Blink and You'll Miss It

don't look away

 "Okay fuck this, I'm out."

Jackson had been saying that for the past twenty minutes, so Sanha didn't take it too seriously, rolling her eyes and tugging on his arm.

"Come on, the project said we had to explore the history of the world around us, and what better way than to wander an old abandoned dorm building?"

"To look something up in a library?"

"Oh, everyone and their mother can do that. They've probably got something awesome we can use in here." She pulled on a door to the side of the hall, slipping through the crack she'd created.

"You know," he grunted, squeezing through behind her, "when I said I'd do this project with you I didn't expect to be crawling through some old building."

"Me either." She was already behind the desk to the side of the room, clearing the shrubbery off of it. "It's wild how that works, isn't it?"

He made a face at her cheeky grin. "Just get what you want and let's go. Old buildings always have ghosts in them."

"Jackson~ Lighten up, just think of it like we're the Buzzfeed Unsolved guys," she cooed. "We come into old buildings, look around, see nothing, and leave disappointed."

"They only don't find anything because they've got cameras."

"So pull your phone out and start recording, and we'll be a-okay." Sanha pulled a drawer open, her entire face lighting up. "Ah! There's a book in here!" She took it out and thumbed through it quickly, skimming the star charts within, before brushing most of the dust off and stuffing it into the satchel at her side. Jackson spluttered indignantly.

"You're stealing now? Do you have a death wish? We're going to get some vengeant ghost following us home hell bent on murdering us!"

"Murdering me," she corrected. "I'm sure they know full well you're not in on this, what with the amount of whining you've been doing."

"Okay you know the only reason I'm here is because you're not allowed to do anything dangerous without me."

"If you hate it so much just go back to the dorm." Sanha slid back out the door, wandering over to the large flight of stairs to the side of the front door.

"Are you kidding? No way, you can't do this stuff on your own." He trooped up the stairs after her as she skipped up them, two at a time. "That just doubles your already way too high odds of getting straight up murdered. Maybe triples."

"You worry too much," she sang. "C'mon, let's check out the room with our number." She pointed at the sign on the wall as she climbed past it.

"And then we can leave?"

"I never said that."

He groaned.

They climbed another couple flights of stairs to get up to it, which winded neither of them (the elevator in their own building was incredibly untrustworthy, so neither of them used it after it broke down and trapped them for three hours one night).

"I don't trust this."

"It's not that bad."

"The floor looks like Swiss Cheese!"

Sanha jumped over one of the holes, holding a doorknob on the other side for extra support, and grinned at him. "Weren't you the one who called yourself a parkour king?"

"That was a joke! And I'm not about to let you kill yourself, even on accident."

She crouched down and directed a finger under a section of the floor that was intact. "There's a wall under this bit; probably load bearing."