We have reached the darksome hinting part of this story-okay, we kind of did that last time, and maybe in the first chapter, and oh, whatever. But still, I am trying to give you bits of all of the important things before you find out what really happened/s, mostly because I know that you will try to speculate and it will drive you insane. You're welcome.

...Although no, I haven't decided if he's a werewolf or not in this yet. Why would I do that?

If you have an opinion (on anything!), do please review and tell me about it.

Please. For the love of God. Who I actually don't love all that much. I mean, we get along, we're friends, but he's not the kind of deity you can really get down and party with, you know?. Buddha, maybe-he's a fun guy-but not so much God. But I do love you! And I will love you even more if you give me comments! Go look at my profile picture. See? Kisses! Kisses for you if you give me reviews because seriously, I am shameless, and you people only seem to listen to me if I completely embarrass myself first which, okay, I understand because at least I am amusing you and like I said I'm without shame. But you're still jerks, you know-mainly because you don't acctually read these amusing little author's notes I spend so long (not) composing.

...

Tyler wasn't sure how the minutes, and then hours, that passed while he sat there had somehow managed to be completely different from what he thought he knew as time. Time pissed Tyler off. It always did; he had no patience and he knew it, and even when he got what he wanted he had the attention span of the average seven year-old. Yet

Tyler was pretty sure he'd never made a friend before. He had them, yeah, and even some damn good ones in the mix, who generally made up for the bastards, and sometimes even made up for him. But most of them belonged to a network he had been born into; like the house he'd been brought up in, there were the boys who lived along the same road, and went to the same school, and there had never been a time before they were friends. Some of them had been new when he started high school—or like Matt, who moved in in sophomore year—but even then, they had just passed in the halls, or shaken hands the first day of football practice, and…yeah. Friends.

It had never occurred to Tyler before that maybe a friendship that mattered more would be one of the kind that wasn't a certain bet. Talking to this kid felt like a job interview, it felt like work, and yet he found that he cared about the outcome. He wanted quiet, unexpectedly confident, weirdly insightful Jeremy to like him. Maybe later, he thought, he would ask exactly why that was; and the thing was, he was pretty sure that Jeremy would have the answer, so maybe that was why.

Or maybe it was the alcohol. Maybe this was the good side to being drunk that everyone had always told him about—usually it just made him morbid.

That made Jeremy laugh, and Tyler added it to the growing list of things to do or say more often, because they made Jeremy laugh. "Really," he commented. "I never would have guessed."

"Yeah," Tyler admitted. "Yeah, I am, kinda. I'm weird right now. And I think I'm going to be sick."

Jeremy waited, politely. "Are you going to?" he asked after a minute.

Tyler considered. "Huh. Maybe…I guess not."

Jeremy nodded in acceptance, and then shifted his seat on the couch. "So, I don't want to be moving, or anything…"

"No!" Tyler threw a play punch at him—or, well, somewhere near where he was—and Jeremy ducked and countered, snickering. They messed around, trying to push each other onto smaller portions of the couch, and Tyler allowed Jeremy to entertain the notion that he was actually winning for a minute or two, before using his weight advantage to simply flatten Jeremy into one of the couch's arms.

"Alright, alright, for Christ's sake," Jeremy managed to squeeze out. "I'm not going anywhere. Apparently."

Tyler reduced the pressure a little and Jeremy shifted, until somehow without Tyler entirely noticing he ended up with his head on Jeremy's knees as Jeremy sat with his feet tucked up against him. "Better?" Jeremy asked, and Tyler closed his eyes and nodded, feeling denim against his cheek and warmth welling up from the flesh and bone beneath.

He figured that he fell asleep there, or maybe he just kept on talking, telling this random stranger his thoughts on nothing in particular and everything at all. It was hard to tell, hard to work out, later, whether he'd dreamed about the next half hour, or if it had just felt like some comfortable, private dream. Either way, at about two in the morning Jeremy shook his shoulder gently, and suggested that they probably ought to be heading home.

Tyler started, and remembered, somewhat unwillingly, about his mother's Friday night binge that would bring her home in about an hour, just sober enough to lecture him if he wasn't in bed already.

"Yeah," he said, and found that he almost had trouble getting the word out. "I should probably get home, soon." He paused. "Could—"

"Yeah, okay," Jeremy reassured him, standing first to pull him upright. "You got a way of getting home?"

Tyler resisted the urge to roll his eyes. It was something about the way that Jeremy always seemed to know the answer when he said things like that that both made them sound so maternally authoritative and at the same time prevented them from being annoying.

"I can walk."

"You sure about that?"

"Fuck you, you know?" Jeremy snickered, and Tyler reconsidered the wisdom of punching someone who was still half-supporting and half guiding him down the darkened hallway. Jeremy only ducked when attacked, and the movement had sent a storm of inebriated butterflies flapping wildly towards safe haven in his stomach. Still, he thought, he liked that Jeremy wasn't the kind of guy who tried to take any blow that was aimed at him, even play ones, just to show that he could.

Basically, Tyler liked that Jeremy wasn't him, because he sure wouldn't be helping someone like him down the stairs, which this house had far, far too many of, in his opinion.

"Yes, and that's where you're missing out, see," Jeremy told him. "This is exactly what guys like me do for fun, cause then I get to see you trying to walk down these stairs—which, believe me, is pretty fun."

Tyler had to admit, he probably had a point there. "Guys like you? Like, geeks?"

Jeremy nodded. "And sadistic bastards in general. But they're usually the same thing." He stepped onto the floor at the bottom first, and when Tyler followed his arm was there for him to grab onto, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Not like anything; it was.

He could see that Jeremy was scoping out the downstairs, now; his eyes drifted between the various chairs where sleepers were strewn, and the others who were still making an attempt at partying, visible through a few doorways they passed. He didn't say anything about how Tyler should have been staying with them, not hanging onto some geek, but Tyler was pretty sure he thought about it, in the matter-of-fact way that Jeremy seemed to think about things like that. It was obvious his feelings wouldn't be hurt if Tyler did go back to them, but still, Tyler was glad that he didn't ask about it, because Tyler wasn't sure how he would explain why he wasn't going to.

At the door they separated so Tyler could grab his jacket from the table where he'd dumped it; when he came back, Jeremy was still standing there, his hands in his pockets.

"Don't you have a coat, or something?" Tyler asked him, as it somehow didn't feel fair that Jeremy could look after him but didn't have to do the same thing for himself. Jeremy just shrugged.

"I have lots of things."

"You're an asshole."

"If you want. Come on, let's get out of here. This house gets on my nerves. Anyone who decorates like that must really be an asshole."

Tyler wouldn't argue with that, and Jeremy laughed at him as they stepped out into the night. "Squirrels?"

"They were...oh, shut up."

A ghostly dust of snow was falling, every snowflake above them shining against the darkness like a star. Tyler tipped his head back as they walked down the drive to gaze upward, something inside him responding warmly to the knowledge that Jeremy was almost certainly doing the same thing, and even if he wasn't, and Tyler looked like an absolute idiot right now, Jeremy wouldn't care. He just kept walking, a steadfast red shape in the corner of Tyler's left eye, and let Tyler stare at the sky as long as he wanted.

Tyler wasn't sure what it was he loved about the sky, or when it had started. He loved the night sky best, the perfect blackness of it, and how you could see the air at night. Standing in the light from the house's windows and looking outward, the darkness wasn't just overhead but all around him, growing heavier and heavier into the distance, the way that visibility faded under water. On nights like this, especially, when Virginia was finally growing colder under December's loving touch and not a single cloud would show its face, he felt an awareness of the sheer space of the world, extending not only out to the side but also endlessly upwards, through the winter air. Even if he couldn't go there, thinking about it, feeling, in someway, that space around him, was just as good. Outside, at night, Tyler sometimes thought that he was nothing more than another area of the air, connected to all the others, and the feeling was one of the best that he knew.

Once they reached the main road Jeremy went one way and Tyler turned in the other. Neither of them said anything and Tyler appreciated it, but twenty yards along the road, he did turn to look back, reassured in some way but the solid shape of Jeremy, heading to some house Tyler had never seen where he had a warm bed and a family and all the other things that home meant, waiting. And although he didn't wait to see it, he was certain Jeremy looked back, too.

It wasn't a long walk home from the idiot's house—he'd never been there before, but he knew the road it was on, just at the edge of town, and sometimes when he wasn't tired enough added it onto his summer training runs. Soon enough he was on his own road, and then turning onto the stupid drive that took far too long to do something as simple as reach the front door.

His mother always said that they were beautiful gardens. He agreed, although very little, and certainly not his mother, would make him call something beautiful out loud. He didn't mind that they were there; he just wished that they weren't quite so blatantly designed to intimidate people, because all it took was five seconds with his family to work out they were all dicks; they didn't actually need to hang a sign that said so. As it was, the only thing that stopped them doing just that was that no Lockwood had yet managed to find a sign that was ostentatious enough, although they had certainly tried their bests.

He let himself in at the front door and looked around for someplace inconspicuous to place his coat, before deciding not to risk it and tucking it under his arm instead. He'd only have to collect it later anyway, because in his mother's mind there was no reason to clutter up the front hall with personal effects. Or anywhere else in the house, really. If he wasn't feeling particularly antagonistic—which, admittedly, he generally was—he'd do what he could to skip the lecture.

His room was at the end of the hall, and he was in the bathroom with the main light off by the time he heard the grumble of his mother's car in the drive.

God knew where his father was. Tyler realized he hadn't checked, and really hoped that his father hadn't either noticed Tyler's entrance, or decided to make this one of the nights when he and his wife had a "talk" in the front hall at Metallica concert volume.

Odds were he wasn't even home, though. Tyler finished brushing his teeth and snuck back towards his bed, pausing for a moment before he swung his feet up onto it to listen. There was the slow tap, tap, tap of high heels clicking up the front hall to the stairs. Then his mother must have slipped, or set her foot down on the first step badly. He heard the snap of the heel, the thud of her foot back on the floor and then an outburst of swearing that rose to a banshee shriek before the words tumbled away, forced out too quickly to be intelligible. They faded into quiet, and then a choked back little sob.

Sometimes Tyler wished he couldn't hear things quite so well.

He flopped back on his bed, looking up at the darkness of the ceiling as the house grew silent again, except for the whisper of the snow outside. But he couldn't find any stars there, so he rolled over onto his stomach, considering the blankets for a moment but not bothering to pull them over himself.

Alcohol always lost its warm glow in his stomach the moment that he got home.

Something about the knowing tone Jeremy had used came back to him, and Tyler wondered whether Jeremy really had known that he needed to get home by two thirty. The thought kicked something inside of him and he turned over onto his back again, shutting his eyes against the idea that a total stranger, his strange new friend, might have seen Carol Lockwood run her drunken circuit through the Grill a thousand times or more—because really, was there anyone in town who hadn't? He focused on counting slowly to ten, controlling the pace of his breath in and out and building walls around the sudden and familiar fear that had no particular name or basis.

He forced himself to fall asleep, feeling as distant in the darkness as he had the morning Sheriff Forbes called him to say that Vicki Donovan had killed herself the night before.

But he made himself promise, too, that the next he would find his new friend in town, and even if Jeremy decided that he didn't want him around, he would do anything that it took to make Jeremy like him for who he was, attitude and all. It would be a project, admittedly, but despite all the opportunities he'd had to practice, Tyler had never really learned how to give up.

...

Kisses? I mean it.