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Ryan finds out that Shane is a big fat liar on a beautiful summer afternoon just after lockdown finally ends. He goes to Shane’s house, and in the heady euphoria of being able to do that he doesn’t call or knock. He has a key after all. So he just walks right in, floating high on a cloud of excitement just to be in a friend’s space after so long.
Shane is in the front room, wearing nothing but a mostly open bathrobe.
Shane has horns.
Shane has patches of shimmering, iridescent scales.
Shane has pitch black eyes.
“What the fuck,” says Ryan, frozen in the open doorway.
“You’re letting the A/C out,” says Shane. Well, Ryan had been feeling fear. He’d been feeling fear, and shock, and confusion, and that particular unmoored feeling you get when your worldview gets shifted just a little to the left. But at that, all those feelings pop like little emotional balloons.
Now Ryan is enraged.
“I’m letting-” He can’t even finish he’s so mad. He does step fully into the house though, if only so that he can slam the door behind him. “You fucking- You- You fuck! You’re- This whole time. This whole time! You’re a demon!”
“I am not a demon,” Shane insists. There, in his bathrobe, with his horns and scales and pitch black eyes, Shane insists that. “Or a cryptid.”
“What the fuck,” Ryan repeats. “What the fuck, Shane. You’re not a demon?” Ryan stomps across the room, into Shane’s space, so that he can poke and flick at the various hard evidence on display. “You have scales. And horns. And solid black eyes.”
“And a tail,” says Shane. The back of the bathrobe lifts when he raises the tail up behind his shoulder to show Ryan. It’s covered in the same shimmery scales that frame Shane’s face and spill over his collar bones and down his chest, and it has something sharp and hollow at the end. A fucking stinger.
“Shane!” Ryan shouts. His hands claw up in between them, in the instinct to strangle Shane. “You’re a fucking demon!”
“I’m not.” Shane shakes his head firmly. “I mean, we get called demons sometimes, but we’re not.” Ryan forces himself to take a deep breath. He counts to three in his head, and clenches his fists shut tight so that they can’t grab.
“Okay,” he says, even though this is so not fucking okay. “Okay, then what are you.”
“We haven’t been scientifically categorized," says Shane.
Ryan is furious. He’s apoplectic. He feels like he’s about to burst a blood vessel and die in Shane’s fucking demonic embrace out of pure unadulterated rage. He closes his eyes because he’s seeing red, which is making Shane look even more like a demon. Which is what he fucking is.
“Semantics,” he growls through clenched teeth. “You’ve been lying to me this whole time through semantics.”
“It’s not semantics!” Shane argues, sounding affronted. As if he has a spot to stand in here. “I didn’t lie at all. There’s no such thing as demons.”
Ryan reaches something like critical mass in terms of ire; he loses touch with his own brain. In the coming days and for the rest of his life, Ryan won’t remember what he was thinking or why he did what he does. He won’t remember opening his eyes and glaring at Shane so heatedly that Shane actually takes a step back. He won’t remember grabbing Shane by the fluffy lapels of his bathrobe and yanking him forward and down. He won’t remember which cuss words he was spitting under his breath that made Shane laugh.
But he will remember the kiss. He’ll remember the way Shane’s black eyes widened in surprise, and Shane’s tiny gasp against his lips. He’ll remember the taste of Shane’s chapstick, and of his mouth when he lets Ryan lick inside. He’ll remember the way Shane melts into his touch and kisses him back with an aching sentimentality, bittersweet and rich like baking chocolate. These details are burned into Ryan’s psyche like a brand.
“I can go change, if you want,” Shane offers quietly, once Ryan has let him up for air. Ryan’s brain hurts thinking about that, about Shane ‘changing’ his body like clothes. He shakes his head, just to clear it at first, and then in answer.
So Shane serves Ryan some of the late lunch he’d been about to make for himself when Ryan walked in, and when he hands over Ryan’s plate and their fingers brush Ryan can feel the ticklish scrape of brushing Shane’s scales back the wrong way. He tries to employ Shane’s fear trick and push off the existential crisis until a more convenient time.
They eat next to each other on the couch, Saturday cartoons on the TV for background noise, business as usual. Except for the fact that Shane’s horns make him almost another foot taller, and Ryan keeps catching glimpses of a truly terrifying set of teeth every time Shane takes a bite.
But it’s fine. Everything’s fine. Ryan is fine. Shane is his friend, or- Maybe Shane’s something different, now. Shane kissed him back. He kissed Ryan back like he really meant it. The point being, Ryan cares about Shane and more importantly he knows him. So yeah, Shane looks like he’s built to kill. But Ryan has always known that anyone could. Shane won’t. So it’s fine. Ryan can deal.
There’s a stretch of silence after they finish eating. Shane looks like he’s sweating something, which is crazy because Ryan can’t even imagine anything bigger than the horns and the scales and the tail that Shane could possibly be hiding. Ryan waits him out in curiosity. He breaks quick.
“Andrew is one of us too,” Shane blurts. And then, “Steven knows.”
Ryan is fucking- He can’t- This absolute motherfucker.
“I’m gonna fucking kill you,” he promises, flat affect.
Ryan doesn’t actually kill Shane, in the end, not literally.
The bathrobe meets a pretty gruesome fate, though.