Chapter Text
There was a knock at the door.
It pierced through the silence that had filled Sonya’s dorm for the past— how on earth had it been four and a half hours? Her phone had to be lying to her. There was no way she’d been reading about and rewriting notes on different applications of game theory for that long without getting distracted. She was usually lucky if she could go for twenty minutes without succumbing to the siren call of literally anything other than the studying she was supposed to be doing.
Anyway. A miracle had occurred, and Sonya had been studying for four and half hours, and so when somebody knocked at the door and shocked her out of her focused flow-state she just about jumped out of her skin.
Then she checked the time, realised how hungry she was, and was immensely grateful for whoever it was who’d disturbed her.
Especially because it was probably Harriet.
“Coming!” she called out as she shoved her lecture notes inside her exercise book, before slamming the whole thing shut and putting it to the side.
Sonya deciding to study today had been borne mostly of solidarity with her girlfriend, who was drowning in imminently due assignments and had needed to practically ban Sonya from being around her unless she initiated it herself. Sonya understood completely. She could be very distracting, and Harriet couldn’t afford to be distracted right now. Harriet had hidden herself away in the library and forbidden Sonya from following her there. Sonya had figured that she’d use the sadly necessary time apart to start getting her own notes in order ahead of when it would be her turn to suffer in a few weeks, and Harriet had promised that she’d come back once she’d gotten a reasonable amount done for the day. Sonya was planning on cooking dinner for them both and then treating Harriet to a cosy and relaxing night in together, with comfort movies and hot cocoa.
She opened the door, eagerly awaiting her girlfriend’s warm smile.
It wasn’t Harriet.
Sonya’s own smile dropped as she took in the person standing there.
It was a stranger. A man. He had light skin, just a few shades darker than Sonya’s own. His hair was dark and messy like he’d been running his hands through it without giving much thought to how it would look as a result, and he was tapping his fingers against his legs as if standing still was an impossibility.
“Sonya?”
Sonya looked at the hall behind him, as discreetly as she could. There wasn’t anybody else around.
“Who’s asking?”
“You’re Newt’s sister?”
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m Newt’s…” the man trailed off and winced. “I’m his friend,” he settled on. “I’m pretty sure you’re who I think you are. You look like the pictures he showed me. Obviously your hair’s longer, but it’s been a while since he last took a picture of you, so of course your hair would be longer by now, I don’t know why I—“
“What,” said Sonya, loud enough to cut off his rambling, “are you doing here?”
There was no good reason for a ‘friend’ of Newt’s to come knocking at Sonya’s door. Especially when it had been months since she and her brother had last spoken.
“Newt’s missing,” came the man’s instant reply.
At least it wasn’t the absolute worst case scenario.
Sonya gestured for the man to come inside.
No verbal invitation. Even though that wasn’t how vampires worked in reality, it didn’t hurt to be careful. Sonya wasn’t foolish enough to think she knew the rules for every single variety of monster out there. There was sure to be something that needed an invite, and Sonya wasn’t going to be the fool who let it get her.
The man passed into the room with no problems, either unbothered by or unnoticing of the devil’s traps carved into the doorway and salt line hidden under the welcome mat.
“I think you’d better explain.”
Sonya set about making tea as he did so. Although she hadn’t lived in the UK since she was a child, old habits died hard, and making tea gave her hands something to do.
The man’s name was Thomas, and he was a hunter like Newt.
The two of them had been investigating a string of disappearances in a small town a few hours away. People walking into the woods and not coming back. Newt had thought it was a ghost, a straightforward instance of a spirit luring people in to recreate their own tragic death however many years before, but Thomas hadn’t been so sure. Thomas didn’t have a phone of his own — a occupational hazard for hunters, his had been thrown down a well by an unhappy werewolf a couple of weeks prior and he hadn’t gotten around to replacing it yet — so when Newt didn’t return to their motel room when he was supposed to, Thomas hadn’t known what to do. Newt’s car had still been in the lot and all his stuff had still been in the room, so it wasn’t as if he’d just skipped town without him, and Thomas didn’t think that Newt would do something like that anyway. He was just gone. Gone like all the people who’d disappeared in the town already.
“He talks about you a lot,” said Thomas, “and he kept saying that you weren’t far away from where we were. He said that we could maybe come visit once we’d wrapped up the case. He misses you.”
“How did you get my address?”
If it turned out that Thomas had been able to find her exact room by asking a passer-by where he might be able to find her then heads were going to roll. Sonya didn’t get the impression that Thomas posed a threat to her, but he could’ve been anyone. Even when you didn’t factor in the possibility of demons and monsters coming after a hunter’s loved ones, did nobody have any sense of caution?
“I got it off a postcard you sent him. He keeps it in his glove compartment.”
Right, so the head that needed to roll was Sonya’s own. She'd sent her brother that postcard in the first week of college, in a fit of optimism that things might be better now that there was physical proof that she was doing okay for herself. That Newt didn’t need to keep fighting the whole world. That she was safe, and that all she wanted now was for Newt to be safe too.
Of course Newt had kept it. Of course anybody who had access to Newt's things would be able to get the return address off of it as well.
Sonya handed Thomas a mug of tea. “Last time I spoke to my brother,” she said, “I told him that I never wanted to hear from him again unless he stopped being an idiot who kept doing things that could get him killed.”
“I know,” said Thomas. “I was kinda hoping you weren’t telling the truth about that.”
Thomas hadn’t said how he and Newt had met. He hadn’t said how long they’d been working together. He hadn’t said why they’d decided to team up in the first place, though if his hesitation when he’d described himself as Newt’s ‘friend’ was anything to go by, Sonya reckoned she could take a reasonably accurate stab at it.
If Sonya ever found herself face to face with one of Harriet’s estranged sisters, Sonya probably wouldn’t make their shared lesbianism the first thing out of her mouth either. Basic safety. Even if things with Harriet’s family were a teensy bit more complicated than the majority of family situations out there, Don’t Out People was gay 101. Sure, if Harriet’s family showed up at their door it meant they had a much bigger problem on their hands than how they might react to Harriet’s sexuality, but even so. The ensuing confrontation wouldn’t need to be added to.
Thomas was playing it safe. Sonya already knew her brother was gay, but Thomas didn’t seem to know that Sonya knew that, and was acting accordingly. He’d nearly slipped up right at the start, and Sonya had noticed, but he was trying. It made Sonya more inclined to trust him. He clearly cared about Newt, even when it made things more difficult for himself.
Sonya sighed, picked up her phone, and called her brother.
The call connected after a single ring.
She put it on speaker, and Thomas’ face lit up with hope that the situation wasn’t as bad as he’d feared.
Nothing.
“Hello?”
But the only sound that came though the phone was dead air.