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

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[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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And they've officially lapsed back into the conversation regarding things Tim definitely doesn't want to talk about. His jaw tightens as he glances away, laterally. Should've held onto things for longer than he did. But he hadn't - there hadn't been a body when Jay disappeared to wherever he disappeared to. He was still, lifeless, as he lay there, but even if his image was snared on the camera, fingers crusted with red, was there ever any guarantee that it was real? Any of it?

He'd had nothing else to bury. He'd had nothing else to signify the passage of a man that no one else would remember to mourn.

Maybe he never should've bothered. Letting him go wasn't any easier the second time around.

A muscle in Tim's jaw flexes once, twice, but he nods.

"Yeah," he says, at last. "It's still there. For all the good that does."

Letting out an audible sigh of relief, Jay leans forward bonelessly, nearly doubled over on the bench seat. He screws his eyes shut, waiting until he no longer feels a prickling at the corners.

It's still there. It's still there, even though he's gone. The one worthwhile thing he's ever done in his sorry life, and it's actually managed to outlive him. The viewers will remember him, even if nobody else does.

"Thanks," he manages hoarsely.

He's thanking him for what, exactly? For letting him persist digitally, because he never could in any other way? What the hell kind of memoriam is that?

He deserved more of a funeral, more of a send off, than just being a fixture on a silent YouTube channel, something to accrue pointless views for people who should never have to glimpse that level of horror.

"Dunno why you're thanking me." He still fucking got him killed, didn't he?

"I mean, you had the password." He isn't looking at Tim. "You could've deleted it. But you didn't."

Unconsciously, he places a hand on the camera. He still doesn't look up.

"So, thanks."

"Didn't exactly have anything else to..."

Remember him? Commemorate him? How the hell are you meant to talk to someone about the nature of their own death after the fact, after you watched it happen, led to it happening, because you left him tied up and screaming in your own damn house and expected that to be enough.

They're touching on that which he never thinks about, that which he tries not to think about, and more than anything, he needs to run. Needs to get as far out and away from this conversation as possible.

His fingers squeeze into fists. It's difficult, as always, to meet Jay's eyes.

He didn't have anything else to...do? To what?

Jay looks over, and he can see the tautness in Tim's shoulders, down his arms to his fists. He's seen him like this before, and he wonders if prying any further will net him another black eye, or maybe another breakdown like the one in the hospital.

'Maybe this is all my fault!'

But Jay went to 79 Creek Street. Alex shot him. That thing took him.

If the hooded man slit his throat with that knife on the floor of Tim's house, then it would be a different story. If that thing found him while he was still trapped, zipties biting into his wrists, then it would be a different story. All Tim did was string him along.

He knew the truth about Jessica--at least part of it--when he died. If he didn't, if Tim had still been using him to get to Alex, it would be a different story.

Still, what's Tim thinking?

Jay cocks his head in Tim's direction. Go on.

Edited 2017-06-23 15:46 (UTC)

He's waiting for him to keep talking. Like an explanation will do anything but make every inch of this worse, hammering home just how useless he was, how much of an abject failure Tim was, up until the end. A failure as a friend or an ally or whatever the hell Jay wants to call them, a failure as someone who just wanted things to go right, a failure as someone who offered a way out. Falling short on every conceivable level. Lying, hiding, shuttering things away, right up until the end. The source. The problem.

Jay's looking at him, expectant. Like that will fix anything, like an explanation will make any of this go away. Like that'll make any of what happened to Jay better, easier, more palatable.
I didn't want to believe you were gone.
He doesn't talk about this, just as a rule. Who would he have talked about it with? And now he's up against the person he failed to help, failed to save, failed in every possible way, and whatever needs saying is dissolving into nothing beneath the unrelenting pressure of his own thoughts.
I kept waiting for you to come back.
"I never...you never showed up again." Well, no. That's a lie. "I mean, I saw on the camera what happened, and, and I remember seeing you - seeing your body, but it was gone when I checked, so it was like you were never..."
I should have tried harder.
He was alive.
I'm sorry.
He was alive when It took him, and he spent his final moments in pain, afraid, and who knows how fucking long it took for him to finally -

Why the hell did he bring this up?

Tim kept the channel because he was gone.

He was gone because that thing--

Something in his head skips back through the haze of static, stitching together memories in fragmented pieces. Concrete split by gnarled roots, branches silhouetted against an orange sky. Where's the camera? Feeling himself sink, clutching his side as the water fills his lungs. A moment of quiet, somewhere familiar, dripping lakewater onto the carpet. He'd come back. He'd come back soon, the filthy liar, and he'd help him to his feet, and they'd run.

"I was there. I was back. I remember, I--"

But that wasn't really Tim's house, was it? Not with the way it slipped at the edges of his vision, not with the way the trees grew right up to the window.

He doesn't remember anything after that.

"You remember?" His head jerks up at that, eyebrows lifting in something that isn't quite hope, but perhaps approximates it. He remembers what, exactly? Does he even want to know what it is Jay is remember? Does he want to know how much of him was conscious for the rest of it? How long he lingered, alone and in pain and afraid and without the camera he'd screamed for, screamed for?

Perhaps, like Jay, he should learn to put his impulse aside, the desire for answers aside, in favor of what's comfortable.

(But what's comfortable in this state of perpetual unknowing?)

"What...how much do you...?"

(You're making another mistake, Tim.)

Jay digs his nails into the fabric of his jeans, balls his hands into fists. It stings, but it's solid. It's not moving.

"I think I was...where you were. Before. There was water."
are you drowning
He can barely manage a monotone. His head's cocked at an odd angle, and he can feel the ache start to set in, but he doesn't want to move. He's safe like this, and he doesn't want to move.
do you know me? i will always know you.
"I was in...I knew..." He grits his teeth. "It looked like your house, but it wasn't. It was...wrong."

He spits the last word, remembering too clearly the creeping horror of the place, the way the colors split and crackled at the edges of his vision, the way it felt like it stopped existing when it wasn't observed.

It was wrong.

His house, but at his feet was the bright crinkle of pages, the scrawled words splayed out like dead lives. Words scribbled on a mirror, an indictment he didn't to see to know, right down to his bones.

Was he...

Was he awake for that? Did he hear Tim, see him materialize, his fists clenching over rumpled paper? Did he hear him call his name, a nervous, whispering prayer?

His throat contracts in a painful swallow. Water. A world warped around him, the same as the one he remembers but different, refracted in subtle ways he couldn't define. Wrong. Wrong.

"You remember that?"

"Pieces," Jay manages.

It hurts to remember. There's a crushing weight on his chest, wrapped around his throat, and he can feel the muscles in his neck pull taut. But he needs to think through it, needs to bring it back. He didn't have the camera then, so this is all he has.

He remembers exhaustion. He remembers the way his eyelids slid shut as his vision warped and blurred, as his head buzzed with dizziness. He remembers fighting it, trying to scream for help and move, at least, but nothing responded. Not now, not yet--!

And then it stopped. He couldn't move, could barely think, but he was there. Trapped on the edge of death. Paused.

Because he couldn't sleep, he waited.

Sounds filtered through, once or twice.

"I remember...noise." His inflection's off, he can hear it, but he can't bring himself to speak naturally. "Hard to..."

Hard to hear through the static, through the sluggish thrumming of his own blood in his ears.

Pieces. The longer he strains to remember, the less of a good idea it sounds like. He starts to look unmoored, like he's utterly adrift. One step forward, and Tim falters. Recalls the uncontrolled way Jay had scrambled off from on top of him, paranoid and fearful. Something as simple and bracing as a hand on the shoulder might end up doing more harm than good.

Tim would know, wouldn't he?

Figures. Figures it wouldn't be this simple. Asking at all, pushing and prying like this - didn't he learn anything from Jay? It's a fucking mistake is what it is, and now he's getting burned for it.

Even worse, Jay is the one getting burned.

"Jay?" He draws the word out several syllables past its termination, weighted and wary. "Jay."

Shoulders hiked up, he turns to face the source of the noise--Tim, that's Tim. The cold prickles at his arms, even under the sweatshirt, and he crosses them over his chest.

He thinks he made some kind of noise of acknowledgement, a hum and a tilt of the head, but he's still not sure, not with the fizzing in his skull as loud as it is. His thoughts are jumbled; something interrupted something and now everything's out of order.

It's sunny outside. He's in the garden. Still in the garden.

The camera--? He reaches for it, and his hand hits familiar plastic. It's here. It's not gone. He didn't take it. It's still here.

Tim, also. Jay thinks he was here before, but something--he's coming back, he's coming back--makes it unsure.

"You're...still here?" He's not sure if it makes sense. It should make sense.

Fuck.

Whatever it is he just remembered, whatever repressed memories he just unearthed for Tim's sake, it's not worth it. He looks - shaken. He looks like someone who has to affirm that the physical world still exists, and that he's a part of it. Who could blame him? The man died, for god's sake. He died, and now Tim's asking him to casually relive the precise moments of how it happened in excruciating detail, as if that wouldn't hit just as hard as whatever Tim can dredge of his time in Rosswood, in a windowless hospital room.

"Yeah," says Tim, slowly. "I'm still here. Jay, are you...?"

He's not okay.

He's not okay, and he should've gotten help months before this. Even now, is he remotely willing to admit that he still needs it? Death doesn't make something like that go away, does it? In theory, it's meant to, but no suicide hotline in existence bothers to elaborate on what happens once you die and then bother to come back.

"You're in Wonderland. Remember?" Talk slowly. Evenly. Pull the words out. "It's okay."

It's the furthest thing from okay.

And whose fault is that?

He's in Wonderland. It's okay.

Sluggishly, something like normal thought patterns start to reassert themselves. He's in Wonderland. He's on a bench in the gardens in Wonderland, and it's summer, and he's still got a sweatshirt on because he had a chill this morning he couldn't shake off.

He called Tim out to talk about--

He doesn't want to think about that.

He's in Wonderland. It's okay.

There's an event coming soon, and Wonderland itself might be an alien intelligence, and there are people who watch from behind the mirrors and scrawl messages on the glass, but not right now.

It's okay.

The shame starts to sink in, and Jay reaches up to rub at his eyes, to cover them.

"Sorry. I'm...I'm good."

Never should've asked. Never should've pried. Didn't he learn from Jay's own ill-advised endeavors? Didn't he learn not to fucking dig into someone else's secrets?

"You sure?" He doesn't look okay. Then again, Jay always looks like he's at the very end of his rope, plagued by sleepless nights and worn to a thready skeletal frame. "You look kinda..."

He doesn't complete the thought.

"Should've gotten you help back home. I should've - " He trails off again, jaw setting. He'd tried. He'd tried but it hadn't resolved itself, largely because Jay couldn't go in for mental health treatment if he was dead.

"Tim, I'm not--" It comes out on a ragged laugh, because really? Are they seriously doing this again?

He hears himself, and he doesn't like how strained his voice sounds.

He's not sick. He's not hallucinating, he's not blacking out and running around with a mask on at night, and he's not hurting people.

(That excuse doesn't work so well anymore, does it? Not after the knife--but really, that must have been for intimidation, because he couldn't have been planning to use it--and not after his first night here. Not after Jay's grip on Tim's throat and Tim's blood on his hands.)

But that isn't what this is about. This is about him being upset--and yeah, he's upset, he can't deny that--about remembering getting hurt. Remembering something awful. That happens all the time. It makes sense. It's normal.

Tim's projecting his own issues, as if what worked for him would work for everybody, but Jay's not like that.

"Look, I've just...seen things I maybe shouldn't have. That's all."

Fuck yes they are doing this again. Jay should have been seeing a doctor as soon as he started sleepwalking and filming himself, not years after the fact. If nothing else, starting to see things that weren't really there, seizing on the floor, forgetting everything from his home address to his name in a hotel room bed - those were warning signs that never should have been ignored.

"We have time here. Resources." Yeah, okay, he's apparently given up all pretense of stepping around the topic. Go for the throat. 'Cause that always goes well where Jay is concerned. "Jay, you've been dealing with stuff like this for years. Only difference is you finally had someone around to point out that it was a problem."

"A problem? Is that what it is?"

Everything he does--everything--is in response to a very real, tangible threat. Several tangible threats, really, and if Tim won't acknowledge that, then yeah, he is the one that's crazy.

Jay rises from the bench, shoulders hiked, hands out.

"Remembering the place where I died, that's a problem? Or--or seeing that thing, when you said it wasn't there, but then it shows up on the tape--!" The words rip from him. "Is that a problem? The coughing fits, the--the blackouts...Tim, we know what's causing them, so it's not...It's not in our heads, so why are you still treating it like it is?"

Edited 2017-06-25 05:46 (UTC)

"Because this kind of stuff doesn't just go away, Jay." They're yelling, now. This is where they're at. They've progressed to this, to the typical aggression, squaring off like there's a referee about to throw a handkerchief.

At least it's familiar. Easier, in its own way. And how fucked up is that?

"The fact that you're still carrying around that - " And he jabs a finger at the camera, glowering at it like it's personally offended him, " - just about proves it. Are you sleeping at all? Do you have to keep rewinding the tape to make sure that what you just saw was actually there?"

"I'm not hallucinating." He's not, he's not. He's exhausted, that's the problem. The way the shadows stretch at the corners of his vision, that's just what happens if you get two hours of sleep a night. The human body's not built to work that way. "That's not--that's not what the camera's for."

"And...and sure, I've been having some trouble sleeping, but that's because your Mirror... did something to me!"

The way those words just made sense, the way they made him want to read more, to write back to the Mirror the same way--it's not him. It can't just be in his head; those ideas can't be his.

"Right. Like you haven't been having trouble sleeping since this whole thing started."

Goddamn it. Goddamn that little prick and his morbid fascination with reawakening the things that are finally, finally vaguely dormant in their lives. Only it's not, really, is It?

Maybe It never will be.

He blows out a low, frustrated breath, shutting his eyes. Just...start again. "What do you have to lose from trying?"

What does he have to lose from trying? He hadn't really thought about it from that angle, not much, but his mind quickly supplies a list of worst-case scenarios.

"What if...the doctors don't understand what's going on?" He starts to pace. "Which they won't, because we can't exactly explain what we saw without...what happened to you. So we're gonna end up giving them only part of the story, one way or another, so they might wind up with the wrong diagnosis, so they might wind up giving me the wrong treatment, which could be, y'know, bad."

He doesn't want anyone else messing around in his head. Never again.

He can't exactly say he's wrong, exactly. It took doctors years to pin down whatever was wrong with Tim, eventually settling for a diagnosis that probably wasn't even correct. Hallucinations that were only hallucinations some of the time, and he's still not entirely sure how much of those were hallucinations.

"Right, except this isn't home anymore." He shakes the bottle in hand with the rattle of capsules snapping against plastic. "And this helped you, don't forget."

It's not as if Jay could have consented to it, but given what few resources they had on hand, what other choice did he have?

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cw for internalized ableism and ten tons of denial

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cw: same as before

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cw: back at it again

DAMN DANIEL

BACK AT IT AGAIN WITH THE CAMERA AND THE OVERWHELMING DENIAL

cw discussion of forced institutionalization, nonconsensual drugging