entrancelogs | i've got demons running 'round in my head [open]

“It’s better than nothing, right?” Any further suggestions are abruptly cut short when long, clawlike appendages work through the dense cloud of perfumed steam and curve around the door with a menacing click. The yellow of its eyes aren’t just for show anymore - the twin beams sweep across the space with slow, searching morons, and Tim unconsciously tries to worm back.

It won’t have to look long. Just until it sees the only two living things in the room.

Two knives and a lighter...and a building made of wood. He glances down at the lump in his pocket and draws it out, displaying the lighter to Jay with a meaningful lift of eyebrows.

If they can lure it somewhere dry enough...

What's Tim--oh.

If the shadow wasn't right there, Jay would have some harsh words for that plan. Sure, they're in a building made of wood, but so's everyone else. If there was even remotely a chance of fire working, they'd have to keep it from eating up the whole bathhouse. Granted, water's in good supply, but still. Still. Jay glares back at him.

(Still. It might work if they're fast enough.)

Jay bends down, feeling around for something to throw, something to catch the creature's attention for a second. It works in movies; no reason why it wouldn't work here.

Jay slips against the wet tile, catches himself against the wall.

The noise is enough.

The creature's gaze locks onto Jay instantly, and his own eyes widen in response.

"Go, go go go go--!" he blurts out as he stumbles back to his feet, bolting off at an odd angle. Distract it. Draw its attention. Maybe Tim can, can do something, can run, whatever.

Shit.

The floors are too slick and slippery. The thing that used to be that mirror image of Jay swings its too-bright gaze around, throwing Jay into sharp and skeletal relief for a blazing second. It's enough for that to make Jay the new target - as always.

(It's every chair he tripped over, every light he turned on, every time he knocked on the house he meant to break into, every beam of flashlight cutting through the uniform dark and telegraphing his position.)

"On me, asshole!" He tears out from his crouch at a dead sprint. The lighter presses into his palm with hard edges. He just needs to find someplace dry, somewhere dry enough where he can set it all alight, weaken the floor around it or bring down the walls and ceiling -

The sound catches its attention, sending the lights swinging around to face Tim. Straining against the doorframe, it reaches for him with one crooked limb, and for a dizzying moment it looks like it might succeed. Instead it swings wide, claws burying into a chest of drawers.

The shadow lets out a low huff of frustration, a vast machine releasing steam, before straining to look at the splintered remains of the furniture. The air around it shifts impossibly, and it clips forward, now close enough to pick the pieces up, manipulate them.

The door is clear.

Jay sprints toward it, pocketknife unfolded (and praying he doesn't slip a second time). He rounds the vast bulk of the shadow closely enough to have a terrible idea.

He abandons his first idea, because this isn't Shadow of the Colossus, and even he's not stupid enough to try to make that work. He's exactly stupid enough to try his second idea, though, and he reaches out to nick the thing's ankle with his knife on the way to the door.

The hit lands, somehow, slicing a ten-inch gash in the creature's skin. The wound drips black tar, and the way the shadow screams is nearly human. Jay's stomach lurches.

~~Not so easy this time, is it?~~

The shadow twists to look at him, and there's a moment of blinding eye contact before Jay bolts out the door, spots dancing across his vision. Need to find somewhere flammable, but not too flammable. Somewhere they can contain the blaze before it spreads too far. Tim probably knows better about this stuff, if he's honest.

The vast, mechanical spiderlike sprawl of the thing should be unnerving, but it makes sense, doesn't it? It makes sense with everything it claims to be and the way Jay inserted himself into a narrative and now is really not the time to be thinking about the symbolic meaning, particularly as one massive, clawed hand slams into a chest of drawers with a splintering of wood and barely misses him.

A spurt of something black and oily erupts from the scar Jay's knife leaves across the thing's ankle. Its shrilling prickles at Tim's neck and raises gooseflesh on his arms despite the adrenaline storming his system, despite the pressing, thick-scented humidity clouding everything else.

"If we can get it moving up," he hisses to Jay as the other man closes the space between them, "we can take out the floor from under it."

Jay nods furiously. "Long as there's nobody below us." Tim's got a point. Use the height of this place to their advantage. If only they could've done this back in Tartarus.

He runs down the hallway, measuring his steps to make sure he doesn't lose Tim. He slides to a stop at an intersection, looks down each hall, and--

"Stairs, c'mon!" He motions for Tim to follow.

There's a sound of splintering wood behind them as the creature claws at the door, trying to force itself through.

"That's it! Stay right on our asses!" he belts back at the malformed shadow as it tries to work its way through a doorway far too small for its swollen frame. Pretty soon, he's certain the pieces of wall are gonna start crumbling and breaking to accommodate it. That's fine. That works fine in their favor, because this place might have a nice and pretty little aesthetic, but everything's downright fragile when it comes to combat.

He snatches up a splintered chunk of wood, some remnant of the shattered dresser, and hurls it at the creature before tearing up for the stairs.

"High as we can get," he pants to Jay. "If anyone's underneath - they're just gonna have to run."

The creature is bending low, still trying to fit through the doorway, when Tim heaves the piece of broken furniture at it.

Due to either lucky or unlucky timing, depending on whose perspective you take, the chunk of wood nails it across the face. A crack splits the mask from the jawline to the left eye, and the shadow screeches, lunging forward. The air buzzes for a moment, and if either Jay or Tim look back, they will see the space around the shadow split and smear as it clips forward, freeing it from the doorframe. It bounds toward the staircase.

Jay sprints up the stairs two at a time, glancing back at every landing to make sure Tim's still following. Lungs aching and throat stinging, he stops for a second at the entrance to a floor Jay neglected to count, wheezing, "Get downstairs! We're--the ceiling's coming down!"

He continues his ascent, attempting to repeat the warning every few floors, but he knows he's losing track. He knows he's not being as careful as he could be.

He can hear the scrape of the shadow's claws behind them.

The shadow. The true self.

This is Jay's true self. This. This thing with the inhuman screams and the buzz of static and the skull-like mask fused to the oil-slick black of its face and the discomfiting scuttle to its movement, like something spidery and wrong and put through a tape being wound backwards.

"C'mon, c'mon, c'mon," he mutters. They reach the end of the stairs as the shadow skitters after them, forcing its disproportionately large body through doorways and up the narrow staircases with the wooden supports that suddenly seem fragile as matchsticks.

If there's anyplace higher than this, they're not likely to reach it here. He can only hope to god it's enough.

"High enough?"

Jay nods anxiously, breathing hard as he leans against a rack of folded towels. The heat is indescribable. He feels like he's being cooked alive.

(He'll never complain about Tuscaloosa summers again.)

The room is spacious, with a bank of sinks down the center and shower faucets lining the tiled walls. Near the back is a pool--not a full on swimming pool, but bigger than his aunt's jacuzzi. (Why the hell is that something he still remembers?)

There's an awful clatter echoing up the stairwell. It's getting closer.

"Hey, Tim," he says, and it sounds thin. "Remember what I said about old tape?"

Of course he remembers. He can't remember pieces of himself, gaps of his memory that have fallen to pieces and been torn away. He can't remember entire weeks, months, years from certain periods of his life. He can't even remember the exact points in time in which he lost track of Alex, lost track of Jay, lost track of Brian.

But he remembers this.

Old tape. It's made of the same stuff they use to make flash paper and guncotton. You can dump burning film in water, and it'll just keep burning.

And that's the thing with tape. It holds things together, but it also burns.

His fingertips chase the wood of the surrounding edges until he picks out a particular spot that seems driest. The lighter hiss-spits to life after a few sharp jerks of his thumb.

"Damn right," says Tim.

He puts flame to wood.

Smoke curls out from the wet grain, but eventually it catches light. He blows on it, gentle, to stoke the flames.

Jay watches, transfixed, as he backs away. It's done. They're burning this place down. He checks the viewfinder screen. Blown out to hell, but at least he's getting the shot.

He should have been prepared for this, he really should, but he still jumps when the clattering below gets louder, closer. There's a scrape and a drag of claws on wood, and Jay backs away farther, farther from the door. The camera shakes, but that's fine for now, really.

A pale face appears in the doorway, yellow eyes shining bright enough to blind.

Furiously, it scratches at the doorframe, wood splintering until it can force its shoulders through. Again, the air buzzes and hisses, and the textures glitch, stripping away the skin for a split second to reveal a bent-wire ribcage, twisted black cellulose convulsing in a horrible imitation of lungs, a heart.

It turns its searchlight gaze on the growing flames. On Tim. On Jay.

It pauses.

Again, it looks around. Takes a slow step forward, gradual, almost delicate. Its bad leg trails a smear of wet tar.

It looks down, gaze lingering on Jay.

Jay lifts one shoulder in a hesitant shrug.

Visibly agitated, it shifts on its feet, focus now fixed on Tim. Expectant.

It isn't watching when a spit of flame shoots out from the growing blaze. It's too late to react. The film catches alight.

For several moments, it almost seems like it won't be deterred even by that. Its exterior crawls away with a pitched digital squeal. Every bony, rake-thin mechanism bares itself in an amalgamation of stitched-together barbed wire, pulsing organs that contract like a fist squeezing over one's own heart.

It doesn't see the fire as it leaps along the wood and latches hungrily to fuel it knows will burn forever.

"Back, back!" Tim barks, snapping one hand around Jay's wrist. He has little doubt that once it realizes it's doomed, it'll do everything in its power to take them both down with it.

Jay allows Tim to pull him back, camera still trained on the creature. Still watching.

The shadow screams, pulling its injured arm to itself, pressing into a corner. The flame spreads fast, twisting and flickering across the exposed patch of film like steel wool, burrowing under the skin. It claws at the wall desperately, but all it does is leave deep grooves in the wood. It's not strong enough anymore.

Instead, it turns to the two observers, and in a motion too quick to properly track, it twists out of a crouch and reaches for Jay, pinning him to the floor. Jay struggles furiously, shoving back against its vast, gnarled hand nearly hard enough to wriggle out, but it's not enough. The shadow peers down at him, waiting for the flames to spread.

Motion out of the corner of its eye catches its attention, and it looks up. It looks at Tim, the one who started the fire, the one it can blame. In a clumsy jerk of deteriorating muscle, it reaches for him as well.

It moves too fast for him to track, raking clawlike hands across Jay's front and trapping him a cage of spined fingers against the deteriorating floor. Lighter in one hand, knife in the other, Tim -

Tim lets it grab him.

Lets it drag him closer.

Every instinct screams for him to bolt, to run, to do anything but sit here patiently and let it reel him in like a fish on a hook, but it pulls him close, close enough for Tim to click his lighter to life and meet its spotlight eyes with a flinted glare.

He holds the stilling flame beneath the shadow's chin.

It wants to hide its face so bad?

He'll give it a reason to.

The flame melts through the skin in an instant, and the film underneath crackles and warps. With a high, panicked radio-static squeal, it drops Tim, scrambling to get away.

For a terrifying instant, it leans its weight on the hand caging Jay, sending a bright shock of pain across his chest.

The shadow flees toward the far end of the room, clawing at its face, at its neck. Its movements are unnatural, dragging, as the skin flakes away from the twisted wire underneath. It's falling apart from the inside.

Jay tries to catch his breath, tries to pull himself into a sitting position, but god, it stings. Gritting his teeth, he forces himself up. The camera's still running, and with an awful twinge of pain that worsens as he tries to steady himself, he lifts it to face the shadow.

Heaving, its chest rising and falling like a broken bellows, it crawls into the small pool. It curls into itself, trying to submerge itself completely, sending waves of hot water sloshing over the edge and across the floor, but there isn't room. The fire keeps burning. There's not much left now.

The lights behind the cracked mask gutter and die. The breathing slows.

The shadow's body crumbles, rust and decay crawling across its remains in uncanny fast-forward.

Soon, all that's left in the pool is a bony human body, battered and burn-scarred, with a cracked mask still over its face. It twitches, taking in a thin, wheezing breath, and grabs for the edge of the pool with a shaking hand. Its grip falters.

Jay pulls himself to his feet with a small, pained cry he can't quite suppress. He takes a step forward, pauses, glances over at Tim.

He can feel its grip compressing around his chest, like heated iron bands over his throat, an instant before the flames lights it up in an electrifying blaze. Jay wasn't lying about the capabilities of burning film - when it burns, it burns like nothing else he's ever seen. Plumes of red-orange streak from the shadow's mask, from the writhing coils of knotted wires and contorted organs, belching up great puffs of blackened smoke.

It presses down on Jay for a fraction of an instant, then releases him.

Then Tim slides from its grasp and hits wood with the splinter and crack of breaking floorboards. It's hauling ass to water. That won't save it.

Tim gags on the thick, gummy smoke, spitting up a streak of black phlegm. One hand draws taut over his chest as the other digs in against the ground to brace himself to his knees. Between the hiss of flame and water, the hushing swell of steam mingling with the cloying clouds of oily smoke, there's the sound of someone calling out, in pain.

Somewhere in the curtains of flame and the curls of smoke - they're gonna need to put this out fast before it eats the whole bathhouse alive - a char-blackened shape lies at the base of the pooling water, no longer luxuriously scented, no longer swollen beyond comprehension.

Tim presses faintly against the center of his rib cage and is rewarded with a dim twinge of pain. At least he can still walk. He half-stumbles and half-limps to draw even with Jay, panting.

"Is it..." The words die in a dry-throated rasp. He clears his throat and tries again. "Did we get it?"

Jay opens his mouth to speak, but the smoke catches in his throat and he barks out a cough. It's agony. He tries to still himself, managing a few thin, wheezing sounds somewhere between a low cough and a heave. Finally, he shakes his head. No, not yet.

He can hear the fire still crackling at the edges of the room, but there's something else he needs to take care of. Carefully, he steps toward the pool, toward the charred hand barely gripping the edge.

As he walks by each showerhead, he turns the knob, as if it would help at all. As if that would be enough to stop the flames.

Jay reaches the pool. He unfolds his pocketknife.

He peers over the edge, down at his own blackened corpse.

"What?" the shadow asks, straining to keep its head above water. Its tone is challenging, but there's a low waver at the edges, like the nasal cavity's swollen shut. "Are you gonna finish me off? Slit my throat and watch me bleed out? Is that what this is?"

"I don't know."

"But you want to."

Jay closes his eyes, breathes in smoke and burning plastic. He grips the pocketknife tighter. "Yes."

The shadow laughs, a soft, painful thing. "Then why aren't you?"

There's silence. Why isn't he? Why isn't he?

Jay shakes his head. "I don't know."

"There's all that stuff in our heads that's so certain. That we know. You know why, right?"

The word's at the tip of his tongue, repeating in a static-laced loop, begging to be written across papers, across film, across images and icons, sent over the airwaves and sung in chorus.

Jay grits his teeth.

He nods.

The body in the bathtub smiles, thin and pained. It looks up, gold eyes ringed with red, and draws in a thin breath. Not much longer now. "I'm scared."

Jay knows he looks similar. He's shaking, but he nods again. "Yeah."

With one of its last breaths, the shadow calls for Tim.

They're okay. They're alive. They're both...alive, and so's the shadow. So that's something. They're managing quite the track record out of this - surviving, but only just, and only after at least one thing or person has been set on fire as a result.

The shadow calls out, its voice thin and creaking. It's hard to be afraid of the thing now, a deflated, charred smear splayed flat across the puddling, ashy water.

"You gotta accept it," he whispers. "Just...do what you have to. Okay?"

I'm right here, he almost adds - but why the fuck would that be comforting? Why would that be, in any way, reassuring after he almost killed Jay, again, with his own shitty, reckless planning? What right does he have to give Jay even half the shit he's given him?

He glances down at the crumpled shadow as it lies there, warily.

"Yeah. Hey."

He has to accept it. He has to accept the skeletal body with the cracked skin, the one shakily holding its head above water, the one on the verge of tears. He's guessing he has to accept the monster, too.

Just do what you have to.

At least Tim's here. Whatever that's worth.

"Hey." Its voice is fading, but it's still breathing. "Asshole. You almost killed me."

Jay winces. It's his own voice, but there's a teasing fondness there that's a little too genuine, a little too sincere for comfort.

"Can't really blame you, though." It coughs, spitting black tar that stains its teeth. "I mean, I can. You're kind of a piece of shit. Jay doesn't trust you, I don't trust you..."

Its hand slips on the edge of the bath, and it scrabbles for purchase. When it looks up again, its eyes are redder, mouth pulled wide in a grimace. It takes a few shallow, labored breaths before speaking again. "But you know you're my best friend, right?"

You almost killed me.

The hell is this? This thing is...it's supposed to be talking to Jay, right? It's supposed to be talking to Jay, and spilling its guts so that they can both reconcile and Jay can be fine and they can close the book on this nightmarish chapter of their nightmarish fucking lives.

None of it is new. He's a piece of shit. Jay doesn't trust him. Well, fine. He doesn't need him to trust him. He doesn't need him to -

There's a moment where his heart squeezes in his chest, boiling like a hot coal, like a hand has worked its way over it and clenched. That doesn't - no.

That doesn't make any damn sense.

Is he really saying that...what? In the end, he'd do it all again?

"I thought...I thought Alex..." He can't finish that sentence. He dropped everything for Alex, ran to his side, tried to help him, was grateful that he'd tried even if it meant rousing hell for everyone else in the process.

Wouldn't it have been Alex?

"I barely knew Alex." The real Jay speaks up, hesitant, clumsy. "We, we had a couple classes together, and we hung out a few times, and he, uh, he tried to kill me."

He didn't know Alex. He only knew the Alexes saved on film, hidden in the attic or in grocery bags or in a safe or in a cooler in the backseat of his car, played back over and over enough that it almost felt like companionship.

And this is the hard part, but he's talking now, and he doesn't stop. "At least you...gave a shit, y'know?"

And that makes him a best friend?

That's what makes a best friend? Giving a shit? Jay gave a shit about a lot of people - too many people, in fact, to the point where it seemed more likely that he didn't have any room to give a damn about himself. Jessica, Alex, the long-dead cast of a long-dead student film - and him?

"I didn't..." He can't tear his gaze from the shadow as it lies there, he can't. He can't but he does because he has to, and he looks at the real Jay without knowing where to goddamn begin.

Brian was a friend. Brian was his best friend by default, as he lacked any other friends to give him the singular title of best, but Jay's as different to Brian as it's possible to be. Stammering, inept, nosy, untrustworthy.

Or maybe he's just the mirror to what Brian ended up becoming.

"I didn't know you thought that."

Jay ducks his head, eyes focused firmly on the wet tile. "'S not something that really just...comes up."

There's a low, choked laugh from below them, from the body in the tub. "That's the easy part."

It lifts up the mask it tore from the scarred skin of its face, the plastic cracked and warped but still whole. "Now, this? It's in there, whether you like it or not. You've either got to...accept it, or you'll just...just be stuck here. Running in circles, like you've always been."

With some effort, it lifts its head, looking Jay right in the eye. It's uncomfortable, near-painful. "But here's the thing, bird-brain. You're still not normal, even without the mask. No matter what Mommy and Daddy told you, no matter what you told yourself, you're not fine. You've never been normal in your life, and I know you noticed, because I'm you."

It has to take a few moments to catch its breath before barreling on. "Do you really think a normal guy would've done what you did? You've always been like this, but you choked down everything you ever loved, everything you ever cared about, until you could justify it." Its voice squeaks into a raspy falsetto. "'I'm not obsessed. I'm just doing what has to be done. This is the first thing I've ever done that means something.' Did you ever consider, just once, that this is the first time you ever just embraced it?"

Jay doesn't say anything. He just stands there, burning alive under the steam, and doesn't say anything.

And things have taken a sharp nosedive into the painfully and acutely personal.

Tim shifts, rocking his weight on his heels, wiping ash-streaked and sweat-stained palms on his already soot-grimed jeans. He really can't gauge if Jay was always like this; if this was a deviation from the norm for him, or if this was just plain and fucking typical. Everything fell so far out of the boundaries of normal so fast that it no longer became possible to discern an easy baseline for anyone.

"You have to," he says at last, tearing apart the silence as it hovers in thick steamclouds around them. "So you're not - normal. Big fucking deal. Is anyone who lives in Wonderland normal, Jay?"

Is it really so bad to be a freak like the rest of them?

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