Chapter Text
Tyler was hungry. It wasn’t his writing-hunger, the kind that sought out rhymes in his mind and made his fingers itch for a pen and paper. It wasn’t human hunger, either; didn’t make his stomach growl, didn’t fill him with the standard longing for a cheeseburger or an extra-large bag of chips. It was the kind of white-hot, sore throat, bubbling hunger that made his pupils get tight and his head foggy. He grabbed his coat off the sofa’s arm as he got up and headed for the door.
It’d been this way now for three years, but Tyler had been sick of it since the first week. Those first few days were the worst, when he was confused and scared with pain in his gums and eyes fixated, without discernible reason, on the throats of those walking past him. The fourth night… He shuddered and changed the direction of his thoughts, which naturally wandered to Josh. The only thing he really thought about consistently. The week this whole thing started was about a month after Josh had shook his hand, actually, told him it’d been a good run, and thanks, man, but he had to go help his brother with his new company in Illinois. Family, dude, he’d said helplessly, and Tyler had nodded, because he understood. Of course he did. Maybe we can do a Fall Out Boy, Josh had joked, but Tyler could tell he was unhappy, too.
He thought they would’ve kept in touch, but sometimes life is ridiculous and keeps people apart. It was like a mean kind of fate; Tyler lost his contacts, Josh was travelling for business whenever he called, new phones, new homes, different paths. It wasn’t just that he missed Josh – he knew when they’d parted ways that he would. But the strength of the loneliness punched the breath out of him, sometimes. He’d lost a limb, an invisible one that was just as vital as his arms and legs. Just like when a cat loses their tail and their ability to balance is shot at the same time, Tyler being separated from Josh had knocked him off kilter. There was nothing, now, to steady him on the precipices he frequented. There was nothing to wrap around him, no curled safety blanket, no warmth. He was exposed bone now, even with the added strength and vitality that came with his three-year-old horror story.
The streets of New Jersey were intimidating in the late night/early morning, but Tyler wasn’t nervous. Not anymore. There wasn’t a human alive that could harm him. Not unless they had a sharp piece of wood, he thought, smiling without humour at how much of a walking cliché his life had become. He headed straight for the cluster of clubs closest to his house; drunk people were suggestible, easy to separate from their friends, and had hazy memories that couldn’t pick his face out of a crowd in the morning. He was walking past The Den, a gay bar that he was much too nervous to visit on a normal basis, lest anyone he knew saw him there, when he caught… Something good. Really good. This happened, sometimes – just like with food, some people smelled more appetising. Tyler grimaced at how casual thoughts like that came to him, but the feeling only lingered for a moment, pushed aside by his now ravenous hunger and the warm, dark scent from the gay bar.
He half-jogged around the back of the building and arrived at one of the back exits just as a girl with two messy braids came stumbling out and vomited against the side of the closest of two dumpsters. Tyler skirted around her as her friend, presumably, rushed out after her. He caught the door before it closed and slipped inside, the music starting a beating thrum in his head before the door even sealed behind him. He pulled his black hood around the edges of his face and pushed his way into the crowd, all of his senses zeroed in on the one smell that’d caught his attention. His eyesight in the dark, sweaty club was excellent, but he could’ve found his target without it – his hands were on the man and dragging him away from the throng of bodies at superhuman speed into a quiet corridor before anyone would notice him missing. If he’d been concentrating more on his surroundings, he might have even noticed the brightly coloured arm and the dark eyes that were all too familiar. But he wasn’t, and he didn’t, and his mouth was at the man’s throat when he spoke.
“Woah, woah, dude,” it was only slightly slurred and still alert, confused and a little on edge but still polite. Most importantly, it was Josh’s voice.