#gray makes things

Shane

Vocal patterns

Verbose, softly spoken, proper. A little awkward, but usually in a way that makes it clear he’s very self-aware and capable of playing it for laughs.

Uses archaic turns of phrase.

“ol’”

“musta’”

“why don’t you head on in” (Voodoo)

“boilerplate” (Natalie Wood postmortem)

“..., baby!”

Has a generally slow/drawling and almost grandiose manner of speaking. Lots of qualifiers, very evocative. Frequently ominous.

“Children will come here and tell tales of me” monologue (Goatman)

I wanna be swept up in this” monologue (Voodoo)

Honestly the fact that he has bits on this youtube ghost hunting show that can be reasonably described as monologues says a lot

“I think it’s a little bit more fun to believe that humans are capable of some truly horrific things.” (Salem)

“There is an emptiness there… and it is growing.” (Isdal Woman postmortem)

He loves double entendre. This is especially evident in the Queen Mary episode.

Personality

Pretty much un-flusterable.

Usually - though not always - the instigator of their most morbid bits.

The entire DB Cooper bit - do you realise how long that thing goes on for?

Lounging on the couch where Mr Borden was murdered, waving a prop axe around and joking about what it would be like to die the way he did.

“We’re here for the cult stuff!”

I like the fanon that says that Shane is typically the more in his own head of the two of them - he mulls his thoughts and feelings over slowly and with great care, and tends to try to keep them to himself as much as possible until, or unless, he decides to act on them.

Physicality

Shane is physically awkward. That being said, I think he turns his physical awkwardness into a joke in the same way he uses his social awkwardness - he exaggerates things that are already there, like the slouch, the stiltedness, the long moments of stillness.

Sometimes he stops exaggerating - for example, that one ig story of him playing pool in Savannah. He straightens up to his full height and becomes much more fluid and graceful in his movements.

He has this expression. I’ve described it as hungry before. He turns it up for the bit sometimes, as he does with everything - see the True Crime season 5 promotional photo - but it also makes appearances in the attic at Bellaire, the hallway at Eastern State and a few other places where it just feels… well, demonic.

Ryan

Vocal patterns

Colloquialism-heavy

Fast speaker

Makes a lot of use of filler words - “man”, “dude”, cursing,

Makes up lots of nicknames for Shane

Sasquatch

Big guy

Robo-squatch (Waverly Hills) (seriously)

Not necessarily the best at coming up with eloquent arguments on the fly - his strength is presenting a case with research and preparation to back him up, and without them he can get flustered.

Personality

He strikes me as incredibly intelligent, but also emotionally driven. He’s passionate about his work and has a tendency to hyperfocus - “we don’t like to approach Ryan when he’s working” (Isdal Woman postmortem)

Ryan Bergara is in no way a scaredy-cat. He gets scared on location, yes, but in general he has a fascination with dark, creepy, spooky things and I think he gets a great deal of joy out of indulging that.

He’s a huge horror connoisseur. He listens to horror movie soundtracks while he researches for episodes, which I have to imagine would be creepy as shit.

There’s a bit in the Worth It dates episode where they go to a horror-themed escape room, and Ryan is cool as a cucumber the entire time.

He’s also got a morbid sense of humour to match Shane’s, and he’s always delighted by Shane’s darkest jokes. 

His sense of humour sometimes comes out in the form of threatening (highly detailed) physical violence, especially in the more recent seasons.

Especially in the early episodes, Ryan would work himself up trying to get out from under the slightest, most accidental innuendo.

“I’d like to see you put on a dress from that time period” (Borden)

“That… that made us sound like a couple, we’re not a couple” (Goatman postmortem)

However, that’s changing! He’s become much more comfortable, probably as a result of the stuff he internalised as a frat boy fading with time.

Physicality

First, the obvious: Ryan’s a prototypical jock in a lot of ways. He’s got a solid sense and control over of his body. He plays basketball. He works out a ton.

When he gets scared, his eyes get huge and his voice gets high.

He also freezes up, widens his stance and gets low to the ground - for all that he talks about how his “mind is melting” and loves the part of the night where they get to leave a location, I think he has an instinctive fight response.

It’s the lightest whisper of a touch, lingering at his waist or against the back of his neck, just faint enough that he could almost believe it’s just his jacket pinching with his movements or whatever bullshit excuse Shane supplies for the camera. But his boyfriend’s eyes keep flickering black when he looks into the darkness, and from the way he’s moving, predatory and slow, Ryan suspects that if his tail were un-glamoured right now it’d be lashing.

There’s something in here with them.

They’ve joked before about how waiting for an EVP is soul-crushing work, but never quite like this. The silence has never felt this charged before. Ryan’s heart is pounding in his throat, the taste of iron heavy on his tongue. Feather-light touch builds into a long, slow trail down his spine, and he shudders, choking off a moan. Oh, god, not now.

“Shane?” he gets out, his voice trembling. He clenches his hands at his sides, forces his voice steady. “I - I really think something touched me. It just happened again.”

“Is that so? Has something taken an interest in ol’ Bergara?” Shane laughs, but there’s a hard edge to his voice, a viciousness, that drags low in Ryan’s gut. It’s not helping. “Well, that’s too bad, ghosties. You want him, you’re gonna get me too.”

“Sh - !” Ryan starts, but all at once he’s being shoved up hard against the wall, his breath forced out of him in a rush. His head falls back with a thunk. The spirit is pressing so close. He can feel the chill of its presence against his exposed throat.

And then Shane is there, horns and tail on full display and teeth gleaming in what little light comes in through the window, wrenching the spirit away from him with one clawed hand and rounding on the thing where Ryan can only assume it lies dazed on the floor.

“What did I fucking say?” he growls, sounding wholly inhuman, and Ryan’s legs choose that moment to give out entirely. He slides to the floor. Shane casts him a look over his shoulder: his eyes are twin pools of pitch, darker even than the rest of the room. Ryan can’t stifle the sound he makes this time. Apparently satisfied that he’s in no immediate danger, Shane turns his attention back to the spirit. “What did I fucking say?”

“Pl- please, no -” The voice is ethereal, like an itch in the back of Ryan’s mind, carrying with it a spark of terror that only intensifies his own.

Shane laughs again, cruel this time. “Oh, it’s too late for that now.”

“No - no! I’ll do whatever you want -”

“Then perish.”

The spirit’s final scream echoes through the empty house, hitting Ryan like a physical force. It’s a long moment before he comes back to himself enough to register Shane’s words.

His laughter comes out hoarse. Shane wheels around in alarm, only to realise that Ryan isn’t crying.

“Are - are you fucking serious?” he wheezes. “‘Then perish’?”

Shane shrugs. “It seemed like a good line at the time?”

Ryan rolls his eyes, holds out a hand for Shane to help him up. “You are such an ass.”

“Oh, I’m an ass?” Shane shoots back, smirking. He takes Ryan’s hand and pulls him up, then crowds in closer, pressing him back against the wall. His eyes flick downward. “Guess you don’t need any help with your little problem there, then.”

Ryan flushes. “Shut - shut up.”

“Shame. I mean, we’re going to have to edit all this out anyway…”

It’s so casual he wonders if maybe she hadn’t even realised it was his: she’s just curled up against the arm-rest, checking her phone, looking impossibly small in the grey crewneck he must have left here when they left for work together on Thursday morning.

“Hi,” he croaks, and she looks up to greet him with the impish smile on her face that she usually reserves for teasing Shane. She knows, Ryan thinks. Faintly, he’s aware that that probably means he’s doomed.

“Hey, Ry!” She reaches out to take his hand, her fingers only just peeking out from the sleeve, and tugs him closer. He flops onto the couch beside her, apparently unable to handle higher functions like balance right now. “How was your day?”

Ryan makes a noise that’s supposed to be non-committal but comes out closer to wanting, leans in and slips his arms around her waist. Under the sweater, her bare skin is spark-hot. The wanting noise turns into a groan, and he buries his face in her neck.

Sara laughs, drops a kiss to his temple. “That good, huh?”

Ryan nips at her throat and pulls away. “Shane! Your girlfriend is trying to kill me!”

Shane appears in the doorway, three beers in his hands. “She does that sometimes,” he shrugs. “What is it this time?”

Ryan makes a wordless, helpless gesture. Sara looks up at Shane from Ryan’s arms: the sweater pools in her lap, almost to her mid-thighs. She’s wearing a black skirt and thigh-high socks. It’s probably the cutest thing Ryan’s seen this year.

“Oh. Yeah, that,” he says, crossing to sit on Ryan’s other side and handing him a beer to pass to Sara, then another for himself. “That’s a thing.”

His face has gone studiedly blank. It reminds Ryan of when they were trying their hardest to be best platonic buds and Ryan used to try to get a rise out of him by showing off his P90X gains. Shane likes to think he’s smooth, but he’s terrible at hiding it when he’s flustered.

Ryan hands Sara her beer with a raised eyebrow. She raises one back. Smirks. Ryan thinks, oh.

On Monday, Shane is still half-asleep when he gets into the office, trailing after Sara with his eyes on his travel mug. Ryan’s already at his desk. He leans back in his chair, waits for Shane to drop into the seat next to him and look up.

When he does, Ryan gets to watch the same dumbstruck look cross his boyfriend’s face that he’d worn on Saturday night. It’s incredibly satisfying.

So is the heat that curls in his abdomen when, just before lunch, Shane crowds him into a bathroom stall and kisses his lips red and swollen.

“You two are gonna be the death of me,” Shane murmurs, his hands balled up in Ryan’s - his - shirt. “And you know I’m going to have to retaliate.”

Ryan just grins, pulls Shane closer.

“What’s up, big guy?”

“You tired, Ry?”

There’s a pause. Shane knows Ryan is reaching for the punchline, but he can’t quite grasp it, so he relaxes into the bit, trusts Shane to take it somewhere worth going. “Why would I be?”

“You’ve been running through my mind all day, baby.”

Ryan’s wheezing laughter is muffled: he’s slapped the phone against his chest. He comes back a minute later: “You’re an asshole. What’d you call me for?”

“I’m stuck in traffic on Sunset Boulevard. Pretty fucking stupid, right?”

Ryan snorts. “Yeah. Why’d you take that way?”

“I don’t fucking know. I don’t want to go home yet. Wanna meet me somewhere?”

Ryan’s grin is audible, or maybe Shane’s just too familiar. “Sure.”

The club is lit up with the inverse of the sunset, like Shane stopped the clock on tonight when he parked off Sunset and now he’s just making his way down the spectrum, killing time until reality crashes back into them. The bass is counting down in his ribcage.

He needs another drink.

Ryan’s skin is shining in technicolor: red, blue, purple by turns. His shirt glows under the blacklights, tinged with shadows where it sticks to his skin. He’s got a drink in his hand, raised up above his head as he dances, and Shane leans in to steal a sip from it, uses that as an excuse to slip his hand over Ryan’s hip and match his rhythm.

Ryan looks up at him and his smile is mocking, knowing. He pulls Shane closer. They press chest to chest in the crush.

He has to lean down so far to reach the shell of Ryan’s ear. “Bold, Bergara,” he whispers, and Ryan probably feels his words more than he hears them, but that’s okay, because he’s never needed to hear Shane to know what he’s saying.

Ryan smells like hair product, the same shit he runs through his hair every morning when they’re on location, someplace else where the clock stops and they can play-act at domesticity with no consequences. His shirt is riding up against Shane’s jeans, and Shane wants to skate his fingers along the lines of his hip bones like he does in the hotel beds they share, make him shiver and roll them forward.

Ryan drops his free hand to the small of Shane’s back. “Missed this,” he tells him, but they’ve never danced together like this before.

“Missed you, too,” Shane says. From this angle he can see how Ryan’s mouth pops opens in surprise.

It’s so easy to lean in and catch it with his mouth.

Ryan’s hand balls into a fist in the back of Shane’s shirt. They drop out of time with the music, slow and sliding against one another. Shane twines his arms around Ryan’s shoulders, presses their foreheads together when they break apart for air.