in your bedroom and didn’t come out for a week, he’d just let you die while cussing because you didn’t put things in the dishwasher correctly.
“Emma’s. I’m starving.” you yawned, your hand on your stomach. Scaramouche looked at the pasta bowl for a split second before his gaze returned to you.
“I made too much. You can take it, eat it if you want, throw it away if you don’t.” he said, returning to his original state of scrolling through twitter, not caring about your reaction in the slightest. You stood there, absolutely gobsmacked by the offer, never having seen the ‘generous’ side of your flatmate before. Your eyes were jumping between him and the bowl of creamy goodness on the counter, another rumble threatening to escape your stomach the longer you stood in one place.
“Erm… Thanks, but I need to get something for tomorrow anyway so…” you scratched the back of your neck, taking your keys out of the wooden basket, shaking his off. “But thank you for making it, I’ll-“
“I don’t care what you do with it.” his statement was final, and you nodded awkwardly before saying sorry and slipping out of the flat.
He was seriously something weird, you thought as you skipped steps down the stairs, the foam soles of your slippers smacking against the tiles, giving you vacation vibes. The smell of cat piss somehow got more intense, and you longed to go back and take him on his offer, rather chugging milk with his spicy food than crossing this godforsaken stairway one more time. You were really close to putting up thinly veiled threats on the community board against the animal-keeper, or hiring one of the grannies on the lower floors to keep a eye out for the suspect.
All in all, you had a good relationship with the residents, especially after your former flatmate had moved out. The average age of the block was above 45, but you still made friends amongst the seniors, making small talk and chatting about the weather with the older women living under you. There was one senile man on your left, in an unbelievably tidy flat, that you were yet to tame because he was a really tough nut to crack. He seemed to have a problem with everybody in the block, rewarding each and every tenant with a yellow post-it note from time to time, reminding you of your shortcomings of the week. You tried to appease him, moulding yourself into the shape of the perfect neighbour, but when push came to shove, he came to remind you of the grime of your doorknob or your unwashed bathroom window.
You reached the bottom floor and escaped the horrifying stench, taking deep breaths after holding one for so long, looking up at your flat, four floors above. The kitchen window was open, light still on inside, along with the bathroom window, that was, in fact, on the dirty side. In your defence, to clean that damned thing, you had to take the cabinet out and go through all the webs that hid behind it, something that not a single bone in your body wanted to do.
You crossed the football pitch with hurried steps, circling the block in front of you to see that the small, standalone store, Emma’s, was still open. You sped up and waved to the lady inside, mentally asking her to keep the shop open for another five minutes. There were bells on the top of the door, chiming when you opened it wide. You smiled apologetically and made small talk while you picked out a couple packets of instant oatmeal and some pasta on the side. You looked at the sauces, seriously considering buying one or two. Money wasn’t exactly a problem right now, you’d managed to complete two well-paying commissions on the weekend, and had another dozen lined up so you could go out of your previous budget. Skill, however, was something you lacked. You picked up the curiously green jar of pesto, grimacing. It couldn’t taste too bad if you just put it on some al dente pasta, right?
You paid, an awkward smile on your face as you zoned out and thought about some recipe sites that you could use, before exiting the shop and walking back to your flat. You threw your keys on the cupboard, earning a sigh from Scaramouche, who was now sitting at the table, legs crossed, his chin on his palm. You put your pasta box in the dusty cabinet and shoved your jar of pesto in the fridge, next to the alpro, even though it wasn’t opened. You took suspicious glances at the pasta bowl, and at your flatmate, before taking it into your hands along with a metal fork.
“Can you also smell the cat piss in the halls?” you asked absentmindedly, desperate to end the tense silence between the two of you. You picked at the pasta before realising that it might be seen as rude. You took a forkful and put it in your mouth.
Damn this guy could cook.
“Are you sure you want to talk about cat piss while eating?” he retorted, a smirk plastered on his face as he didn’t even look at you. You coughed, swallowing heavily with red cheeks, you were pretty sure that you looked like a chipmunk or some kind of squirrel. “And yes, I could, but I don’t want to.”
“Any idea on who’s keeping a cat here?” you decided to ignore his remark, downing the thing no matter how spicy it was.
“Could be a dog for all we know.”
“Had dogs, that’s definitely a cat.” you opened the fridge for the almond milk, your throat on fire. You poured some in an old mug, trying not to pounce on it the moment you set the carton down.
“You can tell based on the smell?” cynicism dripping from his voice, he lay back and watched you with an amused expression on his face. Scaramouche observed you and the mug like you were the next big thing in post-modern, the follow-up for Breath, new and hot work of Beckett, the mug the breaking success after Fountain. Boring on its own, ingenious in your hands. The little scribble on the outside of your thumb your own signo for the piece.
Your face red, not sure whether it was from embarrassment or chili, you shot him a dirty look and took the bowl in your hands again, pointing the creamy fork at him.
“Don’t twist my words goddamnit.” it was not the first time you’d seen him with that annoying smirk, although it was the first time you managed to sneak a spark behind his eyes. You could even call him pretty if he wasn’t making fun of you at the moment. He was stupidly beautiful, but your pride would never allow such thoughts to materialise in words, even though you were used to complimenting people. Dark indigo hair in a bowl cut, you had no idea how he pulled it off so well. You only had that cut one time back when you were way too young, and your mom’s hairdresser was on vacation, the memory of sitting on a plastic stool in the bathroom while your mother tried to cheer you up as she cut your hair with a pair of kitchen scissors, forever haunting you. His skin was fair, sickly so, further confirming your suspicion of him being a CompSci student. But his setup was so simple though…
“I’m pretty sure it’s that old hag on the first floor.” Scaramouche said, watching the contents of the bowl disappear at a much slower rate than the dreaded almond milk.
“Which one?” you questioned before shaking your head quickly. “And don’t call them old hags.”
“The one with the dumb knocker.” he seemed to have a hard time holding back a grin.
“All of them have- I swear to God, you’re so insufferable.” he let out a chuckle as you grumbled to yourself, your nose stuffy from the spiciness. It would’ve tasted so good if not for that stupid sauce.
“It was simple observation.”
“I don’t understand what they did to offend you.” you put your back against the fridge, enjoying how cold it was against your clothed skin. You found yourself no longer tense from being in his presence, joking around with Scaramouche was surprisingly nice after a long day.
“Nothing except putting post-its everywhere I step.” he said, putting his phone aside and crossing his arms. It bothered him greatly, so much so that he made it his personal goal to tear off every single flimsy piece of paper in the block just out of spite.
“That’s just Mr.Ebberts, he’s always been like this.” you shrugged, having accepted the eccentric man for what he was a long time ago. You sometimes forgot that Scaramouche was very new in this community, he didn’t know the ins and outs of Block 7. You hadn’t spent too much time here either, having moved in only a year before him, nothing compared to the ladies that grew up in this old thing.
“Mr.Ebberts should mind his own fucking business.” he grumbled, deeply affected by the behaviour of the strange man. It was almost like Scaramouche had an agenda against him. “I swear, if I find out that he’s the one with the cat…”
“Absolutely not.” you shook your head, your fork standing ungracefully in the middle of the bowl like a flagpole, your eyes watery as you spoke “There’s no one that’s more on the case than him.”
“Does that guy have nothing else to do in his spare time?” this question wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular, but you took it upon yourself anyway.
“He goes to church sometimes…”
“Why would you even know that?” he looked absolutely fed up with his current neighbour, his expression distraught. He stood up slowly, picking his phone up and putting the chair back in its place. “You know what, never mind.” with that, he walked past you, scooped your keys up from the cupboard and threw it into the wooden basket.
“Thanks for the food.” you called out to him before he disappeared behind his door, the first room in the hallway, but he didn’t turn back.
“I see no point in thanking me.” he said before shutting the door, the muffled sound of a light switch ringing after his voice.
You were left alone in the kitchen, the cool breeze paired with the chilly metal behind you giving you goosebumps. You stood there, looking outside the window, staring at all the tiny lights flickering behind glass panes in the distance, thinking of the people living behind them. So many ants in this colony, yet no one you could compare to him.
What a character…