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It was just meant to be a normal coffee date.
With exam season coming up, Jon and Georgie are both too busy and too tired to do anything big, but meeting up for coffee, they can do that.
Or at least they should have been able to. It takes them until they’ve already gotten said coffee to realize the coffee shop doesn’t have any open tables, and the weather is miserable, so sitting outside is hardly an attractive option. Jon blames his sleep deprivation for his inattentiveness. This was an awful idea. Neither of them is even that fond of coffee, they’re just tired.
Groaning, Georgie grabs his hand and drags him deeper into the coffee shop, aiming for a larger table only populated by three people, with a couple chairs left open. It’ll be awkward, but better than standing outside in the rain.
“I’m sorry, is it okay if we sit here?” she asks nicely, and Jon tries to look anywhere but at anyone.
One of the people at the table has been talking excitedly at the two others, and he barely pauses to say, “Yeah, whatever,” before he continues his spiel.
The man is loud in a very annoying way. Jon is having a hard time tuning him out as he sits down.
“It’s not magic,” he’s arguing to the two girls across from him, gesticulating wildly. “Or like, it’s more than that. Look it’s… my friend Tom found this book…”
The words catch on something deep in Jon and make him freeze over his coffee. Georgie sends him a concerned look and he shakes his head at her. It’s nothing. He ran into one evil book one time. Sooner or later, he’ll have to stop panicking at the mere suggestion of it. But he also doesn’t stop listening.
“…and it’s truly amazing the things it teaches you! It’s called A History of Violence.”
One of the poor girls he’s proselyting to makes the exasperated noise most girls make when their awkward date starts talking about the manly glory of single combat. Georgie raises an amused eyebrow about it.
“No, it’s not like that, I promise,” the guy says. “It’s like… it’s sort of like a history book. Tom says he found it while he was buying his other textbooks for class, but it was just sort of jammed into a shelf and didn’t have a price on it or anything so they ended up giving it to him for cheap. It was from some weird publisher or something. And it’s not a normal history book. Sure, it talks about wars and stuff, but it’s not just the boring facts, it’s like, the mentality you have to have to go into a fight, and what it does to you to see all that stuff.”
“Still doesn’t sound like something worth having a whole club about,” one of the girls says.
Georgie rolls her eyes and Jon almost agrees with her, except there’s an old alarm bell in the back of his head ringing as loud as it can.
“I know I’m not selling it well,” the guy says. “I mean, yeah, it’s just a book, it’s just words, but it’s like, the words are more than words. You read them and you get it, you know? The truth of what people are, what they’re like, why they’re like that. It’s more truth than truth. Reading it changes you.”
Georgie has stopped rolling her eyes. She doesn’t look scared—Jon doesn’t think he’s ever seen her look scared—but she doesn’t look amused anymore.
“It practically teaches you mind reading. If you read it enough, you learn to read people the same way you’d read a book. Just from how they’re looking at you or from their posture you can tell their thoughts and intentions. I’m not quite there yet but the stuff Tom can do is amazing.”
“Sounds kind of crazy, I’ve got to be honest.”
“Look, just… just show up once. You won’t regret it, I promise.”
“Show up where?” Georgie asks, nearly giving Jon a heart attack.
The guy blinks dumbly at her.
She smiles at him. “Sorry, I couldn’t help overhearing, and this sounds really interesting! Where do you meet up?”
It takes him a moment to catch up, and then he grins right back at her. “Oh! We have meetings in the old gymnasium behind the science building every Thursday. It’s not really in use by anyone so we got permission to use it as long as we don’t make a mess. It’s every week, at five. Show up! Bring your friend. Boyfriend?” he directs at Jon.
Jon tries for a smile, though he doubts it looks natural. “Boyfriend.”
“Cool. You interested?”
Not in the least, but curiosity has its hooks dug well and deep into him. “Just… curious,” he says. “This weird publisher of yours, do you remember the name?”
“Ah, uhhh,” the guy’s eyes glaze over as he thinks. “Some private library I think. We couldn’t find anything on it. Name’s German or… maybe Scandinavian?”
“Jurgen Leitner?”
“That’s the one! You know about it?”
Jon feels the paper cup give between his hands and forcibly lets go of it before he accidentally crushes it. He’s not sure his heart is still beating. The buzzing in his ears is too loud.
“I’m… familiar.”
“It’s amazing, right?”
“That’s certainly a word for it.”
“Thanks!” Georgie says. Her smile is forced, but she hides it well. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to make it any time soon, what with exams and all, but we’ll definitely keep it in mind.”
“Hey, we’re continuing through the summer, so just show up whenever. Hope to see you there!”
“Of course. But we’ve got places to be, so…” she gets up, still smiling, and Jon follows her out of the shop as quickly as he can while still looking natural. Only out in the rain again does he realize he left his coffee untouched on the table.
“You’re not going, are you?” he asks the moment the door closes behind them.
“I’m not actually stupid, Jon,” she says, then she gives him a studying look. “That name meant something to you.”
He’s found his heartbeat again. It’s stuck in his throat. “I-It’s not something I talk about.”
“Yeah, me neither,” she says, matter-of-factly.
They look at each other for a long moment before Georgie glances through the window of the coffee shop and they both start walking away.
“So you- you…” He takes a deep breath. “You’ve had an… encounter? With one of these books.”
“Not with a book, no.”
“Then how…”
“That guy just gave me a bad feeling, that’s all.” She grimaces. “Words that change you. Guess I’ve seen that before.”
Jon isn’t sure where they’re heading. He doesn’t think Georgie knows either. Just away. He steers them in the direction of the student dorms. There’s no point in walking around in the rain like this.
After a few minutes, she asks, “You tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine?”
There’s nothing he wants less. Except, maybe, Georgie walking into reach of a bloody Leitner with no proper warning.
“Alright,” he says.
She starts slowly, haltingly, and then seems to rush to the end of the story as fast as she can. She clearly doesn’t enjoy telling it, and Jon doesn’t much enjoy listening. It’s not a nice story, not a pretty one. A walking corpse took away everything that made her life different from her death, leaving her with a slow recovery and no answers.
They’re at the entrance to the dorm building by the time she finishes, but he makes no move to go in. They stand there, under the overhang, with the growing sound of the downpour around them drowning out his voice as he digs up old, infected memories.
“I never thought I’d see another one,” he ends it on. “Though, a part of me has always been expecting it. I know damn well there’s nothing out here protecting us.”
She sighs. With the rain so loud, he sees it more than he hears it. “Yeah,” she says. “That’s why we’ve got to go check this one out.”
“What? Georgie, that’s…”
“I’m not saying we go to the meeting! But I don’t think we can leave it alone either.”
“Yes, we absolutely can! Nothing good comes out of getting closer to these things.”
She draws a breath to argue again, then lets it out and says, “Let’s go inside. I’m wet and cold and my roommates are out today so we’ll have the place to ourselves.”
Once they’re inside, she tosses him a towel, and he realizes half the reason he was shaking was the cold. She puts the kettle on and they settle on her ratty couch before she says anything else.
“All I know is we’re not going to be safe with this… club growing unchecked anywhere near where we live. I just want to stake the place out, see what’s going on and if there’s anything we can do about it. That’s all.”
Jon wrings the towel between his hands in his lap. “That is still obscenely dangerous. We don’t know what we’re doing, or anything really. All we know that others don’t is that awful things exist at all. That helps nothing.”
She shrugs. “Well, who else is going to do anything? Most people don’t believe even that much. Should we call the police? I can just imagine it, ‘Hi, there’s this macho club at our university based on an evil book. That’s probably bad. Want to check it out?’”
“I don’t think walking into danger is going to help anything either. I… Georgie, are you sure you’re even capable of considering the risks here?”
“Hey, fuck you, I’m not stupid.”
“S-Sorry, I didn’t…”
“I’m perfectly capable of being logical about this. Right now, I think it’s a bigger risk not to know what’s going on at all.” She glares at him, daring him to say anything.
He swallows his words and doesn’t.
Her eyes soften a little. “Look, I know you’re scared. I get it. Obviously I’m not going to make you come if you don’t want to.”
Well, that makes things clear enough. “You’re going regardless, aren’t you.”
“Yeah, of course.”
He sighs, hopes the shaking in his hands will go away soon. “Then of course I’m coming with you. If you went, and something happened, and I just sat here and let it, I’d never forgive myself.”
She smiles, and it almost helps a little.
“Tell me you at least have a plan,” he asks.
“Not yet,” she says. “But we have until Thursday to make one.”
They’re at the gymnasium hours before the meeting is meant to start.
Jon doesn’t know why the building is there or when it last saw use. Now it seems to be mostly used for storage space. The main hall is relatively small for what it is, and is made smaller by the desks stacked up along one of its ends, along with the surprising amount of old sports equipment sitting around abandoned.
They spend the hours mapping the layout of it. The hall itself and the doors leading to it. The front doors through the entrance hall, and the two back doors that lead to hallways that lead to dusty storage rooms and changing rooms that lead to further corridors that lead to the back of the building. It all feels surprisingly anthill-like. Perhaps the ridiculous architecture had something to do with the building falling out of use.
Surprisingly, their student cards open every door without issue. The back doors seem like they haven’t seen use in years, not least because inside the gymnasium hall they’re blocked by stacked desks.
On Georgie’s prompting, they move the desks just enough to clear both doors—one on each side of the end farthest away from the front doors—just enough that it’ll be easy to slip through.
“There,” she says, standing back. “You can barely tell anything’s changed.”
“This still seems risky,” Jon says, pushing a rolling cage of old basketballs up next to the left side door and sitting down behind it, back pressed against the door.
“Hmm, wave your hands around a little?”
He does, feeling rather silly.
“Yeah, even when I know you’re there I can’t see you. Can you see me?”
There aren’t many gaps between the basketballs, but he can just barely glimpse the rest of the gymnasium through them. He sighs and stands up. “Yes. So, what? We wait here for an opening, and if we don’t find one, we just hide out here the whole time?”
“Yeah, pretty much,” she says. “Or we just slip out the door if it seems futile.”
“And if we get caught?”
She shrugs. “We say we snuck in to make out and didn’t know they were having a meeting here?”
“Georgie, you told one of their members just a few days ago that we might be here.”
“…Okay, fair. So we were nervous about it and didn’t want to have to talk to anyone, but wanted to come regardless? Something like that. Probably best to just run if we think they’ll spot us.”
Jon isn’t shaking anymore like he was when they first talked about this. Since then, some sort of resigned determination has sunk into his bones, leaving the fear as a constant tension. “We are going to get murdered. They have a goddamn Leitner. We can’t be sloppy about this.”
“I know,” Georgie says. “Jon, I know. I hate it too. Don’t you want to do something about it? Burn the damn thing with your own hands?”
His breath catches in his throat. God does he want that. “I…” His voice is shaking again, but not from fear this time. “Okay. Okay. But then, when- if we get our hands on it, do we just slip out the back and hope the don’t notice? We can’t bet on that.”
She paces a little. “No. Well, yes. No one’s been back there for years, and it’s confusingly laid out. We’re probably the only ones here who know the fastest way from the hall and out the back. I’ve left all the doors on the way open so we can slam them behind us, and once we’re out, it won’t be far to run before every passerby can see us, so even in a worst-case scenario, they probably won’t straight up murder us in public.”
“That’s uh, that’s almost a plan.”
“What, you have a better one?”
“I-I didn’t mean…”
The sound of a door opening reaches their ears, and they stare at each other for a single moment before they both dive behind the cage of basketballs and shut right up.
Georgie pulls the hood of her hoodie up, and Jon copies her. He pulls a scarf over his face. She slips on a medical mask. It’s not perfect, but they won’t be immediately recognizable even if they are seen.
They press close together, nearly holding their breaths, and watch as people start trickling into the hall.
The group that enters is mostly men, but there’s a good number of women as well. The ones Jon can get a look at are all university students, or at least they look like they could be. They don’t dress like they run in the same circles, ranging from a woman in a faded graphic tee and sweatpants to one man in a complete goth getup. Even in glimpses through the basketball shield, the man who must be Tom is easy to pick out. The rest of them seem to gravitate around him.
Tom is not an unusually tall man, nor an unusually big one. He looks like he does sports for fun, but not for a living. Even so, there’s something about the way he moves that makes Jon feel like this is not a man you fuck with.
To spot Jon and Georgie, he would have to either walk directly up to the door they’re hiding by or start wading through the stacked desks, but even knowing that, Jon doesn’t start breathing again until Tom stops by the desk closest to the centre of the room, nowhere near them, barely visible through the basketballs.
He turns around to the rest of them. “Anyone else coming?” His voice seems too normal for someone who’s presumably carrying around a Leitner.
“Looks like that’s everyone,” someone by the front doors says.
If Jon had to guess, he’d say there’s just over a dozen people in the room, excluding him and Georgie, though he can’t see well enough to get an accurate count.
“Great! There’s a couple new faces here. Don’t worry, we’re always happy to see more people! Do you guys have any questions before we get into it?”
“Um, not really?” a girl from the crowd says.
“Just here to see what it’s all about.” It sounds almost bored. Jon thinks it came from the goth man, but the angle is too bad to tell.
“Cool!” Tom says. “Let’s just get into it, then.” Leaning back against the desk, he opens a bag he has slung over a shoulder and pulls out a book. It looks like any battered softcover textbook from a distance, dog-eared and bending to gravity.
The hairs standing up at the back of Jon’s neck at the sight of it are probably just because he already knows better.
Tom opens the book.
Georgie jabs Jon in the ribs with her elbow, and he sees she has her hands firmly planted over her ears. He hurriedly copies her before Tom can begin reading out loud.
He’s not sure how long they sit there, blocking out the sound of the voice just enough to not hear the words. It might be an hour, might be more. Curiosity tugs at him to take his hands away and listen, but memories of spider legs keep him firmly still.
The mismatched congregation, what he can see of them, looks enraptured. Some of them are staring, wide-eyed and still. Some have their eyes entirely closed, just listening without distraction. It’s almost uncanny.
Finally, the voice stops. Jon has to see the group wake up from whatever trance they were in before he dares take his hands away.
“Well!” Tom says, accompanied by the sound of a book slapping shut. “That was a lot of words. Now I’m sure you’re eager to see some of this be put into practice, yeah?”
The group yells encouragingly.
He puts the bag and the book down on the desk behind him. “Thought so. You three.” He points to someone in the group. “You’re going to try to attack me. Not as hard as you can, not yet, just enough so people can see what you can do if you really know what you’re doing.”
More cheers from the crowd. They move away from the desks, towards the middle of the room, leaving the book behind.
Georgie looks at Jon. “This is our best chance,” she whispers so quietly he can barely hear it.
Reluctantly, he nods. Once the fight has started, the whole group is going to be extremely distracted, and the book is just lying there.
“I’ll go, you stay,” she says. “I’m smaller. Harder to see.”
He opens his mouth to tell her absolutely not.
“Don’t argue. If something happens you can yell and distract them. This is the safest.”
He closes his mouth, warring with himself. On one hand, she’s right. Both of them going just makes them twice as likely to get seen. On the other, Georgie in danger while he just sits back and watches. Either way, arguing won’t help, only lose them precious time and make them more likely to get caught.
Instead, he looks back up at the book, at the room.
“It’s closer to the other door,” he says. “Don’t come back this way.”
She nods, and then she goes.
Even piled up, there’s enough room under the desks for her to crawl through easily, and with the only lights here being on the ceiling, it’s even shadowed enough that she’s almost hidden. She moves slowly, carefully, any sounds covered by the yelling from the group now standing in a circle around the fight.
Jon holds his breath as he watches Georgie approach the desk with the book. He bites his lip watching her stand and pick it up gently. He tastes blood from a split lip as she crouches down again and makes her way towards the door across the room, one hand clutching the book to her chest.
She’s almost to the door when someone yells, “Hey!” and his heart stops.
He can’t see who yelled. He can see Georgie look, then dive out from under the desks and scrabble to her feet, lunging for the door. He can hear yelling and running, and can feel that she won’t reach the door in time.
Standing up, he intends to yell, but the very loud heartbeat in his throat seems to get in the way.
Tom is steps away from Georgie when her eyes set, some sort of decision made. She screeches to a stop, yells, “Go! Run!” and chucks the book across the room.
It hits the wall above Jon. He catches it by half the pages. They dig into his skin.
Too many eyes alight on him at once, and he sprints out the door, hearing Georgie yelp in pain behind him and hating himself the entire way.
Down the hall, past a turn, through an open door to a changing room, slammed behind him. Through the changing room, out the other side. The book’s pages bite at him and someone is hot on his heels.
From behind him come the sounds of fighting, shouting, and the rapid footsteps of someone fast and dangerous, and Jon is so small, so weak, so out of shape, and this was an awful idea.
Knowing the layout beforehand isn’t an advantage when the pursuer is close enough to see him. He crashes out the back door of the building and finds himself exactly where he expected to be, in the abandoned stretch of overgrown road between the science building and the gymnasium. Just a few meters down the road is the safety of the evening crowd. He knows very well he won’t make it that far in time. He tries to run anyway.
He could drop the book. Maybe they’ll let him go if they get it.
Or maybe they won’t, and it’d just get him killed and make the evening pointless. His hand twitches, crinkling pages. His other hand goes to his pocket, acting on a half-formed idea.
His foot catches on something and he crashes to the ground, knee first, then shoulder, then forehead.
When his breath returns to him, two very angry and very dangerous men are almost on top of him, Tom in the front, reaching towards him.
Jon yanks his lighter out of his pocket and lights it in a single movement, holding it up to the book. “Another step closer and I-I burn it!”
Miraculously, they stop. The rage boiling off them only intensifies. “You don’t want to do that, asshole.”
“Y-Yes, yes, w-well,” Jon struggles to his feet, making sure to keep the book and the lighter flame in close proximity. There’s blood on the pages now, dripping from his clenched hand. “I hardly think you want me to do it either.”
Tom is all but snarling at him, but his voice is still scarily calm. “I don’t, but what do you think happens if you do? You burn that, what do you think happens to you?”
Jon spares a wild second to be glad the scarf is still covering his face, as if that is going to make a difference now. “I’m- I’m sure we can find a way to- to resolve this without anybody getting hurt.”
“Yeah,” Tom says. “You put that book down nice and quiet, and I’ll let you get away from here alive.”
Jon’s hand twitches on the book again. Alive doesn’t mean unharmed, but even then… “That’s a promise?”
“Of course.”
The thing is, Jon doesn’t believe him. So he can’t put the book down. And he can’t burn it. And he can’t wait here forever. This was an awful idea.
The door to the gymnasium bursts open again, and out comes—oh thank god—Georgie, with red spots on her medical mask, and right behind her is… the tall goth man from the group?
“Just burn it!” Georgie yells.
Tom and his hanger-on twitch, but only the hanger-on turns to look, just in time to get a heavily tattooed fist directly to the face.
He goes down like a sack of bricks, but Tom dodges an elbow jabbed at his ear like he saw it coming. In a second, he has the goth man in a headlock, efficiently and effortlessly. Terror and regret flash past the goth man’s face before he’s yanked back and choked. He’s going to be killed.
Georgie catches up, kicking the man on the ground and looking ready to tackle Tom.
Shaking from fear, Jon finally jolts out of his frozen state. “Hey!” he yells, and brings the lighter flame to the book’s pages.
They catch instantly, the flame grabbing a hold like it’s a living thing, hot and hungry.
Tom roars and lunges for him, but the goth man reacts to being freed with an immediate grab and counterattack. He’s not near as skilled as Tom is, but he’s stronger and not as distracted.
The flames don’t seem likely to go out and are licking at Jon’s fingers, so he lifts the book above his head and winds up. “You want this?” Then he throws it as hard as he can over Tom’s head and away from them. “Then go get it!”
Tom violently throws the goth man off him and takes off after the book at a sprint.
“Good, now you run!” the goth man shouts.
Georgie takes off immediately. Jon tries to go after her, but is abruptly reminded that he crashed knee-first into the ground less than a minute ago and a lot of things hurt.
He hears, “For fuck’s sake,” and then the goth man grabs him and practically picks him up, running after Georgie.
She slows to a brisk jog once they round the corner into a more public space, leads them to one of the doors of the science building and gets it open with her card. Her hands aren’t even shaking. She doesn’t stop walking until she finds an unoccupied study room.
They follow her inside, and the goth man finally lets go of Jon—who finds a chair to fall into—and closes the door behind them, leaning against it.
Georgie sinks into a chair of her own, looking as exhausted if not half as jittery as Jon feels. “Did we lose him?” she asks the man, who is squinting out the room’s frosted windows. “Is he gone? Or, I mean…”
“Hard to say,” the man says. “I don’t think he knows where we went, at least, but for the rest… Might be that burning the book broke all its effects. Probably did; it looked like it hadn’t been here long. Which means now you just have a few normal angry guys out for your blood. Though for all I know, something stuck, and you’ve got a proper avatar of the Slaughter with a grudge against you.”
“A what of the what?” Jon asks, pulling back the scarf and the hood so he can catch his breath.
The man finally turns away from the windows and meets his eyes, an almost bored, maybe disbelieving expression on his face. “Oh, you guys are really new at this, huh.”
Jon sighs. His head hurts, his shoulder hurts, there’s a big hole in his trousers over his knee, which also hurts, and his fingers are still bleeding from deep, burning papercuts. “Yes, this was… perhaps not the greatest idea.”
“It was awful, yeah,” Georgie agrees. She peels the medical mask off her face, showing her nose and chin smeared with blood.
Jon gasps. “Georgie! Are you all right?”
She groans and pokes gingerly at the side of her nose. “Yeah. The prick got me in the face before he followed you. It’s stopped bleeding and I don’t think it’s broken, though.”
“Are you certain?” he asks. It looks rather grisly.
“It doesn’t look broken,” the man says. “If it stopped bleeding on its own it’s probably fine.” He looks to Jon, gives him a quick once-over. “He hit you too?”
“No, I-I tripped. And this is just from me holding the book wrong.”
The man freezes. “The book did that to you? Let me see.”
The urgent alarm in his voice makes Jon give up his hand without complaint, letting the man study the nasty cuts across the inside of his fingers intently. “They’re- They’re deep for papercuts, but I don’t think they’re that bad,” he says. It’s still bleeding, but he’s had worse.
The man still looks concerned, however. “I wouldn’t be so sure. You got a first aid kit around here somewhere?”
Georgie pipes up. “The lecture hall two doors down should have one.”
“Right,” the man says and leaves in a hurry.
They look at the door in silence for several long seconds before Jon turns a questioning look at Georgie. “What…? Who…?”
She shrugs helplessly. “I don’t know. He was in the group, but he knocked a couple heads together in the hallway and he caught me running after you, asked me what we wanted with the book. I said we wanted to burn it, and he said, ‘good,’ and let me go, so I figured he was on the level. And then he saved our sorry asses, so I think I was right.”
“He certainly did.” He sighs again. “If he hadn’t been there, we both might have died, or at least been injured much worse than we are.”
“I know, I know, you were right,” she says, trying to wipe the blood off her face with the folded up medical mask. “We should have been more careful. Maybe had a few backup plans. I’m sorry.”
“No, it- it wasn’t all your fault. I wanted to as well, for all my complaining. I suppose we should have stood back and let the professionals handle it.”
Georgie snorts, then winces in pain. “You think that guy looks like a professional?”
“He certainly seems to know more about this than the two of us put together.”
“Yeah. Maybe we should ask him.”
The door opens, and the man in question walks back through, carrying a small first aid kit. Without a word, he pulls out a chair to sit in front of Jon and reaches out for his hand. Jon gives it to him. Refusing doesn’t seem to be smart nor an option in the first place.
He watches silently for a few minutes as the man tends to the papercuts on his fingers with experienced hands. Georgie hops up on the table so they can sit in a sort of triangle.
“So,” Jon asks as the silence starts getting awkward. “How- How come the papercuts may be bad?”
The man grimaces, still focused on the bandaging. “It’s probably nothing. This one did seem more mental than physical, but… This thing, the Slaughter, you usually don’t see it around here. It’s more of a war thing. Senseless violence for the sake of violence. It can leave some nasty wounds. Better to be careful.”
“I… see,” Jon says, though he mostly feels like he’s barely glimpsing the edges of something he can’t understand. “Is there anything I can do to- to stop that?”
“Mostly try not to get it infected. Go to the hospital if it gets worse, I guess? There really isn’t much you can do.”
Well, that’s not reassuring.
“Putting that aside for a moment,” Georgie says as the man finishes the bandaging. She reaches out her hand for a handshake. “Hi, I’m Georgie, this is Jon. Thanks for the whole rescue.”
“I mostly just happened to be there,” he says. He seems to consider her hand for a moment before he shakes it. “Gerard.”
“Thanks anyway, Gerard. That wouldn’t have gone well without you, and I think you took a couple punches for us. How did you get involved with all this?”
He shrugs. “Family business.”
Jon had been planning to say something, but whatever it was vanishes from his mind at that answer. “Your family business is burning Leitners?”
Gerard snorts. “Not burning them, maybe. My mum collects them, but I don’t really, uh…”
“You just started doing this for fun, then?” Georgie asks.
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“Yes, you do have the look of a walking teenage rebellion,” Jon says before he can think better of it.
Luckily, Gerard just laughs again. “I guess you’re not wrong. How did you two end up here, then, if you don’t know anything?”
Jon and Georgie exchange a look and come to a mutual decision.
“Well,” Jon says. “We’ve both had… encounters before this…”
They summarize as best they can as they clean up the rest of their cuts and scrapes. Jon didn’t have fun talking about his old trauma the first time and doesn’t enjoy it much more now—and he can tell Georgie feels much the same—but there’s something… strangely nice about telling the story to Gerard, who accepts it all instantly, without question or confusion, and in fact seems to understand what happened better than Jon ever has himself.
He doesn’t say a word as they’re talking, but when they’re done, he asks Georgie, “You really can’t feel fear at all?”
“Yep,” she says. “It’s not great. I try to compensate for it, but I should probably get better at that.”
“Oh, yeah I suppose it wouldn’t be great for uh, survival instincts, but purely practically…” He looks at her with some level of intrigue. “These things, they’re made out of fear, all of them. Everything that’s… supernatural if you want to use the word.”
“What? But that- that doesn’t make any…” Jon says.
“Doesn’t matter if it makes sense. It’s true. It’s all fear, all the way down. They’re made out of it, they’re attracted to it, they cause it, one way or another. If you really can’t feel it at all… might be some of the more immaterial ones won’t even be able to notice you. Things that’d be awfully dangerous to anyone else might not even affect you.”
“Huh,” Georgie says. “So I might not have needed to put my hands over my ears for that guy reading from the book after all.”
Gerard makes a face. “I mean, I wouldn’t risk it. Plenty of things will still happily tear you to shreds to scare other people. Always best to be careful.”
“What about you?” Jon asks, because it’s been nagging at him for a while. “You were listening to all that just fine.”
“Oh. Right.” Gerard chuckles, and then he pulls his hand through his hair, drawing it behind his ear and revealing the earbuds he has apparently had in since the beginning, the wire disappearing down the back of his shirt. He pulls a small iPod out of his pocket for a second. “I was blasting metal the whole time. Couldn’t hear a thing.”
Georgie breaks out laughing. Jon joins her a moment later. It’s so simple, so ridiculous. He can’t believe they were about to die less than twenty minutes ago.
It takes them a few minutes to catch their breaths again.
“You’re actually fighting the forces of darkness with the power of music?” Georgie says, grinning.
“Guess so,” Gerard answers.
He’s laughing too, but not loudly. He has his head bent so his hair falls in front of his face. He looks awkward, strangely vulnerable for a man so willing to throw hands with a supernaturally powered thug. How can someone be so utterly confident in the face of danger, yet shrink in on himself when faced with laughter?
As if prompted by Jon’s thoughts, Gerard gets to his feet. He nods at them, says, “Don’t get killed,” and walks towards the door.
He’s halfway out when Georgie jumps down from the table and says, “Wait! Wait just a moment.”
She looks around the room, finds a stack of post-it notes and a pen and scribbles something on it before handing the note over to him.
“Here. My phone number. In case you, you know, want backup or just someone to go drinking with. Give me a call, okay?”
He doesn’t take the note. Looks at it like he doesn’t know what to do with it. But he isn’t leaving, either. “I’m not looking for drinking buddies.”
“Georgie is right,” Jon finds himself saying. “We owe you. And… And this isn’t- No one should have to deal with this alone, Gerard.”
Gerard meets his eyes and holds them. There’s something slightly unnerving about the gaze, like there’s something else behind his eyes, watching. But there’s also the smile, traces left over from the laughter that stick and don’t go away. There is the open and vulnerable look on his face, almost confused, as if a simple offer of help is as alien to him as monsters made of fear is to Jon.
He looks down at the post-it note, looks up at Georgie, looks away altogether. Then he takes the note carefully between two fingers. “Gerry,” he says without looking up.
“Hm?” Georgie says.
He laughs, embarrassed. “I uh. I’ve always wanted my friends to call me Gerry.”
“Alright. Then I hope to hear from you soon, Gerry.”
There’s a smile, a small, hopeful thing as he looks at her. “Yeah, maybe you will,” he says. And then he disappears out the door.
After a few minutes, Georgie says, “We should go too. I have studying to do.”
“I have an exam in two days,” Jon groans. It feels so incredibly irrelevant now. “At the very least I don’t think I’ll be nervous for it.”
“Oh, I never am.” She grins at him, like it’s a joke. Like this is something to joke about.
They leave the building together, looking around but seeing no trace of angry… slaughter avatars? Whatever that actually means. The pain in Jon’s knee has abated to a regular bruised throbbing, and walking is uncomfortable but not a problem.
Something hits him, and he snorts to himself.
“What?” she says.
“Just wondering. Should I be worried? I just watched you give your number to another man.”
“Oh, don’t you start!” she says in mock offence. “I had to watch him tenderly bandage your injuries first! Maybe I’m the one who should be worried!”
He laughs, slips his hand into hers, wonders if he might want to kiss her. The desire doesn’t hit him often, but with the adrenaline rush fading, he might be there. On the other hand, she hasn’t quite gotten all the blood off her face and it’s a little gross. He settles for squeezing her hand.
“Next date, let’s stay inside,” he says.
She squeezes his hand back, and holds on all the way back to the dorms.