Why is it that when I enter "Tyler L." and "Jeremy G." into the character search options on this site and hit "ROMANCE", stories come up that are not slash? This should not be.

Jyler is about as obvious as Jack and Ianto, for christ's sake, and they are canon. I mean, the Vampire Diaries are playing for the teenage girl market hard with the 2 Hot Guys Alone In A Room Breathing Heavily At Each Other And "Arguing", Occasionally While Shirtless, Card. I enter as exhibit A any scene that includes Damon and Stephan having a "brotherly talk". (Air quotes in the extreme. If any brother of mine walked into my room to talk about matters of life and death and vampirism, I would tell him at least to wait until I had all my clothes on, first. Then I would check to see that he wasn't on any heavy medication. Everyone knows my family are werewolves.)

So I feel it is my duty to finally contribute to the side of those who have seen the light.

This is not, in fact, Jyler yet. Instead, Tyler takes a dip in the crystalline waters of the good old river Denial, where he once again encounters the crocodiles of the obvious, who whack at him with foreboding hammers. (Gee, Tyler, I dunno. Maybe this happens to you because you're a werewolf, which we guessed in episode one, and there is a full moon sitting on top of your head.) I'm not sure why he likes to swim there, but he sure does do it a lot.

Warning:...Tyler is a dick and says bad words?

...

Tyler knew it wasn't a good thing. Probably wasn't going to end well at all, really, though what exactly was going to go wrong the awkward feeling in his stomach never told him. It was only a feeling.

But still, it felt a little odd that the only thing he could think of to draw was Jeremy. Not surprising—he had been always been painfully bad at finding subjects, one of the reasons he had finally lost patience. Fantastic as some of his figures might be, the ideas came slowly and at great intervals; only once he had finally happened upon exactly the right one could he visualize it perfectly, almost obsessively, and draw.

And after all, Jeremy had been the one who had planted the thought of drawing again in his head. And one evening, alone in the house, his brain had pulled it out again and presented it to him as a compulsion that wasn't about to be ignored.

The ideas never came on command, and after impatient minutes of staring at the paper and rejecting every image that he'd thought of—too hard, too easy, too boring, just plain not right—his subconscious had summoned a picture of Jeremy. That one felt perfect. Tyler had been able to see it exactly, the details waiting to be transferred from mind to hand to borrowed printer paper, and the need to start that hand moving had yanked at its tethers. He wasn't much good at portraiture, really—at all, in any way—but it was probably that or sitting and staring at the paper all night. Or until he ripped it in half; more likely—or gave in and tried to draw something he didn't want to just for the sake of it, which would result in something half-assed that would only piss him off. So he had started drawing Jeremy.

And now, three days later, he was still drawing Jeremy, still able to think of nothing but drawing fucking Jeremy. It wasn't that he meant to, but each time he sat down to sketch something it just happened. And that was just—well, sort of icky, supplied the part of him that had never quite stopped being five years old. Anything involving Jeremy was a bit icky. Uncomfortable, awkward. Weird. He balked at thinking about any of the things that felt that way, for fear of learning anything further.

But even with that, the just—weirdness—of the idea of thinking about Jeremy Gilbert at all, it also felt almost natural. He had pushed down the five year-old him simply to spite it for its irritating continued existence, and kept at it, and soon began not to think about it at all.

And drawing Jeremy was, really, in many ways a good thing. He needed practice drawing real things, realistic people—portraits and things like that had always been his stumbling block, and in a way that one artistic failing had always been what hurt the most about his drawings. Tyler could trace out whatever was in his mind with, if not ease, complete accuracy, but the level of detail and understanding required to make a lifelike, human face or form out of graphite and paper had always been an annoyingly unattainable goal. Fantasy had always been easier for him, but that made it feel like settling somehow, like it was less worthy. But he still stuck with it, because, well, realism was too hard for him to try to change. And he had always hated himself for that, just a little.

What a surprise.

Now that he was starting again, however, Tyler had thought, he might as well put in the effort he had never particularly bothered to before. That meant a choice between practicing on a memory of a person or a memory of an object—no way he was asking anyone to model, or let his mother catch him drawing her, and there was only so long he could sketch an apple placed at his windowsill before he went mad with boredom. Or ate it. That meant it might as well be a person, then, and there hadn't been anyone in particular he would want to draw. So if Jeremy his subconscious picked, he couldn't think of any definite reason why Jeremy it shouldn't be.

It certainly was good practice. It wasn't as painful as he had thought, he considered, looking at one. And maybe that was because he hadn't really tried before, but maybe also, just maybe, he had gotten better.

They looked like Jeremy, at least—though why did that boy keep growing his hair out? It was bloody annoying, Tyler was starting to find, given that he was working from strung-together memories, and often the damn hair looked far too long or far too short at whatever angle he was drawing, and he couldn't seem to recreate the way it flopped about. But the nose was right; and the eyebrows—very straight, the mainly moved from side to side—when he had a feeling that when he got those the whole thing would begin to work. It was odd how a few details could immediately recreate a person for you, and especially details that he realized now he had never consciously noticed before. Now, inspecting his memories, he was able to find some of those things that made his mental images of Jeremy look like Jeremy.

It wasn't even as if he was properly thinking about Jeremy, anyway. Just looking, and that within the safety of his own imagination. He didn't have to feel anything, he could just look and assess on the purely visual plane, analyze the fall of light and shadow on a face just as he would anyone else's. At some point it wasn't even Jeremy any more, just an image, an assemblage of details, and he could sit on his bed for hours, an atlas as an easel on his lap, staring at the space in front of the wall where, in his mind, Imaginary Jeremy revolved. The construct, assembled at first from snapshot memories before beginning to exist on its own, became like a doll that he could move about to practice drawing from any angle.

The drawings were shit sometimes—often. He wasn't much good at it, really: his hand failed, never quite able to make the shapes he could envision so clearly, or he forgot what he was doing, working without an actual subject, and drew as if there were two light sources, ruining the way the shadows fell. Even the mental image itself, that seemed at first perfectly clear, grew fuzzy when he tried to focus on a single detail—because after all how much time did he spend looking at fucking irritating Jeremy?

But sometimes, too, they were pretty fucking good.

Looking at the first sketch—a three-quarters view of head and shoulders, and with realistic drawings he'd always sucked at those—that came out more than decent, Tyler had had to work hard not to start laughing.

It had been a long time since he had laughed just because he was happy.

...

Aw.

This is why I should not start writing at two o'clock in the morning on a Sunday. But hey! they canceled school, and so all is well with Jamie.

Except that jamie's brain toast and jamie has homework to do and also needs to shovel the drive and I would like some orange juice, but do we have any? I don't think so, curses, and also yet again there is this thing called "plot", here, which jamie has only just realized my story requires. Also, am I capable of resisting the urge to write yet another thing with two POVs? I don't think so. What do you think?

Can you say "review", children?

Knowing me, a second part may well be up by tonight. Or, alternatively, next July.

...

Second PS: driveway done!

jamie has sandwich.

Yumm.