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tyleryourethinkingofvampires · 1 month ago

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wrote a scene from @ikeanestinginstinct's excellent reverse fight club au bc i got inspired by this post!

Scopaesthesia, the ability to tell when someone is looking at you through some kind of extrasensory perception, is provably pseudoscientific.

The phenomenon is a cocktail of the subconscious processing of peripheral vision, a few poorly designed pop psych experiments, salt the rim with confirmation bias for texture. That nervous prickle on the back of your neck was because you saw someone looking at you, and reacted accordingly. It was just easier to recognise the reaction than the fact that you saw them.

Tyler isn’t going to tell a doctor that he wakes up to find someone looking at him disproportionately often. To a statistically significant degree, even. This is because he already knows the response he’ll get—Tyler, you wake up to people staring at you because you fall asleep on the subway. In stairwells. Cafe bathrooms and the steps outside churches.

He knows it’s not that, he knows that he wakes up specifically because someone’s been staring at him, even though he would not be able to see them to know this. He knows it’s impossible, and he doesn’t care. He can hear the tired just let go of it and stop confirming your own suspicions, but whoever would be telling him that isn’t the one who has to make all the eye contact.

So he doesn’t tell them shit, and at a certain point, if it works it works. When he opens his eyes there’s a coin flip; fifty percent chance it’s nothing, fifty percent chance someone’s been staring at him a little too long, and whatever lame fucking version of a third eye that’s watching over him while he’s passed out has decided he ought to do something about it.

Usually he catches the tail ends of stares when he blinks awake, flashes of startled and guilty expressions that quickly flick away to something undeniably less interesting. He can see in their eyes when they remember he isn't a portrait, he won’t always be still as a painting and completely oblivious to his surroundings. Even if no one’s looking at him directly, he can usually figure out who just was, if they’re staring above his head or past his shoulder—a gaze forced to scramble to the nearest hiding place.

When he wakes up on a crusty subway seat going god-knows-where on god-knows-what-day, though, he doesn’t immediately catch anyone looking at him. He doesn’t think anything of it. Like he said, it’s a coin flip. Heads, someone’s eyes are lingering, it clatters over to tails and he woke up for no reason in particular.

The fluorescent lights sting harshly in his eyes, the plastic outer rim of the seat buzzes and rattles incessantly where he’d tipped his head back against it, and now his teeth feel fuzzy. He scrubs the back of his knuckles against his face and hisses as pain flares across his hand, like a fat drop of hot oil dripped right onto his skin—when he pulls his fingers away he sees that there’s a raw, pink little soap bubble of a burn developing on his skin. It’s ringed in a light smear of gray, ash gathered in a silty halo around it. He’s got no clue how it got there.

He glances up from the cigarette burn, blinking blearily. Heads.

The man standing directly over him, barely a foot away with one elbow looped around the silver stanchion post, is wearing dark sunglasses. He’s dressed up nicely in a suit and tie that almost hides how scrawny he is, and he absolutely oozes that dull, gold-watch-black-tie kind of elegance that makes Tyler feel just a little bit grimier to be near him.

In the hand he has draped around the pole he’s holding a cigarette, carried carefully in the crook between his first two fingers. He isn’t smoking it, though—he’s not even paying attention to it. Past the dark lenses of his glasses, Tyler can see that the man is staring directly at him.

Tyler stares back, the burn on the back of his hand momentarily forgotten in favor of wondering how long he can get this guy to stare at him without either of them saying anything. It’s a good few seconds—he forgets to count—and then the man is ducking his head just slightly so he can take off his glasses with his free hand, pressing one temple down into place with his thumb and closing the other against the waist of his neatly ironed, silt-gray suit. His eyes don’t leave Tyler’s face.

“What,” Tyler says.

“Hm?” the man responds, with the tone of someone just now looking over, needing to pull their attention from something else to notice he’s there. The man’s eyes don’t move. His face is just a little bit sunken, like his default expression is somewhere between faintly scowling and a dull, bored glare.

Tyler shrugs expectantly, voice almost instinctively slipping into the tone best used for starting fights. “What? What do you want?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

After another long pause of watching the man’s unmoving, unimpressed expression, Tyler lets out a long, slow breath through his teeth. He grimaces and sits up to search for his cigarettes, but his pockets aren’t where he remembers them. He doesn’t remember getting dressed this morning, let alone what he was wearing, so he fumbles at his clothes for a good few seconds before the man speaks up again.

“Oh–” he says, straightening. “Do you want this back?”

He lifts his cigarette, and Tyler sees that it’s not only extinguished but half-smoked, the edge already ashy and peeling. He runs his tongue along the gap between his fuzzy bottom teeth and the inside of his lip, dragging it through the lingering taste of tobacco. All things considered, it probably is his.

Skeptically, Tyler glances at the other passengers in the subway car. There are only a handful of others, so it must be late. The stranger’s watch doesn’t have numbers on it.

“You fell asleep while smoking it.”

Tails, tails, tails. The exchange goes unobserved.

Tyler shrugs. He frequently smokes, he frequently falls asleep. There’s bound to be some overlap. “Sounds right.”

“I put it out for you.”

The back of his hand still fizzes with pain, and the stranger stares at him, at once perfectly polite and quietly daring him to ask. Briefly, he tries to picture the man leaning over to gingerly take the cigarette hanging from his lips, cradling Tyler's palm in his own before brutally crushing the flame straight into the skin on the back of his hand.

He decides not to ask.

“Cool,” Tyler says dryly, reaching out and flicking two fingers towards himself beckoningly. “Yeah, I’ll take that back.”

The man passes the cigarette over and Tyler rolls it over in his fingers to confirm that it feels like something he'd have been holding before falling asleep. It does. Sort of. Hard to tell, his fingers feel numb and the back of his hand is still faintly searing from the burn. He doesn’t bother to dig through unfamiliar pockets for his lighter again, so he nods to the stranger.

“You got a light?”

“I do.”

He reaches into the pocket of his clean, silt-fine suit, and then he— they have the same lighter.

They’re almost, if not exactly, identical, and it distracts Tyler for long enough that he doesn’t process the man sparking it for him, holding it up to the end of the shortened cigarette to light it for him.

With only a split second to decide whether he’s going to let this happen or react with a more reasonable ‘oh, fuck off, give me that–’, he instinctively cups his hand around the end of his cigarette to let him light it. The flame flares back to life in a little bloom of orange, like if the cheerful blossoming of a marigold tasted like acrid, burnt topsoil.

Tyler bumps the bottom of the lighter with his knuckle before the man can draw it away. “You borrow that, too?”

“This is mine.”

Tyler holds his gaze as the flame vanishes and the man tucks the lighter back into his pocket. On one hand, he doesn’t come off as the kind of guy who smokes. Doesn’t have the face for it. Even if he did, Tyler would expect something more sleek and silvery, fit for lighting cigars, as opposed to his corner-store zippo that crunches when you spark it. But to root through an unconscious stranger’s pockets and steal nothing but their shitty lighter is so senselessly, stupidly bold, that Tyler would almost respect it. Which is why he doubts it’s true.

“We got the same one, then.”

He’ll check his pockets when he gets home.

“Must have.”

He raises his eyebrows at the stranger, taking a long drag. In return the man tips his head to the side contemplatively, like he’s trying to figure out if he’s hung a painting on the wall straight.

“You know what line you’re on?”

“Nope,” Tyler says, popping the word against the cigarette on his lips.

After a brief, thoughtful pause, the man reaches into his suit and takes out a business card, holding it out to Tyler as if it’s some kind of answer. He offers it the same way he did the cigarette, resting it delicately between his index and middle finger.

Tyler doesn’t look down at what it says when he takes it. He watches the man briefly smooth out his lapel, unfold his glasses again, and put them back on.

“This is my stop.”

The man says it a moment before the train starts to perceptibly slow, impossibly timed. There’s no overheard announcement. There’s no digital display. Maybe he was counting the seconds since the last stop. Maybe he felt it on the back of his neck.

Tyler scoffs.

“Bye.”

The man says nothing, and disappears.

Tyler presses his eyes shut until he can feel the gritty ash and sleep dust in his eyelids, imagines each blink as the rough scrape of a flintwheel. The burn on the back of his hand throbs insistently.

He opens his eyes. His vision is grainy, and he swears exhaustedly under his breath as he looks back down at the card. The corners are so crisp, the kind of sharpness that tells just as much as the words themselves, which are ever so slightly inlaid on the matte paper. The type is not quite black, two or three shades darker than the silt of the stranger’s suit.

It’s for a modeling agency. Tyler stares at the phone number and address and is abruptly presented with the daunting task of figuring out if that was a job interview or the worst attempt at flirting he’s ever seen.

A flake of ash falls from the cigarette between his lips and settles in the crook of a capital J, a few specks of grey falling around it. He tips the card and shakes off the ash– it’s just a touch too coarse to look like silt, and they leave tiny wisps of marks behind that ghost around the name on the card.

Jack Moore.

#started writing this in first person then immediately backed down bc it was scaring me #3rd person limited plus free indirect discourse and a splash of second person is my wife #anyway this au is so cool and im gonna be thinking about it a lotttt #fight club #fight club fanfic #writers on tumblr

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