Hold the Fort

"Always do a full sweep before you break the rules. The sweep is the part where you win."

The key went into the front door. The front door opened. I pushed it shut behind me with my shoulder because my hands were full of backpack, and I stood in the hallway for a second, listening.

The house was quiet.

Not quiet the way the house was quiet at five-forty-three in the morning. Quiet the way the house was quiet when there were supposed to be people in it and there weren't. Mum's radio wasn't on in the kitchen. Nothing was on the stove. The hallway had the slightly wrong acoustic of a room that wasn't currently being lived in, and I stood in it for another second, and I filed the quietness under interesting and left it there.

My bag went down by the bench near the front door.

I walked down the hallway. On the way past the living room I glanced at the small desk against the wall where the computer lived, and the idea arrived, fully formed, in the way ideas arrived when the universe had lined up in your favour and was waiting to see what you were going to do about it.

League of Legends.

Nobody home. The computer right there. Forty minutes for a match, maybe fifty with the pre-game screens. Mum's rule about computer use outside of homework — the rule specifically designed, I had always assumed, to prevent exactly this kind of rare and beautiful alignment — was not currently in force because nobody was currently in the house to enforce it.

I paused in the hallway.

I am not, by nature, a man who acts before he has checked. This is, I would argue, one of my more underrated qualities. Mum had a habit of being places I did not expect her to be — the laundry, the pantry, the small corner of the garden between the hills hoist and the lemon tree where she communed with her vegetables — and the consequences of launching an illegal League session and then discovering that she had been folding sheets in the laundry the whole time did not bear thinking about. The consequences of not checking, weighed against the minor embarrassment of checking, were not equivalent. Not remotely.

I decided on the full sweep.

First, though — Nibbles.

I pushed open the door of my room. The smell came up to greet me the way it always did. Books, body spray, warm electronics. Nibbles was up on his wheel, perched in his customary attitude, which was the attitude of a creature who knew he was about to be spoken to. I crossed the room and crouched down.

"Mate."

He turned his head very slightly. Nibbles's head-turn was about a quarter of the rotation any other animal would have done, and it meant the same thing a full turn would have meant in another animal, which was proceed.

"So here's the thing." I unlatched the cage and put my finger through the bars for him to investigate, which he did with the thorough professionalism he brought to all investigations. "Mum and Dad aren't home. I'm going to play League of Legends. I am going to play it on the computer in the living room. I am telling you this now because I need you to know the plan, in case anything goes wrong and I have to claim an alibi, in which case I will return to this bedroom and we will pretend I have been up here the whole time. Are you with me."

Nibbles sniffed my finger.

"I'm going to take that as a yes."

I scratched the top of his head with one knuckle. He tolerated the scratch the way he tolerated most attention, which was to say he tolerated it for exactly the length of time I was prepared to give it and then wandered away. I watched him amble across the cage floor to his food bowl. I latched the cage.

"Hold the fort."

Back out into the hallway. The sweep.

The laundry was empty. The door to the laundry was half-open, the washing machine quiet, a small pile of folded towels on top of the dryer that Mum must have finished before she went wherever she had gone. I did not pause in the laundry. The laundry was confirmation, not a finding.

The kitchen was empty. The kettle was cold when I put the back of my fingers against it — not freshly boiled, not even recently boiled. No cups on the drying rack with fresh water droplets on them. No sign of a snack in progress on the counter. Mum was a woman who left small archaeological traces wherever she went, and the kitchen had none of them from the last hour or so.

The dining room was empty. The dining room was always empty except at tea time, so the dining room was a less informative data point, but I ticked it off anyway. The formal living room — which was the room nobody ever lived formally in, because nobody in the house was, by my observation, formal — was empty. The far end of the hallway past the dining room was empty.

Which left Mum and Dad's bedroom.

I stood outside the door for a second.

Mum and Dad's bedroom was a room I entered roughly twice a year. Once at Christmas, because Mum liked all of us in the same photo and the early-morning Christmas photo had to happen before anyone was dressed, which meant it had to happen in their doorway, and once at whatever other occasion the year produced. Their bedroom was not forbidden so much as unexplored. Like the deep sea.

I pushed the door open.

The bed was made. Not Mum-made, which was hospital-tight; this was a quicker, this-morning make, the kind she did when she was in a hurry. The duvet sat slightly crooked at Dad's end. The pillows were stacked the way Mum always stacked them, two big, one small. Mum's side of the bed had a book on the nightstand, face down, which was not how she treated books most of the time and suggested she had put it down quickly. Dad's side had his reading glasses and an empty mug.

The dresser. Mum's perfume, which was the perfume she'd been wearing my whole life and which smelled, in this concentration, more like Mum than I had ever realised — I had always thought of Mum as smelling like cooking, and it turned out Mum smelled like Mum, and the cooking smell was something she put on on top. I filed this under interesting. A small jewellery dish with a pair of earrings in it. Dad's wedding ring, which he always took off for work because he was a mechanic and he had seen things happen to fingers that he did not intend to experience personally.

I did not touch anything.

I crossed to the ensuite door and looked in. Empty. The shower was dry. The towel on the rail was the same towel from this morning, still slightly damp but not recently damp. A single hair of Mum's on the edge of the sink — a forensic detail I chose not to dwell on. I got out of the ensuite and out of the bedroom and pulled the door shut behind me with the particular quiet a person uses when closing a door they never got formally permission to open.

Back to the kitchen.

Out the back window — not the back door, because opening the back door created noise and I had committed at a subconscious level to leaving no evidence of my movements. Just a look. The garden was empty. The hills hoist was empty. The vegetable corner was empty. The chair by the back step where Mum sometimes sat with a cup of tea was empty, and the cup that was usually there — on days when Mum was out but had recently been in — was not there.

The coast was clear.

The verdict was in.

I allowed myself a grin that I would not have allowed myself around anybody who knew me.

Kitchen. Biscuit tin. The tin lived on top of the fridge on the theory that height equalled unreachability, which was a theory that had applied when I was ten. I reached up, got a grip on the lid, levered it off. Oats. Sugar. The specific home-cooked smell of Mum's Anzacs. Two in the left hand, one in the right for the walk back, one more in the left hand for immediately, because if Mum was going to be cross about biscuits she was going to be equally cross about one biscuit and four, and I had a working theory of cost-benefit in these matters.

Back to the living room. Down at the desk. Headphones on.

League loaded the way League always loaded, which was slightly too slowly for the amount of anticipation I always brought to it, and I ate one of the Anzacs while the team screen came up. My character queued. The match loaded. The usernames of four strangers came up alongside mine. Timnatus. MagpieSon. Glurg1977. Someone whose name was just the string asdfasdf. I rolled my shoulders and stretched my fingers and got in.

The first skirmish went the way first skirmishes usually went. Timnatus rushed. MagpieSon tried to support. Glurg1977 was somewhere doing something that appeared, from what I could see, to have no connection to the actual game being played. I held my lane. I held it well, in fact. The biscuit in my other hand went to pieces because I kept forgetting it was in my other hand, and crumbs collected on the keyboard, and I noticed them and did not stop.

The rhythm took over. There was a thing that happened when a game was going well where the ambient room receded and became a grey area at the edge of your vision while the screen became the whole world. The kitchen clock became a thing that was not currently happening. The quiet of the house became a thing that was not currently happening. The biscuits that were now, I noted distantly, almost finished became a thing that was not currently happening. The lane, the character, the specific decision about whether to push or hold, the specific decision about which ability to hold back for the next engagement — these were the things that were happening.

Then Timnatus did something stupid.

Timnatus did something not just stupid but aggressively, specifically, trained-in-being-stupid stupid. Timnatus walked into a fight he could not win, lost it immediately, and by losing it put my character into a position where my next thirty seconds were going to be spent scrambling to keep the damage from spreading. My fingers were already moving. The part of me that could think in complete sentences was shouting at the part of me that could play the game, and the part that could play the game was not listening because it had other things to do.

"Ah, you freakin' imbecile," I said, and I said it louder than I had meant to say it, because the headphones were on and the headphones had the specific muffling effect that made you misjudge your own volume, and the words came out of my mouth at a volume that would have been correct if I'd been on the other side of a football field.

My fingers kept moving. The damage was containable. The damage was possibly not containable. I was going to find out in the next five seconds which it was.

A hand came down on my shoulder.

It came down hard. Not painfully hard — the kind of hard that meant I am here, and you did not notice me arrive, the particular emphasis a person gives to a grip when they have decided they are going to enjoy the next half-second of your life more than you are.

Every muscle in me went off at once.

"Crap —"

The chair went back. The headphones came off my ears at speed and stopped at my neck on the cable. My right hand, which had been in the air holding the last quarter of an Anzac, sent the Anzac sideways in a small shower of crumbs that hit the desk and the keyboard and a specific cluster of them that came to rest on the mousepad. My left hand had already gone defensive across my chest in the instinctive way a left hand goes defensive when the body has decided, without consulting the brain, that the situation has become a fight.

Behind me, a deep laugh.

The kind of laugh that was enjoying itself.