bettle (bettle) wrote in solsticerp, @ 2010-03-18 20:16:00 |
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Entry tags: | june 20 2009, sam b, torin |
Saturday - Breach of Social Rules
Who: Torin and Sam
Where: the side of Foggy Branch Road, near the asylum
When: mid-day
It was an incredible day, which in Torin's experience meant that the weather was going to turn to shit in a matter of hours. That, of course, made no difference to him. He could easily find something to do indoors, and maybe all the nimrods who were going to Eldritch for Cian Andersen's party would drown. He'd be okay with that for most of them, although Taryn was going, and he wouldn't wish such a fate on her, of course. As soon as he'd gotten up at around ten and seen how gorgeous it was outside, he'd taken a quick shower and dressed in a casual-- for him-- outfit of a black tanktop and jeans. Oakley sunglasses over his eyes and a grab for his car keys later, he was ready to get out and just drive.
Sometimes, he enjoyed just putting the top down, revving up his sportscar and driving around the hilly roads of both his neighborhood off Cold Harbor Road and the winding curves of Foggy Branch. He didn't have to be headed anywhere in particular; the only goal was getting some sun and seeing how well his car could navigate the twists and turns. It was a calming ritual, and he'd decided he wasn't even going to answer his phone. Well... unless it was one of the Delaneys, and then he probably would. He'd been driving for about an hour by the time he headed up the desolate stretch of road that led to the asylum. The murders there and the escaped convicts were far from his mind, because he didn't really follow local news all that much. What did catch his attention as he rounded a curve, though, was the sight of a tall, punky-looking and familiar guy at the edge of the asylum grounds.
"Well, well, Sam Boesch," Torin murmured to himself before pulling his car to a stop, cutting the engine and staring at Sam over the tops of his sunglasses. His angelic blue eyes and little smirk didn't betray the way his insides twisted every time he set eyes on the kid. No, no, that could never be known. "Do you have friends here?" he inquired.
Sam was busy doing a special for his Youtube channel. Insane criminals escaping an insane asylum right in his neighborhood wasn't exactly something he was going to let slip away. It was an opportunity of a lifetime and when it came to documenting his life and his town Sam didn't stop at anything. He'd been at the library to try to find information on the two escapees but had no luck so far. What he could do for now was make shit up or get some footage and the latter was a better way to start.
He was filming the asylum when he heard Torin's voice and looked back curiously. He wasn't expecting anyone to be there, especially someone of the snobbier group of kids and Torin definitely fell into that category. He was friends with the Delaneys for one and that alone made him mock-worthy. The zippers and chains on his boots and leather pants clanked a bit when he turned to face Torin, not phased by the intended insult. "I wish I did, then maybe I'd get in to film there," he replied cheerfully, pointing the camera at Torin, leaving it running. "What brings Torin Spencer to the asylum at this hour? You here to make sure there's no evidence of your part in the great escape?"
Torin had very rarely actually talked to Sam, but he'd spent a lot of time surreptitiously watching him. He'd wondered if maybe being out of the country for as long as he had this last time would dim the completely unseemly fascination he had with the guy, but evidently it hadn't. As soon as he'd seen him with his freaking camera, here out in the middle of nowhere, he'd known he'd have to stop the car and say something. Torin had smoothly hoisted himself up onto the seatback and then swung his legs over the side of the car, sitting on the top of the drivers' side door. Fortunately, he hadn't gotten his foot hung and fell over into the grass at the side of the road; that would have been really suave. "I wasn't coming to the asylum," he said, as if Sam should have known that. "I have friends up the road." He gestured vaguely with one hand. He'd never, ever admit that he'd just been driving randomly and had stopped because he'd seen Sam. Why'd he have to be so freaking hot? Hopefully, the sunglasses he wore would disguise his expression, because it wasn't especially one he'd want to go up on YouTube.
Sunglasses or no, Sam was oblivious to Torin's view on him. He was hopeless at picking up on things like that from other people and while he considered himself good looking, he didn't actually count on people being attracted to him. Especially not someone outside the group of freaks and geeks. People like Torin and the Delaney girls were all about jocks or fashion victims and Sam was decidedly neither of those things as evident by the mismatch of fabric that had gone into his current tank-top. It looked like a minimalist quilt, if quilts came with a lot of hello kitty patches mixed with skulls and swear words.
What Torin said gave him quite a few ideas. Had his friends seen anything on the night of the escape? Had the police been over to talk to them? "How about you take off those shades and tell my audience how you feel about insane criminals roaming your home town," he suggested with a grin, idly poking at his bottom lip with his teeth. Torin was fortunately not one of those people he could expect physical retribution from and he was being civil for now, despite the Delaney bashing on Sam's Tube. Maybe he could get the guy talking - that would be pretty neat.
Torin didn't quite fit a hundred percent into any niche. He wasn't a jock, but he was too well-built and attractive to be a nerd even though his frequent reading of textbooks, biographies and et cetera could have put him in that slot. He was extremely intelligent but in many ways superficial. Also, he didn't care where or whether he fit, and most people did. At any rate, his crowd and Sam's crowd never meshed, and he was well-aware of Sam's lack of respect for the Delaneys. It was quite possible that another punker freak wouldn't be forgiven for that attitude, but he was willing to (silently) overlook that for Sam.
Why was what he didn't understand. Not like he was hard up or anything. It was just that Sam Boesch did something to him. Damned if he could explain it. He smiled lazily at Sam's request, not moving from his perch on the side of the car. "How about you take that camera and perform an anatomical impossibility?" he suggested, but his tone was more teasing than bitchy or serious. "I kid, I kid." He lifted one finger and slowly pushed the Oakleys up to nest in his sun-streaked chestnut hair, effectively pushing it back from his face and revealing intensely blue eyes. "I don't see much difference in the insane criminals and some of the other people who're already there," he shot back. Nothing like a good smartass answer, right?
His replies stole a few snickers from Sam, of which only the last was audible. Torin was so impossibly smug, it was amusing. He also had the sort of hair Sam wanted to 'boing'; pull on and see if it was as bouncy as it looked. "So you acknowledge that Darkwater is a crazy, crazy town to live in?" he asked, fishing for more chatter, not necessarily related to the asylum. He could always cut that out and use it in a different video if it became unrelated. The thing was that there were skeptics out there (majority of his commenters) who dismissed his videos as fiction in the vein of Cloverfield and Blair Witch Project, even called him a wannabe! It was always good to get more people chiming in on the oddity of where they lived.
It helped that Torin wasn't his friend. To Sam it was obvious to anyone with a brain that a guy like Torin would never chill with a guy like him or agree to talk rubbish in his videos. Not at their age anyway when everyone tried as hard as they could to fit into a neat little box, all the while calling themselves original.
Torin had never been on the other end of Sam's video camera before, and it was a little odd. There was a small part of him that was worried about what the guy might do with the footage he took, or if he might edit it to make Torin look like an idiot. That wasn't a thought that made him happy, but at the same time, it wasn't enough to make him drive off or insist that Sam shut the camera down. "Absolutely," he said, his tone wry and yet still fairly mellow. "For instance, there's a guy who runs around shooting video of people in their most awkward moments. Places where there might be a story or drama of some kind." He pushed off from the car and slid to the ground, then started walking toward Sam, curious as to whether he'd walk backward and trip over something or else stand in place while Torin loomed larger and larger in his lens.
Sam did the latter, standing his ground and smirking at Torin. When the other boy got too close, he did lean back a little to keep him in frame, but all in all it made a good shot. "Better a camera than a gun, right?" he teased, tilting his head while keeping the camera steady, eying Torin both on the small screen and beyond it. "Would you say that's the weirdest thing about Darkwater?" he asked, always fishing. It'd be disappointing if he didn't get Torin to say anything interesting, how often did he get the guy in front of his camera? Never before this, a pity he realized now since Torin was very photogenic.
They were about the same height, Torin realized when he was close enough. "I know better than to think you'd carry a gun," he scoffed, rolling his eyes a little. "You couldn't slap a skull and crossbones sticker on it." There was a difference in what he was doing here and the way he'd snarked at Ava, and it was all in his tone and his posture. There was an underlying amusement beneath his words, a faint smile curving up one side of his full mouth and a lack of defensiveness in the way he held himself. He wondered what exactly Sam's camera was picking up as it recorded his words and his expression. Hopefully it wouldn't be anything that would embarrass him, he thought. "You and your camera?" he asked, his eyebrows arching a little. "Almost but not quite. Did you see that hail the other day? There's the fucked up weather, there's the fact that we even have an insane asylum..." He shrugged, tempted almost beyond bearing to go over to that fence and bend it with his fingers. The fact that it was most likely electrified stopped him, as well as the fact that then Sam would know what he was. Not like it was a state secret, but still.
"I saw the hail," Sam said, widening his eyes in dramatization. "Middle of summer in Oregon, I'd like to see people explain that one." None of what Torin had to say about him bothered him, he'd heard far worse and taken a kick to the gut, a drink in the face and other more hurtful things in the past. Torin's words had a sense of playfulness to them that made them entirely too easy to shrug off as ... cute? "What about the people? Seen the weird shit that goes on in town?" he asked since weather was too easily explained with science mumbo jumbo that placated the mundanes. As for asylums, they had to be somewhere, did they not? That could be filed under geographical coincidence.
Nobody Torin typically interacted with would believe this. He wasn't being cutting, wasn't looking at Sam like he was something scraped off the bottom of his shoe... which would have been what Jess or Jordan or possibly even his sister would have expected if they'd been with him. He had the sudden urge to yank the sunglasses back down over his eyes, but he restrained himself, because they weren't really in bright sun right now, and Sam would wonder why. He crossed his arms, trying to make his expression a bit more guarded. Aloof. "What kind of weird shit are you talking about?' he asked, sounding as if he didn't care much. He wasn't about to be easy enough to start blurting things out even though he was in the presence of his secret obsession. Absolutely not.
"Supernatural," Sam said without hesitation and in a tone that suggested Torin was being obstinately daft. He noticed a small change in Torin's demeanor but couldn't put a finger on just what had changed exactly. "You know, ghosts, magic, shape shifting." Duh. Still his eyes lit up a little at the subject and he subtly zoomed in on Torin's face, just in case there was a little twitch of recognition - in case he denied it all. Sometimes people's faces spoke volumes more than their words did.
"Are you serious?" Torin said, and his face was probably a picture. It wasn't that he was discounting the rumors of supernatural activity in the area that floated around-- he did too much reading and had too much native intelligence for that-- but was Sam Boesch really asking him that on camera? "C'mon. Let me tell you a secret: the Winchester brothers and the True Blood vampires don't really exist." His crossed arms dropped, and his thumbs hooked into his beltloops. "Sorry to disillusion you." The words were right, but there was something in his expresson that hinted at more than he was actually saying. He just refused to talk about ghosts and ghouls and zombies or whatever and then find himself on YouTube with all of his friends thinking he was an idiot.
Sam pouted at him, keeping the camera steady but looking above it at Torin's face. "You mean I'll never get a blowjob from an angel?" he said mock-sullenly, then abruptly changed his tune. "You're no fun. You know this shit's out there. Maybe not like it is in crappy TV shows but you know it's real. Admit it." He was all smiles again, encouraging smile mostly. It'd just be so damn sweet to get someone else on camera saying these things and not always just Sam himself.
Sam? Was completely evil, Torin had decided. That decision was based upon that way-too-pretty pouting mouth and his random mention of blowjobs. There was no way he could know that Torin had entertained lascivious thoughts about him unless he was psychic. Could he be psychic? That would be a major disaster. He tried to drag his mind out of the gutter; sadly enough, despite the way he and Chrissy had torn into each other on Sunday and the completely awesome round of phone sex he'd had with Vicente a couple days ago, it still wouldn't take much to get him going. There were days when he couldn't quite decide if being male was a blessing or a curse. "I'm admitting nothing while that camera's on," he said, his blue gaze a touch darker. "Do you even know how to talk to people without it?"
Sam arched his brows at that, glancing at his camera with a non mocking pout this time. He did not want to turn it off and what did that say about him? "I know how to talk to people without it," he said a bit defensively. "I just sometimes choose not to." He sighed and lowered the damn thing, contemplating whether to really turn it off or not. He could maybe get audio alone, he thought and closed the viewscreen, lowering the camera as if it was off. "There," he sighed. "No more camera. Tell me what you know."
Torin's own eyebrows arched slightly. He got the feeling that he'd touched a nerve. Interesting. People ranked Sam out all over town for running around with that camera, taping anything and everything. Did that maybe bother the guy a little? Of course, many of the same people who slammed him were checking his YouTube account every day to see if he'd posted anything else. Torin would have been furious had he known that Sam was still taping audio, but then as much reading as he did on a consistent basis, he didn't have any info stored in his brain about how camcorders worked. He took a step closer, his gaze almost challenging. "Why?" he asked. If Sam could be demanding, so could he. Did he really want Torin to hash over the same rumors everyone in town talked about? He should make up some bullshit ghost story just to yank the guy's chain. Metaphorically, that was. God only knew Sam had enough chains dripping from his pants and his boots.
Sam's expression turned almost impish and he half-grinned while gnawing on the inside of his cheek. "First off, you said you wouldn't talk while the camera was on. The camera's off now so there's nothing stopping you from talking. Second-" Well damn. He had no idea what was second so he shrugged, grin widening. "Admit it, you want to talk to me. There's something on your chest that you're just dying to get off and you know nobody would believe me if I said you'd confided in me. Not without the camera." He almost gave Torin a victorious smile at the end of that because damn it was good. How could Torin not talk to him now? At least that was how Sam felt about it.
"Uh-uh, Boesch." Torin shook his head, his own expression smug with an underlying hint of something that could have been either frustration or annoyance. "You didn't answer my question." Sure, there were always rumors in a town like this. People who could raise the dead, spirits that walked in plain sight. Vampires, monsters, creatures that were part snake, part human. Torin considered most of it hoodoo used to scare people on Halloween. Most of it. "What difference does it make to you what I think about paranormal activity in Darkwater?" His eyes rolled slightly. "How come you're not at the graveyard getting video of shadows on tombstones?" He smiled, the expression carrying a hint of lazy mockery that was almost seductive. "Only thing on my chest? Is my shirt."
"Shadows on tombstones?" Sam said with a small frown. "You gotta give me more credit than that." He had a good point with his question though, what did Sam care what Torin thought? Unless he was filming. "Maybe you know something I don't, you're not someone I usually talk to," he fibbed, shrugging. Torin had a way with confusing him it seemed and he felt like he was forgetting something important, led astray from some important mission, removed from his original train of thought. "But maybe you're just one of the mundanes, huh?"
"I know a lot of things you don't," Torin sniffed, unable to keep his natural arrogance from bubbling to the surface. He pulled the sunglasses off his head and fiddled with them, needing something to occupy his hands. A lot of times he'd noticed that Sam's YouTubes involved local gossip; it was possible he just hadn't paid attention to any of the ones that were about other subjects. He scowled a little at Sam's last question. "What the hell's a mundane?" At first he'd thought the guy said muggle, which was some damned Harry Potter thing if he remembered correctly. He made his expression cool and lofty. "Your attitude certainly isn't making me feel like confiding in you," he said, finally folding the Oakleys and hooking them onto the neck of his tanktop.
"Like you have something to confide in me with," Sam shot back with a grin, baiting him gleefully. "A mundane's a person who doesn't see anything beyond the-" he waved around with his free hand. "Solid world, the- the world like people like to think of it. They don't believe in supernatural stuff because it's kept under wraps." He tilted his head, adding a cheeky, "And they dress in a boring way."
"You don't know what I've got," Torin said, too stubborn to buckle under. When Sam started baiting him about mundanes and supernatural stuff, he absolutely burned to let him know he didn't have nearly as much info as he thought. He could bend metal, and Jess and Jordan could light things on fire. But no, he might be attracted to Sam but that didn't mean he could trust him. If he didn't know about elementals, Torin wasn't going to be the one to tell him. He made a scornful huff of breath when Sam said that mundanes dressed boringly, thinking that the guy clearly hadn't seen him in some of his more eccentric outfits. Whatever. "I happen to know of a place where there's some very solid evidence of weird shit going on," he said, his gaze locked intently to Sam's. "I don't know if I wanna mention it, though."
"Tease," Sam murmured, a mix of indignation and amusement in his tone while his expression remained calm and perhaps a bit challenging. "You can't say stuff like that and then not say anything more. It's against the rules, don't you know?" Sam tended to go into bullshit land and he saw no reason not to do that just because he was talking to Torin and not Shoel or Dax, of course Torin might not get it and think even lower of him for it but Sam didn't really care.
Camera on or not, Torin didn't feel as if he could flirt like he might've with some people. It wasn't that he ever tried to hide being bisexual, but what would his friends think if Sam went around saying that Torin was hot for him or whatever? It was frustrating as hell. He was definitely a tease, but he clamped down tight on the snappy remarks that wanted to come out of his mouth once Sam accused him of that. "There are no rules," he said with a lazy shrug. "Unless it's something you pulled out your arse, and that doesn't count." He pondered over what he was willing to say, because he wasn't just making shit up. He and Chrissy had seen it with their very own eyes back last year, before he'd gone to Italy. "Let's just say it involves Stonehenge and leave it at that, what do you say?"
"Oh, there are rules," Sam told him, trying to be serious as he did but not really succeeding. "And if you break the rules. your face will melt and your hair will fall out. And then where will you be, without your good looks." He laughed, unable to help it. "The meltie man cometh and all that; you really shouldn't tease." He was beginning to feel like he really was just wasting film here, metaphorically speaking. Wasting batteries, something. Torin wasn't delivering at all and he couldn't even capture his face while he was at it.
"You're absolutely full of it," Torin told him, but he didn't sound quite as snotty as he ordinarily might, saying that. Why was he spending so much time on this, standing outside the electrified fence of Darkwater Institute, talking around things that went bump in the night with this dude? And just as importantly, wouldn't Sam start to wonder why he was? This was so fucked. "I always tease," he said, fingers hooked through his beltloops again. "You don't know me very well, or you'd know that." A remark that could be taken any number of ways. He generally wasn't stupid. Damn. Maybe it had been Sam joking around about his good looks that had loosened his tongue, even though he was probably just fucking around, anyway. Not that Torin lacked confidence, but it wasn't like he and Sam ran in the same circles or anything.
Sam studied his face for a few long moments, intently like he really was looking for something there. "Can't have been teasing about important things," he said at last. "Your face hasn't melted much." Of course he was full of shit, it was the only way to be unless he wanted a life void of fun. "You know what I think?" he added but didn't wait for Torin to dignify that with an answer. "I think you're full of it. You don't know anything." He grinned, snapping the camera open and pointing it at Torin again. "You're just coming up with excuses to talk to me because you don't really want to visit those friends of yours."
The way Sam stared at him disconcerted Torin a bit, although hopefully he wouldn't show it. It was almost like the guy was really seeing him, and he couldn't decide if that was a good thing or not. "Fuck you," he mumbled when Sam said his face hadn't melted much. He was starting to feel irritable about this whole thing, and when Sam jerked the camera up again and pointed it at Torin's face, he unclipped the sunglasses from his shirt and put them on again. "Whatever. What part of I don't want to talk to your fucking camera did you not understand?" Sam was deliberately being irritating, he thought, and he was only feeding into it by continuing to stand here and talk to him. Maybe that made him an idiot instead of Sam. "I know plenty. I know what I saw up there, anyway, but I'm not going to tell you because you'd never find it without me." He didn't answer Sam's last point because he wasn't about to admit that he hadn't really stopped on his way to visit friends because he didn't have any solid plans made to do that. No way.
Sam lowered the camera again. "You can't just say you know plenty and not back it up with some evidence," he said, getting a little bit frustrated as well. Torin kept indicating that he knew something and Sam had the distinct feeling that he wasn't just making it up to pull Sam's leg. That made it even more annoying if anything because he was getting more and more curious, damn it. "Why should I believe you know anything?" He closed the camera and stepped back, looking over at the asylum. That was what he'd come here for and now he was losing light. He frowned at the thought, brushing his hair from his eyes before looking at Torin again. "Anyway, stop jerking around. Either you know something, or you don't."
"Sure I can," Torin said, beginning to feel as if each of them was trying to out-stubborn the other. He thought that what he'd seen was both freaky and creepy, and Chrissy had, too... although he figured the blonde had already forgotten about it by now. She was hot, but not necessarily bright, really. He felt better when Sam shut the camera again, because he was getting really damned tired of that thing. He'd wanted to slap it from Sam's hand to make him stop, actually. "Tell you what, I'll show you," he said, making a split-second decision. "Not today, because I have things to do." Things he'd come up with after he left here. It didn't pay to be too easy. "Monday, maybe. On the condition that you keep that camera out of my face when we go."
Monday. Maybe. It sounded crappy in Sam's opinion since it meant he had to wait and by the end of that wait he might find out Torin was just fucking with him. He set his jaw stubbornly, narrowing his eyes and pursing his lips. "How do I know you're not just making shit up?" he asked then and by now he would turn off the camera if not for the fact Torin thought the damn thing was already off. This was the most pointless waste of digital space, ever. Of course he might be able to edit it in unflattering ways if it came to that, he'd just have to see if he'd have ample cause to do such a thing. Embarrass Torin? Why not? If Torin tried to set him up for a joke.
"Why would I bother to do that?" Torin wanted to know. He looked at Sam over the tops of his Oakleys again, his gaze as blue as lake water, cool and amused. "If I didn't know anything? I'd just say I didn't know anything and we could go on our merry ways." For the moment, at least, he felt like he had the upper hand, and that was what he'd wanted. Well... one thing he wanted that he could have, anyway. "Because God knows I'm not dying to spend time with you or anything." And the lightning from on high could strike him... now. "2 p.m. Monday, meet me at the high school and we'll drive up there."
The stubborn stance didn't leave Sam just yet, not while he studied Torin suspiciously but then, just like that, he shook it off and relaxed, a smile taking over. "Two, I'll hold you to that," he said cheerfully, glad they were actually getting somewhere. If Torin was playing him, he'd find some funny and embarrassing way to get him back. He had every intention of bringing a camera too, he'd just keep it in his bag to begin with.
Torin pushed the glasses higher on his face so he could watch the nuances of Sam's posture and expression without him realizing it. "You do that," he agreed, nodding once. He'd chosen two in the afternoon mainly because it had been later in the day when he and Chrissy'd been up there, and it had been fucking creepy. There were rumors that strange, mutated people lived somewhere back in those caves and hills, and Torin didn't believe that. Of course not. But he still didn't want to be up there when it got dark, necessarily. He turned and headed back for his car then, perching on the edge of it and sliding back into it the same way he'd gotten out, without even opening the door.
Sam watched him go, unable to keep from flicking the camera back open to record the rather snazzy exit. "Such a movie star," he muttered to himself, smirking as Torin started the engine. It wasn't quite the footage he'd come up there for but he liked it anyway. He finally turned it back to the asylum, trying to remember just what his train of thought had been before his unexpected encounter with Torin.