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

"I'm not the one with the bird's eye view, asshole. Give me a minute." Bird's eye view. Funny, right? Yeah. He's fucking hilarious. He's just trying to cover ground when he's not supposed to be moving on the ground at all, and the darkness pressing around him at all edges isn't helping.

"It's...yeah." He can't fight the bite of relief that curls up in the posterior of his brain, dopamine and shot nerves shivering his feathers. "It's a way out. It's a way out."

And that's good enough for Jay.

He drops, stomach lurching with regret the instant he feels his claws slip from the branch. His wings shoot out a second later, redirecting the dive into a glide, and while it's not as even as he'd like, at least it's horizontal.

Jay coasts toward Tim. His descent is slow, gradual. His legs stretch out to meet the ground, and--

He lands too hard, tumbling end over end into a patch of brambles.

There's silence, and then a low moan. "Fuuuck."

Earth to Jay, he thinks. Then: Jay to Earth. That's almost funny. He feels like he should rupture his internal organs laughing, because it's so fucking stupid and he's probably a horrible person for making that joke, because Jay's probably actually kind of seriously hurt, so a decent person would be taking him to the - the nurse's office or something, or a doctor, seeing as they're after school hours now. Fucking obviously.

"Maybe you should stick to flying," says Tim, painfully pointlessly. But he sighs, and starts moving to intercept. See if he can actually help and not just comment sarcastically on the sidelines. "You...uh, can you get up?"

"Safer down here, thanks," Jay mumbles, still splayed out and half-tangled in the brambles.

He hates that he says it. He hates how backwards it sounds. He hates how he's not sure he's got full control of his limbs, how something that should just work suddenly takes effort, how stumbling and hopping across the ground like a human is suddenly preferable to being up where things can't get at him. He shouldn't be getting vertigo. It shouldn't feel safer down here.

That whatever it was did something to his head. He felt it burrowing under his skull, under his skin, even if he couldn't see what it was doing. It must have done this on purpose.

God, he feels sick.

"Gimme a...gimme a second."

Gingerly, he pushes back with his wings against the ground, against the branches, and tries to pull himself upright. He braces himself for the agony to set in, but it doesn't hit. No indication that anything's broken. His whole body aches, though. He can feel bruises dotting up his side, across both wings. Even his bad leg twinges with the world's faintest case of pins and needles. His head throbs.

Fuck, how's the camera? He tilts his head down frantically, wincing as pain shoots down his neck. Red light's still on, lens looks...it's fine. There's a little dirt, maybe a chip in the corner, but it's still running. He blows on it, trying to clear the worst of it off. That's definitely a chip in the glass.

Still, all things considered, that wasn't as much of a disaster as it could have been.

Squinting, he pokes his head out of the leaves.

"That better be the trail."

Oh, sure, all the warning signs are there. But he's not Tim, is he? He doesn't go missing for hours on end. He wandered out here to try and find something, and he fucking found it, all right. He doesn't miss days of class, or get dizzy fits, or hear voices. He doesn't see things in the corners of his fucking eyes.

Pointless. Fucking pointless asking, acting like they've got any common ground here. Like anyone wants to have anything in common with the local freak.

"It's gotta be," says Tim, with more confidence than he actually feels. "You'd...you can walk on your own. Right?"

He'd better be. He just wants to go home.

"Yeah, I'm..." He shuffles out from behind the leaves, leaning on his good leg. His numb foot doesn't look as tightly curled, but it still drags unnaturally along the ground. Jay spares it a glance, and even though he can't feel it, he's pretty sure the ankle's swollen. He'll probably hate himself for putting as much weight on it as he has, but that's a problem for future Jay.

That assumes future Jay doesn't have permanent nerve damage. That also assumes future Jay isn't going to need to have it amputated. He feels like he should be panicking about this, but at this point, it's been shuffled pretty far down the queue.

"Uh, I'm--" He hobbles forward a few steps before stumbling, flaring out a wing against the ground to right himself. A muscle in his back twinges in protest. "Yeah."

Priorities. He can figure out how to walk later. First, he has to figure out where he's walking.

"I...Yeah, this is..it's the trail." He takes a moment to process what he's looking at, to mentally hold up the images against the map, against his own memories. This isn't the first time he's been out here. "I mean, definitely. If we're...if we're past the picnic tables, then we gotta head that way."

He gestures with a jerk of his head, pointing with his beak.

"And I think...yeah, we gotta be past the picnic tables, or we'd be able to see the, uh, the lights from here. The streetlights." He pauses, cocking his head as his thoughts take an abrupt left turn. "You...okay, by the way?"

Something in Jay got fried when he strayed too far behind, but Tim was right there to help. (How long was he out? How long before Tim got there?) Did Tim just get lucky? Did it just skip over him? Did it leave before he got there? Is Tim gonna pass out on him? Are his legs just gonna spontaneously stop working, too?

What happens if that thing finds them again?

"I'm not the one who's having trouble walking."

He's not in any particular state he can't handle. He's not dealing with anything he hasn't already dealt with. He's...he's not fine, but he's never been fine, cannot, in fact, remember the last time he could quantify his state of being as fine without lying through his beak about it, but his metric for fine is skewed on the lower end compared to most. So, for the moment: yes. He's fine.

"You're going to a doctor after this. Right?" Oh my god, why does he care? What does it fucking matter, what Jay does? He's just some asshole who was asking too many questions and thinks he's in a ghost hunting documentary and they're wasting time.

Jay takes a moment to look down at himself, and then back up at Tim's crooked wing.

"Y-yeah. The ER's supposed to be open all night, right?" His head cants to the side, genuinely unsure. "So we could just..."

Fly there. Great idea.

"Call a...call a cab or something, I dunno."

He doesn't have a car yet, and his parents are gonna kill him for staying out this late anyway. Then they'll probably hook him up to a pair of jumper cables and bring him back, Frankenstein-style, and then kill him again once they figure out he got lost in the woods and screwed up his leg. Or his brain, or whatever that thing did to...

Shit, he doesn't hear crickets. He doesn't hear anything further than the shuffling of the leaves beneath his and Tim's feet. It's like somebody switched off everything beyond the edges of the trail.

He tries to catch Tim's eye. Is it just me?

ER. Like he needs more medical bills in his life. That's assuming that Jay's not going to be fucking himself over if he asks for a check-up, just to make sure that he's compos mentis for the moment. Call a cab, he says, like either of them can afford it. He shouldn't be working himself up over the prospect of how they're going to pay for it - they have to make it through this first, after all, in order to be able to pay for it.

"What?" says Tim. Then, quieter, more urgent: "What?"

The world is quiet.

Unnervingly so.

"...come on," he mutters, low, urgent. "Come on. We have to get out of here now."

Jay nods furiously, tripping towards Tim. His wings flare out at his sides, ready to catch himself if he loses his balance.

Maybe it's just a coincidence. Maybe it's nothing, but maybe it knows they found the way out. Maybe it knows they're talking about things like hospitals and cab rides instead of leaning against each other, mumbling and blinking against the moonlight like it wants.

Quit it, Jay. You're acting paranoid.

But the camera's still rolling. He can go back and look through the footage frame by frame after they get out, try to piece together what happened when he fell the first time. Just like the bumper sticker says: It's not paranoid if they're really out to get you.

"This--" Jay stutters, nudging Tim in the right direction. "This way."

He flinches away from the contact automatically, but his feathers are already spiked up on end and his expression is already drifting, drawn tight and unfocused simultaneously, so he tries to pass the gesture off in the choppy jerk of his nod.

"You can afford a cab?" Don't question how rusty the words sound, the way they rasp up against each other like gravel. Don't wonder why your eardrums are throbbing, why a migraine is leveling itself between your eyes like a heat-seeking leucotome.

Don't speculate why your head feels filled with static, why Jay's words break through to you slowly, as though you're hearing them issued underwater.

Tim can't, even in an emergency like this?

It's not an emergency. He could call his parents. He could get them to take him and Tim to the hospital. He could get Tim to call his parents. He could call 911. He heard ambulances are expensive, but they can't be that expensive, right? Would it be more or less than a cab?

How much is a cab?

And how pissed are his parents gonna be if he calls them?

"My parents told me they...they wanted me to--" His voice sounds muffled to his own ears, like his head's stuffed with cotton. A muscle in his jaw throbs, the pain trailing down his neck. "Practice before college, so I have a--"

Not a credit card, not for another few months, but he's got a card, and he's got an account, and for the first time he's got more than some cents in a piggy bank, more than enough to get a slushie at the 7-11. They wanted him to practice managing money, like he's some kind of adult. Like they're just assuming he's not gonna be a starving artist, like they're just assuming he's gonna give up on his passions the second he hits the real world. Whatever they think they're teaching him, he knows it's not going to apply.

"I can afford--" He blinks, and for a dizzying moment it looks like the trees are vibrating. He screws his eyes shut, still moving forward. "I just can, alright?"

So he has parents who give a shit about him. Big fucking deal. Most everyone does. Most everyone has parents who bother to check in, who give their kids things like birthday presents and well wishes and calls every Sunday and fucking credit cards, or whatever it is that Jay isn't mentioning. That's not unusual. It's not a personal attack. He got over that kind of thinking years ago - that disgusted, disgruntled envy that someone had stability that Tim himself never had. There's no point in holding it against them, when he's always known himself to be the exception to the rule.

"Then call them now," he says. "They can meet us outside the woods, or...something. You can't stay on your feet for much longer."

He doesn't need to be a doctor to know that much.

Jay cracks his eyes open, squinting against the pain burrowing into his skull to shoot Tim a look. Speak for yourself.

He reaches into his backpack to grab his phone and--

--and--

His backpack. The backpack he left a couple miles in the woods. The backpack with his phone in it. That backpack.

He curses under his breath.

"You have your phone?"

"Yeah. Just..." He has to fumble to extricate it, and the battery is at forty percent, but when you have a habit of waking in the middle of the woods with no idea how long you've been out and where you are, you hardwire it into yourself to charge your phone any chance you get.

He thrusts it in Jay's direction, unlocking the screen.

"Here."

Thank god.

Jay snatches the phone from him, swipes it open. The signal's bad, but not gone. Jay pauses just long enough to punch in a search for a local cab company. While it loads, he stumbles a few steps forward, trying to make up for lost ground.

Pause, type in the number, run. Hold it in your beak; you need your feet to move. Wait for the ringing to stop. Don't think about the needles burrowing into the back of your skull every time you stand still for too long.

There's a voice on the other end of the line, but it's difficult to make out. It cuts out mid-word, and the bits he can here are garbled.

Jay doesn't ask for clarification, just stammers the address of the school. "And we need a ride to, to the hospital. The closest hospital." His throat catches, sending him into a fit of thin, wheezing coughs. "Soon--soon, please."

"--need--e to call 911?"

"No! No, we just--"

"--ow old are you? Pu--ther on the--ine."

"No, come on, just--" There's a click. "Hello? Hello?"

He looks over at Tim, eyes wide, like Tim'll somehow be able to fix the fact that the line just went dead. He looks down at the phone.

They got the address. It's fine. It should be...it's fine.

Historically, phone calls that end with frantic hellos being shouted down the line aren't necessarily a good thing. At least, that'd be the general assumption as far as Tim is concerned. But, hey. Jay's apparently got them covered as far as expenses go, and the fact that he was able to call at all breaks some swollen soap bubble that Tim hadn't realized was welling up in his chest; some fear, some lurking terror that they weren't really...there anymore.

Stupid. A stupid, irrational fear, and just as irrational as the warm slide of reassurance into his veins, like the phone call is a tether back to reality.

"Let's keep moving," is all he has to offer, because it's better than looking over his shoulder. "We shouldn't...shouldn't keep them waiting. Right?"

Don't think about the whisper of static. Don't think about it.

It's fine. You're real. It's all real.

"Right." Jay nods, the motion brief and jerky, before handing back the phone in his beak.

A chill runs down his back, his feathers rising with it. He shakes, tries to smooth it all back down.

Keep moving. Shouldn't keep them waiting. He drags his bad leg along, ignoring the way every step sends pins and needles prickling down it. It should be fine. He probably just fell on it wrong. Probably doesn't even really need the doctors to look at it.

Tim's wing needs a doctor, though. That can't be okay. So they need to keep moving.

Spots dance across his vision, his head spins, but they have to keep moving. It hits again, harder this time, and his ears ring. He screws his eyes shut.

His throat tight and hoarse, he whispers, "Hear that?"

Is it just him, this time?

Edited 2018-09-04 07:18 (UTC)

He can't hear anything beyond the rumble of adrenaline shooting pins and needles down his spine, ricocheting along the base of his skull and jittering his nerves into overdrive. You're losing it, Tim. The thought nearly makes him laugh, which is a problem. It's a problem because he doesn't laugh and yet he almost wants to double over with the breaking tide of mirth that doesn't suit him. Because he's already lost it. Because he has nothing left to lose. Because he's already been wrung dry and there's no saving himself from that.

"Can you move any faster?" he says, which isn't a yes or a no but an urgent, frantic response nonetheless.

They need to get out of here. Now. Now. If they could just get free of the cage bars of the trees, if they could get somewhere else inhabited by actual people, maybe that'll finally put this entire nightmare to an end.

"Shut up, I'm trying," Jay snaps under his breath, which isn't a yes or no either.

And he is. There's something deeply wrong with the trees right now, with the way the foliage seems to be encroaching on the edges of the trail, dangling climbing vines and bare, twisted branches nearly low enough to scrape at them, and it's enough for Jay to wish he could take off again.

If he tried now, he knows he wouldn't be able to keep his balance.

He'd probably lose the trail again.

And he'd lose Tim, which should've been the first thing he thought about, but he's apparently the kind of piece-of-shit coward who'd consider leaving somebody to die in the woods just to increase his chances of survival. The kind of guy in a slasher movie where, when the killer eventually catches up to him, the audience cheers as he gets a machete driven through his chest. The camera really lingers on that one, lets the audience soak it in. No respect for the dead when they don't deserve it.

He hasn't left Tim yet, though, and Tim hasn't left him. He tries to close the distance between them. (Tim hasn't pulled too far ahead, but Jay knows he can.) His blood's rushing in his ears, the sound mixing with the pressure in his head, with the pressure against his eardrums, like he's flown too high and his head's started spinning and there's a hiss-pop like an old CRT monitor turning on, and running on pure, stupid instinct, Jay twists his head back and

sees

something

at the center of nothing.

It's a thin sliver of a shadow, barely lighter than the void around it, but the whole of him seizes up, frozen in place, lungs straining because he knows. He knows it's looking directly at them.

Don't look back. That's one of the first things he taught himself. He learned the story properly when he actually started going to school like a normal person, and that's where he first heard about Orpheus and Eurydice. The smiliarities were impossible to ignore, except Orpheus's story, he thinks, was the more pleasant of the pair. He walked into hell for the person he loved, and failed keep his eyes off her in those pivotal final moments. A tragedy, but an endurable one; they got to be together in death in the end, didn't they?

Tim never went into any hell by choice. He was simply born in it, and it doesn't matter if he never looks back; It still follows, ghosting behind his every step.

Locking Jay up. Freezing him solid. And Tim yanks at him, furiously, hissing:

"Don't look back."

He jolts at the contact. Don't look back. Instead, he looks at Tim, tries not to focus on the way the his silhouette blurs into the space between the trees.

The headache subsides, just slightly.

Don't look back.

"Okay," he mumbles, following after. He keeps his eyes trained on the worn dirt trail, on the grooves cut into the soil by Tim's claws. He's lost track of how much ground they've covered, but it can't be too much longer.

(There's a pressure against the back of his head.)

Don't look back.

(His lungs ache, and his breath stutters in his throat.)

Don't look back.

(The hum and hiss of the air behind them spikes in volume, spikes in pitch, screams, and Tim has to hear this, he has to, but he doesn't respond. Doesn't move, doesn't twitch, but he has to hear it too, because the alternative's--)

Don't look back.

There's a light between the trees.

Pray to god (God isn't listening, Timothy - why would He listen to a thing like you?) that it's headlights from a cab or something, a car idling out in the woods waiting for a pair of idiots to come flapping into view. Pray to god that it's the real world, cracking its way through the haze of this woodland-stink nightmare. Pray to whoever the fuck is listening that there's a way out.

As long as they don't look back. As long as Eurydice isn't aching to catch at their ankles and drag them back into the mindscape of unspooling limbs and a dark stain on the texture of their souls.

His soul.

"Hey," Tim says, a gravelly raven's rasp. Then, louder, calling out to the light: "we're over here!"

"Hey--hey!" Jay joins in, adding a high, blue-jay screech to the cacophony.

(Tim can hear that, right?)

Don't fucking--don't look back. Just keep moving toward the light.

Jay sets his jaw, tenses his neck, so he won't get tempted again. So he won't hear something that makes him jolt to attention, so he won't lock up. Maybe next time, Tim won't be able to yank him out of it. Maybe he won't want to.

The light starts to coalesce into two small points--headlights, thank god.

"We're--we're right here!" His run falters, balance thrown off-kilter by the way he spreads his wings, waving them in an attempt to catch the driver's attention.

The driver. The driver he called, and whom he intends to pay for out of his own pocket so he doesn't have to call his parents. Like they're not gonna notice.

God, fuck, his parents are gonna kill him. He thinks he can cover a cab, he thinks, but can he really? Is he just gonna call another one to get himself and Tim back home, or are their parents gonna have to pick them up at the hospital? Is that three cabs? Can he afford three cabs? Is there even a fraction of a chance they're going to pull this off?

A laugh catches in his chest.

Really? Is he really thinking about this?

Whatever his parents have in mind, grounding him or locking up the Playstation or monitoring his computer use or slashing his allowance, it can't be worse than what's behind him. It's a hell of a lot better than nothing, a hysterical part of him suggests, and he has to fight even harder to suppress the urge to laugh.

Edited 2018-09-06 07:26 (UTC)

They're almost out. The noise that breaks the back of Tim's throat is achingly close to a sob, a relieved spurt of sound that nearly crumbles him down on the spot. It's okay. It's okay. They're back to the real world. They won't get stuck here. They can make it.

They'll be out of here, and he'll never have to think about this - this night where his nightmares caught up with him and nearly ensnarled someone else in the blank spaces in the back of his head - ever fucking again.

It feels like it's receding. Is that just him?

Doesn't matter.

blue canary in the outlet by the light switch

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jay merrick: anxious bird with bad ideas, now in teenager form

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face in hands jay

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blue canary in the outlet by the light switch

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jay merrick: anxious bird with bad ideas, now in teenager form

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*face in hands* jay

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face in hands jay