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.
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