Jacob Bixenman has been watching Troye Sivan for four days.
And it's not been very eventful. Turns out that The Uprisor in the Kingdom of Timothee is not nearly as adventurous or lively as Timothee made him out to be. Rather than "fitting into everybody's pockets" (a direct and startlingly inaccurate quote from none other than Timothee himself), Jacob hasn't actually seen the boy talk to another soul for more than five minutes at any given time. Rather, he strides quietly about the school grounds, earbuds tucked firmly in his ears, his fluffy head always bent low towards the soil and grass and cement pathways that glide beneath his purposeful, Converse-clad feet.
And that's basically it. That's pretty much all he does. Just walks around with a bag slung over his shoulders, head down, listening to music. Vaguely, distantly, and unamusedly, Jacob wonders what he listens to, but the curiosity is almost instantly squashed when he comes to the inevitable conclusion that it's most likely shit. Nickleback or something. Shit.
Still though, the boy isn't what Jacob had expected.
This 'Troye Sivan' definitely doesn't seem like the type that would boast about being recruited for a footie team without even needing to tryout (the boy is all stick limbs and points, and trips up while he walks, so...) and as Jacob watches him every day for four days, peering at him through the tendrils of smoke from his cigarette while he times the slaps of his long, gangly feet against the pavement to the bass of Nirvana's "Aneurysm," he grows more and more curious as to what this boy could possibly possess that should cause Timothee to feel so threatened. He can't really put his finger on it from the distance though, so he doesn't waste much time mulling it over, just brushes the thought away along with the ash from his cigarette.
It'll be easy, though. This target? Easy peasy. Probably won't take more than a week, even, given that the boy is seemingly docile and potentially shy. Clearly, he's not one of the aggressive, repressed types that take a bit more time and concentration on Jacob's part; the ones who kick out their questionable sexualities on the field and grunt the words they can't form before colliding their bodies into you in a manner that suggests more than just petty violence.
Nah, this Troye boy, with his earbuds and skinny limbs and unmoving lips, is a bit more... well. The 'innocent' type, Jacob suspects. One of the naïve ones that flushes easily, that stutters out his sentences and sends forth shy smiles as he curls the edge of his notebook paper. He's one of those sweet ones that Jacob has so callously tossed aside on countless times before, all on Jacob's orders, all due to boredom, all because he's just a shitty, deplorable fucking human being at the end of the day.
He does feel bad sometimes, though. Secretly, quietly, he does.
He doesn't mind conquering one of the aggressive types — fucking them in the head professor's office and getting purposefully caught or leaking shitty iPhone footage of them exchanging blowjobs all over Facebook or whathaveyou. He doesn't so much mind crumbling the (frankly, pretty shitty) foundations of a douchebag footie player who's bred even more misery in an already miserable world.
But he does feel the pinpricks of remorse when it comes to dashing the hopes of boys who hold a less...blemished heart. He does have a bit of trouble meeting his own reflection after he's broken the spirit of one who was never meant to be broken.
But. Jacob is piece of shit, you know? Facts are facts.
It's just how it is. Not everybody was born to be inherently 'good'. The world is going to be filled with different characters, different flavours, different levels of respectability and whatnot, and Jacob just so happens to be on the lower ranks. He's not good, he's not brave, and he's not out to save anyone except himself. Even fairytales have their villains — it's a part of life. And it's always been that way. Jacob's always been a bit harsher around the edges. He certainly isn't going to be winning any "Humanitarian of the Year" awards, that's for sure. And he doesn't mind it so much, being thoroughly unaffected by anything and everything and totally removed from his peers and their very trivial lives. Because he's not like the rest of them. That's the thing. They're all the fucking same. With their money and their uppity attitudes and twattiness and their preconceived notions and recycled sentences that disappear as quickly as they come. The same.
He's always been a bit sour, probably, always a bit different. Probably because, when he was a lad, he spent most, if not all of his time, with just Carrie, his mum. He doesn't ever remember calling her 'mum', though. Why call someone by anything else but their given name?
When he was just a baby, his father fuckered off, leaving just Carrie and just Jacob and no trace or memory or money or care. So it was down to them and that was it. They were very mobile, all through Jacob's first very ripe childhood years, constantly moving, Carrie constantly hopping from job to job and town to town because she always taught Jacob that "home was where the heart lay"—and the heart was ever moving, never constant. So on whim after whim they travelled. Met a fuck ton of people and experienced a fuck ton of things and Jacob was just a small little thing so it was all in good fun, really. Just changing flats every couple of months and staring up into different parts of the sky. Different babysitters, different friends, different temporary dads, different smells, different textures of carpet, different paint peeling in different corridors. Simple, really.
Looking back... it was probably because it was just the two of them for so long that Jacob had always just regarded her as more a friend than a 'mother' figure. They were more like companions than family, in a way. It was odd. Sort of hard to put into words. But, thing is, he always held good thoughts of her despite the distinct lack of familial coddling. She may have left him on his own a lot, she may have been a bit flighty and too, too young for a son, but she was kind and creative and free and Jacob was like a smaller, male version of her. They even have the same eyes—Jacob's best feature. Thanks, mummy.
And he liked their lifestyle—their haphazard, ever-changing lifestyle. He liked the changes and he liked the inconsistencies, and he liked the adventure of it all because he felt a bit more alive. He remembers reading or hearing a quote at a very young age: "To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all." And that's always stuck with him. It's become a sort of religion to him, a sentence to wake up and go to bed to. And even as young as he was at the time, Jacob still remembers hearing those words in his head every time it came around to packing up and leaving again, whenever he would fold his five shirts and two pairs of jeans into his ripped purple bag with the ink stain at the bottom. Because it felt like they were living instead of just existing. They were trading out memories and people and flats and, somehow, leaving seemed a bit more fulfilling than just building a shitty foundation in a shitty town with shitty people whose accents all sounded the same.
It was around the age of eight, though, that things began to get a bit more...complex. Convoluted, maybe.
That's when she met Alan.
They were in Orange County at the time, a decent enough northern town with a school that was easy enough to bunk off from. Jacob had found good mates—good, proper mates to sneak him cigarettes and make him laugh—and then, suddenly, the heart became constant, apparently. Because they stopped moving.
Instead, Carrie got married to this burly bloke who was a fireman with a loud laugh. Instead of adventures and patched up suitcases and his purple bag with the ink stain housing his seven articles of clothing, it all became houses and wardrobes and fences and gardens and grocery shopping. It became Carrie popping out five—count 'em, five—fucking children in stunningly quick succession. It became Carrie suddenly reading little children bedtime stories and kissing their cheeks while Jacob made dinner and Jacob cleaned the house and Jacob babysat every single minute of every fucking day. It became Jacob watching Carrie suddenly awakening into a mother while Jacob stayed a friend, not a son, even if he didn't need a mother because he was quite capable of keeping himself alive on his own, thanks.
It became Alan and Carrieand the younger siblings. And it became Jacob, always mentioned a sentence away. Always separated by punctuation and a pause and a wall that tucked him into the smallest corner in the smallest room of the house. Like Harry fucking Potter, but with the perk of having a 'best mate' who was seventeen years his senior, who also happened to have birthed him.
And then, as all things do, that all came to an end. Because Alan the Fireman suddenly left too — Jacob can't even remember why anymore—and it was back to Carrie and her good friend Jacob, on their own with five adolescent children all to their names.
It was Jacob working two jobs at the age of fourteen. It was Jacob unable to do his tedious homework because he was so tired all the time. It became Jacob raising children while Carrie struggled to hold her head above water and it became Jacob babysitting still, always, while Carrie worked overtime and Carrie went on more dates and tried too hard but not enough and it became too fucking much by the time Jacob was sixteen.
It was just too much. He loves his sisters, true — he's not a complete robot, or anything. And, honestly, they were the reason he stuck around as long as he did. But when he suddenly began failing all of his courses and was told he'd failed his grade again...
Well.
It became too much.
So Jacob left. Jacon got up and left one night when his blood was spiked with nicotine and his jean jacket scratched against the soft skin of his arms. He left after kissing his sisters to sleep one last time and he left without one a word to Carrie because he didn't need to say anything at all. She knew. She knew it was too much and she didn't look for him after he'd gone. Not out of a lack of affection, Jacob knows, but merely because she just knew and there was nothing left to say.
Even though... Jaob probably should have found some words. Just a few, even.
He never once told her how suffocated he felt. It was a realisation that made him sick to his stomach the minute he stepped out the door, but it was one that wasn't strong enough to make him turn back. Because he's the child, isn't he? He shouldn't have to be the one to initiate that conversation because she was the mother. It shouldn't be his damn job to clean up the messes, now should it?
So he dropped out of school and moved in with whatever friends he had at the time. And, ever since, he's been flittering from flat to flat, maintaining a glamorous job as a busboy who sometimes serves hard liquor to old drunken gents with wandering hands at the pub down by the river. It's lucky he'd found the job when he did — he'd quit his two jobs after he'd run away in some ridiculous form of protest that proved absolutely nothing to no one. But one of his friends worked there and his lying-through-his-teeth good word landed Jacob the gig and the tips he'd made almost immediately were enough to float him along his merry way and feed him and buy his vices, so. It was a win-win situation.
Thing is, though.... Jacob lives in a nice neighbourhood, even if he does reside on the other side, the shittier side. But overall, it's nice. Filled with rich folks and manicured lawns. Pets with diamonds in their collars—that kind of neighbourhood. So, as miraculous as his shitty pub tips were at the time, he still couldn't even afford a flat to rent out for himself.
So the solution seemed a bit...simple, really.
It was around that age, sixteen, that Jacob began to realise he could use his looks to his advantage. It was at sixteen when Jacob began to frequent the richer bits of town, began to flirt with the meaty, sporty, credit card-endowed teenage boys with enough intrigue in Jacob's eyelashes and carefully cut lips to spoil him enough for a decent blowjob in return.
And it was just fun, really. Jacob enjoyed it, enjoyed the power he held over a bunch of cocky douchebags that couldn't quite break eye contact with him. Being from the "shady" side of town, the rich boys found him to be fascinating and dangerous and, in return, he found them to be financially beneficial, lavishing him with excellent hard liquor, gourmet meals at laughably pretentious restaurants, and arrays of presents that suddenly made life fun. So he got off with some pretty football captains and was sort of 'adopted' into the circle of good parties and good drugs and unattached sex.
Well. Mostly unattached.
It's no secret that Jacob had his fair share of cling-ons. Young, sweet boys with big eyes who fell just a little bit too hard after that orgasm; sexually repressed polo players who craved Jacob's attentions just a bit too much for his convenience; token bad boys who wrote awful pop-punk songs on cheap guitars because they wanted Jacob for themselves, wanted to ensnare a heart that isn't there, wanted to wreck the world with a partner in crime who, in the end, was only going to stab them in the back.
Really, it's all just humorous because Jacob doesn't like to share his glories and enjoys kinship even less. Thanks, but no thanks.
So he's probably damaged some feelings in his wake. Probably most definitely. He has absolutely deleted too many teary voicemails and unanswered texts with too many questions marks. He's stared unfeelingingly into enough desperate eyes that he's just come to sort of realise that he isn't a good person. He just isn't. He wasn't born with enough compassion or care or patience; instead he was laden with a minuscule, distant, barely decipherable conscious that weighed him down and made him angrier.
Instead, he embraces an aimless life with no grasp of the future or, hell, even the present. Because, at the end of the day, Jacob's just a jumbled mess of frustration and aimlessness, getting by from day to day and never thinking past that. So he makes a bit of extra money one night at the pub? Has some spare cash left over? He spends it on an elaborate breakfast the next morning, with maybe a bottle of champagne to chase it down, all the stops pulled, throwing his money away as quickly as it comes because if he's going to burn, he's going to burn bright.
Once, for a solid month, he lived in an abandoned garage by a junkyard because instead of spending his money on, say, renting an actual flat, he chose to buy either cigarettes, vodka, hair product, or copious amounts of weed. And this thing barely even had a roof, the tin rotted away in spots, providing a perfect entryway for stray, icy raindrops and small intruders. He slept on a shitty, stained mattress that was flattened and uneven and painful, a few springs busted through the thinned, off-coloured fabric. They used to jab into his tailbone and bruise him, sending little flicks of discomfort throughout his body during the day. But he chose it, he chose to stay in a hovel, sleeping top-to-tale with some meth addict he met at the pub. His name was Buzz and Jacob mocked him heavily for it (for obvious reasons, fuck) and he would always swear by the moonlight that snuck through their rotted roof, a bent wooden guitar perched atop his lap, that he was going to be the next "big thing" in music. He was going to change the world with his re-inspired poetry and endless melodies and sometimes Jacob would believe him, sucking on a cigarette as he stared at the stars that peaked through from above. He'd lie back on their cold, shitty floor that was half concrete, half dirt, and he'd gaze up through twisted, endless smoke and a haze that constantly seemed to blanket him, and he'd listen to Buzz's dreams, vaguely wondering if he had any of his own.
He doesn't, though. Jacob may be many things, may possess many thoughts, but he doesn't have dreams. He's not even sure what they really are, what that even means... he's not sure. It's sort of stupid and idealistic though, isn't it?
Yeah. Just a bit.
But he kept on living, feeling continuously frustrated and bitter and constantly annoyed and uninvested and there wasn't one fucking person in this shitty town that impressed him or truly sparked his interest—not even Buzz who, one day, decided to undergo a "spiritual reawakening" and moved across the country and sold all of his possessions. Though, Jacob was a little sad to see him go, if he's being honest.
So instead of a hovel with a meth head, he began hopping from mates' couches to mates' beds and back again, with little to nothing but the clothes on his well-toned back, thank you very much. He only had his music and Kurt Cobain's frustrated wails and playlists entitled "fuck off" and just stared at the same quote he etched into the chipped wooden tables at pubs and spray-painted on dirty alley walls—"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all." He'd fallen asleep in too many places listening to the same songs and hearing the same words in his head.
And then he met Timothee.
It's sort of a funny story. Timothee's the classic Golden Boy of the town, see. He's the one with the clean haircut and the too-white teeth and the parents that run the town with unyielding, hypocritical fists and he's got the most money and the best marks and the best abs and if he's not adored, he's feared.
Jacob hadn't known all about him when he'd first come into his pub, though. Jacob doesn't go to school anymore so the name 'Timothee Chalamet ' virtually meant nothing. He might've heard it said in passing before, but Timothee wasn't often a subject that was approached in detail when Jacob was fucking nameless boys' mouths in their pool houses.
So one fine night, Timothee happened into Jacob's shitty pub down the river. Now, rich boys never usually go there, so the minute him and his mates walked in, it was noticeable. It was a thing. They thought they were being all bad and cool, hanging about on the other side of town, the shitty side. And Jacob sort of laughed at them as he was wiping down the counter, casting them a few eyerolls and indifferent shrugs.
But Timothee's eyes latched onto Jacob and it didn't go unnoticed. He stayed at the counter, knocking back sub-par whiskey and thumping skinny hands on the worn, scratched wood as his mates thundered out laughter and slurs at the televisions tucked in the corners beneath the peeled, uneven ceiling. Timothee watched Jacob polish the cloudy pint glasses with an off-grey rag and Timothee watched Jacob stretch to the tips of his toes as he reached for top-shelf vodka.
The entire night, Timothee watched Jacob.
"The fuck you staring at?" Jacob had barked abruptly, straightening up from where he'd been bent over, rummaging beneath the bar for spare cocktail napkins. He said it harshly, his dry throat crackling the words, but his practiced lips were speckled in a smirk, and he enjoyed the flicker of emotions that danced across Timothee's eyes. Very green eyes. Jacob didn't know where they started or where they ended. If they ended, that is.
Timothee set down his glass, the ice tinkling a bit harshly, never breaking Jacob's gaze. His own smirk was quick to form.
"You," he said without a moment's hesitation.
It was enough to prickle Jacob's interest, and it was enough to send a wider smirk Timothee's way, before Jacob sauntered off, the distinct flutter of banknotes fluttering in his ears. Another night, another boy.
But, not long after, Timothee had disappeared in a flurry of noise and screams and sports jackets, surrounded by his peers. Only momentarily was Jacob deterred before shrugging and wiping down the rest of the bar. No major loss—just another rich boy. Not special, was he?
It was only after Jacob closed up shop, shuffling on his beer-splattered jacket, that he noticed the shaded figure waiting for him outside.
"Thought you left," Jacob breathed, sliding a cigarette out of the pack with practiced ease. The sky was bright, the moon full, and Jacob used the blades of blue light to his advantage as he sucked on the stick with hollowed cheeks, met the boy's eye beneath his lashes.
And it did the trick. Always does.
Timothee hadn't really said much of anything. Just twisted his face into a smirk/grimace sort of thing as he shuffled Jacob against the wall, immediately latched a hungry mouth to his neck. It was fucking incredible, Jacob remembers. It was incredible because there was no pretence of affection—only lust—and it was incredible because he smelt like old money and he smelt corrupt and it was every single thing Jacob needed in his lungs. So he grabbed back, pushed back, and dropped to his knees for Timothee fucking Chalamet, in the back alley of his pub.
It must've been good head because Timothee asked him his name afterwards.
"Bixenman," Jacob said through curls of smoke, lips still red, still wet, still smirking.
Timothee glinted his grin as he extended his hand, clutched tightly to Jacob's own. "Timothee," he said in response, and took Jacob's number. "I'll be in touch with you," he'd said as he'd begun walking away, leaving Jacob with his red mouth and an arched brow. "I get bored easily." He cast one last look over his shoulder, his grin devilish and raw. "And I think you might be the cure for that."
He said nothing else and Jacob merely laughed as he finished his cigarette.
It was just three days later when he heard from Timothee again. And from then on, they were...'partners in crime', so to speak. Nothing sexual arose between them, not after that first night. Of course, it was no secret that Jacob was up for it (pardon the pun) but Timothee merely smirked whenever Jacob would advance, would hold up a steady hand as he held that same glint in his eye. "Not today," he'd purr, before taking Jacob's hand and dragging him along. "I have a game I want to play," he would say, and that's how it all began.
Timothee was bored? He'd set Jacob on an unsuspecting soul. Timothee was mad? He'd set Jacob to avenge him. Simple, simple, simple. And if there was some thin thread of actual friendship between them beneath the tarnished, sordid bits, then it was one formed through dissatisfaction, boredom, and a sort of loneliness that would never be confessed. It was two bad people finding solace in each other's fate and it was how the world worked.
It's still how the world works.
And so now Timothee's got him on this new mission—Mission Troye Sivan—and Jacob has been watching him for four days.
He's been watching the quiet boy with fluffy blonde curls and muted blue eyes and skin that almost glows translucent in the day. He's been watching the slump of his shoulders and the way his jumpers bunch at his wrists and the way his gaze rarely ever lifts from the pavement with each step. He watches the boy's sunny smile when he greets passerby who greet him first—a smile that the boy seems to flash more on instinct than anything, almost as if he smiles before he realises it or even thinks it through.
He's watching Troye Sivan right now as he walks, foot after foot, eyes on the pavement, towards the library and Jacob is very sure that this boy is one of those who merely exists.
Boring. He's a very boring type. Should be no problem at all. New in town or not.
Perhaps this'll even be Jacob's fastest achievement yet—even faster than the boy who tattooed Jacob's name into his wrist after one week of stolen whispers in the park. What was his name? Brad? Something along the lines of that.
Yes, this boy should be easy as pie.
So with that thought, Jacob stubs out his cigarette and pushes himself off of the wall before making his way towards the library, seeking the boy who merely exists and very secretly wishing he himself felt more alive.