The mountains were already beginning to swallow the sun, casting long, jagged shadows across Alya's balcony. She stood at the railing with her phone in both hands, the way someone holds something they're not supposed to need this badly.
Inside, through the sliding glass door, she could hear the television. Her parents had found a documentary about migratory birds. Her father had already asked twice if she was cold. Her mother had already reminded her once that the neighbours could see the balcony from the road.
She stayed outside anyway.
It was the holidays, which meant home, which meant this: the same four walls, the same family dinners, the same careful questions about her studies and her plans and whether she was eating enough. Her parents loved her in the particular way of people who believed that love and freedom could not coexist, and that they had made the right choice on her behalf. She had stopped arguing about it somewhere around sixteen. Now she just found corners.
This balcony was one. Her phone was another.
Ping. Ping. Ping.
She opened NEO-TOKYO 2049 out of habit more than interest. It was a sprawling Discord server built around an anime she genuinely loved, full of people who mostly didn't. The General Chat was already on fire.
[X-TREME_FAN]: GOJO WOULD TOTALLY WIN.
[LuffyLover]: L + Ratio + No diff.
Alya exhaled slowly through her nose. Friday night, she thought. Five hundred messages and not one original thought between them.
She should have just scrolled past. Instead, with the particular recklessness of someone who has nothing else to do, she typed.
[Alya_Moon]: Honestly? Both of them have mid character arcs. The side antagonist was the only one with actual depth.
She hit send and leaned back against the railing.
3… 2… 1…
The clown emojis came first. Then the angry faces. Then someone typed a paragraph in all capitals that she didn't bother reading. The chat erupted like it always did: loud and immediate and completely empty. She watched it with the mild detachment of someone who had started the fire and wasn't particularly afraid of it.
Then, cutting cleanly through the noise:
[Seth_SZN]: @Alya_Moon Careful. You're about to start a literal riot in here. But also... you're 100% right. Episode 12 proved it.
Alya sat up straighter.
She read the message twice. Not because it was complicated, but because agreement was the last thing she'd expected. She glanced at the username. Seth_SZN. No role tags. No flashy avatar. Just a grey profile picture and, apparently, an opinion worth having.
[Alya_Moon]: Most people stop watching before the philosophy kicks in.
[Seth_SZN]: Most people are watching for the fight scenes. They want power scaling. They don't want to think about what the sacrifice actually costs.
[Alya_Moon]: Exactly. The antagonist understood that better than either of the leads.
[Seth_SZN]: You have weirdly good taste for someone starting riots on a Friday night.
[Alya_Moon]: I could say the same for a city boy who actually pays attention.
She typed that last line and paused, wondering if it was too much. Then she sent it anyway.
There was a brief pause on his end. Then:
[Seth_SZN]: Too loud in here. DM?
A notification dropped from the top of her screen.
New Direct Message from Seth_SZN: "So, about that antagonist… want to actually finish that thought without 50 people shouting at us?"
𖤐⭒๋࣭ ⭑
He was easy to talk to, which surprised her.
She had expected the conversation to last maybe twenty minutes: a quick exchange, a mutual nod of understanding, and then the natural dissolve back into anonymity. Instead, they talked for two hours. About the show first, then about the way stories were constructed in general, then about other things neither of them had planned to mention.
Seth was dry and unhurried in the way he typed, never flooding the chat with messages but making each one count. He was funny without trying to signal that he was funny. He asked questions like he actually wanted the answers.
About forty minutes in, he said something that made her stop scrolling.
[Seth_SZN]: I think people are drawn to the villain in that show because he's the only one who's allowed to be tired. The heroes have to keep performing hope. He doesn't.
Alya read that twice, slowly.
She thought about her room: the motivational print her mother had framed above her desk, the planner she was expected to fill, the vision board she had made at fifteen that she still hadn't taken down because taking it down would require an explanation. She thought about how exhausting it was, sometimes, to perform being fine.
She didn't type any of that. She typed:
[Alya_Moon]: That's the most accurate thing anyone's said about that show in this entire server.
[Seth_SZN]: I have my moments.
But she held her phone a little tighter after that, and she wasn't entirely sure why.
An hour later, he asked her something unexpected.
[Seth_SZN]: Do you actually like anime or is it just the discourse you're after?
She smiled at the screen despite herself.
[Alya_Moon]: Both, honestly. The discourse is more entertaining when you actually know what you're talking about.
[Seth_SZN]: Fair. I respect the chaos strategy.
[Alya_Moon]: What about you? Or do you just lurk in servers judging everyone silently?
[Seth_SZN]: Mostly the second one. Tonight was an exception.
[Alya_Moon]: Should I feel special?
There was a pause, a beat longer than his usual rhythm. She noticed it.
[Seth_SZN]: Jury's still out.
She laughed, quietly, to herself, on her balcony in the dark. It caught her slightly off guard, not the laugh itself, but how easy it had been.
The conversation wound down slowly, the way good ones do, neither of them quite wanting to be the one to close it. At some point her mother knocked on the glass and pointed meaningfully at the time. Alya held up one finger and didn't move.
Then Seth typed:
[Seth_SZN]: Are you on Instagram? Or Twitter? Easier than Discord for actually talking to someone.
Alya stared at the message for a long moment.
She was on Instagram. Her account was private and protected by a password her parents did not know existed, and she intended to keep it that way. Twitter was out entirely; her father had strong opinions about Twitter. She thought briefly about lying, then thought about how quickly lies about social media unravelled when someone tried to find you.
She also thought, for a half second she didn't fully acknowledge, that she didn't want him to find the wrong version of her before she'd decided which version to show.
[Alya_Moon]: Not really active on those. My family's kind of… strict about it.
She sent it and immediately wondered how much she'd just revealed. She didn't usually say things like that to people she'd known for two hours.
[Seth_SZN]: Noted. No pressure.
A pause. Then:
[Seth_SZN]: Is there somewhere else that works for you?
She hesitated, thumb hovering. There was one app, a quiet, low profile messaging platform her parents had never thought to ask about, mostly because none of their friends' children used it. She'd downloaded it for a group project in her first semester and never deleted it.
It wasn't Instagram. It wasn't anything they'd recognise. It wasn't anything they'd even think to look for.
[Alya_Moon]: Yeah. Give me a second.
She switched apps to Watcha?, found her username, and typed it back to him. Her heart was doing something slightly odd. Not quite fast, just aware. The way you feel stepping onto a bus you've never taken before, going somewhere you think you want to go but can't be entirely sure of yet.
This is fine, she told herself. It's just a messaging app, just like Discord or Whatsapp. It's just a conversation.
She sent the username and waited. The mountains had gone fully dark, the last trace of sunlight long dissolved into a deep, seamless blue. Somewhere below, a car moved along the road. Inside, she could hear her parents switching off the television, the low murmur of her mother saying something to her father, the particular quiet that meant someone was listening for her footsteps.
The new app buzzed.
Seth_SZN is now connected.
A beat. Then she saw it:
Hey. Better?
Alya slid the glass door open quietly and stepped back inside. The warmth of the apartment met her like a wall: familiar, a little suffocating, not unwelcome. She crossed to the hallway, shoes still on, and paused at her parents' door.
"Going to bed," she said.
Her mother's voice came through the wood, tired but alert in the way mothers' voices always seemed to be. "Finally. Don't stay on that thing all night."
"I won't," Alya said, which was the most comfortable lie she knew how to tell.
She closed her bedroom door. Didn't turn on the light. Just sat on the edge of her bed in the dark, phone screen glowing against her face, and looked at his message for a moment longer than was necessary.
Better?
She thought about what he had said earlier, about the villain being the only one allowed to be tired. She thought about the way he'd paused before answering her question, that beat just slightly longer than his usual rhythm. She thought about the fact that she had made him an exception and she wasn't sure yet what to do with that.
She typed back.
Better.
She set her phone face up on the pillow beside her and lay down without changing out of her clothes. The mountains outside her window were invisible now, swallowed completely by the night. But the room felt different than it had this morning. Not smaller. Not larger.
Just inhabited, in a way it hadn't been before.
Her phone lit up again. She reached for it immediately, and noticed that she did, and chose not to think about what that meant.