#brockandroll

Behind him, chipper as a bird, Eli continued: “Is it…wet? I bet it’s wet.”

That was what did it. He had to turn around. He opened his mouth to ask a question of his own, something along the lines of ‘What?’ or ‘Huh?’ or (currently his top pick) ‘Wet?!,’ and stopped when he saw what he saw. Namely Eli.

Namely upside down.

Namely Eli, upside down.

The first time they’d met, Jayco had found himself thinking that Eli looked like what would happen if a small Victorian child with a wasting disease was visited by Ye-Olde-Make-A-Wish and granted his lifelong dream of raiding a Hot Topic employee’s closet. That impression had not changed in the time they’d known each other. Where there weren’t ruffles on the guy, there was lace, and where there wasn’t lace, there were rivets and studs. He took the whole vampire thing a little too seriously, that Eli Underwood, as if that wasn’t made perfectly crystal fucking clear by his insistence on doing things like hanging upside down or drawling “Good evening…” by way of a greeting when anyone entered his shop.

And like, okay, power to him, but Jayco was a simpler man. He had simpler tastes. An undershirt with only one heinous stain, a pair of Tripp pants that still mostly fit, a pair of Chucks…he hadn’t quite been able to meet the intensity of Eli’s vampire vehemence. Shit, he wasn’t sure he was even approaching it—Eli’d been doing character work.

“We’re still doing that, huh?” he asked, the exasperation in his voice at least momentarily outweighed by his confusion. “Dude. How many times do you need people to tell you that’s not a thing? You’re not gonna…please let the bat thing go. Have some dignity.”

If Eli heard him, he didn’t show it. Nope, he kept up his unintelligible ranting, his head on the floor and his knees hooked over the mattress on the flimsy IKEA bedframe, looking at once like a kid at a slumber party and the world’s strangest crime scene. The hands folded over his solar plexus only added to the general vertigo of the scene—that much, at least, Jayco liked to think he was starting to grow accustomed to. Someone else walking into the cramped bedroom over the storefront might’ve thought it odd, the way Eli seemed to stare off into the ether even as he chattered on and on, but that too was par for the course…even on the rare occasions there was a flicker of awareness, hell, of ‘there-ness,’ in those gauzy eyes of his, it wasn’t there for long. It was as though he were always seeing things juuust to the left of the real world, following conversations and gestures no one else could see.

Not for the first time, Jayco had to wonder whether he would’ve been so gung-ho to track down a Malkavian for Serena if he’d known this was what he’d be signing up for.

It seemed doubtful.

“Hey. Hey!” He set his phone down mid-text, moving his hand instead right in front of Eli’s face and snapping his fingers a couple times to bring him back. “The hell are you talking about?”

Praise be, his eyes flicked to him immediately, full of recognition and (for the time being, at least) some measure of attention. “Kissing guys,” repeated Eli Underwood, he of the dime store Dracula accent and cataract-colored contact lenses. “What’s it like kissing Kevin? I mean, I imagine you’ve kissed Kevin. I don’t want to wrongfully presume you’ve kissed Kevin. If you haven’t kissed Kevin, far be it from me to suggest that you’ve kissed Kevin—”

Aaand he was off again. Wonderful. Fantastic. Precisely what he’d been hoping for. “Could we, uh, maybe not bring Kevin into this?” he grumbled, glancing once towards his phone before making the executive decision to just get this conversation over with; there’d be time for everyone else later, none of the Tremere were so important that they couldn’t fucking wait five more minutes, and though he hadn’t known Eli long, there was no question in his mind that nipping this shit in the bud was the only way to go. Otherwise, the shit in his head took root and festered into something awful, like the whole cousins thing. And the dead grandpa thing. And, of course, the upside down thing. Always the fucking upside down thing. “Now you gotta rewind—why the fuck was ‘is it wet?’ the first thing that occurred to you?”

Without missing a beat, Eli dropped one tangent and picked up another. It was a skill, the way he could do that, and his execution was nothing short of masterful. “I just figure it’s probably a wet experience, that’s all. Moist.”

“Don’t.”

“What?”

“Don’t say moi…forget it.” There was a moment, brief but unbearable, where he saw this cute little exchange from someone else’s eyes: There they were, two full-grown men just hanging out in a shitty little bedroom over a creepy fucking curio shop, Eli hanging from the bed like some sort of horribly mutated sloth, Jayco sitting on the floor with his legs crisscross like a kid at camp, talking about smooching cute boys. Jesus fucking Christ, the only way it could’ve been more surreal was if they’d both been on their tummies with their legs kicked up behind them, and even then…

But that was when something he’d said earlier clicked.

He pulled back a bit, sizing him up in a way he hadn’t thought to do before. Suddenly…suddenly something made a whole hell of a lot of sense. “You’ve never kissed anyone before,” Jayco grinned, his tone equal parts adolescent jeering and dawning realization. Of course he wouldn’t know what it was like to kiss someone! Who in their right fucking mind would kiss Eli-Fucking-Underw…his grin faltered. “I’m not kissing you.”

 As though his face was made of rubber, Eli’s expression morphed into one of cartoonish insult. “Oh merciful Christ, no, I don’t want to kiss you either!” He averted his eyes and his lower lip pooched out into something probably meant to be a pout. “Say what you want about my morals—”

Bad, Jayco thought to himself, They are bad.

“—but I wouldn’t kiss you if I was forced to.”

“Uh. Wow.” He set his elbows on his knees and leaned back a bit, doing his very best to mask the quivering of his own mouth with a scowl. Weirdo or not, he never felt totally right laughing right in Eli’s face. Usually he waited until he was distracted by something shiny. “Hurtful. What you said just now was hurtful.”

Eli’s eyes rolled towards him again, pupils made uncannily small by those fucking contacts, and the annoyance in those dark pinpricks was absolutely palpable. “I don’t involve myself in impromptu romantic entanglements with people who have tried to murder me.”

“Oh my God…how many times am I gonna have to apologize for that?! I said I was sorry! What, I was supposed to just ignore all the blood you were gushing? C’mon. Be real.”

His pout resurfaced, but as Jayco watched, Eli’s gaze went far-off, distant, as though a more important thought had sunk its talons into his brain. He didn’t have to wait terribly long for clarification on that one. “And for your information,” he drawled, “I have, in fact, kissed people, thank you. Female people. Girls. Er, women. Ladies. Women.” There was no use in pointing out the repetition, he knew, so he let it go. “What do you take me for? Look at me! I’m a…a fairly handsome young man!”

A fairly handsome young man cosplaying Lestat, Jayco thought, and had to fight his snickering that much harder, A fairly handsome young man doing a shitty Borat impression while hanging upside down and trying to think himself into a swarm of bats.

What he actually said was, “Oh yeah? And uh, how’d that go?”

“How’d what go?”

God help him. God help them both. “Kissing, Eli. Focus, please. You’re the one who brought it up.”

“Oh,” he said, blinking as though he hadn’t expected that. “Hmm. How was it?”

“Yeah.”

“Kissing?”

“Yes, Eli. Kissing.”

He seemed to mull it over for a long moment—much longer than he should’ve needed—and then sighed with such intensity that his entire body flattened. “Wet.”

“…oh.” Well, at least he didn’t have to fight his laughter anymore. “I mean…I guess that…explains some stuff.” Before his tender, delicate mind could process that deeply troubling statement any further, Jayco cleared his throat. “Don’t know how to tell you this, but kissing guys is a lot like kissing girls, so.”

Eli’s distress was obvious.

Knowing full well the sort of crazed bullshit that came with the worst of his episodes, Jayco very, very quickly backpedaled. “I can’t…dude, ‘wet’ really isn’t…I think you’ve had some bad experiences in the past, and you shouldn’t let that, uh…cloud your judgment here.” Then, praying it would perhaps save them both from a retelling of what he was sure was just an unspeakably horrendous explanation, he abruptly changed tack. “Wait, what guy do you wanna kiss all of a sudden?”

“It’s not that I want to kiss anyone,” Eli said a bit too quickly, “I was just wondering. Just curious. Just trying to get some answers. I mean, honestly, genuinely, like, before this? I don’t think I’ve ever even thought about men like that, even once, or in passing, or anything like that. I-I-It never occurred, you know? To me, I mean. It never occurred to me, is what I mean. I’m sure it occurred to other people. Like you. And Kevin. You and Kevin I’m sure it occurred to. Not me. But…” He grew pensive again, his lips pressing together in a tight line as he appeared to gather his thoughts.

Which, of course, Jayco had to figure was easier said than done. The idea of Eli ‘collecting his thoughts’ brought to mind some poor sap trying to put snowflakes an alphabetical order. Just didn’t work like that.

“I’ve bitten a lot of guys since turning.”

Shit, and just like that, the laughter was threatening to come back. He sounded so goddamn serious! Jayco did his best to cover it with a cough.

“And I’ve licked a lot of guys. I didn’t think licking was going to be such a big part of the vampire experience…did you? That wasn’t in any of the books! Or movies! Or anything! But it’s all, nooo, you need to lick the wound, and that’s just…I’ve licked more guys in one week than I think most guys lick other guys in a year. It’s been a lot of licking.”

“…Eli, how often are you eating?”

Again, he may as well have said nothing at all. “And I’m not saying that it’s awoken something in me—”

“I think this conversation sort of proves that it has, actually.”

“—I’m just saying that it’s, you know, a thing that some people do, and I was curious because I know you’re one of the people that does that thing. Or at least I think you are. I guess I’ve never asked outright. It seemed impolite. But I’m pretty sure you are. I mean, Kevin certainly seemed happy to see you at Unspooled, so—”

Ah.

Uh huh.

And there it was.

As realization sunk down around him, Jayco’s entire posture changed; his shoulders loosened, his back slouched, his eyes rolled to the ceiling. He must’ve been spending too much time around him, because all at once he could see the exact path of Eli’s reasoning laid out before him like a treasure map drawn in crayon. It had been the mention of the club that had done it—thinking about Unspooled slid the memory of the night’s events more firmly into place, and it didn’t take a genius to trace a line from one club to the other. Before their (uncomfortable) time at Unspooled, where had they been?

Club Blue.

And what had they been doing at Club Blue?

Getting extorted by Mavis, mostly, dealing with her sneering in their faces as she hiked up the price for Jared’s (Jacob’s? Jerry’s? Josh’s? Jonah’s?) blood doll.

And who had come to their rescue just in time? Who had appeared in a veil of shadow, flanked by two Frankensteinian amalgamations of flesh and bone and ill-fitting skin? Who had flashed an impressive wad of cash that had Mavis fawning and simpering like she was talking to the Baron herself?

Mother. Fucking. Bez. Dunsirn.

“You meet one asshole with a cravat,” Jayco said flatly, “And that’s enough to trigger an entire identity crisis for you, huh? That’s all it takes?”

Puffing up like an indignant sparrow, Eli tsk’ed and tutted before he managed to make his mouth work the way he wanted it to. “I-it wasn’t the cravat!” he sputtered, his eyes momentarily going wide enough that Jayco could see the full-moon outline of his contact lenses. “There was the waistcoat! A-and the, the pipe! And the…I…the brooding! And…and…” He deflated visibly, dropping his hands from his chest to cover his face. “The cravat factors pretty heavily into this, I will grant you that much, but—”

Oh this was going to be an issue. This was going to be a fucking problem. Eli might’ve been the one prone to (shitty) premonitions, but Jayco didn’t need a crystal ball to see trouble on the horizon. “You do realize he’s probably going to try to merc us, right? Like everyone else in this fucking shitshow of a town?”

“He invited us to dinner!”

“Yeah. So he can kill us. Or blackmail us into taking on a job that will get us killed. Probably send us into Camarilla territory again.”

It seemed Eli hadn’t considered the possibility until that precise moment. Jayco could almost see the smoke coming from his ears as the cogs of his mind whirred away at double speed at the mention of the Camarilla. Poor guy was probably thinking of that elbow he’d taken to the nose…or, more likely, the bullets still lodged in his side. Fucking Camarilla.

God. Sure. Sure, Eli could agonize over every insignificant noise he heard on the wind as an immediate threat to his life, but when faced with the very real, very probable threat of a Giovanni necromancer wanting to tear his skin off and make his skeleton dance just for shits and giggs, all he could think about was how dreamy the guy’s eyes had been.

…yeah, sounded about right.

He kneaded at his temples until the worst of his exasperation faded to a dull roar in his ears. They were going to have to go to the stupid dinner one way or another—he didn’t know enough about the Giovanni to know exactly what they were in for, sure, but turning down the man who’d had Mavis shaking in her boots like that didn’t seem like the brightest fucking idea—and there was no doubt in his mind that something would happen during their time there that would smash Eli’s strange (and sudden) little crush to miserable smithereens. Probably underneath a designer loafer, at that. Corporate patsies, all of them.

“Okay, uh…hmm.” Jayco rolled his head on his shoulders before pushing himself up from the ground, grabbing his phone to finish the text he’d left half-typed. “Not for nothing, but maybe, uh, consider the possibility that kissing girls sucked so bad because you’d prefer kissing guys, huh?”

Eli’s gaze clouded again. Had it not been for the deep crease of confusion between his eyebrows, his face had gone slack enough to give him the appearance of an actual, factual corpse laid out on a slab after being surprised to death at his own birthday party.

Oh, he was…so glad he couldn’t hear Eli’s thoughts. Just…so, so glad. That was the look of a man doing a fair amount of internal yelling, that’s what that was, and interesting as he found the little weirdo, Jayco couldn’t fathom helping walk him through…whatever was going on in there. No sir, no ma’am, no thank you. He would pass.

As he prepared to make himself comfortable for a long snooze in the wardrobe, he patted Eli’s knee chummily enough. “Don’t kiss Bez,” he said simply, unsure (and frankly not caring) whether he’d actually been heard; there wasn’t a reality in which he could imagine someone who appeared as chill and put-together as Bez Dunsirn being tempted by a lunatic Malkavian like Eli “Here, Come Talk To My Dolls” Underwood, but…shit, he’d seen some weird fucking bullshit go down, the past few weeks. Better safe than sorry. “For the love of God Eli, do me this one solid and kiss anyone but Bez, okay? Literally anyone.” He didn’t wait for a response to shut himself away in the wardrobe, pulling the doors shut tight behind him.