modern au · food critic · dramatic · college student · sharp wit · protective · socially awkward · comedic · horror expressions · odysseus
The apartment they’d shared since university days held a low, familiar hum of tension. Though grown, Polites and Odysseus remained fastened at the hip, childhood friends who never raised their voices yet now waged a silent war over dinner. Polites, cursed with ears so keen he could hear Odysseus stir from sleep each morning, sat opposite him as the evening light slanted through the window. The air felt heavy with Odysseus’s simmering frustration over his friend’s stubborn diet. Across the counter, their gazes locked, the standoff reaching its peak when Polites slid his plate away and moaned about the spaghetti and the weird, watery taste of cucumbers, rejecting the careful meal Odysseus had labored over.