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It wasn’t until Kristen had slammed the door behind her and was trying to get her seatbelt on that Gorgug realized how little time they’d spent together, just the two of them. It wasn’t that he didn’t like hanging out with Kristen, because he did. He always had. Gorgug loved Kristen. He’d walk through fire for her, and he was pretty sure he had, unless he was misremembering one or five battles. Maybe it was venom, but for sure some dragon-shaped thing had been spitting something at him that hurt like hell. All that to say, Gorgug usually saw Kristen in group settings. The whole party was there, or the Mordred girls, or over the past several months especially Kristen hadn’t ever been seen without Riz and his campaign clipboard. But there they were, just the two of them, driving away from Tracker’s new apartment in the Hangvan.
“Thanks for picking me up,” Kristen said once she was done fighting with the seatbelt. People usually didn’t have trouble with it, but Kristen was Kristen, so Gorgug didn’t bring it up.
He just said, “No problem,” because it never was. “How’d it go?”
If Fig were there, she would’ve known exactly how to ask. If it were Adaine, she would have sipped right over questions and gone straight to analysis. Riz would’ve already known based on contextual evidence and clues he found God knows where, and Fabian wouldn’t have cared enough to ask. That was exactly why Gorgug was the wrong person to be in this situation, barring the fact that he was the only one with a car. But Kristen didn’t seem to care. She just shrugged and said, “We’re taking things slow.”
Having spent two weeks living with Kristen and Tracker in the exact van he was driving, Gorgug hadn’t seen them take anything in even a vague approximation of slow, but that didn’t seem like the supportive thing to say. Instead, he tried his best to hum sympathetically.
“He was like, I don’t think I should drive you home unless you want to make out in my car, and I was like, I wouldn’t be opposed, but slow means slow, so.” Kristen shrugged again. “You really saved my life. It would’ve been so embarrassing to have to walk home like a middle schooler.”
Gorgug took another look at her out of the corner of his eye. She seemed fine, but she’d also seemed fine when Tracker left for Fallinel, and then she’d spent the next month wrapped in a blanket cocoon. He decided not to mention that. “Do you want to go back to Mordred, or-?”
“And deal with the third degree from Aelwyn? No thank you. Anywhere else, please.”
“Aelwyn?” Gorgug asked. Just her name was question enough, given that every time he’d met her she’d referred to him by a different name. Adaine said it was on purpose, as some sort of power play, but Gorgug failed to see why someone who still called him Gregory when he came over for movie nights would care, or even know, about the awkward situationship Kristen had going on with her ex girlfriend.
Kristen explained the whole situation—Aelwyn and Tracker had gotten close when everyone else got stuck fighting Baron in the standing stones, and they discovered they had a lot in common, both being high school dropouts albeit for very different reasons, and they’d been keeping up ever since—while Gorgug drove until she directed him to turn. It seemed like she was choosing directions at random, and that was confirmed when Gorgug realized they were on the outskirts of Elmville, all the way up by the Mithral Factory. “My life has just never been this messy,” Kristen groaned, and put her head in her hands.
Gorgug let the van roll to a stop and put the hazards on, just in case. When he turned to look at Kristen, she was peeking out at him from behind her fingers. “I know this is probably the wrong thing to say,” he said slowly, “but can you explain to me how this is more messy than dying on the first day of school? I’m trying to put myself in your shoes so I can be helpful.”
Kristen dropped her hands and practically shouted a laugh in an explosive movement so forceful that Gorgug almost went for his axe. But unlike the multiple other times he’d been attacked by Aguefort students, Kristen’s laugh resolved quickly into an endearing, snorting mess, like it always did. Once she caught her breath, she said, “Dying was easy, dude. This is way worse.”
“You’re gonna have to explain that to me.”
Several deep breaths later, Kristen seemed to have regained the ability to be at least a little serious. “Dying can’t be your fault. I mean, you can make stupid decisions that lead to it, but the act of dying is like- it’s so beyond something you have control over. And then when you come back, or at least when I did the first time, I came back with purpose. I couldn’t not question everything that was going on with me. But all this shit with Tracker and the church is nothing but my fault. It’s all choices I have to make, and actions that reflect my intentions, and stuff I did wrong that I wasn’t even aware I was doing in the first place, but it’s still my problem because I did it. I’d love to die again and just… have a path laid out for me.”
Gorgug still had his hands on the steering wheel even though the car wasn’t moving, and he found he couldn’t take them off. “And you weren’t scared that none of it was real?”
“What?” Kristen asked, and Gorgug was ready to say never mind, that they should keep talking about Tracker, or Helio’s heavenly game of beer pong, but the way Kristen said it wasn’t dismissive or a path to a joke. He knew Kristen well enough to know that she was giving him an invitation to explain something he didn’t have the language for, something he doubted anyone could understand, and she’d meet him in that doubt.
“Dying wasn’t great, for me,” Gorgug said, and that was hard enough. He wanted to leave it there.
But Kristen just settled into her seat and said “Yeah, okay,” and Gorgug couldn’t not keep going.
“Dying was this thing that, like… it hurt really bad, and it was really scary, and then when I came back my life was so much better than before. I had friends, and I got a girlfriend, and I found my parents, and I was smart. I could do artificing and I had places to go on Friday nights. No one would have believed me if I told them that was going to happen on the first day of school. It was like everything that happened to me from that point on was too good to be true, or something. Like right now, how I don’t know what you say to help you feel better about what’s going on with Tracker, that feels like proof that I’m still there, you know? It can’t be real because I’m not good enough for all this stuff I have, and one day when it goes away, that’s the punishment.”
Kristen had started shaking her head halfway through Gorgug’s explanation, and she was still shaking it when she said, “Who cares if it’s real or not?”
“I-” Gorgug said, and then stopped, because he’d never really considered it. Not even in the Forest of the Nightmare King, when he’d admitted it to the air and the darkness, not even when he’d been smashed in and out of consciousness in Porter’s grip and he’s thought, this is it, the dream is about to end. “It matters,” he said finally, because he wasn’t sure what to do if it didn’t.
“If it’s real, you’re worrying over nothing. And if it’s not real, well, I think it’s really beautiful to not know and try anyways,” Kristen said. “If your life was fake, when I asked for a ride, you could’ve said no, or told me to go fuck myself, and there wouldn’t be any consequences because one day, according to you, this’ll all be erased. But you came and got me anyways. That means way more than it would if you knew all this was permanent.”
Gorgug looked at her for a second, the tie-dye shirt and tracksuit pants, the uneven haircut he knew she’d had Fig give her with nail scissors, the bruises on her elbows from tripping over nothing, and somehow all of that came together to make the greatest Cleric of their age, and quite possible the wisest person Gorgug would ever know.
She reached across the console to gently shove his shoulder. “Given my the way my love life is going right now, I have to believe second chances are real, just so you know where I stand personally. But it also means something that it’s only the good stuff about life and not the hard parts that scares you,” she said. “Kinda like how it means something that it’s the choices and not the sacrifices that scare me, and that’s why I’m in this whole situation with Tracker in the first place. And also why dying was great.”
“Shit,” Gorgug said, and he did laugh even if it was a little bit watery. “I’m sorry I turned this whole conversation about me. I was supposed to be giving you advice.”
Kristen thought for a second and said, “I think your problems gave me perspective. Plus, counseling people through doubt is supposed to be my whole thing. This was good practice.”
Gorgug reached for something to say that would move them past this conversation but wouldn’t also devalue it, or make it small. He landed on turning off the hazards and putting the van back in drive.
“I hope you’re taking us to get milkshakes,” Kristen said, and Gorgug obediently put on his blinker for the next turn. “I want to pick your brain about what it was like for the simulation to make you run into Zelda after you guys broke up so I can compare it to every conversation Tracker and I have ever had.”
And only Kristen could’ve gotten Gorgug to laugh at one of the deepest and truest fears he’d ever felt. She was also the only person who could’ve gotten him to admit that, “We haven’t really talked much, but I did see her dad at the hardware store and he kissed me on the lips.”
“He did not do that!” Kristen shouted, and then, in the same breath, “How do I get Tracker to do that to me?”
“Well, with Mary Ann, it was kind of like-”
“Oh, please tell me what it’s like with Mary Ann, I’ve been dying to know.”
They talked about girls and Quokki Pets and what Gorgug had been buying at the hardware store until they got to Basrar’s, and then they talked about afterlives and second chances and what made werewolves hot while they were there, and somehow they hadn’t run out of things to say when they got back in the Hangvan. It was dark by the time he dropped Kristen off at Mordred. She sat in the driveway with him for a little bit, the two of them finally quiet, and then she said, “You know, I’m a much better Cleric now. I’m not gonna let you die again.”
There was a lot Gorgug wanted to say, but they’d had a fun day, and he wanted to end things on an easy note, so he just said, “I know,” and hoped Kristen picked up on the subtext.
Judging from the expression on her face as she waved goodbye, she did. Gorgug drove him, for the first time in a long time, happy without worrying that his happiness was manufactured. So what if it was? It didn't matter. He chose it anyway.