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"You know, maybe hiding out there wasn't the smartest thing you ever did," Ryan said, taking off his shirt.
Joe noticed a few appreciative looks - or, all right, more than a few. He supposed he couldn't blame them and yet he did, for looking at what was his.
Of course, this did seem rather a day prone to the impossible becoming possible.
In that spirit: "I will allow that perhaps I did not investigate the situation quite as thoroughly as would have been advisable."
Ryan sniffed. "You think?"
Joe frowned. He rather felt that a bit of fellow feeling from Ryan wasn't so terribly much to ask for, under the circumstances. They were both in this together, after all.
"Korban is love," Courtney intoned. Clearly, Joe should have gutted her when he'd had the chance, instead of trying to play nice and putting her in the hole.
Joe had been in a hole of his own, after all: he knew better than anyone (except perhaps Ryan) that imprisoning someone was only ever a stopgap measure. A temporary reprieve. A pause in hostilities - not that he and Ryan were enemies, of course.
"Korban is love," the congregation chorused cheerily.
"Could still make a run for it, you know," Ryan said, apparently under the impression they weren't surrounded by a lot of people equipped with many pointy objects.
Alone, Joe might have given it a go. At least until he'd worked out a clean route of escape.
But leaving Ryan behind simply wasn't an option, and sacrificing himself so that Ryan could get away lacked a certain appeal as well.
Which left as his only option ... well.
"Maybe later," Joe said, in belated response to Ryan's suggestion. Meaning, of course, definitely later.
Ryan sniffed again. Maybe he was coming down with a cold. Given how little clothing he was wearing, that didn't seem especially unlikely - about on par with a bunch of hippie cultists somehow managing to force an FBI agent and a serial killer slash genius to star in some sort of weird sex ritual.
Granted, Joe supposed that in this particular instance, he prefered sex over violence. If he and Ryan had been forced to fight to the death or some such nonsense, things might have ended poorly. Someone might have gotten hurt. (Ryan. Ryan would have gotten hurt, and while Joe was certainly all in favor of Ryan suffering and being tormented and having an all around miserable time, he felt very strongly that these things should happen by Joe's design, at Joe's instigation and on Joe's time schedule.)
As things were, they'd simply ... skip ahead a little. Who needed dinner by candlelight when you had sociopathic cultists around?
"If you're not going to run, you may want to start stripping," Ryan said. "This crowd doesn't look too patient."
This crowd should have been my crowd, Joe thought. He still didn't know how Courtney had managed it. He supposed it didn't much matter: they had only ever been intended to be tools. Not like Ryan, who was so much more.
Ryan was right though: they did look impatient. Hungry. Eager for entertainment. Religious.
Joe sighed and pulled at his collar. "Fine."
"So how do you want to play this?" Ryan licked his lips.
Joe wondered if that was code for 'so who's going to be on top?' which actually wasn't something he was terribly concerned about. He'd leave his mark on Ryan either way.
"Why don't we just start with a kiss and then we'll see how it goes from there," he said, throwing a shoe at someone in the crowd (Anna? Annie? just Ann? something like that). It missed their face, which was a pity, but then, this did seem a night for disappointments.
Happily, having sex with Ryan in front of an eager audience should break that pattern.
And who knew, perhaps Ryan might be amenable to a bit of judicious murder, after, or at least amenable to looking the other way while Joe did what needed to be done in order to get them away from Courtney and her fellow lunatics.