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And now he's looking at a mirror instead, which is not a terribly big improvement. Tim stares dully at his own reflection, from the purpled half-moons hung beneath both eyes to the rumpled disarray of his hair, and then back to Jay. This is exactly the sort of thing he wants to wake up to. This is exactly it.

Tim shuts his eyes.

"You have five seconds to tell me what the hell, Jay."

Jay flips the mirror closed and lets his hand swing back to his side, the whole of him hanging a little looser than he was a second prior.

"You're back," he says, by way of explanation.

He realizes that's not much of an explanation.

He screws his aching eyes shut as he thinks. "Wait, how much do you remember?"

"I'm...what?" Jay, it's who-gives-a-shit o' clock in the morning, and he is not in the mood. "Remember from what? Jay, what the hell?"

He's definitely elapsed his five seconds, but Tim's also not about to shut the door on a cryptic hint like that. He doesn't need this right now, but where the hell else is Jay gonna go? Back to his room, to spiral downward into his own paranoia?

Like hell.

Tim sighs and lets the door swing open the rest of the way, scrubbing a hand across his weary face.

"...c'mon."

Jay shuffles into Tim's room, flicking the nightvision setting on to scan the walls. He braces himself for when Tim inevitably turns the lights on and ruins the picture.

"You told me I did something." Jay can feel his head buzzing, and he sways on his feet for a moment. "And you were on the wrong side. Of the mirror, I mean. Said you might forget. That's why the--" He pulls the mirror back out of his pocket briefly, shaking it for emphasis.

Either the coffee hasn't kicked in, or it has and Jay's worse off than he thought.

"Haven't checked the footage yet."

Flick the light on Tim does. The place isn't anything special - just a carefully cultivated whirlwind of dirty laundry and rumpled papers. The place stinks of smoke and nicotine, and he's got a little wire wastebasket half-heaped with cigarette butts to prove why. It's small, boxy, and white-walled, because that's always what a room's been, in his head. It's almost like a dorm in its hollow impersonality, but at least it's not a hospital.

It's not a hospital because it has a window, which is the only thing that really sets it apart aside from the desk.

It takes him several minutes to parse the entirety of what Jay says, and by the time he finally loops around to make the connection, Tim's already sunk back to sit on the foot of his bed, regarding Jay wearily. It doesn't surprise him that Jay's up this late - or this early. It doesn't surprise him that Jay sleeps fully-clothed with a camera running, when he bothers to sleep at all, while Tim's digging the base of one palm into an eyesocket to wake himself up while he sits here in t-shirt and boxers trying to sort through all this.

No; all this is just another part of how their lives go.

"I don't..." A sigh, and Tim's hand drops to drape over his knees. "Okay, obviously I don't remember. But I think it'd be a little more obvious if I crossed over Mirrorside when no one else has. That's, like - that's not easy, Jay."

The camcorder screen flashes white when Tim turns the lights on, and Jay misses the button to disable nightvision on the first try, leaving him scratching at the right general area until he manages to switch it back to normal. In this light, the room looks oddly familiar.

"Yeah, I've heard, but--but it sounded like you. Or looked like you, I guess. The handwriting." He feels like he's hearing himself ramble from about four inches to the left. Concentrate. Get to the point. "Here, just, just--"

He'll show him the footage on his laptop. He's got a desk, so he should have a computer, so he should be able to plug in the SD card somewhere. Jay tilts the camera in his hand, folding back the thin rubber that covers the slot for the card, and digs his nail in at just the right angle to release it. He fishes out the card and holds it out to--

Wait.

Wait, no, fuck.

The red light's still on.

He slips the card back into the camera, switches the mode to playback, because maybe, just maybe--

'STORAGE CORRUPTED,' the text on the viewfinder reads, and Jay's not sure he's willing or able to keep standing anymore, because he's a fucking idiot, and of course you're not supposed to pull the card out while it's writing, because of course this is exactly what happens, and he kept putting off reviewing the footage until later for no real reason, and now he'll never know what happened.

He'll never know what happened.

He'll never know what happened.

He sways on his feet again. Back on the wall, he slides down.

He wants to throw the camera against the wall and watch it shatter. Just as useful like that as it is like this.

It looked like him, as if his Mirror wouldn't excel at precisely that sort of subterfuge. Tim barely refrains from rolling his eyes, but has to plant his face in his hands regardless, thumbs working at the sleep-deprived corners of his lids. He misses most of what comes next. He misses everything except for the moment in which Jay rocks on his feet, his balance failing, and ends up pressed against the wall, sliding slowly to the floor.

Tim sits up.

"Jay?" Did he see something that proved him wrong? Fuck, is he seeing things again, already? It wasn't - It was never here. He shouldn't be seeing things if It was never here.

"Don't have the footage," he mumbles, swiping his free hand across his eyes hard enough to sting. "I--fuck."

He's more accustomed to tapes, but that's no excuse. He knows better. He knows better.

He tries winding back to another point, playing from there. Nothing. Tries a few more times before he lands on some footage that'll run, but it's just an unconscious body lying in bed. Nothing out of place.

"I did something, but there's no...I can't see what happened."

He's no expert on what the hell Jay's just been talking about, or what even just happened, but there's no mistaking the familiar, defeated slope to Jay's shoulders, the way he slouches there with his hand scrubbing over his eyes.

"Jay. Hey." The word is low and careful, and he slides off the edge of the bed to crouch at Jay's height. Fuck. If something did happen, and neither of them have any knowledge or memory of it whatsoever -

Can't worry about that now. Not right now.

"Walk me through it, okay? Tell me what happened, specifically. Maybe it'll...I dunno." He shrugs, a helpless jerk of the shoulders. He's not what you'd call optimistic, but if he can contextualize what even happened, it'd be a start. "Maybe it'll jog something."

Walk him through it. He can do that. (Can he do that? Has he forgotten anything else?)

He looks up at Tim's mirror. Covered, so they can't be watching.

"Alright." He fidgets with the playback controls as he talks, watching the screen skip through frames of his dimly-lit bedroom until it hits an error message. "I went to sleep. Well, I tried at least, and I guess it worked, because something woke me up around two-thirty, maybe three. That's about when I started seeing writing on the mirror."

He takes in a deep breath. "I know it sounds...like it doesn't make much sense, look, I know, but it looked like your handwriting. And it sounded like the way you talk--or, or write, not..." Unable to really put a name to the Mirror besides 'Tim' or 'Mr. Wrong', Jay just gestures vaguely. "And you or..." He forces himself to consider other possibilities. "...or him or whatever it was said I'd done something. Sounded not good."

Fast-forward. Pause. "Assumed you'd gone Mirrorside, so I came up here with this." He holds up the folding mirror. "Somebody'd defaced the fourth floor mirrors pretty bad. With...y'know." He looks over at Tim, eyes hooded.

"And that's...basically it. That I remember anyway."

As if Tim's Mirror would be anything but adept at imitating him. Jay believed it; maybe because he was tired, or because his judgment is already frayed to hell to begin with, or any other number of reasons. He's exhausted. Who could blame him?

And with his Mirror just dicking around with him, it's no wonder that he bought it. Only now there's no way to check.

"I didn't," he says - trying, frantically, to make it sound halfway convincing without a shred of evidence. "I didn't. I'd know if I had. I'd remember."

Jay shoots Tim a warning look.

The words 'It's not that I don't trust you--' are on the tip of his tongue, and Jay nearly laughs at himself. Tim's done a lot to help him out lately, and Jay admits he's thankful, but Tim's still a liar. It's only been two months, probably a few more for Tim, but that's not enough to change a person. Not completely.

"Alright, we need to calm down." We? Really? "What do we know for sure?"

Jay forces himself to think. He knows there was writing on his mirror. He knows the Tim standing next to him can't be from the Mirror side. He knows the footage he has from tonight is patchy and incomplete.

So not much, then. Great.

Edited 2017-08-27 03:43 (UTC)

"We know my Mirror's a dick, so that's a good start." It's not that he blames Jay for that; he's not that off his nut, right? Only he's blamed Jay for worse for far less before. Can't blame Jay for electing to be wary about that either.

What a fine pair they are, huh?

"You sure it was really...y'know, me? He's lied to us before. Both of us."

Sure, he was clearly manipulative, but did the Mirror actually lie the one time they talked for sure? He gave Jay information, albeit cryptic, potentially dangerous information.

Jay agrees with Tim on one thing, though. He's definitely a dick.

"I guess we can't exactly..." Jay pinches the bridge of his nose. "...prove it for sure either way."

He rocks back, leaning his head against the wall. "So if it was him, then what? What would he even gain from that?"

"He threw you off, didn't he?" Can't say for sure what else might be on his agenda, but - maybe George has had contact with him since then. She asked for his help in investigating whatever the hell his Mirror might be doing.

Maybe it's time to uncover the glass and start chatting him up again.

Doors open both ways.

"He likes messing with us. Both of us." He turns the words over and over in his head, eyes narrowing thoughtfully. "...said you did something. Didn't say what?"

Despite his instincts screaming at him that something's wrong, something happened, Jay admits the possibility is making more and more sense. Easier for the Mirror to mimic Tim than it'd be for Tim to get behind the glass and back without anyone but Jay noticing. Occam's razor.

(Or maybe it benefits Tim if Jay doesn't know. That doesn't really fit what he remembers either, because why would he write on the mirror if he didn't want Jay to know?)

Jay shakes his head. No, he didn't say what.

"Can't say for sure it was nothing, though. I mean, I don't remember getting up before three, but..." He shrugs. Just another day, right?

"Right. Neither do I." He rubs at the bridge of his nose between pinched forefinger and thumb, staving off the incipient migraine that's threatening to drill into the delicate center of his brain. You'd think it'd be easier to bear when one gets used to it, but mostly you just get tired. You get tired of it being the default state of being. You get tired of it being your life.

His temples throb, distantly. He drops his hand across his knees. Looks at Jay directly - not staring at the lens that he so often substituted for his eyes, but at him.

"He could've just been lying to us."

He is a liar.

Jay meets Tim's eyes.

He looks as exhausted as Jay feels, and Jay knows it's not from the hour. Four-and-a-half years on the run, winding back tapes and looking over his shoulder. An entire life in and out of hospitals, barely scraping together a normal life (until Jay showed up). And here they are, sitting next to each other on the floor of Tim's room at 4 in the morning. A fine pair, indeed.

Jay breaks the eye contact.

"Yeah. He could've."

...doesn't believe him, does he?

Or maybe - fuck, maybe not everything's about Tim, huh? Maybe it's not that. Maybe it's just the infuriation of not being able to know whether or not he was. Maybe it's just the fact that not knowing is Jay's own personal brand of hell, and he's just stranded himself in the deepest circle of it.

He nods at the camera in Jay's hands without glancing away.

"You ever done that before? Messed up the, uh...SD card like that?"

"No." It comes out almost petulant. "I haven't."

And he's not planning on doing it again. God, what a fucking rookie mistake. The one thing he's got experience with, and he manages to screw that up, too.

"Might be able to salvage some of it." He digs the heel of his hand into his eye socket, pushing hard enough to see sparks. "If I'm lucky."

He resists the urge to snap out an equally petulant response to that. Jay's got good reason to be pissed; the last thing you need in the wake of some Mirror messing with your head is a simple mistake to ruin any possibility of knowing what, exactly, actually happened.

"Look, that's not on you."

(He is a liar.)

"I mean..." Try to revise. Try to be better. "You messed up, but it happens. We're just gonna have to figure things out on our own. We've done it before, right?"

"Yeah, I guess."

They've done it before, but they shouldn't have to. Not when there's a block of time neither of them remember. (Just sleeping, nothing else.) Not when someone's telling him he did something he's forgotten, and Tim's explanation makes sense, but since when has anything in their lives made any goddamn sense?

He just wants to sleep. He just wants to sleep knowing he'll wake up the same person.

"Look, I'll...send you whatever I can get off this card. That's a start, at least. Then we can try figuring out whatever from there."

He knows he's gonna have to pull himself to his feet. Some stupid part of his lizard brain is tugging at him to just close his eyes and fall asleep here, but that's an awful idea for multiple reasons. Even if the carpet's more comfortable than he would've anticipated.

He's kind of expecting Jay to get up and start doing that, but whatever caffeine's in his system must not've been nearly enough. It's goddamn like...three? Four AM? Of course it's not enough.

Tim sighs, and pushes himself to his feet.

"Look, there's...there's no rush. Okay?" The least he can do is make sure Jay doesn't pass out from exhaustion, or whatever the hell. "Take a break, yeah?"

When Tim rises, Jay attempts to do the same. He wobbles on his feet for a moment, leaning against the wall until his head stops spinning. The Mirror or Tim or whatever it was told him not to sleep, didn't it? And now the Real Tim's here, telling him to 'take a break.' Inconsistencies. God, it's looking more and more like that was the Mirror back there.

There's no rush. Take a break.

"Okay," he says, because he's not sure what else he can say. At this point, staying up doesn't seem like a real option anymore.

He doesn't want to wake up with anything missing, but he can't stop it.

"Keep an eye out, alright?" If Jay can't stop anything from happening to himself, maybe Tim will have better luck.

Useless camera in hand, Jay inches back toward the door.

One stupid, stupid parts of him wants to make that offer for him to crash here, if he wants. No cameras. No mirrors watching over him. And it'd be stupid and he can't say which instinct has that question swelling on his tongue and which instinct has him muzzling it.

It's the way he has to lean against the wall for support that clinches it. The way he looks almost dizzy. He's bound to trip and fall down the stairs at this rate, right? Wouldn't put it past him. Tim sighs.

Maybe it's weird, but what part of their lives has ever been normal?

"Look," says Tim, "you can just...just crash here, okay? You look like you can barely stand."

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