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Tyler did not like Christmas.
It's a consumerist creation designed to empty your wallets and fill up your homes, with a fat jolly bastard to sell it to you.
40% off TV'S, buy one get one free on every other thing in the store, so many discounts that you don't even notice you've bought enough things to spend more than you would have without a holiday deal.
New, shiny Christmas versions of things you already have.
A pack of pine tree patterned socks, holiday oven mitts, spatulas with little nutcrackers scattered across them, etc.
Tyler did not like Christmas.
But Jack,
Jack loved Christmas.
Tyler saw it in the way his eyes lit up when he looked out at the snow, bundled up in a hoodie to brace against the chill that brushed through the slowly collapsing walls of their house on Paper Street.
Tyler saw it in the child-like glee that radiated off of him in waves when they passed those stupid blow-up lawn decorations in someone else's yard.
Tyler saw it in the lazy grin Jack wore when he heard the melody of some Christmas tune floating down from the speakers of Lou's bar.
Jack had managed to kick his habit of ordering things out of furniture catalogs after Tyler blew up his condo, but he caught Jack browsing Christmas magazines anyway.
New ones too.
Jack only ever seemed to read the plethora of magazines the previous occupants had left behind. Reader's digest, People, MAD, The occasional Vogue.
But right around the time snow started falling, pristine magazines without rings from mugs of coffee or torn pages started appearing. Magazines with Christmas trees and gingerbread houses on the covers, gift catalogs filled with things he would never buy.
Jack read them all with a smile on his face.
And Tyler found himself not minding nearly as much as he would have expected.
Honestly, it's getting mildly disturbing how little it bothers him. At this rate Tyler is starting to think Jack could bring home a magazine with Martha fucking Stewart on the cover and he'd only be slightly disappointed.
He supposes he's officially a hypocrite.
But Jack is like a little kid who still thinks Santa is real, It feels wrong to shatter his illusion.
Although telling children Santa isn't real is also very enjoyable for him, so that comparison doesn't even make sense.
God, who is he becoming?
Whenever Tyler goes to criticize the holiday, whenever he thinks of a brilliant speech… he looks at Jack's face, painted with joy, and it suddenly becomes unappealing.
His lips seem to be split into a near constant grin, his eyes twinkle. They fucking twinkle. Tyler didn't know that was a thing somebody's eyes could do outside of Sunday morning cartoons, but that's the only word he can think of to describe the look of sheer happiness Jack sports these days.
Tyler doesn't know when other people's feelings started ruling over his actions.
Well, not other people.
Just Jack.
But he doesn't know when that happened, he could have sworn he was more headstrong than that.
This is how he finds himself waking up early on Christmas Eve and sneaking out of the noisy house to acquire various festive items. The snow crunches underneath his feet as he walks away from Paper house, and he thinks about how Jack would look up at the sky to watch the snow fall if he were walking beside him.
How the snowflakes would dust his clothes, make a home in his hair, occasionally land on his eyelashes.
How his cheeks would be colored rosy, the tips of his ears and his nose a matching shade.
Tyler sighs.
He hasn't been Christmas shopping since he was a child. By the time he was a teenager the distaste for society had already set in. He's breaking a streak of around 17 years of not participating in the holiday season, for some fucking guy he met on a plane.
He wonders briefly what Christmas was like when Jack was a child.
Tyler supposed this was what you might call a mid-life crisis.
(And if you told him that your thirties isn't ‘mid-life’ he'd laugh and tell you that if he's still alive by 70 he'd throw himself off a very, very tall building.)
But Tyler decides there's not very much time for him to get existential if he wants to surprise Jack. It's still dark outside but there's no telling how early Jack will decide to wake up. Like he said, a little kid.
Tyler takes the bus to a street with a rather large 24 hour general store, walking up to the doors and grabbing a shopping cart on his way inside. He silently vows to himself that despite giving in to celebrating the holiday, he will absolutely not fall victim to the rest of it.
He looks around at the mostly empty store, a few people scattered about descending on all of the decorations like vultures on a slaughtered deer. Cashiers with a look of exhaustion on their faces, Wives dragging their husbands along on invisible leashes.
All brain-dead and vicious, falling victim to the holiday season, lining the pockets of every department store with their feral desperation.
Slaves and consumers.
He sighs in disapproval, dread coiling in his gut as he brings his attention back to the task at hand.
He figures the tree is the most important part, and becomes briefly disgusted when he catches himself debating whether or not to get a real tree from outside, because that seems like the kind of thing Jack would like.
He gets a plastic one because it would be ridiculous to go through that amount of effort every year when he could just pull it out of a box.
He tries not to examine how easily he accepts that this probably isn't a one time thing.
Again, time constraints.
He pushes the cart along, head on a lazy swivel as he tries to come up with a list of things the average person would have for holiday decorations.
He laughs to himself at the idea that they could ever be average.
Tyler grabs a pack of pink ornaments off a shelf because he finds humor in the closeness of the color to that of the soap they make. He has a feeling Jack will catch on. He throws them carelessly into the cart.
Then he stops in front of a seemingly endless selection of string lights and gets incredibly overwhelmed by the miniscule differences in shape, color, and length, before selecting one at random.
As an after thought he grabs a second pack, just in case.
Quickly he runs out of ideas for things to get, which he supposes is actually a good thing, considering the whole consumerism aspect and Tyler's general unease surrounding what he's doing.
Which really just leaves the most difficult part.
The present.
Tyler sighs, thinking over various options and dismissing them just as quickly.
You know the saying ‘What do you get someone who has everything?’
Tyler is in a similar predicament.
What do you get someone who doesn't need anything?
He almost wishes he hadn't successfully converted Jack to a lifestyle of minimalism. Then he could just get an ikea end table and be done with it.
He considers getting Jack some kind of Christmas patterned tie, but that would interfere with Tyler's plot to get Jack to quit his job. (and possibly blow up the office building, but that's a conversation for later)
Tyler makes his way to the music aisle on a whim, passing a bunch of copy and paste pop records before stopping to scan through the selection. Tyler tries to recall all of the music he's seen Jack listen to: Pixies, Radiohead, The Smiths…
Tyler chuckles to himself, remembering an occasion where he had found a box of Jack's cassettes.
—----------------------------------------
His fingers skim over thin plastic cases, tracing the words like someone blind might trace braille.
“The Bends, Doolittle, Hatful of hollow, self-titled- Man you got a lot of tapes huh, Ikea-boy?”
Jack just stiffens, snatching the box away from him and mumbling something about ‘snooping’
Tyler laughs. As if they have any privacy left between them at this point.They sit together in the bathroom while one of them bathes, he's helped Jack change his clothes when he's too disoriented from fight club to muster any hand-eye coordination, hell, Tyler's told him about all the fucked up shit Marla's said while they screwed.
But looking through his music, that's a step too far.
He watches Jack walk away, a red flush creeping up the back of his neck.
Strange.
Later that day, Tyler will listen to one of Jack's tapes as he works his waiter job. The self-titled The Smiths cassette he had failed to notice Tyler slipping into the pocket of his jacket before the box was taken from him.
He'll listen to it absentmindedly, until a particular song comes on, and Tyler will feel with a strange sense of certainty that this must be why Jack had reacted so oddly.
He won't have any reason for thinking as such, but he'll believe it so strongly that he’ll rewind the song over and over again. And the tape will not make it back to the box as he had planned.
No, instead, the cassette will remain in his walkman for days, and he will listen to it whenever he has a moment alone.
He will listen to it while he makes the soap, he will listen to it while he splices film together, he will listen to it alone in his room.
And when Jack needs the walkman, Tyler will hide the tape in the space between his mattress and the wall.
He will listen to it when he can't sleep, he will listen to it while he drives, he will listen to it on the few days where Jack doesn't attend Fight Club, and he walks home alone.
He will listen to it so often that he memorizes the lyrics.
‘...a jumped-up pantry boy, who never knew his place..’
‘...He said, Return the ring. He knows so much about these things…’
‘...He knows so much about these things…’
‘...I would go out tonight, but I haven't got a stitch to wear…’
‘...This man said, It's gruesome that someone so handsome should care…’
This will be just one out of tens of tapes, just one song out of an entire album.
But he will know, somehow, exactly what Jack thinks about when he listens to it.
It will feel like an invasion, and yet Tyler will keep listening.
He will think about their conversation in the bar.
“The things you own….end up owning you…”
He will think about the car ride where he confessed to blowing up Jack's apartment.
"Stop trying to control everything and Just. Let. Go.”
He will think about all of the ways he has sculpted Jack into something better over the past few months or so, and then he'll start the song again.
‘...Punctured bicycle, on a hillside desolate...’
‘...Will nature make a man of me yet..?’
‘...When in this charming car, this charming man…’
—----------------------------------------
Tyler blinks, realizing he's been standing there staring at a row of cassettes for upwards of five minutes.
He scoffs at himself, grabbing two tapes he's pretty certain Jack doesn't have. (Louder than Bombs and Trompe le Monde respectively) And after a moment of hesitation, he'll grab another of The Smiths debut album, because he still hasn't returned the one he stole, and probably never will.
He looks back at the frost covered glass doors of the store, and sees the sun has started to rise.
“That's my cue...”
Tyler smiles to himself as he wanders through the store, eventually finding what he was looking for.
A big box of firecrackers.
He tears open a box in the middle of the store, producing a lighter from his pocket, and lights them all at once, throwing them a few aisles away.
He could have taken the time to run around the store and get the things for some napalm, but time is of the essence, and as much as he doesn't want to admit it, he quite likes this store. And the time it would take to repair damage from an actual bomb would be inconvenient to him.
Not that he's ever actually bought a single thing from here.
The firecrackers go off, setting a stack of ugly Christmas rugs ablaze, a loud popping sound echoing off the shelves, sending scattered screams through the building. Tyler uses the distraction to wheel his shopping cart right out the front door, unnoticed in the chaos.
He chuckles to himself, a large, wicked grin plastered across his face as he approaches some poor bastard’s car, smashing the window with his elbow and sweeping the glass off the driver's seat. He gets to work on hot-wiring the car with a pocket knife and some patience.
It takes a few tries, but eventually the engine roars to life and Tyler smiles triumphantly, emptying the cart into the backseat and peeling out of the driveway.
The clock on the dashboard reads 5:23 am
And Tyler's pretty confident he'll be able to set everything up before Jack comes prancing down the stairs to see if Santa visited.
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Jack wakes to the sound of a crash downstairs, followed by a quiet “Fuck!” from Tyler. He smiles fondly, shaking his head and sitting up.
He pulls his blanket up around his shoulders, shivering slightly. Outside his cracked window, snow emerges from the sky, pouring down the glass in slow-motion.
The sunlight catches on the ice crystals, making the snowflakes glow angelically. He almost wants to sit there and watch it fall indefinitely, but he has to see what Tyler is getting up to so noisily.
Jack sighs, his breath fogging in front of him, and pushes his feet into a pair of ratty grey slippers, trading his blanket for a thick hoodie with worn out cuffs. Sluggishly he trudges out of his room, and pauses at the top of the staircase.
There's lights wrapped around the railing.
Pretty red and green bulbs spiraling down the stairs messily. He trails his fingers along the cord, snapped out of his trance by another expletive mumbled by Tyler.
I am Jack's unexpected feeling of nostalgia.
He makes his way down the stairs, a hesitant hopeful feeling blooming in his chest.
“Tyler..?”
He calls out as he reaches the living room. And as he rounds the corner, he sees Tyler wrestling with a Christmas tree.
Supposedly the source of the crash.
He freezes in place, utterly shocked.
His face is bathed in colorful light, painting his features beautifully. His blonde hair glowing with the same red and green from the stairs.
He looks-
Well, he looks like an angel.
“Uh- Surprise!”
Tyler manages to get the tree upright in the corner of the living room, ornaments scattered on the floor beside him.
Jack beams, his hands curling and uncurling in his pockets.
“Tyler- this is… I mean- I thought you hated Christmas..?”
He's practically vibrating out of his skin, a grin etched into his lips, making his cheeks ache.
“Yeah well…thought I'd try something new I guess.”
Tyler is always going on about how 90% of the things people own are unnecessary, how holidays are manufactured things made solely to get you to spend and keep spending.
Although, now that he thinks about it, Tyler hasn't given the latter of those speeches in…. a while.
‘Something new’? Yeah right.
“I- Thank you..”
And Tyler just stares at him for a moment, His eyes boring into his face until Jack looks away, avoiding his gaze.
“Yeah, whatever… help me with these ornaments Psycho-boy.”
Jack wrestles his smile under control and picks up a pink bulb-shaped ornament, wondering why it looks so familiar.
After a moment he laughs, the sound echoing through the house warmly. Tyler looks up from where he's sitting on the floor in front of the tree with an eyebrow raised.
“You- Tyler, are these soap colored?”
The man in question breaks into a mischievous grin and watches, pleased, as Jack doubles over, gripping his stomach and trying to reel in his laughter.
It works for a moment until Jack is struck with the visual of a garland strung with bars of soap instead of popcorn and cranberries.
Tyler just rolls his eyes, returning to his task.
“It's not that funny Jack..”
Tyler chastises. But he begins to laugh along, a feral sounding hyena-like giggle bubbling up from his chest.
It takes them an hour to decorate the tree. When they're done, Jack drags Tyler outside for a snowball fight.
—--------------------------------------------------
December 25th, Christmas morning
Jack wakes slowly with a smile on his face, dreams of Tyler running around in the snow fading behind the backs of his eyelids. He gets out of bed with a stretch, lifting his mattress and retrieving something small and silky, slipping it into his pocket.
He pushes his creaky door open, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
He actually slept a full 8 hours, insomnia nowhere to be found.
That's been happening lately, although it's usually after a particularly exhausting fight, or a crying session with Bob.
But more and more often it's just been a result of Tyler's general presence.
He tries not to think about why that is.
Jack walks down the stairs with a bounce in his step, barely noticing the chill in the air.
And on the couch sits Tyler, a small box in his hands wrapped with newspaper. He looks up as Jack draws closer, a grin on his face as he runs his fingers across the object absentmindedly.
I am Jack's rushing blood.
“You got me a present?”
You can hear the grin in his voice as he speaks.
Tyler waves his hand dismissively
“I stole it, don't get too excited.”
He fails to follow that command pretty much immediately.
Suddenly he's reminded of the words of the doorman at his old apartment complex.
“Young people, they think they want the whole world. If you don't know what you want, you end up with a lot you don't.”
Looking at Tyler, pink bathrobe pulled around him, light from the tree casting an ethereal glow upon his sitting form, a small smile on his face and a Christmas present for Jack in his hands, he's startlingly aware of what it is he wants.
Aware with a certainty he's only felt a handful of times.
He sits next to Tyler on the couch, under the roof of their home. The home that Tyler blew up his apartment to get him in. And in a strange way he feels grateful.
Maybe he should be concerned with how much he doesn't seem to care that Tyler followed him home in a stolen car and planted a bomb in his house.
But instead he feels….. almost flattered.
Yeah, he's pretty sure he actually is a psychopath. Tyler was onto something.
But that doesn't make the feeling dissipate. Tyler saw something in him, and in his own strange, fucked up way, set the pieces in motion for Jack to move in, liberating him of all his worldly possessions, bringing them together.
And now, he's gone out of his way to decorate their home for a holiday he swears is a scam.
He hasn't said it, but Jack knows why he did it. Only one of them likes Christmas.
It's a gift.
He knows this because Tyler knows this.
Jack reaches in his pocket, fingers wrapping around the present he got on impulse at the beginning of the month. He hadn't even planned to actually give it to Tyler until yesterday.
He takes the box from Tyler's hands, gripping his wrist lightly and setting his unwrapped present in Tyler's now empty hand.
It's a bowtie, adorned with candy cane stripes across the surface of the fabric.
Tyler runs his thumb over the material, looking at Jack with an expression he can't quite seem to place.
“When did you get this, Jack?”
He flushes and flicks his eyes away to the tree in the corner, Tyler's eyes too exposing, too easily stripping away his defenses, peering into his thoughts.
“Oh, you know… Just the first week of the month..”
It feels like a vulnerable admission.
‘Yes Tyler, I think about you constantly. Yes Tyler, I got you a present that I wasn't even going to give you.’
He's still looking at Jack, and he feels his face turning more and more red by the minute.
“Open yours.” Tyler taps his wrist lightly, his fingers trailing up Jack's arm and coming to rest near the crook of his elbow.
Willing his hands not to shake, he tears at the newspaper, (which upon closer inspection, Is a Project Mayhem headline, one they did together without any of the space monkeys.) sending three rectangular items falling into his lap.
He picks them up, turning them over in his fingers. Jack feels an emotion he doesn't dare name rise in his throat, and tries not to choke on it.
He raises one of the cassettes to Tyler's eye-line. ‘The Smiths’ In simple white lettering on the bottom half of the cover.
“How’d you know I lost mine?”
Tyler shrugs, smiling at him.
And Jack has a feeling that he's lying.
He finds that he really doesn't care.
Tyler stands, ruffling his hair, mumbling that he'll ‘be right back’ and disappearing up the stairs.
Jack looks at the tapes in his lap, and is overcome with feeling when he realizes just how much attention Tyler pays to him.
He managed to get two cassettes that Jack doesn't own, and a very suspicious replacement for one he lost a few months ago.
Either Tyler looked through all of his tapes while he wasn't paying attention, or he just remembered which ones Jack had.
He's not sure which option he likes more.
Then, he cracks open the case for the debut album, and on the track list, circled in red marker is ‘This Charming man'
He definitely knows Tyler was lying.
He opens the other two, and it becomes very clear that Tyler has listened to them before he wrapped them.
Jack is very glad that he knows the songs on these albums, because one is circled on each.
‘Head on’ on Tromp le Monde and ‘Ask’ on Louder than bombs.
The second one stops him in his tracks, and with shaky hands he picks up their shared walkman from the table beside the couch, (conveniently placed, mind you) loading the cassette in and skipping to the song.
Maybe he just…misremembered the lyrics.
‘...Shyness is nice and shyness can stop you..’
‘...From doing all the things in life you'd like to…’
Jack swallows.
Of course not.
‘...So, if there's something you'd like to try, If there's something you'd like to try…’
‘...Ask me, I won't say no, how could I..?’
He sits in disbelief for around a minute straight. The words echoing through his brain, etching themselves on every corner of his mind in bright red marker.
And then the world stops spinning. Metaphorical oxygen masks fall from the ceiling and Jack is knocked off balance by the turbulence.
‘...Because if it's not love…’
‘...Then it's the bomb, the bomb, the bomb…’
‘...The bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb…’
‘...That will bring us together…’
I am Jack's stunned disbelief.
He sits there, shell-shocked, his heart beating out of his chest, almost drowning out the music.
Not only has Tyler gotten him a Christmas gift and decorated their house, but he has also taken the time to listen to the tapes, and pick out a song from each for Jack to pay extra attention to.
A love song.
He must have been transported to another dimension.
He's so distracted by the lyrics, that he doesn't even notice when Tyler comes back down the stairs until he's standing right in front of Jack.
Wearing his waiter uniform with the bowtie dangling undone under the collar.
Tyler drags him to his feet, and Jack slips the walkman into his pocket before starting to tie the bowtie. His fingers tremble against the fabric, and Tyler grins at him.
If you asked Jack, he would vehemently deny that this is exactly why he got a bowtie for Tyler, of all things.
But it is.
They're standing so close together that Jack can see each individual scar on his face. Scattered across his cheekbones, splitting through his eyebrow, dancing across his crooked nose.
A few of them are his own doing. Evidence that he laid his hands on Tyler's face. Perfectly handsome and an angel in his everything-blond way.
Jack straightens the bowtie, running his palms down the lapels of the suit jacket.
“Merry Christmas, Psycho-boy.”
And like a thread pulled too tight, his resolve snaps and Jack drags him down into a kiss, his hands fisted in Tyler's uniform, wrinkling the fabric.
Tyler smiles against his mouth, his hands coming up to cup Jack's jaw, fingers tangling into the hair at the nape of his neck.
“Took you long enough.”
Jack breaks away, laughing and swats at Tyler's chest.
“You fucking asshole..”
Tyler laughs at him, mixing beautifully with the instrumentals of the song still playing through his headphones.
'...Nature is a language, can't you read..?'
'...So ask me, ask me, ask me...'