entrancelogs | blue canary in the outlet by the light switch

Entry tags:

blue canary in the outlet by the light switch

Who: (Blue) Jay Merrick + You
Where: Media club + the woods behind the gym
When: August 3rd to 6th
Rating: PG (May change)
Summary: This half-plucked blue jay may not be the greatest student, but he's got interests beyond the classroom.
The Story:

Media Club:

Wherever he ends up getting into college, Jay's going to major in film. That's basically a given, though it's not because because he's a brilliant filmmaker. He likes movies, sure, and he likes learning the minutiae that go into making them. It's not exactly a passion, but it's something, and it's adjacent to his other interests.

There isn't a major in paranormal research, though--he checked--so his best chance at college prep is within the school's media club.

They're showing off their personal projects this week. Jay's got a sharpie-marked DVD under his wing. Anybody like amateur documentaries?

The Woods:

The game's already over, and the lights on the athletic field have been turned off. Nobody in their right mind would still be here this late on a school night, no matter how many questions they had for their AP physics teacher.

Jay's heard rumors, though, stories about people in the classrooms adjacent the woods seeing a too-tall silhouette between the trees. Some people say it's just a malformed tree trunk. Others say it's a human. Still others say it looks more like a water-bird, like some kind of crane, though it's taller than any crane they've ever met. Paler, too, with bleach-white feathers standing out against the leaves.

Whatever it is, Jay intends to get it on film.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The darkness between the trees stretches back. A breeze twists through the underbrush, and the shapes around it move and lean and rustle and reform, but the darkness doesn't. It doesn't do anything.

It's nothing.

And then Jay blinks, and the nothing is much closer.

"No, no, no--" He's babbling. It's just noise, like the creaking-door sounds of his ancestors, played back on old human film reels, digitized and reprojected in the classroom.

He beats his wings, jerky and uncontrolled and panicked, the tips of his ratty, unpreened flight feathers bending against the leaf litter.

It's useless.

~~Besides, you can't leave him again.~~

"Come on!" It's high, piercing. An alarm call.

Edited 2018-08-18 06:58 (UTC)

At some point, things took a haphazard shift from weird to unnervingly familiar. He can't fly. He can't fly, with one wing trailing the way it is, bent and bruised, and trying to power through it only elicits a harsh caark of agony rinsed in regret.

He doesn't look behind him. He doesn't look behind him. He just tries to scramble through the leaves underfoot, but being unable to fly is hampering his ability to make much ground.

"No," he mutters under his breath. "Not real, it's not real, It's not real - "

He hears Tim scream behind him, and he trips, pauses just for a second. Tim's wing trails at his side, beak gaping open with agony, but he's not stopping. Good.

His legs aren't built to run. His body's not built to carry the weight of a camera strapped across his chest and a full backpack, but stopping to let the bag drop feels like more of a death sentence than keeping to the ground, clumsily skip-hopping through the dead leaves and roots twisting beneath them. He doesn't know what will happen if it catches them.

This isn't the way he wants to find out.

But god, it's real.

He can't possibly deny anything now. What if he just - the thought seizes him, worked up like tangles of vines around his fragile throat - what if he just fell behind, and let It catch him? Let It do whatever It wanted? Just let it all happen? He wouldn't have to explain a thing! He wouldn't -

He glances behind him, and the sheer emptiness that yawns back at him is enough to send his heart rabbiting against his ribs, and for Tim to decide that awkward questions are infinitely preferable.

"I can't fly," he says, hating the way the words crack like a whimper. "I can't fly."

There's a sound behind him, not the sound of cracking branches or the low hum like he's got his foot wrapped around the tip of an aux cable or the horrible, blank nothing beneath it all.

(He read something once about sensory deprivation. He forgot a lot of it, but one thing stuck with him: How your brain doesn't know how to process it. How your brain makes things up to fill in the gaps.)

But this sound is a voice, and the voice is real, and it's confirming Jay's suspicion: Tim can't fly.

Jay can, he thinks. If he just drops the backpack, it might be enough. He'd be able to get out, and there'd be echoes and the sounds of trees and voices and all the things that his brain's wired up to expect. He'd be able to go home.

His throat constricts, blood rushing in his ears, and he skids to a stop. Just need a second. Just need to lose the bag and--

What the hell is he doing?

Just need to lose the bag, and he's got the option to take off. He doesn't have to right now. It's just if he has to. He won't have to take off the camera. It'll be enough.

(Tim must be past him by now. He'll have to fly to catch up, won't he?)

Jay can still see him. He can still catch up on foot. He just needs to get the strap over his wing, and he'll be able to run again. He'll catch up. He's not leaving Tim behind. He's not--

A bolt of agony splits through his skull, and his legs give way, the unbalanced weight of the bag sending him tumbling into the leaf litter. He doesn't hear himself scream. Maybe he doesn't scream. Maybe he just falls silent.

For a minute, he thinks - he thinks he's gone. Left him. Would make sense, wouldn't it? Who is he to this guy, anyway? Just some asshole, snapping at him in the woods. Just some idiot, who's too cagey to yield answers and too cold to be of much use, too evasive to be good company. Some guy who woke up in the woods with a bruised wing, who's hampering progress and dragging him back.

So he's going to fly ahead, and leave him. Well, good. He should. He should. What's Tim ever done for anyone in his life? What's he ever done but get in the way, drag people down, anchor them into places they should have left?

Then he goes down in a flutter of wings and a harsh cry.

"Hey. Hey!" He's not sure what instinct steers him to the bird that's ended up on the ground. He doesn't even know the poor idiot's name.

But it's not like Tim is going to get out of this any quicker on his own.

"Get up. Get up, come on!"

His neck is twisted back, his eyes wide and glassy and staring at a point between the trees. His beak gapes open, and his chest heaves and stutters. One wing beats uselessly against the ground, the other pinned beneath the weight of the bag still wound around it.

There's something in his head. There's something beneath his skull, rooting around, cracking him open to taste the meat inside.

Get up.

He can't.

Get up, come on!

He...he can't see, but he reaches out with one shaking foot, the other curled into the wet dirt beneath him.

They're gonna die out here, he thinks. They're gonna die out here because the nothing that's crawling at them from the trees is going to swallow them whole. It's nothing that's needling in his hollow bird bones and tensing like a coiled snake in his beak, and it's what's reduced the jay's eyes to a glossed-over, beetle-shell shine.

"Get up. Get up, get up get up get up you dumb shit - " He's just making sounds at this point, an unceasing slew of noise, of no no no no no no without any rhyme or reason to it, until he can get his good wing out underneath the other bird's body and use it to try and prop him upright.

"We have to go. We have to go!"

He feels a pressure at his side, barely noticeable over the pins and needles under his skin, the spikes of pain at the base of each feather. Then, all at once, gravity's coming at him from a different angle, and he's stumbling to get his feet under him.

There's another weight still pulling at his wing, twisting it at an odd angle, but then he feels the strap of his bag unhook from his elbow, slide down the rest of his wing, and the pressure stops.

He blinks through the headache, but the film across his eyes just swims in place. His breath hitches, heartrate spikes with one sudden, full, coherent thought: What if it's permanent?

It's followed by a second thought: Tim's still here.

Another spike of agony drills into the space between his eyes, and he stumbles again, leaning hard against the shape holding him upright.

We have to go.

It hurts. But they have to go. He stumbles forward, one foot still curled unnaturally under his weight.

They're both in bad shape. Tim is down one wing, and the only company he has is moving awkwardly through the carpet of dead leaves. One of his legs is all but useless. Between them, they might make one full, functional avian being.

The bag ends up on the ground. Tim disregards it.

"We're getting out of here. Come on." He has to move at an awkward angle, propping the other bird up and trying to keep the pressure off his bad wing all at the same time. It's not idea. Their progress is slow and staggering.

He doesn't care.

The pressure behind his eyes is unbearable.

"Just - keep moving. Come on."

"Jus' keep moving," Jay slurs, his tongue heavy and sluggish. Movement helps; even as his head's swimming, even as the pain burrows into his skull, he can feel it start to ease off the more they move.

They're getting away.

They have to get away. The realization jolts him, fear trickling through the cracks in the pain. He blinks once, twice, and the shadows start to coalesce into familiar shapes. He can make out the individual trees now, follow the outline of the dark silhouette holding him upright. Jay can't quite make out his expression, but he sounds shaken.

"Where...?" His mind might be working faster, but it feels like his beak hasn't quite caught up. "You know where's the..." He heaves, breath catching in his throat. "...the way out?"

"No," says Tim, because he doesn't. He has no idea where they're headed. His only plan here is: get out. Get away from - the thing that doesn't exist, because It's only ever been a memory, a thought, a bad dream. A shape in the corner of his eyes. A flicker of something that never moves.

"We're getting..." A strain of breath squeezing out from his overtaxed lungs - not broken with a smoker's cough, in this universe, but still far from in peak condition. "...getting out of here. I don't care where we end up."

He used to play a game. Anywhere but here.

It won't save anyone now.

Jay wouldn't call that reassuring. He's seen old human movies, where they're stuck on foot and can't get above the treetops to find their way out. Sometimes they starve. Sometimes there's the risk of starving, but everything's okay. Sometimes they wander into an abandoned building and scream and drop their camera and the credits roll without explaining what happened.

Tim doesn't know the way out, but Jay does. He said he did. He doesn't now.

"Find th' trail." He winces at the sound of his own voice. On the next sentence, he speaks more slowly, over-enunciating to make up for the fact that his tongue still feels like it's been coated with cotton balls. "If we get to the trail, I know..." Again, he winces, hearing the way the vowel warps in his mouth. "I know which way's out."

He steps forward with more purpose this time, his injured foot curled and dragging through the dirt behind him.

He sounds like he's on the verge of passing the hell out, which is really not what either of them need right now. Tim can only barely keep the other bird upright with a damaged fucking wing; if he drops off in earnest, they're both screwed.

"Okay," he says. How the hell he's going to dodge the million and one questions around this, he has no idea. That's not the issue right now. The priority is getting out while he still can. "You gotta stay awake, okay? No passing out on me. I can't carry you with one wing, okay?"

It hasn't occurred to him that there's no real reason he should care. There's nothing stopping him from dropping him and just - running for his life.

The thought simply hasn't crossed his mind.

"You don' have to--" --carry me, he means to say, pulling himself upright on his one good foot and balancing the remaining weight on the other. That plan goes out the door the second his head starts swimming, sending him back into Tim's side. His beak's still half-open, earning him a mouthful of some-guy-from-physics-class's feathers. He spits.

Looks like walking unaided isn't really an option. And it's still not like Tim has to prop his sorry ass up, but he's still doing it.

What do you say, Jaybird?

"Thanks," he mumbles. He shuffles along as quickly as he can manage in whichever direction Tim points them, cowed for the moment.

Until he gets another idea. His foot's near-useless, but he's got two operational wings (even if his parents say otherwise, with how clear it is he never takes the time to preen them). He tilts his head back, looking up at the canopy.

He ignores the way his head buzzes again, unexpected vertigo from the sudden movement.

"Hey." He nudges Tim, before glancing up again.

That little maneuver goes about as well as one would expect - which is to say, not at all. Tim doesn't fight it when he pushes away, but the anticipatory shuffle of his weight across the leaf litter is a pretty solid indication that he's expecting the attempt to backfire.

"I can't fly," he says, a terse undertone. "Remember?"

That's...that's what kind of plan he's hinting at, right? What other kind of plan would involve the canopy overhead?

"I'll come back," Jay snipes, a little too forcefully. The birdie doth protest too much, something in the back of his head pipes up, helpfully reminding him of the copy of Hamlet he left in his backpack. ~~It's that thing's now. Hope it has as much fun with it as Jay did.~~

"Listen, I can...If I get enough hei--" His voice catches in his throat, and he tries to cover it with a cough. "If I can get high up there enough, maybe I c'n see where we are."

He has to take a second to catch his breath, give his beak a break. It's all still sluggish. His tongue's got pins and needles, and his foot doesn't even have that. He can't even feel it.

"Then we know where's...the way out."

Flying's easier than walking, anyway. It'll be fine.

"Are you in any condition to fly? You can barely stand." Forgive him if he's skeptical, Jay, but he's been supporting you this entire way and is pretty dubious that you can manage to fly in a straight line, let alone play at some recon. He's not a doctor. He has no idea how bad it is, what the guy might've done to his foot, but it's not going to make landing any easier.

"What about landing? If you crash, I - " I'm not going to come back for you again, he almost says, but the lie doesn't seem plausible. He's the one trying to keep the poor idiot alive and moving, even if he has virtually no reason to give a fuck.

There's some kind of rationalization there he could probably dredge up if he put his mind to it. He shoves it viciously aside instead.

"If you crash, that wouldn't be ideal."

"Well, if we die out here, that's probab--prob'ly even less ideal." He pushes off from Tim again, wavering on his feet, and shuffles backwards until he's a little over a wing's length away.

"Lemme just try."

He doesn't quite take off, not yet, but he stretches his wings, trying to ignore the pins-and-needles prickling along the length of them, trying to ignore the way the dirt clings to the barbs of his feathers, pulling them out of alignment.

Tim got him this far. Jay owes him one.

If we die out here.

It's a damn good thing that Tim isn't the sort to laugh at that, or at things in general, because otherwise he'd be sorely tempted to let loose at that little gem. If they die, that sure would suck, wouldn't it? It'd suck for Jay, sure.

"Your funeral," says Tim, because he might not be laughing, but he's still got a sense of gallows humor to rival all else. What else is he supposed to do? They haven't got a plan here. Might as well let the guy try, even if he's probably doomed from the start.

Jay doesn't laugh either, just lets out a quiet, derisive huff of air. Jay's lost, and Tim probably never knew where he was in the first place. They could be fine, or they could be walking deeper into the woods. They could've gotten turned around. It could be biding its time, waiting for them to get too wiped out to flee, waiting for Tim's wing to set crooked or Jay's leg to go fucking...necrotic or whatever it's doing.

Better to die trying something, right?

He checks over his shoulder, peering into the woods. He can still hear the rustling of the leaves in the wind. The light fades out the way he expects, uneven, speckled with moonlight.

Jay runs the first few flight feathers on each wing through his beak, grimacing at the texture on his tongue. Probably didn't accomplish much. His mom tells him it won't feel that way if he does it more often, but he's got his doubts.

He adjusts the camera.

And with a frantic shuffling of feathers against the leaves, Jay takes off.

He regrets it instantly, the buzzing in his head returning full-force. His vision swims. He's still airborne, though, somehow. He pauses in mid-air, flapping furiously to hold his position long enough to get a better view. He squints into the darkness, seeing double.

On a good day, he'd be able to keep his balance on an upright twig, but that sounds like a worse joke than Tim's with the way he's--Shit.

Jay dips for a dizzying moment, wings flaring out to turn his clumsy dive into an arc. He barely has enough time to shut his eyes before he crashes through a clump of narrow branches. Nothing to land on, even if he tried; they bend and snap to accommodate him, raking against the patches of skin they can reach through the feathers.

His wings shoot out again, curving him back upwards, trying to make up for lost altitude. His head throbs, and another wave of unnatural vertigo hits hard enough to make him retch; he has to land, now.

He sees a place. It's close to the trunk, sturdy, twisted with notches in the bark where he can dig in his claws. He tucks in his wings, diving for it.

It'd be a near-perfect landing, if he hadn't forgotten he had one functioning leg. Instead, his working foot clings to the branch, and he swings forward, flapping to right himself. His bad foot, curled around nothing, scrapes uselessly against the rough bark of the branch. He realizes with a jolt that he felt it scraping, felt the skin between the scales split and sting against the air. It's muted, but he felt it. Maybe it's not quite necrotic after all.

He takes a moment to check his balance before peering down, ignoring the way his gut lurches. He can see sparse patches of the forest floor, maybe even something that could be a trail, but there isn't a crow immediately visible in any of it.

"Tim?"

He can't have flown far. He can't. Right?

He can walk just fine, if awkwardly, brokenly, in fumbling, wobbling paths. His unwitting partner in crime takes off with a rustle of leaves and batted twigs, and leaves Tim behind, groundbound and waiting for his return.

Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It'd be so fucking perfect, wouldn't it, to just ditch him and go? To keep flying, so he doesn't have to be dragged down by all this fucking deadweight. As soon as the possibility reveals itself to him, Tim swears under his breath and starts moving with renewed fervor. If he's not coming back, then he has to move. He has to move fast. He has to get out of here before whatever it is - before whatever It is comes back and bleeds into his vision, his broken fucking brain.

He doesn't have a camera or a bag to worry about. Just a shit sense of direction, coupled with the unfortunate bottom line that he has no idea where he's going or which direction home is. How he's supposed to get out. Panic is a swarm of hornets threatening to choke him out; he only woke up here. He could die here. He could wander, forever, lost in some fogged-up void that presses up against his closed eyes and smothers him in his sleep -

That's roughly the point in time where something crackles overhead, raining fragments of bark and twig down over him.

He glances up and squints. Doesn't remember saying his name, but introductions weren't his priority. Maybe he's just recognizable enough by his neuroses, his frequent class absences, the obvious nature of just how fucked his neurochemistry is.

"Who's there?"

He never asked his name, did he? 'Course not. That'd require him to be halfway decent at baseline.

"Who d'you think?" Jay snipes, his voice sounding too loud in the stillness of the woods. (Weren't there crickets, just a second ago?) Jay's not sure, but he thinks he heard an echo. "It's--"

He halts, adjusting his balance on the branch, fluffing up despite himself. Great. Now Tim has to be wondering what the end of that sentence was going to be. Now he's gotta go through the whole spiel.

"Look, don't laugh, alright?"

"I don't think you have to worry about that here," says Tim, because I laugh at a rate of maybe two times per year total is too many words for him to bother with just now, and the fact that he's getting that as an answer is perfect grounds to speak as flatly and sarcastically as possible.

Thankfully, cold condescension is a mood that comes naturally to him. It's one of his lesser qualities. Though the use of the word "lesser" implies that he has qualities that are decent to begin with, which he takes firm issue with.

"Fine, it's Jay." Har-har. "'S a family name."

Both a joke and the stupid truth. It'd probably go down easier if he wasn't saying it like he had his claws around something's throat, but that's a little too much to ask right now. Like he hadn't been target enough since kindergarten with the patches of feathers missing and the camera strapped to his chest and the way he won't talk when people want him to talk and shut up when people don't and the way he talks like there are things we don't know about yet, like he believes ghosts and creatures and a dark void between the trees that splits your head open are real.

Tim doesn't need to deal with his bullshit.

"Since it seemed like you didn't hear it in class."

But Jay's gonna keep acting like he needs to, isn't he?

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