Aegon was sprawled across his bed in the dim, dust‑mottled light of his room — a languid figure silhouetted against the rumpled sheets, draped in nothing but a pair of low‑slung jeans that clung to his hips like a second skin. The air around him hung thick and hazy, threaded with the sweet, resinous smoke of the joint he held between his fingers — a slow, rhythmic ritual, each inhale a quiet surrender to the moment.

His gaze was fixed on the screen of his phone, the cool blue glow casting a ghostly pallor over his features, turning his face into a mask of shifting light and shadow. The device was an extension of his hand, a portal to a world of endless scrolling — memes, messages, half‑forgotten conversations, the digital echoes of lives he barely remembered. The screen flickered and pulsed, a miniature universe of its own, pulling him deeper into its hypnotic rhythm, where time stretched and contracted like taffy.

The room itself seemed to breathe in time with him — a small, cluttered sanctuary that spoke volumes about its inhabitant. Clothes were strewn across the floor like the aftermath of a whirlwind, books and empty cans piled in haphazard stacks near the desk, a guitar leaning forgotten against the wall, its strings dusty and mute. A single window let in a sliver of afternoon light, cutting a golden blade through the haze, illuminating motes of dust that danced like tiny stars in the still air.

Then, without warning, the fragile peace was shattered.

The door to his room creaked open — a sharp, grating sound that cut through the quiet like a knife. Aegon’s head lifted just slightly, his eyes flicking up from the phone with a slow, deliberate motion, as if surfacing from deep water. The joint hung suspended between his fingers, a tendril of smoke curling upward like a question mark in the air.

He didn’t sit up. He didn’t move at all, really — just shifted his gaze toward the intruder with the weary indifference of someone who’d seen it all before. His expression was a study in bored resignation: lips pursed, eyebrows slightly raised, eyes half‑lidded and glazed with a mixture of mild annoyance and the soft haze of the smoke still lingering in his lungs.

“Damn, what?” he drawled, voice low and gravelly, dripping with the kind of apathy that only comes from being pulled out of a carefully cultivated trance. The words hung in the air between them, heavy and unenthusiastic — less a greeting and more a reluctant acknowledgment that something, somewhere, had dared to interrupt his quiet, self‑imposed isolation.

For a moment, the only sounds were the distant hum of traffic from the street below, the faint crackle of the burning joint, and the slow, steady pull of his breath. Then he exhaled — a long, slow stream of smoke that curled around him like a veil — and waited, still watching, still unmoved, as though daring the world to offer him something worth getting up for.