Chapter Text
Living with another streamer wasn’t exactly something Ash had factored into his life plans when he decided to start streaming.
Okay, maybe that wasn’t entirely true.
If he was being honest with himself, he’d always pictured ending up in one of those high-budget content houses once he’d made it big, the kind where collaborations happened on a whim, everyone was always around, and the clips practically made themselves.
After all, who wouldn’t want to spend all day hanging out with their best friends and call it work?
He just never pictured what it would actually feel like to live with one. To have the noise follow him out of his headset and into the kitchen.
Ewron was a well-known Polish streamer, best recognized for his high-energy roleplay antics, though every few months he’d inevitably relapse into Minecraft whenever he wanted something a little more laid-back.
Ash, by contrast, had built his channel on obscure indie titles, the occasional Minecraft world when the mood struck, and duo sessions with friends that usually devolved into far more talking than actual gameplay.
His viewers came for the chill vibes and dry humor, but lately, they were getting an unexpected secondary audio track whether they’d asked for it or not.
Every now and then, chat would pause whatever Ash was doing to ask who was screaming in the background.
The answer was almost always the same: Ewron.
On paper, they were a terrible match for roommates. Different audiences, contrasting streaming styles, opposite sleep schedules, and wildly different definitions of what constituted an acceptable indoor volume.
Anyone looking at the two of them side-by-side would’ve assumed the arrangement was doomed to implode within a month.
In practice, though, it worked embarrassingly well, far better than either of them had expected back when Ash stumbled across a roommate listing online and Ewron, after nothing more than a two-minute video call, had shrugged into his camera and said, “Sure, why not.”
Well, it could be worse, Ash had thought at the time, leaving it at that. He’d learned not to question the things that worked.
Besides, having the freedom to work in his pajamas without brushing his hair was too good to pass up. They were both faceless creators, which was a massive perk.
While other creators had to worry about ring lights, camera angles, bad hair days, and looking presentable at three in the afternoon, Ash’s pre-stream setup consisted of dragging himself out of bed, grabbing an energy drink, and making sure his noise-suppression filter was turned all the way up.
Not that it ever actually worked. But that was beside the point.
Ewron operated on a similar philosophy, albeit with considerably more chaos. It wasn’t unusual for Ash to wander into the kitchen at midnight and find him standing there in mismatched socks and sweatpants, muttering furiously at the stove in Polish that Ash had long since given up trying to translate.
That was the funny thing about two faceless creators sharing an apartment. Most of the stuff stayed strictly behind the scenes.
To their audiences, they were digital avatars, usernames, or simply voices floating over gameplay footage.
The versions of themselves that left dirty dishes in the sink, argued over whose turn it was to buy toilet paper, or fought about the thermostat never made it past the apartment walls.
Naturally, that anonymity only encouraged their viewers to fill in the blanks.
Ash had seen fan art portraying him as everything from a cozy, oversized-sweatshirt-wearing anime boy to a shadowy figure rendered entirely in black-and-purple glitch effects, a reference to one infamous stream where his video feed had corrupted into those exact colors due to a technical hiccup he still hadn’t managed to track down.
Ewron’s depictions were even wilder. Viewers usually leaned toward rendering him as a manic priest, a tattoo-covered criminal, or, oddly enough, a fiery red panda.
Cute, if Ash had to give his honest opinion on it.
The reality, as Ash looked across the living room, was much less cinematic. Not that he minded. Honestly, he preferred this real version of Ewron over anything the fans had dreamed up.
Though if he was being completely honest with himself, his appreciation for his roommate had started straying into complicated territory lately.
Ash had never really dated anyone before. Well, maybe a couple of quick, silly flings back in middle school. Or was it elementary school? Either way, nothing serious.
Up until recently, he hadn’t even realized he swung both ways, and the realization still sat strangely in his chest.
Ewron, on the other hand, was eight years older, with eight full years of life experience ahead of him, presumably including the kind of experience Ash had precisely zero of.
Ash had never asked about the guy’s dating history, mostly because it wasn’t his place. What kind of normal housemate brings that up out of nowhere? He’d end up sounding like some deranged fan who’d somehow breached apartment security and let himself in.
Even knowing that, it didn’t stop the stupid little crush he’d developed on his roommate. And it was stupid, because Ewron almost certainly wasn’t even into guys.
So Ash did what any rational person would do and buried it, pretending like his heart didn’t do a pathetic little jump whenever Ewron tossed him a compliment after a stream.
They’d been doing a lot of joint streams lately, too, which really didn’t help matters.
Ever since a recent Assassin’s Creed co-op playthrough where they’d spent hours backing each other up in chaotic stealth missions, they’d picked up a pair of running nicknames for each other.
Ash had started calling Ewron “My Blade,” and Ewron, naturally, had returned the favor by calling Ash “My Assassin.”
It was just harmless gaming banter, but their chats had absolutely devoured it. Every interaction got clipped, quoted in donation messages, spammed across the screen the second the two of them appeared together.
Along with the nicknames came more co-op games, most of which neither of them had touched before. Ash’s favorites were always the horror titles. Partly because of the genuinely interesting storylines, but mostly because of Ewron’s reactions.
One night, mid-playthrough, something grotesquely deformed lunged out of the dark. Ewron shrieked at the jump scare loud enough that Ash heard it twice, once through his headset, and then again through the thin wall separating their bedrooms, half a second apart, like a poorly synced echo.
Ash collapsed over his desk, wheezing with laughter.
“You’re supposed to be protecting me, My Blade,” he said between breathless giggles, wiping actual tears from his eyes.
“Kurwa, I am protecting you!” Ewron protested loudly, his voice echoing from the hallway as much as the Discord call. “You’re just so needy! Stop hogging all the light batteries!”
“I can’t see shit!” Ash shot back, frantically spinning his character in circles as another flickering shadow melted back into the darkness.
“I’m older than you and somehow I can see just fine. Those poorly lit indie games have permanently damaged your eyesight!”
Ash barked out another laugh, clutching his stomach. “You cannot possibly be talking right now.”
“I have perfect vision.”
Ash nearly walked his avatar straight into the monster’s mouth because he was laughing too hard to focus. “Yeah, says the guy who literally had to get laser eye surgery! Sorry the rest of us haven’t ditched our glasses yet!”
Chat was losing its collective mind. Even with his overlay minimized, Ash could see the wall of laughing emotes, frantic caps lock, and someone, inevitably, asking if they were dating yet.
Ash used to scroll past comments like that without a second thought. Streamer chats loved shipping people together. It happened to everyone.
Lately, though, he caught himself lingering on those messages a fraction of a second too long before forcing his eyes away.
God, he was pathetic, wasn’t he?
“Alright, that’s it for me tonight before this guy lets another monster eat me,” Ewron announced to his chat. “Go raid Ash, tell him to buy better glasses. Goodnight, everyone!”
“Hey! My glasses are fine!” Ash protested into his mic, though the raid was already pouring in, flooding his chat with heart emotes, red pandas, and relentless #Ashwron spam.
He scrolled through it on reflex, his thumb hovering over the trackpad as he read the messages flying by far faster than he meant to.
finally together omg!!
ashwron supremacy real
my blade & my assassin forever
A notification popped up in his second-monitor browser, someone on Twitter had already clipped Ewron’s sign-off and stitched it with an old duo clip from three streams back, captioned with nothing but a long string of heart emojis.
The internet worked frighteningly fast.
“Yeah, yeah, very funny,” Ash muttered under his breath, shaking his head as a reluctant, helpless smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
He spent another ten minutes wrapping up, thanking the raiders, welcoming the wave of new viewers, answering a couple of quick last-minute questions, and promising he’d be live again in a few days.
Ten full minutes slipped by before he finally reached for his mouse, dragged the cursor over, and clicked the End Stream button.
The sudden silence that settled over his room was deafening.
He pulled off his headset, rubbed the bridge of his nose where his glasses rested, and leaned back in his chair with a long, exhausted sigh.
His shoulders ached from sitting tense through all the horror game jump scares, and he stretched his arms high over his head until his back gave a deeply satisfying crack.
Before he could even stand, his door clicked open without a knock.
Ewron leaned casually against the doorframe, two chilled alcoholic drinks balanced in one hand. His ginger hair was a ruined nest of bedhead, and he wore an oversized hoodie that had definitely seen better days.
He was the epitome of an off-camera faceless creator, the exact sort of look millions of viewers would never associate with the loud, energetic streamer they watched every week.
To Ash, though, this was Ewron.
“You took forever, My Assassin,” Ewron said, tossing one of the cans toward him.
Ash caught it on instinct. He immediately busied himself with popping the tab, letting the sharp hiss of carbonation fill the room as he silently willed it to drown out the traitorous, frantic pounding of his heart that the nickname never failed to provoke.
“I had to defend my honor,” he said, taking an exaggerated sip. “You slandered my eyesight in front of twenty thousand people.”
“Not slander if it’s true,” Ewron laughed quietly, wandering farther into the room until he leaned his hip against the edge of Ash’s desk.
He took a sip of his drink, his blue eyes scanning Ash’s face with that exasperatingly fond expression he always wore whenever they were off-mic.
“You played well tonight, though.”
“Yeah, well,” Ash muttered, looking down at his can and tracing a thumb through the cold condensation pooling on the aluminum. “I try. Even if my ruined eyesight almost got us killed three times in the second chapter.”
“Four times,” Ewron corrected with a lazy smirk, taking another sip. “Not that I was counting.”
He shifted, pushing off the desk to wander around the small perimeter of Ash’s room. It was a habit of his after long streams, the leftover adrenaline always needed somewhere to go while his brain slowly spun down.
So he paced, his socks quiet against the wooden floor as he made a slow loop past the bookshelf and back toward the dark window.
Ash watched him out of the corner of his eye.
Before they’d become roommates, he’d seen thousands of clips of Ewron online. He’d thought he knew what the guy was like: loud, quick-witted, and endlessly energetic.
Yet somehow, none of those viral clips had ever captured this version of him.
Away from the camera, without chat flying by at a hundred messages a minute or the pressure to keep thousands of people entertained, Ewron seemed so much softer somehow.
He still paced, still carried that restless, coiled energy in his limbs, but there were no exaggerated reactions now, no loud persona driving it.
With his sharp, surprisingly delicate features and bright eyes, he reminded Ash of a red panda, making the fandom’s favorite comparison feel entirely obvious.
“Chat was pretty ruthless tonight,” Ewron said eventually, stopping beside the edge of Ash’s bed and leaning one shoulder lightly against the wall. “They’re really sticking with that #Ashwron tag, huh?”
Ash nearly choked on his drink.
He coughed violently, hastily setting the aluminum can down on his desk with a clatter that was just a little too loud in the quiet room before clearing his throat.
“Oh. Yeah,” Ash said, aiming for casual and landing somewhere near mildly strangled. “You know how shipping goes. Internet’s gonna internet.”
Ewron laughed under his breath. “Yeah, yeah, after this many years in the content creator scene, I have a vague idea.”
The teasing edge in Ewron’s smile melted away as his eyes lingered on Ash. He took a slow step closer, resting one hand on the back of Ash’s gaming chair.
The movement was completely casual, but the effect it had on Ash was anything but.
“Seriously, though,” Ewron said. “I know the chat can get a little… much sometimes. With the shipping stuff. If it ever makes you uncomfortable, or if you want me to tell them to dial it back, just say the word. I don’t want it to be weird between us.”
Ash froze, his breath catching painfully in his throat.
Ewron was being a good friend. A considerate, responsible roommate who wanted to make sure Ash didn’t feel pressured by thousands of internet strangers poking fun at their dynamic.
It was sweet. And it was absolute agony, because the last thing Ash wanted was for Ewron to think the shipping was the problem.
The problem was that Ash was falling for him all on his own, entirely independent of chat’s loud encouragement.
“No, it doesn’t make it weird,” Ash said, the words spilling out a little faster than intended. He swallowed hard, forcing himself to look up and meet Ewron’s warm blue gaze. “I mean, it’s just jokes, right? It’s fun. I don’t care what chat says.”
Ewron searched his face for a moment, as if checking to see if Ash was just being polite to keep the peace.
Eventually, the tension eased from his shoulders, and that warm, familiar smile returned.
“Good,” Ewron murmured softly. He reached over and gently tapped his can against Ash’s, making a small, metallic clink. “To surviving another night of twitch chat, then.”
He took a final long pull from his drink, lightly crushing the empty aluminum can before setting it down beside Ash’s on the wooden desk.
“Well...” He stretched his arms high over his head until something in his spine gave a faint pop. “You should probably get some sleep. You look like you’re about to pass out on your keyboard.”
“Pot, meet kettle,” Ash retorted, a weak smile tugging at the corner of his lips.
Ewron huffed out a quiet laugh, turning toward the doorway and running a hand through his already disastrous bedhead. “Yeah, yeah. Goodnight, My Assassin.”
“Night, My Blade,” Ash called back, the nickname slipping past his lips before he could even think to second-guess himself.
Ewron paused right at the threshold, glancing back over his shoulder with a quick, lopsided grin before softly pulling the door shut behind him.
The exact second the latch clicked into place, Ash collapsed backward into his chair, covering his face with both hands and letting out a muffled, desperate groan into his palms.
“I don’t care what chat says,” he mimicked himself silently in his head, groaning again.
God, he was utterly useless at this.
He had practically handed Ewron a written guarantee that everything between them was totally fine, totally platonic, and that they were just a couple of bros playing video games and rolling with internet shipping memes.
He’d had a golden opportunity to hint at something, to say anything, do anything, and instead, he’d panicked and sprinted in the exact opposite direction.
Dragging his palms down his face, Ash stared up at the dark bedroom ceiling in total defeat. He and his love life were a completely lost cause.
He’d seen plenty of creators fall into the ship-baiting trap before, leaning into the rumors for clout, playing coy for clip channels, feeding their chat a storyline just to watch the donations roll in.
Ash had always sworn he’d never be that guy, but the problem was that he wasn’t performing at all. If anything, he was trying to do the exact opposite, and somehow, that only made it worse.
With a heavy, resigned sigh, he finally dragged himself out of his chair, flicked off his PC’s power strip, and collapsed straight into bed without bothering to change out of his clothes.
He told himself he’d just scroll for a bit before sleep. One minute, tops.
It was a terrible idea.
Every third post was a clip of the two of them, some new variation of the same nickname stitched underneath, complete with hearts, cat emojis, and a truly alarming number of people in his mentions insisting they’d “known it since day one.”
Known what, exactly? Ash didn’t even remember agreeing there was a day one to begin with.
He kept scrolling anyway, completely unable to look away. The very next post was a fan edit with a slowed-down love song layered over their gaming highlights, and the video already had tens of thousands of views.
Ash made it barely four seconds in before his stomach twisted into a tight, uncomfortable knot.
Frustrated with himself more than any of it, he tossed the phone face-down onto the nightstand with a sharp thud, as if it were the phone’s fault and not his own for opening the app in the first place.
He yanked the blanket up over his ears, squeezed his eyes shut, and tried very hard to stop thinking about his roommate.
It turned out that was significantly easier said than done.
Well, fuck.