Looking for Group

by Alexis Hall

  In his first term, they’d talked a lot about the way games have grammar. It was about the way games teach you to interact with them so there came a point when you weren’t thinking Press x to jump, you were just jumping.

  This was kind of like that.

  It felt like the bit in a game when you finally got it. When your character stopped toppling off ledges, missing jumps, and pulling out their binoculars instead of their sniper rifle.

  The bit where it felt right.

  At some point, Kit rolled him over and straddled him, and Drew gazed hazily up at him. Kit was a little glittery in the fading light. Flushed and smiling and mussed up.

  Because of Drew.

  Drew pulled him down for another kiss.

  “You know,” said Kit, some time later, “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t dark when we started.”

  Drew blinked. Kit was right. The sun was long gone, and the stars were out. “Man, it’s like playing Civ.”

  “You mean—” Kit grinned “—just . . . one . . . more . . . kiss.”

  “Yeah, I was two turns away from building a wonder.” A pause while that sunk in. “Uh, sorry, that sounded way less dodgy in my head.”

  Kit pushed the hair back from his eyes. “So . . . do you need to get to get back or do you want to . . .?”

  “No, I mean, yes, I mean, sorry, what were the options again?”

  “Do you need to go home, or do you want to come up to my room? I’ve got tap water and PG Tips.”

  It was late and Drew wasn’t sure how long the buses ran, but he really didn’t want to leave Kit. “Well, I do like tap water.”

  They got to their feet, brushed the grass off their clothes, and Kit led the way into one of the old-fashioned buildings in the middle of the park. His room was slightly nicer than Drew’s, and significantly tidier. He had a rickety bookcase stuffed with tatty paperbacks and physics textbooks, and a scarily bare desk with just a laptop gleaming in the middle of it. Everything else was standard student-issue furniture. Drew glanced warily between the bed and the only chair and, after weighing the potential for awkward, settled on the chair.

  Kit disappeared into the en suite and emerged with a University of Leicester mug full of tap water. He presented it ceremoniously to Drew, and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “This is way classier than my room,” said Drew. He glanced at Kit’s posters. One of them might have been an actual print. It was one of those old-fashioned, hand-drawn adverts where there wasn’t even a slogan, just a picture of a dude with the product, and everybody else staring at him like he was awesome. “I like your . . . uh . . . man picture.”

  “Thanks, it was the effect I was going for. I went into the shop and said, ‘Give me your finest man picture.’”

  Drew gave him a look. “No, seriously, the geometries are really interesting. It’s sort of sharp and fluid at the same time.”

  “It’s a Leyendecker.”

  Drew made the over my head gesture.

  “Sorry, I just find it intriguing. The way everyone is gazing at the man in brown, and how easily he’s being gazed at. I keep wanting to make up stories about him, but then I remember he’s just trying to sell a shirt.”

  “What about that one?” Drew pointed at the three-panel poster on the opposite wall.

  “It’s a film poster for the Back to the Future trilogy.”

  Drew gave him another look. “I know that. It says so on it. But how is it the Back to the Future trilogy. It’s just dots and semicircles.”

  Kit laughed. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  They assembled underneath the needlessly oblique Back to the Future poster, and Kit took his hand as if drawing stars in the sky. Drew stole a sideways glance at him because this felt weirdly romantic, and Kit’s lashes were really long and very gold from this angle.

  “So—” Kit drew his finger to the third dot on the top row “—we start in 1985, go back to 1955.” They followed the line to the second dot. “Then back to 1985.” They closed the circle again. “In the second movie—” they slid to next panel “—we start in 1985, go forward to 2015.” Their joined hands moved from the third dot to the fourth. “Then back to alternate 1985.” They followed the spiral round to the single dot in the second row. “And finally back to 1955 to stop Biff getting the sports almanac.”

  “Oh, I get it.” Drew pulled Kit over to the second dot on the third panel. “They start in 1955, then go back to . . . shit, like, the Wild West, whenever that was.”

  “1885,” offered Kit, wickedly.

  “And then finally—” their fingers traced the spiral to the third dot “—Marty comes back to the present. By which I mean, back before I was born.”

  Kit turned and pressed his lips to Drew’s cheek, swift and a little shy. “Do you know they’re making a musical?”

  “I really don’t do musicals.”

  “You have to. It’s part of the Gay Laws.”

  “Stop labelling my sexuality.”

  They kissed again under Kit’s no longer confusing Back to the Future poster.

  And, afterwards, they both sat on the bed, side by side, with their shoulders nudging, and their backs against the wall.

  Drew mimed casting a line into the water, and Kit laughed and did the same.

  They fished for a little while.

  Suddenly, Drew remembered something. “Shit, I haven’t done my dailies.”

  “You can borrow my computer if you like.”

  “Like, no. Seriously, no. I’m not going to sit in your room with you doing my dailies on your computer.”

  “It’s cool. I don’t mind.”

  Drew swivelled round, scurfing up the duvet. “I’d rather do something with you.”

  Kit’s eyebrows went up.

  “Not in a sex way. Not that I wouldn’t in a sex way. I mean. Um. Do you want to play a game or something?”

  “I’d love to.” Kit slid to his feet, grabbed his laptop, and came back. “I’m not sure I’ve got much that’s two player.”

  Thinking about it, Drew couldn’t remember the last time he’d played a co-op game on one screen. That was what the internet was for. But then he remembered Sanee and Steff, and their weekends playing Total War: Era Number, X-Com, and Europa Universalis. “I’ve got a couple of mates, I mean I’ve got mates who are a couple, who play strategy games together. They pause a lot and argue about what they’re going to do next. Like, ‘No, flank the catapharcts.’ Or ‘We have to core Granada.’”

  “That sounds really nice except, y’know, the arguing. And the only strategy games I’ve got are Civ and CKII, and that’s only because—”

  “—it’s secretly an RPG.”

  Kit beamed. “Aw, you remembered.”

  “So what are we going to play?”

  “I’ve mainly got RPGs.”

  “I’m good with anything. We can decide which elf to sleep with and whether the Staff of Whatever is better than the Sword of Thingamy.”

  “I think you’ll find—” Kit gave him an arch look “—that what we’ll be doing is engaging with complex moral questions through an interactive medium which will aid us in our task by helpfully highlighting all of the evil options in red.”

  Drew laughed. “Bring it on.”

  Kit fired up Steam, and scanned down his library. “The problem is a lot of these are a bit too action-heavy. Weirdly, we might be better off with something turn-based.”

  “Wait. I draw the line at musicals and JRPGs.”

  “How do you feel about retro?”

  “Isometric retro or ASCII retro?”

  “Black Isle retro.”

  “You mean the guys who turned into the company who are legendarily incapable of finishing games?”

  Kit closed down Steam, and opened the GoG launcher. “Jacob’s got me hooked on Good Old Games. Um, the site, but also games that are old, and also good. He’s kind of convinced that PC games are dwindling into the west like Galadriel, and every game worth playing was made in the
late nineties.”

  “Back when everything came on twenty CDs?”

  “Pretty much, but now you can just download them for about five dollars.” He double-clicked on a picture of an angry-looking blue man with dodgy dreads, and a tiny little cinematic popped up of an island and a storm. “This is one of his favourites, but I haven’t actually got round to trying it yet. It’s called Planescape Torment. It’s about this guy who—”

  “Kit, I’ve heard of Planescape Torment. It’s like the Breaking Bad of RPGs. People who’ve played it won’t shut up until you do.”

  “We can try something else?”

  “No, it’s cool. It’s like a gamer rite of passage, and I’ve been meaning to look at it for years.”

  On the screen, a slightly blurry zombie was pushing a slab with a grey dude on it slowly through some kind of dungeon.

  “Wait,” said Drew. “Do we start off dead?”

  “Only mostly.”

  “Hang on, what’s the pillar. Why are there skulls? Who’s that chick, and why is she on fire? Is the guy in the mirror us? Why are we a zombie? Is that the same chick and is she dead now? Is she the ghost as well? Hey, stop laughing.”

  “Sorry.” It wasn’t a very convincing apology, especially because Kit was still smiling. “I’d say it was an old-games thing, but to be honest I think it’s just a Black Isle/BioWare/Obsidian thing. You just kind of have to go with it.”

  When Drew next checked his phone, five hours had passed. “Shit, it’s nearly two. I’d better be getting back.”

  Kit pushed his laptop out of the way. “Oh my God, I’m sorry. I lost track of time.”

  “It’s that game, man. It sucks you in and it makes no sense, and the journal system is borked. And where the heck are we supposed to find someone to grow this black barbed seed for us? I mean we took it to the people in the market who specialise in growing weird plants, and they were like, no, sorry, not our bag.”

  “Yeah, I’m beginning to think the humble quest marker gets a really bad rap.”

  “I’m never complaining about having to kill fifty harpies again.”

  Kit laughed, and crawled off the bed. “It’s really late, do you want me to walk you home?”

  “Dude, if you do that, I’ll have to walk you back again, and we’ll get stuck in an infinite loop.”

  “And then we’ll have to hard reset the evening.”

  Drew felt a bit goofy, but he went with it anyway. “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “Neither would I.”

  They smiled and stared at each other.

  “Look, I could . . .” Drew began, at the same time Kit said, “Do you want to . . .” and just in case that turned into an infinite loop as well, Drew jumped straight to, “Yes.”

  He’d shared beds with people before for various reasons, but this was different. They dithered for a while about what exactly was appropriate to keep on and what wasn’t, and finally settled on boxers and T-shirts as a safe middle ground. And then Drew hopped into bed, pulled Kit’s duvet right up to his chin, and tried not to look like a complete dork.

  Kit was equipping a slightly worn blue T-shirt, which meant Drew—who wasn’t watching, honestly—got to see the curve of his spine, the shift and drag of muscles under his skin, the freckles on his shoulders. Then Kit flicked off the light and slipped into bed.

  It was a single, so there wasn’t much room to be coy. Too many limbs to sort out. Soon, they were pressed right up against each other, wriggling and kissing, and trying to find places to put their hands.

  “This is nice,” said Drew sleepily.

  Kit answered with a murmur, drowsy and content. He rolled onto his other side, and Drew very naturally curled up round him. Only slightly self-conscious because kissing and closeness and stuff had sort of . . . well . . . if Kit had ever been worried Drew wasn’t into him, he now had, um, concrete evidence he was.

  Drew was just dropping off when Kit suddenly twitched in his arms. “What’s wrong?”

  “I just realised something.”

  “Huh?” This was kind of worrying.

  “We met a guy in the hive called Mourns-For-Trees.”

  Now Drew twitched. “We should totally check that out. Can you remember where he is?”

  “I remember he was wearing green.”

  “I think I saw someone like that near the Flophouse but that might have been the weird guy who gave us the box we weren’t supposed to open.”

  “It might have been down by the Burning Corpse, or maybe I’m thinking of Amarysse. We can look tomorrow.”

  “Yeah.” Drew was smiling as he tucked his head against Kit’s neck. “We can look tomorrow.”

  Between HoL, Frisbee, and coursework, Drew wasn’t able to visit Kit in person until Thursday. They’d raided together and hung out in the game a lot, but since Drew had got used to seeing Kit and, well, touching Kit, it wasn’t quite the same.

  He was just stuffing his toothbrush and a spare pair of boxers into his laptop bag when someone banged on his door, and before he could respond, Sanee barrelled in and settled into the chair like he was camping a spawn point.

  “New Mortal Kombat. Tournament. My place. Right now.”

  Drew stared for a long moment. Then pointed at his bag o’ pants.

  “What?”

  “I’m spending the night at Kit’s.”

  Sanee shrugged. “Bring him along. There’s no better way to meet a bunch of people than to have them rip your spine out.”

  Drew was kind of aware he’d been blowing Sanee off for a week, but he was pretty invested in a romantic one-on-one evening with Kit and a retro video game. And replacing it with a violent beat ’em up and an undisclosed number of his mates was just . . . not something he wanted to do. “I’m sorry, but we’ve got plans.”

  “But do your plans involve buckets of CGI blood, creepily detailed boob physics, and the opportunity to explode heads as a thunder god in a stupid hat?”

  “Well, no,” Drew admitted. “It involves getting to see my boyfriend when I haven’t since Sunday.”

  “You saw him on Tuesday. That’s why you didn’t come to the Late Night Chillathon and Impromptu Curly Fry Pig Out.”

  “We were in HoL. And we were running dungeons with two of his friends from the guild.”

  Sanee was uncharacteristically quiet for a moment. “Mate, are you saying that you skipped the Late Night Chillathon and Impromptu Curly Fry Pig Out so you could pretend to be an elf in a video game?”

  Sanee had a point. It had been fun hanging out in HoL, but Drew had been slightly paralysed by the knowledge that other stuff was going on and he wasn’t there. Kit might have made peace with missing out, but a tiny part of Drew still thought he should be doing everything, and he could never quite shake the fear that the best experience of his life was happening right now to somebody else. “It was the only time we could do it, and Kit has a regular Tuesday night thing with Morag and Ialdir, so it was really important to him.”

  “So, you didn’t hang out with your real friends because your boyfriend wanted to hang out with his imaginary friends?”

  Drew stole a look at the time on his mobile. Sanee was clearly upset and that was stressful, but he had somewhere to be—somewhere he really wanted to be—and that was also stressful. Basically this was just stressful. “I’d already agreed, and the Tuesday thing is always a bit up in the air. Like, last week we spent about two hours debating whether to play board games or watch a movie and then didn’t do either.”

  “This is a total mischaracterisation of what happened. We played Munchkin.”

  “Dude, nobody actually likes Munchkin. It’s just bland enough that no one can strongly object to playing it.”

  Sanee gave him a wounded look. “Well, then, object next time. Don’t just go along with it, and then throw it in my face a week later.”

  “Look, I’m sorry. It was a one-off. I’m not one of those people who can’t tell the difference between real life and video games. I’m not going
to die of exhaustion in a café in South Korea.”

  “I dunno.” Sanee rocked the chair onto its back legs. “I think you might be heading that way. You used to play Mondays and Wednesdays. Then it went up to Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And you were there on Thursday and Tuesday. And it sounds like this game is most of what you do with your weekends as well. That’s not a hobby, mate, that’s an addiction.”

  Drew let the laptop bag slump to the ground. “Wow, you went there really fast. Especially when I know for a fact you put a hundred and eleven hours into Skyrim.”

  “It’s not the same. Like, if you were an alcoholic—”

  “There’s no way I’m going to be able to put up with the end of that sentence.”

  “I’m serious, Drew. I’m trying to help you here.” The chair crashed onto its front feet, as Sanee leaned forward intently. “Being an addict isn’t about how much you do something, it’s about feeling you have to do it all the time.”

  “Have you been on Wikipedia again?”

  “You’re not even going to think about it, are you? If you didn’t know I was right, you wouldn’t be acting like this.”

  “I’m acting like this—” Drew wasn’t quite shouting “—because I’m late to see my boyfriend—my real, actual, physical, real-life boyfriend—and you burst in here and called me a junkie.” He hoisted up his laptop bag again and stomped out. “Make sure the door locks when you decide you’re ready to leave.”

  He was still pretty shaky by the time he got off the bus at the Botanic Gardens. Because, actually, Sanee had been wrong when he’d accused Drew of brushing off his concerns. Right back when he’d first met Solace, he’d been worried that “she” didn’t seem to have anything in her life outside HoL and studying. And, honestly, there’d been a part of him that had secretly liked the fantasy of coming into this person’s life and drawing them out of their shell and into the real world. But now it looked like the opposite was happening.

  Drew had always been quite proud that he was a gamer who wasn’t like gamers were supposed to be. He played sports, he was not completely socially awkward, he’d had girlfriends and . . . a boyfriend. He went to the pub with his mates like ordinary people did. Yes, they sometimes talked about video games while they were there, but that just happened to be a common interest. One of the things he’d liked about raiding with Anni was that the game was a means to an end. Every single person in that guild wanted to prove that they could compete at the top level. It wasn’t about HoL, it was about the challenge. And after he’d left, it had been really nice to hook up with people who appreciated the sunsets and elves part of the game, but part of the problem with appreciating a virtual world was that you began to treat it like a real one.