Fine, darling. Fine. I will actually work on this. If I have to...(I'm kidding! I'm sorry! I'm serious!)
This is the longest chapter I've ever written for a fic, by the way.
Note: this story is going to involve a lot of drug use and abuse, (more than I anticipated, so I'm reissuing the warning), and while I can promise that I know what I'm talking about and will try to present things accurately, the characters definitely don't. From this point on I'd like you to remember that you SHOULD NOT take Jeremy or Tyler's ideas about drugs or alcohol as facts, because they are willfully ignorant teenage drug abusers (and, while ANY teenager who drinks or does drugs is legally an abuser, however responsibly they do it…their behavior definitely deserves the term, whatever their age.)
Don't listen to what Vicki says about anything.
...
It almost seemed too easy, and he wasn't sure exactly why that was, because he didn't know why he thought it should be hard. It might have been because important things were supposed to be, but that opened the question of why, in his mind, this should be important, and he much preferred questions when they stayed closed.
Tyler picked the Grill to start searching because everybody went there, even strange freshman guys who didn't seem to have any friends. His guess turned out to be inaccurate but led him in the right direction, and he found Jeremy sitting on one of the benches along the green outside. He was pleased that he recognized him immediately—between darkness and alcohol Tyler had managed to forget plenty of faces: it had caused him quite a few problems, especially when the owner was female, and not the person that he had thought at the time. Fucking this up would feel a bit worse than a slap, he thought, or rather it would cost him something that might turn out to be good.
But the awkward way of sitting and the eyes that promised, even from a distance, to be sort of ridiculously large and brown were immediately recognizable, and Tyler crossed the road half a block up from him, feeling his mouth relaxing into a natural smile. He looked a bit different in the sunlight, but somehow the sight of him on the bench seemed familiar in its own right, and Tyler realized that he had almost certainly seen Jeremy here before without it ever making a conscious impact.
He rolled his eyes at himself. That certainly made sense—both because he would do something like that, and because if Jeremy had guessed that Tyler hadn't noticed him outside a place Tyler frequented nearly every day, that would explain his attitude.
"Hey," Tyler said, somewhat awkwardly, when he was a few steps from the bench. Jeremy, who had been gazing in the other direction, snapped his head around so quickly that Tyler couldn't help but laugh, and after a minute Jeremy sighed and laughed with him. He had been sitting with one long leg pulled up almost against his chest so that when he turned his foot had slipped off of the bench, making him wobble. Once he had straightened himself out he smiled wryly up at Tyler, gesturing towards the space beside him.
Tyler circled around behind the bench and sat on its cast iron arm, setting one foot on the seat of the bench instead. The space next to Jeremy was kind of small, Jeremy himself being larger than Tyler thought that he remembered, and in any case he didn't plan on them being there too long. He didn't usually mind talking to someone seated next to him, but last night he had found that he liked being at a bit of an angle, so that he could Jeremy for reaction while he talked, and somehow that mattered more than the spatial concerns. "How are you?"
"Okay," Jeremy said, and smiled a bit more broadly, the way he did when he was about to tease. "You're the one I'd be worried about. Feeling okay today?"
Tyler laughed. He kind of liked the way that Jeremy's quiet, almost shy voice made his own uncharacteristic gentleness of tone sound appropriate. He liked listening to Jeremy, and so it made him happy, in an odd way, that he was starting to sound different himself. Not quite like Jeremy, maybe, but different. It was nice to know that it wasn't only the bad things that left a mark. "I don't get hangovers."
"Fuck." That made him snicker again, at the look of genuine appreciation on Jeremy's face. Jeremy's smiled brightened too, and they both laughed for a minute, before Jeremy's face made it clear he'd come up with a new comment. "Makes sense," he said, and ducked out of the way when Tyler swiped at him.
"What does that even mean?" he demanded, grinning.
"Dude, your blood alcohol must be permanently up there, if you're like last night all the time."
"I don't do that every night," Tyler protested, which only made Jeremy laugh louder. "Dude, shut up." He smacked at him and things quickly devolved into a poking match, both of them trying to be discreet and failing completely, from the looks that passersby gave them. Jeremy, who Tyler was beginning to suspect of being a right little bastard when he chose to, spotted an opening and tickled Tyler's side just below his ribs, nearly making him fall backwards off of the bench. Glowering, Tyler righted himself and took the first opportunity for revenge.
His fingers ghosted over Jeremy's stomach, making him giggle, and Tyler could feel the reverberations of it, Jeremy's muscles spasming under his touch. Something about it made his own stomach lurch, and he withdrew his hand as fast as he could, wondering if he was about to be sick. He'd been on edge all morning, and he'd thought it had been eagerness to get out of the house and go look for Jeremy. But Jeremy was found, now, and Tyler pushed away the thought that maybe that was exactly it.
He had left himself undefended while thinking, though, and he was brought back to the moment by the feeling of Jeremy's index finger drawing lightly down the delicate skin behind his left ear. Tyler swore, loudly, and laughed, and, giving up on talking there, pulled them both up off of the bench to head into the Grill for lunch, and the safety of a table in between them.
Jeremy came willingly enough, and once they were ensconced at a booth in the back he asked for and received a sandwich, which he began to eat while Tyler toyed with his fries. It wasn't that he wasn't hungry, but somehow even Grill hamburgers weren't as interesting as talking. That had never happened before.
After a minute he ate the fry, because he was starting to feel weird. "I'm really sorry about last night," he said.
Jeremy looked up. "Why? You didn't beat me up, or throw up on me or anything." He paused. "Wait, please tell me that you haven't forgotten it entirely and think that you actually did that?"
"Shut up," Tyler told him. "'Course not. I just…I wanted to thank you, you know. For being cool."
"So why not just do it?" Jeremy asked, tucking his fist under his chin and looking up at Tyler with a curiously honest intensity. Tyler was about to answer—though with what, he didn't know—but Jeremy suddenly looked away, seemingly embarrassed by what he had just said. A moment later he had straightened up again, and the familiar ironic smile had returned. "Anyway, of course I was cool. I'm always cool. Thanks for noticing."
Tyler laughed at him and ate a few more fries, wondering briefly whether Jeremy meant those words to sound as sad—and biting—as he thought they could be. The joking tone was perfect as always, but Tyler couldn't keep himself from reading something more into that smile. It pulled up merrily at one side, but the very corners were always turned just a little down, and sometimes Tyler thought that it was odd how Jeremy's teeth, revealed, were always tightly together. It didn't look faked, exactly, but it seemed to him it had been copied imperfectly, by someone who had to look at other people to figure out how to smile.
"Yeah, well," he said, shrugging, and took a bite of his hamburger, before setting it back down. "Wait, what's with that?"
"What?"
"Beating you up comes first on that list?"
Jeremy frowned at him. "Sometimes you make no sense."
"Shut up. Just now, when you were listing things at least I didn't do."
"Oh." Jeremy considered his sandwich for a minute, then raised a eyebrow at Tyler. "In case you hadn't guessed, it happens to me kind of a lot."
"Oh." Tyler couldn't really claim he hadn't figured that, because Jeremy had been hiding in a darkened hallway, and he both looked like a geek and talked like one. The effect was even stronger today, as Jeremy's hair was a bit out of order, and his ratty band T-shirt had a rather frightening man almost completely swathed in bandages. Tyler would bet a lot of money Jeremy had gotten it at a concert which he had waited months for, and that it hadn't been washed since then. Apparently, last night's ensemble represented all of the normal clothes he owned. "Why?"
Jeremy snorted. "Again, the obvious: I don't get along with people."
Tyler resisted the urge to ask, what about me? "Don't you have friends, or something?"
"Something," Jeremy said immediately, and Tyler glowered at him. "No, I mean no, I don't. Not really." He didn't sound particularly bothered, and as he said it he looked up at Tyler again and smiled in a way that stopped him feeling sorry for Jeremy and, maybe, made Tyler think that sentence didn't apply to him. It felt like he was telling him a secret, letting him in on the joke that the world was stupid enough to see Jeremy so simply, and so wrong.
Tyler offered him a fry in silent thanks, and Jeremy took it. As he put in his mouth Tyler rubbed at his ear, and said quietly, "Me, too. Or, me neither, I guess."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Uh. I—" Tyler shook his head, wondering what had possessed him to say that. He was pretty sure he'd said the same sort of thing last night, or at least indicated it pretty clearly by his behavior, but neither of those things had led him towards what he wanted to both say and hide right now.
It had been months, now, since he had let himself think about Vicki. When he had gotten home the night before he'd felt the thought of her drifting around just beneath the surface, and the kind of pounding, sick headache that came with it, but sometime in the early hours he'd gotten out of bed to grab two Acetaminophen, and with the alcohol in his system he had slept without any dreams. He was pretty sure, now, with Jeremy sitting in front of him, that he was the one who had brought her to mind, but whether that was because he was somehow like her, or because being happy in a new way had brought the old guilt to mind, Tyler didn't know. He wanted to ask Jeremy, almost, but he found that he was terrified at the thought that Jeremy might not know. Part of that was because he was getting used to Jeremy seeming to just get him, without any trouble at all, and Tyler couldn't see how even he could understand how badly fucked up Tyler was over his girlfriend's death, when Tyler didn't get it himself.
He hadn't been in love with Vicki. Even at the time, he'd known that. It had been a given, because he'd never even thought about love, with any other girl. But in a weird way, he had liked her: the kind of way he almost never felt. He'd been happy around her. She'd been close to being his best, and only, friend.
Afterwards, and even on the very first morning, when Sheriff Forbes had knocked on the front door, he'd felt guilty over that, because he really ought to care about his girlfriend for deeper reasons than the way she looked almost weightless when she danced, and how she didn't mind that he didn't like to talk. Tyler had liked her, but once she was dead he searched for things that he actually knew about her and came up with nothing, and it sucked, it really did, that that was all that Vicki had got out of her life, and all he had gotten from her. He might not have been the one who killed her, and he probably wasn't the reason she made her choice, but he sometimes thought that he had had a chance to be the reason that she didn't.
Instead he had just fucked it all up, because he didn't know what else to do.
"What's the shirt?" he asked instead, and tried to make his voice say that he was sorry, because even as he realized he couldn't do it he wanted to explain. He wanted to promise that he would tell Jeremy all of it someday, because Tyler thought that he wanted Jeremy to know that stuff about, because he didn't want the two of them to go the same way.
He wanted to have the promise of someday.
Jeremy startled, obviously not expecting that particular turn. But he didn't seem surprised Tyler had changed the subject, and he didn't seem to mind it either. "It's a band," he said, looking down at it as though he needed to affirm this.
"I can tell." Tyler, relieved, set his chin on his fist and smiled.
"No, I mean…oh, fuck you. Yes, they're a band. I like them. They're metal," he added, decisively.
Tyler raised an eyebrow. "Screamo?"
"Christian."
"You're kidding me."
Jeremy shrugged. "Heavy metal Christian," he said, as if that made it tolerable.
"Are you?"
"God, no," Jeremy said, and when Tyler laughed loudly enough to annoy the neighboring tables he smiled. "I suppose I should have said fuck, shouldn't I?" He waved at the lady sitting diagonally from them. "Hello, Mrs. Baxter. Oh, shut up, you. They're totally looking at you. "
Tyler just shook his head, unable to speak until he got his sniggering under control.
Jeremy stole a fry off of his plate in the meantime, and crunched on it, consideringly. "So….Anyway, no, I am not, and if there's a God I'm sure he's releaved. Father Kerry certainly was when I stopped going to church." He took another bite and then stopped, looking at the remnant of potato in his hand. When he spoke again, it was in a very different tone. "Caroline was, though. She liked that I listened to them—or, liked it better, anyway. She's the one who got it for me."
"Who's Caroline?" Tyler asked, frowning. Jeremy was biting at his lower lip, and the suddenly corners of his mouth were completely turned down now, without any pretense at smiling.
"She's my sister," Jeremy muttered, eyes fixed on his plate as though there was some childhood nightmare reflected in the white china, and he couldn't look away. Tyler frowned at him, and after a moment Jeremy spoke again. "And the apostrophe S….That stands for 'was'," he said, very softly. "She's dead."
In Tyler's mind, everything seemed to freeze. On the last words Jeremy had lifted his eyes to meet Tyler's gaze, and was looking evenly back at him, head tilted just a little to the side. The whole world seemed like it could be reflected in those eyes, Tyler thought, but Jeremy was looking at him, watching him, as if waiting for his reaction, as if nothing could possibly be more fascinating. Nothing about his face spoke immediately of sadness, and it made Tyler think of some sculpture or painted mask, smooth and set like white marble.
But there was a spark in it, too, behind his eyes, that living, active interest as he watched Tyler, that melted that frozen image, and that was what Tyler found he couldn't look away from. It turned Jeremy's eyes from gentle brown to chocolate colored, deep and dark and fascinating.
Tyler noticed that there were tiny tears in the corners of them.
"Oh," Tyler said.
Jeremy blinked. The shine of tears was gone, if it had ever been there, brushed away onto Jeremy's lashes. "Yeah," he said. "Thank you."
Tyler nodded, glad and somehow disappointed that he hadn't had to say that he was sorry for it to be understood. He'd wanted to say it, somehow. He'd wanted to do something to make those tears go away, but it seemed he didn't need to.
He didn't like not being needed. Or maybe it was more that he wished that he were.
"Are you going to eat that?" Jeremy asked him.
"What?"
He rolled his eyes at him, and however it had happened Tyler was glad to see him revived. "Food. You do know what to do with it, right? Open mouth—"
"Oh, shut up," Tyler snapped. "We were talking."
"You can't eat and talk at the same time?"
"Not if you have manners, no."
Jeremy laughed aloud. "You have manners? Really?"
"A couple." Tyler shrugged, and found that he felt comfortable smiling once more. It was hard to resist joining in when Jeremy was happy, and, apparently, the cloud had passed for now. "You haven't been eating either."
"I have."
"Not your food."
"What, these aren't mine?"
"Not before you stole them."
"Well," Jeremy said. "Whataya know."
Tyler snickered at him.
"I was delaying," Jeremy said, with plain faced honesty.
Tyler looked at him. "So was I."
Any earlier disappointment was made up for by the way that made Jeremy smile. "Good," he said. "But I'm also hungry, so that settled, I'm going to eat this."
"Okay," Tyler said, and picked up his own food, repeating, "Okay."
It still took them an hour to finish lunch and leave, and they walked along the street slowly, in the direction of what Tyler assumed was Jeremy's home. Jeremy swung his hand as he walked, making cheerful brushing motions in the air that reminded Tyler of himself as a little boy, knocking the tops of summer grasses as he ran home. He'd gotten started on music before they left the Grill and had yet to run out of things to say about it. Tyler would have found most of it boring, seeing as he neither knew nor thought that he liked Jeremy's kind of music, but he was fascinated by the way that Jeremy spoke about it. He didn't just list names of bands or facts about their history, but talked about the sound of each song, the melody and the beat and what he thought when heard this lyric or that one. He almost seemed intent on recreating the music in description, and Tyler had never thought someone would do that until he began to wonder if, maybe, Jeremy really could.
It was hard not to think, suddenly, of Vicki, drunk on the music and stolen vodka, dancing in sunbeams.
They stopped halfway down a residential street, under a spreading tree which had left its outline on the ground in snowflakes, and Tyler looked between the yellow house behind them and the two white ones further on and felt a bit cheated, that he wasn't going to learn where Jeremy lived.
"Tomorrow?" he asked, hopefully, and everything looked like sunrise when Jeremy grinned.
"Okay."
"Come over to my place," Tyler suggested, then paused. "Do you…."
"The stupidly large house," Jeremy said dryly. "Yes, Tyler Lockwood, I know where you live."
"The stupidly large house," Tyler confirmed, "up on the hill. It's not my fault, you know."
"Yeah, yeah," Jeremy said, waving him off. "I'm sure. I need to get home now, but yeah. See you tomorrow."
"Okay," Tyler said, but he was already heading off down the street, and he wasn't sure Jeremy could hear him. It didn't matter, anyway: delaying tactics had already won him an hour. It would be a bit much to dig his feet in for a few seconds more.
He turned for home, too, deciding not to spend the whole day in town like he had planned to, for reasons that he didn't really understand.
He'd make sure, he thought. Now more than ever he was determined to have his someday: he'd tell Jeremy about Vicki, and anything and everything else that he could think of, because he'd have to. He needed Jeremy to understand all of that, so that he'd get what it meant when Tyler told him that he thought that maybe this was what he'd wanted to feel for her.
And maybe, just maybe, given what he'd said today, he'd be able to understand it and explain it back to Tyler in a way that wasn't really fucked up, but, Tyler thought, looking up into the clouds, he didn't even really care, because that wasn't what he wanted.
He wasn't certain what he did want. But it had something to do with the way he could say anything he wanted to Jeremy, and something to do with the things that he said back. Part of it was tied up in wanting to understand that twisted, sad and happy smile, and part was just wanting to look at it. Because, in its own way, he thought that it was beautiful.
...
Second Note: I hate Vicki's name. I'm considering setting Autocorrect to spell it right for me, because I am apparently INCAPABLE.
Also: Search List of Vampire Diaries Characters on Wikipedia.
I submit to you the WORST cast photo I have seen in a long time. Why are Stefan and Damon trying to become one with Elena's hair, especially when there is SO MUCH room on either side, between them and the rest of the cast? Why does Stefan have a humpback and Damon a wrinkly semi-bolero jacket? Why is Jenna hiding behind a line of ionic columns? Why does Jeremy have the worst middle-part the eighties ever produced, Caroline a veritable mane (okay, I can't complain about her hair. Her hair is GOD, probably. Edit: why is she perched in heels on a really tiny stone post? She is going to hurt herself, and that CAN'T HAPPEN.)
Why is Tyler standing like that? No, really, that's actually one of my major complaints, not so much because he looks bad, per se, but because the first thing that caught my attention in this image was the way his expression is somewhere between, "Yeah, you know you want me. Just admit it already," and "…Why are Stefan and Damon trying to become one with Elena's hair?" Seriously, if he had his neck twisted back any more skeptically, I would be worried about him.
I am already worried that he appears to be sinking into the ground (okay, on closer inspection this isn't warranted: he just has his legs seriously far apart—as…previously mentioned—and there's an awkward leg-truncating fern, and Bonnie.) Still, the photoshopping on that side is…questionable, because Bonnie can't possibly be sitting where she seems to be AND have her hand there: the angle's wrong. She certainly can't be as far in front of Tyler as she is, because his missing leg would be inside the wall, so she must be seated on air.
Meanwhile Matt is…awkward. He's….
Well, he's missing one hand and I wish he didn't have the other one because Matt, I love you dearly but this season has not been good for you and Tyler is already pretty much saying, "Look at my crotch," so I don't need you doing it too because I don't love you that much and you're kind of flexible and/or weirdly proportioned, because while at first you appear to be sitting upright you're also showing us pretty much EVERYTHING between your legs, which means you must be sitting on your lower back rather than your ass, and black makes you look (actually kind of nicely, if inappropriately) vampiricaly pale, so since you're supposed to be the all-American blond HUMAN character I don't know why you're wearing it, because even thought it LOOKS like black is a theme here glancing at the other side immediately shows that it isn't, because there's purple and Kelly green and brown and….Why?
Third/Fourth Note: ELENA, STOP COMPELLING JEREMY TO DO STUFF. (Yes, even if Damon does it for you, it's still you.) KLAUS, I LOVE YOU, BUT THE WHOLE TYLER-AND-YOU THING IS CREEPY. Please go back to perving on Stefan, because you two are cute together, in a very scary way.