Chapter Text
The first red flag was the price.
Not because it was merely cheap.
Cheap suggested compromise. Drafty windows that whistled at night, water pressure with commitment issues, walls thin enough to make you an unwilling participant in your neighbors’ relationship collapse. Cheap was manageable. Cheap was expected.
This was different.
This was suspiciously, aggressively affordable.
The kind of rental listing that made you wonder whether the previous tenant had died under circumstances the property manager was legally obligated to disclose but had instead chosen to describe as “an unexpected vacancy.”
Possibly multiple unexpected vacancies.
You stood on the sidewalk across from the building, phone still in hand, staring between the listing and the actual structure for nearly a full minute as if prolonged observation might reveal whatever crucial flaw justified a monthly rate this low.
It did not.
Which somehow made it worse.
The apartment block stood in that distinctly Z-City way of appearing both partially abandoned and technically inhabitable, as though the entire structure had reached some sort of uneasy truce with local zoning laws. The exterior was worn but upright. Faded paint peeled in long curling strips near the upper floors. Several windows had visible cracks spidering through the glass, though all remained intact enough to suggest they had lost previous battles without fully surrendering. One corner of the building looked as though it had been repaired with materials selected entirely on the basis of immediate availability.
Concrete.
Metal sheeting.
What might have been part of a bus stop.
And yet.
It was standing.
More importantly, it was available.
You had been looking for temporary housing for almost three weeks.
Just long enough for every available apartment in your budget to reveal itself as either:
A) approximately the size of an upright coffin
B) home to at least four existing tenants and one deeply optimistic ad claiming “great communal energy”
or
C) somehow both.
This arrangement was meant to be short-term. Month-to-month, furnished, and flexible enough to cover the awkward in-between stretch while you waited for final confirmation on your school placement and figured out where exactly your life was supposed to be heading next.
Temporary.
A stopgap.
A place to exist for a few months while future-you handled the larger logistics.
And after your previous landlord had raised rent by citing “regional atmospheric demand”—a phrase that remained so aggressively meaningless you still occasionally thought about emailing him just to ask what the hell it meant—your standards had become impressively negotiable.
So.
Here you were.
Standing outside what might very well be a structurally experimental apartment complex, seriously considering signing paperwork because the alternative was another month sleeping on your friend’s aggressively judgmental futon.
The property manager met you out front.
He was sweating.
Not ordinary sweating.
Not warm-day inconvenience sweating.
This was urgent, spiritually committed sweating.
The kind of perspiration usually associated with hostage negotiations or active tax fraud.
The moment he spotted you, he straightened so quickly it looked painful.
“You’re here for Unit 302.”
It wasn’t a question.
His voice had the brittle brightness of someone performing normalcy under duress.
“That’s me.”
“Excellent.".
He said it too quickly.
Far too quickly.
“Great unit,” he added, already gesturing for you to follow him into the building lobby. “Really excellent opportunity. Fantastic natural light.”
You glanced around the space.
There were no visible windows.
Just flickering fluorescent panels and a potted plant so thoroughly dead it had begun collapsing inward on itself.
“Okay,” you said carefully.
“Very stable.”
That gave you pause.
Stable was an odd quality to advertise in housing.
That was the kind of descriptor usually reserved for bridges and emotionally recovering ex-boyfriends.
As you followed him toward the stairwell, your gaze caught on the wall beside it.
A large section had been patched with a completely different material than the surrounding concrete. The texture was rougher. Darker. Uneven in a way that suggested either rushed repair work or someone with only conceptual familiarity with construction.
You slowed.
“Has there been... damage?”
The property manager laughed.
It was not a reassuring sound.
It was the brittle, hollow laugh of a man whose nervous system had already packed its belongings and quietly left.
“Nothing ongoing.”
You stared at him.
That was, in every possible way, not an answer.
You opened your mouth to ask the extremely reasonable follow-up question of what exactly constituted non-ongoing damage, but before the words could fully form he was already thrusting a clipboard into your hands with the kind of determined efficiency usually reserved for emergency evacuation procedures.
“Short-term arrangement,” he said quickly, the words tumbling over each other with the practiced haste of someone trying to get through a rehearsed explanation before questions could interfere. “Month-to-month. Flexible termination. Shared occupancy, of course.”
You blinked.
The clipboard in your hands suddenly felt heavier.
“Shared what?”
He froze.
Not dramatically.
Just enough.
A brief, unmistakable stillness that passed over him like his entire nervous system had hit pause to reconsider several recent life choices.
It lasted maybe half a second.
Then he smiled.
It was not a reassuring smile.
It was the smile of a man realizing, with mounting internal horror, that he had accidentally skipped a crucial portion of his script and was now attempting to improvise his way out of it.
“The current tenant is…” He hesitated just long enough to make everything significantly worse. “Quiet.”
You stared at him.
The fluorescent light overhead buzzed faintly, filling the silence with a low mechanical hum that somehow made the whole interaction feel even more ominous.
“There’s another person living there?”
“Very low maintenance.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“He mostly keeps to himself.”
Mostly.
The word lodged itself in your brain with immediate and profound concern.
Mostly implied exceptions.
Mostly implied incidents.
Mostly implied there existed enough prior evidence of not keeping to himself that clarification had become necessary.
Slowly, you lowered your gaze to the paperwork in your hands.
The lease agreement was three densely packed pages of aggressively small print, the kind seemingly formatted by someone with active contempt for human eyesight.
You scanned the page once.
Then again.
And there it was, tucked neatly into the middle of paragraph six like it had every right to be there:
Temporary shared occupancy arrangement.
You looked back up.
The property manager was still smiling.
Still sweating.
Tiny beads of perspiration had gathered visibly along his hairline now, catching under the harsh fluorescent lights.
He radiated the kind of brittle, tightly wound energy that suggested he believed if he simply maintained enough forward momentum, you might not stop long enough to fully process what was happening.
And under any normal circumstance, this would have been enough.
Enough to hand the clipboard back.
Enough to offer some polite excuse about needing time to think, to immediately leave and continue your apartment search somewhere significantly less suspicious.
But then your eyes drifted back to the rental price printed at the top of the page.
You thought about your current living arrangement.
Specifically, your friend’s futon.
A piece of furniture that had long since evolved beyond discomfort into something approaching targeted hostility.
You thought about the way the springs somehow managed to identify and attack entirely new sections of your spine every night.
You thought about waking up every morning to her cat sitting squarely on your chest, staring directly into your face with the cold, unblinking intensity of a creature quietly evaluating whether your continued existence was strictly necessary.
Then there was the email still sitting unanswered in your inbox.
The one from admissions.
Placement decisions will be finalized within eight to twelve weeks.
Administrative language for:
We know this is life-altering information for you, but unfortunately that sounds like a you problem.
You exhaled slowly.
And, because your life had apparently reached the point where this constituted a reasonable decision-making process, you began mentally weighing your options.
On one side:
A suspiciously cheap temporary apartment with visible structural trauma and an unnamed mystery roommate whose strongest listed quality was apparently being “quiet.”
On the other:
Another month on the futon.
Another month of apologizing for existing in someone else’s space.
Another month of waking at four in the morning because a cat had decided your face represented an acceptable emotional outlet.
Honestly?
The mystery roommate was starting to sound less threatening.
The property manager watched your expression shift with the desperate focus of a man witnessing his final chance at salvation.
You could practically see the exact moment he realized he might still close this deal.
You looked at the lease. At the rent. At the sweat steadily gathering along his temples. Then, with all the solemnity of someone making a choice that would almost certainly become a cautionary tale later, you signed.
The pen scratched loudly against the paper.
Final.
Irrevocable.
Probably stupid.
But honestly speaking, even if there had been a murder here (so long as it wasn't yours), the rent was still excellent.
And besides—
it was temporary.
That was the important part.
Just a few months.
Long enough for your school situation to sort itself out, to figure out your next move.
Long enough to save some money and move somewhere with fewer unanswered structural questions.
Long enough, surely, that nothing especially weird could happen.
Which, in hindsight, was an extraordinarily stupid thing to assume in Z-City.
---------------
The second red flag was the door.
It hung at a subtle angle, the frame warped just enough to catch your eye the moment you reached the third floor landing. One side sat lower than the other, creating a slight uneven gap at the top where the light bled through in a thin yellow line.
It looked like a door that had once experienced a deeply personal disagreement with something large and fast-moving.
You stood in the hallway with your meagre moving box balanced awkwardly against your hip and stared at it for several long seconds.
The box was heavier than you remembered packing it. One corner was already beginning to collapse inward from the strain, threatening to spill your carefully packed supplies all over the questionable carpeting.
Your arms ached.
The hallway smelled faintly of dust, old plaster, and whatever vaguely chemical cleaner the building used to create the illusion of maintenance.
This would have been an excellent time to interpret the crooked door as some sort of cosmic intervention.
A warning from the universe.
A final opportunity to reconsider your choices before stepping fully into what was almost certainly a mistake.
Unfortunately, your options at this point consisted of either opening the door or dropping a box full of personal items directly onto your foot.
You shifted your grip, reached for the handle, and pushed.
The door gave with a low, reluctant creak.
You stepped inside.
And stopped.
The apartment was larger than it had any right to be.
Not expansively so, but enough to create immediate suspicion. From the outside, the building had projected all the cramped architectural optimism of a place that considered “functional closet space” an extravagant luxury. Yet the room stretching out before you felt unexpectedly open, as though the interior dimensions had entered into some private arrangement with geometry.
The layout was simple.
A small living area connected to a narrow kitchen.
A low table positioned in front of an older television.
A couch that had clearly lived several lives before arriving here.
Scattered across nearly every available surface sat evidence of a deeply committed relationship with discount grocery shopping.
Instant noodle containers.
Plastic produce bags.
A stack of supermarket flyers spread across the table with several items circled in red marker.
And sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the television, perfectly at ease amid the chaos, was a man in a yellow jumpsuit.
He held a cup of instant noodles in one hand and a pair of chopsticks in the other.
The television cast a muted wash of blue light across the room, flickering over his face as he looked up at the sound of the door opening.
He blinked once.
His expression shifted only enough to register your presence.
Not alarm or confusion.
More the mild acknowledgment of someone noticing that weather had changed.
“Oh,” he said.
The single syllable settled into the room with complete neutrality.
For a moment, neither of you moved.
Then he glanced briefly at the box in your arms, back at your face, and said, with quiet certainty:
“You’re the new roommate.”
It wasn’t phrased as a question.
You remained where you were, still gripping the box. Several thoughts attempted to form at once.
Most of them were variations of what?
You eventually settled on:
“...er, yeah."
He took one last mouthful of his noodles with an absentminded slurp, the sound oddly loud in the otherwise still apartment, and set the empty cup down beside him with the casual finality of someone completing an entirely ordinary part of his evening. Then he pushed himself to his feet in one smooth motion, and without quite meaning to, you found yourself instinctively straightening where you stood, your grip tightening around the box balanced against your hip as your brain hurried to reassess the situation now that your unexpected roommate was upright and fully visible.
And what struck you first—more than the yellow jumpsuit, more than the complete lack of concern he seemed to feel about your sudden appearance in his living room—was how profoundly, almost aggressively average he looked.
He was of middling height, with an entirely forgettable build and the sort of posture that suggested he had never once in his life considered whether he was standing in an interesting way. His face was open and uncomplicated, absent of any particularly striking features, and his complete baldness somehow only emphasized the startling normalcy of everything else about him.
There was nothing remarkable there for your attention to latch onto.
No dramatic scar.
No eccentric expression.
No immediately suspicious intensity.
Your mind kept searching for something—a detail, a quirk, some visual cue that would help contextualize why a man dressed in a bright yellow jumpsuit was calmly eating instant noodles in your suspiciously cheap apartment—and kept coming up empty.
It was unsettling in a way you struggled to articulate, as though reality itself had intentionally assembled him from the most unremarkable traits possible, carefully selecting every feature to ensure he would register as entirely, impeccably ordinary.
Which, under the circumstances, felt significantly stranger than if he had looked actively threatening.
“I’m Saitama,” he said.
His voice carried the same flat, matter-of-fact quality as everything else about him, as if introductions were simply another practical necessity to move through before returning to more pressing concerns, like whatever had previously been happening on the television.
He extended a hand toward you.
For half a second, you simply stared at it.
Then, shifting the weight of the box awkwardly against your side, you reached out and shook his hand. His grip was perfectly normal. Neither too firm nor too loose. Brief enough to be casual, solid enough to be polite. It was exactly the kind of handshake any completely ordinary person might give another completely ordinary person upon meeting them for the first time.
And somehow, impossibly, that unsettled you more than anything else had so far.
You introduced yourself, still trying to reconcile the bizarre sequence of events that had somehow led to this moment.
Saitama gave a small nod, as though your introduction had satisfactorily completed whatever social obligation the situation required, and then simply shifted back to where he had been sitting on the floor, returning to his noodles. He made a vague, sweeping gesture with his chopsticks toward the rest of the apartment.
“The bathroom’s down there,” he said, pointing toward the narrow hallway branching off from the living room. “Kitchen’s here. Your room’s the door on the left. The one on the right sticks when it rains, and part of the ceiling came down a few months ago.” The words arrived in one flat, uninterrupted stream of practical information, delivered with the same tone someone might use to comment on appliance settings.
You stared at him.
For a moment, your brain latched onto the statement about the bathroom, then the kitchen, then the room assignment, all perfectly normal pieces of information that might reasonably appear during an unexpected and deeply under-explained roommate introduction.
Then it caught on the final part.
And stopped.
Your grip tightened slightly on the box balanced against your hip.
“The ceiling what?”
Saitama looked up from his noodles.
“Came down.”
He said it with complete calm, as though clarifying some minor point of housekeeping.
You glanced automatically toward the hallway.
From where you stood, you could just make out a section of the ceiling near the far end where the plaster was a noticeably different shade than the surrounding concrete, patched over in a rough rectangle that looked functional in the broadest possible sense of the word.
Your eyes narrowed.
“What do you mean it came down?”
He considered this for a moment, chopsticks paused halfway to his mouth.
Then, apparently deciding greater specificity was required, he added:
“A lot of it was on the floor.”
You stared at him.
That was, somehow, less reassuring than the original phrasing.
“And that just... happens here?”
Saitama tilted his head slightly, as though genuinely considering the frequency.
“Not a lot.”
The qualifier did nothing for your peace of mind.
He finally took another bite of noodles, chewed thoughtfully, and after a moment added, "it’s mostly fixed.”
Your gaze drifted back to the uneven patchwork visible in the hallway.
The word 'mostly' lodged itself in your mind with immediate and profound concern. You opened your mouth, fully prepared to ask what exactly had caused enough force to partially collapse an apartment ceiling and still qualify as something to mention this casually—
And then something exploded outside.
The sound hit all at once—sharp, violent, and close enough to rattle the glass in the window beside the couch. The entire apartment gave a sudden, unsettling shudder, the floor trembling briefly beneath your feet. Somewhere overhead, dust sifted loose from the ceiling. A fine gray drift of it floated lazily downward through the air.
You flinched hard enough to nearly drop your box.
Your head snapped toward the window.
Beyond the glass, the city skyline remained frustratingly intact from this angle, the neighboring buildings blocking any clear view of whatever had just happened.
“What was that?”
The question escaped before you could temper the edge in your voice.
Your pulse had already quickened, adrenaline arriving with enough force to leave your hands suddenly unsteady around the box still braced against your hip. Somewhere beyond the apartment walls, the city had gone briefly still in that peculiar way large spaces sometimes did after a violent disruption, as though even the surrounding buildings were pausing to register what had just happened.
Behind you, Saitama turned his head toward the window. The movement was unhurried. He squinted slightly, his expression settling into the faintly distracted concentration of someone trying to place a familiar but ultimately unimportant sound—like hearing a car alarm several streets over and wondering vaguely whether it might belong to someone you knew.
For a moment, he simply looked.
Then he gave a small, thoughtful hum.
“Probably a monster.”
The words landed in the room with startling calm.
There was no alarm in his voice, no tension, no indication that he considered this information particularly noteworthy. He might just as easily have remarked that it was starting to rain. And with that, apparently satisfied with his own assessment, he lowered gaze back to his meal, picked up his noodles, and resumed eating.
You remained exactly where you were. For several long seconds, your thoughts refused to assemble into anything coherent. The apartment seemed suddenly too quiet, save for the low murmur of the television and the faint scrape of chopsticks against styrofoam.
Slowly, you turned your head toward the window again, staring at the narrow slice of skyline visible between the neighboring buildings as though some clarifying detail might present itself if you looked hard enough. Smoke, perhaps. Flames. A giant clawed silhouette rampaging dramatically through the streets.
There was nothing.
Just the familiar gray sprawl of Z-City and the distant, delayed wail of sirens beginning to rise somewhere far below.
When the window offered no further explanation, you turned back toward Saitama. He was lifting another bite of noodles to his mouth with the same absent concentration he’d shown throughout this entire deeply alarming interaction.
“Probably?”
He glanced up.
“Yeah.”
The casual certainty in his voice was somehow more unsettling than the statement itself. He said it the way someone might identify overcast weather through a window.
You waited.
Surely this was the point where elaboration would follow. Where he would clarify what he meant, or perhaps explain why the possibility of nearby monster-related destruction apparently ranked somewhere below finishing his dinner on the scale of immediate priorities.
Instead, he simply took another bite.
The television continued flickering blue light across the room. Dust still drifted lazily from the patched section of ceiling in the hallway. Outside, the sirens grew louder.
Your fingers tightened unconsciously around the cardboard edge of the box. “Does that happen often?”
This, at least, seemed to make him pause.
He lowered his chopsticks slightly and gave the question the kind of thoughtful consideration one might devote to calculating bus schedules or trying to remember whether they had locked the front door. His brow drew together as he considered it with complete sincerity, his attention fixed somewhere just past your shoulder. For a moment, the only sound in the apartment was the quiet flicker of the television and the faint, distant wail of sirens drifting in from outside.
You waited.
The silence stretched just long enough that you began to wonder whether he had forgotten you were standing there at all.
Then he swallowed.
“Depends.”
The word landed with all the frustrating incompleteness of a sentence that clearly should have continued.
You stared at him.
He resumed eating.
Several seconds passed before it became painfully obvious that, once again, this was the entirety of the answer he intended to offer. You tightened your grip on the box balanced against your hip.
“Depends on what?”
That earned another pause.
He tilted his head slightly, considering.
“Usually whether there’s a sale going on.”
You blinked.
“A sale?”
“Yeah.” He lifted another bite of noodles. “If the supermarket’s doing coupons, there are always more monsters around.”
There was a beat.
Then, as though recognizing that perhaps some elaboration might be warranted, he added in the same even tone, “Or maybe I just notice them more because I’m already out.”
The clarification did very little to improve the situation.
You stared at him across the cramped living room, trying and failing to determine whether this was some exceptionally deadpan joke. His expression offered no help. There was nothing in his face to suggest amusement, no crack in his flat delivery, no trace of self-awareness regarding how completely unhinged that statement sounded when spoken aloud to another human being.
He looked entirely serious.
And standing there in the middle of your suspiciously inexpensive temporary housing arrangement, with dust still drifting lazily from a visibly damaged ceiling and your arms beginning to ache from the weight of the box, you felt one startlingly clear thought settle into place.
This was either going to be the worst housing decision you had ever made.
Or, somehow, against every reasonable expectation, the most interesting.