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

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."

Jay snorts under his breath. There's an art to microwaving pizza rolls. You have to practice. You have to get to know your microwave.

Or you have to get used to just sucking it up and eating half-frozen, half-blisteringly hot pizza rolls. Your choice. Jay's done both.

"Your loss," says Brian, who bites into the first pizza roll he snags between his fingertips - and immediately starts hooting in apparent agony when the interior scorches the roof of his mouth.

One of Tim's hands jerks up over his mouth, but there's no mistaking it - underneath it all, he's actually biting back a smile.

"You dumbass," he manages, the word both strangled and companionable. "The hell'd you expect?"

"Aaagh," says Brian, bolting to the sink to spit up the offending incendiary contents.

Tim takes advantage of his friend's lapse in focus to double over in his seat, shoulders shaking with suppressed mirth.

Jay winces when Brian bites into the dangerously hot pizza roll, but he's immediately distracted by Tim pulling a hand up to cover his mouth. Is Tim...smiling?

Then he calls Brian a dumbass, and Jay's sure of it. This might be the best time he's ever seen Tim have. Ever. In all the ~~years?~~ months they've known each other.

These two seriously were good friends, just like Tim said. They could hang out, tease each other about overheated pizza rolls, even crack a smi--now Tim's laughing. Tim Wright is actually laughing.

Jay screws his eyes shut, hit with a wave of homesick nostalgia so strong he's not even sure it belongs to him.

"Screw you, man," says Brian, still breathing in that slightly misshapen, halting way that people do when they eat something that's far too hot and don't want to spit it out. "I'm dying over here."

"I told you." Tim Wright is laughing, and what's more, he actually sounds like he means it. "That stuff is molten."

Brian makes a sound that sound suspiciously like retching as he yanks Tim's trash bin out from the cupboard under the sink - and then proceeds to stick his head directly beneath the kitchen sink and turn it on.

"Ech."

"God. Look, here."

Tim nudges the freezer open, shoveling a handful of ice cubes into an empty glass and thrusting it in Brian's direction. Brian opts to skip over the process of filling the glass with water, and instead tosses his head back and sucks two ice cubes into his mouth, moaning with pained relief.

"Thanmkf."

Tim manages to smooth his expression back into something resembling his typical deadpan look - though a hint of a smile still flickers at the corners of his lips.

"Don't mention it."

This is genuinely entertaining, in a way most of the old footage wasn't. Jay wishes they'd been able to bring half this chemistry into the movie with them.

At least they weren't necessarily the worst actors on set. If Alex had actually given him any lines, Jay suspects he would've been granted that honor.

Maybe Brian will come to Wonderland, still stained from whichever wound finally killed him--maybe Alex got him with the stick of rebar, like he did with Tim--but stitched back together the way Jay was.

Maybe he'll be better at making pizza rolls.

Brian's laughter chimes distantly, but it's like hearing it through a thick pane of glass, and the image of him crunching on a couple of ice cubes starts to hum as it fades and fogs around the edges.

There's a skip, like a tape hitching at a stop-start.

...

"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.

The memory begins to play again.

"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."

Oh.

Tape's ended.

Jay's not sure why he expected anything else.

Slowly, Jay backs out of the music room, out of the apartment, and shuts the door behind him.

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

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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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