entrancelogs | and in the end if i don't make it on the list [ open ]

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and in the end if i don't make it on the list [ open ]

Who: Tim Wright and YOU! ...and guest
Where: It's a Wonderful Wonderlandland
When: January 19th - January 23rd
Rating: PG-13 probable
Summary: Tim's ideal world is simple. Incredibly simple. Except for the part where it's impossible.
The Story:

19th - 20th ; fantasy ; give me a boost over heaven's gate

Once he gets over how he has to shade his eyes against the diamond reflection of a too-bright sun, of the pumping lights and blinding colors of what looks like what might've been the end result if Lisa Frank took a couple tabs of acid and decided to start her very own apocalypse, he figures, correctly, that there's probably more to it than this. He prowls the edges of the bubble of increasingly absurd imagery, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It does.

He turns a corner, and there they are.

Sarah's hair falls back in a dark curtain as she laughs at something Seth just said. A little further - he can swear that's Jay there too, squirrely as ever, and the broad shoulders of a silhouette that couldn't belong to anyone but Brian.

But most startling, terrifying, unnatural than anything else, than the fact that they're there at all, is the way they all laugh and grin and joke freely and without abandon.

It's in the way they all look happy.

He doesn't breach that perfect world just yet. If this is his chance to watch what the world might have been without him, then why would he spoil it a second time? He can see them all like this, like they were meant to be, and no matter how thickly the nostalgia might build in his chest, how blindingly the ache of longing might tighten its stranglehold around his throat, he doesn't draw any nearer.

He simply settles down on the grass, draws his knees up beneath his chin, folds his arms around them and...watches.

21st - 23rd ; but i'm a missile that's guided to you;

Of course it wasn't real.

Apparently music is how you're supposed to destroy the things, but he's kind of lacking the instrumentation and an additional pair of willing voices for the sake of the three-part harmony that's supposed to be the kicker here. And, frankly, in his adrenaline-soaked, survivalist state, he doesn't have much of an instinct for memorization of lyrics from the Top Ten Hits From the Nineties listings in an off-brand version of a world not unlike his own.

It's kind of hard to be scared of zombies at this point, though. He'll give Wonderland that much; it sure knows how to desensitize.

He's not doing too badly, all things considered. You'll find him perched just alongside a sluggish river of viscous, rainbow-tinted water, having deftly dug a trench out from the sparkling earth and filled the bottom of the ditch with knitting needles, points up, to catch any one of the slavering horde that decides he looks interesting enough.

It's not a permanent measure by any means, but it's only until he can figure out how to get the busted karaoke machine he's been tinkering worth to start working again.

wildcard ; you're the one habit i just can't kick

[If you want a closed prompt with either Frisk or Tim, let me know here or at arrpee! Just because this is initially a Tim log doesn't mean I can't toss Frisk in if you wanna do something with them! I will match prose or brackets!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

“Easy.” That’s a familiar voice, isn’t it? And not merely for the man who met its owner in college. Turn around, and there he is, in all his film student glory: bespectacled, smirking, his early-aughties hair entirely too long and falling unevenly across his forehead.

Happier, in fact, than any time Shepard has ever seen him.

“By giving you what you want.”

She feels her heart leap in her chest at his voice, eyes flicking up and behind her and feeling something tight in her throat.

Ah, fuck.

She wonders if this is her fault-- it probably is. Shepard intermingling, stupidly getting involved. Maybe this one can go a little better than the last time she met him in a dream, when her fist connected with his jaw, when she was forced to watch his hands around Jay's neck just moments away.

"Kralie." Shepard realizes, for all she's talked about speaking to Alex, Tim has never seen the two of them. She wonders if this him will know her at all. "Hope you didn't come just to cause trouble."

"Uh, what?" His eyebrows lift, one corner of his mouth tweaking upward in faux shock. "I mean, If by 'trouble' you mean the most groundbreaking movie night of the century, then yeah, I'm here for that."

Look at this. He has DVDs. He starts carding through them, flipping over the casings to survey the backs with unmistakable fondness.

"You have been missing out on some modern day classics," says Alex. "So you're gonna need someone with, uh, impeccable taste?"

Ugh, this is worse. This is happy, this isn't a fight, no vicious fire and cracked jaws. Just something she misses, desperately so, some kindness in a dark world.

"No, not what I was thinking of when I said trouble." God, he's right here. Right fucking here and she can't take it. She can't. "So this is it, huh? No violence, just... an offer."

"...you okay?" That might be the worst thing about him; the fact that he's almost painfully sincere, when he says it. The joking facade slides away like an oil slick across water, and all but the barest shreds of that wry wit, the kind bordering on disdain, dissolves.

He doesn't seem like he's here to cause trouble at all, really.

"Seriously, you're, uh...not really acting like you."

Fuck. Goddamnit, fuck. She looks for a moment beside her, to see if Tim is still there, or if she's just been stuck in the narrative. Either way, she finds her way back to Alex. This has gone so, so spectacularly wrong.

Shepard sighs, running a hand up from her forehead, fingers through her hair.

"What makes you say that, kid?" She should walk away. She knows that. She should get up and leave and stop making this worse at every turn. "Have to be on my guard, when there's an event on making me see things."

Oh, Tim's still there, all right. He's not saying anything - half expecting it to fly straight over the apparition's head. None of the people he knew from college - Brian, Seth, Sarah, the facsimile of Jay - could so much as pick up on the fact that there was some fifth stranger mingling in their midst.

"C'mon," he mutters, purposefully avoiding Alex Kralie's gaze. "He probably won't follow us if we just..."

"Uh, rude?" Alex interjects, his brow knit down into an accusatory frown - directed at Tim. "Still in the room, asshole."

Tim stops dead, eyes flicking nervously between Shepard and Alex and back again.

That - that doesn't make any sense. Not in the context of everything else he's seen. Not when every interaction he's had with these people from his past has involved their blatant ignorance of his mere existence. There's no reason that Alex Kralie should have acknowledged him, let alone heard him at all.

Except for the fact that he did.

Shepard stays stiff on the ground, her head unmoving but her eyes drifting between them. Alright. That complicates things some.

"How can you...?" She doesn't know the dynamics between Alex and Tim, not well enough- maybe this is something Tim wants that she doesn't know about, a desire this place is picking up on. Maybe he's stronger because both of them know who he is-- but then shouldn't Jay also be able to speak, to see them both? Fuck.

Shepard takes a breath, steadies herself, and looks at Alex.

"Do you know what's going on? Or here, let me rephrase that. Where do you think you are? What do you think is happening?"

"They're not supposed to see me," Tim hisses, adamantly avoiding so much as glancing in Alex's direction. "They can't hear me, they can't see me - not Seth or Sarah or any of them, but he's - "

He's from Tim's world, isn't he? It stands to reason that some part of him must miss that. That some part of him is desperate to reclaim that one glow of normalcy he had.

Unless -

Oh god.

Unless it's not Tim that he's here for.

Unless it never was.

"Yeah, that makes about as much sense as usual," says Alex, who's apparently chosen to opt for disdain, squinting instead in Shepard's direction. "And I'm not the one who's saying random shit, so maybe you should save the interrogation for somebody who needs it, huh?"

Three guesses as to who that "somebody" might be.

Oh, hell.

Shepard meets Tim’s eyes, hoping she looks properly apologetic. Goddamnit. Why did she have to come get involved? He was perfectly fine, he was doing just fine, and now she…

Her shoulders fall, and she looks back to Alex. “Look, don’t worry about it, alright? Been kind of a weird day. But I think we’re gonna have to take a rain check on the movie night right now.”

They have to get out of here, before she ends up in a situation where she’s compromised. (More than she already is.)

He wasn't supposed to be able to see Tim. If this were Tim's fantasy, if this were what he wanted, if this was someone he was desperate to see, maybe he wouldn't be able to. But if nothing else, this all but confirms it.

Alex isn't here for him.

He never was.

His expression settles, at last, on Shepard. He has to pull something of himself together, make himself more articulate than he's currently being. God knows what he must look like, staring at her the way he is. It'd be stupid to be caught off guard, taken aback, betrayed. And yet there's something to the way his brows have knitted down, his mouth has parted, something torn between shock and unease.

"...you," says Tim. "He's not here for me. You - you miss him that badly?"

Oh, this is just getting worse, this is getting so much worse. She still doesn't know the full spread of his and Alex's relationship- never knew, could probably never hope to understand. But in the same way, how does she explain this? She doesn't know what he was like back home. She doesn't know the terrible things he might've done. She just remembers talking with a kid at a ball about a better future. She just remembers a gun and a note and a promise left unfulfilled. She just remembers the first person in Wonderland she could never, ever hope to save.

"... I couldn't help him. Before he left." It's the only way she can think to explain it, even if she doesn't know if it'll make any goddamn sense. "He died scared and alone and I didn't get to him in time."

"Of course he did," Tim hisses, torn somewhere between disbelief and outrage. "You think you know the half of it? You - "

How does he even begin to broach this topic, with her, with this - this recreation of Alex that isn't even really him, that's not even from Tim's own head, if it's from hers. Do those streams cross? Hell if he even knows anymore.

"You think any of this is on you?"

Alex has gone silent. He squints between the two of them, apparently uncomprehending.

“Of course I don’t know all of it!” She barks back, wanting to gesture with her arms but not quite making it, so it just ends with a sweep towards him.

“I know what happened in Wonderland. I can’t fix everything. But I had to do something. He— he helped me, and he turned around and martyred himself for nothing. I can’t blame myself for that?”

She would have forgotten Alex is there if he wasn’t directly in her field of vision, and she wants to reach out with some sort of reassurance, some comfort or apology. But she doesn’t know what to say now that he’s here, especially when it’s not really him. Just a copy from her memory, of a boy much happier than the one she lost. Regardless, she gives him a look that’s sympathetic and regretful, and hopes it gets the point across.

“Because he was always doomed, Shepard! Right from the fucking start!” He can even pinpoint the precise moment it happened, too: the day he held auditions for his shitty student film, and Brian was a kind enough friend to urge Tim to step out of his comfort zone for a spell.

It was an innocent mistake.

“Nothing you could’ve done was gonna save him! Not from this!”

One hand works up to the fabric of his shirt, fisting into the cloth over his chest. His voice breaks; the words shrink forlornly.

“Not from me.”

She doesn’t have any heart to keep fighting him here, her shoulders falling with a sigh, her hands closing and opening again in small measures. This is bigger than her- it always has been, even when it was just her and Alex and a dark kitchen, or the Mako, or at the ball or a gun. He’d become more than that. He was the first time this place beat her, he was the first time her inactivity, her lack of speed and drive, ripped someone away.

But maybe Alex feels like that to Tim, too. The one who had a fine life until Tim came into it. She worries about that, too, with the people who she holds closest. She once foolishly thought the safest place for any of them was by her side. But that’s where they all fell. Within arms reach. Stepping just away, a little too fast, a little too slow.

“Tim.” Shepard doesn’t know what she’s gonna say here, but she has to say something. “I know I sound stubborn blaming myself for this. And it’s hard to say exactly where certain things start, but… there’s no way of knowing he wouldn’t have ended up involved. No one is inherently toxic. Especially when you’re the victim.”

"I wasn't the victim here, Shepard!" he spits out, desperate.

Don't you dare call him the victim in any of this. As if he has a right to that title. As if he has the right to presume himself innocent. He knows what he's done. He knows that he's to blame for bringing that horror into their lives.

The ground beneath his feet starts to wither and darken, the grass's idyllic shade of green torching into a volcanic, reddened black.

"You think he would've turned out the way he did if he hadn't met me?" He flings out one hand to gesture at Alex, wildly. The picture flickers, as though torn through with static. Shorter hair, smashed glasses, the rough, ragged edges of stubble creeping over across the line of his jaw. One eye heavy and bruise-purple, a jaw clenched, his face sunken.

In the blink of an eye, he's back to regarding them both curiously, with his hair too long and his glasses settled across the bridge of his nose.

Immediately, she finds herself in a defensive stance, hands a bit up, knees just slightly dropped before she catches herself. Tim’s not going to attack her. But this is his fantasy- he controls it, as much as she shaped it. She has to calm him down. They have to get out of here.

“Tim, you can hurt someone and still have been victimized.” Shepard knows she doesn’t have a great track record with convincing Tim things aren’t his fault, but she still needs to try. “You can’t carry all the blame for everything bad that’s ever happened— and I know. I try. It’s hard.” She forces her shoulders to fall, extending a hand towards him. “C’mon. Remember. This isn’t real. We can go. We can leave.”

"You don't get to say that to me. Not when he said it to my face!"

He jabs a finger at the specter torn between them, and again the picture slide, shifts, tilting across an axis askew until he's stoked in vibrant shades of crimson, bubbling from a welling point of contact in his throat, soaking the front of his shirt, clumping his hair with tack and the salt-and-pennies tang of his own blood.

Two memories of the same man, meeting along a seam down the middle. Neither capable of being reconciled, except in the ghost of the man Shepard met, quaking, in a kitchen, panicking over nothing.

(Over the flax-gold tint of her hair, the flash of her smile, the whites of her eyes when he - )

"Everyone is gone because of me."

She can’t truly stifle the distress she feels when Alex changes again, the hurt showing on her face. Shepard has only ever gotten this story in pieces, in bits here and there when someone finally broke enough to explain. But piecing a story together out of broken memories is no way to get a clear picture; it’s spiderwebbed with cracks and issues and hangups, over and over again.

“I can’t change your past. I know that. No one can do that. But I want to help your future. So this— none of this has to happen again. We can build something better.”

But she can see the end, can't she?

She can understand where things are headed. Where they were always going to be headed, the moment Alex met the man who would tear his life apart, sliding a rake-thin beast with a blank face into the cracks between his waking moments and his sweat-soaked nightmares.

The way things are always headed, with him.

"You can't know that," he says, the words rancid as bile. "You're gonna end up just like him."

Because of me.

"I know I don't know that."

One of her hands is clenched into the fabric of her pants, trying to keep herself under control. The other, she still raises towards him. Despite it all. Despite that she's failed Alex, failed him on more than one occasion. She'll keep going. Keep trying.

"But that doesn't mean I'm gonna give up before I've started. I'm with you. You need help and I'm not leaving you behind." She sounds so sure, even if she doesn't feel as confident. "If you know anything about me, you should know I don't give up. I might not know the future, but I'm damn well gonna try to save you."

"I tried to tear you apart." There's no masking the horrified incredulity in his tone. Did she forget that little detail? That part where he dredged up every horrifying aspect of the experience he instilled in her, because his head is fucking toxic and there's no escaping it. There's no ever, ever any escaping it.

"I used everything that I did to you to leave you on the ground."

Or does she think so little of herself that even that doesn't really matter?

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