Chapter Text
Abigail wasn't the type to comment on reels. She scrolled, she watched, she occasionally sent one to a friend with no caption because the caption was implied—this is us or this is you or why does this exist—but she did not comment. Commenting meant being seen wanting to be seen, and she had spent a lot of years making sure that never happened. The internet, to Abigail, was a museum where she was a ghost in the gallery, drifting past the exhibits without leaving fingerprints on the glass. She liked the anonymity of the shadows; it felt safe, clean, and entirely within her control.
But it was 11:47 on a Tuesday, the kind of night where the silence in her apartment felt less like peace and more like a heavy, suffocating weight, and she’d re-watched the same fifteen-second clip four times. The audio over it—a melancholy, stripped-back acoustic version of a song she hadn’t heard since high school—was doing something unfair to her chest. It was digging up old things, sharp-edged nostalgia she usually kept firmly buried beneath layers of adult pragmatism and routine.
The caption on the screen was a simple, baiting prompt, the kind designed to farm engagement from lonely people lingering in the dark corners of the app: comment one of your favourite lines, and meet the person who replies by completing it.
Normally, she would have scoffed, rolled her eyes at the blatant algorithmic manipulation, and scrolled past to a video of a raccoon eating grapes. But the room was too quiet, the hour was too late, and the memory the music invoked was too vivid. She typed it before she could think better of it, her fingers moving with a sudden, uncharacteristic urgency that defied her usual hyper-vigilance.
abviant: "death cannot stop true love—"
She didn't finish it. That was the point. She sat there for a second, thumb hovering over the glowing screen, feeling faintly ridiculous—a grown woman playing a matching game in a comment section at midnight, waiting for a stranger to know the same stupid line she knew. It was an exercise in futility, really. The internet was vast, shallow, and populated mostly by people who didn't read past the headline. She almost deleted it, her finger twitching over the backspace key as a wave of sudden embarrassment hit her. What was she even doing?
Then the little notification bubble appeared at the bottom of her screen, glowing with a sudden, bright intensity, and something in her stomach dropped before she'd even opened it.
eerqateol: "—all it can do is delay it a while."
Abigail stared at it. She read it twice, the words blurring slightly as her eyes adjusted to the stark contrast of the white text against the dark mode background. A short, undignified laugh got out of her before she could stop it, the kind that startled her more than it would've startled anyone listening, because she was alone in her apartment and nobody had said anything funny.
It was such a specific line. Not the famous one from that movie, not the one everyone quoted—not the grand, sweeping declaration that made it onto t-shirts and wedding invitations. It was the throwaway one, three scenes later, delivered with a wry, half-broken smile that only mattered if you'd actually watched the whole thing and not just the parts people made reels out of. Nobody quoted that line. She'd never once, in years of loving that stupid, beautiful, tragic film, met a single person who'd quote that line back to her unprompted. It was her private sanctuary, a line she kept in her back pocket for days when the world felt too heavy, and now, suddenly, it belonged to someone else too.
Driven by a sudden surge of curiosity that bordered on compulsion, she clicked the profile.
eerqateol. There was no profile picture—just a default gray silhouette staring blankly back at her. Zero posts. Zero followers. A bio that said, in full: don't ask me to spell it, i don't know either.
Great. A ghost account with excellent taste and apparently no interest in being found. A digital phantom floating through the ether, leaving behind nothing but perfect literary references and a trail of missing vowels.
She should have left it there. That would have been the normal thing to do—the healthy, well-adjusted thing to do. It could have been a nice little internet moment, a stranger who got the reference, a fleeting spark of human connection to be forgotten by the weekend when the mundane realities of her day job took over again.
Instead, her fingers were already moving across the keyboard, fueled by a strange, caffeine-like buzz of adrenaline that she hadn't felt in a very long time.
abviant: ok but WHO taught you that line. nobody knows that line.
The reply came back almost immediately, the notification popping up at the top of her screen like he'd been sitting there in the dark, waiting for someone to ask, his phone held inches from his face just like hers was.
eerqateol: a man of culture doesn't reveal his sources.
Abigail let out another quiet breath of a laugh, her back shifting against the headboard of her bed as she settled in. The initial embarrassment was entirely gone now, replaced by a strange, competitive spark.
abviant: a man of culture doesn't hide behind a username that looks like a cat sat on your keyboard
eerqateol: i'll have you know i spent real time on that username
eerqateol: thought about it. workshopped it. this is the result of a creative process
abviant: and the process just. didn't involve vowels
eerqateol: vowels are a scam invented by people who wanted usernames to be readable
Abigail was smiling at her phone in an empty apartment at midnight, which was, she would think later, the exact moment she should have known she was in trouble. The room around her seemed to fade into the periphery, the shadows lengthening as the glow of the screen became her entire world. She didn't put the phone down for another forty minutes, her thumbs flying across the glass, trading barbs with a faceless stranger who knew the exact cadence of her favorite tragedies
Leeroy had four unfinished projects open at once, which was, statistically, about average for a Tuesday night. His tiny apartment was a physical manifestation of a brain that refused to stay in one lane for more than twenty minutes at a time. There was a vintage steel-frame road bike in three separate, greasy pieces on a blue towel by the front door because he'd decided at 9 p.m. that the derailleur needed a complete overhaul. There was a half-eaten bowl of cereal going soft on the kitchen counter, abandoned somewhere around hour two of a deep-dive video essay about Soviet architecture that he wasn't really watching anymore. There was a job application tab open in his laptop browser that had been open so long the cursor had probably atrophied in the first name field.
And there was his phone, propped precariously against a stack of heavy engineering textbooks he owned but rarely opened, playing the same fifteen-second reel on a loop because some algorithm in Silicon Valley had decided he needed to see it nine times in a row.
He wasn't even sure why he kept rewatching it. It wasn't that funny. It wasn't even that good a clip, technically speaking—bad lighting, some stranger's home-video quality, just a scene from an old movie set to a melancholy acoustic sound that had gotten popular for reasons nobody could really explain. But it had a line in it. A real one. The kind that snuck up on you when you were least prepared for it.
The caption beneath the video was a standard bit of internet bait: comment one of your favourite lines, and meet the person who replies by completing it.
He scrolled past it twice before it did that thing where a piece of media lodges itself somewhere behind your sternum and simply refuses to leave. The third time the video looped around, the music swelling at the exact same frame, he started looking at the comments. But none of them caught his attention.
He didn't weigh the digital odds of it going nowhere, didn't calculate what it meant to put a piece of himself out into a public comment section where anyone could see it and nobody had asked for it. Leeroy operated mostly on the lifelong principle that things were infinitely more interesting if you just did them, and if it turned out to be embarrassing later, well. He had a long, highly distinguished history of embarrassing himself in public. This wouldn't even crack the top ten.
He looked at the clock.—11:47 p.m., a truly unserious hour to be doing anything this sincere—and tossed the phone onto the counter next to the soggy cereal, turning back to his video essay.
He almost missed it if he hadn't turned his phone back on. He definitely almost didn't care. Except that the second his eyes caught the comment, something in his chest did a full, jarring stop, like missing a step on a dark staircase.
abviant: "death cannot stop true love—"
He knew it. Obviously he knew it. It was his comment—well, the video prompt he’d engaged with—that had drawn her out, or, well, someone's. He didn't know yet that abviant was a she; he wasn't thinking about gender or identity or the logistics of the internet at all in this moment. He was thinking instead about the sheer, statistical improbability of the fact that somebody, somewhere, at midnight on a Tuesday, had picked that specific line. Not the famous one. Not the grand, sweeping declaration that ended up on graphic tees, coffee mugs, and wedding invitations, quoted by millions of people who'd only ever seen the highlight-reel version of the film.
This was the one from the back half. The quiet one. The one that only meant anything if you'd sat through the entire story enough times that even the precise pauses between the words were memorized like sacred geography.
He grabbed the phone, his thumb flying across the glass to finish it without a single second thought.
eerqateol: "—all it can do is delay it a while."
And then he sat there. Which was, for Leeroy, an incredibly unusual thing to do. Sitting still, waiting, his phone held slightly too close to his face like sheer physical proximity would make the next notification arrive faster. He possessed approximately zero patience under normal, daylight circumstances. He'd once famously given up on a weekend fishing trip with his buddies after exactly eleven minutes because nothing had bitten yet—an incident his best friend Zach still brought up as though it were a profound moral failing rather than a completely reasonable evaluation of anyone's limited time on earth. But this—this he could wait for.
He didn't have to wait long. The three little dots appeared, danced for a second, and vanished into text.
abviant: ok but WHO taught you that line. nobody knows that line.
Something about the sudden shift to all-caps did something to him. He could hear it in his head—could hear the exact, distinct tone of voice that went with typing WHO like that. Indignant, bewildered, and delighted all at the same time, like she'd been personally wronged by how good his answer was. He grinned at his phone in the empty kitchen, a wide, bright expression that, had anyone been there to see it through the window, would have looked deeply, undeniably unhinged.
For a split second, he thought about being completely honest. He thought about typing out the whole messy truth: My mom used to put that movie on during severe summer thunderstorms because I was terrified of the noise, and she told me if I focused entirely on the dialogue I wouldn't hear the thunder. It worked every single time. Now I've seen it probably forty times, and I know the whole thing by heart, including the parts nobody quotes, including this one. I don't know why, but this line specifically has lived in my chest since I was seven years old, and I have never once told a single person that.
He didn't say that, of course. That was a massive, heavy piece of real estate to hand over to a complete stranger with four minutes into a conversation that had started because of a bad social media format. Instead, he did what he always did when something got too close to the real thing too fast—he deflected sideways into a bit.
eerqateol: a man of culture doesn't reveal his sources.
abviant: a man of culture doesn't hide behind a username that looks like a cat sat on your keyboard
Leeroy barked out a laugh at that—actually laughed out loud, the sound bouncing off the subway tiles of his backsplash. A volume loud enough for neighbors to hear, if they're paying attention. He did have neighbors, a full building of them, a whole apartment complex worth of people he mostly knew by the distinct sounds they made through the shared drywall rather than by name. He usually didn't care much about his neighbors. But the woman downstairs? God. She could be the dumbest woman in the world. He hated her. Even though the music was too quiet, she'd come and complain. Disgusting.
None of that mattered right now. What mattered was defending his username, a task he took, entirely unreasonably, very seriously.
eerqateol: i'll have you know i spent real time on that username
eerqateol: thought about it. workshopped it. this is the result of a creative process
This was, generously speaking, about forty percent true. He had, in fact, spent a genuinely embarrassing amount of time trying to come up with something back when he'd first created the burner account. It had been during a phase of his life he mostly preferred not to dwell on—a rough stretch of months where he'd desperately wanted somewhere to exist that had absolutely nothing to do with his actual name, his actual face, or the actual version of himself that people at his old job used to roll their eyes at behind his back like he couldn't tell. He’d wanted a blank slate. A place where nobody knew him yet, where he could just be funny and a little chaotic, and nobody would look at him like they were just waiting for him to mess something up again.
So, he'd literally mashed his fingers against the keyboard until something came out that felt right—less because it meant anything, and more because it meant absolutely nothing, which at the time had felt like the exact thing he needed.
abviant: and the process just. didn't involve vowels
eerqateol: vowels are a scam invented by people who wanted usernames to be readable
abviant: revolutionary. groundbreaking. truly the einstein of unreadable usernames
He was full-on grinning now, the kind of expression that made his cheekbones hurt a little, standing alone in a kitchen that smelled faintly of stale Cheerios, surrounded by bicycle components he was absolutely not going to finish reassembling tonight. This was a stupid amount of joy to be extracting from a text-based conversation with a stranger whose real name he didn't know, whose face he hadn't seen, and whose entire existence currently consisted of a clever handle and an impeccable taste in throwaway movie lines.
It didn't matter. He'd take it. He had been starved for exactly this kind of easy, low-stakes, no-history back-and-forth for much longer than he cared to admit to himself. It was the kind of interaction where nobody already had a pre-established opinion about him, where he hadn't already been sorted into whatever neat little box people liked to put him in the second they met him in person. Too loud. Too much. Great at a party, exhausting in real life. The kind of things people said with a polite smile that was supposed to soften the blow but never quite did.
With a sudden burst of reckless curiosity, he decided to push past the surface.
eerqateol: so are you gonna tell me the real reason you commented that line or are we doing the bit indefinitely
There was a pause. A noticeably longer one than before. He leaned against the counter, watching the tiny, animated "typing" indicator start, stop, disappear, and start again. He felt an entirely unreasonable amount of personal investment in whatever words were about to come out of it.
abviant: honestly? bad week. wanted to feel something that wasn't about the bad week
abviant: that line always gets me. don't know why. it's not even sad really. it's more like. a promise dressed up as a threat
Leeroy read the words twice. Then a third time, slower. Something about the way she'd put it—a promise dressed up as a threat—sat down somewhere deep inside him and made itself comfortable, the way certain sentences did sometimes. The ones that felt like someone had reached directly into a dark part of your head you never let people look at and described it back to you more precisely than you ever could have done for yourself.
eerqateol: ok that's actually a really good way to put it
eerqateol: i'm stealing that. no credit. you'll never know it was you
abviant: you say that as if i won't absolutely know
eerqateol: you're right. i'll credit you. "quote provided by a woman who's mean to me on the internet"
abviant: i'm not MEAN i'm ACCURATE. the username thing was a fact-based statement
eerqateol: cruelty disguised as journalism. classic
He kept typing, his thumbs moving with a fluid, rhythmic cadence, constantly finding new reasons to keep the thread alive past the point where any normal, casual internet conversation would have naturally wound down and drifted off into a mutual, unspoken agreement to stop. He wasn't ready for it to stop. There was something almost dangerously comfortable about how easy this was—no weight to it yet, no heavy history, nobody in the conversation who already knew what his flaws looked like and had decided in advance exactly how much of his energy they were willing to tolerate. Just him, and someone whose taste in movie quotes he already trusted more than he probably should, at—he glanced at the glowing numbers in the top left corner of his screen—12:31 a.m.
They'd been at this for the better part of an hour without either of them acknowledging the time.
eerqateol: ok real talk. bad week. you good?
He almost didn't send it. The second the blue bubble popped up, a tiny wave of anxiety hit him. It broke the precise comedic rhythm they'd built over the last forty minutes, stepped clean outside the safety of the bit, and he knew there was a very real version of tonight where that was the exact wrong move. A version where she read it as too much, too soon, from a faceless stranger with an unreadable username, and just—stopped answering entirely.
But he sent it anyway. He had always been inherently bad at not saying the sincere thing once the thought occurred to him; he always had been, no matter how many times it had gotten him laughed at, waved off, or told, gently or not so gently, that he was simply a lot to handle.
The typing indicator appeared. It sat there for what felt like an eternity. Disappeared. Appeared again.
abviant: getting there. it helps that some guy on the internet knows an obscure Princess Bride quote, weirdly
Leeroy grinned so hard his face actually ached this time. He let out a soft breath, dropping his head back against the upper cabinet behind him with a dull thud, and did not, for the second time that night, put the phone down for a very long while.