Tim W█████ (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
postictal) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
applesaucedream2015-02-06 02:08 pm
postictal) wrote in applesaucedream2015-02-06 02:08 pm
Entry tags:
stolen friends and disease, Operator please [closed]
[warning: this thread deals with some very heavy topics, including drowning, acrophobia, blood/gore, lots and lots of body horror, disturbing imagery, emotional trauma, emetophobia, buckets of self-loathing, derealization, anxiety/paranoia, drug overdosing, suicide ideation, and probably more. Individual tags will have more specific content warnings. Read carefully, friends.]
Between darting over the dense carpet of dead leaves, weaving around jagged, crooked, wrong trunks that stretch unknowably and distantly and away, Tim wonders how has he been here and for how long? Time doesn't breathe how it used to, it's staggered and burning itself into loops. Maybe he was here before. Maybe he was gone. Maybe one day he got out, and it just wanted him back.
Maybe he never left at all.
no eyes no eyes
The tangled branches overhead form a ghastly arc, knobbed and knotted, skeletal, that reaches too far above his head to give him any form of enclosed comfort. It’s not the trees themselves he hates; it’s their potential, it’s the way they jut up like bars, like back when he had a room with a window a million years ago; it’s the horrifying stillness gapped between each bark-clad column. It’s because he knows how it watches, unwatching, unfathomable, limbs reaching for some sempiternal point beyond the scope of sight, comprehension, anything. The parts of it, the pieces of it, the thing that Tim can't perceive or see properly, that makes the camera stutter and fuzz like the static in his mind. He sees it, he knows it's there, he doesn't know what it wants, he never did, it just reaches, seeps toward him -
Duck between the trees with their blackened, scorched bark. Run, boy, run faster, keep running, it'll catch you either way but running lets you forget. There's a camera strapped to his chest and he doesn't know if it's still recording, or still working. He doesn't look at it. He doesn't look at anything. He runs, faster, faster, run; little broken toy made of stumbling limbs and warm organs and blood and heat and ragged panting breath, who can't escape its own packaging.
The crackling snap of another pair of feet hitting leaves whips his head around so harshly he feels his neck crack. No no no no. There's nothing else here, nothing but breaking trees and the crumbled wreckage of Tim's own head, and the thing waiting with arms, no arms, outstretched to reel him in.
Between darting over the dense carpet of dead leaves, weaving around jagged, crooked, wrong trunks that stretch unknowably and distantly and away, Tim wonders how has he been here and for how long? Time doesn't breathe how it used to, it's staggered and burning itself into loops. Maybe he was here before. Maybe he was gone. Maybe one day he got out, and it just wanted him back.
no eyes no eyes
The tangled branches overhead form a ghastly arc, knobbed and knotted, skeletal, that reaches too far above his head to give him any form of enclosed comfort. It’s not the trees themselves he hates; it’s their potential, it’s the way they jut up like bars, like back when he had a room with a window a million years ago; it’s the horrifying stillness gapped between each bark-clad column. It’s because he knows how it watches, unwatching, unfathomable, limbs reaching for some sempiternal point beyond the scope of sight, comprehension, anything. The parts of it, the pieces of it, the thing that Tim can't perceive or see properly, that makes the camera stutter and fuzz like the static in his mind. He sees it, he knows it's there, he doesn't know what it wants, he never did, it just reaches, seeps toward him -
Duck between the trees with their blackened, scorched bark. Run, boy, run faster, keep running, it'll catch you either way but running lets you forget. There's a camera strapped to his chest and he doesn't know if it's still recording, or still working. He doesn't look at it. He doesn't look at anything. He runs, faster, faster, run; little broken toy made of stumbling limbs and warm organs and blood and heat and ragged panting breath, who can't escape its own packaging.
The crackling snap of another pair of feet hitting leaves whips his head around so harshly he feels his neck crack. No no no no. There's nothing else here, nothing but breaking trees and the crumbled wreckage of Tim's own head, and the thing waiting with arms, no arms, outstretched to reel him in.
no subject
Not a body but a person, upright, too sturdy for him to knock down, he knows the feel of that fucking jacket, oh god, oh no.
"Tim-!" His voice tears as he backs off, limbs flailing, expecting a blow, a counterstrike, but there's no mask after all. He stares, half-sprawled on the ground, trying to see into his eyes, is he really there, is it really him?
"Tim?" His breath catches and his fingers uncurl. Something isn't right about this. They already did this part. Or something.
no subject
The voice that gasps out his name dispenses a familiar flood of ice into his system. His skin's already prickling and his heart is already groaning and his mouth is already dry; there's nothing left of him to be startled any more. But Tim knows that mess of skinny, bone-ragged panting, but he doesn't look right without his camera, he just stands there, one fist clenched ridiculously, like he's about to fly at Tim and bring him crashing to the ground by the power of scrawny resolve alone.
"GIVE IT TO ME!" Jay snarls, thrashing like a rabid thing."Fuck," growls Tim, brow scrunching into a concerned, weary furrow. "Not you again." He doesn't need this guilt. But Jay looks remarkably alive, miraculously not-bloody, which is in its own way a tiny blessing. Not that it isn't a reminder either way.
no subject
This is no place to have a conversation
parking lots, tunnels, ruined burnt-out buildingsand he twitches around like a frightened animal, keeping a blind eye out for something, anything, the hooded man, that thing, Alex."Where are we?" he says, his voice shuddering low. "I don't remember how I got here."
He can almost hear the digital scratch across his voice.
no subject
Tim breaks off to scan the ominous clouded shadows between each stunted bone of a tree, breath still warm and heavy in his throat.
"C'mon." He glances over one shoulder at the nervous wreck that he wishes would leave his head alone. "We can't stay here."
no subject
And Tim doesn't know it's him.
Tim probably dreams about this shit a lot.
He looks up slowly, his breath coming out shaky. "Tim?"
no subject
And then Jay stops and Tim's heart wrenches in its cavity for a minute - keep moving, you idiot, do you wanna get yourself killed?
Oh. Right.
He half-turns, looking at the little remnant of his guilt and his failures, who's frail and trembling harder than any of the dead leaves that flutter like torn banners from branches.
"What are you doing?" he demands, frown darkening. Don't stop. They can't afford to stop.
no subject
He knows they should keep moving so he takes a faltering bird-step forward, and that's when he feels something tug, a sensation not altogether solid, like a phantom limb, but it's there, something he can't see and can only barely feel wrapping tight around his waist and in the fractional moment before it pulls taut his head snaps back up and he reaches out for nothing.
"No, no- TIM!" he screams but it's already yanked before he's finished, hard enough that it leaves his breath behind, his limbs collapse inward like he's under water, hoisted up off the ground and back, sucked deep into the dark.
tw: blooood
"Jay," says Tim, the warning of whatever you have to say can fucking well wait heavy in his voice. "Whatever it is -"
And then Jay is pulled sharply up and back, arms and legs dangling sickeningly like a marionette being dragged off by its strings, hanging there for a reeling scrap of a second before he's unceremoniously and abruptly gone.
fo un dyou
"Nonono, no, Jay!" It found them. It found them.
It always finds them.Tim lurches forward, one arm outstretched desperately, leaving his fingers clawing for the empty patch of air where Jay's hand was before he doubles over and folds to the ground on all fours. His lungs are on fire, his head is on fire, he coughs hoarse and jagged, and a spray of dark thickness coats the leaves, blood spattering against the ground and the inside of his mouth and the backs of his teeth."Jay," Tim says again weakly, spitting out blood, lifting his head to stare out at the horrible pooled darkness. There's ringing in his head and static wailing in his brain, and he has to go and do something stupid, Jay must be rubbing off on him, so he surges to his feet in a lunge of breathless gasping and uncoordination, pitching himself heavily after.
His vision erupts into colors that don't exist.
no subject
cold water hits his back so hard and so fast it feels solid, feels like he should have been shattered across the surface, but he's still here, the motion's stopped so suddenly and it's so dark he can't tell where the surface is, he's drowning, fuck, fuck, fuck, this is what it did to Tim, he remembers the sickening gut-punch of watching Tim thrown around in space, tortured like that, and now he's being treated to it first hand, it's almost poetic
because it was all his fault. He reaches out in every direction trying to breach the water, kicking and flailing and struggling even as his breath runs out.tw: more blood, body horror, drowning, FUN
Long, sticklike shadows flare back into his line of sight as he rolls over, from sprawled on his back to on his knees, half in and half out of what can best be described as water but looks more like ink, depthless and plunging and bubbling.
Tim remembers drowning. He remembers screaming, clawing for a surface that didn't exist.
Oh fuck.
Jay.
Tim splashes into the stuff, wades into it, ignoring the dribbles of crimson lashed down his chin and nose and shirt and the way the stuff feels denser than how water should feel because it probably isn't water, Tim's brain flashes nauseatingly to Brian, Seth, Sarah, Amy, how they never found out what happened to their bodies and he grimly steers it away. Trails of thick, dark bubbles distend the smoky, pitch-black surface, and with a retching gulp Tim sucks in a lungful of air and dives in after.
It's dark. He can't see. He swims deeper, fear tightening its hold around his chest, and the straps of the camera feel they're constricting, iron-like. A gush of bright bubbles spills from his mouth in alarm when he brushes the thrashing, many-limbed disturbance. Water resistance slows his movements agonizingly until he can finally - wrap fingers around what he can only guess is a thin wrist, and pull.
Which way is up. Oh god, which way is up.
no subject
Then the water is gone, sunlight is bright and blinding in his eyes and he's gasping frantic for breath and the weight shifts violently forward, dragging him almost off the edge of - where is he, where they fuck are they, Tim is the one dragging now, dangling off the edge of what is this, a building, the roof of the hospital maybe, doesn't matter where, what matters is Tim is going to fall if Jay lets him go, Jay tightens his grip as hard as he can, feet scrabbling on the crumbling architecture as he tries to pull Tim up, but he's so fucking small and weak.
"Shit," he rasps out, desperate, clinging to him probably hard enough to bruise. "Tim, hang on!"
tw: acrophobia, body horror
The air hits Tim's lungs in a dizzying rush and now his hands are scrabbling at the edge of grimy cement, flakes of scratched-up white paint powdering his fingers. The sky is back, the brightness, the air, Tim tries to breathe but it emerges a staggered, wordless cry of terror as his entire understanding of gravity fucks itself over, and over again. His legs dangle skyward - or downward, he can't fucking tell anymore - and the grip on his wrist is a clamp of pain he doesn't need.
"Jay -" Tim stammers out, fucking terrified, don't let him fall, oh god, Tim let Brian fall, maybe he deserves it, but his legs kick vainly, grazing the edge of the ash-streaked building and he looks down with eyes that are too-wide, petrified, at the plummeting drop. He can't tell what's at the bottom, or if there is one. He doesn't want to.
Jay's fingers dig into his forearm, fingernails shredding skin, their twin horrified expressions lock into one another for a flickered instant, and Tim can feel his stomach drop a heartbeat before its owner does.
He thinks he screams as he falls.
He thinks he sees branches, hard black lines gridded against stark-bone-white.
Everything distorts.
He hits leaves and rolls, breath stunned out of him but there is no squelch of smashed viscera and there is no snap of bone, but Tim can only lie on his back and pant and gasp and shit, fuck, where's Jay.
no subject
Just as he starts to move he's somewhere else, almost getting used to it now, ha ha, beneath his hands is no longer ash and stone but leaves again, dead and dry. Distantly he can hear someone breathing, gasping, he knows that sound too well, did he survive? He pushes himself up, body wanting to betray him and crumple but he won't let it, clutching onto branches as he hurtles himself into the woods.
Night. He's blind again, smacks right into a tree and falls back, groaning, holding his head. "Fuck!" he hisses, muffled through his fingers. "This is getting old!" he shouts to no one, to whatever force or memory is making this happen. He's answered by silence, only a little gust of wind in the trees. Not even the sounds of Tim breathing anymore.
"Tim?" He starts groping his way through, feeling out the trees, no flashlight, no night vision, nothing. "Tim, where are you?"
tw: more body horror and more blood
"Jay?" He tries to get up but slips on the dead paper-thin leaves, back on all fours again. A pale blur streaks his vision on one side and Tim's head whips around to track it - a ghostlike smear of tan jacket and scuttling limbs, moving weirdly, wrongly, like a spider whose legs have been snapped. It stops. Its face turns slowly, impossibly to look at him. It's all wrong the way it moves, jerking but controlled, curious, watching. It's all wrong. Smooth and white and featureless, save for the dark rings circling its pair of horrible empty black eyes, the arched mockery of eyebrows, the Mona Lisa lips that are smiling then smirking then taunting.
Fuck, no. How is that even possible?
Tim scrambles back and hits something solid and wavering. His hand leaps up to wrap around a fistful of shirt and he can feel the rapid tattoo of the beating pulse beneath.
"Jay," Tim says tautly. He can see it, standing out in deathly alabaster against the darkened cast of black trunks and black leaves and black sky. It's standing. It's looking at him. Tim's stomach lurches. Tim wants to die.
body horror continues
-what-
It's there, Tim's here but it's still there, in its own body now, the mask part of its features, just a face, nightmarish and ghostlike, shit, what the hell. He doesn't know what to do with his hands anymore, doesn't have a camera, can't catch this, all he can do is grip onto Tim, a hand on his shoulder, steadying, maybe. He's shaking.
"Tim," he says softly. "We should run."
The thing takes a limping, shuddering step toward them, awful, inhuman movements, and Jay's grip tightens briefly.
"Tim," he says, harder, and steps forward, just enough to nudge himself between Tim and the specter. "Tim, run."
Tim told him that before, and he did run, abandoned him to this fate, and he let Tim fall, and he's not going to mess this up too.
The thing lunges. He turns and gives Tim a forceful shove. "Run, Tim!"
Its arms lock around him.
tw: MAJOR body horror, also pain
Its hands. Its hands aren't hands. Those aren't hands at all. That isn't skin. It's like someone lacquered it over in the tautly stretched skinstuff that made up that thing's face then burned it. There are ridges and bumps and seams that bubble out of nowhere then are gone again in the slips between eyeblinks. It shivers. It's a mosaic. It's wrong.
"I am not fucking leaving -" Tim whispers in furious indignation, because Jay is about to do something completely and utterly fucking stupid, which he does. He pushes Tim, and charges it, and it charges him, a slithering pale thing that collides with the man whose body folds and crumples like paper against it.
"Jay!"
Tim takes a leaf out of Jay's book.
He does something equally fucking stupid.
He scrambles upright and bull-rushes it, slamming into them both so they tumble in a chaotic downslide. For a minute Tim's fingers slide across the spot where the mask would meet skin, only to realize with an awful heaving in his chest that the mask is its skin, its head smooth and bald and slippery and cartilaginous. His nails bite into it, sink into rubbery flesh and pull away in the same instant - Tim's stomach seizes. Its body batters his in their disorienting skid downhill, then uphill, then -
Then Tim smashes into a tree trunk, bright spots exploding over his vision, and his scream wrenches and cuts out halfway when two twisting, struggling bodies follow and crush into his. There are too many limbs and too many white streaks against his vision, and he can only hear Jay's grunts and the inhuman, terrifying silence of the other thing, the whisper of its flesh striking theirs.
body horror forever, WE'LL LET YOU KNOW WHEN THERE IS NO LONGER BODY HORROR
Not fast enough, of course. It's up, coiled over them like a scorpion, one knee pressed against Jay's chest to hold him in place, trapping Tim between his scrawny body and the tree. Jay gasps sharply, painfully, watching with wide eyes and snagging breaths as it tilts its head toward Tim, its neck twisting improbably, birdlike and curious, and reaches for his face with rippling fingers.
"No!" Jay heaves himself upright, and it hurts like hell, pushing himself against the weight of this thing, but he doesn't care. He forces himself up, knocking the thing back, amazingly, fucking stroke of luck that isn't bound to last.
It doesn't seem overly perturbed by his dumbass maneuver. It tilts his head at him, smiling, the smile is widening, black unnaturally glistening lips parting, oh god, no, no - its teeth are white, so white they blend into each other, are they teeth at all? it's like they're growing, the whiteness overtaking the rest of the face, overtaking it until it's nothing
until is has no face
A cold spike of panic shoots down his spine and he tries to wrest himself away but it seizes onto him, one hand clamping onto his mouth, the fingers so impossibly long that he can feel them wrapping around his head. His scream is dampened beneath the press of awful waxy skin; both his hands grip its arm to no avail as it rises slowly, spine uncurling, and it's taller now, so, so much taller, too tall, holding him so many inches off the ground.
It isn't that thing anymore.
He knows what it is now. Its hands, its jacket, all of it blackening, remolding into something oppressively familiar. Holding him off the ground and gazing at him with no eyes to gaze from, head bent at the slightest angle, like he's a mildly interesting little insect, poisoned and writhing.
tw: derealization?? unsettling things? abuse of formatting?
Blinding, sickening blankness settled against dark-ink black, recognizably shaped like something human but so deeply, intrinsically, disturbingly wrong, it
doesn't
make
physical
sense.
Jay dangles there, puppet from a loose string, and Tim clutches his head and screams. His body jerks, visceral, head pounding, nose bloody, retching and coughing for all the world like there's glass in his throat. He almost expects to see white pills come spraying out, rattling against his teeth.
Pills. Pills. Wait.
Tim plunges a hand into his jacket and thank fuck they're there, just two left in the entire fucking bottle but that's enough, so he gulps them down in a painful dry-swallow. The static in his head dims, barely. His limbs are his own. He's Tim, he's alive, and he's angry. He can still feel its very fucking presence sending needles jabbing into his skull, jittering and graying and bright-burning-hot, because this isn't supposed to be looked at. He's doing something stupid. Jay-level stupid. Because Jay's not in the position to fuck up, the mantle falls to Tim. He remembers the last time he did this.
He walks forward, agonizingly slow. Those limbs will swallow him whole. Its head tips down, if it had eyes they would burn, a whipcracking tendril of thought hits him alien and stabbing, the emotion so far removed from human that Tim doesn't think he can define it. He doesn't care. It'll swallow him whole. It'll try. It'll win. No eyes. No eyes. No eyes. No eyes. No eyes. Fuck. No eyes. Look at it, no eyes. Look at it. Look Ma, no eyes. Fuck. No eyes. Here he comes. No eyes. Found us. Found them. Found him. Us? No. No eyes. Let him go.
Its mind, whatever passes for its mind, sluices into his. He can't think for the pain, but not pain, because pain would feel real. He's static. He's senseless. He's breaking. He's here? No eyes. Fuck off, let him go. There's no release, and no pressure. There's static in his skull, in his eyes [if he still has them], and then it's all just -
the end of the body horror; minor emetophobia warning
He can hear Tim hacking up a lung beside him, thudding down to the floor as well, but it's okay now, it's okay, it's gone, it's gone, it's gone.
"T-," he says, the only sound he can make, tongue clicking against his teeth - his voice is gone, all he has is breath. He retches again but doesn't go all the way, his hands touch the wood, trembling and wet, it's okay, it's okay.
He crawls over to Tim and doesn't know what to do.
Story of his fucking death.
Ha, haha.
"Tim," he whispers. He feels like he's on the verge of collapse, so he does, his forehead coming down to rest stupidly on Tim's shoulder. He swallows until he's able to speak, hoarse and brittle: "Tim, come back."
tw: drug overdose mention, blood, emetophobia continues
The coughing is how he knows he's still here, and the pain pressing into his head and hands and chest and everywhere, that's how he knows he's still human. Probably. Mostly. Maybe. It's like his self, his fucking humanity or whatever the shit, was torn from him. Displaced. Eviscerated.
Operator. Well. Maybe it did surgery. Some fucked-up, metaphysical sense of the term. Who fucking knows. Tim's wheezing and breathless, and he can hear the sounds of Jay gasping, dry heaving, not dry heaving, that's fucking gross but Tim's got to have coughed up half his body weight in blood by now, so maybe they're even. And the second part of that observation means - he and Jay, miraculously, unbelievably, are both alive. How the fuck did they survive that one. There's no one left to save them. And Jay never makes it out, Tim's head always makes sure of it.
A soft weight comes to rest exhaustedly on his shoulder. What the hell? Go away. Let him sleep. Fuck, Tim's tired. He just got his neurons flayed alive; the least Jay can do is leave him alone and let him take a goddamn nap.
His eyes crack open a slit. "Jay." And then an involuntary groan as he rolls onto his back and looks at him in utter, halfway-dazed, infinite exasperation. "You goddamn moron."
no subject
It sounds awful, sick and dry and sour, but it's a laugh. Remember laughing? When was the last time he laughed about something? When was the last time Tim laughed about something? Never. That's even funnier. He covers his face, still half-giggling through his fingers.
"I saved you," he says after a moment, only an echo of actual indignation making it through the soft hysterics, "you jerk."
And then Tim saved him. Again.
Who's the moron now, huh?
His lips feel sort of numb. Buzzing. White noise sensation. He touches them absently, trying to reclaim his fucking face, make sure it's still there, something. The laughter has died down now. He's not sure it ever even happened.
tw: minor blood gross stuff
Jay's laughing, and that's a sound Tim's never heard before, except it comes out wrong and just makes him feel ill. Well. Ill-er. He drags his jacket sleeve across the front of his face a few times and tries not to let his stomach heave when he sees the tan fabric. The way that thing had worn it - that wasn't him. But this is his dream, his head. So of course it was.
"Yeah," says Tim wryly, eyes shutting again. "Real great job you did there. Don't forget I had to save your ass. Y'know. Again."
At least he succeeded this time. That never happens. Tim forces his eyes open to look at the idiot whose life he always fails to save in dreams like these, and doesn't dare to hope that it would let itself end like this. Jay dies, or Tim dies, or they both do, but mostly it's Jay. The unbreakable loop.
"You okay?" He doesn't have the energy to infuse the words with much emotion. They sound robotic, mandatory. Well. It's the thought that counts.
no subject
He's not really okay but that's not new. The question is more immediate than that. He and Tim know not to ask each other that kind of thing and mean it on any level deeper than 'right this second'. 'You okay' as in 'you're not fatally wounded, right?' Jay used to ask it all the time. And mean it. Are you okay, Tim? But he knows that's pretty pointless by now.
"I feel great," he says, simultaneously droll and manic. He eyes Tim, all smeared up with blood and dirt. "You look about as great as I feel." If that clears things up.
no subject
'Okay' is code for 'not'.But the smart remark makes its entrance as always, and Tim can't suppress his immediate urge to roll his eyes slightly as he lurches onto his side and starts to get up. It's slow going, mostly because Tim doesn't want to succumb to any more vertigo.Ignoring Jay's comment on his appearance - he's fully aware he looks gross, thanks, no need to point it out, asshole - Tim wobbles to his feet and finally takes stock of where they disappeared to this time.
"Oh." He should have figured. Scuffed wood floors, dry and dusty from disuse, and dim lighting? This is where he always ends up. He's memorized the layout of this place by now, he's been over the footage so many times. "Fuck."
And Tim was so hoping he'd see Benedict Hall again.
no subject
He decides it's probably best not to react. In the woods he was close to telling Tim - it's me, I'm here, I'm in Manhattan just like you - but now... what's the point? Tim doesn't need that. All Jay's ever done is make things worse. No, stick with the original plan. Your gut instinct. Leave Tim alone. Get out of his head tonight and leave him alone. That's probably what he'd rather.
He doesn't say anything, perhaps conspicuously, and gets shakily to his feet.
"Man I wish I had my camera," he mutters.
no subject
Jay's pronouncement gets a flat glare of disbelief.
"Yeah, cause that worked out so well for you last time." Immediately he regrets saying it, because it's not like Jay needs the reminder but whatever, Jay isn't technically real anyway. Maybe Tim should start easing him into it, preparing him for the inevitable. That's really fucking twisted, but he knows what's coming. Every night, every dream, every time it's the same; all replays end with a uniform outcome, set on a different backdrop. Jay bleeds, everything's red, the thing he spent all that time running from looms, and then they're lost in a blaze of torn reality. This one may have seemed more visceral somehow, and the shit that happened in the woods is something he'll be purging from his memory more aggressively than usual (gotten awfully good at conveniently forgetting, hasn't he), but it's a set conclusion. Tim's never meant to effect change on the inevitable result. He's just the unlucky audience.
"You stay behind me," he orders without any enthusiasm whatsoever. It won't do any good. Alex will come up from behind Jay, then, or from a hole in the celing, or Brian will hold Tim down and make him watch it happen, or that fucking thing will forgo pleasantries and simply rope Jay in itself. He's played all the possibilities. There are probably some he hasn't seen yet. Isn't leaning new things fun.
no subject
"Oh yeah, okay," he says bitterly. "Like that's going to make a goddamn lick of difference."
And it's his turn for immediate regret. Like Tim doesn't know that. Like Tim hasn't already probably gone through a thousand possibilities in his head.
no subject
But no, fuck it, this Jay is just some stupid transient mental construct. So what the hell, right, it's not like he'll walk away with memories of this. It's not like he'll walk away at all, because he always ends these dreams shot and bleeding. Sometimes worse.
"You think I don't try to change what happens?" And Tim rounds on him properly, anger flying out of his core. "You think I haven't seen it? I had to watch that footage, and I try to change it every goddamn time, every goddamn night, and I can't." His voice breaks humiliatingly on the last word. Is he crying? No, just perilously close to it, per the fucking norm. Can't help but break down, can he? Tim reins it in, barely, but the words still tremble when he spits them out. "Every night I try, and it doesn't matter. I know how this ends, and every night I fuck it up."
There are footsteps over their head, causing the wood to creak, and Tim freezes. Fuck, he didn't even realize how loudly he was speaking. He knows what's coming. He knows what'll happen. He's seen every repetition. No, no, not this time, please.
no subject
When it stops the silence is deafening, the struggle to respond is almost physical; Jay stammers for a moment, not sure what to say, what the hell can he say to that?
And before he can figure it out, footsteps, and Tim's distracted, and the moment is gone, maybe for the better. Jay looks up, his breath quickening a little. Alex? Maybe Totheark? Or something else. It doesn't matter what. Anything is bad.
"Let's go," he whispers, and starts moving, nudging past Tim, not bothering to stay behind him. It won't matter and they both know it.
tw: guns
"Go where?" The utter hopelessness of their situation is sinking into him again (it always does) and Tim stares at Jay, shakes his head helplessly. "What'll it do? It -"
There's the thudding of footsteps, behind them this time, not above, and Tim whips around. Gray jacket, the ragged beginnings of a rough beard, sallow-cheeked and tight-jawed and dead-souled and empty-eyed - Alex Kralie, or Tim's blinding mental image of Alex Kralie, raises a gun.
"Alex -" Tim says desperately, an unintentional grim parody of Jay's final words.
A shot goes off.
no subject
He thinks he has for a moment, the sound of the gun going off sending an instinctual tremor through his body, his gut clenching with the horrible sense memory of the hit to his stomach.
But it doesn't hit him.
"Tim!" His voice rings distorted off the walls. He lunges forward, pushing his arms under Tim's, trying to hold him up. Tim is heavy, a crumpling dead weight, though not dead yet. It takes a while to bleed out from a wound like that. Jay remembers.
"Tim," he says again, his voice breaking, and he glances back up but Alex is already gone, around a corner, or gone altogether. Jay struggles to keep Tim upright but he starts to sink as well, Tim pulling him down to his knees. "No, no, nonono, Tim, no."
Just a dream. Just a dream. Just a dream. It doesn't fucking matter. Like any dream this bad he just wants to wake up and he can't.
There's no sound that draws him to look up again, no footsteps; it isn't Alex standing at the end of the hall anymore, but It, again, always, staring at them, staring at Tim, coming to claim him just as it claimed Jay.
Jay grits his teeth.
"Fuck off!" he screams, hoarse and ragged. He slides back a bit, trying to drag Tim with him.
Tim, we have to go. Come on, Tim. Get up. Tim, get up.tw: blood, suicide ideation
For about five seconds.
"Jay -" he tries to grunt out, and he can feel the man unsuccessfully trying to prop him up, but has he seen the size difference between the two of them lately, what is he doing, he needs to grab the camera and run because that's what he always does, Tim faces the monsters and Jay just bolts. That's bitter, that's wrong.
He has one hand clamped over the place where it happened, same place as Jay even, he's going to bleed out so fucking slowly and it'll hurt every step of the way assuming he doesn't die of shock first, Tim knows too much about medical procedure after his life, and this feels exactly how he'd think getting shot would feel. There's a lot of fucking blood, the hand's not even doing anything but getting soaked in red, the front of his shirt, the ground, Jay's shirt, all of it. Tim's not even standing anymore but he can't run, he can't even make it as far as Jay did. He's gonna die like Jay, running scared, no camera, chased down by a childhood nightmare. Ha. Ha. Ha.
"Get out of here," he whispers, but to Jay or to the thing that's sliding impossibly, imperceptibly, towards them in the spaces between ragged breaths. It doesn't even move normally, fuck. One arm reaches. For them, for Tim, well fuck it had to happen sometime didn't it?
This is better. It was always gonna happen. At least it wasn't Jay. At least it wasn't Brian. At least it's someone who deserves it. He's the source, cut him out, shoot him out, bleed him out, break him open, burn the cancer inside.
Tim feels bizarrely like laughing at the absurd symmetry of it. Instead he gasps out a wordless cry at each movement, each jerking, clumsy attempt Jay makes to drag him away. Run, you dumb fuck. Tim's been shot and he deserves it. Run.
"Get out," he rasps. "Go."
The thing without a face reaches them, arms larger and longer than the world arcing at them to take him away.
no subject
And now, now Tim's taken the bullet meant for him and it's just a dream so fuck it, not now, not this time.
Jay stands up. He lets Tim down as gently as he can while his hands are shaking and stands up, keeping his eyes on the thing even as it advances between eyeblinks. He's shaking so bad. He's so afraid. Just a dream, just a dream. He has to do this. Even if Tim doesn't know he's real, he has to do something - better, maybe, if Tim thinks it's his own brain trying to protect him. Instead of just giving up.
He's seen this before. He doesn't remember it but he's seen himself, barely conscious, writhing on the ground and Tim staggering toward it, staring up at it, limbs splayed like he's being dragged back. He can do this. He can do it.
He steps, and oh god, it's so much harder than he thought, there's so much pressure, so much weight in his mind, compressing and crushing, fuck, fuck, fuck, is this how Tim feels all the time? He lets out a torn scream but he keeps moving because there's no other choice now, he has to, he has to know what this was like, what was done for him and he never said thank you.
Leave him alone leave him alone leave him alone leave him alone. Maybe he's saying it out loud, he doesn't know. His teeth hurt from clenching. He takes another step. It's looking at him now. Good. Good. Here. Not on him. Leave him alone.
He doesn't see it move - it doesn't move, not the way they or a camera could perceive it, but he feels it, reaching for him with arms open, arms too long, arms they can't even see, coiling around his throat, pressing in on him. When did he collapse? All he knows is his knees hurt like crazy, having crashed down onto concrete, and he can't breathe and the buzzing in his head hurts so, so much, but he won't fight, he won't try to escape, he won't run, if it'll just leave him alone.
Everything shifts, his vision jolting to the side, like the image on a camera tearing, jittering, breaking - he sees things for an instant, himself and dark scorch marks seeping down through the walls to wrap around him, and he probably screams but he can't hear anything but static, and then, then he's gone.
no subject
"Jay - JAY!"
The halation of the other man's silhouette blazes against closed eyelids for a minute, there's an awful wrenching in his chest when Tim realizes what he's doing, and then he's gone. That idiot, that stupid fucking moron who thinks he can charge into that with no consequence. Tim sags against his little stretch of wall, the hand that was formerly holding his injury shut now dropping limply. Your fault, your fault, he fucked this up and failed, again, just like every time. Fuck, he's sorry, Jay, he's so fucking sorry.
The thing turns itself to him. His vision's graying out, but the cleanly divided color scheme of white against black stands out perfectly, the only absolute in his vision that's become a slurry of grays and red-browns.
He has no strength to run and no breath to give a final defiant word to the incredible pain he's in. Tim just watches in weary, broken defeat as the thing draws closer, like it should have happened, and closes his eyes as it wraps him in arms that follow no physical logic, obscenely reminiscent of a tender embrace.
nd
you
forever