entrancelogs | merry christmas; i could care less [ open ]

There's an instinct tugging him up, up, even as his back aches and itches, pinpricks crawling across and up the back of his neck. He's tired. He's sick and tired of this stupid event and these stupid cookies and these stupid irresistible urges plugged into his head that weren't there before.

He forces open the door at the top of the stairwell one-handed, the other gripping his camera like a lifeline. At least he won't forget. The world's freezing cold and dipped in chocolate and the mirrors are cracking open and someone's hosting a party and he knows he's acting wrong, but at least he won't forget. It'll make sense later, when he ~~edits the entry.~~ No, no, that's wrong, too. Limited network means no more entries means spooling back through the raw footage for anomalies (few and far between) before dumping the whole thing on the server. Replication, backups in triplicate, locked away and hidden somewhere the Mirrors won't know to look.

God, it's cold out. He scratches furiously at his neck as several flimsy tubes of translucent something fall away, leaving something soft and downy and what the hell's happening to him?

There's someone else up here with him. He doesn't recognize the shape of the silhouette.

Of course he doesn't recognize the silhouette. Who would? Does Tim look very much like an angel to anybody, even the most optimistic of viewers?

Tim's heart thuds in his chest in the brief window of time in which he seriously contemplates the merits of throwing himself off the roof of the mansion and just seeing what happens from there, because the roof has no other conceivable hiding space and he feels ridiculous with these stupid things stuck to his back, and whatever the hell kind of inane commentary Jay has to shed on the matter, he doesn't want to hear it.

God, he just - doesn't.

When it reaches the point that there's no way in hell that Jay isn't not going to notice him, he has a limited scope of options at his disposal. He takes the least drastic but potentially most embarrassing one, which is to clear his throat and try to fold his wings across his back - mostly failing, as the wind chooses that particular moment to pick up and stretch one of them out like a billowing sail.

"Uh," says Tim. "Hi."

That's Tim.

That's Tim, and he's got wings.

What.

"What."

It's nearly enough to distract him from the pain that shoots across his back. Nearly. He doubles over for a moment before righting himself, struck by the inane thought that this should hurt more. He doesn't even know what this is, only that it feels numb in patches, like when the aspirin starts to wear off.

Oh, shit.

The way Jay doubles over is a dark parallel to the way Tim himself did. The wind catches at his wings anew, staggering his turn and the beeline he tries to cut in Jay's direction.

"You're kidding me," he snarls, to no one in particular. "You're kidding me. You ate one too?"

And then it all slides into place.

"Not on purpose!" he snaps in return, before taking a few labored, hissing breaths.

Whatever's happening along his back--if he's growing wings or feathers or whatever--seems to have sped up tenfold, and even though the numbness continues to crawl across his back, catching the bright spots of pain as it spreads, it still itches like nothing else.

The fabric of his jacket (closet-made, thicker than his usual) catches on his shoulders, and after a split-second of hesitation, he unzips it, clumsily yanking it off his back and tossing it aside. The cold raises goosebumps on his arms in an instant. It's below freezing, there's snow on the ground, and he's wearing a t-shirt.

There's that pressure again, something forcing its way out, and Jay doesn't have time to contemplate whether or not he's really willing to go shirtless in this weather before the fabric splits, exposing...something to the blistering cold. Somethings, plural.

Jay forces himself to look back. God, he looks like a plucked chicken.

This day's just going great.

And...yep. Yep. Those are definitely wings.

Tim sighs.

The discomfort of actually growing them in the first place is nothing compared to the unwieldy nature of the things once you have to deal with them on an hourly basis.

"Great. Good." He opens one hand in a weary supination, glancing up at the sky to breathe out a long, frustrated gust of air. "I'm glad we get matching quirks here. That makes me feel better."

"At least you've got sleeves." Jay rubs at his arms to try to get some circulation going, but it feels pretty pointless when you're losing heat even faster through the stupid, featherless hot wings sticking out the back.

God. Merry Christmas to him.

The itching makes some backwards sense now. Feathers coming in. He doesn't feel it past his neck and back, so maybe he'll be spared growing some kind of beak or something.

Again, he forces himself to look back. Mostly just downy fluff for now, but he can see something that looks like it could be some flight feathers, wrapped in more of those tubes. Dark brown, so at least he and Tim don't match any more than they already do. They look like they might be a little smaller, too, but he's not willing to place any bets until all the feathers are in.

"Why're we up here?" It's barely a question, more a complaint.

"Because this is the only place where I don't risk knocking shit over," Tim grunts. It's admittedly interesting to see the plight from another point of view - it's a bit like watching a tree grow in fast forward, feathers spurting up from the hollow-boned appendages protruding awkwardly from his back - but there's something more than a little awkward about that, and he quickly looks away.

The wings do a fantastic job of scalloping around him, as though to hide him partially from view, which is stupid because the wings are easily the most recognizable thing about him and practically dominate the radius of something like five feet around him, cupped as they are.

"Angels on top of the tree," Jay mutters under his breath. Sounds like something Alex came up with. He may be starting to get used to Wonderland pulling stuff like this, but it doesn't mean he has to like it. Clearly Tim doesn't, if the way he's hiding behind his own massive wings is any indication. No wonder he was knocking stuff over; those things are huge.

He didn't think it was possible for the mess behind him to get any itchier, but Wonderland proves him wrong yet again. He tries reaching behind him, and in an alien sequence of muscle contractions, he can feel his scrawny wings reach out in turn. Jay grabs onto a handful of pin feathers and furiously starts prying them out of their casings. It's like picking at a scab; maybe he shouldn't do it, but it feels like it's helping somehow.

He's gonna have to ask Tim's help, isn't he? That, or he'll have to find some corner to rub up against to get all this stuff off. He's not sure which would be more humiliating.

"Hey. Hey." He's gotten bolder, with every event. He does something he would never have even attempted prior to Jay's arrival in Wonderland, and snags at Jay's wrist with one hand to yank it away. "Cut it out. It'll settle, okay? Just give it time, and don't - don't try and pull it out or anything."

Did he attempt something like that? Maybe. Maybe he did. But maybe it doesn't fucking matter, because all it ended up doing was hurting about as much as it would to try and pry your arm from its own socket.

Jay struggles against Tim's grip for a second, but then he forces himself to hold still. It'll settle. It'll work itself out on his own, and he doesn't need to pick at it.

it itches it hurts it itches it hurts like a hundred thousand little injections

He doesn't need to pick at it. Instead, he shuffles through the thin powder-coating of snow across the roof to retrieve his jacket, and he pulls it over his arms like the world's most ineffectual snuggie.

It's getting better, he can feel it. Either that or his wings are just going numb from the cold. Either way, he feels a little warmer, and when he glances back it does actually seem like those godforsaken pin feathers are losing their coating.

He tries stretching them. The sensation's unreal, like nothing he's felt since that shapeshifting event.

"How long d'you think we'll keep these?"

"Couple hours, if we're lucky. Couple days, if we aren't." They're not liable to last through all of Christmas, he's hoping, but he can't really know that for sure. He can't, because that was one event out of many, and it was the only one that lasted that long.

He has no idea if it's necessarily healthy to go ripping feathers up like he's about to go up in a molt, but it sure as hell can't feel pleasant. Sprouting a whole pair of new limbs is never an easy thing, to no one's surprise.

"I ever tell you about how Christmas here is kind of an ordeal?"

Jay winces. An ordeal. Between the Mirrors and the spiked cookies and the infighting between the queens and the party that nobody wants to take credit for, "ordeal" sounds about right.

"Every year? I mean, is it always like this?"

He gestures to the mansion below them, to the gumdrop forest and the apparently edible birds, and one of his own wings helpfully stretches out as well, as if for emphasis. It's looking a little less patchy, but hell if he recognizes what kind of wings they're supposed to be. Probably nothing interesting.

"Not always like this, no. The mansion doesn't always turn to candy and we don't always have cookies that turn us into little fucking birds." Jay's are brown. Can't say for certain what species they might belong to. Can't say anything at all, as a matter of fact, seeing as Tim has no idea what species his wings belong to either. He's not what you'd call a birdwatcher.

"But last year, we kinda had these...dreams. For weeks. Real vivid. Felt like we weren't sleeping at all."

So not a terribly huge shift from the norm in that respect.

Great. So they're just lucky. Even as he resists the urge to reach back and keep picking at the feathers that are just coming in, he can't keep himself from fidgeting with the wings themselves. He keeps readjusting them, stretching them, feeling the weird scrape of a pair of new limbs against his back.

Vivid dreams for weeks. They must've been significant enough for Tim to point out, but Jay can't resist the urge to ask the obvious: "How's that any different from...y'know. 'Normal?'"

He is definitely not thinking about the sound of Alex Kralie screaming inches from his ear, dripping blood and pus from a pair of hollow eye sockets. He is in no way thinking about the feeling of Tim's hands crushing his windpipe, the flat-blank look in his eye, played nightly in high definition. And he's absolutely not thinking about Jessica.

"I mean, they were...it wasn't dreams of just anything. It was dreams of Wonderland. Like, another Wonderland. One where the White Queen ruled over everything. And everyone seemed to really love her. Like, even the Mirrors."

His tone has sharpened from idle and thoughtful to concentrated anew. With the Red Queen's return, with the idea that the Queen of Hearts didn't issue the invite and neither did her sister, his theory that the White Queen is still around has only swelled to prominence in the back of his mind.

It takes his mind off the humiliating situation, at least. His wings flick idly, as though possessed by a mind of their own, as Tim scowls at nothing at all, lost in the hot-bright routes of memory.

"But no one remembered anything about home. I mean, anything. They all thought they'd always lived there."

This is something. This is something. Last Christmas, more about the White Queen, and as soon as this Christmas rolls around, those invitations show up. He remembers back to what the Queen of Hearts told Georgia: "She blends right into the snow."

He doesn't realize he said it out loud until it's too late.

"I mean--" His wings twitch, hiking up along with his shoulders. "It's not really a pattern, but it's a little weird to be a coincidence."

There's so much about what Tim said that Jay wants to dissect. The memory loss, the dreams, the fact that everyone loved her. Who is the White Queen, really?

"There were these jars, see. Locked room, full stop. These...I think they were memories of who we were. People who got them out could open them up and return one memory to someone else."

Something he had to put together from hearsay and mutterings after the fact; he didn't have anyone worth sacrificing for, at that point. He didn't have much of anything but the vague, unsettled itch of perpetual displacement across every inch of his lungs and the vague hope that this would be one temporary stop on a longer road that would take him back to where he had to be, so he could finish what he'd started.

But it hadn't, and he hasn't.

And so here he is.

"Alright." He's looking down at the tracks in the snow, but his eyes are unfocused. "Alright, so I guess we should count this as a possibility if she comes back. The White Queen, I mean."

He ruffles his wings, longer now, and it blows the snow into strange arcs.

"Normally I'd say her being alive is a good thing, but..." He looks up at Tim, cringing briefly in place of an actual answer. "You think we'll forget that thing about the jars? If we get...wiped?"

"I have no idea." He has no idea if her being gone is a good thing. Sure, people seemed happier, but they were only really happier because every memory of their lives at home had been scraped away. No events, no calamitous fits of despair, no Mirrors trying to self-sabotage. Just people being absurdly content with their lives in Wonderland, having had their memories of everything else, of anywhere else, hollowed out and displaced.

He yanks a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and sets one alight with a grumble.

"We're always five steps behind with anything Wonderland throws at us."

That answer's about as unsatisfying as they come. He'd like to say he's used to that by now, though.

Back to another thing that caught his interest.

"Winter...and, I mean, snow in particular. You think that's important?" He pans the camera, awkwardly held in one hand that emerges from his backwards jacket. "Given that your dream thing was the same time last year, and the invitations showed up this year, and the whole...thing with the Queen of Hearts making that snow joke. Could just be a coincidence, but maybe, I dunno. Could be worth looking into."

"See, that's the thing." His tone lowers, fierce and intent. "You saw the way those two were fighting over on Mirrorside, right? Neither of them sent out those invites. We've got no clue who."

He has his theory, naturally. It's a hell of a theory, considering everyone he's talked to has insisted that the White Queen isn't coming back. But the nature of the dreams from the year prior - the fact that the felt atypically vivid, even for him, and the fact that they may as well were some parallel reality while it lasted - has him not-so-privately thinking otherwise.

This is new. Jay doesn't think he's seen Tim get this invested in solving something since...honestly, Jay doesn't think he's seen this before. Even when they were sprawled across neighboring hotel beds, picking carefully through numbers and letters for patterns, Tim still gave off this sense of quiet apathy. Like, they could solve the mystery, or they could just go to sleep or something. Didn't really care either way. The closest thing Jay can think of is the time Tim insisted they go to Rosswood, back before he learned just how bad things could get.

But here he is, gathering evidence and discussing it with an intensity that's downright contagious.

Maybe it's easier when the mystery's not so close to home.

"Yeah--yeah, I saw it. There's definitely something going on there." He drums his fingers across the top of his camcorder. "And whoever made those invitations seems like they were trying to mimic the Queen of Hearts. I mean, there's one major suspect we both know, but...but what would she stand to gain from that? Is there anybody who'd get something from that?"

“Maybe someone who wants us to think she’s gone, but isn’t.” Is that paranoia? Reasonable suspicion? He lost the ability to delineate between the two a long time ago. Maybe this is something he can finally do on someone’s behalf that won’t be completely doomed from the outset - help the Mirrors, whether they’re expecting it or asking for it or not.

They’re victims.

“Maybe someone who expected the two of them to blame each other instead of looking for who’s really responsible.”

"And maybe someone who'd benefit from having the two of them at each other's necks."

Jay's wings fluff up for a moment as he paces.

An idea strikes him, and he stumbles to a stop before turning towards Tim. "And someone who'd benefit from having all of us in one place."

merry christmas; i could care less [ open ]

...couldn't resist.

time to die and be dead

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cw: gore

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