Chapter Text
𝘼𝙛𝙩𝙚𝙧 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙎𝙩𝙤𝙧𝙢 - 𝙈𝙪𝙢𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙙 & 𝙎𝙤𝙣𝙨
𖤓
The house looked wrong.
It wasn’t dangerous, nor abandoned. Just wrong. As if it had been drawn onto the street afterwards, squeezed between reality and something else entirely.
Its red roof caught the afternoon sunlight. The lawn was overgrown with a ditched, mangled lawnmower to the side. A harpoon protruded from somewhere near a dormer as though nobody had informed the house that harpoons didn't belong there.
CJ stared through the moving truck window. The house stared back. Neither made a particularly convincing first impression. Still, she'd come too far to turn around.
The truck stopped, and the rumble of the engine fell silent. For a moment, the world seemed to hold its breath.
This was it.
Everything she owned sat packed in cardboard boxes behind her, which wasn’t much. Everything she had left behind existed cities away, shrinking further with every road she'd taken to get here.
It would be a different life, and more importantly, a different version of herself.
The front door swung open after a single ring of the doorbell. A young man with tousled brown hair and a green hoodie stepped into the doorway. Behind him came the distant sound of breaking glass.
Then it was shouting.
The boy didn't react. He only looked at CJ up and down. "You're the new roommate?”
She looked past him into the house, then back at him. "I might be."
The boy smiled. It was something warm and effortless. "I’m Edd! Come on in."
So she did, because sometimes life changes with a grand speech, and sometimes it changes because a stranger holds a door open.
The house smelled faintly of paint, food, and a strangely chemical scent that probably should have been investigated by professionals. Voices drifted; laughter followed. Everything felt loud, messy, unfinished…
Alive.
CJ hadn't realized how long she'd been living in silence until she stepped into a place that had none.
Hours passed in fragments after that. She began to learn names and faces she’d be rising to every morning.
Edd, the one who put out the advertisement, was the lived-in, approachable one. He seemed calm and perhaps slightly mischievous. He was much friendlier than CJ expected and made sure to include her in every conversation. He was definitely stronger than he looked, and he wore rectangular glasses.
Matt was either incredibly confident or completely insane. He’d make sure he was known whenever he stepped into a room. He talked a lot and rarely seemed embarrassed. He also asks too many questions. He definitely put effort into his looks — bright ginger hair fluffed up, clear skin, ironed clothes. He had loads of freckles and a noticeably square chin.
Then there was the man with no eyes. How he could still see, CJ couldn’t figure out. His hair was unruly to say the least, and medium brown. He had multiple ear piercings, an eyebrow piercing, and symmetrical labret piercings. Tom left the strongest impression, not because he talked the most — or because of his lack of eyes — but because he talked the least. He’s reserved and standoffish, only offering CJ a short greeting. He watched conversations more than he participated in them. He seemed like he merely tolerated CJ’s appearance.
CJ thought she had formed an opinion on Tord, but she kept second-guessing it. He carried himself differently from the others — he rarely looked uncertain. However, he could go from charming to distant in a matter of seconds. His dirty blonde hair was styled into a shaggy mullet. He looked athletic and had sharper features.
CJ also quickly found out that Tom and Tord desperately needed to get over themselves. They seemed incapable of being in the same room for too long before something happened. It was always an eye-roll, a passive-aggressive comment, or an insult. It wasn’t ever anything normal roommates argued about. It seemed personal, like they genuinely disliked each other.
𖤓
Orange paint soon splashed across the walls. Flowers bloomed where there had only been blank space before. By evening, CJ’s new room no longer looked like something she'd rented. It looked like something she'd touched, something she claimed.
Outside the window, the sun sank lower. Golden light spilled across the mural, catching painted petals and soft shadows alike. For a brief moment, everything glowed — the room and the walls. The light highlighted the dust floating through the air. CJ stood in the center of it all and watched.
There was a strange kind of grief in beginnings.
Nobody liked talking about that part; the way new things asked you to let old things die, the way hope and loss often arrived together, the way freedom could feel frightening when you'd spent years dreaming about it.
Downstairs, somebody yelled. Another voice immediately yelled back. A door slammed, and someone laughed.
And the spell broke.
The house was ridiculous. The people inside it were somehow worse. Luckily, for the first time in a very long while, tomorrow felt larger than yesterday, and that was enough.
Outside, the last of the sunlight disappeared beneath the horizon. Inside, the lights remained on, the voices continued, and life carried on. Somewhere between the fading day and the coming night, CJ found herself standing on the edge of something she couldn't name yet.
It wasn’t happiness. Not healing either. Not home.
Perhaps it was the beginning of all three.