postictal | ic inbox; entranceway

[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

will do

[Jay's still getting used to being on this side of it. The closest he's ever gotten is with Jessica, and even then, he had a gaping hole in his memory. He didn't even get the chance to explain what little he did know.]

[But it'll work this time.]

[It'll be fine.]

[After all, he won't be doing it alone.]

ic inbox; entranceway

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cw: internalized ableism

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cw: internalized ableism, jay being dramatic

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