Looking for Group

by Alexis Hall

  Drew was about thirty-percent mindlessly angry, thirty-percent sorry, and forty-percent really not sure what the hell was going on. Now he was here, now they were both here, he realised he didn’t have a clue what to say. In the end he went with, “Uh, hi.”

  Kit looked up. They might have both been there in practice, but he seemed a million miles away. “I’m kind of in the middle of something here.”

  And, with that, he went back to texting.

  Drew was now seventy-percent mindlessly angry and about two-percent sorry and fuck knew about the rest. “For fuck’s sake, Kit. Do you even want a boyfriend and friends? Or do you want to sit alone in your room playing HoL for the rest of your life?”

  “Right now, I just want you to leave me alone.” Kit’s thumbs skimmed ceaselessly across the gently glowing surface of his smartphone. “And I’ve got friends.”

  Drew literally threw his hands in the air in frustration. “Holy crap, for the last time, they are not your friends. They are just people you play a video game with. And when you stop playing that game, or if anything happens that they don’t want to deal with, you will never hear from them again.”

  He’d started strong but, for some reason, all his anger was draining. And now he was just sad. Really fucking sad. “I raided with Annihilation three times a week for three years and the moment I stopped being what they needed me to be, that was it. I haven’t had so much as a whisper from any of those . . . from any of them.”

  “I’m sorry that happened to you, and I’m sorry it’s made you so upset.” Kit didn’t sound all that sorry, and as Drew was getting sadder, he seemed to be getting colder. “But you do realise the reason it happened is that everyone in Anni thinks about HoL the same way you do? That the game isn’t real, that the people aren’t real. That you have no obligations and nothing to offer each other except your DPS and your raid buffs.”

  “That’s . . . I mean . . . I . . .” Nope. Not happening. There were thoughts and feelings and stuff, and Drew had no idea what any of them were.

  “And what I really don’t get is how you can have gone through that and experienced firsthand how shitty it is and still be so keen for me to do the exact same thing to other people. People, by the way, who have actually been there for me when I’ve needed them. Been there for me in a way that nobody else ever has.”

  “Okay but . . .” Drew rallied slightly. He wasn’t sure how he’d got quite so swept off course, but he was sure he had genuine grievance. Somewhere. “That’s no excuse for blanking our mates when we’ve gone round their house for the evening.”

  “Drew, I’ve known them a month. I like them, but they’re your mates, not our mates. I didn’t mean to be rude, but I told you something came up.”

  “What? What came up that was so important that you had to wreck everybody’s evening?”

  “You remember that poet Tiff was seeing? They got drunk and hooked up last week and now there’s a performance poetry thing she’s done all over Facebook, and it’s all about Tiff, and it’s really horrible, and she’s really upset about it, and she needed someone to talk to, and Jacob’s got kids, and if I’d found out about it earlier I’d have cancelled, but we were already at Sanee and Steff’s, and frankly, you’ve made me so fucking self-conscious about my friends that I didn’t feel I could tell you about it.”

  Drew hit one-hundred-percent sadness, crushed under this horrible mess of loss and failure. The only thing worse than sucking at something was sucking at something you thought you were okay at. And up until now, he’d thought he was an okay boyfriend. “You know you can tell me anything,” he mumbled.

  “No, I really can’t.” Kit drew in a shuddery breath, and Drew realised he was close to tears. “I loved being with you and some of the time you made me feel amazing and cared for and sexy and wanted. But you also made me feel wrong and broken and like I was letting you down.”

  Drew stared at him in horror. “I don’t think that. I’ve never thought that.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Because you acted like you did. You got so hung up on HoL, and it was like you wanted to replace my friends with your friends. Like you were doing me a favour. But you just don’t get it. Jacob and Tiff and even Bjorn have been my best friends since I was fifteen. When I met them—even if it was just in a game—I stopped being lonely. I stopped feeling like I didn’t fit anywhere. It was when I first realised it was okay to just be me and people would like me for it.”

  “I like you too,” put in Drew pitifully.

  “I know, and when I first met you, it was like the final piece of the puzzle. Like there was this great guy who got me and didn’t want me to be different. Except then you did.” Kit pushed a lock of hair out of his eyes. It glinted gold in the light from the bus stop. “And the worst of it is, I liked you so much that I tried to be different.”

  Drew’s sadness had decreased by about ten percent, but only to make way for crippling fear. “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean . . . like, any of this. Can we talk about or fix it or—”

  The bus turned the corner and rumbled to a stop in front of them, all cartoon bright and empty. Drew glared at it as if he could force it away again with the power of his mind.

  “Please, Kit?”

  He shook his head. “I’m done being with somebody who makes me feel bad about myself.” He climbed the steps and swiped his bus pass.

  He didn’t hesitate. Didn’t even look back.

  The doors closed, and the bus pulled slowly away.

  Drew wasn’t sure what to do or where to go or even where to look, but he was pretty sure he’d just been dumped at a bus stop. He started walking and, on a kind of autopilot, found himself back at Sanee and Steff’s. After a moment of staring blankly, he rang the bell and Sanee buzzed him up.

  The evening had clearly been legit ruined. Andy and Tinuviel had left, Steff had gone to bed, and Sanee was in the middle of washing up when Drew let himself in.

  “So, we’re thinking of getting T.I.M.E. Stories,” said Sanee, scrubbing away at a baking tray. “Except the whole only-play-it-once thing feels like it’s taking the piss.”

  Drew wedged himself into the doorway of the tiny kitchen and burst into tears.

  There was something a bit panicked about the rigid set of Sanee’s back, but he turned round and clumsily tugged Drew into a soapy hug, thumping him slightly aggressively between the shoulder blades in the universal signal for I’m hugging you but that doesn’t make me gay. “Aww, mate.”

  Drew squeezed and sniffed and cried some more. And, after a moment or two, Sanee helped him into a chair, rolled off the Marigolds, and sat down opposite.

  “Aww, mate,” he tried again.

  Drew wiped his eyes. “I really fucked that up.”

  “Honestly, it could have gone better. But couples fight. It’s what they do.”

  “This was way worse than a fight. I’ve been a really shitty boyfriend, and now Kit thinks I want him to be someone else.”

  “That’s bollocks. You’re obviously totally into him. I mean, dude, you went gay for the guy.”

  “I didn’t go—” Drew put his head in his hands. “Look, that’s epically not the point.”

  “Sorry. I just meant you look like quite a good boyfriend to me.”

  “Yeah, that was kind of the problem. I was so focused on what you guys would think—about me and him and fucking HoL—that I totally ignored what Kit wanted.”

  “What’s HoL got to do with anything?”

  Drew gave him a genuinely dumbfounded look. “What . . . the . . . actual . . . hell? You’ve been taking the piss out of me for playing this game since I met you. You told me that you thought we were at risk of getting literally addicted to it. And that Kit’s behaviour was abnormal and unacceptable.”

  “Whoa, whoa.” Sanee held up his hands. “Don’t put this on me. I was just winding you up. It’s what mates do.”

  “Mates also care about what their mates think. And it didn’t sound like you we
re winding me up. It sounded like you meant every word of it.”

  “I was just, like, saying stuff. Everybody takes the piss out of HoL. Even people who play HoL take the piss out of HoL.”

  “Well, maybe we shouldn’t. Maybe we should just accept that we like what we like.”

  “I never said not to like it.” Sanee sounded faintly offended. “And if I’d known you were really bothered, I would’ve left it alone.”

  “Why would I not be bothered by you constantly ripping the shit out of something I really enjoy doing?”

  “Drew, I’m a skinny Asian dude who’s had one girlfriend in his entire life. I have all of two friends. You play actual sports. You can talk to girls and, as it turns out, boys. Being a nerd is basically optional for you. So why the hell would you be bothered by anything I say about anything?”

  “Because you’re my best mate, you colossal douche. Of course I care what you think about stuff.”

  There was a long, mutally confused silence. Sanee was the first to break it.

  “You’d better not be angling for another hug.”

  Drew was too busy putting his brain back together for the thirteenth time that evening. There were only so many glimpses into other people’s worlds a guy could take.

  “You do realise,” he said slowly, “that while you may technically have only had one girlfriend, you and Steff totally win at the relationship thing. You’re blatantly the happiest people I know. And this two-friends thing is crap because none of us would be hanging out together if it wasn’t for you. Also you’re annoyingly smart and you’ll probably be running EA in like five years’ time.”

  “Fuck you, I would never work for EA.” Sanee grinned. “Also, you’re right. I’m way cooler than you.”

  Drew gave him a slightly feeble smile.

  “So anyway—” Sanee made an awkward gesture “—now we’ve established which of us is best, and that it’s definitely me, what are you going to do about, y’know, Kit and stuff?”

  “I dunno. I thought I might just sit here for a bit. And then go sit at home. And then maybe never speak to another human being ever again.”

  “You could do that. Or we could try to fix it.”

  “I tried. I said I was sorry, I said I’d do better. And he got on a bus anyway.”

  Sanee sat forward excitedly in his chair. “No, no, no, dude, you have to understand. Sometimes chicks . . . and, uh, also probably dudes—”

  “You know, you could just say people.”

  “Dispensing wisdom here. Sometimes when you’ve really upset a person, you have to wait a bit so when you say sorry, they’ll believe you. Otherwise it’s like you’re just saying it to get them to calm down and do what you want.”

  “So let me get this straight. Your plan is do nothing. Then do the same thing again and hope it goes better. Wow, I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.”

  Sanee shrugged. “Well, you could go stand outside his window with a boom box if you like, but I’m pretty sure romance has moved on since the eighties.”

  “So I should stand outside his window streaming Spotify on my phone?”

  “Honestly, mate, I think that’d just annoy him.”

  “No offence, but you are really bad at this.”

  “Look, all I’m saying is that you need to find a way to apologise to him that will show him you’re actually serious. Basically, you should do something that shows him you don’t think what he thinks you think. Whatever that is.”

  To Drew’s surprise, for what felt like the first time that evening, something made sense. He didn’t quite know exactly what he was going to do, but he knew how to start. “Thanks.”

  “No problem. Should I make up the futon?”

  And Drew nodded, not quite wanting to be alone in his room with his thoughts and his laptop.

  The next day he woke up with a slightly bad back from the futon, and a plan he’d thrashed out in the small hours of the morning. He’d been thinking a lot about what Sanee had said and what Kit had said, and his time with Anni and his time with SCDD, and he’d come to the conclusion that he’d spent far too long worrying about stuff that was basically meaningless. He’d thought he left Anni because he didn’t want to be the sort of person who got angry about a virtual axe in a video game, but actually he’d left Anni because he’d finally realised that nobody there cared about anybody else.

  And he thought he’d been worried that Kit spent so much time in HoL because he wasn’t happy, when really he’d been worrying about—what exactly? What his mates would say? What his old guildies would have thought? The judgement of an anonymous cloud of strangers he vaguely thought of as “everyone.” And wasn’t that the stupidest thing of all? He’d been so down on Kit for caring about people he rarely met in person, but Drew’d spent all this time obsessing about the opinions of people he hadn’t met at all and who probably didn’t even exist.

  When you got right down to it, killing imaginary pigs with a bloke who lived on a different continent was no worse or sillier a way to spend your evenings than throwing a piece of plastic around with a bloke who lived down the corridor. The really silly thing was that he’d ever believed there was a difference. As long as you cared about what you were doing and who you were doing it with, then it didn’t matter if you were in a pub or your living room or on a virtual rock in an imaginary kingdom in a video game.

  And now he just had to show Kit he’d finally got it. But he couldn’t do that without help. Unfortunately, the people best placed to do that probably had good reason to believe he was an irredeemable prick right now. Nevertheless, he used Sanee’s wi-fi to log on to the guild forums and send a PM to Jacob. He would have asked Tiff as well, but given what Kit had told him last night, he really didn’t think she needed to be bothered with his problems right now.

  Then he folded up the futon, gathered his belongings, and hurried back to his room. He took a quick shower and pulled on his serious gaming tartans, before turning on his computer. Technically, he should have been at a lecture, but frankly he was in no fit state to sit through a long talk on visual design.

  This was more important than his degree. This was more important than pretty much anything.

  Jacob had already messaged him back with some ideas and promised to catch him before the raid to help with Operation Say Sorry For Being A Dick. Inspired by Jacob’s unending enthusiasm for obscure HoL trivia and the fact he hadn’t said anything about the plan being pointless, terrible, or doomed to fail, Drew logged into HoL.

  What with it being before lunchtime on a weekday, the guild was basically dead. Mordant seemed to be around doing whatever it was he did when he wasn’t raiding, and there were a couple of others Drew didn’t really know that well. He said hi for the sake of politeness and hit the auction house, where he picked up a [Delightful Red Bouquet] for slightly more in-game gold than he was really comfortable spending on something he would have been unable to avoid acquiring for free during the Valentine’s event. He lost about an hour browsing for other cool stuff Kit might like, but it was all either far too common or far too expensive. He did, however, grab some [Very Romantic Fireworks] and a bottle of [Overpriced Elvish Wine] and stashed them in his inventory along with the [Elegant Tuxedo] Kit had tailored for him.

  Then he jumped on an airship and flew between continents to the mighty underground city of Koboldeep. While he was hunched in the prow, waiting for the load screen to pop up, he experienced an unexpected rush of affection for this strange, invented, and occasionally hard to navigate world he shared with so many people he’d never meet.

  The long-awaited loading screen appeared and flashed away again and the airship juddered to a halt at the top of a rickety tower outside of the kobold capital.

  You have discovered Koboldeep.

  Jacob had pointed him at this place. Apparently an obscure quest in one of the game’s least popular dungeons would supply him with a vital component for any big romantic gesture. He horsed-up and galloped through the twist
y, steampunk-inspired streets of Koboldeep until he found the swirly portal entrance to Koboldeep Deeps. As far as he could tell, the kobolds used to be slaves to the orcs, and they’d worked in this big mine, but they’d used their technological know-how to build giant warbots so they could fight back. And now the robots had gone nuts and they needed level thirty-four to thirty-eight adventurers to sort them out. Being level ninety and the best-geared tank on the server, Orcarella basically flattened in there.

  It was still a bit of a pain to navigate because it was from vanilla, when they’d designed dungeons to feel like places that might actually exist instead of places it might actually be fun to visit in a video game. As Ella jogged through the corridors, trailing about thirty malfunctioning death bots, none of them capable of harming her, Drew realised he’d got used to playing in company. Kit would have wanted to stop and look at all the giant wheels and steam vents, and Jacob would probably have known all the lore ever, although Drew suspected the lore for this place wasn’t much more than “there were some robots, they went evil.”

  Following Jacob’s instruction, he ducked down an easy-to-miss side tunnel, where he found a small, cowering kobold called Sir Yips-a-Lot, who gave him a quest called I Like Big Bots And I Cannot Lie. It involved fighting an endless conveyer belt of giant warbots, which would have been a massive pain to do at level, but which Ella handled with little more than Circles of Corruption and patience. Eventually Drew had harvested the required number of [Intact Warbot Crankshafts] and returned to Sir Yips-a-Lot for his reward.

  He couldn’t be bothered to actually finish Koboldeep Deeps, so he activated his bindstone and bamfed back to the City of Stars. From there, he jogged down to the docks, where he recognised the high elf that his medusa had snubbed. There was another ship farther along, which Drew remembered from back when he first started playing. It was a huge longship crewed by angry-looking teddy bears and it took players to what, a few years ago, had been the brand-new continent of Nifelbard, home of the Asbjorn and the Cult of the World Serpent. He hopped aboard and waited for it to depart.