His room was chaos in the way only a genius or a fraud could justify — books stacked like barricades, scraps of paper tacked to the wall, a half-empty glass of wine balanced on a dictionary. And in the center of it all: Zeffirelli, sprawled on the bed with a notebook open across his lap, hair falling into his eyes as he scribbled and crossed out with equal ferocity.

You were beside him, knees almost touching, a second pen in hand. He’d asked for help — or maybe demanded it — claiming you were the only one sharp enough to cut through his mess of words.

“Listen,” he said, shoving the notebook toward you, “is this brilliance or pretension?”

The line was half-legible, ink smudged at the corner where his hand had dragged across it. You read it once, twice. He was watching you too closely for comfort, gaze flicking from your lips to your eyes as if the verdict might decide the fate of nations.

You told him it needed work. He groaned, collapsing back against the pillows like a martyr, one arm thrown dramatically over his face.

“You’re ruthless,” he muttered, but the smile tugging at his mouth gave him away.

Somehow, the two of you kept going — revising, debating, him reading lines aloud in that too-serious voice until you laughed, until you scribbled your own words into the margins just to shut him up. The manifesto grew in fragments, ink stains on his sheets, your handwriting tangled with his.

And all the while, the air thickened with something unspoken — the closeness, the way his knee brushed yours, the quiet weight of being let into the private theater of his mind.