The Book of Firsts

Forty-Five

On Friday, Bran met me at the fence and once again silently conducted me inside and offered me coffee.

"How’s the wrist?"

"A bit meh. Despite holding off, I think I stressed it working on my model, so I’m just going to avoid doing anything much at all for a couple of weeks."

"It wasn’t until we saw the thing yesterday that any of us understood why the whole faculty was cooing over that bridge. I’d been picturing something far less detailed. What will you do with it now?"

"Given that they’ve already built a display case for it, I’ve donated it to the school. I’d have no table space if I tried to take it back to my apartment."

"Would you have kept it if you could? If you had a house?"

I thought about it, sipping the coffee he’d handed me. "That one, possibly. It’s a beautiful bridge. But unless I had a museum-sized house, I’d rather reserve space in it for the bridges I design."

Bran’s attention had strayed to my legs, clad in tights thanks to the relatively good weather. He’d also reverted to tights for the first time since the Three Kings had debuted their unisex uniforms, which meant that we were basically dressed identically.

I crossed my ankles and said: "Did Rin and Kyou’s parents really throw their tunics out?"

Bran smirked. "Their toes were all curled up in horror. Those branches of the family are so caught up in image." He glanced at me. "So are mine, just a different image."

"Which one is going to react worst to game development as a career?"

He shrugged, then thoughtfully slid a hand along my thigh. "Rin’s. Not that Kyou’s father won’t be furious, but Kyou’s shown signs of straying off the right path the last few years, while Rin has basically kept his mouth shut for the last decade. They’ll be blindsided right in their complacency."

"His family’s the story behind the model president façade?"

"Mostly. It gets him other things he wants—Rin has a streak of two-faced politician in him—but without maintaining that lie, Rin would have had to spend half his life being reasoned out of doing the one thing he loves. As it is, he’s got two sets of parents who are going to go apocalyptic on him. We’ve been preparing for anything up to and including the police being called ever since they wouldn’t let him sign up for music camp."

"Guess I should stop sniping at him about not showing his true face."

Bran laughed, then took my coffee cup away and pushed me down onto the couch. "I think he likes how low your opinion of him seems to be."

"My opinion of Rin isn’t low," I said, as he began to ruck up my tunic. "Rin is very fun."

"Would you like him if he really was a perfectly proper president?"

"Probably. I have a lot of time for people who are very warm and kind. They make the world a better place."

He snorted, but concentrated on stripping me, and we didn’t talk for quite a while after that. Today’s challenge was supposed to be on a table, and Bran had brought the café table indoors in apparent preparation, but ignored it in favour of enthusiastic missionary on the couch. Having prior appreciation of Bran’s powers of recovery, I didn’t make any comment, and simply enjoyed how much he’d improved, and the attention he continued to pay to my reactions. We’d also reached a point where snuggling together comfortably in the aftermath felt only natural. Once Bran had given up fighting with himself, he’d stopped taking it out on me, and now almost treated me like an old friend.

Wondering how open he’d now be with me, I asked something that I’d been curious about since yesterday. "Where did you get the instruments?"

"Mm?"

"You live all the way off in that semi-enclave suburb, but drove somewhere to get instruments that was less than ten minutes away."

"Oh. The office for our company. We keep our servers there, though it’s mainly a place for Rin to hide his ever-increasing collection of musical instruments. He’s only officially been playing the violin lately, and his parents would never believe he’s following their master plan for the rest of his life if they knew he had fifteen guitars, let alone the rest of it."

I laughed. "How many instruments does he play?"

"All of them. Just some he hasn’t spent time on yet."

"Wasn’t performing yesterday exposing himself early, then?"

"He passed it off as feeling obligated as Student Council President to help out."

"And he just happened to being completely competent playing bass?"

"I taught him, apparently." He slid a hand down my back. "And he was also willing to help me out in trying to impress my girlfriend."

"You decided displaying hickies wasn’t enough?"

"Revealing that I’m with someone was stupid of me," Bran said, bluntly. "But it’s done, so damage control is necessary. Not publicly reacting to your injury won’t be enough to get Tomas' attention off you, so we’re going to flesh out a completely fake relationship. A slow drip of details, until the whole school knows everything about my college-going girlfriend except her name."

The school forums were still melting down with the double hit of Rin and Bran performing, followed by confirmation that Bran was dating. Kyou’s few words had been embroidered almost beyond recognition, but older woman had stuck. Whether it would prevent further attacks on me was another question.

"How’s your spying progress?"

"We still don’t have his phone. That was always going to be the hardest, but he’s particularly careful with it. We’re setting something up so we can access his locker without being caught by the school’s monitoring."

"Has he done anything that you can count as evidence that he’s the attacker?"

"Other than obsessively comment about me on the forums? No."

"What does he say about you?" I asked, tracing his admirable abdominals.

"Huge manwhore seems to be the current theme, with a side order of raging ego and complete lack of manners."

"Two out of three," I murmured, laughing. "Do you think you’ll be a huge manwhore one day?"

Bran gave me an unreadable look, then stood, picked me up, and plunked me down on the café table. The surface was chilly so I squeaked, hopped immediately off, and grabbed one of the blankets to cover the table before sitting back down.

"I don’t think I’m the one with the ego problem around here," Bran said, watching me.

"Maybe," I said, consideringly. "I’m usually low-key, but I’m not that modest. I don’t know that pretending would improve me much, though." I reached out a bare foot and tried tracing his abs with a toe. "I’d offer to put on a persona for you, but my acting is fairly limited."

"And I’m not into fakes," he said, grabbing my foot. "I expected you to ask me how it felt to perform."

"I couldn’t see any sign of nerves," I said. "And by now you’re used to a slavering audience, regardless of whether you’ve a guitar in hand. So, I figured you must have found that it wasn’t a big deal."

Bran had stepped closer, experimentally lifting my foot and setting it on his shoulder. "You think you can see through me?"

"Okay, I’ll go with the story that thinking of your college girlfriend got you through it," I said, hooking my other foot behind his legs. "I’m sure she thought you had incredible stage presence, and were quite the hottest thing she’s seen…" I gasped, and took a steadying breath. "…the hottest thing she’s seen all year."

Bran clicked his tongue, but I don’t think he was displeased, since he then spent a lot of effort making me particularly limp and tired, and looked quite smug when we moved back to the couch.

"Are you going to Art Club?" he asked, arranging us in a spoon so that he could comfortably nuzzle the nape of my neck.

"No. I told Lania I’d stay away since I can’t do anything. They’re only doing a few Valentine’s Day posters, nothing major."

A small pleased exhalation told me that Bran still had plans for the remainder of the afternoon. But then he shifted so he could compare my wrists.

"It does still look slightly swollen. I’d have suggested a few rounds of Tyranny otherwise."

"Not being able to play has been the worst. I’ve been training myself to use the mouse with my left hand, and exploring ancient point-and-click adventures instead."

"Oh? Which ones?"

"Space Quest, King’s Quest, so many quests."

"Classics."

We talked old games. Bran seemed to have played everything, but was particularly interested in anything that had a strong story, since narrative was his primary focus in the games he planned to make.

"We want Echoes to be high stakes, but not grimdark," he said. "An RPG with severe consequences to some decisions and failures—more than just reloading a save and continuing on. You can bring about some rotten endings, but to balance that you can also recover mistakes, and do extra to avoid bad losses."

"Are you already working on the scripting?"

"We have been for years. Admittedly, we’ve had to abandon a lot of the early stuff, due to it being embarrassing, and also as we began to understand what we were trying to write, not to mention just how hard it is to design a game which truly accounts for player choice."

I nodded. "My dad looked into game writing once, but was scared away by the skip button. He couldn’t stand to do all that work and have it just blur by in a series of clicks."

"Write a compelling enough story and only the irredeemable skippers will miss out. Though I admit your father’s books are very readable."

My eyes widened. "You’ve been delving into Rock Hardison?"

"The prose was far better than I expected. He’s very strong with dialogue."

"He’s won awards for it," I said, finding myself pleased. "When I tell people what he writes, not many people actually go and read my dad’s books."

"If nothing else, I need to source a lot of writers for Echoes. There’ll be multiple potential romances, so if he’s looking for work in a year or so, send him our way."

That made me laugh. "Sure, if you’re still talking to me then, I’ll get my dad to write a romance for your game."

Displeasure was immediately transmitted through the whole of his body. "You haven’t given up this idea we’ll break off contact with you after this?"

"You agreed with me last time," I pointed out, a little surprised.

"And nothing’s changed?"

There was no way this could be a productive conversation. I suppressed a sigh, then decided to be up-front with him.

"I think maybe you’ll start out trying to be just friends with me. I don’t think it will work, but I’ll welcome the attempt if you three decide to go that way."

"Don’t underestimate us," he growled.

The words were firm, and so was the way he pressed me down afterwards, but the light frown he was wearing when I left told me that he was not so certain as he pretended.

But perhaps I was the one who was wrong. Rin, Kyou and Bran truly weren’t people to be underestimated. When they moved on to having girlfriends again, there would undoubtedly be a period of awkwardness, probably a gap when they avoided me, but maybe in time they would be able to treat me as a friend again. Maybe my dad would even write a romance for their game, which he’d probably enjoy a lot.

Not a future I’d bank on, but I decided to cautiously let myself hope for it.