THE ONLY THING I DO IS SIT AROUND AND KILL TIME

“If you want to see it like that,” he replied with an uneasy shrug. This was one of those times when Thomas couldn’t know for sure if Jack was teasing, or if he was being serious. He hated it, absolutely loathed it because he couldn’t figure out whether he’d said something wrong or not. It was unnerving, not knowing exactly what to do.

Thomas glanced at Jack out of the corner of his eye. Not even a proper look, he didn’t want to risk showing the confusion. To make matters worse, he was pretty sure he was fully blushing now, and that Jack would be able to see it unless either of them turned their back on the other. Great.

“You are not fair,” Thomas finally mumbled, the words nearly being drowned out by the noise around them. Nearly, but not quite. With a deep breath, he finally turned towards Jack and gave him his very best attempt at a smile. “You are you. That’s the only kind of person you can be.”

It was a stupid thing to say, he knew it. And he’d probably earn himself a teasing for it. But at least then he would know for sure the meaning of Jack’s words. There would be no doubt about whether it was teasing or seriousness.

Though it hardly ever seems liked it, Jack listens as much as he talks, watches as much as he listens. Studying people is a habit with many uses: the best humor is rooted in truth, in the kind of quick and incisive observations he can make of people; and sometimes, even if it’s only rarely, it lets him know when he should stop joking and shut up.

Now it tells him to back off a little: Thomas is uncomfortable and shifting, and he isn’t going to give Jack what he wants, besides what he takes at tacit confirmation that, whatever Thomas does think about the kind of person Jack is, it’s not entirely kind.

He isn’t sure how he feels about that, someone kind harboring unkind thoughts about him. If he’s offended—if he wants someone to think well of him, even though he knows it wouldn’t be true. Or if it’s a good thing—if he should be somehow proud that Thomas seems to have some kind of self-preservation, the ability to see the world and people as they are and not look through rose-colored glasses, to not be blinded by flirtation and whatever else there is between him and Jack.

It certainly makes Thomas a lot more interesting, to think that he knows that Jack’s no good and is choosing to still hang around him anyway. Jack doesn’t know what to make of that.

“Okay, so,” he says, changing topics obligingly, though he does nudge Thomas with an elbow, silent acknowledgement that, yes, he is doing Thomas a favor in doing so instead of pressing the issue—or, at least, pressing this issue. He’s got no problem pressing another one: “What do you think of this whole Abernathy thing?”

     “Oh, you need me, do you?”

The words are practically a dare, catered directly to her artificially inflated ego, her pride at being the life of every party, the most savage of the beasts that made up their little society. She shifts in her seat a little, closing the thick book around a green highlighter to mark her page as she sits up on her knees and turns to fully face him, a little bit of a grin on her lips, a little bit of a challenge behind her smile. 

She’s not sure when her life turned into every Gravemaker begging her to go do dumb shit with them, but she knows she’s earned a well-deserved reputation for livening up any shitty event, and she has to admit that even if she knows he’s putting on a show to convince her, she’s flattered nonetheless.

She is the best at making fun of people, a kind of remorseless glee that comes naturally to her, that she’s kindled with years of practiced indifference.

     “Well if you need me, how can I say no? Oh, right: no, sorry. We can make fun of it from here, if you’re that keen. I bet Yaz is going to be livestreaming it to his fuckin’ instagram, I can text him and make him find all the people we hate.” 

“Yeah, Silva, I do,” He says, giving her his best puppy dog eyes, then taking it over-the-top—his favorite place to be—with a couple bats of his lashes. He’s pretty sure that she wants him to beg, and he’s definitely not above it: clowns don’t have dignity, and so he’d left his beyond a long time ago, that is if he even had any to begin with.

If it’s a game between them—him cajoling and flattering, her denying him just to see how far he’ll take it—it’s a game that he’s well-poised to win. He’s a natural flatterer, when he wants to be: there’s that aforementioned lack of dignity, and then there’s also his loose relationship with the truth.

And, in this case, it isn’t even untruths, just blatant exaggeration—delivered with the most deadpan, sincere expression he can muster—in the name of making Silva laugh, and then hopefully cave. “I will literally die if you don’t come with me. You don’t want me to die, do you? Come on, I know I’m your favorite after Beaux.”

He doesn’t know that, actually, but as far as he’s concerned he’s everybody’s favorite—placing Beaux ahead of him is just a concession to the exceedingly obvious. And, besides that, he’s banking on the fact that if Silva takes the opportunity he’s offering her to insult him straight to his face, she’ll at least get a kick out of it: “I am, right?”

Sometimes, when Thomas allowed himself to think of it, he wondered if his high school self would have ever gotten as close to Jack as he was now. Most of those times, the answer was no.

Talking to people was hard, some more than others, and Jack had not been the exception in the beginning. But now, Thomas found it easy to talk to him. At least during those few times when he wasn’t mocking or making fun. Which, he knew, weren’t many, but still.

High school Thomas would have never gotten close to him, he didn’t think so anyways.

“Maybe in your room? I don’t know,” he said, looking slightly to the other side. He could feel the warmth creeping up his cheeks and he would do his best to try and keep Jack from noticing. “I just didn’t take you for the kind of person to come to something like this.”

“Is that an insult?” He asks, eyebrow raised, a smile on his face to remove any of the sting that might otherwise have been in his words, show that he isn’t taking any of this too seriously—as if he ever takes anything seriously at all, let alone too seriously. “What ‘kind of person’ am I?”

Though there is, still, a part of him that wants to see Thomas squirm a little. See how much he’ll blush and look away. How much he’ll let Jack get away with. Because Jack doesn’t know and so he can’t help but keep testing. It’s a habit he formed when the consequences were much steeper, when the price for going too far was usually paid in violence. When he found it by cheerfully stumbling over the line that divided what someone could tolerate and what they could not.

He doesn’t know how far he can push Thomas with his own brand of teasing. Has no idea what a person like Thomas would do when pushed too far.

And there’s another part of him that’s just honestly curious. Jack knows who he is—(or thinks he does, at least)—but different people are like different mirrors held up to him: it’s not so much that he changes but that his reflection does. His view of himself does. And it’s novel: for long he’d only seen one thing, and taken it for absolute truth. Now that truth seems more variable: he can be one thing in someone else’s eyes and something else in another’s, and maybe life just about finding the reflection of yourself that you can live with.

And he doesn’t know, yet, how Thomas sees him—so isn’t the nice thing to do to ask?

There’s something strange about it: Lovell was supposed to be his escape from his father’s kingdom, a place ruled by guns and violence and death. That death has followed him to Lovell would almost feel like his fault, somehow, if only for the fact that he knows as little about what happened to Marcus Abernathy as anyone else.

There’s something almost unsettling about it: Jack had learned a long time ago to stop crying about the terrible things in the world he couldn’t control, but surrounded by mourning, he almost wishes he could feel more. What he does feel, however, is something that has long since become familiar, almost compulsive: he can’t look at a sea of serious faces without wanting to lighten the mood. He doesn’t know how to let tragedies like this—(if this even counts as one)—touch him anymore.  

When he’s reached his limit, he knows exactly who he’s looking for. Jack is a creature of big laughs and good times, and he’s learned to gravitate towards the people who reflect that same energy right back at him, don’t force him to create it wholesale himself the way he always used to have to, laughing like he didn’t care if anyone laughed with him. 

Nat is one of those people, and so he doesn’t give much care to the last few people he has to shoulder out of the way to make it to her side. After the reveal of Marcus’ portrait, they’re all milling around like gaping fish, anyway. “There you are—thank god. You about ready to get the fuck out of here? I need a drink.”

     “Mmm, tempting, but you know I have a very low tolerance for sad people. Walsh couldn’t find his favorite t-shirt this morning, so my quota’s all used up for the day. Maybe next time.” 

She grinned behind the words, the full brunt of it only spilling out at the end of the statement – if anyone could make going to a candlelit vigil for a dead asshole sound tempting, it was Jack, but even with the promise of something as exactly catered to her priorities as stealth pictures of people we hate crying, it was going to be hard to get her to budge from this seat. Usually, her priorities involved not being sober, ruining someone’s day, and having a laugh at someone else’s expense.

But today, she’d really been looking forward to a little peace and quiet.

Ideally, he’d join her. Some company while she went through the tedious process of finding quotes for her paper, somewhere in the mess that was her heavily annotated book. She could use some light conversation, while she worked, and Jack pretty damn close to  the very top of her list for ‘people she’d like to talk to while she was supposed to be working on her dissertation.’

     “Just snap me one of Roswell looking pathetic, if you can find her.

When it comes down to it, Jack isn’t really a rebel. More often than not, deliberately doing something other than what he’s supposed to takes effort he doesn’t really care to expend. He didn’t feel any real need to go to the vigil, didn’t think he’d get anything out of it, but hadn’t even really considered not going until Silva put the idea in his head.

It’d just seemed easier to go with the flow, make what fun of it he could. 

And now, after a truly inspired off-the-cuff idea, he’s convinced that he needs Silva with him for that fun. Sure, there are probably a couple other Gravemakers he could talk into his scheme, but Silva has a special level of viciousness to her that Jack can’t help but admire, want to surround himself with whenever possible. He’d always been taught that words were weapons for the weak, for people like him that didn’t have any others they could wield. But Silva doesn’t make words seem like a lesser weapon. Part of him hopes that, if he spends enough time around her, that might rub off.

“Rude, Silva,” he says, really getting into it now, working up to a truly impressive whine: “Come on, you know it’s no fun to mock people alone. I need you.”

THERE THEY GO, THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE DAMNED....

1. Szerencsétlen Venetian Snares 2. The Other Side Woodkid (I was shaped for the fury now I pay the price) 3. Pays To Know MyPet (Oh, I got you where I want you nowhere to go) 4. The Garden Mirah (Don’t tell me the truth, that your heart has hardened) 5. Glitter & Gold Barns Courtney ( Do you walk in the valley of kings? Do you walk in the shadow of men who sold their lives to a dream? Do you ponder the manner of things in the dark?) 6. Hajnal Venetian Snares 7. Sing It Back Moloko (Now you can't help it if you have been tempted by fruit hanging ripe on the tree) 8. When The Lights Go Out The Black Keys (Don't it hurt so bad, standing in the sun? The bottom of your heart, you don't love no one) 9. Machine Gun Portishead (If only I could see, you turn myself to me and recognize the poison in my heart) 10. Lose Your Soul Dead Man’s Bones (Oh, you’re gonna lose your soul tonight; oh, you’re gonna lose control tonight) 11. Cherry Tree The National (Loose lips sink ships, loose lips sink ships, loose lips sink ships) 12. Everybody Wants To Rule The World Lorde (Acting on your best behavior, turn your back on Mother Nature, everybody wants to rule the world)

YAZ; does social media influence the way you see the world?

“As far as I’m concerned, if you don’t follow me on Instagram, you’re fucking dead to me. Does that count?”

MATIAS; can anger be useful, or does it lead to destruction?

“For some people, destruction is useful. Depends on what you’re destroying. The thing that you’re angry at, or yourself. Personally, it hasn’t ever worked out all that great for me.”

RACHEL; Do you believe that found families share a bond as strong as blood relations?

“Stronger, even. My family thinks I’m a disappointment and a liability. The Gravemakers don’t.”