Sweeter than the First Time [Open to All]

[applesaucemod]

Hello, dreamers of Manhattan. The Rift knows that things have been kind of rough, lately. The last dream didn't go as well as it had hoped. Consider this an apology of sorts, and a hearkening back to the good times you've shared.

It's a grand old (and potentially familiar) cabin house that the dreamers will find themselves wandering. The furniture is plentiful and comfortable, the floors are strewn with cushions and blankets, and there are cheerful fires burning in the grates. It seems a little odd that the house still manages to be on the chilly side despite looking so warm, yet it is.

Oh, well. You'll just have to find another dreamer or two and spoon up and fall asleep like little baby cats get cozy. It shouldn't be difficult; most of the dreamers (excepting those with strong telepathic defenses or deeply ingrained cuddle-averse personalities) will find themselves feeling friendlier than usual, along with an almost overwhelming desire to snuggle up to someone. How convenient that the house seems designed for that very purpose!

And if some of the cushions are Hello Kitty themed, well, that's just coincidence.


[OOC: Standard dream party rules apply. Characters will be affected by the dream-whammy to whatever degree makes the most sense for them, and will remember or forget the events of the dream at the player's discretion. Backtag into infinity.]

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[deadeyedchild]

Jay stays put, watches Tim pace and feels to blame for it somehow, which he supposes he is, just like he was to blame for everything - he was getting better before and who knows what he just stumbled into, maybe he was getting better again. He doesn't like what Tim is saying, or isn't saying, talking around. It makes his skin crawl.

"I, uh..." His eyes slit, sifting through the jumble of memories, always jaggedly put together, a messy clipshow. "I went - I followed you? We went to Alex's old school, right? You went." He followed. Stalked.

"Alex was there?" he says abruptly. It's a question, but he's pretty sure he's right. "Alex was-"

He doesn't like this. He covers his face with his hands and tries to pull himself together but ends up just sinking down into the chair, the nest of blankets Tim has abandoned.

"Tim, what happened to me?" he whispers through his fingers.

[postictal]

Alex was there. Fuck, fuck, he does remember. He remembers some of it. Not all of it, clearly, clearly, fuck, Tim doesn't want to do this, he can't do this.

What does he say? How the fuck does he go about dropping this sort of fucking bombshell, oh, by the way, you're fucking dead and I got to fucking watch.

"Alex shot you."

It's cold, it's blunt, and Tim hates how utterly detached it comes out. Of all of them, Jay was the one who knew the least about any of it and should have been able to get out alive, he was the one who fucking deserved to get out and not Tim, who lied and stole and killed and clawed his way out of that mess only to learn he was the cause of it in the first place.

"I went, um, through the footage," he adds sloppily, staring at the rug without seeing it, it's so fucking cold and Jay is standing right here and none of it was supposed to happen, none of it, and this is a dream and it doesn't matter what Tim says anyway, because it's only a fucking dream. Is this meant to be closure? Tim doesn't fucking want it. He didn't fucking want closure then, he didn't want to be the only one to live through this, and here he fucking well is. "Alex shot you. You, uh. It didn't - you didn't look -"

Fuck. Shit. He can't just say this, Jay, you're dead, you're dead and I didn't do shit about it except stab Alex in the neck and hope that fixed everything.

(It didn't.)

(It doesn't get fixed. Not while Tim's still alive.)

"You died. Okay?" Not okay. That's not how you break that news to someone. Is there a good way to do it? Is there, at all?

cw death memories, also general cw for everything being terrible

[deadeyedchild]

No. No no no.

He sinks down further, curling up into the armchair, pulling the blankets up like a scared little kid. He wants to argue but he can't because he knows, he remembers it, the sharp punch of pain in his gut, the sensation of bleeding out on the dirty cement.

"Tim," he says, small and feeble and broken. He digs his hands into his hair and ducks his head down, folding in on himself. "I, I remember," he murmurs. "I remember."

He doesn't know how to cope with this information. No wonder Tim can't look at him. What is he? Is he a ghost? He doesn't feel like a ghost, he feels solid. He's cold.

He reaches out suddenly, grasping for Tim like a lifeline, he doesn't know what he wants exactly other than to feel something, ensure that he's more than just air, that he's here.

tw: MORE DEATH TALK

[postictal]

But really, honestly, what did Tim expect? It was one hell of a fucking bombshell, and Jay's skipped right past denial and plummeted directly into horrified, fetal-position acceptance.

And then one of his pale, trembling hands wraps around Tim's wrist and he jerks at the unexpected contact, pained and instinctual, but he can't bring himself to tear away fully no matter how much he wants to in that shearing, polarizing instant. Hands that look pale and fragile enough to belong to the blood-drained corpse he'd glimpsed between jerking parallel lines of being repeatedly displaced in space. There's a pulse, fluttering and stuttering and so fucking terrified, and it would be reassuring if it weren't just some fucked up dream in Tim's fucked up head.

He pushes back his shaggy mop of hair in distress, completely at a loss for what to say. Jay remembers. Gunshot wounds aren't easy. They aren't quick, they aren't like a fucking knife to the neck. He must have bled out slowly, over a period of days, in complete gibbering mental terror as his vision grayed out and faded into static, then shapes, then nothing, then ceded into utter deadened silence. Deadened. That's a joke, Tim, why aren't you laughing?

Tim has to remind himself to keep breathing and force himself to keep talking and makes himself look at Jay, tiny and curled and spun-glass splintering, barely able to breathe while sitting shrunken in his armchair.

"Everything's - I dunno. Everything's different here." Tim looks at the walls, then the floor, then at Jay - he's sorry, he's so sorry, but since when will that fix anything? - and knows he's not making sense. "Maybe you're not really - I mean, I wasn't in Manhattan. I was in Alabama and then, then I was here."

[deadeyedchild]

Jay starts to laugh, sick and hollow, and he wants to take his hand back but he can't let go, like if he lets go one of them will disappear, so he just shrinks back, pulling, dragging Tim with him his other hand returning to cover his face. Tim's not making sense but Jay can't hold that against him, considering the circumstances.

"What," he says flatly, looking up at Tim, too dried out to cry even though he can feel his throat closing up. "Maybe I'm not really what? Here?" His smile is more of a grimace this time. "I'm not in your head, Tim."

[postictal]

Right, like that's gonna help. He's been told that all his damn life, 'there's no man, it's just your imagination, there's nothing outside your window, Timothy,' but even if his jaw tightens Tim's trying not to hold this against him.

Since when has Jay ever been sensitive. The fucking moron blundered into everything he did about as delicately as a surgeon trying open heart surgery with a chainsaw, from trying to figure out what happened to Alex to sabotaging the hell out of Tim's life by accident and then sequentially fucking everything up enough to get bitten for it. Badly. Tim's not the only one who broke everything; he just arrived conveniently pre-broken enough that Jay simply couldn't do anything worse other than dragging back the sickening memories he didn't want to look at.

"Yeah, well, 'scuse me if I don't really take your word for it," Tim fires back flatly, finding a perverse comfort in falling into that recognizable rhythm of trading halfhearted barbs. "Don't think I need to remind you why."

He's still clinging to Tim's hand like it's some anchor; fuck, maybe it is. Tim won't fault him for that either. He's not the one who fucking died and bled out because he cared too fucking much and ran at his fucking murderous lunatic of a friend armed with nothing but a camera and self-righteous sentiment and expected it to magically turn out well.

[deadeyedchild]

Well he deserved that, probably. He doesn't let go of Tim's wrist but his grip loosens a bit, his expression slackening as he looks down at the floor. He knows he's here. He's pretty sure Tim knows it too, or he wouldn't have waffled so hard on revealing the killshot, so to fucking speak. Ha ha. He would have been more like 'you're DEAD Jay' right off the bat. Maybe that would have been better. Like ripping off a band-aid.

He's been staring at the floor for a while now. He stirs, lets go of Tim and looks up at him like he's waking up, casual, like that awful conversation didn't just happen.

"Sorry, I - kinda stole your seat," he mumbles.

[postictal]

For a second Tim just looks at him in muddled disbelief. The tiny conversation backslide into their former halfway antagonistic, halfway sort of helpful relationship tempts him to whipcrack right back: you'll apologize for stealing my seat but not for uprooting my fucking life?

But, whatever. That's not something Jay needs to hear. He fucked up, and he got burned for it.

Burned isn't even funny anymore. Not that it was ever. Not after the hospital.

Instead Tim shrugs wearily.

"Honestly, I don't really care." He settles on the arm of the thing because Jay's fingers are still latched doggedly around his wrist, so he has to step fucking carefully to not - break him or something. Jay always looked like he'd snap under the right amount of pressure and look at that, just look at what all that pressure did to him. At least he looks fine here. Not bleeding everywhere. Or staring at Tim with no eyes and no mouth, grinding the words your fault your fault YOUR FAULT into his head. "It's a chair in a house full of chairs. In a dream. In Manhattan."

[deadeyedchild]

Jay tilts to look up at him, pulling his hand back to push it under the blanket, because it's too cold now. How can a house so full of fires be so cold?

"In a dream," he echoes. "What are you talking about?"

Dream doesn't make any less sense than anything else, but he doesn't like how easy that makes it to support Tim's potential theory that he isn't really here. He is here. He's breathing. He's shivering. He's alive, no matter what Tim thinks.

[postictal]

Look, Tim doesn't get the physics of this any better, okay? He woke up in a new universe, so everyone keeps telling him, and now he has a shiny new phone and a shiny new life and he's planning to keep it sequestered away in hotels. It's The Jay Life, part deux, but at least it's sort of safe, kind of, or it would be if people didn't keep wandering into his head.

"That's what everyone keeps saying." Tim shrugs again, looks at the ground again, then somewhat begrudgingly drags one of the blankets from Jay's stolen armchair to pull it over his lap and pick absently at some of its loose strands. "I mean, I woke up in fucking Manhattan like two days ago, and people tell me that's normal. It's a new world, or something. And apparently here they have dreams where just about anyone can wander in."

Including people who are dead, gone, shot through, stamped out, bleeding out, no eyes, left broken and unburied and unmourned. Do his parents know? Did they ever find out? Do they even know where he's been the last five years? Tim didn't even think to contact them, fuck.

"So I guess right now you're here. Kind of." Right now. Something transient. Maybe it's his head, or a figment, or not. Maybe Jay is just - there for now, floating without anchoring. If that makes any sense.

[deadeyedchild]

Oh. That's - comforting? Maybe? Maybe not. Maybe he is really dead. Maybe he's only here temporarily, in this one dream, and then he goes back to being nothing, nowhere.

He shudders involuntarily and curls up under the blankets. He doesn't want to look so vulnerable, what good will it do, but he's not sure how to be. Nothing in the world prepared him for this. For anything that he went through over the past five years. He shouldn't have approached Tim at all. He should have left Tim alone. From the beginning. And now again, too.

"I'm sorry," he whispers, and immediately wishes he hadn't. He twitches with discomfort and rubs the heel of his hand against his eye. "I mean, I... I'm..."

Well, there's nothing else to say. He falls silent, berating himself. Should have kept his mouth shut. Eyes open, mouth shut, and don't get involved. Like a good documentarian. Something he never was, and, well, he never will be now. He can't quite cut off a sick-sounding giggle before it happens.

[postictal]

Oh, look, he's breaking again.

Tim can only note it with the horrible distance he's gotten used to evaluating everything with, the technique he polished in the months following it all ending, finally. Control that apathy, boy, twist it into that psychological armor that you let slip off, pathetically, the second someone acted like they might want to be your friend. As if.

He shakes his head and huffs out of his nose, and it's less of a struggle to keep his voice wry and level after all of it, after Jay being here.

"I know it wasn't really you, dumbass." Jay's dead, so might as well put him at ease about that one. At the very fucking least he's earned that. "I mean, with the zipties," he clarifies hastily. "I saw the tape with your message. It was that thing, it - so it wasn't you."

There's no real way to tell if it matters, even, but maybe it's closure. However much people like them can get it. Tim didn't even get to bury him, because there was nothing to bury. So he buried his memories of Jay and forced himself to forget (because he's just so good at that, he's had all that practice) and decided that was good enough.

[deadeyedchild]

Jay answers this with a small nod. He's not even sure that's what he was apologizing for, but he'll take it. He looks up, slowly, seeking out Tim's face only briefly before he tilts his eyes awkwardly back down. "What, um," he mumbles, but he doesn't have the heart to continue the question. He sighs and says, "Are you, um, have you been doing okay?"

[postictal]

It's Tim's turn to laugh, a bitter little snort, as he pushes his hair back again and tightens his hold on his blanket, ridiculously, like he's a fucking kid again.

He only got one blanket, and a room without a window after he broke the glass in the last one.

"How do you think?" he asks dully, but his stomach drops out the instant he says it, because Jay doesn't know what happened after. He can't have, because a little thing like death just might get in the way of that. Just maybe.

There's only the briefest stretch of silence before Tim settles for another shrug and another lie. It's what he's good at. Forgetting, then remembering, then lying about it. "I'm fine. Not much I can really say."

Out of socially-encoded instinct he almost asks how Jay's been doing before he remembers, oh yeah, right. Some awful part of him finds that darkly hilarious, and that's really fucking twisted.