Cute Royal Chaos

"Some people start their morning with coffee. Others with meditation. I start mine with existential dread and royalty reorganizing my furniture." — Owen, probably.

If someone had told Owen two months ago that his near future involved living with a fantasy princess who thought ramen was a cultural revelation, he would've laughed them out of the room. Or thrown something. Probably both.

Now he just sighed and added "buy more instant noodles" to his mental to-do list.

The apartment had changed.

It used to be a proud monument to bare minimum living. Cracks in the ceiling. Paint flaking. That one window that didn't open unless you begged it like an ancient deity. A landlord who probably hadn't set foot inside since the Shōwa era and responded to repair requests with a shrug and a weathered "There’s nothing I can do about it."

Now?

Now it looked like an antique shop run by a delusional spellcaster with no sense of interior restraint.

There were floating crystals on the nightstand that hummed aggressively at 3 a.m. Glowing runes above the sink that blinked in patterns he was pretty sure were Morse code for "send help." The cracked mug that said “World's Okayest” student mug had been replaced with a chalice. A chalice.

"It's from Alaric," Lilith proudly said, placing it on the table like it belonged in a museum.

"Yeah," Owen replied. "And my mug was from the corner shop down the street. You don't see me flexing."

He had questions. Lots of them.

Like, where did all of this come from? When he'd found her, she had nothing but the clothes she was wearing—and an attitude.

"I picked you up off the street," he reminded her once. "Like a soggy, arrogant cat. You had exactly one outfit and a questionable understanding of pedestrian crossings."

Lilith had just blinked at him. "I had items stored."

"In what, a locker? An enchanted glove compartment?"

"In a storage spell," she explained. "Spatial containment. Enchanted compression. Think of it as... portable storage."

So basically: a fantasy item box.

For the first time, Owen genuinely considered the perks of being a hero. That storage spell alone might be worth the prophecy-induced anxiety.

And then he remembered what else positive came with the deal.

Lilith. The princess. The chaos. The beautiful, brilliant, maddening disaster that now shared his fridge space and kept replacing his shampoo with potions.

Lilith? Positive?
No!

He immediately labeled that part as a nuisance.

But deep in his chest, something didn't agree. Some quiet part of him whispered that maybe, just maybe, it was the only part of the deal that truly mattered.

His mornings had changed too.

Where they used to start with quiet alarms and cold cereal, now they begin with the smell of something burning.

Every. Single. Day.

If there wasn't smoke, there was silence. And silence meant danger.

It meant she was either planning something—or standing in his doorway. Watching him sleep again.

Actually, not standing. Kneeling. Right next to his bed, elbows on the mattress, chin in her hands, red eyes fixed unblinking on his face. Less than half a meter between them. Just watching. Quiet. Still. Close with a genuine smile.

The first time she tried cooking, he screamed. Now he just groaned, threw something over his pajamas, and stumbled to the kitchen.

Sure enough. Chaos.

Lilith stood in front of the stove with the intensity of a surgeon in the middle of open-heart surgery. The pan sizzled. The air smelled vaguely like betrayal and eggs.

"What are you doing?" Owen asked, already dreading the answer.

"Cooking breakfast," she replied without looking up. Like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

It wasn't.

Lilith, princess of Alaric, hadn't cooked a day in her life not even back in her own world. Her idea of a "kitchen" involved six attendants and three summoned fire spirits.

Now she was trying to fry an egg.

And the egg was losing.

"My textbooks describe eggs as a versatile food source," she offered, flipping a page in her notebook.

"Versatile doesn't mean indestructible," Owen muttered.

"I followed the instructions precisely. Step one: crack egg. Step two: apply heat. Step three—"

"Step three is not summoning a culinary demon," he snapped, grabbing the pan and dumping its charred contents into the trash.

The stove fan wheezed above them, doing exactly nothing.

"In Alaric, we learn basic sustenance preparation by age twelve," Lilith huffed.

He cracked a fresh egg into a clean pan.

"And here we learn basic concepts like don't burn down the house."

She didn't argue. She just retreated to the dining table, pulled out her ever-present notebook, and resumed writing.

He glanced over her shoulder.

Title: The Secret Art of Breakfast Preparation.

She had written that exact same thing at least forty times since she moved in. And every time, she acted like it was brand new.

The routine was ridiculous.

And also… strangely comforting…

Owen stared at her across the apartment. She had taken the living room as her own space and converted it into something halfway between a noble's quarters and a cursed alchemy lab. And still, despite the floating crystals and the wrong-sounding wind chimes and the way the cracks in the ceiling mysteriously vanished one day without anyone touching them—she belonged. Somehow.

When she didn't try to cook, he found her in his room at sunrise, staring at him. Not in a creepy way. In a quiet, haunting kind of way.

It had stopped for a while.

Then it came back last week. Right after that fateful night.

He didn't know which version unnerved him more—the cooking or the silence.

At school, things weren't better.

Ever since a student spotted him talking to Rei and Lilith together the other day after class ended, things had spiraled.

Hikaru had doubled down.

"You're basically extra-terrestrially engaged," he declared.

"Skill issue, bro," Owen deadpanned. "So close, yet so far."

"You guys practically share a toothbrush now," Hikaru said last week. "That's more commitment than my parents ever had."

Owen denied it with a passion that never cooled. But Hikaru had a way of hitting nerves with surgical precision.

Now Owen was "the guy with the hot foreign transfer student" to most people.

To Hikaru, he was humanity's ambassador to alien royalty.

Lilith, for her part, maintained her image of untouchable grace. At school, she was a ghost wrapped in elegance.

At home, she was the reason their rice cooker now glowed faintly in the dark.

Even the neighbors had started to recognize her.

Mr. Tanaka from the store waved every morning. "Good morning, Lilith-san!" he'd call.

She never replied. She just waved back, her expression perfectly composed.

She didn't talk to anyone but Owen.

But that was enough.

She didn't say much to anyone else.

But in the quiet spaces between breakfast disasters and ancient crystal rearranging, she was talking to him all the time.

And Owen—was starting to listen.

Owen looked at the stove, now quiet, and at the ring she'd given him—still hidden in his drawer, never mentioned again. They didn't talk about the letter. Not yet. But it hovered. In the corners. In the quiet. Rei had said it was coming soon. That meant any day now. Any hour.

And yet life kept moving. One burnt egg. One scribbled page. One long, lingering glance in the hallway.

Lilith was chaos, a cute royal chaos. And that chaos had somehow become his routine. A part of his day. A part of him.

He didn't want to admit it—but he couldn't imagine waking up without her lighting something on fire by mistake.

The storm hadn't come yet. But he could feel it. Just behind the silence.

And still, he waited.