ta.
Oh, by the way, if people want to hear from a particular character's POV, or have some other request, I will try to oblige you.
…
Tyler was trying to remember why he went to so many parties. Ostensibly, he knew—or would have known if the use of that word wouldn't send him into the panic of those who know that someone is trying to make them look stupid, and also know they are too stupid to find an escape route—it was because they were fun.
And that worked, because they were fun, except for all the times when they also really sucked. Oddly, the times when they sucked the most were when everyone else was most enjoying them. That was when the people around him had all realized what they wanted to spend the evening doing, and it rarely involved Tyler.
Even when it did, on some level, include Tyler, he was perfectly aware that the only requirement he'd fulfilled was being semi-upright and probably breathing. His friends would unsurprisingly take sex over hanging with him and so stuck around only when the party was unexpectedly sparse of drunken females, talking about the kind of things that you talked about when drunk, regardless of whether the listener was your friend, some freshie geek, or the host's living room wall.
The drunken females he spent time with…well, the girls Tyler messed around with at parties wanted sex more than they particularly wanted sex with Tyler, so while the requirement of having a dick, or at least a working pair of hands and mouth, was slightly more specific, it was hardly discriminating. And it only made him feel falser, when he fucked around with them anyway, that he didn't even really want to be with them himself. At least if he'd wanted it, he thought, or even had wanted one of the girls to like him, despite the obvious fact they never would, he'd feel a bit less pointless about it.
But he didn't even care, and sometimes he thought about changing that, but he wasn't sure he would even if he knew how.
So he wandered instead, telling himself that each footstep was a stride of his afternoon runs, in the hope that he might be able to summon half the focus that he could pour into exercise for having fun. When he was a little bit drunker, he told himself stories instead, looking at a stranger's hanging pictures or the titles of books on the shelves. Sometimes they were happy stories, about little children running on beaches, jumping in their mothers' arms. Sometimes he found a gap from picture to picture—the mother missing, suddenly, wasting away in the years between the moments that a camera captured. Or perhaps she ran away, with the family dentist, to California—or the father couldn't keep his hands where they belonged. Maybe because.
He was doing it now, somewhere on the darkened second floor of a house he thought belonged to some kid who kept failing to make varsity, guessing at the relative who seemed so enamored of crystal squirrel knickknacks. They were everywhere on bookshelves lining the hallway, not in huge numbers, but covertly, one placed demurely between two books, another peeking over the top of the next shelf along, and they glittered like the ghosts of a winter woodland in the shadows. Massed, the effect was one of imminent sparkling ambush, and it was making him more than a little nervous. It was hard to imagine anyone actually liking the creatures that much, and Tyler decided that intimidation had probably been the perpetrator's intention, or at least annoyance. Given what he knew of the varsity wannabe—and the things he could still hear taking place downstairs—he could certainly understand an elderly relative's desire to make him and his equally noxious parents as uncomfortable as possible.
It was the closest Tyler ever came to wondering about other people, these days. But it was different, really, because Tyler never asked questions about the lives around him. He just told stories, the same way he always told himself things, the way he had told himself years ago to stop questioning things. You were safe with what you knew, and maybe once he had thought that there might be more things in life that were worth thinking over, but he'd learned enough from that slip-up. He'd learned that learning hurt.
Tyler shook his head, hard, which failed to knock the thoughts from his brain but stirred the alcohol in there enough that dizzy bubbles rose around him, and he felt about for somewhere to sit down.
There was a narrow couch against the shadowed wall and he grabbed onto the arm of it in relief.
It was with slightly less relief that he grabbed onto the arm of the boy who was revealed to be sitting in the space, a foot or two to the right of the couch arm, where he had actually succeeded in grabbing. That he did with a sound rather like "eurgh," and then, "Fuck," and then, "Oh. Um. Sorry."
"It's…fine," the other boy, who still appeared to be a part of the upholstery but probably wasn't, given that he was talking. He sounded rather doubtful himself, actually. "Are you alright?" he added, sounding suddenly much more confident—and concerned.
It flashed through Tyler's mind, as he wobbled to a stop, to wonder about two things. That tone was the first—it wasn't worry, but concern leavened with the absolute certainty that whatever problem Tyler owned to, the boy would be able to do something about it. It was the kind of tone that took everything away, telling you to simply sit quietly while it fixed everything for you. And Tyler knew—knew—that it would plant a kiss on your bandaged finger when it was done.
The other thing that occurred to him was that he had absolutely no idea who the kid was.
"Uh, yeah," he said, not really paying attention. "Um, can I sit down?"
Obligingly, the shadow shape moved over towards the arm of the couch, where the light revealed it to indeed be a boy, with floppy, ordinary-ish brown hair and a friendly expression. The open, puppy-like expression, in fact, was enough for Tyler to suspect that the boy was also not very intelligent—something that he disproved as Tyler lowered himself onto the freed spot, by flashing a bright, almost impish grin, of the kind that said its wearer had a master plan for everything, and wouldn't you like to know it. It seemed completely out of place with his quiet appearance, and Tyler found the contradiction oddly fascinating.
He blinked. Even without much light to see by, for a moment he had caught a glimmer that his instincts insisted was equal intensity in those dark eyes as the other boy had looked at Tyler. And Tyler, in the instant before he shut his eyes and swept away the image—or maybe the boy blinked too, while he couldn't see, and that was what shuttered the little light—was wrapped up by the thought that maybe that meant he was part of this kid's plan, too, even in some microscopic way.
Even afterwards, he still half hoped that it was true. Perhaps archea didn't affect the outcome of an enterprise, but there was still comfort in knowing that you were being observed and counted, and accounted for.
He didn't remember who he'd heard that from, but he was pretty sure he hadn't thought of it. He wasn't certain exactly what it meant, for one thing, although that didn't really mean much. Or at least, he wasn't sure quite what it meant in words, but it had obviously stuck with him all the same.
"Who're you?" he asked, rushing out sounds probably too quickly because it felt, at least, like he'd been sitting there and thinking for too long. It came out awkwardly; not just the suddenness but the sounds themselves, because really, Tyler, weren't there better ways to greet people? He asked the same idea every day and didn't sound so brain-dead—or so drunk, even when he was usually drunker than this—and yet he couldn't remember exactly how he did it.
There was a little pause, and then the boy laughed, almost as though he'd had a bet on with himself, and had just won. But whatever he had called, it seemed as though he was morbidly pleased at being right about something he hadn't wanted.
And then, maybe, he saw the up-side; the laughter turned sweet.
"Jeremy," he said. "I'm Jeremy." They were sitting close enough that Tyler could examine his face, and it wasn't familiar, no matter how many times he tried to make it be, but the way he said it made it clear that Tyler should know him. Or, he realized, that Jeremy knew him, and the bet was that Tyler didn't.
"Sorry," he said, because he somehow did feel bad about not knowing when the kid was looking at him like that, which was odd, because Jeremy was actually looking rather benevolently amused.
"I'm kind of an oblivious asshole," he added, because first off it was true, and his friends and his attitude were annoying him enough right then, halfway through another drunken party at which each person was too self-centered to notice the same flaw in all of their neighbors, that he didn't think much of admitting it.
To his surprise, Jeremy choked on another laugh. "At least you didn't try to pretend that you remembered once you heard my name," he commented, and Tyler smiled too.
Because, yeah, that had been another option he'd considered. A good old stand-by, actually.
He looked down at his legs, outlines in the half-darkness, and still sending messages that it would be in his interest not to bother trying to stand. Jeremy's knee, deep indigo colored, was settled just against his thigh, below a series of penny sized holes that had worn into the fabric until it was white. They always made him think of the furthest constellations, so impossible and yet so mundane in each night's sky.
He couldn't work out if it was weird that he was noticing something that he wouldn't usually, or weird that he wasn't minding something that he possibly should. After a moment he gave up, because either way, he didn't mind the contact, so it could well be that he simply never noticed how close he sat to people.
When Jeremy asked, "Are you sure you're okay?"—still sounding more amused than anything—Tyler realized he might have been out too long.
"How many times have you asked?" he said, still a little vaguely.
Jeremy grinned. "Just now and before," he said. "Otherwise I'd be more worried."