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

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?

So you're not normal.

Big.

Fucking.

Deal.

"Alright," he blurts out, and there's a manic edge to it. "Alright, I'm not. I'm not normal. I'm paranoid. I'm obsessive." There's something oddly freeing about it, and he keeps going. "And I black out and I see things that aren't there and I write cryptic bullshit, and I run around with a mask on at night, and I want to hurt people, and when I don't want to hurt people I want to know everything, and that thing's been fucking with my head for four years, and I don't know how much of it's it and how much of it's me, but that's just--just how I am now, and it's fine!"

He starts to pace, and there's pain shooting across his chest, but it's not important right now. "I'm not--I'm not neutral. I'm not a third party. I'm not unbiased. I'm part of it, and I have been even before I took those tapes from Alex."

Is he crying? He thinks he's crying, just barely. There's constriction in his throat, water at the corners of his eyes.

"I'm not normal, alright? There. I said it."

There's nothing but the rush of faucets and the crackling of burning timber.

Then, a quiet voice from the pool. "...You actually did it."

"Yep." Jay doesn't know what else to say.

The burnt body lifts itself up again, with a great effort, looks over at Jay. This time, at least, it doesn't force the eye contact. A crooked smile tugs at one side of its cracked mouth. "Now, what're you going to do about it?"

And with that, it crumbles to dust.

Shit.

Holy shit.

The pressure clenched around Tim's chest eases in a slow, incremental rush of breath out his lungs. He rubs his hands over his face, scrubs away the exhaustion that threatens to drag him to his knees. He admitted it. He...fuck. He admitted it. He's okay with it. Or maybe not - okay, but he'll live.

The shadow wicks away into dust with a soft hiss of undeniable finality.

Tim sucks in one final breath, acrid with smoke and hot with steam.

"You okay?"

Jay's still wound tight, still burning up from the humiliation of being forced to say all that (to admit all that), and he blames the lingering dregs of panic for why he turns to Tim, wide-eyed and nearly smiling, and says:

"Guess not."

God, it's almost funny. So funny he wants to sprint downstairs and hide in a locker until the event ends.

"'S not the end of the world, buddy." Despite the tension, one corner of his mouth hooks upward in a vague, skewed smirk. "Worst is over, yeah?"

And he's made it clear once before. Once.

Just remember you're not the only one. If that helps.

It's not the end of the world. It's...he'll handle it. He's handling it.

He's not the only one. If that helps.

Jay takes a deep breath. He looks up at Tim and manages a smile. It's thin, it's barely-there, but it's sincere.

Around them, the flames are dying out.

"This is...supposed to be a bathhouse, right?" ("It's like one my Japanese animes," his brain helpfully offers.) "If we're done, do we just, like...take a 'spa day' 'til the end of the event?"

The idea sounds even stupider out loud. Nice going.

He smiles. So they can both stand here, two idiots looking as burnt out and weary as they feel, as physically wrecked as they feel, staring at the mess they've made the the truths they've unearthed, unwilling, and sighs.

He's still favoring one side of his body, one arm curled around his middle.

"Wish I could," he mutters, and he almost sounds like he means it. "But I still got my shadow to deal with."

Jay grimaces, eyes skirting along the fire-blackened floorboards of the room before looking back at Tim.

"Want any help with that?"

He's exhausted, but Tim helped him through his own bullshit. If Tim needs help, Jay will help.

After the kind of day they've both had?

"No offense, Jay, but I think you might've just cracked some ribs." How in the hell Jay's still managing to haul himself around is admittedly impressive all on its own, but Jay's always had kind of a knack of pushing on when he really, desperately shouldn't.

At Tim's words, Jay winces. Yeah. Maybe they're just bruised, but from the way his whole chest cavity screams at him when he breathes too hard?

Yeah, might be something to get checked out.

Going down all those stairs is gonna suck.

"And you're fine?" he snipes back. "That thing dropped you like fifteen feet."

"I've still gotta shadow running around. Unless you wanna risk getting the rest of your ribs broken." Putting aside that Tim himself is probably risking the same thing. He's too tired, he reasons, to bother putting up a fight if the shadow tries to bare some uncomfortable truths to him or what-have-you. If he wants to go there, fine.

He's learned what happens when you don't listen to your damn shadow.

"I'm not gonna pick a fight with the thing, if that's what you're worried about," he adds wryly. "I've seen what happens when you do."

"Alright." He's not convinced, but if Tim insists he's fine, then fine. "'S your call. Just...call me if you need backup, I guess."

He peers down the stairwell. This is absolutely going to suck.

He takes his first step down, tries to keep his torso upright and his shoulders square. It stings a little bit on the landing, but it could be worse.

Jay speaks again as he continues easing himself down the stairs. This time it's a little quieter, and not just because of the pain.

"So what's next? About..." He sighs, grits his teeth. "I mean, if we were home, I'm guessing you'd make me get another appointment, but..."

He glances back up the stairwell at Tim.

First steps, right?

Baby steps. Getting Jay to acknowledge he even needed help was one thing, but acting on it without any kind of doctor or therapist? It's not like they've got any mental health specialists here. They have the medication the closets can provide, with a little bit of work, but aside from that?

Tim's muddling through it, the same as he's always done.

"We'll figure it out," he says at last. "We've got time."

Jay isn't expecting the relieved sigh that hisses out his nose, the feeling like he's just had his strings cut. He leans a little more heavily against the banister.

They don't have to do anything right away. He doesn't have to do anything today, or this week, or this month.

He can just exist for now. They'll figure it out. They've got time.

"Okay."

He can handle that.

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

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