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“I met a boy.”
Agnes’ declaration passed between the two of them unacknowledged. Gerry didn’t have the energy to say anything at all, and Agnes didn’t know what to add to it. She started drawing on the sidewalk instead, her white-hot fingertips leaving charred black lines behind on the beige concrete. She needed to occupy herself, to think of anything besides the barista who had, apparently, asked her on a date.
She couldn’t keep this to herself. “Gerry, he talked to me,” Agnes said. “He doesn’t even know about the Lightless Flame. He just knows me.”
Gerry huffed a laugh at that, although Agnes didn’t know exactly what had been funny. She exhaled back at him, making sure he felt the heat contained within her lungs. Judging by his subtle flinch backward, he definitely felt it.
Gerry still said nothing, but he fished around in his pocket for a cigarette and held it out to Agnes with a shrug. She huffed a laugh of her own and touched the offered cig with her pointer finger, setting it alight. Gerry leaned back and started smoking, still not having said a word.
“Why are you so quiet today? Usually that’s my job.”
Gerry shrugged, pointing to his throat with a shake of his head that made his greasy ginger hair flop around his shoulders. A few strands almost brushed against his lit cigarette. Almost.
He cleared his throat quietly. “Talked a lot with my mum,” he explained, and then sat back and stared out at the street, like he was done speaking. Mary Keay always took a lot of energy out of him. Agnes wished she could tap him on the shoulder, snap her fingers in front of his face to make them spark, do anything to regain his attention that wasn’t simply saying his name. But she didn’t want to hurt Gerry. She never had.
“Gerry.”
A long stream of smoke in her face answered her. His cigarettes always smelled different when she lit them. She said his name again.
“What the hell d’you want?” he snapped, though there was no real heat in his voice. “Nice going on meeting a bloke, Aggie, big deal. What d’you want me to say?”
Agnes shrugged even though Gerry still wasn’t looking at her. “‘Nice going on meeting a bloke, Aggie’,” she parroted. “Nice of you. Thanks.”
“Welcome.”
They sat there in silence for a while after that. Gerry clearly just wasn’t in the mood to talk, and Agnes didn’t have as much energy as she’d had earlier. The silence was comfortable, although it had no right to be. Sometimes, Agnes hated how relaxed Gerry was around her. She wanted to scream at him, burn him, fly into a rage and make him remember who he was sat there on the step with.
But he’d already been burnt by the Lightless Flame. He had the extensive scarring to prove it. Sometimes Agnes felt guilty for that, because, well, her... family (?) had been the cause. But Gerry always told her not to worry about it, and he outright refused to tell her exactly how he’d managed to provoke Diego into burning him. It was a secret that Agnes was mostly content not knowing, but there would always be that seed of the Desolation within her that raged at being confined to a body and hungered for pain.
Gerry was in between dye jobs. She wanted to braid his ginger hair and feel the strands turn to ash in her hands as a reminder of who exactly he was friends with.
Or maybe Agnes didn’t want those things at all. She was slowly learning to separate her own desires from her patron’s hunger, something that Gerry had taught her. Was teaching her. He’d had a lot of practice stamping down the Ceaseless Watcher’s craving for knowledge while he traversed through Britain burning Leitner after Leitner, destroying vast troves of infernal knowledge. He only spared the ones that his mum had specifically asked him to bring back.
Agnes privately thought that he would’ve been just as content serving the Lightless Flame, but that was a pointless conversation. Gerry was content to feed the Eye a morsel now and again in exchange for Knowing just enough to keep hunting books.
“Found a Leitner,” Gerry grunted, disturbing the silence. About half an hour had passed, if the setting sun was to be trusted to tell time. Agnes lifted her hands up from the pavement and stopped drawing. Her interest was piqued.
“Where at?”
“Wales. Some old couple cleaned out their attic and found it.” Gerry tossed his cigarette down onto the sidewalk and ground it under his heel. “Mum thinks it’s the Desolation.”
Agnes didn’t offer any insight. Despite supposedly being the human incarnation of the Lightless Flame, she didn’t actually know that much about its activities. She was just the cult’s Messiah.
Gerry had picked up a stick from the ground and was using it to poke her on the leg. He managed two taps before the wood disintegrated. “Aggie? What do you think?”
“About what? You haven’t told me anything useful about it.”
“I dunno. It doesn’t matter, I’ve gotta find it anyway. Tell me about your boy.”
Agnes scoffed. “He’s not my boy, Gerry,” she said. “He asked me if we could...’hang out,’ and I said yes. That’s all.”
“Really? He didn’t ask your name?”
“Well, he did ask my name. And I told him.”
Gerry cracked a smile at that. “Nice.”
“Yes. It’s nice.”
They both sat quietly for a few more minutes. Agnes started drawing again, this time on the step below her.
“Where’s he want to hang out at?” Gerry asked abruptly.
Agnes sighed. “I don’t know. I left before we talked about that.”
“Do you even know where he lives? What his name is?”
“...No.”
Gerry laughed and pulled out another cigarette. He lit this one on his own and took a long pull, still slightly laughing and puffing smoke into Agnes’ face, before he finally responded to her.
“Do you want to know his name?”
“How would you– Oh. Sure, if you don’t mind Knowing.”
Gerry shut his eyes and cracked his joints one by one as his brow furrowed in concentration. Knowing things wasn’t as easy for him as it was for more devoted servants of the Eye, but he usually got it eventually. It just took a long time. Agnes knew this, so she didn’t disturb her friend as he systematically cracked his knuckles, then his elbows, then his shoulders, his lower and upper back, and finally his neck.
The eyes inked onto those joints suddenly seemed darker, the lines more distinct. Gerry had once joked that he saved a lot of money on touch ups just from Knowing things. The only time he’d actually had to fix up a tattoo had been when a book aligned with the Dark had drunk the ink out of his skin to add to its pages.
“His name is Jack,” Gerry announced, before cracking his jawbone a few times. “He lives in the block of flats by that shitty pub.”
“I don’t go to pubs,” Agnes reminded him.
Gerry sighed, cracked his ankles and his knees for good measure, and told her the address. He bent his thumbs backward to crack them in a different way and added that Jack was happy he’d talked to her.
“Really? Are you sure you can Know things like that?”
Gerry shrugged. “He thinks he’s experiencing happiness at the moment, and it’s linked to his memory of talking to you. Make of that what you will, I guess,” he said.
Agnes didn’t respond. She was still thinking about the boy, about Jack. What would ‘hanging out’ with him be like? He would be very... different, she knew that. He’d be something new. That scared Agnes far less than it should have.
Jack wasn’t like Gerry, that was for sure. Gerry was friends with Agnes because they had similar traumas and nothing better to do, plus a mutual desire to stay away from their respective guardians for as long as possible. The Cult avoided Gerry because he’d proven he could kill them, and Mary Keay didn’t manifest around Agnes because she was afraid of her page in the skin book being burnt. Agnes and Gerry were each other’s security passes to the normal world, in a sense.
It struck Agnes that she didn’t really know how to fit in with the ‘normal’ world. She knew how to observe it, how to float around the edges of a typical human life, but she’d never attempted to copy what she saw.
It wouldn’t do any good to ask Gerry. He was just as useless in real life as she was. Besides, even if he wasn’t teetering on the cusp of serving a voyeuristic eldritch entity, he was absolutely hopeless at talking to people. He always said the wrong thing, according to his mum, anyway. Agnes wouldn’t know; she hardly said anything at all.
Well, there wasn’t anyone else to ask. “What should I say to him?” Agnes said.
Gerry, predictably, just shrugged. “Dunno. Tell him he looks nice, maybe.” He exhaled yet another plume of smoke in Agnes’ general direction, this time missing her face entirely.
“I won’t tell him he looks nice,” Agnes said. “He probably already knows that.”
“Yeah, I think people just like to hear that,” Gerry mused, “but I dunno why. It’s weird.”
“Maybe they forget.”
“Maybe.”
More silence, and more smoke. Somewhere nearby, a clock tower chimed, but Agnes didn’t bother to count how many times. She could always try to get Gerry to Know what time it was, but there was every chance that he’d overestimate and give her a number three time zones ahead. It had already happened multiple times.
“What time is it?”
Gerry sighed and cracked his neck. “Nine,” he answered. “Give or take a few minutes.”
“I should get home,” Agnes mused. Even if Gerry's timing was off, she usually didn't stay out until the sky began to darken, which it was. “Soon, probably.” She stood up abruptly, making Gerry scramble out of her way so as to avoid getting burnt. If he hadn’t moved, her bare leg would have brushed against his arm and scalded the outer layer of his skin. Agnes was slightly disappointed that it hadn’t happened. Maybe. Only slightly.
“See you around, Aggie,” Gerry called after her as she walked down the street. She didn’t turn around as she waved to him, but she did look back over her shoulder when he shouted, “Say hi to Jack for me!”