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)
applesaucedream2015-07-27 09:32 am
postictal) wrote in applesaucedream2015-07-27 09:32 am
Entry tags:
let them be buried (buried alive) in their suits, in their ties [closed]
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.
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.
ad nauseum
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
"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
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
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."
no subject
"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
"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."
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
"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?"
no subject
"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.
no subject
"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."
no subject
"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.