let them be buried (buried alive) in their suits, in their ties [closed]

[postictal]

It's Rosswood. It's always Rosswood.

The trees yawn ever skyward, jagged, sharp-toothed things with branches unguiculate, reaching toward him, past him, into him. The irregular chiaroscuro of the stretching branches turns them into knobbed, spiny things, like the bones of a joint laid bare, stripped of flesh, muscle and viscera peeled away. He can see his breath, frosted puffs of it leaching the warmth from his bones every time he exhales. The trees blot out the sky. The forest is black. Everything is black, cast in cold grayscale, with trunks painted ashen and leaves soaked in pitch.

This is where he belongs.

He can always feel it pressing over the posterior parts of his skull, clawing to be let out like the caged thing it is. He grits his teeth, as if that will hold it in while it tries to wrench its way out of an opened maw, scuttling free on spidery legs.

Spider.

Hey, that's a thought.

He's in a web. That makes sense. His life has been nothing but webs, puppet strings tangling him, tying him to the spindled thing that lurks in his head, in him. And that thing, always like a spider the way it reeled them all in, well, it just makes sense, doesn't it. He strains against the threads of the sprawling filigree, not silvery and dew-crested but inky, gelatinous and ectoplasmic, clinging to him, miring him, tethering him, holding him down. He tugs against the constraints, but it's nothing more than a cursory struggle. He's too goddamn tired for anything else.

He let Jay die. Let him slip away. Of course Tim's trapped. It makes perfect sense.

But then, Jay looked at him. He looked at him, not full of wild despair but dull acceptance and that, that, that had been the worst thing.

Tim clenches his jaw and pulls again. He pulls.

The webbing holding him down snaps free with the rending sound of tearing elastic. He's falling. He falls forever, until he hits the ground in a tumbling skid and lies there, panting, sucking in greedy gulps of breath despite the chill in his lungs and in his bones and worming into his heart, heartless little beast, little creature, little thing you are, he has to pick himself up and run because that's what he does, that's all he ever does is fucking run and never face anything.

Little. Fucking. Monster.

Comments

[deadeyedchild]

He's so fucking tired but he doesn't sleep anymore. No idea how long it's been. Drifting in and out, dropped into dreams and pulled out again, sometimes too fast to know where he is, sometimes only with faceless strangers. And at every in between he's floating, unmade, unraveled; and when he's not that, he's with the cats. Pawing and kneading at him and speaking sweetly into his head like this is all for his own good.

The familiarity of this dream is almost a relief. Almost.

He's suspended high off the ground in between two trees, inexplicable white birches like sharpened bones, not floating but caught, ensnared in something black and inky, tendrils wrapped around his arms, his legs, his chest, coiling up to his throat. When he tries to struggle it wraps tighter - it's not just a web, it's a living, or at least responsive, thing, clinging to him, punishing every movement with ever increasing tension. He lets out a strained gasp.

Whose dream is this? He doesn't dream himself, so who'd put him here?

Well, the answer is obvious.

"Tim," he whispers, and then he raises his voice, hoarse, cracked, desperate, projected into the darkness and the trees: "TIM!"

[postictal]

The yelp that cuts through the contours of the stunted landscape is part-relief, part-terror, shrieking over trees and the dead husks of leaves and the tall, dark thing that stalks him throughout everything.

Again. Again. Always again, it's always Jay, that thing knows exactly how to lure Tim out and it doesn't matter if he always recognizes the ploy for what it is, he always folds, he always springs after, he always has to save him because - why? Closure? Guilt? Self-flagellation? Instinct? Some chaotic, stubborn train of reasoning he can't or won't examine?

Does it even matter?

Tim sprints, feet spitting out detritus from the trampled undergrowth and crunching over leaves, over the distorted Roswood-esque topography, the looming silhouettes of bony tree trunks and the straggling, blackened cobwebs suspended between them.

And then he sees it.

Struggling, dark threads wound tight around him, crawling over him like something alive, something seeking to cocoon him, devour him, constrict around him until he's limp and skeletal and dangling and lifeless.

"Jay," Tim bellows back, the automatic call-and-response places like this always engineer, tailored just for him. "Hold on."

As opposed to what? Not holding on? Does he have a choice?

Tim starts climbing one of the bone-shard trees, hand over hand, the crinkled bark rough beneath his hands. He doesn't have a choice. They never do.

tw asphyxiation stuff

[deadeyedchild]

"Tim," he gasps again in something like relief when he sees him barreling out from the woods. He has no idea how much time has passed; he's been beginning to think he'd never see Tim again, that the Rift wouldn't let him, outside of that one disastrous weird fucking dream that had Tim grinning and bellowing like a totally different person.

But there he is. And he's climbing now. Like he thinks he can fix this.

"No," he protests, surprised and ragged. "No! Tim - don't-!" His words twist off into a strained, agonized hiss as the threads constrict around his chest, don't speak, little one, just let him come to you, to us. His breath comes in shallower but he can't surrender now.

"Tim, just listen to me!" he cries. "You're dreaming! Don't you remember?!"

He gasps and sucks in harsh, painful breaths as the webbing squeezes his throat.

[postictal]

Tim jars to a halt, hand poised over the next branch, regarding the figure with open uncertainty. He's dreaming, Jay says. Is he? Can he ever be sure?

He looks out over the malformed, spiky geography of the place, trees jutting to the invisible heavens, the air viscous and icy and deadly.

Yeah, this is his mind, isn't it? It would make sense. Rosswood rendered gray and lifeless but for the spider and the flies.

But then - there was something he had to remember -

Something important -

"Bee," Tim breathes, eyes widening. She said - people saw Jay and knew it was him, that he's not gone exactly, not fully, and he looks at the man grappling with his glutinous, vaguely organic restraints, and how does he know if this is really him.

He can't. He never could distinguish reality from his mind's grotesque parody of it.

Tim's jaw sets. He keeps climbing.

"I'm getting you out," he says firmly, eyes fixed on the blindingly pale bark underneath his fingers. "You don't belong here."

[deadeyedchild]

"I don't know if you can," Jay says between short breaths. "I'm - I'm still dead, just - the Rift is keeping me, I can't-" his inhales become even more strained as the tendrils continue to tug and tighten, like it can't decide whether to crush him or pull him apart, "-nnh - I can't choose where I go. I've been trying to reach you for-"

The web ripples beneath him, pulling taut at his arms and legs, forcing his back to arch, his head reeling back. He can't argue against Tim coming to get him, not when it hurts so much, not when he's sure it'll just rip him up if Tim doesn't reach him in time.

"Tim-" he whispers, the word slipping between dry lips, barely enough breath behind it to give it voice.

The web reacts again, nothing he can do will please it apparently; the threads stop pulling and instead wrap around him more completely, shifting his arms down to his sides, cocooning him in thick, oozing darkness, snaking up from his throat to circle around his eyes so he can't look to Tim for help, his mouth so he can't even scream.

tw: some body horror

[postictal]

"You're not," he snaps, and the higher he goes the more the tree lurches sickeningly, as if it's trying to shake him, shed him from its skin. He clings gamely on, locking eyes with Jay's horrified ones a minute before the filaments bind together into the murkiness that swarms over him, gluing shut his mouth and nose and flooding over his eyes.

"You're not dead." He surges forward, wrapping one hand around the viscid stuff that immediately flows over to encase his arm. "It's keeping you here."

The Rift or the thing or the Rift. Does it matter? Did it ever?

Fuck off and fuck you, Tim thinks at it viciously. He doesn't belong to you.

He hauls himself forward, up to his elbows in clinging, gluelike webbing as it crawls over him, fast and fluid and pulsating faintly, strands of plasmic material creeping for his chest, his shoulders, his face.

He wrenches one hand free with the greedy sucking sound of a ripping suction, stretches forward, grasping the viscous layers of the stuff as it seeps over to smother Jay, fingers digging into it, his teeth bared like a monster, and there's a sludgelike resistance but he wrests at it desperately and it -

And he -

And it tears.

tw: drowning

[deadeyedchild]

Jay gasps for air as the stuff is torn from his face, struggling anew with Tim here to help him, feeling the web's tautness slacken and break around him as it fails to adapt to both of them fighting it at once. He wriggles his shoulders free and finally gets an arm out, grabbing hold of Tim and using him for leverage. He grunts as he writhes inelegantly out, until he hears a satisfying snap - immediately the balance of weight shifts, there's no longer anything tethering him, and he tips forward into Tim, grabbing hold of him as if letting go would mean permanent separation, and they fall.

They land not on the forest floor but in seething water. Too startled to do anything but flail momentarily, Jay starts to sink, and as his hands reach up for Tim's he feels something wrap tight around his ankle and pull him down, drown him just below the surface. He panics and thrashes, trying to kick loose the unyielding hold. The dream, or the Rift - whatever - it must be trying to kill him here, trying to end the dream before he can tell Tim anything. His fingers breach the surface as he fights to move upward, but it's not enough.

ad nauseum

[postictal]

The bright crack of branches splintering beneath their combined weight is their only warning as the web's fiber's strain to contain them, plasticity stretching to its absolute limit before it splits unevenly across its own seam and falls away, limp, and they streak downwards in unison. He can feel Jay's hands grasping at him, those too-thin, sticklike fingers fisted into the material of his shirt with the desperate grip of the dying. Tim hangs doggedly onto him, even as the clinging tendrils snap away and the pair of them hit fluid below.

Tim's eyes shut against the wet slap of their bodies breaking water and they plunge beneath its roiling surface. Jay is torn from him, plummeting downwards even as his hands claw upwards in fervent search for Tim's. He squints through the turbid water, following the trail of silvery bubbles, until he glimpses the squirming shape lunge upward.

He snatches forward blindly, and catches Jay's wrist.

He pulls.

There's nothing to brace his feet against, and he plunges under.

No. No, he doesn't.

His free hand cleaves frantically through water, driving him upward, yanking fiercely at Jay's wrist.

Nope, he rails at the water, at whatever thing is holding Jay underneath, you're letting him go. You're letting him go now.

[deadeyedchild]

Jay hangs on hard to Tim's hand, still kicking and fighting wildly for freedom - if he doesn't get unhooked fast he's going to drag Tim down with him, and that'll be fucking that.

He doesn't know what triggers it, but suddenly the grip on his leg loosens and then lets go, the tension release launching him up through the water and allowing them both to float back to the surface.

He breaches coughing violently, and flounders toward the shore, reaching out to pull Tim along with him.

He drags himself out onto an incongruous shore, not the mossy wooded banks they were used to, but hard rock, like the ocean's edge. Doesn't matter where. It seems like there might be nothing here to latch onto him, at least for the moment, so he allows himself to just cough on his hands and knees, and then finally collapse into a shuddering pile of limbs.

"Fuck," he blurts.

[postictal]

Come on, come on.

And, abruptly, it does. The thing chaining Jay down releases him and they burst to the surface in a wet tangle. Tim's lungs heave, overworked, and he feels himself roll over something uneven and unyielding. He's not really that sure what the surface is, just that it exists in all its merciful solidity, so he can brace his palms against the furrowed exterior and breathe.

For a moment, there is nothing but the irregular cadence of their coughing as they frantically expunge the water from their lungs.

Tim tips his head back, gulping, shivering, the pale wrongness of the too-washed-out water and blank sky stinging his eyes.

"You're still here," he pants. Statement of the year. There's more in his throat than water. Some untold obstruction sticks there too, and he can't force the words past - not letting you go again.

He owes him. And he told him he'd never let this happen again. The least he can do, the very fucking least, is fix the damn mistake he made in the first place.

[deadeyedchild]

"Yeah," he gasps, blinking up at Tim. "Yeah, I'm still here."

He pulls himself upright, trembling a little, wraps his arms around his waterlogged self. "I've been showing up in people's dreams, like, at random," he says, trying to get his voice to stop shaking. "I was looking for you. How - how long has it even been?"

He's embarrassed to even look at Tim, much less reach out to him, which is what he wants to do, inanely. He misses people - misses Tim, weirdly, or maybe not weirdly at all.

[postictal]

"It's, uh." He has to suck in a breath, and another. And another. He coughs several more times to jar the fluid from his chest and rolls over from all fours to sit, semi-upright and breathless.

"I dunno." Avoiding each other's eyes, that's nice. Tim can't even ignore the shards of his own guilt carved into his throat as he looks out across the water, the boiling waves that are paradoxically too white and too dark.

Everything comes back to that color scheme, doesn't it, he thinks bitterly. It's just his life. His head. Well, that fits.

"I haven't been - sleep's been - I only just learned you were still here," he says, the excuses shriveling beneath his tongue. Yeah, plenty of explanations why he couldn't have checked on the guy, couldn't have confirmed whether his frankly freakish disappearance was as permanent as it seemed. Nothing in their lives is ever like it seems; haven't you learned that by now, Tim?

tw implied suicide ideation

[deadeyedchild]

Jay makes a small noncommittal sound and finally gives Tim a tentative glance. "The Rift is keeping me here," he says. "I mean, not here, but like - not dead, not alive, bullshit. When I'm not in someone's dreams or floating in fucking oblivion I'm with those cats. There's a bunch of them." He shudders slightly and pulls his arms even closer around himself. "They just keep... prodding at me and asking me questions... I'm just a thing to them. I don't know what they want."

Well, he can take a guess. Probably more or less the same things they were after when they cornered the two of them before.

"I guess it's... probably something to do with, uh." He shrugs warily. "You know. Everything that's... in my head. I don't know."

He stares out at the water, grim, feeling more exhausted than ever. "I just want to be gone for good," he admits in a quiet voice.

tw: depression and self-loathing

[postictal]

Tim's mouth twists downward with distaste. Those fucking things. What, and now they're crawling all over Jay in the fucking cosmos? Are dreams like these a relief for him in comparison to that?

He almost came to favor those moments of blacked-out unconsciousness, because at least then he wasn't aware of the profound pointlessness of his daily existence, because anything was better than looking at himself and hating what he saw -

"Yeah, well," Tim mutters, glaring down at the speckled gray rock face contiguous with the water. "That's not gonna happen. Not gonna let it."

Is it easier to say shit like that when Jay's not really here, when the fallout is still in question, when there's no guarantee either of them will escape this - but when was there ever a guarantee. This sort of thing hounds you. It dogs you, clinging to the underbelly of your life until it eats you alive. He'd know.

"There's gotta be a way to get you back," he says, mouth set in a firm, unwavering line. "You're not really gone."

[deadeyedchild]

Jay looks at him again, more of a real look than a glance this time, almost studying him.

"Tim," he says slowly, "it's not your fault. None of it - I mean, not what happened to me. I didn't have to watch those tapes. I didn't. You were right about - I shouldn't have put them on the fucking internet, I shouldn't have gone looking. I should have just... fucking trusted you. I got myself killed, Tim, not you."

He has no idea how helpful any of that is but it's something that seems like it needs to get said. He's been half-existing in metaspace for long enough now that certain thoughts have solidified. Maybe that, and this unreal landscape, makes them easier to voice.

"This isn't something you have to fix," he says. "You can just live your life, okay? It's - it's not here, it didn't follow us. I'm pretty sure, just based on what the cats are... I mean, it... it isn't keeping you tied down anymore, and neither am I. You can just let me go. It's okay."

Well, it is and it isn't. He's terrified, still, dreading going back to being indefinitely pinned under various paws, but maybe they'll get bored with him eventually. And seeing Tim now, somehow it's just so fucking apparent how torn up he is over this, how torn up he always was. And he doesn't want that. He wants to stop hurting and being afraid, but if only one of them can get that, maybe Tim has a better chance.

tw: more self-loathing

[postictal]

He pushes his hands through wet hair, swiping dark strands from his face as he stands. His muscles tremble with the strain of holding himself up. He doesn't care.

"You don't get it," he says flatly. "You think it would have mattered if you never went looking? Think it mattered for Seth or Sarah or Amy? It never matters."

He has no conception why this, of all things, is what's pissing him off so thoroughly. Why it makes him so angry to see Jay like this, wrung out and giving up and not fighting for answers like the tenacious little bastard he is. He doesn't give up. He keeps going, the dumb shit, and runs himself and everyone else into the fucking ground. The hell was done to him.

He wishes he'd kicked those fucking cats harder when he met them.

"You're coming back," he says, his tone fierce and his jaw set. "I'm the one who got you into this in the first place. It's me. It's what I am, I'm this - " His hand curls into a fist over his chest, shoulders hunching. "I'm fucking tainted, do you get that? I'm a virus. And you're just - I could have kept you out of it, the first time. I could have stopped it. I could have stopped Alex. I could have stopped this. I should have. And I'm going to."

[deadeyedchild]

"I know that's what you think," says Jay impatiently. Fuck this. He picks himself up to follow Tim, reaches out and grabs his shoulder. "It's too late for any of that, okay? You have to fucking let it go or it's gonna destroy you. Whether it was your fault, or mine, or Alex - or none of us, it doesn't matter anymore. This is all there is left. You and me, right here. And this? This has nothing to do with any of that shit. This is just some - totally different thing that decided it wanted to chew me up. I don't want that to happen to you. Fuck, you and Jessica made it, okay? That's - that's the best outcome we could have got. 'Cause you deserve better. You do."

He lets his hand slip down, looks away again, back at the water. Tired.

"You don't need me anymore," he says. "I'm just - I'm dead weight. I know it."

[postictal]

"You were the one who should have made it," Tim spits back, his hand dropping back to his side in the shape of a fist. "You wanted to help. You fucked it up, you kept fucking it up but - god damn it, Jay, I owe you."

He stabs a finger at the other man's chest, his expression hard.

"I owe you that, if nothing else, so you can shut up and let me get you out, whether you like it or not. You did the same for me. You got me outta there, outta that place, even when it would've been safer for everybody if you'd just let me rot there." There's no denying that. Who knows how many people he may have hurt, or killed -

Whatever. That's the furthest thing from relevant right now. He just needs to get Jay out. It's what he does, right? Risks himself, risks everything. Like Jay has any fucking room to talk.

[deadeyedchild]

Jay flinches subtly at the stab of Tim's finger, mostly a kneejerk reaction. He looks down at the ground, taking all of this in, knowing there's nothing he can say to combat it. It'll just be them arguing in circles over which of them is more worthless, and fuck that. He's had enough of it.

"Fine," he says. "Fine. Whatever you want." There's no bite to the words. He's simply out of energy to fight. He looks back up at Tim, hesitantly meeting his eyes. "How are you gonna do it?"

[postictal]

He turns away, scanning the bleached landscape, the water licking the edges of the formless stone. He looks back. Maybe Jay's cooperation is all he needs.

"I'm gonna wake up," he says slowly, decisive. Waking feels so easy, always has been. Always easier than falling asleep. "And you follow me. You follow me out. Okay?"

Maybe it's not that simple. It's not like Tim's qualified to know one kind of death from the other. But then, they never know anything. It's not their lives if they're not perpetually in the dark, left without light and without answers. They make their shit up as they go, and sometimes that's enough.

Sometimes.

[deadeyedchild]

Jay frowns, trying to come up with an argument against such a weird-sounding idea, but he finds he can't. Maybe that is enough. Maybe that's all it'll take. He's been floating around long enough that 'following' someone out of his dream seems... not as stupid as it would have, a while ago. However long it's been.

"Okay," he says slowly. "I'll try."

He stands there for a moment, still hugging himself against the dreamed up wind. "Hey, Tim, uh." He shifts his weight, looking at his feet. "Thanks."

[postictal]

Tim breathes in, sharp and clean. The air here isn't real, and water's always been an illusion. The ark was never real, not how they wanted it to be. Arks mean refuge, and the only refuge is death.

"Thank me when we get outta this," he says.

The sky blanches to engulf the water.

The surface beneath their feet is endless, and then it's nothing.

The brightness fades to night.

Tim's eyes open to the uniform darkness of his apartment ceiling.