Platform Nine, Leeds

The thing about knowing someone for eleven years through a headset is that you know everything and nothing. I knew Torvak's laugh, the real one, the wheezy one that only came out after midnight. I knew he'd been made redundant twice and that his mum had dementia and that he had strong opinions about the correct way to tank a particular dungeon in a game that had shut down in 2019. I knew he lived in Dundee and drove a van for a living and once got the van stuck on a beach. I didn't know what he looked like. I didn't know his real name until about year six. It's Stuart. It felt wrong the first time I used it, like calling a teacher by their first name. We'd talked about meeting up a hundred times. It was always going to happen after the next expansion, or when work calmed down, or in the summer. Then his mum died in the spring and about a week after the funeral he said, on the call, in the middle of a fight, not even paused: "I'm coming down to Leeds on the 14th. You can meet me or not." I said I'd meet him. I got to the station forty minutes early, which is a thing I do. I stood on platform nine and I was, and I'm not ashamed of this, nervous in a way I hadn't been since job interviews. What if he was weird? What if I was weird? Eleven years is long enough to build a person in your head who's got nothing to do with the real one. The train came in. People got off. A woman with a cello, a family with a pram, some students. And then a big man in a Dundee United jacket with a rucksack on one shoulder, looking up and down the platform with exactly the expression of someone looking for a person they've never seen. I knew him instantly. I don't know how to explain it. Something about the way he stood, this sort of readiness, the same way his character stood in the game, weight forward, waiting to be needed.

"Torvak," I said. He turned round. He looked at me. And he did the wheezy laugh, the after-midnight one, right there on the platform at eleven in the morning. "Bex," he said. "You're tiny." "You're enormous." "I told you I was enormous." "You said big. Big's different." We went to the pub across from the station. It was the easiest conversation I've ever had, because we'd already had it, all of it, for eleven years, and we just carried on where we'd left off. He told me about the funeral. I told him about my divorce, the bit I hadn't said on the call because the call is the call and some things are too much for a Tuesday raid. He showed me pictures of the van on the beach. It was worse than he'd described. At one point he went quiet and looked at his pint and said, "I didn't have anyone else to tell, you know. When she died. You lot were the first people I told." "I know." "That's daft, isn't it. A bunch of people I've never met." "I don't think it's daft." "No. No, me neither." He got the four o'clock train back. We stood on the platform and it was awkward for about a second, the hug or handshake question, and then he just picked me up, like a rucksack, and put me down again. "Thursday," he said. "Don't be late. We're doing the big lad." "I'm never late." "You're always late." The train went. I walked home along the canal and I had that feeling you get after a really good raid night, that light, tired, full feeling, except it was daylight and I was on my own and I hadn't touched a keyboard. He was on the call at eight on Thursday, same as ever. Nobody else knew. It was better that way, for a bit. Our thing.