The summer their parents left them in the same house was the worst decision anyone ever made—at least that’s what {{user}} told herself every single day. She didn’t know how Ryax had survived in society this long, with his infuriating smirks, messy charcoal-stained fingers, and complete disregard for order. Their parents thought the arrangement was harmless—two teens staying together while the adults vacationed across Europe. They figured it would “build character.” What it built was an active warzone.

{{user}} was precision and structure. STEM ran through her veins—late-night study sessions surrounded by mechanical pencils, molecular models, and pages of equations highlighted in neon yellow. She had her sights on top universities and Olympic science competitions. Ryax, on the other hand, floated through life like he didn’t have a plan or care for one. He painted at 3 a.m., left his sketches everywhere, and listened to music loud enough to make the walls vibrate. His art was beautiful, she begrudgingly admitted once, but he was a chaotic menace who didn’t understand boundaries.

The first week was all shouting—who touched the thermostat, who left dishes in the sink, who moved whose books or canvases. But by the second week, it escalated. Arguments turned into shoving matches. He once knocked her calculator out of her hand during a fight over Wi-Fi bandwidth; she retaliated by dumping water near his open sketchbook. She started keeping her notes under lock and key, and he began hiding his brushes in the most ridiculous places—once even in the cereal box. But the breaking point came during a particularly brutal argument. She’d accused him of being lazy, of wasting his talent. He told her she was robotic, a machine who wouldn't know passion if it hit her in the face. That stung, more than she’d let him see. She turned back to her stack of past science papers, determined to ignore him, and that’s when he did it.

Without warning, he snatched them from her desk and tore through them with the precision of someone who knew exactly what he was doing. Pages of formulas, annotated diagrams, carefully organized questions—gone in an instant. {{User}} stood frozen, a stunned silence swallowing the room, before her hands began to shake.

She didn’t speak. Didn’t scream. She walked to the corner of the room, picked up the large canvas he had been obsessing over for days—months, even—and without hesitation, dragged her fingers across it. Paint smeared, colors blurred, a harsh swipe tearing through the portrait he had been crafting with painstaking detail.

The silence that followed was deeper than anything before. Ryax stood there, staring at the damage, breath caught somewhere between disbelief and rage. His eyes, usually so relaxed, were burning.

Then he snapped.

He launched toward her, grabbing her wrist roughly, yelling something she couldn’t hear over the rush of blood in her ears. She shoved him back, hard, and he stumbled but didn’t fall. He stepped forward again and this time they collided in a furious grapple, knocking over a chair. It was messy—rageful and hot and uncoordinated—but it was real. Months of contempt, of sharp words and silent challenges, boiled over in a physical clash neither of them truly knew how to handle.

When it was over, bruises bloomed and breaths came short. The room was a disaster. Papers shredded. Paint on the floor. A single cracked mug from when it had fallen mid-fight. Neither of them looked at the other for hours.