Respawn With Me

The Encounter

“Excuse me… may I ask you something?”

The man looked like he regretted his existence within three seconds of speaking.

Gladys liked spending her free time in the ornate University Library. She liked the fourth floor best, the media history section tucked beyond film studies.

A thick book lay open across her lap, its spine protesting every time she flattened it with one hand while making notes with the other.

Her laptop sat on the table in front of her, covered in stickers that had survived three years of ownership and one interstate move: a pixel heart, a tiny black cat, a faded cartridge icon, a holographic frog, a sparkly decal that read SAVE OFTEN.

She tucked a strand of dark hair behind her ear and glanced down at the chapter title again.

The Intimacy of Early Multiplayer Spaces.

She was underlining a passage about LAN parties as pre-social-media community spaces when she heard his voice.

“I’m looking for a book, and I think I’m either in the wrong section or I’m going blind.”

He stepped closer and unfolded the paper. Written across it in neat print was the title of a book about the evolution of first-person shooters.

Gladys glanced at it, then pointed over her shoulder. “Gaming history is the next aisle over. Third shelf down, probably between the arcade design book and the oral history of online mod communities.”

His eyes flicked from her to the aisle she’d indicated, then back again.

“You know that off the top of your head?”

“I practically live here.”

He laughed under his breath, and she noticed then that he had nice hands—long fingers, a little callused at the tips, the kind that looked permanently acquainted with keyboards.

He followed her point with his gaze. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, of course!”

He hesitated a second longer, as if there were something else he meant to say, then thought better of it and walked toward the aisle.

Gladys watched him go for exactly one beat too long before forcing her attention back to the page.

She made it through half a paragraph.

Then his shadow fell across the table again.

She looked up.

He stood there with the book in hand, expression unreadable for a second before nerves cracked through it.

“Sorry,” he said. “Again.”

Gladys leaned back in her chair. “You found it.”

“I did.”

He glanced at the book, then at her, then seemed to decide there was no graceful version of what he was doing and went for honesty instead.

The Invitation

“I was wondering if you wanted to hang out sometime.”

The words landed between them with startling directness.

Then, because apparently he couldn’t help himself, he made it worse.

“Or not hang out. I mean—hang out sounds…” He exhaled. “I meant maybe play something. If you play games. Which you probably do. Since you’re reading that.”

Gladys looked down at her open book, then back up at him.

“You’re asking me on a gaming date?”

His entire face changed. Not flushed exactly, but startled all the way through, like she’d pressed a button on his back.

“When you say it like that, it sounds—”

“Like a gaming date?”

“Gosh, it does doesn't it?” He rubbed his head in defeat.

She laughed before she could stop herself.

He relaxed by a fraction.

“I’m Gladys,” she said, closing the book around her finger.

“Clive.”

She held out her hand. He took it gently. His palm was warm and a bit sweaty.

“So, Clive,” she said. “What do you play?”

He seemed relieved to be back on factual ground. “Mostly FPS games, tactical shooters and horror sometimes.”

She had the odd impression he was cataloguing details by instinct: the silver rings on her fingers, the frog sticker on her laptop, the margin notes in four different colors and the tiny birthmark on her neck.

“What about you?” he asked.

“I play FPS games too and some tactical shooters. Haven't really played horror genres much. Oh and yes I like simulations and role playing games as well.”

His mouth curved and she slid her phone across the table.

“Gimme your handle.”

He blinked. “Wow, you serious?”

“You’re the one who walked back over here twice.”

He took her phone and typed with quick, precise motions. When he handed it back, she glanced at the username and smiled.

“CliveFPS? Very subtle.”

A shadow of embarrassment crossed his face. “It was available. Yours any better?” She showed him her own profile.

g14dy$.3x3

“You can't even read that shit,” he said.

“True. Thank you.”

“So Gladys, Are you free to game tonight?”

There it was again—that directness, suddenly at odds with the rest of him.

Gladys tipped her head, studying him. Up close, his eyes were gray with that indecisive ring between storm and steel, the kind of eyes that looked cooler until they caught the sun.

“Tonight,” she said. “Yeah, I can do tonight.”

He swallowed, but not visibly enough to embarrass himself. Just enough for her to notice.

“I’m free too.”

“I assumed since you asked.”

That earned her a tiny, helpless huff of a laugh. He nodded once, as if confirming something to himself.

“Then I’ll see you online.”

As he turned to go, Gladys called after him, “Don’t pick anything boring.”

Then he disappeared down the aisle with his books, and Gladys sat very still for a moment, one hand still on the closed cover in her lap. Across the table, her iced coffee had gone watery and pale.

She opened her notes again, but the words no longer held her attention.

The psychology of multiplayer intimacy, notes on digital community rituals and observations about shared invented spaces. It was all unimportant in this moment.

She looked down at the fresh contact in her phone and smiled to herself.

Well, her research, apparently, had become immersive.

Game Night

Clive signed in twenty-three minutes earlier than he needed to.

He knew the exact number because he checked the clock twice, berated himself for checking, then pretended he was online early for practical reasons, like any potential updates, audio settings, testing his mic, etc.

These were of course, normal things done by normal people who did not replay a girl’s laugh in their head for three hours after meeting her in a library.

His apartment held space for his nervousness. Light streams of rain tapped lightly at the windows over the sink. The place was narrow, functional and minimal.

He had one couch, one white bookshelf and a desk setup that was the only area allowed any personality: triple monitors, mechanical keyboard, a small row of game cases beneath the stand, and an old game tournament lanyard pinned to the side like evidence from another life.

He rolled his sleeves to his forearms again without thinking.

Then waited patiently and a notification bloomed on-screen.

g14dy$.3x3 is online.

He sat up too quickly.

A direct message appeared almost immediately.

hey ;)

Clive stared at the semicolon-wink combination with the concentration of a man parsing a threat.

Then he typed:

Hey. Ready when you are

He erased the period at the end, put it back and removed it again.

Sent.

Seconds later, another message.

good bc i planned on carrying you

His mouth actually opened before he laughed under his breath.

Bold of you.

After he sent that message, he invited her to the lobby.

When her avatar loaded in, he had the absurd experience of being unsurprised that even her character looked like it knew exactly what it was doing.

Sleek pink armor with ridiculous hot-pink accents, a silver undercut, a hyper feminine weapon skin customized to a shine that was either very expensive or very earned.

“You really did pick the loudest possible color palette,” he said into his headset before thinking better of it.

A beat of silence.

Then Gladys’s voice came through his headphones. It was warmer and richer than he remembered from the library, touched with sleepiness or amusement or both.

“And you really did pick a camo skin,” she said. “It's like you're naked.”

He closed his eyes for half a second.

Voice chat had been a mistake. Or maybe the best one he’d made all month.

“Focus,” he said.

“Oh, I’m focused.”

The match dropped them into an industrial map lit by red warning lights and slick with virtual rain. Clive moved automatically through the opening route, checking corners, tracking teammate positions and calibrating his weapons.

Then Gladys cut through two enemies before he even reached the first turn.

He paused.

“You weren’t kidding.”

“About carrying you?”

“About being good.”

“Please. I was being modest.”

He heard the smile in her voice.

The first hour passed faster than it should have. They fell into rhythm too easily: Clive calling routes, Gladys taking risks he would never take and somehow making them pay off, both of them sniping each other’s kills only to argue over who had really earned the point.

She played exactly the way she spoke—bold, nimble, a little theatrical but annoyingly effective.

At one point she switched skins mid-lobby and reappeared in a pastel lilac gear set.

“Looks like you've toned it down.” he stated.

He made the mistake of glancing at her avatar just as she spun and cleared three enemies in quick succession as his own character got clipped by return fire.

“Oh my god,” Gladys said. “Did you die because I was too pretty?”

“Hell no.”

“That’s so embarrassing for you.”

“It was a tactical misstep.”

“Caused by my taste in skins.”

He could feel heat rise under his skin and thanked every possible deity that she couldn’t see him. When she wiped the rest of the room and their team advanced, her avatar threw a wink emote his way.

Clive gripped the controller harder than necessary.

“Are you always like this?” he asked.

“Like what?”

“Difficult and annoying.”

“You noticed.”

Cooperation

After two rounds of competitive matches, Gladys said, “Okay, new plan.”

“Uh? Ok, what?”

“I want to do co-op. A horror game, since I've never played one!”

He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a second. “You picked horror because you want to watch me suffer.”

“No,” she said thoughtfully. “I picked horror because you seem like the kind of guy who says things like stay behind me with your whole chest.”

He almost dropped the controller.

“Uh.”

“What? I’m just interested in your process.”

“You do realize there are easier ways to tease someone.”

“And yet this is more fun.”

The horror game loaded into an abandoned hospital map with flickering lights and a soundtrack designed by sadists. Their flashlights cut narrow paths through hallways lined with peeling wallpaper and overturned gurneys.

Gladys let out a disgusted noise in his ear. “Why are there always wheelchairs in these games?”

“Atmosphere, mostly.”

“It feels lazy.” She yawned.

A shape moved at the end of the corridor. Gladys’s character stepped back.

“That better not be a damn ghoul,” she muttered.

“It’s probably a ghoul.”

“If it’s a ghoul, I’m closing the game and moving to another state.”

A shriek tore through the speakers as the enemy lunged from the dark. Gladys yelped—genuine, followed by startled laughter—and fired wildly down the hall.

Clive moved on instinct, placing his character between hers and the enemy as it flickered across the floor.

“Stay close,” he said.

He hadn’t meant to say it aloud.

The words hung there for half a second too long.

Then Gladys, quieter now, replied, “Copy that.”

Something in his chest went taut.

The map worsened from there. Doorways slammed shut. More monsters scraped their nails along the walls.

At every turn, Gladys made some dry comment that let him know she was either genuinely freaked out or weaponizing humor against the possibility.

Maybe both.

They reached a room filled with old filing cabinets and buzzing lights when a bigger ghoul surfaced directly behind her.

Her character dropped dead instantly.

“Oh, absolutely not,” she said. “No, no, no—Clive—”

He was already moving. His pulse kicked hard as he sprinted down the corridor, gunfire flashing in the dark, timer counting down over her body.

“I’m coming,” he said.

A second, mangled enemy burst through the door. He took it out, slid to her side, and hit revive.

Three seconds. Two. One.

Her character surged back to life.

On his headset, Gladys exhaled like someone coming up from underwater.

“Phew. That was very heroic of you.”

He tried for dry and landed somewhere closer to flustered. “We had objectives.”

“Mm.”

He could practically hear the smile, and almost feel it as if she were in the room with him.

Then she added, “Still. Thank you, life saver.”

When they finally cleared the level, it was near midnight. Rain had strengthened outside his apartment, washing the windows in silver streaks. His desk lamp threw a warm pool of light over the edge of his keyboard. He realized he’d barely moved for hours except to drink water and fail intermittently at sounding normal.

The victory screen loaded.

Gladys’s avatar did a spinning flourish in her absurdly pink gear.

“You’re so fun to play with,” she said.

He stared at the screen for a second, then said, “You too.”

There was a small silence after that, not awkward, just complete.

“I should sleep,” she said eventually, and he heard the yawn under the words. “I have to meet with my advisor tomorrow and pretend I’m a serious scholar.”

“That sounds grim.”

“It is. They hate when you say video game lobbies are intimate spaces of performance and belonging.”

The old instinct to say something clever deserted him completely.

“It’s late,” he managed.

“Mm.”

“Sleep well, Gladys.”

“Goodnight, Clive.”

She left the lobby.

He sat there with the empty lobby still glowing on-screen, rain tapping at the glass, her voice lingering in the space the headphones had occupied.

Then a new message popped up.

wanna grab food next weekend :3

He stared at the message, read it once, and then again.

His whole body went strangely still, as if any sudden movement might somehow alter reality. He typed back too carefully.

Yeah. Definitely.

Sent.

A second later:

k nite nite 😉

Clive shut his eyes and laughed once under his breath, helpless and disbelieving.

Then he closed the game and sat in the dark for a while with the glow of the monitor fading slowly from blue to black.

The Absence

Gladys disappeared for four days.

Not completely. She was online once or twice, but not long enough to reply. No messages beyond a late apology on day two:

advisor from hell. buried alive. if i perish avenge me

He sent back:

I’ll tell everyone you died doing life saving research.

She reacted with a skull emoji and vanished again.

By day four, Clive had become disgustingly aware of how often he checked for her name.

He would never have described his life as lonely. Quiet, definitely. Structured and logical, with just enough predictability, enough to keep the flow of it humming.

He worked remotely three days a week for a cybersecurity firm that rewarded skill, maintained a few online friendships with people he’d known for years, and had enough hobbies and toys to stop himself from thinking too hard about what was missing.

Then Gladys had walked into his life like a match near an oil drum.

Now every empty evening had a tinge of excitement.

On Friday, close to eleven, a notification lit up his screen.

g14dy$.3x3 is online.

A message followed almost instantly.

did u survive my mysterious absence

He answered too fast.

Barely.

Her typing bubble appeared, vanished, returned.

good. i’d hate to lose my favorite medic

He leaned back and rubbed a hand over his mouth, smiling despite himself.

I saved your ass in Hospital Horror.

She laughed.

yea I kno. OH, guess what? i submitted 32 pages of thesis material today so im choosing to become unbearable in celebration

He stifled a laugh.

I don’t think you’re becoming anything.

Then:

wow. rude. ok rdy to queue with me?

This time they skipped competition and went straight into a co-op campaign. Just long maps, loot drops, and the familiar miracle of easy conversation happening while both of them pretended to be focused on objectives.

Gladys talked more than usual tonight. Maybe from exhaustion and relief in finding common ground with a stranger now friend.

She told him she’d moved here eight months ago for graduate school and still didn’t feel like the city belonged to her. That campus friendships often remained trapped at the level of seminar small talk. That everyone in her department was either trying too hard to seem brilliant or too hard to seem effortless, and she found both conditions exhausting.

“I miss having people around who like things openly,” she admitted as they navigated a neon-lit ruin overgrown with virtual moss. “Everything there has to be framed in theory first, then passion second. Like you need permission to care.”

Clive took out an enemy on reflex. “You don’t seem like someone who waits for permission.”

“I don’t. That doesn’t mean it isn’t tiring.”

He knew what she meant more than he wanted to.

“What about you?” she asked. “You always dodge when I ask what you do.”

“I don’t dodge.”

“You absolutely dodge.”

He switched weapons. “I work in cybersecurity.”

“Of course you do.” She gasped theatrically. “So you’re like a tech genius.”

He snorted.

“Nah,” he said. “Well, I guess to some people.”

“That makes it suspicious. You probably know things.”

“Mostly I know not to click unknown links.”

In the game, their characters stood side by side in the blue light of a ruined station, the world around them hushed for once, no enemies in sight.

Then Gladys cleared her throat softly and said, “Anyway. What I meant was, your work sounds isolating.”

“It can be.”

He rarely admitted that out loud. But she’d offered him something real, and the least he could do was match it.

“Gaming helps,” he said. “It always has. It’s easier to be with people when there’s something to do together.”

“Shared invented spaces,” she said.

He smiled despite the twist in his chest.

Eventually she said, gently now, “You’re not as hard to read as you think you are, Clive.”

His pulse shifted.

“I just mean… you notice everything. You listen and pretend to be all calm and composed, but half the time I can hear you trying not to react to me.”

He could have denied it.

Instead, he said the most honest thing available.

“You make that difficult.”

Gladys didn’t answer right away.

When she did, her voice had gone very soft.

“Good.”

Something warm and deep moved through him.

Then the game lurched back into chaos—alarms, enemies, movement, noise—and the moment broke apart into action before either of them could be brave enough to ruin it.

Weekend Date

Sunday came bright after two days of rain.

They chose a ramen place a few blocks off campus, a place with paper lanterns in the window and game soundtracks playing softly under the chatter. Gladys arrived first, mostly because she had no interest in letting Clive sit alone for fifteen minutes rehearsing how to exist.

When Clive walked in and spotted her, his expression did something immediate and unguarded.

For one perfect second, he forgot to be careful and grinned.

It made her absurdly happy.

“Hey,” she said as he approached.

“Hey.”

He stopped at the edge of the table like he wasn’t sure whether this required a hug, and the uncertainty was so sweet she rescued him with a quick hug before he could overthink it.

Then, they sat.

The first few minutes were a little awkward, but not in a bad way. More like adjusting to scale. Both remembered that eye contact was a physical event and not just an abstraction carried through sound.

Then the ramen arrived steaming, and Gladys told a story about one of her undergrads confidently citing a Reddit thread as a primary source, and Clive laughed hard enough to duck his head, and after that it got easier.

They talked about bad game adaptations, the first consoles they’d owned, the ritual humiliation of multiplayer voice lobbies in the mid 2000s, and why horror games were always funnier in co-op because fear became a joke the second someone was watching.

At one point Gladys reached for her drink at the same time Clive did, and their fingers touched.

Later, when they stepped back out onto the sidewalk, the air had that washed-clean brightness that only arrived after a full day of rain. The pavement still held shallow mirrors of sky. Somewhere nearby, a bicycle bell rang.

Gladys shifted the strap of her bag. “So.”

“So,” Clive echoed.

“This was fun.”

“It was.”

She studied him for a moment. The way he seemed both shy and steady at once, as though whatever awkwardness lived in him had never managed to make him careless.

“You know,” she said, “for someone who approached me like he was about to apologize for existing, you’ve done pretty well.”

He glanced down, then back up. “I almost didn’t come back to your table.”

“Really?”

“I found the book and told myself to leave.”

“Why didn’t you?”

His expression changed just a little.

“Because you looked like someone I’d regret not knowing.”

The city, for one strange suspended second, seemed to step back and give the line room to land.

Gladys stared at him.

“That was smooth,” she said.

She took a small step closer.

“Good,” she said. “I’d hate to think I imagined all that protective hero energy.”

He exhaled a laugh through his nose, eyes fixed on hers now. “You’re not going to let that go.”

“Never.”

They stood there with the late afternoon light slipping gold over the street and neither of them quite moving away.

Then Gladys reached out and caught two of his fingers with her hand.

“Come over Tuesday,” she said. “I’ve got a brutal boss fight waiting, and apparently I like being revived by you.”

He looked down at where she held him, then back at her face.

“Tuesday,” he repeated.

“Don’t make me carry you too hard.”

He smiled then—fully, finally, no hesitation left in it—and closed his hand around hers for the span of one heartbeat before letting go.

Gladys watched him walk backwards two steps before turning, as if he didn’t quite want to face away from her yet.

When he glanced back once from the corner, she lifted her hand in a little two-finger salute.

He did the same.

Then he was gone into the clean bright afternoon, and the city resumed around the space he’d left.

Gladys stood there with a stupid smile spreading across her face and the sudden, vivid certainty that some meetings did not feel like beginnings because they started in grand ways.

Sometimes they began in unexpected ways, like in the strange recognition of being seen by someone who noticed everything. And sometimes, if you were very lucky, your player two arrived exactly when you needed them.

You’ve reached the end of this story.

But not the end of the world it belongs to.

New stories appear regularly.

Stay curious.

© Petalstorm Press — Original Fiction
This story is part of the Petalstorm Press library.
Redistribution or reproduction without permission is prohibited.