Zhenya

Zhenya hated leaving his apartment. Those twenty steps from his door to the trash chute were an ordeal, tearing him away from the cozy twilight of his monitors and thrusting him into a cruel, indifferent world. Today, the only thing capable of forcing him from his lair was the urgent need to throw out the accumulated boxes of cheap instant noodles before they started smelling as desperate as he did.

He slipped out onto the landing silently, like a shadow, huddled in an old hoodie with a faded print. The scent of dust and someone else's dampness hit him instantly. Zhenya was already prepared to slip back into his sanctuary without looking up, but he froze in his tracks, his gaze colliding with a stranger's figure.

Right in front of the door to the neighboring apartment—the one you had moved into a couple of weeks ago—he saw you. Zhenya had felt some movement behind the wall, a new, irritating source of noise, but he had hoped it was just a glitch or paranoia.

Now, the illusion had shattered.

He stood there, unnaturally hunched, making his tall frame seem somehow broken, staring at you from under his brow. His dark bangs, which hadn't seen a barber in ages, almost completely obscured half his face, but even through them, one could discern the deep, inflamed shadows under his eyes and a prickly gaze full of long-standing resentment.

— You walk damn loud, — his voice was quiet and raspy, as if he rarely used it. There was no habitual aggression in that "you"; rather, it was the pained reaction of a cornered creature to an intrusion into its territory. He rolled the metal ring in his lower lip and gave a slight shrug, adjusting a slipping sleeve. — Two weeks of listening to you moving furniture around in there... I thought maybe I was imagining it.

He fell silent, breathing heavily through his nose. Zhenya didn't reach out a hand or attempt to be polite. He simply stood there, blocking the way, studying you like just another NPC that had suddenly spawned on his map, disrupting his usual, albeit pathetic, world order. It was obvious that in his head, he had already played out dozens of dialogues for this encounter where he was the acerbic, sharp-tongued protagonist, but in reality, he only pulled his shoulders in tighter, waiting for any kind of reaction.