Chapter Text
“You’re not going out while wearing… that, are you?”
Ryland looks down at his clothes. He doesn’t see the problem. He’s wearing his most distressed pair of jeans and his coolest shirt, surely that was perfect for a punk venue. Of course, the shirt has cat heads on a petri dish and said “meow-crobiology”. So… maybe not the right outfit, actually.
His cheeks burn and he quickly shoots a “Of course not!” at his dorm mate, Jon.
Jon, Jonathan Sims, the English major he was paired with for his semester abroad, gives him a rather unimpressed eyebrow raise. Jon is fully decked out in black jeans, a white button up, a brown vest, a leather holster belt, and has two black belts wrapped around his chest like bandoliers. He had even drawn lightning coming out of his eyes with black eyeliner.
In comparison, Ryland is very underdressed.
He quickly starts digging through his clothes. He doesn’t have that many, but what he does are still mostly packed away in boxes. He quickly grows self conscious as Jon just stands behind him, staring at his back.
“Do you need to borrow some of my clothes?” His roommate is probably trying to be helpful, but the British accent does not help him to not sound like an asshole.
“No! No, I’ve got clothes. Besides, I don’t think we’re exactly the same size.”
It’s true enough. While neither of them would ever be called bulky or muscular, Jon is thin and willowy in a way that Ryland just isn’t. Jon is also very short. Ryland stands somewhere around six feet tall while Jon is noticeably shorter than that.
Eventually, Ryland does find an outfit. He keeps his back to Jon as he quickly changes. He ends up layering two skirts on top of each other- a shin length black skirt over an ankle length green one. Over that, he puts on a green and white plaid button up, a blue vest with a celestial star pattern, and a brown leather coat. He finishes it off with his brown docs, a rosary he still has from an old foster home, and a single dangly earring with saturn on it.
He does appreciate the way that Jon swallows heavily as the other man takes in the final look.
“Good enough now?” He doesn’t even try to make his voice less snarky. Jon nods dumbly, and they head out.
—
Apparently, Jon is actually the head singer of the band playing tonight. Ryland doesn’t catch all the details, Jon seems oddly embarrassed despite allowing him to tag along. He does figure out that their band is supposed to be composed of pirates. Or maybe they’re in space?
He’s already three sheets to the wind, so he couldn’t really say at this point. He hadn’t actually dranken that much, but a pretty boy at the bar had offered him a strange pill and he’d accepted.
Like an idiot.
Now his head is swimming, and he giggles to himself as the numbness in his feet makes him feel like he’s floating just slightly above the floor.
The crush of people around him- people bumping into him, people pushing past him, people breathing in his face, body odor filling his nose… With the disconcerting, if pleasant, tingling sensation beginning to dance across his skin, the crowded bar is quickly becoming sensory hell. All of a sudden, he feels overheated. All the layers are stifling. He pushes through the crowd for the side door, tugging at his clothes as he goes. It doesn’t occur to him to look for Jon, he just needs to get outside. To get some air.
By the time he shoves himself through the side door, his coat is dangling precariously from his elbows, his vest is completely unbuttoned, and he’s torn his shirt almost entirely open. He blinks out at the alley he finds himself in, somehow more confused to go from a loud, crowded bar to the near silence of a back alley in Oxford. He almost overlooks a young man hopping out of a window in the building on the other side of the alley with a package in his hands. He can’t see clearly, and it’s dark, but he can see the man’s blonde roots showing beneath his badly dyed, black hair. He squints at the stranger, trying to figure out if he really has an inordinate amount of tattoos, or if the drugs are making him hallucinate.
The two men stare at each other in silence, and Ryland self consciously raises his arm to cover his chest with the remnants of his shirt. After a moment of squinting, Ryland is relatively certain that those are, in fact, an insane amount of eye tattoos scattered across the other man’s body. After another moment, he is almost confident in declaring the mystery package to be a book of some kind.
“Uhm, hi-” Ryland starts to speak up.
He lets out a startled squawk as a hand suddenly grabs his bicep from behind, and he blinks down at Jon in confusion as he’s yanked around to face him.
“Where did you go? Our set just finished, and I couldn’t find y-” Ryland can only sway from side to side under the onslaught of Jon’s strange brand of concern. He slowly turns to glance behind him at the stranger, which is when Jon sees him as well.
The shorter man straightens up, his chest puffing out as if to make him look bigger. “Hey! Were you breaking in-”
At that, the emo man- or was he goth?- darts down the alleyway. Ryland barely realizes that he had taken off before Jon grabs his hand and forces him to follow. Jon was shockingly fast for how short his legs were-
“Stop making short jokes! Christ, how much did you drink?” Jon bites out at him, and Ryland flushes as he realizes he must have been speaking out loud.
“Um… Not that many drinks,” Ryland mumbles, only to flinch at the scathing glare Jon mamanges to shoot him while still dragging him down various streets. “I-I did take a pill though! Don’t know what it was.”
Jon lets out a long-suffering sigh, and Ryland would muster up the brain power to feel more insulted if it wasn’t for them, at that moment, rounding a corner to see the stranger standing over a smoldering book.
The flames underlight the man’s face, throwing his features into sharp relief. It’s clear now that he has the smudged remnants of white makeup and black eyeliner on his face, and Ryland mentally files him under ‘goth’. As the man’s gaze lifts to meet theirs, he feels pinned in place like a butterfly on exhibit.
“Why on earth are you burning a book? You- You can’t just destroy knowledge like that!” Apparently, Jon isn’t quite as captivated. He drops Ryland’s hand in order to stalk up to the angry goth, his body rigid in rage. Despite the fact that the other man had just broken into a building and was some form of an arsonist, Jon gets right up into his face.
Ryland can’t tell if he’s really brave or just stupid.
While the other two start to bicker, Ryland just stands there, swaying lightly from side to side. His eyes lazily follow the flickering embers upwards as they drift into the sky. His breath is stolen in a gasp as, for the first time that night, he catches sight of the stars. He’s deep in a city, and Oxford didn’t exactly skimp on streetlamps. But he swears he can see every star and nebula and galaxy as if he were looking through a telescope. They wink playfully at him, drifting through the near-emptiness of inky space at speeds he knows they don’t reach. The stars are so bright and colorful tonight, and with his feet so numb, he feels as if he might just float away from the Earth and fall into them…
“Trust me, this is one book that the world is better off without.” The goth chuckles bitterly under his breath, paying more attention to the man actively in his face than the one standing quietly stoned in the alley entrance. Despite the fact that the book was still burning, he kicks at it, dislodging a metal bookplate that must have been on it.
Ryland can’t see what the bookplate says, not that he was looking that closely when the expanse of the night sky is much more interesting, but Jon must be able to. He suddenly goes rigid for an entirely different reason than before, his face paling more than can be healthy. In the time it takes Ryland to blink, Jon has his bicep in a vice grip once more and is beginning to drag him off again. The goth seems a bit startled at the sudden change of pace.
As Jon grabs him, Ryland is violently yanked back to Earth. He stumbles slightly, and he must be as stupid as Jon, because he struggles against him just enough to call out, “Wait! What’s your name?”
“Oh, um. Gerard. My name’s Gerard.” The goth- Gerard- doesn’t seem nearly as scary now, his shoulders having slumped slightly as soon as Jon started to march away. In fact, Ryland realizes that he’s somewhere around the same age as them. Early twenties at most. If Gerard is older than 25, he’ll eat his hat.
Which is what prompts his second, even stupider, question.
“You wanna stay in our dorm tonight? I don’t know how far away your place is.”
From the thoroughly murderous look Jon shoots him, Ryland is actually scared that he’s about to get hit. He even flinches back for a moment. But they both turn when Gerard awkwardly clears his throat. The previously intimidating man actually looks a bit nervous, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his coat and his foot kicking at the ashes of the book.
“I, um, I don’t want to intrude or anything. And we just met…” Still, there’s something in Gerard’s expression that softens Jon. Only slightly, though.
Jon lets out another deep sigh before asking, “Where is your place? We can at least walk you there if it’s not too far.”
“Oh, um, I live in Morden.”
Ryland wasn’t even very good at telling how far things were from each other in San Francisco, and he’d been living there for years. He isn’t sure how far away Morden was- if it’s a street close enough for them to walk, or if it’s a town further away. But Jon must recognize it, because he lets out a groan before acquiescing.
Jon doesn’t turn around to look at Gerard, but he does pause in his stride for just a moment. “You’re staying with us for the night. I don’t even know how you’re expecting to get to London at this time of the night.”
Ryland, who had turned around, smiles when Gerard straightens his back. A startled look on the goth’s face.
“But,” Jon adds as Gerard moves to walk on the other side of Ryland, “You will be telling me what you know about books with that nameplate.”
—
Ryland doesn’t really remember the rest of the walk back to the dorm. At some point, Gerard took hold of his other arm after he nearly bit the dust tripping over his own feet. The two men were talking heatedly over his head, but their words just felt like pleasant buzzing against his ears.
Jon had to help him out of his outer layers when they got to the dorm and unceremoniously dumped him on his own bed once he was no longer in danger of being strangled by his own clothes. Ryland curled up happily under his blankets, cuddling with the plushy of Mars that Colt, his twin brother, had bought with his first big boy paycheck. For a moment, his lip trembled as he remembered how badly he missed his twin, before the drugs stole that brief glimpse of meloncholy.
He opens his eyes just long enough to confirm that Jon had set Gerard up on a pallet on the floor before drifting off to sleep.
He isn’t aware that he’s the only one who sleeps for several hours that night. The other two men stay up talking about books, about Leitners, about Eyes and Spiders. Before tonight, Jon had blissfully pushed down his childhood trauma and pretended that there had never been a Mr. Spider. He would be angry at Gerard for ruining that ignorance if he wasn’t so hungry for knowledge. If he blushes when Gerard laughs and mutters, “Of course you’d like the Eye,” no one has to know.
By the time they both finally force themselves to sleep, they manage to agree on one thing about the Fears and the reality of the world they live in.
Ryland can’t know.