entrancelogs | + Let's go for a dreamwalk! + [OPEN PLOT CATCH-ALL]

"So, whaddaya say?" There's a young man sitting across from Tim, sprawled on the carpet of what Tim modestly calls his "music room" - an otherwise quite bare room in his apartment, with only the black squares of instrument cases and the upright stand of a keyboard to deviate from the nondescript blankness of the walls.

"I can't believe you talked me into this," says Tim. He's plucking disconsolately at the stringed instrument in his hands - a banjo, for anyone who can recognize it - without much enthusiasm. "I said I'd try it. I didn't think I'd actually get the part."

"Yeah, well." Brian glances from side to side before lowering his voice as though in confidence - despite the fact that they're very obviously the only two people here. "I don't think anyone else actually tried out."

Tim snorts. "Can you blame them? With that script..."

"Hey," says Brian, leaning back again, "you don't have to. Just figured it might be a nice way to branch out, y'know? I know Alex. We hang."

"God knows why."

Brian slings an empty beer can at Tim's head. It bounces off his skull with an appropriately hollow thunk. Tim's lips twitch in something that almost approximates a smile, and Brian grins.

"There's worse ways to make your acting debut," he says, teasing. Tim shakes his head.

But his mind's already made up.

Jay knows something's off the second he steps through the door. He feels numb, not emotionally but physically, even less "real" than he was in the last room.

When he takes in his surroundings, he realizes why.

He wouldn't be just another hallucination here; there's a nonzero chance he'd be recognized. And whatever this place is, dream or memory or time travel or whatever, seems like it doesn't want that to happen.

Physical form or no physical form, the sight of Tim's music room (which he's only ever seen on tapes) and Brian, whole and alive and as much of a well-meaning goofball as Jay remembers from the few times they talked, is enough to constrict Jay's throat with an unexpected wave of nostalgia.

Maybe Jay could've hung out with them for real, if things hadn't gone to hell.

He doesn't show up at all, really - no more or less a voyeur than he was in a past fraught with tapes, with snippets of memory caught on film and preserved for scrutiny from someone who couldn't remember the cheerful camaraderie of a far, far easier time.

"You know," says Brian, slowly, his eyes lighting up with the kind of spark that would indicate he's getting a hell of an idea. "I bet Alex hasn't got any clue what to do with the soundtrack."

"What d'you - "

"I mean that he's gonna need a composer." He forms one hand into a fingergun, smirking. "Right up your fuckin' alley, dude."

"I can't even read music."

"Listen to this guy." Brian jerks his chin to indicate the black squares of instrument cases liberally festooning every corner of the room. "What d'you call this, then? Hoarding?"

Tim shrugs helplessly. "'S a hobby."

"Says the guy studying music theory."

Jay snickers under his breath.

A hobby, Tim says. Jay takes advantage of his new ability to 'move the camera' and creeps along the perimeter of the room to get a closer look at the cases. Tough to determine what fits inside just based on the outside, but Tim's got a banjo out, and Jay recognizes a tiny case that could be the ukulele.

But it sounds like Tim really did study music theory. Jay wonders what those classes would've been like; he heard it was unexpectedly heavy on the math. Jay's not awful with math, but it just never kept his interest the way film did.

He wonders if music was the same for Tim.

However Tim felt about music, Alex was certainly excited when he heard somebody on his cast was an actual musician. Jay wasn't part of what little soundtrack work they did, but he remembers the glow in Alex's eyes when he talked about how they wouldn't have to use the royalty-free stuff this time. This was a real movie with a real soundtrack. Maybe they could sell CDs.

"You big liar." Brian's laughing, shaking his head as he adopts Tim's slightly higher drawl for a moment. "I can't even read music. C'mon, man, you love that stuff."

Tim doesn't have a response to that - nor does he exactly seem willing to deny it - so he simply bends over the banjo in his hands and starts plucking at the strings all the more intently.

It's not enough to fool Brian. His smirk drops, his eyebrows lifting in that irritatingly sincere way of his. The kind that assures the other party that he's not only completely and utterly earnest in the sentiment, but he's probably concerned on top of everything else. Tim studiously avoids his gaze.

He's had the practice.

"What's the hang-up?"

"Nothing," says Tim. "Nothing's the hang-up. Alex wants me to do something his...whatever, right?"

"I mean, it's not like you have to."

"You just said - "

"Yeah, but you're already stepping out there, y'know?" Brian lifts his shoulders in a shrug that's both infuriatingly noncommittal and barefacedly honest. "One thing at a time, buddy."

Man, Brian was...he really was nice, wasn't he? That was the impression Jay got, listening to him talking to Alex, but this is even more proof. He's picking up on things Jay doesn't even notice. Tim was playing the banjo again, but there must've been something different this time, because somehow Brian knew something was botherng him.

The guy knows (knew) how to talk about this stuff. Jay doesn't even know where to start.

And now one of them's dead, while the other one's...whatever Jay is right now.

Brian didn't deserve it. None of them did, but especially not Brian.

"I'll ask him about it, okay?" says Tim, wholly unprompted. "He doesn't even really know me. No idea why he'd say yes if he just - "

He trails off abruptly, his eyes darting about the contours of the room. Something about the atmosphere feels as though it's undergone some subtle shift, like there's something watching that wasn't. He has to...no.

He has to put that from his mind. He's doing better now. That isn't him anymore.

"...Tim?" Brian's staring at him with eyebrows raised. "You okay?"

"Yeah." But he hasn't stopped scanning the room for something that isn't there. "I'm fine."

Jay freezes.

Is Tim seeing him? Is that what this is? He's not looking directly at him, but he's looking around, like he knows something's there.

Running on instinct, Jay scrambles toward the back of the room. No way out except to leave completely, and nowhere to hide, but at least he's out of their direct line of sight.

The guilt still weighs on him. Can't get him in trouble. Not this time.

It's only when he's out of the way that Jay starts to consider other possibilities.

(Can't be. Not this early, right? It was just Tim before that summer, right?)

Anyone else would have teased Tim for spacing, for not paying attention, for acting kind of weird. He's heard it before, countless times. But Brian does nothing, says nothing, save for gaze at his friend from beneath lowered brows.

"I'm fine," says Tim, the annoyed grind to the words restoring some of his more typical demeanor. He's not losing it. He's fine. He's okay.

"I didn't say anything," says Brian - who doesn't even look offended by being snapped at, when any reasonable person would be. God, what's wrong with him? Can he just...act like a normal person and be frustrated, confused, unnerved by Tim's general appearance and general everything just like everyone else?

"Why're you even..." Tim trails off with a low huff, dragging a hand through his hair. "Forget it."

"Hey, it's fine. Forget I said it, okay?" Now Brian has both hands up in a peaceable gesture. "You don't have to worry about it. Alex probably has the soundtrack sorted anyway."

Tim's not looking around anymore. Things have calmed down. So it must be Jay, not...the other option.

Good. That's fine. That's significantly better.

Jay stays where he is, out of "sight".

Also, the idea that Alex already somehow has the soundtrack sorted is both funny (because Jay knows with absolute certainty that Alex was still nitpicking the script at this point) and actually not entirely unexpected (because it's Alex, the guy who shot DVD special features before he knew the movie was even going to be finished).

"That's not the problem." He just can't let it go, can he? Being a little...a little pain in the ass, as is his goddamn wont. Brian's all too happy to put this kind of thing to rest, but Tim - Tim's just pushing what doesn't need pushing. "I'm just..."

A shiver races down his spine, lifting the hairs on the back of his neck.

It's just in your head. It's all in your fucking head, Tim.

Brian leans forward.

"What?"

"Is it..." Tim grimaces as the gooseflesh pocks the skin of his arms. "It feel cold in here to you?"

The memories come up all at once, numbered and filed and categorized.

"Why is it so cold in June?" Entry 20, June ?, 2006

"Why are you wearing a jacket?" "It's pretty cold in here." Entry 17, June? ?, 2006

"Just wait 'til we're alone together, and I will tell you something new, something (c)old, something sleepy, something obscene, a piece in the long bright curve of space." Signal, November 4, 2009

It's too soon for this. It's too soon. They're not even out for summer yet.

But it's cold in here, isn't it? Jay doesn't even have a proper body, but he still feels it prickling at the not-skin of his not-physical form, and if he wasn't already starting to silently panic, that would be enough.

"No." Brian's look is quizzical, though no less concerned, and Tim deflates. So it's just him. Again.

"I'll be right back."

He sets down the instrument in his hands, slouching in the direction of the bathroom. Yanking out a little orange bottle from the cabinet by tired rote, shaking two capsules into his palm and gulping them down with a splash of tap water to grease their way.

He gets a good look at himself in the mirror.

"It's nothing," he says. "It's nothing. Get your head outta your ass."

So why is he still shivering?

Jay wants to scream at Tim that it's not nothing, don't you get it but again, no voice. He's just a suspended camera.

Brian's not feeling it. Now Jay's wondering how many times that thing was right there, and Jay didn't even notice. How many times did he see Tim wearing a jacket during the shoot? Long sleeves rolled down, even outside?

You'd think he'd be used to the creeping dread of learning stuff like this by now, but it's still just as potent as it was years ago.

He's still cold by the time he re-enters the room, but Brian's now tinkering on the keyboard ("complete with beats," says a ghost of a man that crests the very edges of the memory, a phantom remnants of something Tim can't help but associate with his old music room, and he begins to jiggle the camera in his lap in the parody of a bobbing head) in the absence of anything else to do. A prerecorded beat stutters out from the speaker, and he grins in that distracted, slightly goofy way of his that indicates that he finds even that tiny, stupid, simple thing to be somehow delightful.

Tim opens his mouth, as if to say something, but abandons the effort before he gets a word out, electing instead to slouch to the doorway.

"I think I'm gonna call it," he says, the words flat. "I'm pretty wiped."

Brian glances up with a furrowed brow.

"You sure?"

"Yeah." Tim jerks a thumb over his shoulder. "Feel free to crash on the couch if you want."

Complete with beats.

Now Jay's wondering what happened to that keyboard. Does Tim still have it back at his house? Would the closets give them a replacement? Unlikely, but maybe they'd get a drum machine at least. For whatever good that would do.

It's cold, but nothing's happening. Maybe it's just going to stay outside and watch.

(Not really an improvement, admittedly.)

Brian hums his assent, but eventually the keyboard claims his attention once more. Tim does not, as he implied, call it - not exactly. He slips a cigarette from the box in his pocket and lights it up just outside his doorstep, breathing smoke into the chill night.

Stepping outside doesn't alleviate the strange, leaden cold that's settled across his skin, seeded into his bones. Filling his lungs with heated smoke does nothing to dispel it either, and eventually he's reduced to running his fingertips up and down his arms to warm himself up.

There's a growl of approaching thunder, the telltale spiderweb of lightning illuminating the undersides of the clouds drawing ever closer.

Tim doesn't go back inside until he's finished his cigarette, and at that point, the rain has begun to fall in earnest. He shakes the wet hair from his forehead and locks the door behind him when he enters, shoulders hunched.

Which is roughly the time when a flung towel thumps him squarely in the chest.

He blinks water and alarm out of his eyes as Brian regards him with vaguely raised eyebrows.

"I hear it's way comfier to sleep in beds these days, actually." The levity to his tone suggests that this isn't the first time Tim has done this - though, in fact, this is probably the most lucid he's been while he did.

Tim only sighs and reluctantly begins to towel his hair dry.

Jay cowers as the towel goes flying past his head. It's harmless. It's fine.

As Tim reluctantly dries off, Jay's struck with a strange sympathy. Empathy? Whatever it is, he thinks he understands the urge that drove Tim to stay out those few extra minutes in the rain. He's done it more than a couple times himself, in the parking lot of one cheap motel or another, and he's not sure he'd be able to put to words the reason why.

It helped, somehow.

But now that they're inside, it makes sense to towel off. Air conditioning plus rainwater usually equals a nasty chill that's hard to shake. Maybe Brian knows that, too.

Now would be around the time where a muttered yes, Mom should be slid under the table, a sarcastic comment on Brian's insistent mother-henning. But having a friend who's simultaneously more present and more of a genuine friend than his mom ever was utterly defeats the intricacies of the joke, diminishing it by increments until it's not really a funny sort of comment so much as it is a solemn one.

The mood's low enough as it is.

Tim's hair is an absolute thorny nest of wet ruffles sticking up in random directions when he glances back in Brian's direction, but Brian has already started nosing his way into the kitchenette.

"Dude." He exits, holding a package of something aloft as though it's personally offended him. Squinting reveals that it's a cardboard box of cheap pizza rolls, some poorly-rationalized purchase that was hastily flung into the freezer and all but fused to the side with a dusting of ice crystals. "How long have these even been here?"

Tim shrugs, mystified.

Brian glances back at the box and dusts away some of the ice with his fingertips before relenting with a shrug.

"Eh," he says. "You gotta tray?

He disappears back into the kitchenette.

"Uh," says Tim.

Mere minutes later, there's the loud clatter and crash of a busted cookie sheet rattling over the tile.

"Shit, never mind - found it!" he calls.

Either the threat has passed, or Tim's doing a really good job at pretending it has, and Jay's suddenly struck with the idea that maybe he shouldn't be here. This isn't part of the investigation. Nobody taped this as some "DVD special feature" for a release that would never happen. He's just watching Tim and Brian make pizza rolls.

He steps back toward the door, and he's struck with another idea: He really doesn't want to leave.

Sure, he's hung out with people. He's had people who invited him over. But whatever this is, the weird, punch-drunk 1 a.m. fumbling with snacks? The sleepy banter? This is sort of what Jay imagines a sleepover would be like. With a couple of close friends. People who still want to stick around after midnight, and not because you're all working on some group project that's due at 8 the next morning.

Jay silently follows them into the kitchenette.

"Brian?"

Tim's entrance into the kitchen might be comedic, if he were someone capable of recognizing humor in such things: hair still stuck up on end, wet towel trailing behind him, bare feet still thawing from their contact with the rain-chilled pavement, his expression settled into a dull, blank sort of confusion in which his mind simply refuses to put the pieces together properly.

Brian has now started to hum as he rips open the plastic packaging within and starts to tip the pizza rolls out onto the tray. One of them cracks sharply when it slides across the tray and lands on the floor, and Brian is swift to scoop it up and replace it with its fellows, having decided the five second rule still applies.

"Mhm?" he says, now studying the stove with an attentiveness it doesn't wholly deserve.

"What, uh...what the hell're you doing?"

Brian apparently decides that trying to figure out how to work the oven at 1AM is too much, and starts rummaging through the cupboards in search of a plate.

"Making pizza rolls."

"Uh-huh," says Tim, mechanically. "Uh. Why?"

Brian shrugs as he transfers pizza rolls from tray to plate and proceeds to slide the entire lot of them into the microwave.

"'Cause I'm wired, and you're wired, and I'm hungry. Are you hungry?"

Tim glances from the microwave, humming as it begins its arduous, ill-advised task in heating a mess of frozen pizza rolls, to Brian, who's now replacing the tray as though he didn't just dump a bunch of ancient pizza rolls across its burnt-brown surface, and then down to the floor. His feet are still freezing, and his hair is still wet. The rainwater still soaks his shirt into clinging to the curve of his shoulders.

"...yeah," says Tim. "Okay."

He guesses he's pretty hungry after all.

Jay doesn't think he's hungry, though he's not sure if it's the lack of a body or just the fact that he's never been great at judging that stuff.

Still, watching the plate spin in the microwave is oddly engrossing. The times he's had pizza rolls instead of a proper meal (more than he'd like to admit), he's not sure if he's ever had them in the stove. Too long, too much effort, not worth it. It's food either way.

He glances back at Tim. Tim looks freezing. Jay wonders how long it'll take him to get another towel. Or change. Or something.

Brian grins at that, as though he's scored a personal victory, forming one hand into a fingergun that he jabs in the direction of what is possibly the most well-loved and well-used item in Tim's possession, with the arguable exception of some of his older instruments: his coffeemaker.

"Whaddaya say? No sleep tonight?"

Tim teeters on the edge of something for a moment longer before he finally huffs out through his nose - the closest he gets to a laugh - and drags the towel to drape it up over his neck. As if that's any kind of deviation from the norm, honestly.

"Y'know responsible students would be pulling all-nighters to...study," he says wryly.

"We can study. I mean, you can. You've got your music room and everything." He waves dismissively in the vague direction of said room. Tim snorts as he stumps out from the room. Time to change into something a little more appropriate for a bullshit all-nighter.

Is Jay ready for an all-nighter? He's already dreaming, he thinks, so...maybe?

While Tim gets changed, Jay hangs around Brian. Coffeemaker might not be as engrossing as the microwave, but it's something, and Jay's curious to see if Brian stays just as constantly on without Tim around or a camera rolling.

Is this hanging out? Not really. Is it getting to spend time with a long-dead ~~friend~~ classmate whom Jay genuinely sort of misses? He thinks so.

In Tim's mind? He certainly does. It's not that he thinks Brian is still just...Brian all the time, when no one's watching - it's the absence of anything else to fill the void. It's lacking a "real" Brian to paste over the guy who tips a generous amount of coffee grounds into the maker and fills it up, hitting the button to start it up with a low grumble of heating water.

"You're a bad influence." Tim's eyes itch with exhaustion that he knows won't go away, but now that they've agreed to partake in this sleepless endeavor, there's no point in backing out now. Not like he'd sleep very well even if he bothered to try.

"Thank you." Brian beams, brandishing the plate of pizza rolls with a flourish, like he's presenting them for critique on a cooking show. "Soup's on."

"I'm not eating those until I'm positive that it won't feel like I'm trying to eat a live coal." Tim eyes the still-steaming pizza rolls warily. "Are you sure those even heated up all the way through?"

Brian's lips pinch together in mock indignation.

"You doubt my ability to microwave a decent meal?"

"I doubt that my microwave is up to scratch," says Tim, jerking his chin in the direction of the offending appliance. "Microwaves only have two settings: Aactic, and volcanic."

+ Let's go for a dreamwalk! + [OPEN PLOT CATCH-ALL]

college; i don't blame you for not wanting to stay

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'you big liar.' BRIAN.

he is a liar c':

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oh NO brian is so good

THE PUREST BOY

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aactic

antaactica

shut the hell your mouth

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