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Jon has to take a long, deep breath when he gets there, key raised to the lock. He closes his eyes and lets his forehead thunk against the clouded glass window of the flat door. He hadn’t slept last night (he hasn’t slept a whole night through in a while,) and he feels it now, the heavy wave of nausea, the burn behind his eyes.
He doesn’t want to go in.
He just really, really does not want to go inside.
He doesn’t have to, is the worst part.
Tim’s flatmates have offered to just donate the lot to the local charity shop. It wasn’t like Tim owned anything expensive. One of them would take Tim’s PS4, and they were going to split the clothes they wanted to keep.
Jon got the impression from the brief phone call he’d had with Asher that they’d not known Tim well. Despite his charisma, they all had full-time jobs, and Tim had moved here not long after the Archive started becoming a life-style more than a job. “Plus,” Asher had added, “It’s not like the guy spent many nights in his own bed.” There was a pause on the line, then a small sigh. “Sorry. Is that speaking ill of the dead?”
“It’s not like you’re wrong,” Jon had said, and Asher made a sound he couldn’t quite decipher, then they’d swapped schedules and Jon had picked a time when nobody else would be in the flat.
Jon counts to five and tells himself that on five, he’ll put the key in the lock and he’ll go inside.
He counts to ten, then to fifty, then to a hundred.
He has to take a lap around the street, heading almost all the way back to the tube before he
turns around, determined.
He will go inside. He has to. He has to witness it. He has to… He has to get some kind of closure from this— Tim can’t just leave-
-
Martin decides that if they aren’t going to be allowed an after-school queer club, they’re going to do the next best thing: a thinly veiled game club.
“Dungeons and Dragons,” Martin says, bright with excitement with the suggestion.
Jon rolls onto his side to groan, bringing his latest Poirot with him. Maybe if he looks engrossed in the book Martin won’t bother him.
“It’s all the rage with the kids these days, Jon!” Martin continues, scooting closer to Jon in the bed, until he’s got his chin hooked over Jon’s shoulder, hugging him from behind.
“Can’t we just let them play on their Nintendos?”
“While we make out in the corner?” Martin says with a grin.
“While we mark our huge piles of homework that we won’t have time to mark now that we’ve decided to run a club three evenings a week.”
“It’ll be fun! Anyway, you like telling stories!”
“Do I?”
“You do!” Martin insists. “You were good at it, too.”
“When I had an evil eye puppeting me.” Jon puts Poirot down, folding the corner of the page as his bookmark. “Can’t I just sit and look ominous? I’ll do your homework for you.”
“You’d make a great DM. I always thought you had flair when you recorded the statements.”
“You’re the creative writing teacher,” Jon counters, taking Martin’s hands in his own. “I bet you have a whole world in that head of yours you’re wanting to inflict on some helpless teenagers.”
“I’m no good at the whole…” Martin plays with Jon’s fingers. “You know, dramatics. Tension. Poetry is one thing, but telling the statements… it was like... it took so much out of me.”
“Again, evil eye,” Jon says. “What would I even write about? Aren’t you supposed to write what you know? I can’t exactly make them fight the Fears.”
“Why not?”
“Other than because it’s a categorically bad idea?”
“Yeah.”
“They’ll google Jurgen Leitner the second they’ve got their phones from their lockers.”
“Change his name.”
Jon thinks about it for a moment. “What if it... I don’t know, makes a link; between the Institute and the school. They’re children, they’re going to start processing their fears through their characters. It’ll be like they’re giving statements. What if it triggers something.”
They’re pressed so close together, Jon feels Martin have the thought. “No,” he says quickly, “No, I haven’t, there’s nothing to worry about, I’ve not been, you know, feeling it again.” He allows a moment for Martin to process that. “But who knows what might happen if I, I don’t know, scare the ever-loving shit out of them with our traumatic horror stories and it kicks something off.” Jon shakes his head. “No, I won’t risk it.”
“Yeah,” Martin agrees quietly. “Yeah. No. Bad idea. Don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Hey,” Jon calms. “I’m glad we talked about it instead of doing it on accident.”
“Mm,” Martin agrees. “God, what would I even write if I did DM it. It’s not like my life was full of thrills before the institute.”
Jon shifts around so that they’re facing each other, and smiles when Martin brushes Jon’s growing fringe out of his eyes for him. “Copy the plot of a book they won’t ever read and call it a day.”
“I knew I was saving my Dune fanfiction for something,” Martin laughs. “But I want it to be good for them. Special.”
Jon watches Martin’s face scrunch up in thought, and he feels his heart go silly with the pure amount of love he feels for this ridiculous man.
“What,” Jon asks, “Is your favourite period of history?”
“Is this a trick question?”
“No. Honest question.”
“Uh,” Martin says. “I don’t know. Nineteenth century France? Or, no, mm… I wish I knew more about Turtle Island before, you know… and- oh, I read something on Twitter about-”
Jon watches Martin’s face as he bounces between thoughts, only half vocalising them to Jon so it comes out as a jumble of “And in this Chinese drama I watched - a fleet bigger than - charting space before the West had even invented- this huuuge conspiracy theory- and then they- Oh!” Martin rolls to his own side of the bed to grab his phone from the charger and opens his notes app, typing furiously while still mumbling under his breath.
Jon lets himself have a moment of quiet victory before kissing Martin on the cheek, rolling to his own side and picking Poirot back up.
That’s the power of history, he definitely doesn’t say out loud.
-
Jon has known Tim for six months when Tim’s birthday rolls around. Tim mentions it a month out, and Jon makes a mental note to remember to buy a gift card or something. Tim mentions it again two weeks later, and then at least three times a day for the following two weeks, even managing to set alarms on both Jon’s work calendar and on the private calendar on his phone.
Jon isn’t sure when exactly it is, but it’s some time in those two weeks that they go from distant and vaguely-antagonistic work colleagues to… something sembling ‘friends’. It’s obvious Tim and Sasha are close, possibly more than friends, and Jon is at first wary of stepping between them, or of infringing on their precious time outside of his role as their boss, but… Even he, prickly and new and on edge from the stuff he’s reading, has to admit that it’s nice, being dragged to the pub the second the clock hits 5.
An IPA for Tim, a G&T for Sasha, and a cider for Jon. Tim and Sasha will go through a couple of drinks, the first always Jon’s round, but Jon’s order hasn’t changed since his first year at uni: the largest, cheapest drink he can sip from the whole night.
Even now, he’ll have a half-second vocal clip of his gidda reminding him that he is a disappointment - before ordering the alcohol anyway.
It’s one of those jokes that comes up three hours into an evening and lasts for weeks, and when Tim opens the gift bag Jon’s left on his desk, he tears up with laughter as he pulls out the dictionary. The three of them can’t remember how the joke began in the first place, but it’s somehow the funniest thing Jon could have bought him for his birthday, and it promotes him from boss to mate.
-
It’s no surprise that the gamers (or Gaymers, as Madeleine insists on calling them) are Madeleine, Nnedima, Jason and Femi, with Jon roped in as a fifth. Jon is actively forbidden from doing both historical research and bribing the DM with kisses as they set up the table for the first session, placing a set of dice Martin has bought for each player with their meager club funds at each seat.
“Dibs on getting to sit next to Jon!” Jason shouts as the group of them breach the library doors.
“No!” Madeleine says, pushing Jason to get ahead of them, only to have Femi pull the two of them back by their backpacks.
Nnedimma squeezes underneath the tangled threesome in the doorway and books it to the table, managing to situate herself in the chair beside Jon with a successful smile. “Hey Jon! Hey Mister Blackwood!”
“Afternoon, Nnedimma,” Jon says, trying not to show his relief at her win. He was dreading having to have his ear shouted off by one of the louder two. “How was Chemistry?”
“Easy. Maddy isn’t allowed to touch things anymore.”
“Probably for the best.”
Femi gets to the table next, managing to insert herself on Martin’s left and so directly opposite Jon, then Maddy and Jason fight over who gets to sit at the foot of the table facing Martin and who sits opposite Nnedimma.
Jon is only mildly surprised the pair of them have so far avoided drawing blood in their playfights, their sibling-like ability to go far too hard on the most trivial matters almost legendary at the school by this point.
“A sacrifice for the DM,” Femi says, taking a tupperware box from her backpack, opening it to reveal biscuits. “We made them in food tech. They’re vegan,” she says, offering them out to Martin.
“Oh!” Martin says, heart on his sleeve as always as he takes one with a look of absolute adoration. “That’s very sweet of you, Femi!”
“It’s cool, my brother plays and he says it makes the DM be nice to you if you pay for their pizza.”
“I’ll buy you pizza!” Maddy yells from her seat at the foot of the table.
“Not if I buy pizza first!” Jason says, head turning between Madeleine and Martin.
“Nobody needs to buy anyone pizza-”
“My dad owns a pizza shop, I’ll get you free pizza,” Femi says, taking out her phone.
“That should be in your locker,” Jon says, though gives up on trying to make his voice heard as the four kids start shouting at each other about pizza.
“Okay,” Martin says, keeping his voice level. When that doesn’t work, he and Jon meet eyes and both raise their hands.
Femi cottons on first, going quiet and sitting back in her seat with her hand raised, then Nnedimma, then a begrudging Madeleine and Jason.
“Thank you,” Martin says once they’ve all settled, lowering his hand. “And, welcome to Saint Augustine’s first official game of Dungeons and Dragons!” There’s a small whoop, which Martin cuts off with a hand signal not unlike a composer calling his orchestra to come to a stop.
Martin doesn’t glance at Jon, but Jon touches his ankle against Martin’s in solidarity anyway. Martin’s too good a teacher for his nervousness to externalise in a shaken voice or in his face, but Jon can tell he is. Martin’s been working on the game for a good few weeks now, and he knows how hard he’s tried to make sure it’s going to be fun for them all. To have it finally be happening is overwhelming, and Jon couldn’t be more proud.
“We begin,” Martin says, and Jon has to smile as he hears Martin try to replicate the tone Jon used to use in his early days reading statements, “In a tavern…”
-
It’s such a silly thing to think, but Tim’s room smells like him. Of his aftershave, the fancy cologne he used. Of his hair gel, of his laundry detergent. Jon stands in his doorway and can’t bring himself to cross the border of the room. He has to take everything in first.
It’s a plain room, decent size for a London flat. Twin bed with clean black sheets, bed made before Tim last left. There’s a desk with a mac, there’s a small home gym with weights and yoga gear, there’s a wardrobe with pristinely ironed and hung clothes. There’s also a shame-chair with loungewear Jon’s never seen Tim wear, and there’s a relatively packed bookshelf.
His eyes go to the dictionary, even from the opposite side of the room. The first one he’d bought. Then to the shelf of them, the collection Tim had apparently started once it became tradition for Archive staff to hand him one on gift-giving holidays. A silly tradition. Jon had assumed Tim threw them away, or handed them off to the first charity shop he passed on the way home.
They’re mostly cheap ones, some of them slightly fancier as the joke became tradition, one incredibly precious-looking one Jon suspects was a gift from Elias. The pull of the bookshelf lets him take that first step in, toe-ing his shoes off as if the ghost of Tim would haunt him for tracking dirt across his floor.
His fingers reach for the first dictionary, cracking it open to find the inscription he’d written: ‘Dearest Timothy, Happy reading. Jon.’
Jon’s eyes well at that, feels his throat go dry with its impending knot.
As he flicks through the dictionary, he is surprised to note that the book seems to have had its use, the pages slightly worn with Tim’s fingers. There are no notes or marks in the margins, so he’s not sure what Tim was getting from reading the thing, and it frustrates him. Jon wants to solve this, to know what Tim was doing-
Just reading it, he knows. Reading it to distract his mind. When he was sleepless and couldn’t drag his thoughts away from his anger, from his helplessness. He would read the dictionary, try to get as far into it as he could before he didn’t know a word.
Jon shuts the dictionary and carefully replaces it on the shelf. The others are far less thumbed, the spines yet to be cracked, though the one from Elias is so desecrated it almost comes to pieces in Jon’s hands, ‘fuck you, bitch’ written in several iterations across the pages.
Jon spends a half hour going through some of Tim’s drawers, not really looking for anything, half-hoping he might find a letter, or a photo, or something. He doesn’t, and then he feels uncomfortable digging through Tim’s shit, realising he’s an intruder here, so he decides Tim’s housemates were right. Everything can go.
He’s halfway out the front door when he goes back to the bookshelf and pulls the dictionary out, bringing it with him.
-
The third session they play, Nnedimma arrives a couple of minutes earlier than the others and helps them set up. She’s quieter than usual, and the pair of them exchange a brief eye-conversation before Martin excuses himself to go to the bathroom.
Martin isn’t gone long before Nnedimma breaks the silence with a quiet “Uhm, Jon?”
“Yes, Nnedimma?”
Nnedimma sits at her place at the table, backpack on her lap. She unzips it slowly and roots around until she digs out a small plastic bag. She holds it for a moment before she pours the contents out on the table.
Small, evidently home-made pin-badges skitter across the table, and Nnedimma gets to work turning them upright, sorting them into small groups. Pride badges, Jon notes, watching as Nnedimma pushes the groups to the place settings of her friends; their fledgling identities hand-painted in acrylic for them.
Nnedimma is left with a pile of assorted flags, doubles of her friends’ ones and more. “My sister gave me her badge maker,” she explains.
“They’re beautiful,” Jon says softly, already planning what he’s going to say at the the meeting he’s going to have to be at attendance in where he defends them. “I think your friends will be delighted.”
Nnedimma doesn’t relax, so Jon waits her out.
“I made doubles. If you and Mr Blackwood wanted some.” She taps some of them, twisting them so they’re the right way around. “You don’t have to wear them or anything. Like I know everyone knows you’re husbands and stuff, but. Still. You know. You don’t have to wear them.”
“Are you sure you can spare them?” Jon asks, which gets Nnedimma to look up. “They’re so well made, are you sure you want us old people to have them?”
“No! It’s okay if it’s you and Mr Blackwood!”
“Really?” Jon asks, inserting some false-hesitancy in his tone. “I wouldn’t want anyone to think we were just trying to start a, what is it, a tiktok trend?”
Nnedimma’s face gets taken over by an involuntary look of repulsion, which sparks a sense of pride in Jon. He’s getting really good at misquoting memes and trends at kids, playing up his old-man persona, and it never fails to inspire joy. She also looks like she’s reconsidering giving the badges over to him now, which makes him reach out and flick two towards himself.
“Oh,” Nnedimma says, as she watches him pin the pair onto the lapel of his cardigan. “Oh, I only made one ace one, do uhm, I mean, is- do I, will Martin, uh,”
Jon saves Nnedimma (and himself) from having to have that particular conversation by choosing a badge for Martin; a rainbow with the black and brown stripes and the trans arrow. “Thank you Nnedimma,” Jon says, meeting her eye. “I’ll ask the other teachers if anyone wants to order one from you.”
“Oh! Yeah. Cool! If they want.” Nnedimma is quiet for a moment, then takes her own badge, the traditional rainbow, and fiddles with it. She looks up after a moment, looks at Jon’s badges, then back at her fingers. “Uhm,” she says. “I don’t… How did you know? Not the gender, the… you know.”
“Hm,” Jon says, feeling himself go warm with embarrassment. God, if he thought he was woefully unprepared for talking to Jason about religion, he is certainly not ready to give this teenage girl the talk-
Jon cuts himself off from his panic-spiral. From what he knows, Nnedimma is a second-gen Nigerian immigrant. Single mother, two younger siblings. Jon leans back in his seat and nudges his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Experimentation?”
He can see Nnedimma is half-watching him from her seat, curiosity and the tell-tale tendrils of shame. “Like, having a lot of sex?”
“Hah,” Jon says, a little helplessly. “No. I mean, yes, later, a bit of, er, sex, but only after I found someone that I trusted.”
“Was he like, a uni friend?”
“She was, yes. We dated for a while, and I started realising she wanted to try some things, so I was honest with her. That I didn’t, er, crave it. She was a bit disappointed, I think, but then we talked about it, and we worked out that it wasn’t because I didn’t love her, and that there was a difference between not craving and not wanting…” Jon scratches at the scar on his temple. “But no, before that, it was far less dramatic. More like my peers began to get incredibly horny and to talk about porn, but I just couldn’t understand the appeal.”
“Right?” Nnedimma says, then catches herself, looking like she almost bites her tongue trying to stuff the word back into herself.
Jon tries not to laugh, but he knows that particular feeling of validation well. “Honestly, I mostly look back on it now and wonder how I didn’t realise earlier.” He shakes his head. “No, I do, it’s because I didn’t have the words, didn’t have anyone to talk about it with. My gidda - my grandmother - was a very strict Yemeni woman. She loved me, but we absolutely did not talk about sex, or relationships. As far as she was concerned, the fact that I had my nose stuck in a book was more about me being a good boy than it was about, shall we say, an alternate sexuality.”
“My mum keeps telling me not to get a boyfriend,” Nnedimma says, slightly helpless. “She gave me the flower story the other day. You know? With the petals and the virginity?”
Jon hadn’t been aware of it until starting work at this school, but he’d had to console a couple of the far less-asexual students after a particularly venemous Catholic woman had been given free reign over an assembly a month back.
“And like, it’s so stupid,” Nnedimma continues. “Because now I’m like, I don’t know whether I’m just, like, scared of her stupid lecture and not, like, actually working out who I am, and…” Nnedimma’s voice goes wobbly, and she bites her lip.
“Hm,” Jon says again, trying to put as much this is important in his voice as he can. “That is hard.”
“It’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid. First, it is hard work being a teenager. I’m glad I never have to be one again. And then life is made harder when adults don’t teach us the things that we should be learning about our bodies, and then made triple hard when other adults tell us ridiculous stories about flower petals being our worth as humans. It’s hard work.”
“But you knew. You decided.”
“I’m still deciding,” Jon corrects. “People change, Nnedimma. I’m not sure whether that’s the answer you’re wanting from me, but people decide they’re one thing one day and then change their mind the next. And that’s a scary thought, because we’re brought up in a world where decisions are supposed to mean something. You’re supposed to know what job you want at 12, latest 16, and that decides the whole direction of your life. People are so terrified to admit that they’re on the wrong track that they end up screwing around until they burn out, but better that than admit they made a mistake choosing their O-levels - sorry, GCSEs - er, Nat5s.
“My point is, I didn’t know that I wanted to be a teacher until last year, and I’m an old man. I didn’t know that I wasn’t comfortable being seen as a ‘man’ until a few years ago. I didn’t know that I liked people of any gender until I was in second year of uni. I didn’t know I liked girls until I was seventeen, let alone boys. I didn’t decide that I was asexual until I was in my twenties. The me that’s me, now, is the product of experimentation, both good and bad. Sometimes only bad because it was at the wrong time. Sometimes only good because it was with the right person. Who knows, maybe Martin and I will talk one day and I’ll change my mind again about my asexuality.” Jon thinks for a moment, then half to her, half to himself says “And that’ll be okay.”
“Yeah, you’re right. ...That isn’t what I wanted to hear.”
That startles a laugh from Jon, who smiles at her. “I know. It’s very frustrating.”
“Jason said you gave them this whole life-changing speech.”
“Yeah, well, don’t tell Jason but it’s a lot easier making white people cry when you accidentally say something that sounds profound.”
Nnedimma echoes Jon’s grin. “I’ll keep that quiet.”
Jon unpins the ace pin from his lapel and puts it on the table next to Nnedimma’s dice. “Will you hold onto that for me? You can give it back if you don’t need it anymore.”
Nnedimma picks it up and gives him a small nod, before pinning it to the front of her backpack. “Oh and Jon?” Nnedimma says.
“Yes?”
“You’re not that old.”
Jon laughs, shocked. “You know that doesn’t make me feel better, right,” he starts to say, but he’s cut off by the thundering of footsteps up the stairs.
“You started without us!” Madeleine accuses as she crashes through the door, landing in her seat and immediately picking up her badges. “Oh my god! Did yous make these, Nnedi?!”
“I did!” Nnedi says, smile wide, as if the conversation hasn’t happened.
-
It’s been through a lot, this dictionary.
Jon’s been through a lot, without a place to call home, so he’s been lugging it around with him in his backpack.
He’s taken care of it, though. Despite everything, it’s lasted the last couple of years blood-free, dirt-free, flesh-free, though no-less thumbed than before.
But now Jon doesn’t feel right, keeping it here. In this happy house, with him and Martin. They’d built bookshelves, shitty ones when they’d first moved in then bulkier ones once the first had buckled under the steadily increasing weight and their first wages had come through.
It just feels a bit silly putting the dictionary in amongst the crime thrillers and the histories of Waterloo, or nudged between Martin’s manga. There’s a place for Jon’s Qur’an at the top, but he doesn’t think either Allah or Tim would be very happy with that sharing of blasphemy.
So it just sort of stays in Jon’s backpack like a shitty, heavy, good luck charm.
With a free last period, Jon arrives at the next Gaymer session early. He’d been intending on getting some marking done in the relative quiet, but as soon as he’s up there, he knows he’s not going to be able to concentrate.
It’s Tim’s birthday today, his phone calendar reminds him. Such a strange ghost, to be haunted by a phone reminder made by a dead man. He’s gone through the day a little numb around the edges, teaching at fifty percent and giving his students less homework as reward for putting up with him.
So he sits and he takes Tim’s dictionary out of his backpack and he opens it up to the inscription, then he starts to read. It takes him quite a while until he comes across a word he doesn’t know, but he takes out a pencil and he makes a little line underneath it and he sits back.
A glance at the clock tells him he’s been here for fifty three minutes, so he’s only got another five to get himself together before the kids come crashing through.
Maggy the librarian lets them get up to most anything these days, plied as she is with their homemade treats, and has stopped coming to shush them every ten minutes, but Jon still doesn’t know her well enough to know how she’d react to him having a bit of a cry at the table, so he doesn’t.
Instead he gets up and he goes to the corner labelled ‘reference books’. It’s obvious from the positioning that this section has been very much underfunded since the proliferation of wikipedia, and he wonders how many of the kids at the school have ever seen, let alone used, a physical encyclopedia.
Jon takes out his pencil and, below his inscription, he writes ‘From the Library of Timothy Stoker’ in the fanciest script he can manage. He has a little chuckle to himself at it, at this small joke in this small corner of a small library in a small town in Scotland, and he hopes Tim, wherever he is, has a bit of a laugh at it too.
Then, because he’s feeling particularly childish, Jon skims the dictionary until he gets to ‘Panopticon’ and he draws a dick.
Jon nods to himself and shoves the dictionary into a gap. If it gets chucked out, it gets chucked out, but Jon doesn’t need it anymore, so he lets it go.
-
He makes Martin a ginger ale and gin that evening, holding the gin for his own, and they pour one out to Tim and Sasha, cracking a tinny and an IPA on a small make-shift shrine they make from cheap incense and rice in a bowl.
They’ve printed out a photo they’d found on Facebook, some over-saturated, drunken photo from a club, the two of them in their best clothes, hands all over each other.
They look happy, which is what’s important.
“To Sasha and Tim,” Jon says.
“To Sasha and Tim,” Martin echoes.