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The first memory Tim has is screaming, beating relentlessly on the walls of his room and begging, pleading for someone to get him out, to let him out, please, please, someone, anyone- and when nobody answered, because nobody ever did, sinking to the ground to cry bitterly. Alone, like always, left behind by his mother and anyone else who should have cared. He’s always been alone, except in the ways that matter. Always alone, except for the thing following him.
He sees it and knows it, and then he forgets it every time he turns, and Tim Wright’s life has been a long and winding road to nowhere. It almost makes him smile sometimes, the crooked man walking his crooked mile. Other times it makes him want to sob. It feels like he turns a corner and the whole world is new but after a moment everything breaks open like broken stitches, all of his issues and all of his awful, dirty memories spilling out, all of the past overwhelming him like waves. Who would want to touch that? To be close to a walking wound? To be up to their hands in blood trying to sew him back together?
Who would choose that? Befriend that?
Who would want to spend their time with violence in the shape of a person?
He disgusts himself, really.
When Jay thinks back to his childhood, he remembers ignorance, remembers not knowing. He used to sneak out to the living room at night, when his mother was in her room and his father was passed out on the couch, just to read their books and try to understand. It always felt like he was missing something, like he was left behind somehow. Always running to catch up. Even the other kids used to make fun of him, with wide eyes and a thousand questions bubbling at his mouth. Always irritating, always stupid, always ignorant. “Figure it out, genius,” they used to scoff, but how was he supposed to do that? Where was he supposed to look? Who was he supposed to ask, if not them? Jay remembers having nobody to turn to because that never changed.
He moved out, went to college, made friends for the first time, but still. Still. So many questions with no answers. So many things nobody taught him. He feels like he’s running to catch up to everyone else, all the time, left behind and sprinting forward, constantly being pushed back by the waves at his knees. He doesn’t know as much as everyone else. He may never know.
But he can keep trying.
Tim finds that things ease as he gets older, moves away, can pretend to blend in and know what it is to be normal. He goes to class, goes home, goes to work, goes to class, goes home, goes to work, and after long enough he can lie to himself and say that this is good. This is fine. This is what life is. This is normal. He’s normal, finally. And it works after a fashion- Tim pretends, happily and well, and he makes some acquaintances, then friends- Brian, and strikingly so, because Brian is everything Tim isn’t. He’s charismatic, funny, kind. Handsome and fun, easy to get along with, easy to like. He’s so warm. So emotional. Tim isn’t sure why Brian latched onto him, of all people, and he isn’t sure he wants to ask. Brian likes him, sticks by him and after awhile Tim thinks maybe it doesn’t matter anymore. He doesn’t need to know why. Isn’t it enough to have a friend? To matter to somebody? He and Brian are friends. Real friends. It’s more than he could ask.
Except one day Brian takes him to some audition for a student film, it’ll be quick, he says, it’s for a friend. Brian will do anything for his friends. Tim knows, and he can’t begrudge Brian anything, especially not this. It’s part of being kind, Tim has learned. Loving people without end, without fear. Pouring out your heart for them and asking for the same. It’s admirable. It’s what Brian is good at.
Tim throws in his audition mostly as a courtesy to Brian, but with it comes more change- more joy, more terror. The words “cooler, more apathetic” ring just a touch too true for Tim’s liking- apathetic is a piece of that greater weight he carries, a side effect of his many, many issues. Still, that means he can act the part effectively, doesn’t it? He’s method. Or something. Alex cuts him off, though, and the “I’ve seen enough,” stings a little coming from someone whose opinion clearly matters to Brian but oh well, maybe Tim isn’t an actor. Maybe he never will be. That’s fine. He does enough acting.
Somehow he ends up on set anyway. He meets Sarah there, and Seth, and Amy. And Jay Merrick. He meets Jay. Tim is bad with people, mostly on purpose, because holding them at arm’s length stops them from getting hurt when his life tips sideways again and he wakes up miles from home with no way of getting back and no memory of what he did. Tim knows better than to involve other people in his life. But sometimes he wishes. Plaintively, a little sadly, he wishes.
Jay meets Alex first, in an intro to film analysis course (GASP 087, maybe. Maybe not. Things get blurry the further in he goes.) where the teacher is obsessed with narratives about emotional trauma. They both make fun of her for it, for the cynical way every film ends, for the way she stresses that art is about loss . Alex’s voice sounds funniest when he mimics her Midwest accent and says, nose stuck high up into the air, “art is suffering.” Jay’s never really bought that explanation- art is creation, right? It’s about making things, not destroying them. It’s about carving a space into the world and filling it. Telling stories.
With Alex comes Brian, who seems too tall and handsome and nice to be hanging around with a couple of washed out high school pity cases like them, but he doesn’t leave, and that’s nice. Alex is a little in love with him, Jay thinks, but in the tightly-held, locked down way people can be in love when they know they have no chance. He doesn’t mention it. He likes both of them too much to be that brave, that reckless. With Brian comes Tim, though, and that’s. It’s a lot. Tim is a lot.
He looks like a man who fell asleep fifty years ago under an apricot tree and just woke up, stumbling beautiful and drowsy from the woods, like a time capsule from a bar in Louisiana that was just dug up and cracked open, like some kind of ghostly stranger who teaches you how to light a cigarette and holds your gaze and smiles and then disappears into the mist of the hot summer’s night. He smells like a barber shop and menthol cigarettes and Jay feels like he’s fifteen and even stupider than he is now whenever he’s around him. It’s a lot. Tim is a lot.
Jay forces himself to be normal around him. He’s so normal. Completely normal.
Tim asks Sarah to come be a part of the project, because she’s an actor and she needs work, and she just… makes sense. Something about her slots into the production, the friend group so well. She's sharp-edged and no nonsense, and for all that she’s a community theater actress now, Jay can see the drive in her to get somewhere. Be someone. Escape. Drive out into the night and never come back. Jay understands that.
With Sarah comes Seth, her loyal best friend and the cameraman they needed- well. They had Jay. But Alex didn’t want Jay holding a camera. So Seth is their cameraman now. He tries not to be upset about it. He has his own film to work on, after all, and whatever Alex’s vision is, Jay doesn’t need to be told twice that it’s particular. Maybe his style just wasn’t right. Who can say. Not Jay. He doesn’t know- doesn’t know anything. He keeps his head down, does his job as script supervisor, works on his own film, tries not to blush around Tim.
Jay is pretty proud of his film, in the end, especially since Alex’s falls through a few months in- not that he knew that at the time. His final project is about being haunted, funnily enough. About being the last person alive at the end of the world and picking up a road trip companion in a cemetery. Stop-motion, because it’s fun, and because deep down Jay is a little pretentious too and he wants to prove he can do it. He always has something to prove. It’s a sweet little story, and it ends happily, because Jay wants to believe things can end happily. It’s hard, trying to keep believing that. It eats away at his chest like acid, but he manages it. Mostly, he manages.
Sometimes though… He looks at Seth, holding the camera, and forces down a pang of jealousy. It’s fine. Jay doesn’t have to matter. He doesn’t have anything to prove. Not to his friends, not to Alex, not to Tim. Not to anyone. He sighs.
He has so much to prove.
Tim actually enjoys acting, as it turns out. He talks to Jay, a little, here and there. He’s script supervisor, and it makes Tim a little bit torn between making memorizing his lines a point of pride or fucking them up to spend more time with Jay. He chooses to learn them, like a coward, and spends most of his time watching Brian and Jay run lines- his lines, but Jay says them differently, says them with a kind of purposeful optimism that lends them a warmer tone. Tim had always read them so much colder. Jay has this soft, intangible kindness in him, and every now and then it glints out like gold under the sand under the sun.
It makes Tim smile. He feels like he hasn’t smiled in years. Like something in him finally slotted back into place after years askew. He feels warmer here, with Jay. With Brian and Alex, Sarah and Seth. He feels normal, feels real, feels alive in a way the meds haven’t really let him feel for a while. Or maybe it wasn’t the meds, because he's still taking them. Maybe it was him. Maybe he just… got used to being alone, froze everyone out. He tries not to think about it.
He tries to enjoy this.
Alex makes it hard, though. He used to be nice. Tim remembers, he used to be gracious, if pretentious, and maybe he was a little stiff but not this… rigid, cruel control freak that Tim sees now. It’s like something broke inside of him, like he’s falling headlong into the same place Tim’s been for most of his life, and Tim tries not to think of how that feels, because it leads to uncomfortable ideas. Art people have breakdowns, Tim tells himself. Film majors lose their minds.
This has nothing to do with him.
They’re shooting test footage on campus that day, in the rose-gold Alabama sunset, and Jay Merrick is beautiful where he stands in the light. It shines through his hair and paints his face a glowing rose-petal copper. Tim and Sarah are waiting their turn, which means he can watch Jay without seeming weird. He really doesn’t want to seem weird. He is weird, of course, but that doesn’t mean he wants it to show through like that.
“You’re looking again,” Sarah says in that knowing little voice. “Jay’s going to catch you one day, you know.” She takes the rest of Tim’s fries and drops them on her plate. He isn’t paying enough attention to care about her stealing. “You should just ask him out.”
“Jay Merrick is built like a baby gazelle,” Tim says, taking a long drag from his cigarette. He squints at the man in the far distance, brown hair shining under the sun. He’s handsome. Or pretty, in a sickly Victorian maiden kind of way. He’s also one of Alex’s friends, which makes him precarious in a way Tim doesn’t want to fuck with. Alex is one bad take from breaking something most days, and Tim would hate to get between him and one of his closest friends. Whatever the consequences would be, he doesn’t want them. Doesn’t need them. “I’m not touching that.” Sarah snorts, sopping up leftover sauce with her fries.
“What, you’re not into the idea of being his first kiss?” She says mockingly, red-lining half of her page of script. “God this shit sucks.”
“Don’t be rude to Alex’s shitty script,” Tim chastises her fondly, pointing at her food. “It’s just because you’ve got that whole low blood sugar thing going on.” He’s still staring past her at Jay, standing out in the field with Alex. He doesn’t want to fuck with that. He’s worked too goddamn hard to be stable just to throw something as wobbly and unstable as Jay into the mix. But shit, he’s beautiful. There’s something about him, standing out there in the sunlight, half of his face bright and his hair on fire gold with the way the light passes through. He’s got that whole romantic with a capital R poet thing going on, bags under his eyes and sadness in his smile, all awkward and soulful and sensitive and kind of pitiful and what Tim wouldn’t give to just talk to him-
“Fuck you,” she laughs, nose scrunching up, and Tim scrunches his nose right back at her. He can’t. He’s too steady for that. He has Brian and now he has Sarah and Alex and Seth and Jay and his life is… well, it isn’t functional but it’s close and he doesn’t want to give it up. Not for someone who won’t even love him. Not for someone who can’t. He breathes in smoke again, lets the nicotine filter through his lungs and suppresses a cough. Looking at Jay Merrick is like going a day without his medication; tempting, dangerous, and fatal.
“He’s been kissed before,” Tim says softly, watching Jay laugh. His eyes crease up at the corners when he laughs.
“What?” Sarah looks up, benign obliviousness in her eyes.
“Nothing,” Tim says, shaking his head. He hopes that Jay’s been kissed before. That he’s been loved. That people saw that brilliance in him and cared for it. That because it can never be Tim that it was someone else, anyone else, that Jay Merrick slept every night knowing he was loved and woke up every morning in someone else’s soft arms.
He just hopes those arms don’t belong to Alex Kralie. Then again, he muses, watching the way Alex looks at Brian, there’s a whole other soap opera happening over there. Maybe that isn’t something he has to worry about. Brian isn't… he can take care of himself in a way Tim can’t, in a way Jay can’t. There’s something solid and strong in him that lets him be kind and easy and sweet to the people around him, that lets him laugh at a moment’s notice, that lets him do all the things Tim wishes he was good enough to do. He loves Brian, with a fierceness and a visceral, human, warmth that Tim hasn’t felt before. He thinks this is what friendship is. This is what bonds people together, this searing heat like a bleeding wound, two fleshes made one and inseparable. It breaks through, a little bit. It breaks Tim.
He’s never been this glad to be broken, to let in light through those cracks, to feel for Brian and Sarah and Jay and Seth, even for Alex, who now cuts dead anything he doesn’t like and crushes the voices of his friends in a way Tim doesn’t remember him doing before. Even Alex. Tim can care for him, too, through this crack in the wall. He can reach out.
And then the hole in the wall is fixed. Tim is locked away again, alone again, and maybe everyone else is safer for it. Alex moves away. Tim forgets him, almost. Brian disappears. Tim forgets him too, the vacancy in his heart healing over with the cloudy film of memory loss. He doesn’t know what he’s missing. He doesn’t know who he’s missing. Then Seth and Sarah disappear, and Tim forgets them too. Everything fades, everything darkens, and the best part of Tim’s life disappears, eaten away by the rot of the thing he can’t see following him. He knows there’s something missing, but he can’t remember. It’s all fog and apathy, and he can’t quite bring himself to look further than his own sorrow.
Jay stays.
Tim doesn’t.
Jay Merrick has to ask. He always has to ask, because nobody ever tells him anything. It’s always “because I said so” and “you don’t need to know” and “you wouldn’t get it”, like he’s still a child tugging at his mother’s knee, begging for an explanation she’ll never give. Like his ears are still ringing from the way his father yelled at him for asking too many questions. He has to know. He has to scavenge, to salvage every scrap of information and grasp every truth. It’s all he has.
So he has to ask Alex about Marble Hornets.
He gets the tapes from Alex before he leaves, and Alex gives them to him with a promise of silence, a promise of no contact. That’s fine. Jay would rather draw his own conclusions than take more of Alex’s evasive half-lies. He’s ready to take them, ready to leave, when Alex calls him back. He doesn’t remember the way Alex turns and begins to hurt him, like he was an entirely different person two seconds apart. He doesn’t remember the half-feral thrashing in the dark, the way Alex knocks him down like a predator striking out at a deer, the way Alex beats him bloody and chokes him until Jay is weak and still, his fingers clawing at Alex’s face, at his glasses, knocked askew and spattered with water from the wet grass. He doesn’t remember what happens to him after.
He doesn’t remember it when he wakes up, when he stands. He walks home, mind focusing and unfocusing, bag full of unplayed tapes lighter in his hand than he had thought it would be. He’s left his car at Alex’s house, though that doesn’t hit him until much, much later. He’s in a haze, walking home clutching the plastic bag like it’s his only tie to the earth, dodging the wide circles of brightness under the streetlamps- he feels safer in the dark right now, safer on the soft wet blackness of asphalt than in the amber-citrus halo of visibility. There’s a stretch of road about halfway home, unused lots where houses were supposed to have been built, and from the middle of a deserted three-lane street, Jay can see the darkness stretching out into the purple-bright edges of the sky where the city proper’s light pollution begins to breach it. The street sparkles like obsidian and crushed glass under the glare of lonely, towering street lamps, and the whole world is muffled and near-silent as Jay limps home.
There’s a growing hum, like electricity pushing itself to a fever pitch inside of halogen bulbs, and the streetlights brighten until their light is a terrible, accusatory white. The sound burns in his ears, shrieking and screaming, the whole world tearing apart down to its atoms, and Jay turns. He has no choice.
There’s nothing.
There’s nothing at all.
Jay stares back at the wet, wide maws of light beneath the street lamps, each of them stabbing out into the darkness like jagged white teeth in the mouth of some unfathomable creature. The darkness seems to swallow him, and one by one the street lamps click off. The furthest goes first, a hefty, metallic, shunk sound, a jitter of static, and it’s gone, one tooth sunk deep into the velvet black safety of his hiding place. Then the next- shunk . The next- shunk . The next- shunk . Jay turns, his eyes straining back even as he looks away, and he begins to run, each thud of his feet on the asphalt like a thunderclap in the widening, terrible sky. Maybe he’d feel foolish, any other day, but right now? Right now, he feels hunted.
The nothing is chasing him, the safety of the darkness narrowing down into a thin black ribbon for him to balance on, the lights evaporating before he can reach a street with people on it, other eyes and other ears and other cameras, even, people who could hide him or perceive him, and Jay still won’t relinquish his grip on the plastic bag of tapes. They’re vital, somehow, and even through the whistle and wheeze of his bruised chest, the taste of blood from the split lip Alex gave him that he can’t even remember receiving, he refuses to drop them. He just runs, though everything hurts, and he doesn’t stop running until he can’t breathe.
He reaches the next intersection, empty houses with dark windows flashing by like indistinguishable monoliths, the streetlights’ metallic death rattles following him and Jay can feel it. He can feel the terrible, empty presence behind him, invisible as it is, and he can feel his eyes strain back again, desperate to know what it is that pursues him. After a long moment he sprints past an occupied house, the faint laughter of a family at dinner echoing from the windows, and he can bend over, rest his hands on his knees. Standing there, chest heaving like a beaten racehorse, caught in the dim safety of yellow light bleeding from the windows on either side of him, Jay looks back once more.
There’s a man in the road, he thinks. Or maybe it was a flicker of his imagination, because he blinks and the man is gone. Jay breathes, only half-relieved, chest still heaving and mind going haywire with panic. He tells himself that his eyes were conjuring shapes out of the dark. That he was imagining it. That his mind was playing tricks on him.
The lights don’t come back on for as long as Jay can look back and see them, but he doesn’t look back. He doesn’t think about them. He doesn’t think about any of it, and after he goes to sleep that night, he doesn’t even remember it happened. It fades into a dream of a dream, the only clear and vital piece the memory of Alex giving him the tapes, and even that is filled by the fog of the Operator’s unseen touch, pushing the tapes down deep into Jay’s subconscious, turning off the lights and letting them lie dormant until it gets bored again.
Marble Hornets fades into the back of Tim’s mind, like so many other things in his life have. He almost forgets that he was going to be in it- forgets Alex, forgets the rest of the cast and crew, just about wipes the school away into a haze of grey buildings and tucks Brian away like a beloved memory, wishing him well, a little stung by the lack of a goodbye from his first and dearest friend.
He forgets about Jay, too. That in and of itself isn’t strange- Tim doesn’t form attachments well, according to his therapist, so he passes through the lives of most people, filters in and out like a ghost. He’s probably forgotten more people than he remembers ever meeting. And so he forgets Jay, with time, after everything with Marble Hornets is over. He moves on. Graduates. Moves back home, which makes him feel a way he can’t describe. Like walking through water up to your neck, or trying to move through stone. He can’t escape this place. He isn’t sure if he wants to.
But Jay doesn’t forget him.
He calls him back, to work on Marble Hornets again, to try and finish the ordeal that Alex left hanging like a noose before him, and Tim has a flash of memory, a glint of gold in the late afternoon, a tall, awkward man who looked at him with shadowed eyes and smiled kindly. A brief, bright kindling of affection that strikes through Tim like lightning, shudders down his whole body and makes him say yes before he remembers what he’s saying yes to. It could be something really terrible like a social event or moving furniture. He didn’t even really think about it, too busy listening to Jay talk.
He’s saying yes to Jay, though, and that’s enough. He’d help Jay with anything. He remembers that.
It’s not that terrible, to do a read-through, a callback. Tim didn’t really want to be an actor, but he had fun on set, he thinks. When Alex wasn’t being… Alex. And it’s odd, remembering that, getting brief flashes of a time when Alex was half-rabid and petulant instead of the nice, collected director that Tim has always thought of him as. He remembers Jay, too, now, always cold- probably because he was thinner than a rail- and there with a kind word to say to whoever Alex had singled out that day when he was on set.
He’s still beautiful, is the thing. Tim stumbles over it a little, stepping out of his car and into the school hallways like it’s his first time walking on two legs, and god, maybe it is, the way he feels now. Jay Merrick, elusive and evasive, gawky and awkward and perfect, only he’s sharper-eyed and less nervous, armed with a piercing new determination. He’s older, even if he’s not much wiser, and it does him good. He still looks as tall and precarious as a newborn antelope, but he fidgets less, looks Tim in the eye more often.
The funny thing is that the actual line reading seems like an afterthought to Jay- what he wants, or at least as best as Tim can figure, is information about the filming of Marble Hornets, about Alex, about Tim himself, even. He asks… strange questions. Just a little to the left of what Tim would expect, and always so pointed, so intent. Tim doesn’t know why, even when a deep, unbidden flicker of memory rises. Small corpses, little bloodstains, red sprayed over the grass in front of Alex’s house, and a stab of horror he couldn’t source.
He tells Jay. Enough, as much as he could, even if he recognizes now that it isn’t everything. He doesn’t tell Jay, but there are things he’s forgotten. Things he should know. Pieces missing from his memory like they’ve been plucked clean out. It’s unnerving, really, because looking back he can find the same patterns in his childhood, adolescence, even now, the last few years. Stretches of time that are just gone, but also moments, hours, minutes that he knows happened, that he remembers everything around. It’s as if somebody edited his memories, like his life is a film and somebody’s been picking and choosing which shots get to stay. It’s a disconcerting thought.
Jay sifts through the tapes, still, finds snatches of conversation here and there, enough to parse out some more of what Alex had been doing at the time, but never enough to answer any of his questions. It’s maddening, sitting there and staring at the screen and struggling to listen in on muffled conversations, but Jay knows that it’s important work. He knows it is. He can feel it in the circuitous conversations, the bleak despair in Alex’s eyes, the tangential information he can tear away from the tapes. It’s important. He needs to know. There’s something there, veiled under layers of paranoia and deception and anger.
Jay leans back, stretching, letting the back of his chair arch with him, and when his eyes open again, bleary from a small moment of bodily awareness, he can see a blinking red dot in his air vent. The smallest, faintest red dot, like a camera. A surveillance camera. Jay’s whole body freezes and goes ice cold, his spine striped silver with ice. How could he not have noticed it before? It was so obvious. Of course someone else would be monitoring him of course someone else is watching he’s stumbled into something insane, of course-
Jay trips out to his chair, stumbles blindly to the door, to the closet where he keeps a tool kit, and plunges one hand heedless into it. He can feel several pairs of pliers, thrown carelessly into the bag, the distinct stab of the back end of a hammer, the rustle and rattle of a number of screws left loose in the toolkit. Eventually, his hand closes around the smooth, plastic handle of a screwdriver and he launches himself off of his knees across the room, papers and tape paraphernalia following.
He unscrews the vent plate, throws it and each undone screw across the room and plunges one hand into the vent, fishing across the floor, the walls, the roof of the vent with questing fingers and finding… nothing. Frustrated, Jay tears his hand back out in an explosion of dust and air conditioning debris, stepping back until he’s back where he had been when he first spotted the camera. There’s nothing in the vent.
They knew he’d seen it. They’d taken it back.
Jay begins searching for more cameras, for microphones, wiretaps, any sign that somebody knew what he’d found, what Alex had found, that they were listening to him even now. He rends his computer piece from piece, inspects every inch of everything Alex gave him- the tapes, the bag, the cameras- tears apart his apartment from kitchen to bathroom, rips up carpeting at the edges, undoes his whole closet and and strips down everything he owns, and there’s nothing.
There’s nothing there .
Jay stands, breathless and defeated in a storm of manic destruction, the odd feather floating, scraps of wiring strewn over his desk. There’s nothing there. He’d seen nothing. He’d been mistaken.
He sets Alex’s handheld camera back on the desk, straightening it. There was nothing there. Everything in Jay’s life feels precarious, all of a sudden, strange and unsettling. He feels a prickling, terrible paranoia- somebody could be watching him and he wouldn’t know. Somebody could be listening. He can’t find anything, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there, it doesn’t mean he’s going insane, it means he’s not good enough, it means he’s not trying hard enough, it means he’s asking the right questions or maybe the wrong ones, it means. It means. Jay sits down again, breathing hard, staring at his empty, trembling hands. He feels like he’s being watched. He looks back up at the air vent, the grating torn off, and for a blink, a brief moment, he thinks he sees the red of a camera light pushed back deeply into it. Then it’s gone.
He cries himself to sleep that night, mind reeling and stomach twisted with shame. He’d seen nothing . There was nothing there. He’s so stupid. He’s losing his mind. There’s nothing there. There’s nothing there. There’s nothing there.
The feeling of eyes on his back never disappears.
Tim is waking up in strange places again. Last week it was the town where he went to college, and this week it was just outside city limits. He can smell blood, feels the slick, stinging ache of a burn on his hand, the wrench of a cramp in his neck where he fell asleep wrong. He sits up, catches a whiff of gasoline on his clothes, and tears prick at the back of his eyes. Not again. Not this again. Pressing his face into his hands, Tim breathes. Slow and even, like the doctors have always told him. In, four seconds, hold four seconds, out four seconds, hold four seconds. Repeat. Regulate your breathing. Regulate your smoking. Regulate your dosage. Regulate your routine. Regulate your activities. Regulate your emotions. Breathe.
Breathe. Tim pulls his hands away, with no small difficulty, looks down at himself, sees the splashes of liquid on his shoes, his pants. The scent of gasoline is stronger now, and he tries not to scream. He can’t remember. He can’t remember anything, it could have been a day or a week or a month and he wouldn’t know. What has he done? What has he been doing?
What did he burn?
Alex still hasn’t called him. It makes his life harder, sure, but mostly Jay hates it because it means he has nothing to think about. Or too much to think about, nothing to focus on, a swirl of images pressing down on him. Tim, struggling, screaming as Jay held him down, the mask torn from his face. Alex’s ghoulish face as he held up a chunk of concrete. Amy’s scream on that tape. The slender man in black, reaching into Alex’s room.
Jay doesn’t sleep well anymore. There’s a weight on him when he lies down, like a second body atop him, incorporeal and indistinct. Like another Jay Merrick, overlaid on him as he sinks deep into the dark. Like someone sitting on his chest and making it hard to breathe, swinging their legs like the man in the mask. Like Tim, he should say. Like Tim. It sends a pang of hurt through him, to think of Tim attacking him like that. He’d always liked Tim. Even if Tim hadn’t been- even though Jay had never- he’d liked Tim. And he’d thought Tim had liked him well enough.
But to do all of that, to attack him, to terrorize him, to burn his fucking apartment down, to try and kill Alex… Tim must hate him. Must hate them both. Jay can’t see why. He doesn’t know enough about Tim, doesn’t know enough about Alex. All he knows is that it hurts. Life hurts. It weighs down, pinning him into the mattress like a vice. He’s so tired. Jay lets his eyes close, lets the darkness behind them swim in and cover the light. There’s so much light, eating away at the shadows and burning him to touch. When he dreams now, it washes over him and scorches his skin, floods the back of his mind and shines out of his eyes like a candle in a Jack o lantern, like a painted puppet under a spotlight, like a hundred white teeth sinking into the velvet black of his mind. When Jay dreams, he dreams of static and light, of being cleansed from the inside out, every dark, soft, private thing inside of him pushed out or destroyed.
He wakes to bright, unearthly light in his eyes and can’t bring himself to flinch, only to forget.
The second memory Tim has is misery. An ever-present, unswerving weight on his back. He can’t remember what his own laugh sounds like, or what his smile looks like. He can’t remember the first thing he found funny or the first time he felt joy. He remembers Brian, his first friend, he remembers intimations of other friends, more casual acquaintances and passing fondnesses. He’s never been in love. He knows that. He’d remember if he had.
But then he meets Jay again. His heart leaves his chest like it never belonged there at all, and he wants to scream, wants to run, wants to flee, because it’s so fast. It’s like he’s been loving him silently, all these years, and he only just remembered. Maybe he has. Everything in him sings for Jay, lights up in a way nothing about him ever has. He feels… so much. So much more. Too much, maybe. He starts losing track of time again, starts forgetting things, and it scares Tim to think of the coincidence. A student film? All of this for a student film?
Well, he finds, after looking it up. Not exactly.
Jay wishes there was a better way to do this. He wishes that he didn’t have to lie to Tim so much, but what was he supposed to do? Explain everything? Like some kind of insane stalker who would follow Tim around and pry into his life? Jay sits in his car, waiting for Tim, and feels the shaking in his hands grow. He can’t focus anymore, can’t figure out what the right choice to make is. Tim burned his fucking apartment to the ground. Tim smiled at him and took him to the hospital. Tim broke into his house. Tim didn’t seem to remember. What’s the right call, Merrick? A voice echoes in his mind, sounding more and more like Alex every passing day, what’s the smart move? You can’t trust anyone.
You can’t trust him.
Jay gets out of his car.
Jay’s face still hurts where Tim’s fist landed, and it’s going to bruise fast. He can feel the heat of it, the damage solidifying, as sweet and cathartic as relief. It’s done, now. Tim knows. Jay doesn’t have to lie. He can breathe again.
Jay shuffles back to his feet, not looking at Tim. “I’m sorry,” he spits blood and feels at the cut on the inside of his mouth.
“You’re sorry?” Tim asks, still pacing and turning restlessly, anger pushing him to frenetic energy and scoffing disbelief. “You’re sorry? For what?” Jay doesn’t get the feeling he means that in a forgiving way.
“I’m sorry,” Jay says again, in a voice that makes it clear that he doesn’t know, either.
Tim scoffs.
“Student film,” he sneers. “Sure. Student film.” He nods, still furious, and turns away. Pauses. Turns back. “And just for the record?” Tim says, voice breaking. “Fuck you.”
Jay just sits, sprawled on the blacktop tar, feeling more beaten than betrayed.
“I am sorry,” Jay says, in a low voice. Tim shrugs.
“For what?” He sounds disaffected, like all his anger has burned away over the course of a few weeks. Maybe it has. Jay has to admit that he’s never really seen Tim angry before that, and hasn’t really seen it since.
“He broke your leg,” Jay says, glaring at the trees of Rosswood in a way that makes Tim think he’s really trying to glare at himself. “and I just- I just stood there and I watched and. I’m sorry.” Tim’s fingers twitch to his pocket, hungry for the feeling of a cigarette between them. He’s tired. He’s so tired. His eyes feel heavy when he looks at Jay, like he could just lie down and disappear into the earth. Like he could just let his legs buckle beneath him and fall to the ground and shatter into a thousand little pieces.
“You didn’t even remember,” he says, looking away to hide the feeling in his eyes, and it’s half acceptance, half-contrition. Not forgiveness yet, but an apology of his own.
“Neither did you,” Jay counters, and Tim’s head jerks up so he can look at Jay properly. The self-loathing hunch in his shoulders, the sharpness in his eyes, is like a slap to Tim’s face. Everything about this is painful and he wants it to stop. He wants it all to be over, this conversation, this life, this ordeal they’re both mired in now. He wants to stop looking at Jay Merrick’s sad, shadowed eyes, he wants to stop wishing for a time when they could be more, he wants to stop wishing for more- he wants to walk away and forget again.
But Tim doesn’t get what he wants, so he sighs and nods, turns away as if to hide the broken glass still stabbed into his stupid hopeful little finch-heavy heart. It sings, for Jay. Stupid little hopeful fucking songs, forgiveness and infatuation, loss and love and loneliness. Loud and longing over the thrum of anger still settling, betrayal still sinking in. Tim wishes it would shut the fuck up. He wishes, wishes, wishes. It’s driving him insane, wanting things. For the first time in his life, Tim misses apathy.
“Yeah,” Tim shrugs. “So what? I’m just supposed to blame you?” He fiddles with the camera. Thinks of the footage of him lunging at Jay. Thinks about the smell of gasoline. “I don’t. I’m not going to pretend to.” Jay says nothing, tired eyes looking at Tim with an emotion he can’t name. Maybe it’s shame. Maybe it’s gratitude.
Maybe it’s loathing.
When Tim walks away Jay can see a strange set to his shoulders, an awkward half-limp lagging, and he has a terrible, terrible feeling. He remembers where Tim lives now, and he gets into his car, hands shaking. The world is so bright, even at night. He can see- he sees too much. His fingers fumble at the keys, and they turn, the engine catches, and he drives, still shaking.
The door is open, unlocked, and Jay’s terrible feeling worsens. Tim. He finds him, facing away, looking at the ceiling in that deep gold jacket, and Jay’s stomach twists. Not this. His fists clench and unclench, and he shifts his weight, the floor creaking under his uncertain feet. Tim turns, just a little, slowly, and the white moon-faced mask is pulled over his face. Jay tries. He tries.
“Tim? Tim, you have t-“ it launches itself at him, like in Brian’s wrecked and ruined house, like in Rosswood. He braces for another strong punch, for the impact of Tim’s fists on his body. Instead, it just pushes him back, holds him. The masked thing, nothing like Tim at all in this light, stares back at Jay with cold eyes. It says nothing. He isn’t sure it can. Just holds him, one hand tangled in his jacket.
“You can stop now,” Jay says finally, softly. “You don’t have to push me away.” It’s eyes narrow down to slits, indecipherable emotion housed in Tim’s familiar, usually gentle, eyes. There’s something alien about the thing when it takes him over- it’s nothing like him; it doesn’t move the same, hardly makes noise, just stares. And does violence, apparently. It starts, suddenly, lunges forward, and Jay lets it, moves with it rather than against it. It pins him to the ground, warm, strong hands at his shoulders, then one hand splayed over his throat, and Jay just reaches up to lay his own hands over Tim’s. “It’s too late,” he says quietly, through the prison of its fingers- Tim’s. “It knows about me. It sees me. You can’t-“ and his voice cracks, against his will, realizing what Tim had been doing all along, what he’d been pushed to do subconsciously, to hand the reins over to this thing and allow it to do. “You can’t save me.” Jay feels guilt, deep and heavy- heavier than Tim’s full body pressing down on him right now. He was the cause of Tim’s suffering. He is.
It stares back at him, and it’s eyes are so sad, sunken back beneath the mask, glittering darkly. It moves one hand to rest over Jay’s heart, taps it twice, then waits for him to catch on. Shame joins the guilt in his chest, a roiling nest of snakes all knotted together, writhing inside of him. He can feel the light of it inside of him, trying to break free, to give him a moon face of his own.
“I love him,” Jay admits, voice cracking again, and he’s so glad, selfishly glad, that Tim won’t remember this. That he can cut it from the tapes and lock it away. “I’m sorry for hurting him.” The masked thing piloting Tim’s body just shakes its head, taps its own chest, then lays the hand gently over Jay’s heart.
Oh, he thinks, or would think, if he wasn’t absolutely blown backwards by the revelation. Oh. Oh, Tim .
Sweet, sad, Tim. Apathetic, cold-hearted, self-contained Tim. Tim, who was devastated to learn that Jay had lied to him, Tim, who told Jay truths he hadn’t told anyone else, Tim, who saved Jay’s life and nearly gave his own at Rosswood to let Jay escape. Tim, who had let his other half run wild trying to keep Jay from touching the light that had already nearly destroyed him, had destroyed Alex.
Tim, who loved him. Who loved him so fiercely and so fully, apparently, that even this dark and twisted piece of him, capable only of rage and pain, loved him. He’d been trying to save Jay, to turn him back, to push him out of the darkness and back into the light where he’d be safe, away from the Operator and Alex and the tapes. To scare him off. Jay reaches up, overwhelmed, and wraps his spindly arms around Tim’s neck, pulling his masked face down until it was buried in his shoulder, until their bodies were clasped together like held hands. The masked thing within Tim allowed him to, melting softly into his body like it had been waiting to be touched with gentleness, hands moving to the ground on either side of Jay, neck twisting, shoulders jerking a little every now and then. Jay holds it, holds Tim, heart breaking a little with every breath, and knots the fingers of one hand into Tim’s hair.
The masked thing reaches up, slowly removes the mask, and Jay can see the blank, shuttered look in its eyes, the strange set of its mouth, like it has lockjaw. He can see stilted little movements in its jaw, its mouth, as if it’s trying to speak. His hands slip down from its hair to its jaw, thumb rubbing at Tim’s bottom lip. It doesn’t move like Tim. He has that feeling again, a terrible wave of sorrow, and he knows, suddenly.
“You can’t speak, can you?” He asks, and it shakes its head. “Because it stops you?” It nods. “You don’t work for it, do you?” It doesn’t answer Jay, just stares back at him, hair falling over Tim’s face and mouth set in a sad little frown. Jay nods, accepts that there isn’t an answer to that one. “When is he going to come back?” Jay asks, and the thing in Tim’s body smiles, just a little, taps its own chest and then Jay’s, once more.
And then it’s gone, the weight on his chest running on Tim’s legs away to the window, mask dangling like a lantern from its hand. Jay lies there for a long, breathless moment, heart aching. He’s such an idiot. He’s so stupid. After all this time… all this foolish planning and pining and wailing. It’s Tim. Tim loves him. Tim loves him enough to break the Operator’s grasp on his will, enough to stumble back through the Operator’s own realm to him, enough to not hold a grudge against him for working with Alex. Enough that the part of him that burned Jay’s house down did it to save him.
He lies back and lets his head hit the floor. Jay Merrick, investigator and curious cat, and he didn’t even see it. All this time and he didn’t even see it. He’s so fucking stupid.
He’s so fucking lonely.
Alex’s house is slow and strange, every moment like an hour until they’re on the stairs down into the basement, and the whole world goes dark, moonlight through the window sharp and stabbing like tree branches through Jay’s chest. For a brief, awful moment, Jay can see them, spearing him through, reaching back into the darkness, to the Operator. The master of this house, he understands now, and all others. They can’t escape it. Neither of them, he thinks, looking at the blood-red spray of branches and twigs blooming from Tim’s chest. They’re both neck-deep in it, drowning in the light, watching it beam from each other’s eyes like broken headlights.
“Run,” Tim says, pulling him back. “Run! Jay, run!”
And they do run.
Tim sprints ahead, long-practiced in the art of fleeing from the light, and he’s like a line of red in the dark, a stoplight through a fogged window. Jay runs after him into the shadows, the grass whipping at his legs, and the sharp, brilliant rhythm of his heart can’t drown out the way Tim calls his name in the darkness.
He’s following Tim. He’s always been following Tim. He loves him. Life is always clearest to Jay in brief moments of terror, and this is no exception- after this, he swears. After this he’s going to tell Tim. He’s going to look him in the eye and tell him, before they run out of chances. He’s going to take what the masked man told him to heart and he’s going to tell Tim.
There’s a short, sharp burst of light behind his eyes, like rainbows and lens flares radiating from them, and Jay feels something shatter, like his eyes are made of broken glass, and he feels nothing else as he hits the ground.
“Jay?” Tim’s voice echoes oddly in the night, traveling far and bouncing off of the grass. Jay isn’t there. He turns, fearlessness turning to fear, and Jay isn’t there. He runs back, sprints, whole body thrown forward to find Jay, needle to magnet, compass to north, and he finds him, sprawled on the ground before the Operator, and his rage burns brighter than flame.
The thing turns on him, radiant decay, and Tim feels his knees buckle, feels every inch of him empty out like a whiteboard erased, tabula rasa from his mind to his heart to his bones. He is nothing. He is everything. His soul is splitting at the seams of his body, ranging and dividing, tendrils outstretched like branches of a tree, and his vision goes white too. The whole world is endless noise, the click and rattle and scream of animals to slaughter, and Tim is made of that noise too, the endless expanse of existence made bare to him, and his mind unfolds and unfolds and unfolds and he is open wide to the teeth of the thing before him, the thing that has always been before him. Tim Wright ceases to exist, his whole life a scream among screams, a child clawing at the door of the night begging to be set free. It will set him free, rend body from soul from mind, and it will devour him with jaws of sound and static, and he, small thing, will welcome it.
Jay chokes, behind him, and Tim’s whole world bleeds. Red creeps in at the edges of his vision, gold and green and blue and he can see Jay’s body behind him, even though he isn’t looking at it, and it’s a beautiful, rippling gold, browns and blacks striping through him like Tiger’s Eye, like amber, like the heartwood of some tree, and Tim comes back to himself in an instant. Not Jay. It can’t have Jay.
It won’t get Jay.
Something snaps, something he can’t see, and the thing almost seems to flinch, and Tim presses back, intent on pushing it further, but in a blink it’s gone, and Jay goes still, the occasional spasm of an arm or leg all the movement Tim can see. “Come on buddy,” he says, rolling Jay over into his back, trying not to think of how much pain Jay must be in, of how awful and exhausting his own seizures are. “Come on.” He slings one of Jay’s arms over his shoulders, takes the thin, unsteady weight of him. “We’re going to make it out of here.”
“C’mon,” Tim says, voice low and gentle like Jay is a broken baby bird or something. “You have to eat at some point.” Jay just sits. Catatonic. It’s painful to watch, like something in him was severed, destroyed. Tim doesn’t want to imagine it, doesn’t want to think about what will happen if Jay just doesn’t come back, if Jay has just been destroyed, left like this forever. Empty and cold, vacant and full of light. Tim couldn’t bear that. Couldn’t think of how to live in a world without Jay. His eyes move a little, catch onto Tim’s face, and his whole body tenses, harsh like he’s about to lunge at Tim, but then he just melts, relaxes, slumps back onto the bed.
“Jay?” Tim asks, reaching out tentatively. “Jay, it’s me- it’s, it’s Tim.” Jay nods, still distant, and Tim pulls him up to sitting. “You need- here, you need to take these,” Tim says softly, handing him a pill and a bottle of water. “You need to swallow it.” Jay does, without question, and in a way it’s worse. It’s not like him. He seems empty, seems pliable and easy, and Jay is none of those things. Never has been. Never should be. Tim has felt like this- has felt the small agony of muscle spasms long after they were over, the fog that settles over your brain, the way everything and nothing seems real. But Tim is used to it. Tim knows. Jay’s never felt it before.
He falls asleep there, curled up on top of a motel bed with nothing but water and Tim’s medication in him. He looks cold. He’s always so cold. Tim tugs his shoes off, pulls the quilt over him. Waits for Jay to come back.
Jay can’t see past it anymore. The light wells up in him, covers his eyes and ears and mouth and fills him with white liquid marble, rivers of gold, pretty glowing poison that makes him want to scream. Jay isn’t in control anymore, isn’t the one moving his body or speaking these words. He believes what he says, acts the way he feels he should, but there’s a part of him being suffocated quietly in the back of his mind that says “you don’t believe this.”
He almost tries to kill Tim. He thinks he’s right to do it. He can almost see it, Tim’s body on the floor, knife in his throat, hands bloody from trying to stop the bleeding. He almost wants it.
But the light can’t quell the piece of him, the many, many pieces of him, that tell him that that’s not what he wants. That he’d rather die. That Tim’s death would destroy him. Every time the light crushes one voice, ten more rise. It’s an infestation of the Operator’s territory. It’s a plague, a thousand rats on a sinking ship, a dozen corpses in the fields, poisoning the earth. It’s infuriating, the intensity, the ferocity with which he loves Tim, and it makes it difficult to break him down. Jay Merrick clings, a single shadow in an ocean of light, to the memory of Tim’s soft eyes, Tim’s hand pressed to his chest with all the gentleness of love. It’s all he has now.
It’s all he has.
The memories collide like a car crash, broken glass flying, every movement painful and jarring, the impact like a sledgehammer to his chest. Nothing makes sense anymore. The whole world is turning in on itself, collapsing like an Escher painting, like an ouroboros, cycling forever into a loop of energy and pain and memory. He’s dying. Jay can feel his blood on his skin, and god it’s so warm. He’s so cold and his blood is so warm. He misses Tim. He misses Alex, the Alex he knew, his friend, with the stupid haircut and the funny laugh and the contagious enthusiasm that died so quickly in the hands of the Operator. He misses his parents, misses not knowing anything, misses being a child in his child bed in his child bedroom, so small and inconsequential that nothing matters. He has so many regrets, so many missed opportunities, so much to learn still.
He misses Tim. He feels an awful, sudden tug in his heart, and remembers the knife in his hand, the tape, the way Tim spoke to him and begged him to listen. The way Tim had left him there, on the floor, to stop him from doing this very thing, from dying here, alone and betrayed. He feels a bitter broken loneliness rise up in his throat, tears pricking at his eyes, and he wants so badly to go back, to do it all different, to let it all go and stay sequestered in a motel room, curled up in Tim’s arms, warm and safe and loving him. He wants to be less curious, wants to not want to know, wants to tell Tim that he’s sorry, that he loves him, that he’s sorry for leaving him. He reaches for the camera, wet fingertips clumsily pushing it further away, and he sobs into his other hand, stifling the sound. He’s reminded painfully of Tim hiding in the hospital, trying to cough quietly so Alex wouldn’t find him, and wants to scream.
How did he get it all so wrong? How did he break this so badly?
He looks down at the camera, the angle unfortunate and unclear, but it’s all he has. It’s all he has now, the cold fish-eye lens of it staring glassy back at him. “I’m sorry, Tim,” he says, rough with blood in his throat. “I’m sorry. I was wrong.” He reaches for it again, fingertips just missing it. “I love you, Tim. I love you. I’m sorry.” He trails off, then, hand outstretched to the camera, heart plaintive and pleading. “Please forgive me,” he says, and then nothing else.
Jay is lying there bleeding, when Tim runs in. The gunshot was loud- too loud to ignore, too much to forget, and he knew Alex would be here, he knew it, he knew- and there Jay is, slumped in a corner, looking hunted, looking afraid, trying desperately to keep his blood in his body, and when he looks up and sees Tim, his eyes become bright with tears.
“Jay,” Tim breathes, falling to his knees and pressing his hands to the bullet wound. “Jay look at me, Jay-“ Jay just smiles, blood dripping from his mouth. “Jay! Stay awake. Stay with me.”
“I thought you were Alex,” he murmurs. “I thought you were here to kill me.”
“Never,” Tim says, and he can feel Jay getting colder. Jay rests his forehead against Tim’s, and it feels like a kiss. “Don’t leave me,” he says urgently, shaking Jay. “Don’t you leave me. Come on. I can’t do this alone.” He’s begging now, on his knees, addressing anyone who will listen. “I can’t do this without you.” Jay’s eyes flicker. “Jay!”
“After everything,” Jay manages, coughing up blood, and Tim’s hands come up to cup his face against his will. Jay’s hand rests bloody on his cheek, gentle and cold. “You still came back for me.” He smiles. A real smile. It feels like years since Tim has seen him smile like this, and even with blood in his mouth, with a gunshot staining his side red, he’s beautiful. It breaks him, a little bit, the way Jay can look at him with so much warmth after Tim had left him alone in his house- alone, tied up on the floor, and god, he wishes Jay had stayed there.
“Don’t leave me,” Tim begs, because it’s all he can do. Jay matters. Jay matters to him.
“Wouldn’t dare,” Jay slurs, swaying in Tim’s arms. He’s losing the thread, his heartbeat’s going already, Tim can feel it.
“Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave-“ Tim isn’t as strong as he wishes he was, but right now, right here, he will be strong enough. It isn’t a question. It isn’t a choice. When he had fallen, before, when he had broken under the weight of the Operator’s light on him, Jay had dragged him out. Jay, with his thin, thready arms and terrible, tremendous heart had dragged him halfway out of that tunnel- Tim will not do less. He has to be strong enough. He has to be. He pulls Jay through Benedict Hall to the stairs, pulls him to the back of his car. He can feel the operator behind him, the radiance of some unearthly star, the caustic hum of his flesh and bones turning against him, but he doesn’t look. He doesn’t care. He has to save Jay. He has to.
It burns at him, rips him apart, pulls him limb from limb to hang before it like it did at Alex’s old house, and this time it veils Jay from him as it unspools his center of being. He can’t see Jay. He can’t see Jay. He was holding him just a minute ago, had been cradling his bleeding body in his arms, where is he? Where is he? The Operator, the thing Itself, blazing and strange, drags his attention back to it. It digs down deep into him, tugs at the threads tying him to his body, pulls his soul from his shell like an oyster. He can feel the world again, strange and too-loud and too much and so bright, and all white, bleached into nothing. It’s empty, where Tim is.
Jay, the deep-down threads of him tug plaintively at his mind. Where is Jay? His eyes open. It’s different from last time. It’s a fight, a struggle, because last time he’d managed to surprise the Operator, had managed to startle it out of its grasp on him and Jay, and this time it was determined to win. Tough shit. So is Tim. The color doesn’t bleed in this time, doesn’t feather out like ink on wet paper, but it blocks itself in, first gold, like Jay, then brown, then black, orange and blue, red, green, and all the while Tim looks for Jay, reaches with the awareness that the Operator has given him by extending his mind so far from his body.
Where is he? He asks it, throwing the full weight of his mind at it. What did you do to him? It doesn’t answer, and Tim’s strike slides off of it, like a hand on a pane of glass. Where is he? He asks again, and this time the words hit harder. Where is Jay? Where did he go? What did you do to him? Each question, each step he takes towards it, the full force of him gathers into the center of his chest, threads of awareness spooling into one body, force gathering into one fist. Give him back , Tim commands it, and this time the strike lands true, cracks clean through the glass and shatters it, and he can see .
He can see Jay, bleeding and seizing on the ground, half-gone. He can see the person in the hoodie, crouched and humbled in the darkness of the building, dazzled by the light. He can see Alex, in the doorway behind the Operator, eyes wide and hazy with power. He can see the Operator, a step back further than it had been, for the first time unsettled. Good. Good. Tim is breathless, whole body straining against its grasp, like it’s impaled itself in him, hooked him like a fish, staked him to the ground to scrabble purchaseless against the earth.
He tears away, something ripping open inside of him as he moves, falling to his knees beside Jay, his chest bloody from what the thrashing opened in his side. “Stay with me,” he says again, bloody hands on Jay’s bloody face, and his voice feels thick like syrup, like choking in his throat. It won’t have Jay. It can’t. Alex can’t. He lifts Jay to sitting, slings one of his long, thin arms over his shoulder- he’s so light, Tim thinks with a pang. Tim could carry him anywhere. He manages to drag him to the car, Jay’s legs still loose and unsteady from the Operator, from the blackout, and he just manages to slide Jay into the back of the car before he turns to find Alex stumbling bloody down the stairs. The Operator glows behind him now, radiant like a saint's halo in a stained glass window. Alex spits blood onto the stone path, tries to lift his shaking gun.
Tim flips the both of them off, sliding into the driver’s seat and peeling off campus like hell itself is chasing him. Maybe it is, who can say. He drives them to the hospital with rock-steady hands, staring straight ahead, listening to Jay bleed out, coughing and moaning and murmuring, and he doesn’t reach for a cigarette once.
He’s already done the impossible twice. Who’s to say he can’t do it again? For Jay. For Jay, he thinks he can.
They find Alex on the steps of Benedict Hall the next morning, body strewn facedown like a rag doll, glasses cracked over his eyes and a pool of blood beneath him.
The coroner rules suicide, but Tim remembers the way he’d stood on the steps, the hooded figure half-hidden behind him, and he wonders.
He wonders.
The sun rises every morning and sets every night, and time passes like cars on a highway. Jay has nowhere to go, and Tim has nothing to run from anymore, so they return to Tim’s house with arms full of history. Tim has a record collection- pretentious, Jay says fondly- and it takes Tim less than a day to start trying to impress Jay with it, putting on everything from 40s bandstand brass to 90s grunge. Jay picks out the Monkees and drags Tim into the middle of the living room to slow dance badly.
“I never went to prom,” Tim admits.
“Me neither,” Jay shrugs, half-smiling. “Nobody ever asked me.”
“I would have,” Tim says, before his mind catches up with him.
“No you wouldn’t,” Jay says fondly. Tim thinks of how alone he was, how lonely. How walled-off.
“No, I wouldn’t have,” he agrees, feeling free of blame for once. “But I would have wanted to.”
“Yeah?” Jay asks, tilting his head, a sly little look creeping onto his grin. “Even back then?” Tim flushes without really knowing why.
“Yeah, even back then,” he says. “Wh-“ Jay keeps talking.
“Even back in college?” Jay asks, grin stretching wider. He still looks stupidly pretty, a bashful little tease in the curve of his mouth. The penny drops.
“Yeah,” Tim admits, smiling back, heart light. “Even back in college. I loved you then. I loved you at the callback. I loved you in the hospital.” He kisses Jay’s jaw, where he can just reach without stretching. “I loved you tied up on my living room floor. I loved you in Benedict Hall. I love you now.” It’s Jay’s turn to blush now, bent down so his face is pressed into the crook of Tim’s neck and shoulder, breathing him in.
“I love you,” Jay mumbles into his collar, and even though Tim knows, even though he’s known for a while, it still strikes true and makes him want to drop to his knees. It makes him want to weep, to clutch Jay even closer and push the whole world away from him. To keep him safe. “Even when I didn’t trust you, I loved you.”
They sway like that, all of themselves at once, teenagers at prom and twenty-somethings at their first house party and older twenty-somethings standing in a half-burned house, dancing at the end of the world. Jay wraps an arm around Tim’s shoulders, one hand curling up into the hair at the back of his neck. Tim rests his head on Jay’s chest, arm snug around his waist where the bullet had hit, and he thinks of how lucky he is. How lucky he is, to live this life, to have this heart and this love and these people. He used to be alone. He used to be so alone.
Sometime after midnight, Jay wanders off to set security cameras (still paranoid, still cautious, but he’s right to be, isn’t he?) and Tim collapses onto his bed, tired in a way he never has been before. Tired in a good way, a warm, pliant way that makes him feel like smiling stupidly. He feels safe. Feels like he isn’t going to wake up two states away.
Jay lies down on top of him, like the world’s tallest blanket, and the warmth of his body makes Tim feel like thawing ice, like he’s melting back into his bed and Jay is melting into him. Tim wraps his arms around Jay, heart rusted and flaking but terribly full, and they lie there in silence, Jay’s face buried in the pillow beside Tim’s head and Tim’s legs all tangled with his.
Jay shifts, hand snaking down to clasp with Tim’s, and when he looks at Tim’s hand in his, at the scar arcing across his wrist, he bends in, uses his own hand to pull Tim’s wrist the rest of the way to his mouth, a brush of a kiss over the silver lines there. Tim scoffs, smiling.
“You’re not alone,” Jay whispers, pressing his face back into Tim’s shoulder. “I want you to know.”
“I know,” Tim says, his hand dragging down Jay’s back to rest on his side, on the pinprick scar that used to be the bullet wound that had nearly bled him out in Benedict Hall. “Neither are you.” They lie like that, in a position no sane person would contort themselves into, and Tim feels Jay’s humming absentmindedly through the vibration over his own chest. It’s like the heartbeat of a thousand birds, all singing.
They’re going to be fine. Everything is fine.