Chapter Text
Conrad Fisher
Conrad Fisher was dreading the first day of classes. Stanford felt like a restart button he wasn't ready to press, and he'd already done the new kid, first day of school shuffle at Brown, but this time it stung more, probably because the summer had been... catastrophic.
He tried not to think about it, of course. Tried not to picture the beach house being nearly ripped away from them, his mom's memory dangling on the edge of a realtor's pen. He also tried not to remember the look on Jeremiah's face before he kissed the girl he loved, and it went without saying that he most certainly did not want to think about the look on Belly's face before she kissed him back, the scene of the crime none other than Conrad's own car. He told himself not to dwell, but the problem was, Conrad was a liar and a dweller, so dwell he did.
His first class was a 9 a.m. humanities elective, already a punishment in itself, but he hoped it would be easy, because the rest of his schedule was lined with pre-med horror stories. Unfortunately for him, God wasn't feeling particularly merciful that day.
Just as he slid into a seat somewhere in the middle of the lecture hall, he realized he was screwed. He had no pen, no pencil, his laptop was out of battery, and there was no outlet in sight to save him from his lack of preparation. He muttered a curse under his breath, trying to look less pathetic than he felt, and that's when a hand appeared in his peripheral vision, holding out not one pen, but a fan of them. Seven, maybe eight, all different colours like a rainbow had exploded in the girl's palm.
When he turned, he was greeted by a shock of blonde curls pinned up by a clip that looked like it was fighting for its life, a few strands rebelliously escaping around her face, and her smile was conspiratorial, as if she was about to share an inside joke he hadn't earned yet. A can of unopened Cherry Coke sat next to her on the table.
"Pick your weapon," she told him.
Conrad blinked at the pens and then at her, thinking, who the hell carries this many pens. She didn't look like the type to hoard office supplies, but then again, he didn't look like the type to show up to class completely unarmed, and yet here he was. Appearances could be deceiving.
He reached for the plain black one to be safe, something neutral and boring, and she seemed to catch his intention immediately.
"Of course," she said, rolling her eyes like she'd expected it. "Classic male choice. No imagination."
The corner of his mouth tugged upward before he could stop it.
"And I hope you're a fast writer," she continued, "because Professor Wilson goes a mile a minute."
"How would you know?" he asked with a slight frown.
His seatmate shrugged. "Took a class with him last year and learned the hard way, unfortunately." Then she took out her laptop and flipped it open with the casual efficiency of someone who'd been through this rodeo before.
The rest of class blurred into chaos, and the girl hadn't been exaggerating. Professor Wilson was a tiny man with a bristling mustache and spectacles that made him look like a cartoon character, but his lecture felt like someone had hit fast-forward on a video with bad quality. His words were a bullet train, and his voice was garbled, which meant Conrad barely managed to keep up, scribbling half-finished sentences into his notebook, hoping they'd make sense later.
His wrist throbbed before the halfway mark, and by the time Wilson dismissed them, he was shaking out his hand like it had been through combat.
"Hand cramp?" the girl asked, looking at him with just enough pity to sting.
"Yeah."
"You'll learn soon enough. Most of what he says isn't super relevant if you just do the readings and copy the slides. He loves to hear himself talk."
Conrad tried to gather his things, fumbling a little. Then he held out the pen to her. "Oh, by the way, thanks for lending me your pen."
"Keep it. For good luck. May you never be out of stationery for the rest of your academic career."
That drew another half smile out of him, but before he could insist that she take it back, she glanced at her wrist watch and swore. "Shit! I'm late." She shoved her things into her backpack and joined the stream of students rushing out the door, curls bobbing, already gone.
Conrad sat there a beat longer, the black pen still in his hand, and only when the room had emptied around him did it hit him. He never asked for her name.
Something about her left him with a sense of déjà vu, like maybe he'd passed her once in a crowd or seen her laughing in the background of his life, but that couldn't have been true. She was the kind of pretty you remembered, not in any obvious, loud way, but in the way she seemed so certain of her own space in the world. If he had seen her before, he definitely would have remembered.
Unfortunately, his thoughts always had a way of circling back to the same abyss, pulled under by the undertow he could never quite fight, and soon the unnamed girl drifted out of his mind.
Since his mother's death, the darkness had been a constant, sometimes a murmur, other times a roar. Today it returned in full force. Being at Stanford only made the grief sharper. He should've been able to call her, to hear her voice on the other end, soft but sure, telling him she was proud, asking about his classes, chuckling when he admitted he'd already overslept. Instead, there was a silence so cavernous it echoed inside his ribcage.
This was only the beginning, and she had already missed so much. She hadn't been there to cheer at the acceptance, and she wouldn't be there at graduation. And after that? How many more milestones would pass with her absent, a ghost in the margins? How many times would he look for her in a crowd only to remember that she'd never be there?
The realization that always made his lungs seize was that one day, the years he had lived with her would be fewer than the years he lived without her. One day, she would belong more to the past than the present.
Conrad dragged in a reluctant breath, forcing his hand through his hair and forcing himself to move. Even the professor had left by now, and he had only the bland walls and abandoned seats for company as he pulled up his schedule, praying he wasn't already late for whatever came next. He had to keep moving because if he let himself stay still too long, the darkness would eat him whole.
Three days later, he saw the pen girl again as he was cutting across campus, his mind preoccupied with labs and assignments and the suffocating feeling of always being behind. She was coming out of the athletic center with a group of girls, a gym bag slung over her shoulder, and her hair shoved back with a headband this time. She was clad in the signature scarlet and white of the school's soccer team.
So the stationery hoarder was also apparently a Division I athlete. Conrad filed that information away like he always did when something piqued his interest, but he wasn't ready to admit it outright.
His chest tightened uncomfortably, which it often did when something felt too much like living, but he told himself he wasn't staring, and that he wasn't already halfway across the quad before he had even decided to move.
He repeated the excuse in his head as he closed the distance. He only wanted her name because he couldn't very well go couldn't go around calling her the pen girl forever, and if proximity jogged his memory about where he'd seen her before, even better. He was determined to figure out what it was about her that tugged at him like a half-remembered song, something he should know the words to but couldn't place.
She hadn't seen him yet, too busy snickering at something her teammate said, the sound bright and unburdened, and it made Conrad feel—though he'd never admit it—like he was walking toward sunlight after months of rain.
He pushed the thought down hard, snuffing out the match before the flame could take hold. He didn't dare think about the last time someone's laughter had felt like a summer's day, warm and dangerous because it promised more. He didn't dare think about the utter devastation of being known and then measured against someone else—his own brother, no less—and found lacking. No, he would not do that again.
After the summer, his heart had locked itself away in an underground bunker of sorts, post-apocalyptic and airless. It was safer than risking the mortifying ordeal of being known and then discovered disappointing. Especially when the things that disappointed were beyond his control. His spirals, his silences, the way his grief hollowed him out. It wasn't like he could control any of it.
It wasn't as if he wanted to lie in bed with the blinds drawn all day, suffocated by the knowledge that the world outside was indifferent to the fact that it no longer contained his mother. It wasn't as if he wanted to think of his little brother, whom he had always sworn to protect, stealing the one fragile thing he'd dared to call his own, the girl whose smile had been a lifeline in an ocean of torment. Losing them both was a betrayal, and his father had never been his in the first place, which meant that in one cruel sweep of misfortune, he had managed to lose his entire family. Now he lived in self-imposed exile at the other edge of the country, feeling like shit and feeling sorry for himself like some idiot.
It wasn't as if he wanted any of it. The nights curled on the cold floor of his dorm, his cheek pressed to the linoleum as if the grounding chill might keep him from spiralling into places he wasn't sure he could claw his way back from. But want had nothing to do with it. Sorrow was a thief that took and took, whether he invited it in or not, and so Conrad Fisher learned to seal every flicker of light away before it could tempt him with the promise of something better.
He had almost reached the girl when it hit him—what the hell was he doing? The closer he got, the more ridiculous the idea seemed, and he wondered if he could still turn around, vanish back into the flow of students streaming past the athletic center.
But she'd already caught sight of him before he could abort the mission, giving her friends a quick wave before peeling away from the group and walking up to him.
Conrad's throat felt dry, and when he finally managed a greeting, it came out a little breathless, as if he were still making up his mind about whether to speak at all. "Hey."
The girl arched an eyebrow. "Oh, hey, it's the pen boy. Glad to see you survived. Hope the rest of your classes are treating you well?"
Conrad nodded, shifting his bag strap higher on his shoulder and trying not to look like he'd spent three days replaying their last encounter in his head. "Yeah, uh, they're fine."
"Fine?" she repeated, her smile widening with mischief. "That sounds convincing."
He gave a faint shrug, then barreled on before he could stop himself, "I realized I never got your name."
Her grin sharpened, and with mock solemnity she extended her hand as if this were a business meeting instead of two students standing outside a gym. "Devon. Devon Watson. Pleased to make your acquaintance."
Conrad chuckled in surprise, taking her hand and muttering, "Watson, huh? Like Sherlock's sidekick."
Devon's eyes lit up at the reference. "Watson was actually the brains that kept Sherlock alive long enough to look brilliant. Without him, Sherlock would've been face-first in a gutter two chapters in."
He raised an eyebrow, playing along despite himself. "Pretty sure Sherlock was the genius."
"Yeah, genius with the social skills of a brick wall. Watson was the glue. The charm. The one people actually liked. Tell me again who the real hero was?"
Conrad smirked faintly, still holding her name in his head and tasting it. Devon Watson. It suited her. "So," he remarked, tilting his head, "do you fancy yourself a crime-solving detective then?"
"Alas, not much crime to solve around here. Unless you count me trying to figure out who keeps stealing the desserts I leave in the common room fridge."
"Dessert theft? That's the great mystery?"
"You say that like it's not a tragedy," Devon retorted, narrowing her eyes. "Do you know how upsetting it is to open the fridge after an eight-hour day only to find your cheesecake has vanished? It's a most grievous crime."
Conrad shook his head with amusement. "What, no murders to solve then?"
"God, no." She made a face. "I don't want our campus to be a crime scene. Can you imagine how much harder it would be to trudge to class without using shortcuts? Everyone knows those alleyways are exactly where the murders happen."
"So you're saying you frequent these potential murder hotspots?"
"Sure. And soon so will you, if you value those five extra minutes of sleep on mornings you have a 9 am lecture. Shortcuts save lives."
"Unless they're the reason you're dead," he pointed out. "But hey, at least we'd have our resident Watson to solve the crime."
Devno crossed her arms over her soccer jersey, a spark of mirth flickering in her eyes. " I'd be no help as a counterfeit Watson. No medical degree. Not even a pre-med student. I couldn't patch anyone up."
Conrad's mouth twitched as he tried to suppress his umpteenth smile. "So you're saying if I get stabbed in one of those alleys—which you recommended I take, by the way—on my way to class, I'm on my own?"
"Completely," she said, far too cheerfully.
"Lucky for me that I'm pre-med, then."
"Ah, so you're the Watson." She snapped her fingers. "We've been wrongly named this whole time."
Conrad finally laughed for real. "Guess so."
"Look at us, living a lie. I've been walking around campus oblivious that the real Watson was right under my nose. Tragic, really. Sherlock would be appalled."
"Pretty sure he'd be too busy to care."
"Wrong. He would absolutely be the sort to submit a twenty-page complaint about false advertising, no matter how busy he was." Devon glanced up at him, her expression amused but probing, like she was filing him away in her mental cabinet of observations. "Which, speaking of... I don't have your name either."
Conrad hesitated. It wasn't that he was secretive on purpose, but giving her his name felt weighted, like currency he wasn't sure he wanted to spend. In the end, her expectant look left him no way out. "Conrad Fisher."
Devon extended her hand again, this time less formal and more genuine. "Well then, Conrad Fisher, pleasure to finally put a name to the pen boy."
He shook her hand, her palm warm against his as his eyes lingered on the glossy cherry red of her nails. "You don't have to keep calling me that."
"Oh, I absolutely do. Nicknames are sacred, and you earned yours by showing up to Wilson's class without a single writing utensil. That's an immortal kind of humiliation."
Conrad laughed again, shaking his head. "You're not going to let that go, are you?"
"Not a chance." She pulled her hand away to tighten the strap of her gym bag. "But don't worry, Fisher, you'll grow into it."
Conrad found himself returning her expression, a flicker of warmth creeping in despite every effort to banish it. Before he could say anything else to prolong the conversation, a whistle cut through the air. Devon glanced over her shoulder, and two girls in matching uniforms jogged toward her, waving.
"Ah, curse the call of duty," she lamented, turning back to him with a half-smile. "See you around. Take care not to be late to class, or get mauled in an alleyway."
"I'll try not to get eaten by anything worse than Wilson's lecture notes."
"I assure you, there's nothing worse than those."
Then she was gone to meet her teammates, leaving Conrad standing there all by himself, and he realized absurdly that he was actually looking forward to Wilson's next lecture, and certainly not because of the bespectacled professor.
Over the next few weeks, Mondays—once synonymous with dread, groggy irritation, and the relentless pull of too-early alarms—took on a new quality. He looked forward to them because Devon's presence turned the gray routine of morning lectures unpredictable and irresistibly alive.
He told himself that staying near her was practical self-preservation at best. She was the only familiar face in the crowded lecture hall, the rest of the students already part of groups somewhere in the vast Stanford social network he had yet to decipher. Devon was the constant yet unknowable variable he could latch onto.
During the ten-minute break Wilson grudgingly allowed halfway through the lecture, they shared jokes—sarcastic exchanges about the absurdity of the professor's tangents and the overly dramatic emphasis on minor historical footnotes. During this time, Conrad found himself laughing more freely than he had in weeks, letting the humour wash over the tension that usually knotted his shoulders by 9:50 a.m.
After the lecture, she would always ask about his hand, even after he'd long abandoned paper and pen for his laptop. He never managed to convince her to take back the pen she had lent him the first day, so it stayed tucked in his backpack, a reminder of those minutes of lightness in the otherwise numbing monotony of university life.
As contradictory as it sounded, he began to consider Mondays the highlight of his week. On the weeks when he didn't have a lab immediately following their class, he and Devon had an hour free. One day, when she was feeling particularly generous, she offered him a student version of the campus tour, leading him down hidden paths and less dubious shortcuts between his dorm and lecture rooms, telling him which benches caught the best sunlight, where the coffee in the student center wasn't worth the hype, and which paths were best avoided when it rained.
The next week, it was his turn, and he took her to a small cafe nearby, a gesture he told himself was purely out of responsibility—he owed her, after all—but in truth it was for the simple pleasure of watching her reaction. She wrinkled her nose at the way he took his coffee, mock disgust in her eyes as she pretended to recoil.
Over time, he learned to return her jokes more freely. He learned her humour, appreciating the way she could undercut an absurd premise with a single arch of her brow, and he discovered he liked being on the receiving end of her playful scrutiny.
He began to learn her interests, too. Her favourite movies spanned an impossible range, from horror films he would never have imagined her watching to melodramatic comedies she insisted were the best thing ever. Of course, each recommendation came with a critique longer than the movie itself—improper handling of female characters and implausible character dynamics.
They never touched on family, letting it remain a wall neither of them dared breach. Mondays existed as a separate reality where they could be themselves without dragging the weight of past grief, fractured homes, or personal failure. Outside of that bubble, the world was heavy and complicated; inside it, they could exist on a simpler plane of existence. There were no missed calls, no letters unsent, no waiting rooms full of mourning and ruined funerals on Mondays. Only conversation and the intricate little rituals, making it the lightest day of Conrad's week.
But as always, the time was finite. Devon had a life beyond him, one that wasn't measured by monotony and minor victories. He almost envied the way she could brush off their hours together with a final wave and disappear into her own rhythm, leaving him to watch her go with a hollow pang he tried to disguise beneath a shrug.
Of course, she had a life. Not everyone was like him, waiting for a call that never came, hoping for a flicker of connection to anchor a week that had already begun and threatened to end in emptiness.
Regardless, he savoured the hours he spent with her, feeling something akin to peace. It wasn't anything that soul-deep, but it was life-altering all the same because it gave him the fragile, tentative hope that maybe he could belong somewhere after all. The summer would remain a graveyard for his losses, but maybe fall could gather the scattered remnants of what remained, winter could offer solitude to reckon with them, and spring might dare to dream of renewal.