So. Here you go, people. (Um, if anyone reading this has no patience and just wants to see the story already to find out if it's crap or not, just scroll down. You really won't be missing out on much.)

Oh, and I did research again! I.e. trolled through my memories of the show to see if at any point inside the Lockwood's house they show us where the front door is relative to the cardinal directions, so I could work out which way the shadows would fall through a window on the back side of the house at about 4 or 5 o'clock in the afternoon. (I.e. right or left of the window if you were standing and looking at it.) Then I realized that I had made up the position of Tyler's room inside the house, so it would be a great deal of concentration for an uncertain answer that was, in fact, completely off base anyway. How very like the show... (Okay, that was mean. Then: how very remarkably like Elena's and Stephan's way of dealing with problems.)Okay. I'll stop railing on Elena and Stephan. I like them. Sort of.)

One thing they have certainly taught me about life and love: whenever you meet someone who understands your soul so completely that you both write EXACTLY THE SAME SENTENCES IN YOUR RESPECTIVE DIARIES, run screaming in the opposite direction. You will of course be able to foretell this happening before you even get to the diary reading, because that it the strength of the bond you share. You might even be able to foresee you leaving him for his own brother, and so save all of us a lot of trouble. On that subject: I do not like this thing where they made Stephan and Damon, and one was Good and one was Evil, and they wore little hats which said which was which. Then they realized that, obviously, we all thought Stephan was boring and wanted Damon to be the more important one, so they cuddled up briefly to the idea of making Damon Good (and Stephan sort of molested the idea of becoming Evil, but it bitch-slapped him. More on that another time.) Then they realized, of course, that both brothers would then be Good, which would anger the Powers That Be, and they would have to end their franchise early. And so a plan was hatched to stick both of them into a sort of suspended animation of being exactly where they were when it started, which was hovering on the edge of crossing to the other's side. Except that now, they have faked us out once. We have become embittered. We could practically taste out Damon Is The Romantic Lead Candy, and it was taken from us. Now we are stuck watching him go through his hundred and thirty first "To Kill or Not To Kill" scene. Actually, we don't need to watch any more. I can predict them all with uncanny accuracy: In a surprise move, Damon eats people.

Booyah.

The fire of my hope that when the show returns Damon will stop yet another car (does he have a fetish for being run over?), traumatize some poor lady, and lean in towards her only to have Stephan appear out of nowhere and devour her, at which point Damon is so overcome by emotion and this thing we call morality that he vows to defend the town from the evil menace of Stephan And His Pointy Nose is almost lost in ashes. Come on, people! Stephan and Damon are a yinyang. There will always be a little bit of Damon inside Stephan. Or the other way round if you prefer it.

AND YES I JUST SAID THAT. Booyah.

...

Tyler threw himself onto his bed when he got home, heading straight from the sunny foyer up the stairs. No need to look about when the sound of an empty house already told him he was, once again, the only one home. His door made an irritatingly gentle sound as it swung closed, but it was swallowed by the noise of his footsteps as he crossed the hardwood floor and tossed himself down.

Quiet lowered again, and he lay for a few minutes on his stomach, cheek pressed against the pillow, listening to the muted thump of his own heart slowing.

The light of a late afternoon slipped through the open windows along the wall to his left, and he could smell the scent of his mother's favorite lavender from the garden below in the air. A breeze slipped in to stir it, making the long white curtains flick a little.

They were the same pattern as those on all the other windows in the house, and he had always liked the way the thin drapery moved and how it looked against the darkness of the aged wood all around. But he had disliked, too, that even though they felt so familiar to him they were just another institution of his mother's, and only seemed to be uniquely his.

One of them billowed out to the side to brush him and he growled, grabbed at the mattress with his hands and flipping onto his back. Still tense with irritation, he pushed himself up again, this time rocking all the way up to sitting at the edge of the bed and scooting a foot or so along it, away from the floating fabric. He stopped with his knees bent slightly so that his toes pressed one of the bedposts, and went still.

Tyler was never going to let anyone, besides Matt and a series of girls who'd been far to busy to notice, learn that he slept in a four-poster. An extremely antique four-poster, which meant it was a great deal smaller and less impressive than most people would imagine, especially since all but the uppermost covering had been forcibly removed when he was fourteen and broke his toe getting tangled in them.

He ran his fingertips over the blackened wood now, stretching out his arm, and then let it fall back to rest loosely over his knees. He didn't like this, he thought, considering his motionless fingers. He did not like this at all.

But he couldn't help it—and wasn't that just the story of his life—that he was starting to enjoy not just drawing drawings that happened to be of Jeremy, but drawing Jeremy. Tyler looked over, now, at where he knew the battered folder in which he kept his papers was placed in the gap between his desk and the bookcase against the right wall of the room.

These last few days he had felt flashes of what felt disturbingly close to affection for the Jeremies that he drew: smiling Jeremies, reading Jeremies, Jeremies on a table in the schoolyard, sleeping. It wasn't that they were pretty; he was fucked if he was ever going to say that, when if he even thought it he'd have to burn his brain later. And it certainly wasn't that he knew anything about the real Jeremy that was worth feeling fondness for. But when he looked at the better drawings, it was hard to deny the feeling of warmth. They weren't beautiful and they weren't of a beautiful subject, but they were right, and the joy of making a drawing accurate, of somehow taking a simple thing and making it special just by showing it as it was, spilled over and made him like them.

He wasn't about to tape them up on his walls, or anything—no way in a whole lot of hells—but every now and then Tyler had found himself opening the raggedy folder and looking at them when he sat at his desk, even when he didn't have time that night to add anything new.

Tyler had always told himself that he wasn't, though, because otherwise he would eventually be unable not to think about this again, and he'd rather put thinking off for a while longer. He wanted to slap himself for that now. More than slapping; he'd probably punch himself in the gut if he could. How could anyone be so stupid?

He had enough self-awareness to have to admit, now that he'd reached this point, that that wasn't half as unexpected as he would like it to be.

He had been so busy telling himself that he wasn't doing it that he barely noticed the first time he spoke to Imaginary Jeremy, or that he had begun to do so frequently, muttering to himself as he worked. Little things—Oh, made your eyes too big there or Sorry about that or Why the fuck does your hair do that, it's weird—that Tyler had always had a bit of a tendency to say to any drawing, though he wasn't about to tell anyone that. But even though they ought to feel just like those times, they weren't.

Because, he knew, he wasn't really talking to the paper.

Just yesterday Tyler had found himself imaginary his Jeremy's reactions when he addressed it, picturing how the other boy would respond with a smile or one of those little frowns that looked more like he was about to cry than anything else. He had unconsciously avoided thinking about those frowns, or Jeremy's angry face.

Instead it was the calmer expression, the slow smiles, he had been imagining. Those were the things he almost never got to really see, and yet he had thought nothing of it.

Indeed, he thought now, of course his imagination had produced those visions and left him with an instinctive desire to avoid the others. It was easier not to remember the way things really were, that way, than when he thought about the glowers that were what the actual Jeremy always wore around him.

Tyler groaned aloud again, louder this time, and rested his chin against his knees. It was happening even now—all the time in his head he could see Jeremy, Jeremy's face. The internal Jeremy beamed at him, caught in the middle of a laugh with his eyes half closed and full of light.

He realized coming home today, after seeing Jeremy, that he wanted to see Jeremy do all the things he'd thought about, for real.

He wanted to see him smile. He had to bite his hand, gently but firmly, to keep himself from making another noise when pure longing welled up inside him, making his stomach clench.

After a moment Tyler pulled the hand out of his mouth in exasperation and ran the fingers distractedly through his hair before giving up the fight to act calm and clutching at his scalp in sheer irritation at all the other emotions which surged through him.

Every thought took him back to fucking, fucking Jeremy, and his own absolute inability to think straight was driving him insane. Every path in the mire his mind had become led inevitably back to the center, and all he wanted was out.

But at the same time, Tyler could feel his stomach fill with pleasant butterflies every time a train of thought crashed into yet another image of Jeremy, and the little flash of warmth that shot through him with each one was addicting. It got harder with each one not to let his attempts at rational thought fall apart into nothing but contemplation of Jeremy.

Daydreaming. Daydreaming, about Jeremy.

Oh, fucking hell.

This just wasn't—no. Just, no. He couldn't be doing this.

The wave of disappointment that slammed through Tyler then made the whole room seem suddenly dark. It was ridiculous; he was behaving like child deprived of sweets, he told himself firmly, trying to avoid the thought that Jeremy would then be the Kit Kat bar in the equation, which caused another glow of pleasure just because it contained any mention of Jeremy at all.

Or like a girl with a new crush. Alternatively.

It wasn't that there was anything in particular that made the images interesting. Why should he even care if Jeremy was never cheerful again—if he ever had been, which Tyler frankly doubted—and grew old alone and miserably, much less have such an intense desire to witness the opposite? He didn't care about Jeremy. He didn't know anything worth caring about about Jeremy. Not any more than he did about anyone else, anyway. But while he had been able to ignore it when he had only thought about Jeremy when he was drawing—when it was perfectly explicable for him to spend long stretches focusing on nothing else—seeing the real Jeremy, when he didn't have any such excuse, had made it quite clear that Jeremy was, quite simply, fascinating. He was certain he could lie here and think about nothing more than wishing he could see Jeremy for hours, though what exactly he would do if he actually could was utterly beyond him. All he could imagine doing was, well, watching him, the real one, and Jeremy letting him. Which seemed simply pointless, and rather like courting death as Jeremy would presumably prefer a hike through hell to such a thing, but the thought of being allowed to do it made his insides fizz like a can of Coca Cola.

Tyler might have recently reestablished himself as an absolute idiot, but he wasn't capable of misunderstanding what that feeling meant. But right now, he really had no choice in the matter. He couldn't fucking think, or at least not think logically, when mental Jeremies were lurking around every corner and his disobedient brain seemed to be hooked on their existence like a drug.

Later, he thought, he would find a way to reason out of this, and a time to explain to rebellious parts of himself all of the reasons that he was starting to feel sick. But for now he lay back, one hand falling over the edge of the bed into the sunlight, and let the sugar rush of remembering Jeremy's pale face that morning alleviate the headache that was starting to pound above his eyes, and the bitterness that that very sight had left.

For now, at the moment outmatched, he had no tactical option but to retreat. His case against himself had no chance of winning when the other option had such face value appeal. His side was just too weak.

He really hated that.

...

No talkie anymore. Jamie is gagged from now on.