(no subject)
Title: Faster Than A Speeding Bullet
Author: psuedo_catalyst
Artist: chosenfire28
Crossover: Bandom (Young Veins)/The Social Network RPF
Type: slash, gen
Rating: R
Word Count: 31,600
Characters/Pairings: Ryan Ross/Jesse Eisenberg
Warnings: none
Spoilers: none
Summary: Ryan Ross has a box of self-help books under his bed and a second imploded band in as many years. Jesse Eisenberg has a flourishing career and trouble dealing with being away from his cats. When they meet at an animal shelter, they are brought together by lost kittens and kept together by increasingly surreal telephone conversations.
Author’s Notes: It takes a village to write a really odd story, so I need to massively thank eledhwenlin for the amazing and so patient beta, zeenell for being enthusiastic about this fic the whole way through, and chatficcing years and decades of this universe with me that will never make it into being actual fic, and surexit for letting me send frantic emails with scenes pulled out of their context and added as attachments, and reassuring me that no, I didn't need to delete the entire thing. Also, my f-list is amazing, I'm so pleased and surprised by how many people have been so supportive of this weird little pairing.
Part 2 Part 3 Part 4
Link to Art Master Post: Prettiest ever art!
The thing is, when Jesse is in L.A., he is not in New York, and when he is not in New York he is not near his cats, and his cats are the answer to the guilt and L.A. is the cause of it, which is too bad since he really is required to spend pretty large chunks of his time there.
The city is already starting to make him feel twitchy and self-conscious. His mom thinks he should talk to the cats on the phone. Jesse loves his mom, but part of loving someone is knowing them, and he knows her well enough to reasonably say that she’s crazy. He talks when she holds the phone up to the cats’ ears, but it doesn’t really change anything. He’s in L.A. for a couple of months this time, doing this and that in such a way that it’s clumped up enough that it just makes sense to rent a place here instead of hotel-hopping and flying back east at any conceivable chance. Jesse does try to be reasonable.
Being reasonable includes not adopting a kitten to share the temporary apartment with, so he doesn’t. That doesn’t stop him from hanging around the local shelter wishing he could, though. On his third day going back, he really has to admit to the friendly woman who’s been showing him around that he isn’t living in the city permanently and isn’t in a position to adopt.
She looks at him mournfully for a moment before telling him that if he’s going to be here every chance he gets, the shelter can always use volunteers, and before he knows it, he’s filling out paperwork.
...
The self help books started as a joke-someone left one in the dressing room of a venue somewhere, in the Midwest, Ryan thinks-he remembers cornfields. Brendon accidentally sat on the book, reached back and pulled it out, flipped through it, laughed, and threw it at Ryan’s head as he walked in the door. He remembers fumbling, hands full, telling Brendon, “See if I give you your present now,” dangling a can of Diet Pepsi and laughing at Brendon’s pout.
He remembers Brendon’s injured tones, his protest that he was only trying to help-Ryan has been complaining about not having anything to read since he finished his book this morning! Ryan remembers taking a seat, paging through jokingly, and then looking up an hour later to realize he needed to get ready if he wanted to make it onstage in time.
That was years ago now, but the book is packed neatly in a box at the front of Ryan’s closet, joined by legions of others, a dusty, ragtag lot picked up at Walmarts and Goodwills all across the country. “The Magic of Thinking Big” is still there, but it’s been joined by “7 Habits of Highly Successful Teens”, “I’m Okay, You’re Okay”, “Queen Bees and Wannabes”, “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” and stacks of others, used and dusty, generally, since clerks at thrift stores seemed to care a little less about exactly what he was buying, and it’s not something Ryan has ever been proud of. He’d thought of trying to hide them better even here, but almost no one spends any time looking around his bedroom, really. He figures as long as they’re not out on shelves, he’s safe.
It’s the kind of thing that started years ago, but last year he’d decided to stop buying more. “Take A Vacation” had just been released, it was a clean slate, a chance to be someone new, and Ryan had thought that the someone new he was turning into, in addition to being in a new band and not wearing girl jeans, could maybe not be the kind of person with an ever-expanding secret self-help stash. It means, though, that when The Young Veins falls apart and reading “How To Win Friends And Influence People” for the fifth time isn’t helping, even after he digs it out of the box in his closet, he needs a new outlet.
He tries to think of what he did for stress relief before that show in the state with the cornfields when he’d started the first battered paperback as a joke. It was a while ago, now. In high school he’d mostly calmed down, gotten centered, playing video games or practicing clumsy cover songs in Spencer’s garage whenever he wasn’t in school or working at the animal clinic. It takes him kind of an embarrassingly long time to put it together, but after that, he starts volunteering at the animal shelter.
...
If Jesse knows one thing about Ryan Ross, it’s that he’s kind of a dick.
Actually, Jesse doesn’t really know much more about him than that. One week he went over to the shelter and everything was fine, and the next he showed up and Ryan Ross was there.
Ross is a dog person, which is a forgivable sin, but he also wears sunglasses indoors, which is not. “Is he cute at least?” Andrew asks, laughing.
“No, what-why would you ask-‘cute’?”
“You’ve been going on about him for longer than I care to think about, Jes.” Jesse decides to ignore the fact that Andrew is almost certainly laughing at him. “If I’m going to listen to you talk about him for nearly twenty minutes, he’d better be.”
“You can’t even see him!”
“But you can. I guess the more pertinent question, hopefully one you would object to less, would be, ‘do you, Jesse, find him to be physically attractive,’ but that sounds so cold.”
Andrew is also an asshole, obviously, but in an utterly different way.
...
The guy from Zombieland is working at the animal shelter. Jon would think that’s totally awesome, but Jon is being kind of an asshole, and Ryan is mostly not talking to him, so he doesn’t get to find out. ‘Mostly’ not talking to Jon involves not initiating contact and waiting a few hours before responding to any of his texts. Spencer says Ryan is being passive-aggressive like it’s a bad thing, but Ryan can’t help but prefer this to the aggressive-aggressive that hung around the end of his last band.
Or ‘hiatus’, this time. Whatever.
The point is that if Jon were here, he’d be excited, because Jon was really into that movie, but Ryan wasn’t. Ryan also wasn’t really talking to Spencer when it came out, though, and he might have been unconsciously projecting some of the resentment he was feeling about that onto this movie, which is a parody of the kind of zombie movie he and Spencer adored when they were eleven and twelve. Or something. His New Years resolution was to stop buying pop-psychology self-help books, and he mostly has (the Dr. Phil book last week was an aberration, not the rule, okay), but he can’t help but do a little self-analysis with the knowledge he already has from before he made that resolution.
The point is that Lindsay, who writes up the schedule, says that the Zombieland guy’s work is on a weird enough schedule that he doesn’t come in on a regular basis, just whenever he has time. Ryan thinks it’s kind of sweet the way she doesn’t tell him that the guy is a movie star, keeps his ‘work’ vague, like Ryan won’t know, like she has to protect Zombie-dude from Ryan the rabid autograph seeker.
He doesn’t, however, think it’s quite fair that the guy just sweeps in whenever he’s in the mood. Not that Ryan minds Zombieland guy or anything. Ryan isn’t the type to get intimidated by movie stars, he’s not, and even if he were, even if meeting really famous people still makes his palms sweat a little, “Jesse. Um, Eisenberg,” as he’d introduced himself, is hardly the intimidating type.
He’s got the staff at the shelter wrapped around his finger, though-they all adore him and give him the jobs that involve kittens and puppies, and Ryan is maybe a little jealous-he’s being honest with himself these days, even if that means admitting to emotions he isn’t proud of. Maybe he hasn’t been volunteering there as long as Jesse, but he comes more often, even if that is because he’s between bands right now and technically unemployed, and he is almost always on time, and he tries to be pleasant, remembers peoples’ names and everything, but he’s pretty sure most of the people at the shelter think he’s some lame dropout trying to pad his resume. He could tell them differently, tell them he’s a rock star, but it just seems like too much work.
(He’s also not sure they’re wrong-not about the resume-padding, that’s bullshit, but he is technically a dropout. When he doesn’t have a band to back it up, that doesn’t sound nearly as cool.)
So yeah, Jesse Eisenberg starts popping up every few days with no real warning, swooping in and stealing kittens out from under Ryan, leaving him to clean out the runs instead. It is decidedly Not Cool.
...
Of course, Jesse hasn’t actually told Andrew the thing that made him actually start to dislike Ryan Ross, instead of just being vaguely intimidated by just how L.A. the guy acts. He could have told Andrew about it, and possibly he would have even gotten some modicum of sympathy, though probably not. What happened was this: “Hey. I’m Jesse. Um, Eisenberg.”
Jesse had known even at the time that that had come out awkward as hell, but he’d been distracted. This guy was wearing ridiculous sunglasses. Thick, black round ones with plastic rims that covered half his face, and when he came inside, he hadn’t even bother to take them off. Jesse hadn’t been focusing on introductions because he’d been too busy wondering how Ryan even existed in the real world and not some parodic alternate reality.
He’d tacked on a last name partially because it seems like the polite thing to do and partially because when he doesn’t, people sometimes think he’s trying to hide his identity or something, which is ridiculous because people are much more likely to remember seeing a face than to actually bother to know his full name. Jesse thinks so, anyway. Apparently Ryan had too, because when Jesse added his last name onto the end of his introduction, Ryan laughed a little, in a detached way, and said, “I know, man. Who do you think you’re kidding? Fuckin’ everyone’s seen Juno.”
...
Ryan likes to walk. He wouldn’t have thought so, at most points in his life, but he’s all about figuring out new things about himself-he doesn’t understand how people who never surprise themselves don’t go crazy, stuck being around themselves all the time. He thinks he should probably never get married for about the same reason.
He likes to walk and even chooses to now and then, which is how he actually hears the plaintive meowing sound coming from the convenience store parking lot in the gathering dark. Ryan doesn’t make a point of seeking out strays, he knows better than that, but it’s night and it’s cold and the sound is kind of weak and muted, which he figures is never a good sign.
The kittens are all curled around each other in the open mouth of a paper shopping bag lying on its side in the parking lot. They’re stripey and tiny, little enough that if they were at the shelter they wouldn’t be allowed to be adopted away from their mother for a couple of weeks or so yet. Ryan doesn’t know too much about kittens-they frighten him a little, so much tinier, so much more fragile than dogs. Fine boned. Even puppies make him a little nervous, unsure of himself. Ryan spent a lot of early adolescence avoiding fragile things; he hates when they break.
These kittens are alone, though. Ryan thinks the mother cat must be around, sits down to wait, but it’s getting darker and darker, and Ryan can actually see the kittens shivering, making the paper bag quiver a little around them, and when he reaches in, one of them is sticky and Ryan’s fingers come away smelling like gasoline, like the paper bag is resting on a puddle of it or something, and Ryan knows that isn’t good. He can see the convenience store clerk glancing out the window to where he’s now sitting on the ground on the edge of the parking lot and the last thing he wants to do is explain to Spencer why he’s been arrested for vagrancy. Is that a thing that can happen? Ryan would rather not find out.
On the other hand, he’s not about to leave these tiny animals shivering in a parking lot. He may not be a perfect person, but he likes to think he has some morals. Struggling to his feet and quietly cursing himself for not having the car with him, he reaches under the paper bag, trying so hard to provide some support, a flat surface, but his arms aren’t exactly flat, he can’t help the way the paper they’re curled up on bends and buckles, and the kittens wake and start squirming frantically and before Ryan knows it he has the entire sticky, damp parcel of writhing creatures cradled against his chest. He stops just long enough to make sure the bag’s opening is leaving the kittens with enough oxygen, and to make sure he’s not crushing them, or at least, he thinks he isn’t. What does Ryan know about kittens?
Enough to realize, anyway, that he probably shouldn’t be trying to take care of them on his own, he hasn’t got antibiotics or veterinary training, but he does knows some people who do.
Trying to drive while simultaneously trying to wrangle a litter of frightened kittens in L.A. traffic as rush hour is winding down is probably one of the most horrific experiences of Ryan’s life. He vows then and there to never try it again, but even as he does so he’s rushing in the front door, not even bothering with the employee entrance just trying to get his charges in to a trained professional as soon as possible, so his mind is not entirely focused on his mental litany of all the reasons tonight is absolutely fucked already.
He’s expecting this to be the easy part of this little adventure, but Elsa, one of the actual paid employees, is glaring him down, asking him why he doesn’t just take his pets to a vet, and Ryan is holding on to a gasoline-stained paper bag, here, okay, these are pretty obviously not his pets, but she’s going on to talk about how underfunded they are here, how they’re not equipped to deal with any more sick animals and Ryan is overwhelmed by the sense of wrong, you’re doing it wrong again when Jesse Eisenberg walks over. Jesse Eisenberg who everybody here loves. Jesse Eisenberg who Ryan hadn’t really given a second thought to until this moment, when he says, “I’ll pay for it.”
“What?”
“I’ll pay for these guys. For their shots or antibiotics or a vet or whatever. Just, can you take care of them?”
Apparently that’s what it takes for Elsa to reach out and take the now-quiet bundle of slippery brown paper and no longer shivering kittens from Ryan’ outstretched arms. He’s surprised by how reluctant he is to let them go, but this is what he came here for, so he forces his fingers to relinquish them and turns to Jesse, suddenly angry. “You didn’t need to do that. Just because you’re a movie star doesn’t mean you’re the only one who can afford to take care of-I just-” Ryan is just really tired.
“I know.” Jesse Eisenberg has a surprisingly steady voice when he wants to. “You’d already done the rescuing part, though. I figured you could maybe use a hand.” He doesn’t mention the way Ryan had kind of frozen up a moment ago, which is nice of him, Ryan guesses. He’s even smiling, in a way Ryan hasn’t seen before except for possibly in a movie, but surely he’d remember that particular smile
Ryan is pretty sure he’s not smiling back, but that’s okay. He hopes so, anyway. He looks back at Jesse in time to see him ask, “So, you want to see how your rescue-ees are doing?”
Ryan is pretty sure that’s not a word. Still, “Alright.”
…
It turns out that kittens be looked after by the emergency vet Elsa found is not actually a spectator sport, and they’re shooed out approximately seven minutes after Ryan starts tapping his fingers on the counter. For no reason Jesse can really explain, he feels responsible enough to wait outside with Ryan as he fidgets by the door. Jesse’s not sure whether he feels responsible for Ryan or for the kittens, though the fact that it’s Ryan he’s hovering near possibly sheds some light on that question. If that’s true, he would like to ask himself why-well, he can’t think where the question would go after that? Why him? Ryan is biting his thumbnail and it’s kind of gross and Jesse has no idea what he is doing there.
Elsa steps out into the hall, tells Jesse distractedly, “Weren’t you about done? You can head home now, honey.” It’s after eight. Jesse rarely stays here so long, it’s true. It takes Elsa a moment longer to notice Ryan, for some reason. “Sorry about earlier,” she tells him, though, which is nice enough, the polite thing, anyway. “There’s nothing more you can do tonight for them, though. We’ve got it covered. You might as well head out, too.” It seems pretty obvious that she’s trying to get rid of Ryan, but he just stares back at her blankly.
What do normal people do, Jesse asks himself, to make an acquaintance who looks mildly traumatized feel better, while also getting him out of the way of the frustrated Humane Society worker? Jesse is pretty sure normal people don’t get themselves into these situations. Still. What is the appropriate course of action, here?
“Hey, um, if you’re heading out, too,” Ryan is pretty obviously not heading anywhere, his feet are planted, but he ought to be. That is Jesse’s point, here. “It’s been a kind of long day.” Ryan has been here for less than half an hour, but it looks like he’s not really listening, anyway, so who cares. “Want to grab a drink?”
Ryan turns almost creepily wide eyes on Jesse, blinks and says, “Sure. Why not.”
…
It’s awkward, but Jesse is pretty sure that has a lot more to do with the situation itself than anything he’s doing. He searches his brain for anything they might possibly have in common, but really, all he can come up with is, “So, do you rescue kittens often?” which sounds dumb for so many reasons, from the similarity to a pickup line right up to the actual meaning of the question. Still, it somehow finds its way out of his mouth.
Ryan ducks his head and takes another drink before looking up, and alright,it was a kind of dumb question, but that’s no call for him to look so confused. Jesse is not speaking another language here. “Uh, no, first time,” Ryan says after a kind of excruciating beat of pause. “But, like, someone left them there, right? Cats don’t just spontaneously climb into shopping bags, do they?”
Jesse can’t help it, he snorts an incredulous laugh. “Spoken like someone who has never had a cat.”
Ryan seems too distracted to be insulted, which is probably a good thing. “But these were just, like, little cats. They don’t just migrate on their own.”
“Little cats? You mean kittens?”
“Who leaves little fucking cats alone in a paper bag?”
“Historically,” Jesse says reflectively, “a lot of people.” Ryan glares at him violently enough that he is tempted to flinch, has to say, “What? I don’t approve or anything, obviously. I’m just saying, there’s precedent.”
Ryan is glaring into his beer, he’s obviously not paying attention and Jesse should just leave him here, really, he’s a dick and Jesse doesn’t want to be around him if he’s going to be making Jesse feel this defensive. “No, really, it’s awful, I know that, why else would I be volunteering?”
Ryan looks up, slightly dazed look on his face and yeah, he really hasn’t been listening. Jesse would really like to be home right now, thanks. “What? I wasn’t, like, accusing you... it’s just, why do people do that? They just left them there.”
He sounds so much like a little kid right then that the response that leaps to Jesse’s mind-socioeconomic factors, human conceptualization of other life-forms as lesser, all the rest-dies on his lips. He looks at Ryan and all he can do is say, a little helplessly, “I don’t know. Some people are just-not very nice.”
...
The first time Ryan decides he really has to be going, even gets so far as to stand up, Jesse says in the overly concerned tones of the decidedly tipsy, “Wait. I’ll call you a cab.”
“I can call-” Ryan says. He’s still a little insulted about the kitten thing. “Why do you think you always have to-oh,” he says as it hits him and then, “Oh,” again because it sounds so nicely dramatic. “You think I’m one of that kind of rockstar.”
“Rockstar?” Jesse looks more confused than as ashamed of himself as he ought to be, now that Ryan knows what he’s playing at.
“The kind with the driving drunk and the crashing the car and the dying in fires too young to even have a best-of album. You don’t need to worry about that, though.”
“Not a rockstar after all?” Jesse still looks confused, and after the last hour and a half, he should know better than to doubt Ryan’s word.
“Not that. I’m in a band, you know.” He is suddenly struck by the realization that Jesse did not know that, and then wonders why he thought Jesse might have. Ryan is not that famous. Still. “Two bands. I was in two bands. Might still be in one.”
“You don’t know?” Jesse sounds amused which is not fair, Ryan is not being funny now. He waves his hand in a vague way, says, “These things are fluid.” It’s true, but mostly he just likes the way it sounds. He reaches around till he finds a bar napkin, the pen he borrowed from the bartender earlier, and jots it down. ‘These things are fluid.’
That wasn’t what he’d been trying to get to when he brought this up, though. It’s important that Jesse gets what he’s saying about this. “I am unlikely to die because my crashed car is on fire.”
“Not flammable?”
“What? No. I mean, no less than anyone else, I guess. I never had a drink till I was twenty, you know.”
“No. How would I know that?”
Jesse is spectacularly good at missing the point. “Drinking at twenty is still illegal,” Jesse says reflectively, after a pause.
Ryan thinks they must have had very different adolescent experiences, for that sentence to exist right now. “Right, well, but I was on tour when I was twenty. It was kind of a thing, at the time. To not.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“The point is that I’m not going to drive drunk.”
“But why drive at all, yet?” At this point, Ryan can’t remember. At some point during the conversation, he’s gone back to sitting, and he sees no specific reason to make himself stand again.
...
“Come over,” Ryan says as they finally leave, and it takes Jesse what feels like an embarrassingly long time to figure out that he means.
“To your place? But-”
“Come on,” Ryan says, and Jesse remembers exactly why he hadn’t liked Ryan before this particular little interlude, he just sounds so self-assured and nonchalant and Jesse, who has rarely wanted to commit violence in his entire life, is seized by the desire to hit him. Ryan says, “Come on, I’ve got weed-or, no, I’m out, but I could feed you, I think. Well, we could order in, anyway. You can show me all the places in my house where I should be keeping cats to atone for my sins.”
Well, at least Ryan has been listening when he talks. “You obviously have never lived with a cat if you think you could keep them anywhere,” Jesse says, and somehow he’s walking with Ryan to the curb, waiting while he calls a cab but he’s not giving in just yet, he says, “I’ll split a cab with you, anyway. And I’ll see you soon.” Jesse is not at all sure that this is true, but it feels like the thing to say.
Ryan is obviously not giving up his position here, either. “Come see my place,” he says again, and then, “We can screw if you want to.”
“What?” Jesse knows he sometimes misreads situations, but that is not the vibe he’s been getting from tonight.
Ryan shrugs like he doesn’t care one way or the other and then says, “Or not, if you’re not into it? I don’t know, I don’t always read people right. You’ve been-” his voice sounds a little less inscrutable, now, a little less dickish, the urge to smack him has almost completely receded when he says, “You’ve been really nice tonight, man. I thought that might be why, and I’d be cool with it, but if not you should totally just come over and we’ll order pizza.”
Andrew’s voice is in Jesse’s head again asking, “do you, Jesse, find him to be physically attractive?” and yeah, at this point the answer he’s leaning towards is a very interested maybe but that wasn’t the point of tonight.
“I was being a nice person entirely independently of any interest I may or may not have in getting into your pants.” It seems like an important point to clarify
Ryan seems thrown. The cab arrives. Ryan opens the door while he replies to Jesse, “So that’s just, like, how you are? Whether you want to bone me or not?”
“Not really,” Jesse has to admit, forcing himself not to worry about what the cabbie thinks of this conversation. “I have it on good authority that I’m neurotic and kind of mean sometimes.”
Ryan nods and asks, “Are you coming?” from his spot already settled into the cab, and it’s not until Jesse answers, “What the hell. Sure, I kind of feel like pizza, anyway,” climbs into the cab and shuts the door behind him that Ryan asks, “Why, then? If you’re usually such a jackass.”
Jesse stops short at that, not because he doesn’t know, but because Because you looked sad sounds a little weird, and Jesse’s not entirely sure it would be true, anyway-he doesn’t know why he’s doing this. Instead he shrugs, and the rest of the cab ride is quiet.
...
The thing is, Ryan was so focused on getting Jesse to come home with him, so caught up in the idea of not hanging around an empty house with all the lights on texting Alex sporadically, that he hadn’t even really thought about what he would do if he managed to get Jesse there. Well, he had but Jesse’s made it pretty clear that he’s not in the mood to trade his presence and company for sex, which is maybe kind of good because Ryan feels really sleazy after having thought of it in those terms.
Z really doesn’t like it when he does that, anyway, says that random hookups for the sake of not being alone are awful, Ryan, they’re a sign that you should get a pet before you pick up an STD, which is a sentence that is wrong on so many levels. First, it makes it sound like this is something Ryan does often, which it isn’t, not really. Maybe a little bit just after Panic ended, and a couple of times after the end of the first Young Veins tour, maybe a little bit lately before he started volunteering at the shelter, but not often, Ryan’s not easy, and he doesn’t like the implication-he just doesn’t like to be alone sometimes. He blames it on the fact that some of the most consistently good periods of his life took place on tour busses.
For another thing, it kind of sounds like she thinks Ryan should take up bestiality to avoid STDs, and that thought usually sends Z off on a tangent, so he’s taken to using it earlier and earlier in the discussion, to try to throw off the rest. The rest, when he doesn’t manage to avoid it, usually involves a measure of forced empathy she thinks she’s earned after the Charlotte thing.
Ryan is trying to be a good friend, to learn not to discount the experiences of others, but really, as far as Ryan can tell, the Charlotte thing is like a more intense version of Brent, but not really much like leaving Panic and two of his best friends with it, nothing at all like trying to be happy for Jon while he’s off being married in Chicago.
The point is that Ryan was maybe a little tipsy when he realized that he didn’t really want to go home to his empty, echoey house tonight, so he hadn’t thought too much about asking the guy who’d bought him drinks tonight home with him. Apparently, though, apparently Jesse has just been hanging out with Ryan as a friendly thing, which is nice, but since they don’t really know each other, also kind of weird. The cab pulls up to Ryan’s place and he has no idea what to do with the guy who’s getting out of the car behind him.
He thinks he might have said something about food-if he hadn’t, he should have, but he doesn’t really know any other kind of hospitality besides offering either food or drugs (one learned from Ginger Smith, the other from Jon Walker-Ryan learned the different ways to be a person slowly, he thinks, probably, but once he learned, it stuck), so he probably said something. The idea that he did gives him something to do, though, so he pushes through the door, makes enough of an effort to make sure it doesn’t slam in Jesse’s face, since he’s pretty sure that would be horribly rude, but pushes past into the kitchen, makes a move for the takeout menus. They’re something to do with his hands, with his eyes, with his rapidly tangling thoughts.
They’re even something to do with Jesse, who followed Ryan into his kitchen, who’s hovering kind of awkwardly around the doorway. Ryan offers him a pile of menus and says, “Help me sort out the ones that still deliver this late. Then we can decide what we want.”
...
Ryan means to be a good host, or as good a host as it is possible to be for a drunken movie star you invited home after midnight for a few hours of insomniatic but apparently entirely platonic hanging out. That is, he hadn’t meant to make fun of Jesse’s chosen pizza toppings, but really? “Pineapple? Isn’t supposed to be ham and pineapple?”
Jesse shifts from one foot to the other, looks down at his feet and Ryan is not that intimidating, there is no reason for Jesse to be looking down at his feet like that, but he sounds kind of embarrassed when he says, “Well, I’m a vegetarian,” so maybe it’s Jesse’s problem after all. Ryan is going to go with that.
“So you just decided to leave off the ham instead of, say, coming up with a new plan?”
“I used to like ham and pineapple, when I ate meat.”
“But the point of ham and pineapple is, like, the combination of, like, the sweet and salty, right? I mean, maybe if you subbed out the ham for, um, olives or something else with salt-”
“Pineapple and olives?”
“Hmmm, maybe not, but-”
“If it bothers you so much, just order your own and I’ll call back in a minute to order my pineapple pizza,” and how did this happen again? Ryan doesn’t actually care that much what Jesse fucking Eisenberg wants on his damn pizza. It’s just weird, is all. He dials.
“Hey-can I get a large meat-lovers and a large freak-pizza? Yeah, it’s just a cheese pizza with pineapple-you don’t call it that there-ow, shit, Jesse knock it off-”
…
So yeah, if Jesse had ever been going to picture what hanging out with Ryan-the-musician would entail, he probably wouldn’t have pictured late-night pizza and infomercials, but that’s just life, he figures. Full of surprises. Full of-”Shit, Ryan, put the phone down, you are not ordering that.”
Ryan turns wide eyes in his direction, “But it can cut through a penny!”
“You have no food in your kitchen and live off of takeout, you do not need a set of steak knives.”
“But what if I need to cut through pennies all of the sudden?” Ryan sounds way too innocent not to already know how dumb that question is, so Jesse chooses to ignore it.
“Then you’d be shit out of luck.”
Apparently, that does it, because Ryan settles back into the couch, saying, “Yeah, I guess I didn’t use the last set for much, either.”
“The last set?”
“It could cut through tin cans! I, um, I might be kind of susceptible to advertising.”
Jesse can’t help it, snorts out a thoroughly uncharming laugh. “You think?”
Ryan ducks his head and mutters something about the magic of Oxyclean.
They don’t talk much after that, and before long, Jesse falls asleep on the couch.
...
Breakfast is odd, partially because Jesse needs to get home before noon because he doesn’t have his meds and doesn’t entirely know where he is or by extension how to get to where he needs to be, and partially because he’s bad enough at morning-afters when he’s actually had sex. He feels even more off-balance sitting across the table from Ryan nursing a coffee now that he hasn’t see what’s under the incongruous, faded, high school hockey jersey he apparently wears to bed.
There’s also no food in the house, a fact that Jesse hadn’t quite believed when Ryan mentioned it last night. Oh, he’d believed Ryan maybe hadn’t been shopping in a while, might be the type to have a fridge full of half empty takeout containers and condiments, cupboards full of crackers and dusty cans of soup. He hadn’t even really thought to picture a kitchen this entirely bare, though. There’s coffee, which is a relief, and pop tarts, which Jesse is not offered, and an unholy assortment of takeout menus with the call-in number highlighted like someone was trying to make sure they were as easy as possible to use. That’s it. Seriously. That is all there is, and the pristine nature of the refrigerator seems like a pretty good indication that this is not an uncommon state of affairs.
They’re both mostly silent through the caffeination process, which Jesse doesn’t think is that surprising. It’s not like they’ve got much of anything in common. Still, Ryan looks almost disappointed when Jesse stands and says he has to get going, asks, “Why?” and there’s a kind of plaintive quality to the syllable, like he’s letting a little more emotion than he’d like show. It’s before eleven, and Jesse’s limited experience with musicians leads him to believe that’s not an hour they’re particularly comfortable with. That might have something to do with it.
“Can’t be late with my pills,” Jesse says.
“Pills?”
“Hard drugs, you know.”
Fucking with Ryan is still kind of fun, now that he isn’t standing behind a counter like it’s a shield from the world and clutching at a wriggling bag of abandoned kittens.
Now, he’s already dropped the blank, surprised look. It had been nice, Jesse thinks, while it lasted, for the moment that it flashed across his face, but now he’s got that half smile on his face that makes Jesse a little angry, makes him want to push back, so when Ryan drawls, “Really,” he just says, “Yeah, really,” and then, “Kittens and cokeheads, you know, it’s an unbeatable combination,” and, “Got to go meet my dealer, she gets pissed if I make her wait, could you call me a cab?”
“She?” is the part of the statement that Ryan chooses to zero in on, which, Jesse thinks, probably shouldn’t surprise him anymore.
“Yeah, it’s a women’s world out there, my friend, you and I are just living in it,” Jesse feels like he’s in a particularly unstressful interview-not nerve-wracking like actual press, but still with that spurt of amusing lies and half-truths that pop into his head as fully formed sentences when he’s talking to press-with the smartass part of his brain not really consulting the rational part. “Drug dealing is as equal opportunity as anything else these days. Don’t be a chauvinist pig.”
Ryan laughs at that, messy and mouth wide open, not a calculated reaction, and tips his chair back to grab the wall-mounted phone from a precarious position, balancing the chair on two legs by leaning on the wall with one hand and hitting speed-dial with the other, as if by making him laugh Jesse has earned the right to a cab. When he’s finished rattling off his address into the phone, he turns back to Jesse, still smiling more brightly and less infuriatingly, and says, “Z would love you.”
…
Ryan sometimes wishes he had the kind of relationship with his mother where he could call her when he has something to say, and they could talk about it. He sometimes wishes his father was not dead, and that when his father was alive, they had had the kind of relationship that involved talking. He wishes he wasn’t years away from the kid who could lie on the air mattress next to Spencer’s bed and whisper his secrets into the dark, secure in the knowledge that they’ll be heard. He wishes he had someone he could call right now to say, “I met a guy”, soft and a little nervous and way too serious for the situation. If he had the right person to call, they wouldn’t even laugh at him, they’d notice how tenuous his tone was, they’d know better than to tease over something so wavering and wondering and barely present.
Ryan thinks even if he had someone to know him that well, to take him saying something like this in the right way, he probably wouldn’t call them-it’s not even that this is something new, so much as that it’s something that might not ever get around to even being new. Those are the kinds of things Ryan thinks may be better kept to himself. It’s a moot point, though, there’s no one he thinks he could call right now, not unless he wants a glib answer or uncomfortable questions. No one who will take a statement like that and just let it sit.
Ryan has burned some of his bridges and others have been burned for him. It doesn’t really matter why, all that matters is that there is no one in his house after Jesse leaves, there is just Ryan and that ill-advised, dying house plant he’d bought on a whim and this fragile, fluttering question in his head. Ryan reaches for his laptop. In times of doubt, internet stalking is always a good place to start.
...
Somehow, Jesse ends up back at the animal shelter that evening. He tells himself it would have happened anyway, except that it was the day he’d set aside after he’d promised his agent he’d finally go through that stack of scripts, so really, he probably wouldn’t have gone to the shelter. It’s been a weird day, though-ever since he got home it’s been all stops and starts and nothing getting done. He gets there, though, and his mind starts to settle as soon as he walks in. It’s too bad, because it means he walks in unaware, and ten minutes later he’s wishing he hadn’t come to begin with.
One of Ryan’s kittens is dead.
Something about hypothermia, about them being too small to be away from their mother, Jesse doesn’t really know the science of it. He does know that Ryan walked into the shelter yesterday with three grubby, painfully tiny kittens, and only two of them are still breathing. “Has anybody told him yet?”
“Told who, you mean-? No, of course not, why would we? If he’d wanted them he would have kept them.”
Jesse isn’t sure what that has to do with anything, but he doesn’t say so, just asks, “Have you got his number? I’ll do it.”
She’s not really supposed to give out that kind of information, but she likes Jesse, and it isn’t too hard to get her to relent, especially when Jesse mentions that he and Ryan have been talking (he doesn’t mention when or where and especially not what about, the point is that a connection is there) and that he’d seemed particularly concerned for the kittens (he had-especially as compared to his concern for anything else that Jesse has seen, which is, to be fair, not a lot). And so he calls. Punches the number into the phone at the front desk and listens to it ring. Finds himself hoping it will go straight through to voicemail, which isn’t that unusual for him, but this time it’s more an unwillingness to say what he needs to than to avoid the small-talk which will accompany what he needs to say, which is the usual worry.
After five rings, though, when Jesse is almost sure he’s in the clear, he hears, “Hello?”
He clears his throat, stalling, says after a pause, “Ryan? It’s Jesse. From the shelter.” Jesse doesn’t know, maybe Ryan knows a lot of Jesses. Maybe all of them end up buzzed and a little confused, watching infomercials on his couch at two in the morning. Maybe he gets them mixed up. Jesse is only trying to be polite.
Ryan says, “Yeah? Hey, how are you? How was your trip home?” He sounds pleased and kind of surprised, but he doesn’t ask how Jesse got his number.
“So, um. I’m actually there now. Here now. At, um, the shelter, that is.” Why does he have to sound so fucking halting? Why did he ever volunteer to make this call to begin with?
“Yeah? They’re letting you talk on the phone on duty? Be careful. Those German Shepherds will make a break for it when your back is turned, if they think they can get away with it.”
Jesse is almost certain Ryan is joking. Eighty percent sure, anyway. It also sounds suspiciously like he’s flirting, which seems kind of weird and also in no way makes Jesse want to say what he’s going to say next.
“So, um, those kittens you brought in, you know how they were in kind of rough shape?”
For a second Ryan doesn’t answer, Jesse can hear him breathing faintly through the phone and maybe Jesse should just keep going, maybe he doesn’t need to wait for confirmation, but then Ryan makes a vague, agreeing noise and Jesse has no excuse to stall any longer.
“Two of them are doing fine, but the littlest one didn’t make it.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sorry,” Jesse says, kind of hesitant, more of a filling-the-space kind of sound than anything.
“Yeah,” Ryan says, and of course he doesn’t sound the same as a minute ago, doesn’t sound bright and teasing, but he says, “I’ll see you around, right?”
And Jesse didn’t want to chat, he’s glad Ryan isn’t prolonging this, but it’s still kind of nice, oddly sweet. Unfortunately, “No, I’m going back to New York in just a couple days.”
“Oh.”
“You should-um, you should call me sometime, though.” That’s how Jesse finds himself giving Ryan Ross his phone number.
...
Jesse isn’t too big on airports. Symbolically, they’re a good thing, he guesses-they represent motion, which is a generally positive thing, especially when he is in one place and would rather be somewhere else (he pointedly does not think ‘when he is somewhere and would rather be home’ because he’s not sure he likes how that sounds, but it’s true enough anyway, and Jesse is self-aware enough to know it), but there’s something about the bigness of them that gets to him. Those unnecessarily high ceilings, the shiny siding and weird, clash colored carpets all strike him as self-important, and not in a particularly good way.
Still, they’re a necessary evil, unless Jesse wants to sacrifice speed and take a train. That’s actually something he’s thought about once or twice-it seems like a pretty writerly thing to do, taking a train cross-country. Emma had pointed out, though, that he’d be traveling in a train car with other people, people he didn’t know and might potentially not like, and that people on days long train trips might forget themselves when it comes to following the rules of polite public transportation travel and keeping to themselves.
So train travel is out as an option, mostly, but sometimes when he’s staring up into the metal rafters of an airport and there are all these people everywhere, and they are all walking in very pointed, specific directions, Jesse thinks irritably about bygone days and slower times and how if he was on a train right now, there would probably be plumes of smoke.
He thinks he and Ryan actually talked about this for a while the other night, and Ryan didn’t do that thing Emma does and point out all the reasons it wouldn’t work very well for Jesse in real life. Jesse isn’t sure whether that should have encouraged the idea, actually, since Ryan had also ordered that upside down tomato grower and flirted with Jesse that same night, neither of which argued very well for his judgement. Either way, though, it had been kind of nice to talk to someone else who let himself get swept up in the idea.
...
Z says that Ryan needs to wait three days after Jesse flies back to New York to text him so that he doesn’t seem desperate. “Make him work for it,” she says, which is all well and good, only Ryan isn’t exactly sure Jesse is even interested to begin with, which might be a problem. Tennessee says he should call, not text, and no longer than a day after because, “He’s already on the other end of the country, how much more space could he need?” and then, more darkly, “Or if he does, what do you want with him anyway, Ryan?” Ryan misses the days when the only girls he hung out with were thirteen year old fans and the merch girl with the eye twitch who’d always sort of hated him for no reason he could see.
He’s tempted to ignore both of them, remembering the catastrophic meltdown of Z’s most recent relationship, remembering Tenn swear off of men forever the night before last because, “They’ve all got cooties. Present company excepted of course,” with an apologetic glance in Ryan’s direction. Ryan needs to call Alex up is what he needs to do. He needs to hang out with someone who is not a girl, a cat or dog, or someone he is kind of vaguely trying halfheartedly to date. So yeah, he’s tempted to ignore them, but his fortune cookie last night told him to place his trust in an unlikely source, so he decides to combine their advice and text the next day. Depending on how well the texting goes over, he might call in three days, which would be taking all pieces of their combined advice, albeit in different sections. Ryan thinks it’s a pretty solid plan.
He doesn’t plan for his phone to ring a few minutes after he send off a hopefully innocuous text saying, “hey. how was your flight?” Ryan doesn’t do a lot of talking on the phone. He’s not sure if he doesn’t like it because it doesn’t happen that often and so it makes him nervous, or if people have noticed that he doesn’t like talking on the phone and so choose to text him instead. He peers down at the caller ID idly, without really planning on answering (if it’s that important, they can leave a message) and it’s Jesse. Jesse who he just texted, who therefore knows that his phone is neither dead nor far from him. Jesse who Ryan doesn’t actually want to avoid talking to, even if it is on the phone.
“Hello?”
“What’s up?”
“You called me,” Ryan feels the need to point out. It is not his job to provide a direction for this conversation.
“But you texted me.”
“And then you called me.” Ryan is doing his best to keep the emphasis shifting. Otherwise he would fear the conversation was going in circles.
“I don’t like, um.” It sounds like an admission, or the beginning of one, and for all that he’d love to deny it to himself, “True You, A Journey To Finding And Loving Yourself” is very down on denial, so the truth is that Ryan feels an unaccustomed twist in his gut, a feeling of uncertainty he’s been trying to ignore the fact that he’s capable of since high school.
“You gave me your number,” he says and then immediately feels like an idiot for it, for sounding so defensive. Where is your cool, Ross?’ a voice that sounds annoyingly like Brendon’s asks him in his head. “The Worry Trap” assures him that he’s not crazy, but since he doesn’t actually have chronic anxiety, he’s always been a little wary of taking too much advice from that one.
Jesse is still on the phone, though, still talking, saying, “I mean, I don’t really like texting. It feels so impersonal, you know?”
He says it without even sounding like a pretentious asshole, the way Ryan would if he said the same thing, and Ryan thinks that’s probably one of the most major parts of Jesse Eisenberg’s charm. He laughs more to fill the silence than because he really thinks it’s funny and then asks, “So how are the cats? Did they miss you?” He only feels a little stupid asking, too. He has practice from years of knowing Jon with talking about other peoples’ pets as if they were human.
“They were pining, obviously,” Jesse says, and then laughs, a nervous chuckle that Ryan recognizes as a sound that shows up more often in interviews than in any of Ryan’s actual interactions with him-not that there have been too many of them. Ryan makes sure to remind himself of that. He’s probably seen more interviews on YouTube in the past few days than he has spent waking hours with Jesse. He really needs to remember not to mention that. Jesse seems like he might spook easily. Ryan knows he can be a bit much sometimes.
It turns out that the cats Jesse just came home to are due to be sent to real homes (“I just foster them, they’re not really mine,” Jesse had said the other night, and Ryan still doesn’t quite get it, but he’s not going to pry) so he barely has time to reacquaint himself with them before he lets them go. Jesse doesn’t seem to bothered by this, but Ryan thinks it sounds kind of awful.
…
Ryan goes to visit the kittens that Jesse calls Ryan’s at the shelter the next day. They’re tinier than he remembered, even, with little, rounded ears and thick fuzz where most cats have fur, like the down on baby ducks. One is dark gray and the other is striped, and they look a lot more lonely, more forlorn, with only two of them.
Ryan is pretty sure Jesse thinks he should adopt them. He is less sure of why that might matter to him-even if he’s pretty far beyond denying that he’s interested in Jesse, being into a guy is not a very good reason to take on responsibility for two tiny lives. Ryan may not be the most spotlessly moral person, but he’s still clear on that. Carefully, he reaches down to pick the striped kitten up. The kitten yawns at him, but otherwise doesn’t react too much to being lifted up in Ryan’s hands-long fingers that he even freaks himself out with sometimes when he is very stoned, and he wouldn’t blame the little cat even if it bit him for removing it from the dim, towel-padded compartment out into the open air in his cupped palms. It doesn’t, though, instead seems to burrow in a little, and Ryan is kind of glad later that his hands are too full to follow through on his first instinct because his first instinct is to call Jesse and tell him, “You were right,” and he’s not even sure what he would mean by that.
Part 2
Author: psuedo_catalyst
Artist: chosenfire28
Crossover: Bandom (Young Veins)/The Social Network RPF
Type: slash, gen
Rating: R
Word Count: 31,600
Characters/Pairings: Ryan Ross/Jesse Eisenberg
Warnings: none
Spoilers: none
Summary: Ryan Ross has a box of self-help books under his bed and a second imploded band in as many years. Jesse Eisenberg has a flourishing career and trouble dealing with being away from his cats. When they meet at an animal shelter, they are brought together by lost kittens and kept together by increasingly surreal telephone conversations.
Author’s Notes: It takes a village to write a really odd story, so I need to massively thank eledhwenlin for the amazing and so patient beta, zeenell for being enthusiastic about this fic the whole way through, and chatficcing years and decades of this universe with me that will never make it into being actual fic, and surexit for letting me send frantic emails with scenes pulled out of their context and added as attachments, and reassuring me that no, I didn't need to delete the entire thing. Also, my f-list is amazing, I'm so pleased and surprised by how many people have been so supportive of this weird little pairing.
Part 2 Part 3 Part 4
Link to Art Master Post: Prettiest ever art!
The thing is, when Jesse is in L.A., he is not in New York, and when he is not in New York he is not near his cats, and his cats are the answer to the guilt and L.A. is the cause of it, which is too bad since he really is required to spend pretty large chunks of his time there.
The city is already starting to make him feel twitchy and self-conscious. His mom thinks he should talk to the cats on the phone. Jesse loves his mom, but part of loving someone is knowing them, and he knows her well enough to reasonably say that she’s crazy. He talks when she holds the phone up to the cats’ ears, but it doesn’t really change anything. He’s in L.A. for a couple of months this time, doing this and that in such a way that it’s clumped up enough that it just makes sense to rent a place here instead of hotel-hopping and flying back east at any conceivable chance. Jesse does try to be reasonable.
Being reasonable includes not adopting a kitten to share the temporary apartment with, so he doesn’t. That doesn’t stop him from hanging around the local shelter wishing he could, though. On his third day going back, he really has to admit to the friendly woman who’s been showing him around that he isn’t living in the city permanently and isn’t in a position to adopt.
She looks at him mournfully for a moment before telling him that if he’s going to be here every chance he gets, the shelter can always use volunteers, and before he knows it, he’s filling out paperwork.
...
The self help books started as a joke-someone left one in the dressing room of a venue somewhere, in the Midwest, Ryan thinks-he remembers cornfields. Brendon accidentally sat on the book, reached back and pulled it out, flipped through it, laughed, and threw it at Ryan’s head as he walked in the door. He remembers fumbling, hands full, telling Brendon, “See if I give you your present now,” dangling a can of Diet Pepsi and laughing at Brendon’s pout.
He remembers Brendon’s injured tones, his protest that he was only trying to help-Ryan has been complaining about not having anything to read since he finished his book this morning! Ryan remembers taking a seat, paging through jokingly, and then looking up an hour later to realize he needed to get ready if he wanted to make it onstage in time.
That was years ago now, but the book is packed neatly in a box at the front of Ryan’s closet, joined by legions of others, a dusty, ragtag lot picked up at Walmarts and Goodwills all across the country. “The Magic of Thinking Big” is still there, but it’s been joined by “7 Habits of Highly Successful Teens”, “I’m Okay, You’re Okay”, “Queen Bees and Wannabes”, “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” and stacks of others, used and dusty, generally, since clerks at thrift stores seemed to care a little less about exactly what he was buying, and it’s not something Ryan has ever been proud of. He’d thought of trying to hide them better even here, but almost no one spends any time looking around his bedroom, really. He figures as long as they’re not out on shelves, he’s safe.
It’s the kind of thing that started years ago, but last year he’d decided to stop buying more. “Take A Vacation” had just been released, it was a clean slate, a chance to be someone new, and Ryan had thought that the someone new he was turning into, in addition to being in a new band and not wearing girl jeans, could maybe not be the kind of person with an ever-expanding secret self-help stash. It means, though, that when The Young Veins falls apart and reading “How To Win Friends And Influence People” for the fifth time isn’t helping, even after he digs it out of the box in his closet, he needs a new outlet.
He tries to think of what he did for stress relief before that show in the state with the cornfields when he’d started the first battered paperback as a joke. It was a while ago, now. In high school he’d mostly calmed down, gotten centered, playing video games or practicing clumsy cover songs in Spencer’s garage whenever he wasn’t in school or working at the animal clinic. It takes him kind of an embarrassingly long time to put it together, but after that, he starts volunteering at the animal shelter.
...
If Jesse knows one thing about Ryan Ross, it’s that he’s kind of a dick.
Actually, Jesse doesn’t really know much more about him than that. One week he went over to the shelter and everything was fine, and the next he showed up and Ryan Ross was there.
Ross is a dog person, which is a forgivable sin, but he also wears sunglasses indoors, which is not. “Is he cute at least?” Andrew asks, laughing.
“No, what-why would you ask-‘cute’?”
“You’ve been going on about him for longer than I care to think about, Jes.” Jesse decides to ignore the fact that Andrew is almost certainly laughing at him. “If I’m going to listen to you talk about him for nearly twenty minutes, he’d better be.”
“You can’t even see him!”
“But you can. I guess the more pertinent question, hopefully one you would object to less, would be, ‘do you, Jesse, find him to be physically attractive,’ but that sounds so cold.”
Andrew is also an asshole, obviously, but in an utterly different way.
...
The guy from Zombieland is working at the animal shelter. Jon would think that’s totally awesome, but Jon is being kind of an asshole, and Ryan is mostly not talking to him, so he doesn’t get to find out. ‘Mostly’ not talking to Jon involves not initiating contact and waiting a few hours before responding to any of his texts. Spencer says Ryan is being passive-aggressive like it’s a bad thing, but Ryan can’t help but prefer this to the aggressive-aggressive that hung around the end of his last band.
Or ‘hiatus’, this time. Whatever.
The point is that if Jon were here, he’d be excited, because Jon was really into that movie, but Ryan wasn’t. Ryan also wasn’t really talking to Spencer when it came out, though, and he might have been unconsciously projecting some of the resentment he was feeling about that onto this movie, which is a parody of the kind of zombie movie he and Spencer adored when they were eleven and twelve. Or something. His New Years resolution was to stop buying pop-psychology self-help books, and he mostly has (the Dr. Phil book last week was an aberration, not the rule, okay), but he can’t help but do a little self-analysis with the knowledge he already has from before he made that resolution.
The point is that Lindsay, who writes up the schedule, says that the Zombieland guy’s work is on a weird enough schedule that he doesn’t come in on a regular basis, just whenever he has time. Ryan thinks it’s kind of sweet the way she doesn’t tell him that the guy is a movie star, keeps his ‘work’ vague, like Ryan won’t know, like she has to protect Zombie-dude from Ryan the rabid autograph seeker.
He doesn’t, however, think it’s quite fair that the guy just sweeps in whenever he’s in the mood. Not that Ryan minds Zombieland guy or anything. Ryan isn’t the type to get intimidated by movie stars, he’s not, and even if he were, even if meeting really famous people still makes his palms sweat a little, “Jesse. Um, Eisenberg,” as he’d introduced himself, is hardly the intimidating type.
He’s got the staff at the shelter wrapped around his finger, though-they all adore him and give him the jobs that involve kittens and puppies, and Ryan is maybe a little jealous-he’s being honest with himself these days, even if that means admitting to emotions he isn’t proud of. Maybe he hasn’t been volunteering there as long as Jesse, but he comes more often, even if that is because he’s between bands right now and technically unemployed, and he is almost always on time, and he tries to be pleasant, remembers peoples’ names and everything, but he’s pretty sure most of the people at the shelter think he’s some lame dropout trying to pad his resume. He could tell them differently, tell them he’s a rock star, but it just seems like too much work.
(He’s also not sure they’re wrong-not about the resume-padding, that’s bullshit, but he is technically a dropout. When he doesn’t have a band to back it up, that doesn’t sound nearly as cool.)
So yeah, Jesse Eisenberg starts popping up every few days with no real warning, swooping in and stealing kittens out from under Ryan, leaving him to clean out the runs instead. It is decidedly Not Cool.
...
Of course, Jesse hasn’t actually told Andrew the thing that made him actually start to dislike Ryan Ross, instead of just being vaguely intimidated by just how L.A. the guy acts. He could have told Andrew about it, and possibly he would have even gotten some modicum of sympathy, though probably not. What happened was this: “Hey. I’m Jesse. Um, Eisenberg.”
Jesse had known even at the time that that had come out awkward as hell, but he’d been distracted. This guy was wearing ridiculous sunglasses. Thick, black round ones with plastic rims that covered half his face, and when he came inside, he hadn’t even bother to take them off. Jesse hadn’t been focusing on introductions because he’d been too busy wondering how Ryan even existed in the real world and not some parodic alternate reality.
He’d tacked on a last name partially because it seems like the polite thing to do and partially because when he doesn’t, people sometimes think he’s trying to hide his identity or something, which is ridiculous because people are much more likely to remember seeing a face than to actually bother to know his full name. Jesse thinks so, anyway. Apparently Ryan had too, because when Jesse added his last name onto the end of his introduction, Ryan laughed a little, in a detached way, and said, “I know, man. Who do you think you’re kidding? Fuckin’ everyone’s seen Juno.”
...
Ryan likes to walk. He wouldn’t have thought so, at most points in his life, but he’s all about figuring out new things about himself-he doesn’t understand how people who never surprise themselves don’t go crazy, stuck being around themselves all the time. He thinks he should probably never get married for about the same reason.
He likes to walk and even chooses to now and then, which is how he actually hears the plaintive meowing sound coming from the convenience store parking lot in the gathering dark. Ryan doesn’t make a point of seeking out strays, he knows better than that, but it’s night and it’s cold and the sound is kind of weak and muted, which he figures is never a good sign.
The kittens are all curled around each other in the open mouth of a paper shopping bag lying on its side in the parking lot. They’re stripey and tiny, little enough that if they were at the shelter they wouldn’t be allowed to be adopted away from their mother for a couple of weeks or so yet. Ryan doesn’t know too much about kittens-they frighten him a little, so much tinier, so much more fragile than dogs. Fine boned. Even puppies make him a little nervous, unsure of himself. Ryan spent a lot of early adolescence avoiding fragile things; he hates when they break.
These kittens are alone, though. Ryan thinks the mother cat must be around, sits down to wait, but it’s getting darker and darker, and Ryan can actually see the kittens shivering, making the paper bag quiver a little around them, and when he reaches in, one of them is sticky and Ryan’s fingers come away smelling like gasoline, like the paper bag is resting on a puddle of it or something, and Ryan knows that isn’t good. He can see the convenience store clerk glancing out the window to where he’s now sitting on the ground on the edge of the parking lot and the last thing he wants to do is explain to Spencer why he’s been arrested for vagrancy. Is that a thing that can happen? Ryan would rather not find out.
On the other hand, he’s not about to leave these tiny animals shivering in a parking lot. He may not be a perfect person, but he likes to think he has some morals. Struggling to his feet and quietly cursing himself for not having the car with him, he reaches under the paper bag, trying so hard to provide some support, a flat surface, but his arms aren’t exactly flat, he can’t help the way the paper they’re curled up on bends and buckles, and the kittens wake and start squirming frantically and before Ryan knows it he has the entire sticky, damp parcel of writhing creatures cradled against his chest. He stops just long enough to make sure the bag’s opening is leaving the kittens with enough oxygen, and to make sure he’s not crushing them, or at least, he thinks he isn’t. What does Ryan know about kittens?
Enough to realize, anyway, that he probably shouldn’t be trying to take care of them on his own, he hasn’t got antibiotics or veterinary training, but he does knows some people who do.
Trying to drive while simultaneously trying to wrangle a litter of frightened kittens in L.A. traffic as rush hour is winding down is probably one of the most horrific experiences of Ryan’s life. He vows then and there to never try it again, but even as he does so he’s rushing in the front door, not even bothering with the employee entrance just trying to get his charges in to a trained professional as soon as possible, so his mind is not entirely focused on his mental litany of all the reasons tonight is absolutely fucked already.
He’s expecting this to be the easy part of this little adventure, but Elsa, one of the actual paid employees, is glaring him down, asking him why he doesn’t just take his pets to a vet, and Ryan is holding on to a gasoline-stained paper bag, here, okay, these are pretty obviously not his pets, but she’s going on to talk about how underfunded they are here, how they’re not equipped to deal with any more sick animals and Ryan is overwhelmed by the sense of wrong, you’re doing it wrong again when Jesse Eisenberg walks over. Jesse Eisenberg who everybody here loves. Jesse Eisenberg who Ryan hadn’t really given a second thought to until this moment, when he says, “I’ll pay for it.”
“What?”
“I’ll pay for these guys. For their shots or antibiotics or a vet or whatever. Just, can you take care of them?”
Apparently that’s what it takes for Elsa to reach out and take the now-quiet bundle of slippery brown paper and no longer shivering kittens from Ryan’ outstretched arms. He’s surprised by how reluctant he is to let them go, but this is what he came here for, so he forces his fingers to relinquish them and turns to Jesse, suddenly angry. “You didn’t need to do that. Just because you’re a movie star doesn’t mean you’re the only one who can afford to take care of-I just-” Ryan is just really tired.
“I know.” Jesse Eisenberg has a surprisingly steady voice when he wants to. “You’d already done the rescuing part, though. I figured you could maybe use a hand.” He doesn’t mention the way Ryan had kind of frozen up a moment ago, which is nice of him, Ryan guesses. He’s even smiling, in a way Ryan hasn’t seen before except for possibly in a movie, but surely he’d remember that particular smile
Ryan is pretty sure he’s not smiling back, but that’s okay. He hopes so, anyway. He looks back at Jesse in time to see him ask, “So, you want to see how your rescue-ees are doing?”
Ryan is pretty sure that’s not a word. Still, “Alright.”
…
It turns out that kittens be looked after by the emergency vet Elsa found is not actually a spectator sport, and they’re shooed out approximately seven minutes after Ryan starts tapping his fingers on the counter. For no reason Jesse can really explain, he feels responsible enough to wait outside with Ryan as he fidgets by the door. Jesse’s not sure whether he feels responsible for Ryan or for the kittens, though the fact that it’s Ryan he’s hovering near possibly sheds some light on that question. If that’s true, he would like to ask himself why-well, he can’t think where the question would go after that? Why him? Ryan is biting his thumbnail and it’s kind of gross and Jesse has no idea what he is doing there.
Elsa steps out into the hall, tells Jesse distractedly, “Weren’t you about done? You can head home now, honey.” It’s after eight. Jesse rarely stays here so long, it’s true. It takes Elsa a moment longer to notice Ryan, for some reason. “Sorry about earlier,” she tells him, though, which is nice enough, the polite thing, anyway. “There’s nothing more you can do tonight for them, though. We’ve got it covered. You might as well head out, too.” It seems pretty obvious that she’s trying to get rid of Ryan, but he just stares back at her blankly.
What do normal people do, Jesse asks himself, to make an acquaintance who looks mildly traumatized feel better, while also getting him out of the way of the frustrated Humane Society worker? Jesse is pretty sure normal people don’t get themselves into these situations. Still. What is the appropriate course of action, here?
“Hey, um, if you’re heading out, too,” Ryan is pretty obviously not heading anywhere, his feet are planted, but he ought to be. That is Jesse’s point, here. “It’s been a kind of long day.” Ryan has been here for less than half an hour, but it looks like he’s not really listening, anyway, so who cares. “Want to grab a drink?”
Ryan turns almost creepily wide eyes on Jesse, blinks and says, “Sure. Why not.”
…
It’s awkward, but Jesse is pretty sure that has a lot more to do with the situation itself than anything he’s doing. He searches his brain for anything they might possibly have in common, but really, all he can come up with is, “So, do you rescue kittens often?” which sounds dumb for so many reasons, from the similarity to a pickup line right up to the actual meaning of the question. Still, it somehow finds its way out of his mouth.
Ryan ducks his head and takes another drink before looking up, and alright,it was a kind of dumb question, but that’s no call for him to look so confused. Jesse is not speaking another language here. “Uh, no, first time,” Ryan says after a kind of excruciating beat of pause. “But, like, someone left them there, right? Cats don’t just spontaneously climb into shopping bags, do they?”
Jesse can’t help it, he snorts an incredulous laugh. “Spoken like someone who has never had a cat.”
Ryan seems too distracted to be insulted, which is probably a good thing. “But these were just, like, little cats. They don’t just migrate on their own.”
“Little cats? You mean kittens?”
“Who leaves little fucking cats alone in a paper bag?”
“Historically,” Jesse says reflectively, “a lot of people.” Ryan glares at him violently enough that he is tempted to flinch, has to say, “What? I don’t approve or anything, obviously. I’m just saying, there’s precedent.”
Ryan is glaring into his beer, he’s obviously not paying attention and Jesse should just leave him here, really, he’s a dick and Jesse doesn’t want to be around him if he’s going to be making Jesse feel this defensive. “No, really, it’s awful, I know that, why else would I be volunteering?”
Ryan looks up, slightly dazed look on his face and yeah, he really hasn’t been listening. Jesse would really like to be home right now, thanks. “What? I wasn’t, like, accusing you... it’s just, why do people do that? They just left them there.”
He sounds so much like a little kid right then that the response that leaps to Jesse’s mind-socioeconomic factors, human conceptualization of other life-forms as lesser, all the rest-dies on his lips. He looks at Ryan and all he can do is say, a little helplessly, “I don’t know. Some people are just-not very nice.”
...
The first time Ryan decides he really has to be going, even gets so far as to stand up, Jesse says in the overly concerned tones of the decidedly tipsy, “Wait. I’ll call you a cab.”
“I can call-” Ryan says. He’s still a little insulted about the kitten thing. “Why do you think you always have to-oh,” he says as it hits him and then, “Oh,” again because it sounds so nicely dramatic. “You think I’m one of that kind of rockstar.”
“Rockstar?” Jesse looks more confused than as ashamed of himself as he ought to be, now that Ryan knows what he’s playing at.
“The kind with the driving drunk and the crashing the car and the dying in fires too young to even have a best-of album. You don’t need to worry about that, though.”
“Not a rockstar after all?” Jesse still looks confused, and after the last hour and a half, he should know better than to doubt Ryan’s word.
“Not that. I’m in a band, you know.” He is suddenly struck by the realization that Jesse did not know that, and then wonders why he thought Jesse might have. Ryan is not that famous. Still. “Two bands. I was in two bands. Might still be in one.”
“You don’t know?” Jesse sounds amused which is not fair, Ryan is not being funny now. He waves his hand in a vague way, says, “These things are fluid.” It’s true, but mostly he just likes the way it sounds. He reaches around till he finds a bar napkin, the pen he borrowed from the bartender earlier, and jots it down. ‘These things are fluid.’
That wasn’t what he’d been trying to get to when he brought this up, though. It’s important that Jesse gets what he’s saying about this. “I am unlikely to die because my crashed car is on fire.”
“Not flammable?”
“What? No. I mean, no less than anyone else, I guess. I never had a drink till I was twenty, you know.”
“No. How would I know that?”
Jesse is spectacularly good at missing the point. “Drinking at twenty is still illegal,” Jesse says reflectively, after a pause.
Ryan thinks they must have had very different adolescent experiences, for that sentence to exist right now. “Right, well, but I was on tour when I was twenty. It was kind of a thing, at the time. To not.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“The point is that I’m not going to drive drunk.”
“But why drive at all, yet?” At this point, Ryan can’t remember. At some point during the conversation, he’s gone back to sitting, and he sees no specific reason to make himself stand again.
...
“Come over,” Ryan says as they finally leave, and it takes Jesse what feels like an embarrassingly long time to figure out that he means.
“To your place? But-”
“Come on,” Ryan says, and Jesse remembers exactly why he hadn’t liked Ryan before this particular little interlude, he just sounds so self-assured and nonchalant and Jesse, who has rarely wanted to commit violence in his entire life, is seized by the desire to hit him. Ryan says, “Come on, I’ve got weed-or, no, I’m out, but I could feed you, I think. Well, we could order in, anyway. You can show me all the places in my house where I should be keeping cats to atone for my sins.”
Well, at least Ryan has been listening when he talks. “You obviously have never lived with a cat if you think you could keep them anywhere,” Jesse says, and somehow he’s walking with Ryan to the curb, waiting while he calls a cab but he’s not giving in just yet, he says, “I’ll split a cab with you, anyway. And I’ll see you soon.” Jesse is not at all sure that this is true, but it feels like the thing to say.
Ryan is obviously not giving up his position here, either. “Come see my place,” he says again, and then, “We can screw if you want to.”
“What?” Jesse knows he sometimes misreads situations, but that is not the vibe he’s been getting from tonight.
Ryan shrugs like he doesn’t care one way or the other and then says, “Or not, if you’re not into it? I don’t know, I don’t always read people right. You’ve been-” his voice sounds a little less inscrutable, now, a little less dickish, the urge to smack him has almost completely receded when he says, “You’ve been really nice tonight, man. I thought that might be why, and I’d be cool with it, but if not you should totally just come over and we’ll order pizza.”
Andrew’s voice is in Jesse’s head again asking, “do you, Jesse, find him to be physically attractive?” and yeah, at this point the answer he’s leaning towards is a very interested maybe but that wasn’t the point of tonight.
“I was being a nice person entirely independently of any interest I may or may not have in getting into your pants.” It seems like an important point to clarify
Ryan seems thrown. The cab arrives. Ryan opens the door while he replies to Jesse, “So that’s just, like, how you are? Whether you want to bone me or not?”
“Not really,” Jesse has to admit, forcing himself not to worry about what the cabbie thinks of this conversation. “I have it on good authority that I’m neurotic and kind of mean sometimes.”
Ryan nods and asks, “Are you coming?” from his spot already settled into the cab, and it’s not until Jesse answers, “What the hell. Sure, I kind of feel like pizza, anyway,” climbs into the cab and shuts the door behind him that Ryan asks, “Why, then? If you’re usually such a jackass.”
Jesse stops short at that, not because he doesn’t know, but because Because you looked sad sounds a little weird, and Jesse’s not entirely sure it would be true, anyway-he doesn’t know why he’s doing this. Instead he shrugs, and the rest of the cab ride is quiet.
...
The thing is, Ryan was so focused on getting Jesse to come home with him, so caught up in the idea of not hanging around an empty house with all the lights on texting Alex sporadically, that he hadn’t even really thought about what he would do if he managed to get Jesse there. Well, he had but Jesse’s made it pretty clear that he’s not in the mood to trade his presence and company for sex, which is maybe kind of good because Ryan feels really sleazy after having thought of it in those terms.
Z really doesn’t like it when he does that, anyway, says that random hookups for the sake of not being alone are awful, Ryan, they’re a sign that you should get a pet before you pick up an STD, which is a sentence that is wrong on so many levels. First, it makes it sound like this is something Ryan does often, which it isn’t, not really. Maybe a little bit just after Panic ended, and a couple of times after the end of the first Young Veins tour, maybe a little bit lately before he started volunteering at the shelter, but not often, Ryan’s not easy, and he doesn’t like the implication-he just doesn’t like to be alone sometimes. He blames it on the fact that some of the most consistently good periods of his life took place on tour busses.
For another thing, it kind of sounds like she thinks Ryan should take up bestiality to avoid STDs, and that thought usually sends Z off on a tangent, so he’s taken to using it earlier and earlier in the discussion, to try to throw off the rest. The rest, when he doesn’t manage to avoid it, usually involves a measure of forced empathy she thinks she’s earned after the Charlotte thing.
Ryan is trying to be a good friend, to learn not to discount the experiences of others, but really, as far as Ryan can tell, the Charlotte thing is like a more intense version of Brent, but not really much like leaving Panic and two of his best friends with it, nothing at all like trying to be happy for Jon while he’s off being married in Chicago.
The point is that Ryan was maybe a little tipsy when he realized that he didn’t really want to go home to his empty, echoey house tonight, so he hadn’t thought too much about asking the guy who’d bought him drinks tonight home with him. Apparently, though, apparently Jesse has just been hanging out with Ryan as a friendly thing, which is nice, but since they don’t really know each other, also kind of weird. The cab pulls up to Ryan’s place and he has no idea what to do with the guy who’s getting out of the car behind him.
He thinks he might have said something about food-if he hadn’t, he should have, but he doesn’t really know any other kind of hospitality besides offering either food or drugs (one learned from Ginger Smith, the other from Jon Walker-Ryan learned the different ways to be a person slowly, he thinks, probably, but once he learned, it stuck), so he probably said something. The idea that he did gives him something to do, though, so he pushes through the door, makes enough of an effort to make sure it doesn’t slam in Jesse’s face, since he’s pretty sure that would be horribly rude, but pushes past into the kitchen, makes a move for the takeout menus. They’re something to do with his hands, with his eyes, with his rapidly tangling thoughts.
They’re even something to do with Jesse, who followed Ryan into his kitchen, who’s hovering kind of awkwardly around the doorway. Ryan offers him a pile of menus and says, “Help me sort out the ones that still deliver this late. Then we can decide what we want.”
...
Ryan means to be a good host, or as good a host as it is possible to be for a drunken movie star you invited home after midnight for a few hours of insomniatic but apparently entirely platonic hanging out. That is, he hadn’t meant to make fun of Jesse’s chosen pizza toppings, but really? “Pineapple? Isn’t supposed to be ham and pineapple?”
Jesse shifts from one foot to the other, looks down at his feet and Ryan is not that intimidating, there is no reason for Jesse to be looking down at his feet like that, but he sounds kind of embarrassed when he says, “Well, I’m a vegetarian,” so maybe it’s Jesse’s problem after all. Ryan is going to go with that.
“So you just decided to leave off the ham instead of, say, coming up with a new plan?”
“I used to like ham and pineapple, when I ate meat.”
“But the point of ham and pineapple is, like, the combination of, like, the sweet and salty, right? I mean, maybe if you subbed out the ham for, um, olives or something else with salt-”
“Pineapple and olives?”
“Hmmm, maybe not, but-”
“If it bothers you so much, just order your own and I’ll call back in a minute to order my pineapple pizza,” and how did this happen again? Ryan doesn’t actually care that much what Jesse fucking Eisenberg wants on his damn pizza. It’s just weird, is all. He dials.
“Hey-can I get a large meat-lovers and a large freak-pizza? Yeah, it’s just a cheese pizza with pineapple-you don’t call it that there-ow, shit, Jesse knock it off-”
…
So yeah, if Jesse had ever been going to picture what hanging out with Ryan-the-musician would entail, he probably wouldn’t have pictured late-night pizza and infomercials, but that’s just life, he figures. Full of surprises. Full of-”Shit, Ryan, put the phone down, you are not ordering that.”
Ryan turns wide eyes in his direction, “But it can cut through a penny!”
“You have no food in your kitchen and live off of takeout, you do not need a set of steak knives.”
“But what if I need to cut through pennies all of the sudden?” Ryan sounds way too innocent not to already know how dumb that question is, so Jesse chooses to ignore it.
“Then you’d be shit out of luck.”
Apparently, that does it, because Ryan settles back into the couch, saying, “Yeah, I guess I didn’t use the last set for much, either.”
“The last set?”
“It could cut through tin cans! I, um, I might be kind of susceptible to advertising.”
Jesse can’t help it, snorts out a thoroughly uncharming laugh. “You think?”
Ryan ducks his head and mutters something about the magic of Oxyclean.
They don’t talk much after that, and before long, Jesse falls asleep on the couch.
...
Breakfast is odd, partially because Jesse needs to get home before noon because he doesn’t have his meds and doesn’t entirely know where he is or by extension how to get to where he needs to be, and partially because he’s bad enough at morning-afters when he’s actually had sex. He feels even more off-balance sitting across the table from Ryan nursing a coffee now that he hasn’t see what’s under the incongruous, faded, high school hockey jersey he apparently wears to bed.
There’s also no food in the house, a fact that Jesse hadn’t quite believed when Ryan mentioned it last night. Oh, he’d believed Ryan maybe hadn’t been shopping in a while, might be the type to have a fridge full of half empty takeout containers and condiments, cupboards full of crackers and dusty cans of soup. He hadn’t even really thought to picture a kitchen this entirely bare, though. There’s coffee, which is a relief, and pop tarts, which Jesse is not offered, and an unholy assortment of takeout menus with the call-in number highlighted like someone was trying to make sure they were as easy as possible to use. That’s it. Seriously. That is all there is, and the pristine nature of the refrigerator seems like a pretty good indication that this is not an uncommon state of affairs.
They’re both mostly silent through the caffeination process, which Jesse doesn’t think is that surprising. It’s not like they’ve got much of anything in common. Still, Ryan looks almost disappointed when Jesse stands and says he has to get going, asks, “Why?” and there’s a kind of plaintive quality to the syllable, like he’s letting a little more emotion than he’d like show. It’s before eleven, and Jesse’s limited experience with musicians leads him to believe that’s not an hour they’re particularly comfortable with. That might have something to do with it.
“Can’t be late with my pills,” Jesse says.
“Pills?”
“Hard drugs, you know.”
Fucking with Ryan is still kind of fun, now that he isn’t standing behind a counter like it’s a shield from the world and clutching at a wriggling bag of abandoned kittens.
Now, he’s already dropped the blank, surprised look. It had been nice, Jesse thinks, while it lasted, for the moment that it flashed across his face, but now he’s got that half smile on his face that makes Jesse a little angry, makes him want to push back, so when Ryan drawls, “Really,” he just says, “Yeah, really,” and then, “Kittens and cokeheads, you know, it’s an unbeatable combination,” and, “Got to go meet my dealer, she gets pissed if I make her wait, could you call me a cab?”
“She?” is the part of the statement that Ryan chooses to zero in on, which, Jesse thinks, probably shouldn’t surprise him anymore.
“Yeah, it’s a women’s world out there, my friend, you and I are just living in it,” Jesse feels like he’s in a particularly unstressful interview-not nerve-wracking like actual press, but still with that spurt of amusing lies and half-truths that pop into his head as fully formed sentences when he’s talking to press-with the smartass part of his brain not really consulting the rational part. “Drug dealing is as equal opportunity as anything else these days. Don’t be a chauvinist pig.”
Ryan laughs at that, messy and mouth wide open, not a calculated reaction, and tips his chair back to grab the wall-mounted phone from a precarious position, balancing the chair on two legs by leaning on the wall with one hand and hitting speed-dial with the other, as if by making him laugh Jesse has earned the right to a cab. When he’s finished rattling off his address into the phone, he turns back to Jesse, still smiling more brightly and less infuriatingly, and says, “Z would love you.”
…
Ryan sometimes wishes he had the kind of relationship with his mother where he could call her when he has something to say, and they could talk about it. He sometimes wishes his father was not dead, and that when his father was alive, they had had the kind of relationship that involved talking. He wishes he wasn’t years away from the kid who could lie on the air mattress next to Spencer’s bed and whisper his secrets into the dark, secure in the knowledge that they’ll be heard. He wishes he had someone he could call right now to say, “I met a guy”, soft and a little nervous and way too serious for the situation. If he had the right person to call, they wouldn’t even laugh at him, they’d notice how tenuous his tone was, they’d know better than to tease over something so wavering and wondering and barely present.
Ryan thinks even if he had someone to know him that well, to take him saying something like this in the right way, he probably wouldn’t call them-it’s not even that this is something new, so much as that it’s something that might not ever get around to even being new. Those are the kinds of things Ryan thinks may be better kept to himself. It’s a moot point, though, there’s no one he thinks he could call right now, not unless he wants a glib answer or uncomfortable questions. No one who will take a statement like that and just let it sit.
Ryan has burned some of his bridges and others have been burned for him. It doesn’t really matter why, all that matters is that there is no one in his house after Jesse leaves, there is just Ryan and that ill-advised, dying house plant he’d bought on a whim and this fragile, fluttering question in his head. Ryan reaches for his laptop. In times of doubt, internet stalking is always a good place to start.
...
Somehow, Jesse ends up back at the animal shelter that evening. He tells himself it would have happened anyway, except that it was the day he’d set aside after he’d promised his agent he’d finally go through that stack of scripts, so really, he probably wouldn’t have gone to the shelter. It’s been a weird day, though-ever since he got home it’s been all stops and starts and nothing getting done. He gets there, though, and his mind starts to settle as soon as he walks in. It’s too bad, because it means he walks in unaware, and ten minutes later he’s wishing he hadn’t come to begin with.
One of Ryan’s kittens is dead.
Something about hypothermia, about them being too small to be away from their mother, Jesse doesn’t really know the science of it. He does know that Ryan walked into the shelter yesterday with three grubby, painfully tiny kittens, and only two of them are still breathing. “Has anybody told him yet?”
“Told who, you mean-? No, of course not, why would we? If he’d wanted them he would have kept them.”
Jesse isn’t sure what that has to do with anything, but he doesn’t say so, just asks, “Have you got his number? I’ll do it.”
She’s not really supposed to give out that kind of information, but she likes Jesse, and it isn’t too hard to get her to relent, especially when Jesse mentions that he and Ryan have been talking (he doesn’t mention when or where and especially not what about, the point is that a connection is there) and that he’d seemed particularly concerned for the kittens (he had-especially as compared to his concern for anything else that Jesse has seen, which is, to be fair, not a lot). And so he calls. Punches the number into the phone at the front desk and listens to it ring. Finds himself hoping it will go straight through to voicemail, which isn’t that unusual for him, but this time it’s more an unwillingness to say what he needs to than to avoid the small-talk which will accompany what he needs to say, which is the usual worry.
After five rings, though, when Jesse is almost sure he’s in the clear, he hears, “Hello?”
He clears his throat, stalling, says after a pause, “Ryan? It’s Jesse. From the shelter.” Jesse doesn’t know, maybe Ryan knows a lot of Jesses. Maybe all of them end up buzzed and a little confused, watching infomercials on his couch at two in the morning. Maybe he gets them mixed up. Jesse is only trying to be polite.
Ryan says, “Yeah? Hey, how are you? How was your trip home?” He sounds pleased and kind of surprised, but he doesn’t ask how Jesse got his number.
“So, um. I’m actually there now. Here now. At, um, the shelter, that is.” Why does he have to sound so fucking halting? Why did he ever volunteer to make this call to begin with?
“Yeah? They’re letting you talk on the phone on duty? Be careful. Those German Shepherds will make a break for it when your back is turned, if they think they can get away with it.”
Jesse is almost certain Ryan is joking. Eighty percent sure, anyway. It also sounds suspiciously like he’s flirting, which seems kind of weird and also in no way makes Jesse want to say what he’s going to say next.
“So, um, those kittens you brought in, you know how they were in kind of rough shape?”
For a second Ryan doesn’t answer, Jesse can hear him breathing faintly through the phone and maybe Jesse should just keep going, maybe he doesn’t need to wait for confirmation, but then Ryan makes a vague, agreeing noise and Jesse has no excuse to stall any longer.
“Two of them are doing fine, but the littlest one didn’t make it.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sorry,” Jesse says, kind of hesitant, more of a filling-the-space kind of sound than anything.
“Yeah,” Ryan says, and of course he doesn’t sound the same as a minute ago, doesn’t sound bright and teasing, but he says, “I’ll see you around, right?”
And Jesse didn’t want to chat, he’s glad Ryan isn’t prolonging this, but it’s still kind of nice, oddly sweet. Unfortunately, “No, I’m going back to New York in just a couple days.”
“Oh.”
“You should-um, you should call me sometime, though.” That’s how Jesse finds himself giving Ryan Ross his phone number.
...
Jesse isn’t too big on airports. Symbolically, they’re a good thing, he guesses-they represent motion, which is a generally positive thing, especially when he is in one place and would rather be somewhere else (he pointedly does not think ‘when he is somewhere and would rather be home’ because he’s not sure he likes how that sounds, but it’s true enough anyway, and Jesse is self-aware enough to know it), but there’s something about the bigness of them that gets to him. Those unnecessarily high ceilings, the shiny siding and weird, clash colored carpets all strike him as self-important, and not in a particularly good way.
Still, they’re a necessary evil, unless Jesse wants to sacrifice speed and take a train. That’s actually something he’s thought about once or twice-it seems like a pretty writerly thing to do, taking a train cross-country. Emma had pointed out, though, that he’d be traveling in a train car with other people, people he didn’t know and might potentially not like, and that people on days long train trips might forget themselves when it comes to following the rules of polite public transportation travel and keeping to themselves.
So train travel is out as an option, mostly, but sometimes when he’s staring up into the metal rafters of an airport and there are all these people everywhere, and they are all walking in very pointed, specific directions, Jesse thinks irritably about bygone days and slower times and how if he was on a train right now, there would probably be plumes of smoke.
He thinks he and Ryan actually talked about this for a while the other night, and Ryan didn’t do that thing Emma does and point out all the reasons it wouldn’t work very well for Jesse in real life. Jesse isn’t sure whether that should have encouraged the idea, actually, since Ryan had also ordered that upside down tomato grower and flirted with Jesse that same night, neither of which argued very well for his judgement. Either way, though, it had been kind of nice to talk to someone else who let himself get swept up in the idea.
...
Z says that Ryan needs to wait three days after Jesse flies back to New York to text him so that he doesn’t seem desperate. “Make him work for it,” she says, which is all well and good, only Ryan isn’t exactly sure Jesse is even interested to begin with, which might be a problem. Tennessee says he should call, not text, and no longer than a day after because, “He’s already on the other end of the country, how much more space could he need?” and then, more darkly, “Or if he does, what do you want with him anyway, Ryan?” Ryan misses the days when the only girls he hung out with were thirteen year old fans and the merch girl with the eye twitch who’d always sort of hated him for no reason he could see.
He’s tempted to ignore both of them, remembering the catastrophic meltdown of Z’s most recent relationship, remembering Tenn swear off of men forever the night before last because, “They’ve all got cooties. Present company excepted of course,” with an apologetic glance in Ryan’s direction. Ryan needs to call Alex up is what he needs to do. He needs to hang out with someone who is not a girl, a cat or dog, or someone he is kind of vaguely trying halfheartedly to date. So yeah, he’s tempted to ignore them, but his fortune cookie last night told him to place his trust in an unlikely source, so he decides to combine their advice and text the next day. Depending on how well the texting goes over, he might call in three days, which would be taking all pieces of their combined advice, albeit in different sections. Ryan thinks it’s a pretty solid plan.
He doesn’t plan for his phone to ring a few minutes after he send off a hopefully innocuous text saying, “hey. how was your flight?” Ryan doesn’t do a lot of talking on the phone. He’s not sure if he doesn’t like it because it doesn’t happen that often and so it makes him nervous, or if people have noticed that he doesn’t like talking on the phone and so choose to text him instead. He peers down at the caller ID idly, without really planning on answering (if it’s that important, they can leave a message) and it’s Jesse. Jesse who he just texted, who therefore knows that his phone is neither dead nor far from him. Jesse who Ryan doesn’t actually want to avoid talking to, even if it is on the phone.
“Hello?”
“What’s up?”
“You called me,” Ryan feels the need to point out. It is not his job to provide a direction for this conversation.
“But you texted me.”
“And then you called me.” Ryan is doing his best to keep the emphasis shifting. Otherwise he would fear the conversation was going in circles.
“I don’t like, um.” It sounds like an admission, or the beginning of one, and for all that he’d love to deny it to himself, “True You, A Journey To Finding And Loving Yourself” is very down on denial, so the truth is that Ryan feels an unaccustomed twist in his gut, a feeling of uncertainty he’s been trying to ignore the fact that he’s capable of since high school.
“You gave me your number,” he says and then immediately feels like an idiot for it, for sounding so defensive. Where is your cool, Ross?’ a voice that sounds annoyingly like Brendon’s asks him in his head. “The Worry Trap” assures him that he’s not crazy, but since he doesn’t actually have chronic anxiety, he’s always been a little wary of taking too much advice from that one.
Jesse is still on the phone, though, still talking, saying, “I mean, I don’t really like texting. It feels so impersonal, you know?”
He says it without even sounding like a pretentious asshole, the way Ryan would if he said the same thing, and Ryan thinks that’s probably one of the most major parts of Jesse Eisenberg’s charm. He laughs more to fill the silence than because he really thinks it’s funny and then asks, “So how are the cats? Did they miss you?” He only feels a little stupid asking, too. He has practice from years of knowing Jon with talking about other peoples’ pets as if they were human.
“They were pining, obviously,” Jesse says, and then laughs, a nervous chuckle that Ryan recognizes as a sound that shows up more often in interviews than in any of Ryan’s actual interactions with him-not that there have been too many of them. Ryan makes sure to remind himself of that. He’s probably seen more interviews on YouTube in the past few days than he has spent waking hours with Jesse. He really needs to remember not to mention that. Jesse seems like he might spook easily. Ryan knows he can be a bit much sometimes.
It turns out that the cats Jesse just came home to are due to be sent to real homes (“I just foster them, they’re not really mine,” Jesse had said the other night, and Ryan still doesn’t quite get it, but he’s not going to pry) so he barely has time to reacquaint himself with them before he lets them go. Jesse doesn’t seem to bothered by this, but Ryan thinks it sounds kind of awful.
…
Ryan goes to visit the kittens that Jesse calls Ryan’s at the shelter the next day. They’re tinier than he remembered, even, with little, rounded ears and thick fuzz where most cats have fur, like the down on baby ducks. One is dark gray and the other is striped, and they look a lot more lonely, more forlorn, with only two of them.
Ryan is pretty sure Jesse thinks he should adopt them. He is less sure of why that might matter to him-even if he’s pretty far beyond denying that he’s interested in Jesse, being into a guy is not a very good reason to take on responsibility for two tiny lives. Ryan may not be the most spotlessly moral person, but he’s still clear on that. Carefully, he reaches down to pick the striped kitten up. The kitten yawns at him, but otherwise doesn’t react too much to being lifted up in Ryan’s hands-long fingers that he even freaks himself out with sometimes when he is very stoned, and he wouldn’t blame the little cat even if it bit him for removing it from the dim, towel-padded compartment out into the open air in his cupped palms. It doesn’t, though, instead seems to burrow in a little, and Ryan is kind of glad later that his hands are too full to follow through on his first instinct because his first instinct is to call Jesse and tell him, “You were right,” and he’s not even sure what he would mean by that.
Part 2