postictal | ic inbox; entranceway

[Part of him almost wants to laugh at that. You're a liar was spat out at him from beneath the brim of a hat, shading his eyes in the same furious tint that burned through the static of what used to be Alex Kralie. There was a time when he wouldn't have said something like that, he's sure.]

[Nice of him to say it. Even if, knowing what he does, he probably shouldn't believe it.]

cause i'm not pointing a gun at you right

[You're not like him. The closest thing Jay came to a compliment, when they tramped through the kudzu and detritus of a life he strained to forget. You're not like the guy who tried to murder him, several times over.]

[Can't really say that anymore. Not after the Reapers.]

cause you're not ten feet tall and screwing up my footage, but sure

[He's talked about it directly before. Mostly before, though, before he saw what it could do to a person. Before he wound back through his own tapes and saw a blank nothing leering into the lens.]

[Not the lens. It wasn't frozen like the rest of it, wasn't preserved. It was looking at him.]

[His heart's caught in his throat, face flushed.]

[Tim's Mirror told him to talk about it, to name it. They both saw how well that turned out.]

[Still, he's got a point to make. He can't ignore it forever, can't displace it onto Alex Kralie forever, because Alex Kralie isn't here. Brian Thomas isn't here. Tim Wright's awake and typing, not stumbling between the trees wearing a mask, and Jay's...he's fine.]

still capable of doing that last bit you know

[In case either of them forgot. He leaches static into everyone's lives, same as Alex or Jay have. Same as It did.]

[You can never go back. You can only do your best to recreate. Turn over a new leaf? Fuck it - turn over the whole tree. Stop trying to turn over the page. Rip it out, rip it straight out, because no matter how far you get from who you were you can't do a thing to fight against what made you.]

[He remembers the video Tim posted, "Entry #77," like he'd taken full control of the narrative, like the owner of that channel wasn't right there, bound with zip-ties on his goddamn floor--]

[Breathe. Fucking...calm down.]

[He remembers how it felt, plastic biting into his wrists and ankles, muscles straining to pull himself upright, the sheer fury, the complete and utter confidence that Tim had gone out of his goddamn mind, that he was dangerous and Jay was right.]

[He remembers cutting himself free, the feeling like he couldn't pull enough oxygen into his lungs, that he was choking, but that if he could just get into Tim's medicine cabinet he could--]

[He remembers the spray of static across the screen, watching himself in third-person when he finally got access to a computer. Could have meant a lot of things, but he could see what was in focus when frames dropped and the audio cracked.]

not the only one

[He doesn't know the rules. Doesn't know if this means he's infected, that he's a carrier, like Alex seemed to believe. Doesn't know if this means he's going to spread it, like Tim seems to believe. Doesn't know if this means he's really Jay Merrick anymore, or that the guy he's talking to is still Tim Wright. Maybe they've become something different, something you're not supposed to name.]

[But they haven't caused George to collapse into a coughing fit or Clem to spray static across the screen. He's checked the footage. They're clean, by the only metric he's got. The only times it's changed are when that thing decided to show up.]

[If they're...monsters now, or whatever Tim seems to believe, they're not the same kind.]

we haven't made anybody sick here
not directly
not when it's just us

might count for something

don't be so sure

[Remember Sans. Remember Seth. Remember Max. Remember George.]

[Remember the tiny things they've glimpsed. It stacks up, over time. Eventually, it will cross your mind.]

[You can't know for sure. You can never know. Because it doesn't manifest right away. It's never an immediate thing. It takes years, sometimes. Years for it to spiral up and crack to the surface like a drowning man gasping for air - ]

[And that's when the nightmares begin.]

it took you years to get sick

[He's right. He'd been losing time, filling in the gaps wrong, ever since the beginning, but he hadn't really gotten sick until later. Until 2013 or so, when he was traveling with Tim.]

[When he was traveling with Tim.]

[Liar. That was just the first time he'd had somebody around to notice.]

[No, he hadn't been seeing things until the end. He hadn't been sick like Tim (god, that was hard to even think) until the end.]

[He'd been blacking out and wandering off before that. He'd been wearing the mask before that; even totheark knew.]

nice if something could be straightforward for once

[He got sick, but he can't remember when the symptoms started. Can't figure out what started them, what made them worse. The pills help, but he can't tell how much. Can't tell if he's acting different, because it's not like he had much of a personality to begin with. He's got Tim to keep an eye on him, but Tim's not exactly the most reliable witness.]

for us?
when has that ever been on the table

[It's not. It never is. "Answers" require significant labor to obtain, and even when they do come through, they come at the cost far more questions than is worth the effort of attaining the answer in the first place.]

[He didn't necessarily need answers. He didn't necessarily need anything other than for it to be over.]

[In a painful, frustrating way, so did Alex. Just...with different methods.]

[Never. Not even before, when he was between jobs, sleeping until two in the afternoon, dead-eyed and sprawled across the sheets he hadn't washed in over six months. Not when the kitchen sink became fully unusable, not when his head had only two settings--complete disconnection and all-consuming focus--and neither was any good at scraping the encrusted ravioli residue off his dishes.]

[Not before, when he was supposed to be revising Alex's script.]

[Not before, when people asked him why he was majoring in film if he didn't even seem to care about it that much.]

[Not before, when his teacher-mother-father-uncle-grandmother asked him why he wouldn't just pay attention when they're speaking to him.]

[Not after over four years in motels with smoke stains on the ceiling, scraping by on sticks of beef jerky and bitter hotel coffee, not when he was finally face to face with the only person who might actually know what was going on, and the man didn't say a word.]

it hasn't

[Tim lies back on his bed - a shitty, dorm-esque place with cramped walls and a ceiling that's too low and the place retains the smell of his belongings, cigarettes and cheap aftershave, in a way that suggests a sense of permanence he knows, logically, doesn't really exist.]

[He takes another drag from the cigarette he doesn't remember lighting. So much for quitting.]

[So that's how their lives are. Vague. Ill-defined. Impossible to conceptualize. Dictated by creatures beyond the realm of their understanding.]

max say anything else yet

[Jay slumps in the worn, crooked office chair, the edge of the desk biting into his arm. Like Tim's, his room is dorm-like, with barren, concrete-block walls. The comforter has a familiar pattern, some bland amalgamation of hotel bedcoverings circa 1989-1995, a spatter of brown, pink, and teal. What the room lacks in decoration, it makes up for in clutter; stacks of hard drives are stacked and scattered across the floor, each one labeled with a date and a few keywords, a tangle of wires criss-crosses the desk and the space behind it, used notebooks peek out from under the bed. There's a pair of plastic dishes up against the wall, one still encrusted with wet cat food, and a couple of battered toys (balls with jingle bells inside, mice constructed out of rabbit fur, a feather attached to a long string) dot the space between the bed and the door. (He's got to remember to look down next time; he's still nursing a bruise from the last time he didn't.) Clothes lie in loosely arranged piles: worn, wearable, clean. There's a stack of books on his bedside table, all borrowed from the library long enough ago that he can't quite remember how overdue they are. From his desk, he can see a couple textbooks, a biography of some godawful director with a fascinating story, and a dog-eared copy of the manual for his current handheld.]

[Jay stares at the communicator.]

[Archie rubs his chin against Jay's leg, before sauntering off to find something else to do.]

[Jay picks the communicator back up.]

not really

[She's not the most evasive person he's ever met, but that's only because the competition's so steep.]

[And because he's got Tim on the line, because this is a private message, because this isn't Twitter, he types the next words:]

you think we can do anything for her?

i couldn't do anything for myself

[Whose fault is that. Who do you have to blame for all of this, Tim? Who do you think is responsible? Why didn't you fix it, fix it, fix it the way Alex all but begged you to? Do the right thing, and burn to death. That wouldn't have fixed anything here, but back home, that would have spared whoever else you might have come into contact with.]

[You son of a bitch. You son of a bitch. Look at what you've done.]

[Look at what you're doing to them. All of them. Thought you could scrape out a life like this. Thought this could be a fresh start. And, oh, you told yourself it wasn't, but everything from your actions to your words suggested that you couldn't help but wonder, couldn't help but hope, as if that would mean anything.]

[You stupid, stupid son of a bitch.]

[Jay reads the message. Rereads it. Tries to suffocate the pang of guilt in his chest.]

you figured out the meds were actually doing something.

kept yourself alive long enough to wind up here.

[Jay didn't fix anything, just pointed his camera at every little thing that happened. That's worth something, though. The more he knew, the safer he was. It was just getting the information that was risky, and the only ones really at risk were the ones behind the camera. Once the information was out there, anyone who needed it could benefit. Pissed off as he was, Tim could watch the entire backlog, get access to everything Jay figured out, without leaving his desk.]

[Jay doesn't think about what Alex's theory, transmitted via Tim. He doesn't think about how it spreads.]

if she's already like us
at least maybe she won't have to figure it all out herself.

so you wanna tell her that she's fucking crazy or should i

[Well, Jay? You want to be the person to tell her that she's broken and it's Tim's fault? You want to be the one to force her to admit that there's no scrubbing It clean from her? You want to be the one to tell her there's no escaping It? How about, this time, Jay does the forcefeeding of the capsules against her fucking consent?]

you think she'll be happy to hear that
think she'll be grateful

[The way you were?]

[Fucking crazy.]

[She's not getting locked up here. She's not going to wake up to find them shoving pills down her throat, not going to find herself in the passenger's seat being driven to the doctor's office for her own good, not going to have people telling her she's seeing things that aren't there.]

[~~Not going to be zip-tied on the ground, watching the shadows flicker at the corners of the room, screaming her throat raw.~~]

look maybe she's not fucking crazy yet
maybe we can HELP before it gets worse

cause you took it so well right
bet she'll love to hear that from us

[Shut up. Just - shut up, Tim. What do you know about it? What are you doing, what have you ever done, but make things worse?]

[There's no easy way to break the news that you've ruined someone's life simply by existing in their vicinity. Couldn't do the right thing and burn to death. Couldn't do anything fucking right, could you?]

[He's not--]

[He is. He sees things that aren't there, he hurts people, he's got to pop pills to keep himself from blacking out, losing time, wandering into the woods like there's something out there he needs. He's fucking crazy. He said it himself--she might be like them, which means there's a them, which means he's like Tim, even if they haven't locked him up yet.]

[Well, you know what they say about Wonderland.]

bet she'd love it even more if she had to find out herself
cause you took THAT so well right

i was 8 years old
how well was i supposed to take it

[Eight years old and huddling in the corner of a room alone and he hadn't realized it then, but that was the precise moment she stopped loving him. Or, at least - the precise moment she realized her fear of what might happen next outweighed her love for the boy who screamed and cried and sobbed and collapsed in a fit over invisible ghosts.]

if it's a problem then fine
i'll talk to her about it

no wait
god
no i meant like when you found the channel and got pissed off
not

[God bless text. If this were face to face, he knows he'd be stuttering.]

[Sorry, Max. Jay's just gone silent for a bit while he gets his head and mouth to start cooperating again. His hands are barely there, so he sends another message:]

i mean of course you freaked out back then
you were a kid

[Not every kid's got it together as well as Clem, and Jay's not sure it's a good thing for her, either.]

[It's still easier to think about her than about him, the child with the dark hair and the uncannily familiar eyes. Jay managed to meet him twice, and both times, he couldn't do a thing. Jay couldn't even calm him down, couldn't reassure him that he was trying to help.]

[Children shouldn't talk to strangers, after all.]

[Ignore it, shove it down. It's easier to talk about Max.]

[He rewrites his next message several times, cycling through variations on 'that's not your job,' 'if you're talking to her than so am i,' 'i'm talking to her', 'i'm coming with you,' 'just you?' 'seriously i'm already on the phone with her,' 'just let me do it,' 'we're both talking to her.']

if you're talking to her then i might as well come too

[God bless text.]

oh so you're talking about the time you stalked and filmed me for months without disclosing any of the personal information that was making my life hell for years
got it

[Forgiveness isn't a foreign concept for him. It's just that forgiving is generally a thing that good people do, and Tim is relatively solid in the belief that he's the furthest thing from it.]

this is my mess
i'll clean it up
you're not really the best at breaking this kind of news to people

[As evidenced by the fact that Tim had to find out by himself.]

yeah
the time you told me to come meet you in an empty parking lot in the middle of the night and attacked me
that time

[Sure, Tim might have had more of a right to give him a black eye than he'll ever have to complain about it, but he could have just not done that. They could have just talked, somewhere well-lit, maybe even somewhere public.]

she knew alex long before she knew either of us
and as far as i can remember you don't have a great track record at explaining things either

look if we both go you can keep me from saying something stupid

[And Jay can try and keep Tim from skipping over anything vitally fucking important. It all balances out, right?]

look me in the eye and tell me that if alex kralie hadn't told you the same you wouldn't have listened

[Maybe that's selling Jay short, but in Tim's experience, he's better off selling Jay short and being surprised when he expresses some fucking basic aptitude for the genre he's actually in.]

if you really think that's a good idea
i guess i don't have a say in it do i

i'm looking you in the eye right now
metaphorically

and i can't tell you that because i already did it once
not saying i'd do it AGAIN though
itd depend on the context

[If it's between meeting sketchy people who are pissed off at you in parking lots at night or losing your lead, the answer's obvious.]

[But that last bit. I guess I don't have a say in it, do I? Jay's never been the greatest at getting into people's heads; he can watch, and he can guess, and that's about it. Long way from Sherlock Holmes.]

[But he thinks he recognizes that feeling. It's watching himself getting dragged along by Alex, knowing there's something wrong but being unable to change course. It's scrambling for every scrap of information totheark can dole out, every line of cryptic bullshit buried in layers of more cryptic bullshit, and being unable to tell whether the words will ever fit together, if they ever meant anything in the first place. It's the feeling that somebody else has already handed you the script, that you just have to keep stuttering through take after take until the director hears what he wants.]

maybe we let max decide

i rest my case

[Does any of this even make sense with the context Max has? Jay wants to talk to her, and Tim wants to talk to her, and it's...what? A question of getting tag-teamed? Getting an intervention? It's his mistake, isn't it? It's his goddamn problem. It shouldn't be on her to figure out what comes next.]

[All this time and effort spent trying to get Jay to accept some goddamn accountability, and by the time it finally happens, this is what he's doing with it.]

fine
whatever
try and not make it weird when you ask her

can't guarantee that

[His eyebrow quirks up as he types, automatic, as if Tim would be able to see it through the screen.]

but i'll ask her

fine

[Can't guarantee that. At least he's honest about it.]

just tell me what she says

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burntvideocassette - 2018-10-14 07:00 (UTC) - Expand

ic inbox; entranceway

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cw: internalized ableism

cw: yep

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cw: internalized ableism, jay being dramatic

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