Chapter Text
“It’s the hottest day of the summer,” Matt starts, adjusting his glasses and casting a meaningful look Jay’s way. “You can do nothing, you can do something, or you can…”
Jay, from underneath the shade of his umbrella—Matt had made fun of Jay for carrying it around at first, citing it to be akin to a gay Princess Peach parasol, but a swift whack in the side with the gay parasol in question shut him up—offers a completely and utterly blank stare in return.
“Or you can…” Matt repeats, drawing each vowel out.
Still nothing.
In what will turn out to be a feeble attempt to help Jay out, Matt continues. “Do…”
Instead of properly following up with the right thing, Jay just says, “It’s not really summer, is it?”
Jay’s not wrong—it’s only May—but Matt throws his head back with a groan regardless. “Jesus Christ, nevermind,” he says. “We’ll rectify this,” Matt assures as he points a finger right at Jay, who hitches his shoulders in response, “once we’re back from this stupid field trip, but the—the point is, uh, that it’s hot as fuckin’ shit. Right?”
Hot as fuckin’ shit is almost underselling it—a heat wave’s making its way across Ontario, which is unfortunate for the batch of ninth and tenth graders currently on a school trip to Stratford to see Shakespeare stuck outside for the entire rest of the day while they’re not actively seeing Shakespeare.
“I guess it’s pretty hot,” Jay agrees mildly, despite appearing nowhere near as affected as Matt. While Matt’s over here turning red and sweating buckets, the only sheen on Jay is from his excessively reapplied sunscreen (even though he’s already hiding in the perpetual shadow of his gay umbrella). “Wanna go find some shade?” he offers. There’s only enough space for one under Jay’s protective cover.
For a second, Matt does consider it. But the bench they’re currently sharing is also right at the front of where the line for entering the theatre’ll be once showtime rolls around, and getting the right seats is too important for his plan to take the risk of losing their spot.
Matt says as much, before adding, “What they should do is put up, or—they should build an arbor. Here, right here. Some bullshit that’ll be perfect for all the old people that cream themselves over plays. Making donations and getting seats named after them.” An adjoining thought is quick to arrive. “People… park their asses on those, right? Is that classy? Is it really that classy to get a fuckin’ seat named after yourself? Dedicated to, meet ass.” He turns to inspect their bench, scanning the wooden boards for a plaque. He finds nothing.
In lieu of directly responding to even a single thing Matt said, Jay hefts his heavy-looking backpack onto his lap, reaches in, and hands Matt his bottle of sunscreen.
“Nah,” Matt refuses, shaking his head. Instead, he picks up their tri-fold posterboard—vital for the plan—to shield himself. The size of it makes the act an awkward and finicky ordeal, and he accidentally knocks Jay’s sunscreen out of his hand. It clatters onto the concrete by their feet.
“Hey!”
“Shit, sorry.” Matt readjusts, and hits Jay in the shoulder while he’s reaching for the bottle.
“Are you doing this on purpose!?”
“Rule of Three, Bird. If I were doing it on purpose, I’d make it meaningful—and nothing’s more meaningful than a tricolon. We’re only on two.”
“You make it sound like you’re going for a third.”
“Psh. No. Because then I’d be doing it on purpose. And I’m not. As we’ve established.”
“Okay…” Jay keeps a wary eye on Matt as he reaches again for the sunscreen, and the stare continues as he stuffs it back into his bag. Reassured that Matt’s done messing around with the posterboard, Jay settles back against the bench and relaxes.
“Hey,” Matt starts, smacking his lips and realizing how dry his throat’s gotten, “give me a sip of your water.” The tri-fold tilts in Jay’s direction without the support of both hands as he reaches one out towards the metal bottle sitting in a side pocket of Jay’s pack.
“No!” Jay shoots up, clutching his backpack in his free arm, and he hits himself in the face against the posterboard. “F█k!”
“That was not my fault,” Matt says, setting the board down before Jay can jump to pointing fingers.
“You can’t have my—...” Jay swallows. “...Water.”
“Dude, why the hell not?” They’ve traded bottles before, shared stolen convenience store slushies. It really shouldn’t be such a big deal. “You do realize you’re acting like a total freak right now, right?”
“I’m being normal.”
“Uh-huh. Very.”
“You can’t have any.”
“Jay.”
“Matt.”
“What, you can’t even use your words and tell me why?”
“Um…”
“You want me to—to fuckin’ die?” Matt asks, pivoting to a guilt-trip. “You want me to dehydrate to death? ‘Cause I’m gonna. I’m gonna shrivel up like a raisin. That’s what happens. You want me dead, raisin-style.”
“No, I don’t want that, but…” Jay looks up and down the road. He sets his backpack down on the bench, unzips a few pockets—clearly seeking out something specific—until he apparently finds what he’s looking for in a small pocket near the top. He pulls out a plastic bag with some prepaid bus tickets, a piece of paper with a phone number, a 20 dollar bill, and a few loonies and toonies inside. Compared to Matt’s bag, packed haphazardly (and half-assedly) on his own last-minute that same morning, Jay’s must’ve been positively overstuffed by the guiding hand of an overprepared adult the night before at the latest. “Okay, you… you don’t want to lose our place, so… wait here.”
“Sure?”
“And I’ll get you a water bottle. Cold. Ice-cold.”
Before Matt can say anything else, Jay runs off, umbrella in hand bouncing with every step. Presumably, he’s gone off to go buy Matt a bottle of water.
Well, alright then.
Matt picks the tri-fold back up, no longer in fear of hitting anyone else’s hands, shoulders, or faces, and idles as he awaits Jay’s return.
…He’s kind of taking a while though. A couple of minutes turn into a dozen, and a dozen minutes turn into a half-hour.
“Probably got lost,” Matt decides, and he coughs at the utterance, the dryness in his throat worsening. “Of course.” Jay’s ability to find his way back to Matt seems to vary by the day, and it seems like he’s lost today’s coin flip.
Deciding he’s losing way too much fluid to sweating, and that Jay’s probably-maybe-possibly gonna wander hopelessly for at least another half-hour at this rate, Matt goes right for Jay’s water bottle. He unscrews the cap, not bothering to spare a glance at its contents after hearing the liquid slosh around against the metal walls, and tips his head back as he brings it to his lips.
When the water reaches his tongue, Matt can feel his eyes nearly bulge out of his own skull before he spits out what is definitely not water onto the pavement. In the wake of his own surprise, a not-insignificant amount of the definitely not water spills out of Jay’s bottle, too, getting on his shorts and his legs and—again, on the pavement.
Staring down at the dark red now splattered against the concrete and staining his clothes, still frazzled from the shock of it, he realizes it was blood that he nearly drank. In fact, Matt thinks he might’ve actually swallowed some of it.
“You’re fuckin’ kidding me,” he says, suppressing a shudder. “Holy shit. Jesus Christ.”
Then, with the sort of timing that would make an editor say isn’t that a little too convenient, Matt sees Jay and his dumb, gay umbrella on the horizon, doing one of those little half-jogs and waving a plastic water bottle covered in condensation.
“Oh shit,” Matt says, scrambling to get things looking as normal as they can. He screws the bottle cap back on, wipes the bottle itself dry (and gets red on his shirt for the trouble), covers the splatter on the pavement with the tri-fold, and moves his backpack from behind him onto his lap to cover the stains on his clothes.
“Ice-cold water!” Jay announces proudly as he nears. “Here,” he holds the bottle out with a smug and self-satisfied grin, beaming as if it didn’t take him over half an hour to get a single thing of water.
Instead of pointing that out, Matt wisely decides to avoid potentially starting anything and just gratefully takes the bottle. If he could, he’d like to gargle the taste of blood out of his mouth, but that would almost certainly raise suspicion. He opens it up and takes a series of sips, grimacing with the first few when some of the remnants of blood linger and mingle with the water.
“Thanks, Bird,” he says after he ends up downing over half the bottle. It’s not like he was ever lying about being thirsty.
Jay doesn’t respond. He’s staring down at the tri-fold, and Matt’s brain immediately goes into overdrive trying to think of a distraction. Smoke may as well be coming out his ears.
“Um, Matt,” Jay starts, brows furrowing and head tilting, then, a nervous fear beginning to tinge his voice, “you didn’t, uh… happen to—”
“Jay,” he says with as much authority as he can muster while his brain chugs. Then, stalling, Matt continues, “I know what you’re thinking.”
“…You know I’m wondering if you drank my mom’s blood?” Jay asks in a quiet voice, tone still coloured with anxiety.
“That was your mom’s blood!?” Matt exclaims, voice pitching high and cracking, excuses about experiencing a vision quest and bleeding from his every orifice as a consequence of the sheer psychic strength of the hallucination quickly discarded in the face of such an insane revelation. “What the fuck!?”
“You don’t get to say ‘what the f█k!’” Jay shouts, anxiety replaced with anger. “I should be the one saying ‘what the f█k!’ What the f█k, Matt!?”
“I definitely 100% get to say ‘what the fuck!’ What the fuck, Jay!?”
“I told you you couldn’t have my—... water!” Jay has to force that last word—now a blatant lie—through gritted teeth.
“It’s not my fault you took forever to come back! Need I remind you: raisin-style. Why didn’t you just say what it was!?” Putting on an intentionally terrible and unflattering Jay impression, Matt continues, “Hey, Matt, sorry you can’t have my water. It’s ‘cause it’s not actually water, it’s my mom’s blood for some reason.” Dropping the act, he asks, “Would that be so hard?”
At that, Jay looks away guiltily, like a dog getting caught eating something it wasn’t supposed to. “I dunno,” he mutters. Then, as if parroting someone else’s words, he says, “I shouldn’t need it. It’s bad that I do,” like an echo.
“What?” Matt asks, still rattled from the mom blood reveal. “I mean, do you? Do you need it?”
“Um,” Jay halts. Then, getting the world out as quickly as humanly (vampirically?) possible, he answers, “No.”
“Seriously?” Matt raises an eyebrow, his train of thought already on a new, only tangentially-related track. “Great. Then you can’t get mad at how much got wasted,” Matt says, pushing the tri-fold out of the way with his foot to reveal nearly half the bottle’s original contents spilled onto the pavement. “Ha. Hey, we should get some white tape, set up a fake murder scene, really freak out Mr. Chan—”
“Wait, what?” Jay’s eyes widen comically at the amount of blood that’s been reduced to abject uselessness. “No, I can get mad!”
“Well, y’know, if you had just told me what it was from the start, this never would’ve happened,” Matt retorts, putting himself back on the offensive. “If you, uh, need another reminder, you took over 30 minutes to bring back something as fuckin’ basic as water, so—”
The verbal bickering quickly turns physical, and Mr. Chan finds Matt pinned under Jay (who’s totally cheating by virtue of calling upon his supernatural dhampir strength), with the former’s clothes stained red and the both of them surrounded by what is, in hindsight, a deeply concerning amount of blood. Needless to say, it looks bad.
It takes a long-winded discussion full of lies to convince Mr. Chan to not have Jay expelled immediately for ‘such an excessive display of violence,’ and they both end up punished for fighting, ‘wasting paint,’ and vandalizing by way of being disallowed from the Shakespeare viewing experience.
So much for that plan.
“Are you sure you’re, uh, eating—drinking—enough?” Matt needles Jay, pushing the handful of blood bags from their most recent morally dubious excursion into the fridge. “I dunno how much you actually need, and I really don’t want to put up with your starving vampire attitude again any time soon. Or ever.”
“I’m drinking enough,” Jay grumbles. “And I don’t need your nagging,” he adds, following after Matt to push his own handful of bags into the fridge.
“Oh, nagging. We’re gonna call it ‘nagging,’ now?”
“You have a better word for it?”
“How about ‘caring?’” Matt offers sardonically. “Doesn’t that sound nice? I’m being a real nice and lovable Care Bear about this whole thing. Want a taste of my Care Bear Stare?”
“What? No.”
“Too bad, ‘cause you’re tasting it right now, and it tastes like me making sure you’re drinking enough of your gross blood,” Matt huffs. It’s been about two months and change since Jay finally fessed up to needing human blood after all, and he’s been on a steady diet of a blood bag every two weeks ever since.
Annoyingly enough, Jay oscillates between genuine gratefulness and excitement for the regular meals and an off-putting, grating cageyness towards the whole thing, seemingly at random. “Y’know, I’m—I am literally stealing life-saving blood for your sake!” Matt continues. “It doesn’t get more Care Bears than that! That blood could be going to—to starving orphans! Wait, no—to orphans that fell victim to horrific bear maulings! See, it’s ironic. But, now it’s, it’s for you.”
Jay makes a face at that, scrunching his nose and clenching his jaw, and then he slams the fridge door shut hard enough to make the whole thing shake. “Nobody asked you to.”
“Are you seriously in a mood again?” Matt scoffs. “You sure you’ve been eating enough?”
“I’m just saying.” Jay starts walking away, heading towards the stairs. “You don’t need to be like that about it.”
“What—? Be like what?”
“Like that,” Jay accuses, frustratingly vague, nails chipping the paint on the handrail.
“You’re a big boy, Bird. Big Bird. Use your words.”
“F█k off, Matt.” Then, throwing his hands up into the air, he sarcastically declares, “Sorry I need it to live, okay?” before storming up the rest of the stairs.
“Woah—what?” Matt chases after him. “That’s what you got out of me asking if you were drinking enough? God, you are such a dumbass.” Jay’s bedroom door slams, and Matt finds himself shouting at wood. “You think I give a shit about that? I told you, Bird—that was just the Care Bears special!”
No response. Matt still performatively rolls his eyes, anyway.
“Hey, you know the rules for donating blood?” Matt asks, deciding on a new angle of attack. “It’s every 56 days! Eight weeks! Two months!” He pauses, hoping the implications are sinking in. Just in case they aren’t, Matt adds, “And it’s been—uh, two months since you had a sip of me, so—how about that?”
Behind the door, Matt hears footsteps, and then the door opens.
“...What are you trying to say,” Jay asks, flat.
“I’m saying, y’know, if you want some of that effective fresh stuff, now’s the time for it. It’s blood donating time.”
Jay gives Matt a blatant once-over, very clearly strongly considering the opportunity. He even licks his lips, the maniac.
“You’re up for it, then?” Matt hazards a guess. “I’ll even take a shower this time, you little picky eater, you. Want your food clean, eh?” He says it with the intention of it being nothing more than a light jab, but Jay’s eyes shutter at the statement and he closes the door.
“Thanks,” Jay says from inside his room, “but I don’t need it.”
Well, at least the door wasn’t slammed in his face.
—
It takes another four months of on-and-off offers before Jay finally takes Matt on for another feeding session. Without the ‘starving-to-death’ element thrown into the mix, it ends up largely uneventful—though, on top of a short stretch of increased sluggishness, Matt ends up feeling itchy afterwards, as if he’s been bitten by a mosquito. Not very pleasant.
On Jay’s end, for a couple of days immediately after, his mood noticeably improves. He’s a bit cheerier, a bit more motivated and energized—but then he’s on an avoidant streak for another week after that. Rushing out of shared living spaces at the slightest hint of Matt, avoiding eye contact when proximity is unavoidable, keeping his head down and his footfalls quiet, the whole nine yards.
Whatever. If Jay wants to be a fuckin’ weirdo about the whole thing, that’s his prerogative. As long as he’s not starving.
Though it does make working on plans pretty difficult.
“Erase that kid from your mind,” Matt says as he pushes open the last door separating the hospital from the outside world. “We are never seeing him again.”
Jay’s frowning, trailing after Matt. “But…”
“Never,” Matt repeats.
“…What about that photo we got?”
Matt turns to face Jay, opens his mouth, closes it, squints up and down, then starts leading them back home. “I guess we can get a frame for it,” he concedes. It’s a solid photo. It’d be a shame to just toss it.
“A nice one?”
“Dollarama,” Matt says, definitive. “Maybe Walmart. Maybe.”
“Aw.”
“‘Aw?’ No. No ‘aw.’” Matt waves a hand around dismissively, scowling all the while. “This is some kid that wasn’t even dying of cancer. Dollarama’s what the print’s getting. Maybe a garage sale pickup if we get lucky.”
“But it was such a special day…” Jay muses idly, before seeming to remember all the parts of the day that went wrong. “Um, y’know, aside from the… yeah.”
Matt sighs. “Listen, Bird, I know you had a nice little self-discovery moment and everything,” he starts, recalling that downright serene look on Jay’s face on the bridge by Timberwolf Falls, “but—... but epiphanies like that happen every day!” Matt stops himself. “No, they don’t. No. But they could.”
“Uh…”
“Point is, we’re not gonna go to fuckin’—Michaels or anything. Okay? And, y’know, price doesn’t necessarily dictate quality, anyway. Or, or ardor, for that matter. Why should a cheaper frame mean less? Why even—place so much emphasis on cost and fanciness? And—uh, what of brand names, am I right? Fuckin’ brands. Oh my God, brands.”
“Okay, fine,” Jay yields. “Jesus.” He coughs. “I just thought it’d be nice.”
“Anything can be nice with the, uh, right mindset,” Matt declares. “You just need to frame it right. Ha!”
Jay hums, thoughtful. “So, you could be nice, too?”
“I’m literally always nice,” Matt says, offended. “I’m so nice. I’m so nice! Are you still trying to get something fancy? Really? ‘Cause—”
“No, no, it’s not that,” Jay interrupts. “Actually, I was kinda hoping…”
“Yeah-huh?” Matt stops, looking over his shoulder.
Jay’s stopped, too. He’s wearing a bashful smile, half-hidden behind a hand scratching at the side of his face. “Well…”
“Despite how much I’d like for it to, y’know, not be the case, I’m not a mind-reader, Bird.” Matt turns to fully face Jay, sensing that this section of their perpetual motion machine of a conversation might warrant a bit more focus. “You’re gonna have to use your words.”
“Well,” Jay says again. “Like you said, I kinda feel like I had an ep—… a moment, today.”
“You absolutely did,” Matt agrees. “Big time. It was very—cinematic.” He punctuates the statement with only mildly sarcastic jazz hands.
“Was it?” Jay asks, suddenly preening.
“Totally,” Matt says. Then, fearing that they might end up caught in an ego-stroking loop, he diverts back. “You were saying?”
“Oh, right. So. I was just thinking… sorta ‘cause of that moment, right, that maybe today we could…” He pauses, considering, before deciding to mime a bite. “Y’know?”
Matt quirks an eyebrow in realization. Holy shit, Jay was asking for a feeding session? That’s a first. It’s always been Matt making the offer—whether it was to try and convince Jay to go along with something, or to try and lift Jay’s spirits, or to make up for some transgression or whatever, or even just because the timing seemed right—but now here Jay was, taking the initiative and making the first step.
“Sure,” he finally says, after a moment of flabbergasted silence passes. “I mean, why not? When even—was the last time? Long enough ago, probably.”
Jay’s resulting smile does absolutely nothing to hide his excitement. “Really?”
“Yeah, man,” Matt answers easily. Who is he to get in the way of the fruits borne from Jay’s self-actualization? He pivots on his left foot and starts walking again. Jay starts following, close behind. “Of course.”