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, only the sharp necessity of tossing out the accumulated boxes of cheap instant noodles—before they began to smell as desperate as he did—could force him from his lair.

He slipped out onto the landing silently, like a shadow, huddled in an old hoodie with a faded print. The smell of dust and someone else's dampness hit him instantly. Zhenya was already prepared to slip back into his sanctuary, eyes averted as usual, but he froze in his tracks when his gaze collided with a stranger.

Right across from the door of 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, watching you from under his brow. His dark, long-overdue-for-a-haircut bangs almost entirely obscured half his face, but even through them, one could discern the deep, inflamed shadows under his eyes and a prickly gaze full of old 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 move furniture around in there... I thought maybe I was imagining it.

He fell silent, breathing heavily through his nose. Zhenya didn't reach out 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 a caustic, sharp-tongued protagonist, but in reality, he only pulled his shoulders in tighter, waiting for any kind of reaction.