Monday ran the way Mondays did, lecture, notes, a queue for coffee Daniel insisted on joining despite hating the coffee. Garrett went through most of the morning without thinking about Raymond at all, which felt like an achievement he wasn’t going to mention out loud in case saying it undid it.
When Raymond’s voice did surface, uninvited, somewhere between two lectures, it came back exactly as it had been said. Know your place. Stay in your lane.
Garrett still felt the gap between himself and people like that, the car, the certainty, the way rooms rearranged themselves slightly when Raymond or Brian walked into one. That hadn’t changed overnight and he wasn’t about to pretend it had.
What had changed, in some small and specific way he couldn’t quite name yet, was that he’d started wondering whether Raymond actually got to decide where that place was. Not loudly. Not as a plan. Just a low, persistent itch of a question he hadn’t had a week ago.
He saw her outside the humanities building, early afternoon, part of a loose group spilling off the steps into the sun. Brian was there, easy as always, saying something that made two people laugh. Emiliana stood slightly apart from the centre of it, arms folded loosely, half-listening.
Garrett didn’t cross over. There was no reason to, no key this time, no Daniel needing to find someone, nothing that would make walking up to that group anything other than exactly what it looked like. He wasn’t going to manufacture a reason just to manufacture one.
He kept walking, close enough to register the group without slowing down for it.
Emiliana’s attention drifted, the way attention does in a conversation you’re only half in, and landed on someone crossing the path a little further off.
It took her a second longer than it should have to place him. She had noticed him.
Then it clicked, and with it came the corridor, the flicker of the strip light, the spider, the sound she’d made that she was fairly sure nobody was supposed to have heard, and the one flat word he’d said afterward that had somehow made the whole thing worse and better at the same time.
She looked away before she’d finished the thought, back toward Brian, nodding at something he’d said without having heard most of it.
Garrett caught it from the edge of his vision, the half-second where her eyes had found him, and the faster half-second where they’d found somewhere else to be instead.
His first thought wasn’t anything close to she likes me. It was smaller than that, and stranger for being smaller.
She remembers me.
A few days ago he hadn’t been sure Emiliana Vane knew he existed as anything more than a name the System had put in front of him. Now there was proof, small and involuntary, that she did.
He had no idea what the look-away actually meant. That uncertainty sat there, unresolved, and he let it.
He thought, for about four seconds, about walking over. Introducing himself properly this time, without a spider doing the introducing for him. Even just a nod, something low-effort enough that it couldn’t be misread as anything.
He didn’t do any of it.
Not because he’d suddenly become strategic about it, mostly because forcing a second moment directly on top of the first one felt like exactly the kind of thing that would ruin whatever the first one had actually been. Whatever had just happened didn’t need him showing up to explain it. It could just be what it was.
By the time he’d actually walked past the group, he’d landed on a less flattering read of the whole thing.
Fantastic First impression: guy who witnessed a spider humiliation.
That tracked, if he was honest. Nobody wanted a repeat performance of a moment where they’d lost their composure in a badly lit corridor. If anything, the look-away probably meant exactly what it looked like, not interest, just the specific discomfort of being reminded that someone had seen you flinch.
Chime.
[HOST HAS IDENTIFIED A POTENTIAL SOCIAL PROBLEM.]
He waited.
[SYSTEM IS CURRENTLY OBSERVING.]
"That’s helpful."
[SYSTEM AGREES.]
He put the phone away and kept walking.
He didn’t loop back. Didn’t linger near the humanities steps hoping for a second look. The rest of his afternoon went the way afternoons usually went, lecture, a stop at the shop for something to eat, the walk home he’d done a hundred times before.
Whether she liked him yet wasn’t really the point, and he was aware enough to know that. He’d barely spoken to her. What had actually changed, in the smallest possible way, was the distance between them. She knew the guy from the corridor now, even if she didn’t know his name. He knew more about her than a crowd and a name, even if that still wasn’t much.
Small. Real, though He didn’t need it to be bigger than that yet.
Brian watched the whole thing happen without really meaning to.
He’d been mid-sentence, some story about an Elderly man not having it with him at a store yesterday, and had clocked Emiliana’s attention slide off him and onto something behind his shoulder. He hadn’t thought much of it, people’s attention slid all the time, that was just how conversations worked when you weren’t the only thing happening in someone’s field of vision.
What made him actually turn and look was the speed she pulled it back. Too fast. The kind of fast that made him curious, though Brian couldn’t have said why.
He followed the angle she’d been looking at and found a guy walking past at an unremarkable pace, hands in his pockets, not looking at their group at all. Nothing about him screamed for attention. That was, if anything, what made it interesting, Emiliana got looked at constantly and had spent long enough dealing with it to perfect the art of not noticing any of it back. She didn’t usually react at all. Brian had never once seen her look at someone, recognize them, and immediately look away.
She’d just done it.
He didn’t say anything about it in the moment, filed it, the way you file most things that don’t quite add up yet, and let the conversation carry on around him.
Later, once the group had thinned out and Emiliana had peeled off toward her next lecture, Brian caught one of the others still hanging around.
"Who’s that? Bloke that walked past earlier, dark jacket, was with someone by the humanities steps last week too."
The lad shrugged. "Umm...you mean Garrett? Think that’s his name. He’s mates with Daniel, the one who did the placement at Ashcombe."
"Garrett," Brian repeated, mostly to himself.
"Why, what’s up?"
"Nothing." Brian was already looking somewhere else, the way people do when they’ve decided a thing isn’t worth explaining yet. "Just wondered."
He didn’t ask Emiliana about it. He wasn’t even sure yet that there was anything to ask. But he filed the name away somewhere he wouldn’t forget it, the same careful, unhurried way he filed most things that might matter later.
Garrett.
For now, that was all it was.
Garrett crossed paths with Raymond once more before the day was out, near the affairs entrance, close enough that neither of them could reasonably pretend not to have seen the other.
Neither of them said anything.
Raymond’s eyes found him for a second, flat and assessing, the same look he’d worn in the corridor two days ago.
Garrett held it. Not for long, a beat, maybe two, nothing dramatic about it, but he didn’t look away first, and he didn’t hurry past the way he might have a week earlier.
Raymond kept walking. So did Garrett.
It was nothing, really. A held look for a second longer than strictly necessary. But he noticed himself noticing it, the specific fact that Raymond’s words were still sitting somewhere in his head and yet hadn’t been enough, this time, to make him look at the floor first.
That evening his phone lit up once, quiet about it, no fanfare.
[OBSERVATION RECORDED.]
[EMILIANA VANE HAS CONFIRMED RECOGNITION OF HOST.]
[REQUIREMENT 1: BECOME SOMEONE EMILIANA VANE REMEMBERS.]
[PROGRESS: CONFIRMED.]
No number attached. No reward. Just confirmation, sitting there plainly, like the System had decided this one didn’t need dressing up.
[HOST HAS ALSO SUCCESSFULLY AVOIDED FORCING AN UNNECESSARY INTERACTION.]
"You’re making that sound like an achievement."
[BASED ON HOST’S HISTORICAL PERFORMANCE, IT IS.]
Garrett put the phone down, mostly satisfied, entirely unaware that somewhere across campus a name he’d never bothered learning had just started keeping track of his.