Less threatening, too. The likeliness of Jonathan pounding his new companion (loath though he was to have him) for lunch money or whatever the normal thing bullies picked on other kids for was slim to none. He was smaller, for one, and even if he hadn't been...well. In a perfect, fantasy world, Jonathan wouldn't have to use physical violence to assert himself. There were other ways to win a fight; if he couldn't be sure of anything else today, at least he knew that. Fortunately, for both of them, perhaps, Shawn still didn't look like he had too much fight in him, either.
"Autophobic," he muttered under his breath when the other boy urged him to come along. Anywhere else, maybe with anyone else Jonathan would have turned heel and left the other person to their own devices. But as Shawn observed, this new somewhere was a very old somewhere. It looked something like his imagination's picture of the few mansions that sat on the outskirts of the city and still like his memory's clear-as-day recollection of some of the darker passages in his father's hospital. Did every building in and around Gotham have the same outdated interior, he wondered? Reluctantly, he followed after, but slowly, at his own, faux-casual pace.
Although it did him no good, he, too, bent at the knees when Shawn did at the first door. "What's in there?" he demanded to know as soon as the boy had more than a ten second peek. Teacher's lounge? That didn't sound right and Jonathan was more than happy to seize the opportunity to say so. "Libraries don't have those," he insisted, straightening up. "There should be offices here. And..." People. Grown-ups by the dozen. But, no. They were definitely very alone.