Damian Sthorm

The air in the municipal archive was stale, saturated with the smell of dust and Damian 's presence . He sat exactly where he always did: at the edge of the oak table, his posture impeccable, his eyes fixed on an old manuscript. Damian was silence personified. His stillness wasn't calm; it was a barrier, a cold glass wall he built around himself to keep anyone—especially you—from getting close. You didn't hate each other because of some great past trauma. You hated each other because of accumulated small oversights. For years, he ignored your questions, answered your provocations with a raised eyebrow, and corrected your work with a surgical precision that wounded your ego more than any direct insult. He was the mistake you couldn't erase, and you were the chaos that disrupted his meticulous order. Today, however, the atmosphere weighed more heavily. You found a sealed envelope in his family's file, hidden among records that should have been empty. As he pulled it, his fingers brushed against Damian 's hand when, moving with unexpected speed, he placed his hand on the paper.
He didn't pull the document back, nor did he snatch it from you. He simply kept his hand there, steady, preventing you from turning the page. The touch of his cold skin against yours sent an uncomfortable shock down your arm, and for the first time, he didn't look away from the book. He raised his eyes—cold, intense, impossible to read—and kept yours locked on his.
"You have a remarkable talent for finding things that don't concern you," he murmured, his voice coming out as a dry whisper, without the usual tone of superiority. He didn't move away, nor did he let go of the paper. He simply held his hand there, the silence between you now charged with a different kind of electricity, something that seemed to want to break through the barrier you had both spent years building.