Deviation Actions
Literature Text
Years later...
He sighed and peered through a fringe of brown hair at a five day old empty container of Cup Noodle that had rolled between his desk and the microfridge. It wasn’t as though he wanted to live alone at first, but he found that other college freshmen found his obsessions with paranormal science and alternate universe conspiracies to be a bit alarming.
This most recent room-mate, Robert maybe, set a new record. Griffin hadn’t bothered to learn the meat-head’s name, which seemed a worthwhile risk as he was moving out after a couple of weeks. To be fair, Griffin hadn’t exactly been welcoming-what with Richard-Rick-Raymund’s predatory girl-a-night habits. He honestly made it a point to accidentally walk in on the situation more than once, despite explicit instructions regarding certain garments on the doorknob. Griffin wasn’t a fan of men who made trophies out of women, and college seemed to be disturbingly full of them. It seemed he got the message.
Rich, Rocky, whatever-his-name-was bumped Griffin’s chair, rolling it plus Griffin caddy corner from the desk.
“Oops, sorry, Bro,” the muscled youth sneered.
“Whatever, douchebag. I’m trying to write a paper.”
“You mean rewrite it for the fifth time,” he chuckled. “How does a guy with no life get grades worse than me?” The R-named room-mate threw a couple more boxes on the pile with one hand and then laughed his way out of the room.
Griffin liked to write. The problem was he never seemed to have either enough of or the right kind of evidence for his professors. This most recent draft included the comment “Wikipedia is not a credible, scholarly source.” The young man rolled his odd eyes around the room. Maybe he should go to the library ... Then he spied a stack of overdue books on quantum mechanics and M-theory lying neglected under a dog eared “I want to believe” poster.
“Maybe not the library” he muttered guiltily, eyes locking on an overturned coffee cup from Uncanny Cafe downtown.
Coffee ... Caffeine sounded heavenly.
Griffin latched his abused laptop closed, scattering a slew of other red-lined papers from his other classes. He tossed the laptop in a beaten backpack with his wallet and made for the door.
The young man paused for a moment at the entryway and gently touched an old photo of him and Rory like a ritual. It was taken when both of them were small and suntanned, legs covered in sand from a near forgotten beach vacation when they used to pretend to fly like seagulls. That was before Gramma had knitted Rory that oversized scarf she favored. That was before the ocean in the sky ... before the Not-Rory walked out of the cornfield behind Gramma’s house.
Griffin made a face and launched himself out the dorm room door, practically barreling over his soon-to-be-former room mate as he returned for more boxes.
“See you later, sucker!” chided the room-mate.
“Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, $h17head,” he retorted, ducking around him like he might get hit. Once he’d cleared the door and slammed it behind him, he gave an exaggerated sigh of relief. “Good riddance.” He then hitched up his over-worn bag and made for Uncanny Cafe.
---
Uncanny Cafe was what the campus community viewed as the eclectic coffee shop. A venue for musicians, poets, and small scale theatre groups, the furniture and decor was a hodgepodge of antique meets second hand. The art showcased on the walls were rotated in and out with the range of local and student artists. Unfortunately, it was a bit hard to appreciate the contributed works with the dim, bar-like lighting, and general lack of windows.
Griffin liked to hole up in a particularly dark and dusky corner next to a door to nowhere. There was a haphazard collection of dust covered board games not favored by the crowed and a handful of molding books that should be with the lending library closer to the baristas. He liked the neglected space, with its unstable side table that carried a tippy rhythm as he sipped his coffee. Part of the larger ritual, he ordered his coffee black, whatever Fair Trade was roasted for that week.
The young man was rummaging through his backpack for the laptop when he felt eyes on him. Griffin had a regular tendency to avoid the feeling since the existence of the Not-Rory, as it most often happened when he was completely alone.
He placed the laptop on a worn cushion of the green loveseat he sat in while thinking. Uncanny Cafe, however, was a coffee shop and people were everywhere. Real people, not the kind he might imagine alone in the dark. Try as he might, he could not make himself invisible and his eyes, if nothing else, tended to attract a bit of attention from strangers.
Having disappeared down a dead-end thought trail, Griffin flinched when a hand brushed his shoulder. A shadow hovered near the door-to-nowhere. He turned, a bit too quickly, and saw the shadow fly from his eyes as though it were never there, along with a pop of purple that he wasn’t totally sure wasn’t to do with his astigmatism. Shaking his head, and sputtering “what” he found himself staring at a pair of knee-high boots, which lead up long legs to a button fronted skirt and ruffled jacket. He travelled up the ruffles, trying not to dwell on the tightness around the chest, and found himself at a copper framed face that seemed to hover on the emotional spectrum between amused and annoyed.
“That’s a new one” the woman smirked.
“How? What? Who?” Griffin clamped a hand to his head and closed both eyes. “I must have let you sneak up on me.”
“Sure, let’s go with that.” The woman, probably a freshman like Griffin, stepped suggestively around Griffin’s spread and reclined in the space next to him.
“Ugh, I am so tired of running around,” she grumbled to the air.
Griffin raised an eyebrow as she tossed her head. The hair reminded him of a deep chestnut horse, but not coarse, more like a Mucha illustration. Glancing from her to his laptop, with an army of sci-fi stickers slapped across the top, he wondered what she thought she was up to.
The woman followed his gaze and snorted. “TARDIS. God if time-travel were that simple.”
Griffin blushed, realizing he’d prejudged the woman a little. He tried to force some banter through his numb mouth. “I take it that you are having a rough week of class?”
“You could say that.” The woman gingerly picked up a steaming cup of coffee that Griffin could swear wasn’t there a second ago. He shook his head again. The cup couldn’t have blinked into existence.
The woman sipped coffee, watching Griffin from behind the lip of the cup with burgundy eyes that had to be colored by contact lenses. She glanced down again at the laptop, eyes lingering on a slapped on sticker made from one of Rory’s old school photos. She twitched her mouth, then peered into her coffee, reflecting a moment while blowing the steam away.
“I’m Alexis, by the way,” she murmured, eyes not leaving the drink. She tugged a smile from her lips and Griffin could read the false attempt at sweetness she’d mustered. He couldn’t tell whether it was because she was uncomfortable with friendliness, like himself, or just being sarcastic.
“I’m Griffin,” he muttered, extending his hand with an eye roll. He was left-handed, like his sister.
“Oh look, another leftie,” Alexis acknowledged to no one. He didn’t know why she’d bother to turn it out. Judging by her coffee drinking hand and the pause to figure out how to shake, she wasn’t left handed. “So ... Griffin ... is there a last name that goes with the epic first one.”
Griffin pushed up his glasses, a heavy pair of acrylic lenses that some other students wore to be ironic. Griffin, however, was cheap, and the frames did the job, with the occasional drama of sliding down his nose. It made it hard for him to be assertive in situations like this. “Look, you didn’t tell me your last name, Alexis.”
The red-head smiled at him like this was genuinely the best conversation she’d had all day. “Busted. I’m Alexis Ward.”
“Griffin Perkins.”
At the precise second Griffin finished stating his last name, a stream of coffee splatted him in the face from nowhere.
“Don’t give him more freckles, Gavin,” the young woman exclaimed. “He has more than his fair share!”
Then, in a blink, there he was - the strange, white-haired man who had apologized to him outside Gramma’s kitchen window. Griffin couldn’t quite tell, but was sure the man was wearing the exact same coat and scarf. The man stood, eyebrows raised and mouth open in an expression of confusion and a bit of fear like a child with their hand caught in the cookie jar.
Griffin knew that expression well. He’d made it more than a few times after being caught skulking around the library after hours.
“He just said Perkins,” the man said to Alexis. He seemed to be continuing a conversation that Griffin had not been able to see or hear. In fact, the young man was fairly sure that this white-haired individual didn’t yet realize that Griffin even knew he was present.
Gavin, as Alexis had called him, fluttered his hands in the wait, and exquisitely refined motion like a conductor of an orchestra, tempered with a twinge of nervous energy. He looked from Alexis to Griffin and back, still not locking eyes with him. “I should have seen it. He even looks like her.”
Griffin waved his hands in the man’s face and he started. “I’m right here.”
“You-” The man’s voice trailed off and he froze for a minute, fingers paused in the air like they were holding a place. Then he 180ed, spilling coffee from his cup and sprinted for the door.
Alexis lurched for him, enraged. “Gavin Bartholomew, you can’t just leave without me!” The man didn’t stop, just kept running.
Griffin gathered his wits a bit, throwing his laptop in the bag, then chasing after the man, nearly bowling over a couple coming through the door. He heard Alexis shout after him.
“Lord, you really are two of a kind, aren’t you? You won’t catch him!”
The whites of his sneakers disappeared out the door and the woman rolled her eyes, then sat and started sipping her coffee. She glanced down at the paper Griffin had left behind, picking it up between two fingers. “He seriously tried to cite Wikipedia? I’m not sure he is related to Rory.”
Part II of life with Griffin after Rory enters the Spiral. He's not given up on the idea that the Rory that returned to him isn't real, despite all the time in his world passing. Then there are some unusual happenings at a coffee shop ...
