entrancelogs | [Closed] Some things can never be spoken. Some things cannot be pronounced.

Entry tags:

[Closed] Some things can never be spoken. Some things cannot be pronounced.

Who: Jay and Tim
Where: The gardens
When: 6/18
Rating: PG - PG-13
Summary: Jay attempts to explain what he learned without explaining how he learned it
The Story:

It's supposed to be summer. That's what the people on the network said. Jay hoped he'd be able to step outside and warm up, at least a bit, but he just can't shake the chill. He tried to get the closet to replace his old hoodie--brown and worn thin from years of use--and to its credit, it did a decent job. It's the right color, and roughly the right size, but it's new and stiff and still needs to be broken in. It's not familiar, but at least it's warm.

Jay zips it up to his neck as he approaches the garden, eyes darting to the short shadows cast by the hedges. He tries to think about literally anything but the word that's been looping in his head since his conversation with the Mirror several days prior, but consciously trying just makes it worse. He remembers the conversation, and what he remembers is supported by the footage he's been watching and rewatching since he woke up the morning after. It reminds him of when he first found the tapes, that first massive shift in perspective.

He has to talk through it. Tim's the only one he knows who might immediately benefit from the knowledge. Tim's the only one who might understand.

Jay scans the benches, looking for him.

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Great. He didn't want to get into it, but Tim's asking, and it's not like he can just say, "No, that's none of your business," and walk away. Not at this point. He still doesn't really get what happened, even after watching the video back again, even after feeling the same way as before when he'd transcribed the exchange in a spiral notebook he'd gotten from the closet.

(Even when he'd transcribed the Mirror's words a few more times on the following pages, scribbling replies in the margins.)

"I mean I started...talking back." That's not enough. "The same way. Or...similar. And at the moment, it made sense, I guess."

"Like...code?" No. No, that's not right. That's not what Jay's been saying, but what he's been saying doesn't make any damn sense no matter how he slices it. "But it was you doing the talking, right? Not, not someone..."

Someone else. Something else, because this is how it started with Tim, and Jay never really got the help he needed to prevent it. He was someone else, someone far more familiar, before It got to him in Rosswood. He was apologetic, and then - not.

Does he remember leaving that message? Would it just be simpler, better, if he lets it fade into a selective memory?

"No, yeah." He knows what Tim's trying to say, and he knows that can't be it. He's not like that. He loses time, but he doesn't...the camera would have shown if he'd started running around with a mask on. He's not like Tim. "It was me. I remember doing it."

"And it wasn't code. It was--" Jay cuts himself off before he can say 'poetry'. That's not...he shouldn't say that. "--different. Like I just said whatever came to mind. And like everything he said made sense. And I didn't realize it was...weird until later."

Like maybe he's tapping into something similar. Something that could eventually swell into a masked thing, running around while Jay's mind remains shrouded in static, the divide between the inquisitive, apologetic man on the phone and the man who came armed with zipties and a knife and snarled for his camera deepening to a gulf.

Did his Mirror know? Was he trying to...what? Lure that out of him?

Something beneath the skin of his arms crawls.

"What do you think that means?"

And that's the real question, isn't it? The one Jay doesn't want to answer.

But Tim's asking, and trying not to think about it just makes Jay think about it more. He can't just ignore this. If he were living on the road again, traveling by himself, maybe he could put it off a little longer, but the persistent drumming in his skull says, "not by much."

"It could mean...a few things." Jay looks down at the camcorder screen, watches Tim that way. "Maybe your Mirror knows how to...say stuff that targets your subconscious. There was this book I read back in high school where people did that, but it wasn't...real. Obviously." Off to a great start. "Maybe that thing was...around after all." He mutters that last part quietly enough that Tim might not even hear it. "Maybe I'm just tired."

Jay knows there's another option. He also knows that if he doesn't at least acknowledge it, Tim will bring it up himself, and that's somehow worse.

"Maybe it's something...left over. From before."

Maybe he's just susceptible to being strung along, carrot-and-stick, by whoever offers answers. But he doesn't say it. That would just be salt in the wound, and that's something neither of them particularly need.

More than anything he wants to wrest the camera away from him, fling it as far away as possible, watch it scatter into pieces on the impact. His fingers jerk into a fist and out again as he muzzles the impulse, instead settling for taking another drag that fuzzes in his lungs.

"He's...smart." He doesn't confirm or deny what Jay's saying, exactly, but he deserves to have the whole story, here. Every piece of every puzzle. "He gets under your skin. And I've - "

He swallows thickly, quite suddenly unable to meet either Jay's gaze or his third eye in the form of the camera lens.

"I've seen It. Just...not regularly. It's always been an event or something."

It's here. Now two people have confirmed it.

Or, at least, it's been here. It might still be here. If it's gone, it could easily come back.

Jay forces himself to breathe a little slower, tries to calm the tremors he can feel building in his arms. Keep the camera steady. This is normal. This is normal, now. It would be stranger if it hadn't followed them here.

"How long?" Jay tries to keep his voice even. "Before the next event?"

A while back, Jay heard someone, a guy with bandages on his face, talking about an event where the Mirrors crossed over to their side. "He's smart," Tim had said. Smart enough to say just the right things in just the right way to take control. You can't do that, you can't speak that convincingly unless you know enough to make it plausible.

That's why, Jay suspects, he's never been any good at lying. That's why he'll need to talk to the Mirror again at some point. He just needs to figure out how to pry the truth out of him.

He's not helping. He's really not, is he? Feeding the paranoia that had Jay pinning him to the ground within moments of seeing him again. The Mirror can play off that if he likes, and he will, he knows he will. And Jay will keep talking to him, like it doesn't matter. Like he's reliable.

"Well, the last one was before you arrived, so..." His internal clock has never been the most reliable either, it turns out. And the answer he has is far, he knows, from reassuring. "Soon. I think."

By the of this week or the start of the next one.

Soon.

Jay addresses the viewfinder screen, watching Tim filtered through glass and pixels. "At least it sounds like it follows...some kind of schedule."

Patterns are good. Predictability is good. He hadn't had nearly enough of either in the past few years.

"Anything I should know?" Not that Tim would tell him, a quiet part of him whispers. "Before my, uh...first one?"

Follow a schedule it does, albeit a fluxing one. But if it means Jay has a slightly higher chance of survival, it helps in the long run.

Tim breathes in, slow and deep. Bracing. If it helps Jay through it -

He owes him.

He owes him.

"It...they vary." Oh right. Very helpful, Tim. thanks for that. "Sometimes they make you...forget yourself, kind of. Like, there's a world that you have to fit into, so it makes you feel like you've always fit into it."

Jay inhales. Exhales. Tries very hard not to consider the full implications of what Tim's just said.

"It happens to everyone, right? So I can't just ask you to..." To tell him what's real. Because if Tim's affected, too, they can't check each other. Great. Just great.

"That first night I was here. You said the events are temporary. So it'll be over soon, and then it...puts us back the way we were, right?"

Wrong. Georgia told him otherwise, later that night. He remembers now, though the memory's patchy. She said he could "lose a word" if the event came from his world.

"Well, unless it's...ours."

Tim knows, doesn't he? He has to know. He's been here longer.

He's gonna be fine. It'll be fine. He knows how things work here by now, and he can walk him through it. He owes him this, owes him an explanation for something in his life, even if it's not any of the dozens of things from home that he never got around to explaining.

"If it is ours, we'll know." He tries to sound more certain of it as he says it - more certain than he has any right to. "Most of the time it's...someone else's world. Someone else's memories that we get stuck with for a little while. Usually something like two or three days."

It's far from the sort of orientation Jay deserves. But since when has he had a cause to trust anything Tim's said?

Two or three days. He can manage two or three days.

"And if it's ours, we...forget for real." Jay slumps, defeated. "I guess that's how we know, assuming it's not...obvious."

Jay glances up at Tim before returning his focus to the camera. There's something reassuring, he admits, about working with someone else again. He can't let his guard down this time, and he knows there are things Tim's still not telling him, but in the situations where it won't benefit Tim to lie, maybe it'll be a good thing he's there. Maybe it'll make things safer for both of them.

For some reason, Rosswood comes to mind.

"You still...I mean, you won't always be able to keep filming everything." Jay probably requires fair warning, if he's still going to be wandering around with a camera. Again the urge to tear the thing out from his hands and watch it fragment on the ground itches at his fingers, but he settles instead for a bracing inhalation of nicotine, letting it fill his lungs and burn at his throat.

"Sometimes supplies are kind of...limited." And sometimes the time period simply doesn't allow for cameras.

That gets Jay's attention.

"Wait, you mean this place can just...?"

It makes them forget. It makes them forget and won't let him keep the camera. Just like before, zip-tied on the floor of Tim's living room, telling him to please, just leave him this one thing--

He can't think about that right now.

"Well, if it can take that, what else can it take? We--we keep these, right?" Fumbling, Jay pulls the communicator out of his pocket with his free hand.

"Sometimes."

Can't make any promises, because Wonderland loves its illogical twists and turns. Loves throwing them for new loops when it can. Can never assume that things will simply act in a way that's recognizable, or even familiar.

"It...kinda depends on where we end up. Or, uh, when." Because time is pretty non-linear here, and anachronisms just seem to be part of the general trade deal. "Sometimes we don't get anything."

One corner of his mouth twists at that, his reluctance visible. And then he slides a familiar little orange bottle from his pocket with a rattle of white capsules, rolling it between his fingers.

Up to and including the necessities.

He sees the bottle, and the realization sets in.

"That's not--" Right? Fair?

They spent nearly five years figuring out how to protect themselves from the inevitable, how to minimize the damage from a situation neither of them fully understood, and now they have to deal with the possibility of it all being taken away. No warning, just a vague schedule. Just "soon".

Wonderland wants them to forget.

"Alright, if we can't--" He forces a breath through his constricted throat. "If we don't have...supplies, we can at least meet up. Try to..."

Jay shakes his head. Try to what? Keep an eye on each other? Since when have either of them been any good at that?

Try to organize, maybe. Cooperate? Because Tim's just so agreeable when he's off his fucking meds, right? That's gone really well for the both of them, whenever that's happened.

He suppresses, barely, a huff of frustration at that. Now's far from teh time.

"Hard to know if we're gonna still be in Wonderland when events can pretty much take us wherever." So where do they meet? "It'd be nice if we could form a better plan than trying to figure out where each other is, seeing as we don't always even get a network, but..."

He trails off with a reluctant, meaningful shrug. Yeah. That's where they are.

That's where they are.

Stuck with the world's most stressful game of Marco Polo, unless they can come up with a better plan.

Jay rocks his head back, frustrated, and stares up at the sky. Too bad he's not any good with constellations. That and, depending on the limits of "wherever", the constellations might not even be consistent.

"I don't really want to say, 'Let's wing it,' for something like this, but..." He guesses it's worth mentioning, stupid or not. "Best idea I have so far is figuring out what's north and walking 'til we hit a wall."

Assuming they're allowed to exist in the same place, and not - not fucking stuck in separate rooms, the way certain events have played out. The room where white cubes bobbed gently up and down, and Zacharie tried to act as though he wasn't falling apart at the seams. The room with the tape that Max hadn't wanted to see. The room where he and George had worked together with visible distaste and reluctance, not conceptualizing where they'd end up months down the line.

"I don't think we really can form a plan," he mutters, and shit does that sound like the most hypocritical thing possible, coming from him. "Not for this, anyway. Just...you know."

Try to stay together. Try to work together.

And for the love of god, try not to die.

Just do what they've always done.

With a weary sigh, Jay settles onto the nearest bench. He allows himself to close his eyes, since he knows the camera's still running on the seat beside him.

If he keeps quiet for long enough, he knows the broken-record loop will start up again. He'll reach for the camcorder, rewind, play back what he just heard. Block out the things the Mirror told him and the things he remembered on his own.

But for now, at least, things are familiar. Not good, and not safe by any stretch of the imagination, but familiar.

Still recording every minute of every day. Still losing huge swathes of his life to winding things back, starting and stopping, on the off chance that something might have happened that he didn't see. Or, even if he did see it, completely neglect its existence in favor of denying the vague possibility that something might be wrong with him.

"You're not..." A sigh. He didn't particularly want to have to ask this, but he might as well. "You aren't still gonna be making entries, are you?"

Because Tim got enough of his personal life being broadcasted back home.

"No, not anymore." The annoyance is clear in his voice. "Network doesn't really have anywhere decent for archiving video."

He'd been examining the structure of the Network since the night he arrived, poking and prodding and looking for anything beyond just a place for discussions. So far, nothing.

"'M thinking about setting up a server or something where I can back up the footage. We've got the closets, so it's not like I'm gonna run out of disk space." He stares blankly at the ground as he speaks, focused on the plans drawn up in his head. "The originals might go in one of those...cash boxes or a safe or whatever, but I'd have to make sure nothing happened to the combination."

There's a sarcastic twist to the last few words, as Jay thinks back to his last night with Jessica.

The network has its archive, but the further back you go, the harder it seems to track anything that needs tracking. It archives absolutely everything, not allowing for more selective searches. Scrolling through each post looks like the sole, inefficient method of tracking what's been said.

No wonder Jay's disgruntled.

"You have the original tapes?" The words tug at the corners of his mouth, furrowing his brow. A flash of trepidation, briefly pulling at his attention with a sharp yank.

"Just what I've recorded since I got here."

A sigh hisses through his teeth. Tim got rid of the originals back home, if he'd been telling the truth a couple weeks ago. The idea he could even...think to do that rattles Jay to his core.

Jay's still dead, so it doesn't affect him personally, but...but no, it really does. The tapes from the shoot were the only remnants he had--the only remnants anyone had--of Alex before things went wrong. Without those tapes, Alex Kralie could have easily become a nonentity. Without Jay, nobody would have known or cared or remembered some no-name film student who went missing, who wandered into the woods and never came back.

And now Jay's own footage, the raw record of his own existence, is gone.

"Look, back home, you didn't...the channel's still up, right?"

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cw internalized ableism again lol

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