The plate had been sitting in the refrigerator, clearly marked, clearly labeled, sitting exactly on Arthur's designated side of the taped divide, containing what he had intended to be a carefully portioned lunch for the following day — teriyaki chicken, glazed and perfectly seared, the kind of dish he made only when he had the energy to actually cook rather than simply survive on protein bars and desperation.
He discovered its absence at eleven that night, standing in front of the open fridge in his hoodie, staring at an empty spot on a plate that should have contained roughly half a chicken breast and now contained nothing but a faint smear of sauce and a single abandoned piece of broccoli.
He did not say anything immediately. He simply stood there, jaw tight, processing the specific, personal betrayal of having his one properly cooked meal of the week vanish without a trace, and closed the fridge with more force than strictly necessary.
Diana's door was closed. Through it, faintly, he could hear the sound of a phone notification, followed by the soft, unmistakable click of someone typing.
He didn't know, as he stood there in the dark kitchen, that behind that door, Diana was doing exactly what he suspected — except not to him. To a stranger. About him.
---
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: Confession. I ate half my roommate's dinner tonight. It was sitting right there, looking delicious, and I have no self-control around good food, apparently, even food that has another person's name basically written on it.*
*Hắc Long Cô Độc: That seems like a serious breach of roommate ethics.*
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: It was! I know! But he'd made teriyaki chicken and it smelled incredible and I told myself I'd just have a small piece and then somehow the piece became half the plate before I could stop myself.*
*Hắc Long Cô Độc: Does he know yet?*
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: Not yet. I heard him get home a little while ago. I'm currently barricaded in my room pretending to be asleep, which is an incredibly mature strategy, I'm aware.*
Arthur stared at his phone, the words arriving less than thirty feet from where he'd just discovered the crime scene of his missing dinner, and something cold and slow crept up the back of his neck.
He read the message again. *Teriyaki chicken.* *Roommate.* *Heard him get home a little while ago.*
The coincidence was, objectively, absurd. Impossible, even. There were thousands of apartments in this city, thousands of roommates eating thousands of dinners, and any number of them could theoretically involve teriyaki chicken on any given evening. It meant nothing. It could mean nothing. He told himself this three times, with increasing firmness, while simultaneously feeling his pulse tick upward in a way that had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with a specific, unshakable feeling of recognition.
*Hắc Long Cô Độc: That does sound like a fairly serious act of theft. He should probably know.*
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: I'll tell him eventually. Probably. Once I've built up enough courage, or bought a replacement chicken, whichever comes first.*
*Hắc Long Cô Độc: A reasonable strategy.*
He set the phone down on the coffee table, staring at it as though it might rearrange itself into something less alarming if he looked at it long enough. Through the thin wall separating the living room from Diana's bedroom, he could hear the faint, distinct rustle of someone shifting on a bed, and the small, telltale click of a phone screen dimming.
*It's not her,* he told himself firmly. *It cannot be her. That would be — that would require a coincidence so precise it borders on cosmic malice, and even the universe isn't usually that specifically cruel.*
He picked up his own phone again, thumb hovering over the keyboard, and typed a message he immediately regretted, curiosity overriding every instinct toward caution he possessed.
*Hắc Long Cô Độc: What does your roommate look like? Purely out of curiosity. I'm building a mental gallery of everyone's terrible roommates for comparison purposes.*
There was a longer pause than usual before her reply came through.
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: Why do you ask?*
*Hắc Long Cô Độc: No particular reason. Research. For the gallery.*
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: That's a weirdly specific question for someone doing casual research.*
*Hắc Long Cô Độc: I contain multitudes, remember. Some of them nosy.*
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: Fine. Tall. Dark hair, always looks like he hasn't slept properly in a decade. Wears the same three hoodies in rotation. Talks like he's reading from a legal contract even when ordering coffee. Surprisingly good cook, evidently, which makes the theft even more personally devastating.*
Arthur's stomach dropped somewhere around "same three hoodies in rotation."
He glanced down at himself. He was, in fact, currently wearing one of exactly three hoodies he owned, all nearly identical, all gray, all slightly too large in ways he'd never bothered addressing.
He set the phone down again, more carefully this time, and sat very still on the sofa, staring at nothing, running through several dozen possible responses and discarding every single one before he could type it. If he asked another question, he risked confirming a suspicion he wasn't remotely prepared to confirm. If he said nothing, the silence itself might be equally revealing.
He chose, in the end, to do neither — closing the conversation window entirely, setting the phone face-down on the coffee table, and sitting in the dark for a long, unmoving minute, listening to his own heartbeat and the faint, ordinary sounds of Diana moving around behind her closed door, utterly unaware that the wall between them had just become, in his mind at least, considerably thinner than either of them had bargained for.
---
He did not confront her that night. He told himself it was strategic patience, the same calculated restraint he'd once used to outmaneuver rival factions in Pandemonium's endless court politics, though in truth it was closer to simple, paralyzed disbelief — an unwillingness to test a theory that, if proven correct, would collapse an entire fragile, precious thing he'd only just started allowing himself to enjoy.
The next morning, Diana emerged from her room looking faintly guilty, holding a grocery bag.
"I bought you chicken," she announced, setting it on the counter with the air of someone completing a difficult diplomatic mission. "Replacement chicken. For the chicken I may have eaten last night. Hypothetically."
Arthur looked at the bag, then at her, something complicated moving behind his eyes that she couldn't quite interpret.
"You ate my dinner," he said, carefully, watching her face for any flicker of something more.
"I panicked and I have no self-control around good food, and I'm sorry, and there's chicken now, so we're even, morally speaking." She crossed her arms, bracing for an argument that, to her visible confusion, didn't arrive with its usual intensity.
"It's fine," Arthur said instead, quieter than she expected, studying her with an unreadable expression that made her distinctly uncomfortable in a way the actual chicken theft hadn't managed to.
"That's suspiciously calm for someone who dedicated an entire evening to color-coding a refrigerator."
"I've decided to practice patience." He turned back to his coffee, deliberately not looking at her, and added, almost too casually, "Did you sleep well?"
"...Fine? Why?"
"No reason." He took a slow sip, watching her over the rim of the mug with an intensity she found faintly unnerving without being able to say exactly why. "Just curious."
Diana studied him for a long moment, some old, half-buried instinct prickling at the back of her neck — the same instinct that had once warned her, on actual battlefields, when something important was happening just outside her direct line of sight. She dismissed it, as she'd been dismissing every similar prickle for days now, filing it away under the same growing pile of things about her roommate that made absolutely no sense and that she had decided, for her own sanity, not to examine too closely.
He spent most of the following morning at CyberCore in a state of low-grade internal chaos entirely invisible to anyone glancing at his desk, where he appeared, as always, to be calmly reviewing pull requests. In reality, he had read the same twelve lines of code four times without absorbing a single word of it, his mind occupied instead with an exhaustive, increasingly frantic inventory of every detail Diana had ever mentioned about her mysterious roommate on Nexus, cross-referenced against every detail he knew to be true about himself.
*Tall.* Correct. *Dark hair, looks perpetually sleep-deprived.* Also, unfortunately, correct. *Three identical hoodies.* He glanced down at himself again, for the third time that morning, at the gray fabric that suddenly felt like evidence in a trial he hadn't agreed to stand for. *Talks like a legal contract.* He thought, uncomfortably, of the phrase he'd used just last week — *"clear boundaries prevent unnecessary wars"* — and felt something in his stomach twist.
"You're doing the thing again," Malphas said, appearing at his elbow with a coffee mug he didn't actually seem to be drinking from, more using it as a prop to justify hovering. "The thing where you stare at your monitor without actually typing anything. Is everything alright, sire — sir. Sir."
"Everything is fine." Arthur did not look up. "I'm processing a complex situation."
"Complex situations are my specialty. Well. Historically. In a former capacity. Purely hypothetically." Malphas lowered his voice, glancing around the open office with theatrical caution. "If you ever needed someone to talk through a complex situation — someone with, let's say, extensive experience navigating delicate matters of identity and consequence — I would be available. Discreetly. As a colleague. Nothing more."
Arthur finally looked up, studying the other man's carefully strained expression, the barely concealed desperation underneath the forced casualness, and felt, for the first time since the strange encounter on his first day, something less like suspicion and more like weary recognition.
"Malphas," he said slowly, "is there something you'd like to tell me?"
Malphas went very pale, very quickly. "No! Nothing! Absolutely nothing requiring discussion at this juncture, or possibly ever, depending on how today goes." He backed away so fast he nearly collided with a passing intern, offering a strangled apology to the wrong person entirely before retreating toward the break room at a pace just short of an outright run.
Arthur watched him go, filing the exchange away with the rest of his growing collection of unresolved office mysteries, unable to summon the energy to pursue it further while his mind remained almost entirely occupied with a considerably more pressing mystery three feet closer to home.
---
At MegaIron, Diana was similarly distracted, though she covered it with considerably more physical intensity, running an extra mile on the treadmill during her lunch break specifically to outpace a thought she couldn't quite shake — the strange, prickling sensation from that morning, the way Arthur had asked if she'd slept well in a tone that suggested the question meant something she wasn't privy to.
She replayed the conversation with Hắc Long Cô Độc from the night before, word by word, the way he'd asked about her roommate's appearance with an oddly specific curiosity that hadn't quite matched his usual casual deflection. She told herself it was nothing. People asked odd questions sometimes. Curiosity wasn't evidence of anything beyond curiosity.
And yet.
She slowed the treadmill, breathing hard, staring at her own reflection in the gym's floor-to-ceiling mirror without really seeing it, turning over a thought she'd been actively avoiding for days now: that the two most significant relationships currently occupying her attention — one combative and daily, one honest and nightly — had started, somewhere in the past week, to feel less like two separate things and more like two halves of something she wasn't ready to look at directly.
"You're overthinking something," her coworker Priya said, appearing beside her with a water bottle, watching Diana's expression with open curiosity. "You have your overthinking face on. It's very distinctive."
"I don't have an overthinking face."
"You absolutely do. It's the same face you make right before you tell a client their form is wrong for the fourth time in one session." Priya took a long drink, studying her. "Is this about the mystery roommate again? The one you complain about with suspicious frequency for someone who claims to hate him?"
"I don't complain about him with suspicious frequency."
"You complained about him for eleven straight minutes yesterday over lunch. I timed it. There was a stopwatch involved, Diana."
"That was purely descriptive commentary on shared living difficulties."
"Sure." Priya smiled, unconvinced, and wandered off toward her next client, leaving Diana alone with the treadmill and an uncomfortable amount of self-awareness she had absolutely no idea what to do with.
---
She grabbed her bag and left for work without further comment, leaving Arthur alone with his coffee and a slowly solidifying theory he wasn't yet ready to say out loud, not to her, not to anyone, not even, quite yet, to himself. He spent the walk to the train station running through increasingly elaborate scenarios for confirming or disproving his suspicion, each one more absurd than the last — asking her outright, which felt like walking directly into a minefield; setting some kind of trap involving a deliberately worded message on Nexus, which felt manipulative even by his own admittedly low former standards; or simply saying nothing at all and letting the truth surface whenever it chose to, a strategy that appealed to him mainly because it required no immediate action.
By the time he reached the office, he had settled on the last option, mostly by default, telling himself it was patience rather than cowardice, though some quieter, more honest part of him suspected the two were, in this particular case, indistinguishable from each other.
That evening, the Nexus conversation resumed with a caution neither of them had shown before, both parties, unbeknownst to each other, treading with unusual care around a subject that suddenly felt far more dangerous than it had a week ago.
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: You've been quieter than usual today.*
*Hắc Long Cô Độc: Long day. Work was demanding.*
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: Anything specific, or just the general exhausting nature of existing in an office?*
Arthur stared at the question for a long moment, his thumb hovering over the screen, weighing exactly how much truth he was prepared to risk.
*Hắc Long Cô Độc: I've been thinking about something. A coincidence that seems too precise to actually be coincidental, and I'm not sure whether investigating it further is wise or catastrophic.*
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: That's ominous. Is it about your roommate again?*
*Hắc Long Cô Độc: In a manner of speaking. Is it strange that I find myself hoping I'm wrong about it, and also hoping I'm right, in roughly equal measure?*
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: Not strange at all. I've been experiencing something suspiciously similar today, actually. A coincidence of my own I can't quite explain away no matter how hard I try.*
Neither of them elaborated further. Both sat in their respective rooms, phones glowing in the dark, aware that they had just skirted the edge of something enormous without either having the courage to step fully into it, the unspoken truth hovering somewhere in the thin, charged silence between two messages, close enough to touch and neither one yet willing to reach for it.
*Hắc Long Cô Độc: For what it's worth, whatever this coincidence turns out to be, I don't think I'd regret it. Even if it complicates things considerably.*
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: That's either very reassuring or very alarming. I genuinely can't decide which.*
*Hắc Long Cô Độc: Take it as whichever feels more true to you.*
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: I'll let you know once I figure that out myself.*
She set her phone down on the nightstand and lay staring at the ceiling for a long time afterward, listening to the faint, familiar sounds of Arthur moving around in the living room beyond her door — a chair shifting, the soft click of a laptop closing, footsteps crossing toward the kitchen for what she assumed was his nightly glass of water — and found herself, for the first time since arriving in this city, hoping very quietly that the wall between her two most significant relationships would turn out to be thinner than either of them currently understood.
On the other side of that wall, Arthur stood at the kitchen sink far longer than any glass of water required, staring out at the neon smear of the city beyond the window, turning the day's small, accumulating evidence over in his mind one final time before setting it aside for the night. Tall. Dark hair. Three identical hoodies. A habit of speaking like a legal document. None of it was proof, not really — the kind of proof a former ruler would have once demanded before acting on any suspicion this significant. But it was enough, he thought, rinsing his glass and setting it carefully in the rack, to make the next several days considerably harder to navigate than the refrigerator disputes and morning arguments that had, until recently, constituted the entirety of his concerns about the woman sleeping just beyond that thin, increasingly unreliable wall.
He turned off the kitchen light and lay down on the sofa in the dark, and for a long while did not sleep at all, listening instead to the quiet, ordinary sounds of a city that had no idea two exiled monarchs were lying awake in the same forty-five square meters, each one edging, without quite realizing how close they already were, toward a truth neither was prepared to face fully in the daylight that would arrive, inevitably, in only a few short hours.
You've reached the end of this chapter
The plate had been sitting in the refrigerator, clearly marked, clearly labeled, sitting exactly on Arthur's designated side of the taped divide, containing what he had intended to be a carefully portioned lunch for the following day — teriyaki chicken, glazed and perfectly seared, the kind of dish he made only when he had the energy to actually cook rather than simply survive on protein bars and desperation.
He discovered its absence at eleven that night, standing in front of the open fridge in his hoodie, staring at an empty spot on a plate that should have contained roughly half a chicken breast and now contained nothing but a faint smear of sauce and a single abandoned piece of broccoli.
He did not say anything immediately. He simply stood there, jaw tight, processing the specific, personal betrayal of having his one properly cooked meal of the week vanish without a trace, and closed the fridge with more force than strictly necessary.
Diana's door was closed. Through it, faintly, he could hear the sound of a phone notification, followed by the soft, unmistakable click of someone typing.
He didn't know, as he stood there in the dark kitchen, that behind that door, Diana was doing exactly what he suspected — except not to him. To a stranger. About him.
---
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: Confession. I ate half my roommate's dinner tonight. It was sitting right there, looking delicious, and I have no self-control around good food, apparently, even food that has another person's name basically written on it.*
*Hắc Long Cô Độc: That seems like a serious breach of roommate ethics.*
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: It was! I know! But he'd made teriyaki chicken and it smelled incredible and I told myself I'd just have a small piece and then somehow the piece became half the plate before I could stop myself.*
*Hắc Long Cô Độc: Does he know yet?*
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: Not yet. I heard him get home a little while ago. I'm currently barricaded in my room pretending to be asleep, which is an incredibly mature strategy, I'm aware.*
Arthur stared at his phone, the words arriving less than thirty feet from where he'd just discovered the crime scene of his missing dinner, and something cold and slow crept up the back of his neck.
He read the message again. *Teriyaki chicken.* *Roommate.* *Heard him get home a little while ago.*
The coincidence was, objectively, absurd. Impossible, even. There were thousands of apartments in this city, thousands of roommates eating thousands of dinners, and any number of them could theoretically involve teriyaki chicken on any given evening. It meant nothing. It could mean nothing. He told himself this three times, with increasing firmness, while simultaneously feeling his pulse tick upward in a way that had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with a specific, unshakable feeling of recognition.
*Hắc Long Cô Độc: That does sound like a fairly serious act of theft. He should probably know.*
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: I'll tell him eventually. Probably. Once I've built up enough courage, or bought a replacement chicken, whichever comes first.*
*Hắc Long Cô Độc: A reasonable strategy.*
He set the phone down on the coffee table, staring at it as though it might rearrange itself into something less alarming if he looked at it long enough. Through the thin wall separating the living room from Diana's bedroom, he could hear the faint, distinct rustle of someone shifting on a bed, and the small, telltale click of a phone screen dimming.
*It's not her,* he told himself firmly. *It cannot be her. That would be — that would require a coincidence so precise it borders on cosmic malice, and even the universe isn't usually that specifically cruel.*
He picked up his own phone again, thumb hovering over the keyboard, and typed a message he immediately regretted, curiosity overriding every instinct toward caution he possessed.
*Hắc Long Cô Độc: What does your roommate look like? Purely out of curiosity. I'm building a mental gallery of everyone's terrible roommates for comparison purposes.*
There was a longer pause than usual before her reply came through.
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: Why do you ask?*
*Hắc Long Cô Độc: No particular reason. Research. For the gallery.*
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: That's a weirdly specific question for someone doing casual research.*
*Hắc Long Cô Độc: I contain multitudes, remember. Some of them nosy.*
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: Fine. Tall. Dark hair, always looks like he hasn't slept properly in a decade. Wears the same three hoodies in rotation. Talks like he's reading from a legal contract even when ordering coffee. Surprisingly good cook, evidently, which makes the theft even more personally devastating.*
Arthur's stomach dropped somewhere around "same three hoodies in rotation."
He glanced down at himself. He was, in fact, currently wearing one of exactly three hoodies he owned, all nearly identical, all gray, all slightly too large in ways he'd never bothered addressing.
He set the phone down again, more carefully this time, and sat very still on the sofa, staring at nothing, running through several dozen possible responses and discarding every single one before he could type it. If he asked another question, he risked confirming a suspicion he wasn't remotely prepared to confirm. If he said nothing, the silence itself might be equally revealing.
He chose, in the end, to do neither — closing the conversation window entirely, setting the phone face-down on the coffee table, and sitting in the dark for a long, unmoving minute, listening to his own heartbeat and the faint, ordinary sounds of Diana moving around behind her closed door, utterly unaware that the wall between them had just become, in his mind at least, considerably thinner than either of them had bargained for.
---
He did not confront her that night. He told himself it was strategic patience, the same calculated restraint he'd once used to outmaneuver rival factions in Pandemonium's endless court politics, though in truth it was closer to simple, paralyzed disbelief — an unwillingness to test a theory that, if proven correct, would collapse an entire fragile, precious thing he'd only just started allowing himself to enjoy.
The next morning, Diana emerged from her room looking faintly guilty, holding a grocery bag.
"I bought you chicken," she announced, setting it on the counter with the air of someone completing a difficult diplomatic mission. "Replacement chicken. For the chicken I may have eaten last night. Hypothetically."
Arthur looked at the bag, then at her, something complicated moving behind his eyes that she couldn't quite interpret.
"You ate my dinner," he said, carefully, watching her face for any flicker of something more.
"I panicked and I have no self-control around good food, and I'm sorry, and there's chicken now, so we're even, morally speaking." She crossed her arms, bracing for an argument that, to her visible confusion, didn't arrive with its usual intensity.
"It's fine," Arthur said instead, quieter than she expected, studying her with an unreadable expression that made her distinctly uncomfortable in a way the actual chicken theft hadn't managed to.
"That's suspiciously calm for someone who dedicated an entire evening to color-coding a refrigerator."
"I've decided to practice patience." He turned back to his coffee, deliberately not looking at her, and added, almost too casually, "Did you sleep well?"
"...Fine? Why?"
"No reason." He took a slow sip, watching her over the rim of the mug with an intensity she found faintly unnerving without being able to say exactly why. "Just curious."
Diana studied him for a long moment, some old, half-buried instinct prickling at the back of her neck — the same instinct that had once warned her, on actual battlefields, when something important was happening just outside her direct line of sight. She dismissed it, as she'd been dismissing every similar prickle for days now, filing it away under the same growing pile of things about her roommate that made absolutely no sense and that she had decided, for her own sanity, not to examine too closely.
He spent most of the following morning at CyberCore in a state of low-grade internal chaos entirely invisible to anyone glancing at his desk, where he appeared, as always, to be calmly reviewing pull requests. In reality, he had read the same twelve lines of code four times without absorbing a single word of it, his mind occupied instead with an exhaustive, increasingly frantic inventory of every detail Diana had ever mentioned about her mysterious roommate on Nexus, cross-referenced against every detail he knew to be true about himself.
*Tall.* Correct. *Dark hair, looks perpetually sleep-deprived.* Also, unfortunately, correct. *Three identical hoodies.* He glanced down at himself again, for the third time that morning, at the gray fabric that suddenly felt like evidence in a trial he hadn't agreed to stand for. *Talks like a legal contract.* He thought, uncomfortably, of the phrase he'd used just last week — *"clear boundaries prevent unnecessary wars"* — and felt something in his stomach twist.
"You're doing the thing again," Malphas said, appearing at his elbow with a coffee mug he didn't actually seem to be drinking from, more using it as a prop to justify hovering. "The thing where you stare at your monitor without actually typing anything. Is everything alright, sire — sir. Sir."
"Everything is fine." Arthur did not look up. "I'm processing a complex situation."
"Complex situations are my specialty. Well. Historically. In a former capacity. Purely hypothetically." Malphas lowered his voice, glancing around the open office with theatrical caution. "If you ever needed someone to talk through a complex situation — someone with, let's say, extensive experience navigating delicate matters of identity and consequence — I would be available. Discreetly. As a colleague. Nothing more."
Arthur finally looked up, studying the other man's carefully strained expression, the barely concealed desperation underneath the forced casualness, and felt, for the first time since the strange encounter on his first day, something less like suspicion and more like weary recognition.
"Malphas," he said slowly, "is there something you'd like to tell me?"
Malphas went very pale, very quickly. "No! Nothing! Absolutely nothing requiring discussion at this juncture, or possibly ever, depending on how today goes." He backed away so fast he nearly collided with a passing intern, offering a strangled apology to the wrong person entirely before retreating toward the break room at a pace just short of an outright run.
Arthur watched him go, filing the exchange away with the rest of his growing collection of unresolved office mysteries, unable to summon the energy to pursue it further while his mind remained almost entirely occupied with a considerably more pressing mystery three feet closer to home.
---
At MegaIron, Diana was similarly distracted, though she covered it with considerably more physical intensity, running an extra mile on the treadmill during her lunch break specifically to outpace a thought she couldn't quite shake — the strange, prickling sensation from that morning, the way Arthur had asked if she'd slept well in a tone that suggested the question meant something she wasn't privy to.
She replayed the conversation with Hắc Long Cô Độc from the night before, word by word, the way he'd asked about her roommate's appearance with an oddly specific curiosity that hadn't quite matched his usual casual deflection. She told herself it was nothing. People asked odd questions sometimes. Curiosity wasn't evidence of anything beyond curiosity.
And yet.
She slowed the treadmill, breathing hard, staring at her own reflection in the gym's floor-to-ceiling mirror without really seeing it, turning over a thought she'd been actively avoiding for days now: that the two most significant relationships currently occupying her attention — one combative and daily, one honest and nightly — had started, somewhere in the past week, to feel less like two separate things and more like two halves of something she wasn't ready to look at directly.
"You're overthinking something," her coworker Priya said, appearing beside her with a water bottle, watching Diana's expression with open curiosity. "You have your overthinking face on. It's very distinctive."
"I don't have an overthinking face."
"You absolutely do. It's the same face you make right before you tell a client their form is wrong for the fourth time in one session." Priya took a long drink, studying her. "Is this about the mystery roommate again? The one you complain about with suspicious frequency for someone who claims to hate him?"
"I don't complain about him with suspicious frequency."
"You complained about him for eleven straight minutes yesterday over lunch. I timed it. There was a stopwatch involved, Diana."
"That was purely descriptive commentary on shared living difficulties."
"Sure." Priya smiled, unconvinced, and wandered off toward her next client, leaving Diana alone with the treadmill and an uncomfortable amount of self-awareness she had absolutely no idea what to do with.
---
She grabbed her bag and left for work without further comment, leaving Arthur alone with his coffee and a slowly solidifying theory he wasn't yet ready to say out loud, not to her, not to anyone, not even, quite yet, to himself. He spent the walk to the train station running through increasingly elaborate scenarios for confirming or disproving his suspicion, each one more absurd than the last — asking her outright, which felt like walking directly into a minefield; setting some kind of trap involving a deliberately worded message on Nexus, which felt manipulative even by his own admittedly low former standards; or simply saying nothing at all and letting the truth surface whenever it chose to, a strategy that appealed to him mainly because it required no immediate action.
By the time he reached the office, he had settled on the last option, mostly by default, telling himself it was patience rather than cowardice, though some quieter, more honest part of him suspected the two were, in this particular case, indistinguishable from each other.
That evening, the Nexus conversation resumed with a caution neither of them had shown before, both parties, unbeknownst to each other, treading with unusual care around a subject that suddenly felt far more dangerous than it had a week ago.
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: You've been quieter than usual today.*
*Hắc Long Cô Độc: Long day. Work was demanding.*
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: Anything specific, or just the general exhausting nature of existing in an office?*
Arthur stared at the question for a long moment, his thumb hovering over the screen, weighing exactly how much truth he was prepared to risk.
*Hắc Long Cô Độc: I've been thinking about something. A coincidence that seems too precise to actually be coincidental, and I'm not sure whether investigating it further is wise or catastrophic.*
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: That's ominous. Is it about your roommate again?*
*Hắc Long Cô Độc: In a manner of speaking. Is it strange that I find myself hoping I'm wrong about it, and also hoping I'm right, in roughly equal measure?*
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: Not strange at all. I've been experiencing something suspiciously similar today, actually. A coincidence of my own I can't quite explain away no matter how hard I try.*
Neither of them elaborated further. Both sat in their respective rooms, phones glowing in the dark, aware that they had just skirted the edge of something enormous without either having the courage to step fully into it, the unspoken truth hovering somewhere in the thin, charged silence between two messages, close enough to touch and neither one yet willing to reach for it.
*Hắc Long Cô Độc: For what it's worth, whatever this coincidence turns out to be, I don't think I'd regret it. Even if it complicates things considerably.*
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: That's either very reassuring or very alarming. I genuinely can't decide which.*
*Hắc Long Cô Độc: Take it as whichever feels more true to you.*
*Ánh Sáng Ban Mai: I'll let you know once I figure that out myself.*
She set her phone down on the nightstand and lay staring at the ceiling for a long time afterward, listening to the faint, familiar sounds of Arthur moving around in the living room beyond her door — a chair shifting, the soft click of a laptop closing, footsteps crossing toward the kitchen for what she assumed was his nightly glass of water — and found herself, for the first time since arriving in this city, hoping very quietly that the wall between her two most significant relationships would turn out to be thinner than either of them currently understood.
On the other side of that wall, Arthur stood at the kitchen sink far longer than any glass of water required, staring out at the neon smear of the city beyond the window, turning the day's small, accumulating evidence over in his mind one final time before setting it aside for the night. Tall. Dark hair. Three identical hoodies. A habit of speaking like a legal document. None of it was proof, not really — the kind of proof a former ruler would have once demanded before acting on any suspicion this significant. But it was enough, he thought, rinsing his glass and setting it carefully in the rack, to make the next several days considerably harder to navigate than the refrigerator disputes and morning arguments that had, until recently, constituted the entirety of his concerns about the woman sleeping just beyond that thin, increasingly unreliable wall.
He turned off the kitchen light and lay down on the sofa in the dark, and for a long while did not sleep at all, listening instead to the quiet, ordinary sounds of a city that had no idea two exiled monarchs were lying awake in the same forty-five square meters, each one edging, without quite realizing how close they already were, toward a truth neither was prepared to face fully in the daylight that would arrive, inevitably, in only a few short hours.
You've reached the end of this chapter