Chapter Text
Tim wakes up to the cold, pale, reaching light of morning, and blinks away dreams of better times to stare at the ceiling of a place he shouldn’t be. He sits up, whole body aching like a bruise, and blinks tiredly at the open window. The room is ice cold, and if he didn’t know better he would have sworn it was a ghost. Tim knows better. He turns, catching the faint silhouette of Jay in the corner, and fights himself not to turn back.
Jay haunts Tim like a physical presence, lingering in every inch of his life. It’s been two months since Benedict Hall, two months since Brian- and god, it hurts. It hurts. Two months since Alex, and that hurts too, his voice echoing still you left Brian, you left Jay - and Jay. Jay, bloody, face peaceful and sad and soft, papers screaming your fault your fault your fault strewn across the ground, sickening and sitting in his chest like a weight. Every time he blinks he could almost swear he still sees Jay, a faint, sad-faced imprint on the air. Not threatening, not vengeful, just…. There. Just watching him.
He wishes he wouldn’t. It feels like shame, sometimes, to imagine Jay seeing him like this, curled up and crying on an empty bed like a child. Helpless and lonely. He always turns away from the door, curls up, fingers knotted deep into one of Jay’s sweatshirts, smelling hotel soap and his shampoo. Pretends that he doesn’t feel like he’s being watched, pretends he doesn’t feel like a dirty, awful person for clinging to Jay’s memory when Jay didn’t even know, when Jay didn’t- he didn’t ask for Tim to love him. He didn’t want it. Tim has no right.
But Tim clings anyway, wraps his whole body around the fabric and pretends it’s Jay. Dreams of a better world, where Brian is alive, working at a hospital, where Alex is skimming change from the tip jar at Starbucks and dreaming of his next screenplay, where Jay is safe and alive and warm in his arms, where Tim’s life is full and kind and gentle. He dreams of Jay’s hands on his back, Jay’s arms wrapped around him, Jay’s head pressed into his chest and Jay’s legs tangled with his, all of him whole and safe and happy. He can almost see it, Jay’s eyelashes brushing his cheeks, smile soft, listening to the wind in the leaves outside. He can almost feel the warmth of their bodies pressed together, the closeness of it, the kindness. It scythes through him, misery bleeding into him to the core, and he cries until Jay’s sweatshirt is wet and he can’t smell anything but him.
But not now. Tim pulls toothpaste and floss from a bathroom cabinet, fumbles for his comb and a washcloth; sets to work making himself human again. He can still smell Jay’s sweatshirt, complimentary hotel soap and the sharp, cool scent of film. Something unnatural and alluring, like night air and loss, something familiar and comforting, clean summer sweat and fresh cotton. He tries to push it from his mind with the taste of spearmint, but it doesn’t work. Jay lingers. He sticks to Tim like he’s been glued there, soul to soul, stitched into Tim like a scar. Tim spits out green foam and wishes he wouldn’t, drags wet, clean hands down his face like that’ll cleanse him of his multitude of sins. There’s nothing that can save him now.
The familiar orange plastic of the pill bottle rattles in his hand, and he distractedly washes the lump in his throat down with tap water and the faint aftermath of mint and menthol. He could really use a smoke right now. The lighter’s sitting on his bedside table, shining plastic in the morning sun.
In the end, he doesn’t take it with him when he leaves.
Jay watches him from the corner, invisible and unheard, knees pulled up to his incorporeal chest, and tries not to cry. Or maybe he is trying, and it just won’t work. It’s hard to tell, these days. He’s been dead for two months now- reaching out for two months, following Tim, sitting in the front seat while he drives, sitting by his bed every night. Trying to speak to him. Listening to him cry. Jay never thought he’d miss living so much, but reaching out to Tim and feeling nothing, seeing Tim feel nothing, watching his hands pass weightless into Tim’s body… it’s more bitter than death. It’s worse than dying was, to be caught between and unable to touch anything, kept from speaking to Tim, from telling him- Jay can’t tell him anything. He can still feel from the inside, unfortunately, the tug in his chest like a sick, nauseous pull watching Tim shake and stifle sobs in his sweatshirt every night. He wants to touch him. He wants to hold him, to pull Tim into his chest and murmur that he’s sorry, that he’s so sorry and Tim was right, that Tim had been right all along, that he loves him. That he’s sorry. That it wasn’t Tim’s fault.
All he can do is watch.
The first time Tim broke down Jay had stood, against his own will, and crossed the room to kneel beside Tim’s bed. He had been trembling, just a little, body wracked by the force of his grief, and Jay reached out, as if to smooth the hair from his eyes. His hand looked so pale and translucent beside Tim’s body, so insubstantial, and when it dipped into Tim’s face Jay wanted to scream, wanted to cry, the sudden flush of misery hot in his eyes like the tears he can’t even shed anymore. He couldn’t touch Tim, couldn’t comfort him, couldn’t speak to him. He couldn’t even cry. He had ripped his hand away, letting his weight splay his legs a little and coming to rest on the ground, seated uselessly beside Tim for the rest of that night, and every night after. Watching a movie of someone else’s life, helpless to save them.
He’s so tired. He’s so, so tired but he can’t even sleep anymore, can’t get away from this. All he can do is watch. The logical conclusion of all this filming, all this spying and stalking- forced to watch as Brian died, as Alex and Tim fought, as Tim fell apart alone in the aftermath. That day had been the worst, watching two of his dearest friends fight like half-feral dogs; blood frothing at their mouths, covering their guilty hands, pooling under their bodies when they fell. He’d knelt on the steps beneath Tim for a long long time, watching the blood drip from his hands, watching his eyes dart under his eyelids, watching his breathing stabilize. Hoping, praying, that Tim wouldn’t be like him, an echo caught between two panes of glass. Selfishly, quietly, hoping he would be.
Tim had woken with a wet, painful cough, blood spilling like melted red candle wax from his throat, and Jay had watched with mingled relief and agony as he pushed himself to his knees, then to his feet. He stumbled back, unsteady, looking dazedly at his own blood, then back over his shoulder at the pool of blood where Alex’s body was. Where it had been, at least, before the thing in the suit took it. Jay wishes he was happy about it, wishes he could feel a smug, vindicated certainty that Alex’s corpse was probably being devoured, wishes he could be glad to know Tim was safe. Instead he’d just felt sad. He still does.
They’d been friends, once.
Jessica is okay, somehow. Jay’s glad, glad with a fierce swell of relief and warmth that surprises him. He’d been so sure she was dead- terribly certain, enough to condemn Tim with. But then he’d been certain that Brian was dead, too. He’d seen Brian, after, two ghosts locking eyes over Alex and Tim’s shoulders as they struggled, and he’d smiled at Jay like he used to, wholehearted and kind, handsome face unbroken by a fall and uncovered. Jay had been able to hug him one last time, the two of them clinging to each other with tired, desperate hands over Tim’s broken body before he followed Alex and the man in the suit into the shadows.
Jay hopes he finds peace there, in the space between the dark and the devouring, with the man he loved. Loves, Jay corrects himself. They’re out there even now, tangled up in each other like a mountain lion in barbed wire, forever caught in the claws of the dark thing that claimed both of their lives in the end. Jay can almost understand that love, the soft, terrible pain in Alex’s dead eyes when he saw Brian, the reciprocation in Brian’s smile. Maybe he and Alex will find peace together in that place, old loathing torn up by the rake of a world without time or reason. He hopes they do. God knows Jay isn’t going to any time soon.
They’d both left him there, Alex still caught in the unbearable light of the thing’s glow and Brian still caught in the unbearable throes of love for him, pausing just long enough to run a hand through Tim’s hair, to say a goodbye he’d never hear. Jay could have gone, too. He felt it like a resonance, the light burning through him like it had before, telling him that Tim was a traitor and a liar and that Jay could have his friends back if he only- but Jay had stopped listening, curled haphazard by Tim’s body, eyes fixed on the fallen knife below his hand. Jay’s knife.
Look what he’d done, leaving like that. Running from Tim, so caught up in his own head that he couldn’t see the truth. Jay owes him this, at least, owes him a little time spent by his side, seeing if there was anything he could do to help. Seeing if there’s a way to say goodbye.
Tim left Jessica with a sweet lie, and Jay was half-grateful, touched by the way her shoulders had slumped in, relieved, to hear that he was alright. Sometimes it really was the thought that counted. Tim had begun to drive out of town; not moving, like he had told Jessica, but he had two bags packed in the back of his car and a camera running on the dashboard beside him. Jay had sat beside him in the passenger seat, listening to silence for hours on the road until Tim finally turned on the radio. The Proclaimers, first, and the choked half-sound Tim had made was awful. Then static. Then 80s hits on loop. He’d watched as Tim drove and drove and drove, endless on long, winding black roads under terrible bright blue skies that deepened to amber, then violet, far out of town, on highways and long, cold stretches of interstate out to the middle of Virginia, out into the woods where a dusty cabin stood, crawling with vines. Tim had turned the key, let the car die, headlights flooding the clearing, and then just sat there looking at it, motionless at last. The blue-dark shadows of the trees had stretched across the earth as the moon rose, pricking at the edges of Tim’s car like huge, reaching hands, and Tim just sat, eyes dead.
Jay watched. It wasn’t like he’d never looked properly at Tim before- he had. Often. Tim was handsome, and kind, and awkward in a way that made him seem more human, all rough edges and acceptance and a hand stretched out any time you fell. Of course Jay had looked at him. Stared, even. Stalked, a little. But there was something different about watching somebody who couldn’t see you, who didn’t know they weren’t alone. And yeah, it was a creepy thing to think about, but Jay was beginning to realize that the person Tim was when he thought he was well and truly alone… wasn’t far off from the person Tim had been around Jay. He’d been honest. He’d been himself. And now that Jay can see that, Tim can’t see him. He can’t hear Jay, either. Jay had been glad of that, watching Tim open the car door and begin walking slowly to the cabin, choking on hollow sobs, eyes dry and heart wrenching, watching Tim open the door, shoulders low and heavy with the weight of his sorrow. He looked defeated. Laid low. He looked alone.
He wasn’t, though. Not really. Jay was there with him, hovering softly a few inches above the ground, trailing behind him from the car like a personal cold spot. He’s been following Tim this long, from Brian’s empty house, to Rosswood, to the tunnel, from Alex’s house to endless motel rooms, to Benedict Hall. And now, here, to the end of the world. He’s always been following Tim. Maybe that’s what he was meant to do, become his companion, his friend. His ghost.
The first night Tim brings in his suitcase and Jay’s, drags one of the dropcloths off of a couch over to a clean square of floor to keep them from getting dirty. He didn’t have to bring Jay’s things. He doesn’t need them. If he was a better man he’d find Jay’s family and give them his possessions, but Tim is selfish. He can’t bring himself to let go of them, to stop pretending that one day he’s going to wake up and Jay’s going to be there, tired-eyed and ready to rip a hole into the world to find what he’s looking for. He can’t bring himself to stop pretending that Jay is still here now.
He opens his own suitcase and pulls out a fresh set of clothes for tomorrow, loose flannel pants for sleep. He opens Jay’s suitcase and pulls out his sweatshirt, olive green and worn with love and time. It feels almost too light in his hands, like something precious that could blow away in the wind. Tim is glad to be alone, right now, glad to be here in the quiet, with nobody to laugh at his grief, his wanting. He unfolds the sweatshirt, draws it up to his face. Breathes in the last of Jay. Crushes it to his chest, throat caught with sobs.
Jay turns away, though Tim can’t see him. Doesn’t want to intrude on this, doesn’t want to violate Tim’s grief like that. He passes through the wall out into the woods, surrounds himself with the half-crack of twigs, the rustle of leaves, the chirrup of insects and nocturnal frogs. Lets the wind blow through him.
Tim keeps weeping, even as he changes, even as he curls up on the couch and wraps Jay’s hoodie in his arms and murmurs apologies, wishes, regrets, all bitter and tied together with the thread of chastened hindsight. He cries, thinking of Jay’s face, twisted with anger as he writhed on Tim’s floor. Jay’s face, soft and peaceful as he lay dead on Tim’s floor. Jay, gone. “I should’ve taken you with me,” he sobs into the pillow, his own voice muffled by tears and fabric. “I knew what you would do,” he says, voice breaking. “I knew you. I should’ve taken you with me.” He breathes, half-choking, and his eyes break with another wave of tears as he remembers Jay’s last words to him. He stares sightless at the hoodie in his hands, then up at the ceiling, at the sky beyond it, unhearing, unfeeling. “Could I have saved him?” He begs, throat raw and eyes red. “Could I have saved him, if I was there?” He begs, prays, cries, but no answer comes. Only sorrow.
Jay spends a few hours in the woods, trying not to hear Tim cry. The frogs chirp and croak and sing like waterbirds, a lonely symphony for the last ghost standing. He wonders where Brian and Alex are, if they’re alright. If the thing that took them has torn them apart, or if they’ve made it out. If they can make it out.
He wishes he could feel, right about now. The mist is rising up from the ground, cooling in the night air, and Jay looks down at his hands, just as pale and just as insubstantial. The whole world is blue in the moonlight, and the night life of the animals around him rises up like violins on a movie soundtrack. He feels so small, so alone, like the whole world could swallow him up. He could disappear into the mist like he never existed at all. Nobody would miss him- he’s already gone. He’s a part of the blue dark too, a whisper of cricket song on the wind, already forgotten. His fingers begin to dissolve, his hair tugged apart into discrete atoms in the moonlight, like infinitesimal drops of water, like fog in the sun, like memory into air.
Somewhere behind him, Tim coughs, painful tears giving way to the hacking of a long time smoker.
Jay turns, half-startled out of the haze he’d fallen into, and his thinly-held body recollects. He can’t leave yet. He can’t leave without making sure that Tim is- that Tim will be okay. He already left Tim once, ran scared from the floor of his house and slammed headfirst into Alex’s gun. He won’t do it again. He can’t do it again. He’s a ghost, but he’s Tim’s ghost. He’s going to stay. He’s going to stay. The certainty solidifies something inside of him, and his feet hit the ground like he’s fallen from some great height. Winded, despite not having lungs, Jay walks back to the cabin and sweeps through the door, only breathing again once he’s kneeling beside Tim. Weeping, mourning, but whole. Alive. There’s blood on his palm from coughing, and Jay’s heart tugs painfully, but Tim lays Jay’s sweatshirt down, careful not to get his blood on it, limps to the sink to clean it off and coughs up a little more. Unbothered. Practiced, even.
Jay waits out the night on the floor beside the couch, lying on one side like it’ll make him more human. He can’t even feel it enough to be uncomfortable, hardly solid enough not to slip through and plummet through the earth. That’s fine.
He’ll wait. He’s staying.
The sun rises through the far windows, sweeping golden over the man and the ghost, and Jay gets a better look at the cabin in the day. They’re in a front room- a huge room, really, divided by the careful arrangement of some shelves and furniture to seem like several. A living room, sort of, with several couches arranged in a half-circle around a large central fireplace, a kitchen behind them, counters and sink hedged up against the walls under the windows, flooded with light, and a wall of dusty, cobwebbed bookshelves. One bathroom, small but comfortable, with a sturdy old bathtub that looks more appropriate for washing vegetables or dying clothes than taking a bath. Two doors on opposite walls lead to what Jay expects are bedrooms, and a flight of rickety stairs leads to a loft and a second bathroom. It’s a homey place, comfortable and lived-in. Or it used to be, a few years ago. It looks half-abandoned, dirty and dusty and lonely.
Tim spends the first day cleaning, sweeping out all kinds of bugs that have lived and died here, washing the windows and taking ghostly white dropcloths off of the furniture. Jay dimly comes to recognize that this place isn’t Tim’s, through looking at the photographs on the mantle, the scuffed and worn name placard on the wall. It was Brian’s family’s cabin, before Brian disappeared and his family was picked off, one by one, probably by the same monster that had been haunting them. It’s painful, sobering the way cold water on your skin is, thinking of lonely, soft-eyed Brian in a hoodie and a mask, watching his whole family hunted down from afar, barely remembering enough to know to be sad. Thinking of him choosing to follow Alex even after Alex did this to him.
Thinking of how much laughter once echoed here, in this lonely, half-shattered cabin, walls timber-thick and storm-glass windows insulated enough to outlast a hurricane. A safe, once-happy home, a retreat, left to rot and tumble inwards in the absence of anyone to care for it. Tim handles everything in it carefully, with gentle hands and no small amount of sadness in his eyes. He dusts counters and the mantle, wipes down furniture and washes countless dishes that had been left out of cabinets with the expectation that they’d be used again. He pauses sometimes, runs reverent fingers over photographs and the spines of books.
Brian had had younger siblings, Jay remembers, reading the titles. Two sisters, well-read and probably wearing that same kind smile, and Jay almost flinches away from shelves of little girl books, Gail Carson Levine and Dickens mixed in with Austen and Nancy Drew. Gone, now, like their brother. Maybe Brian would find them there, in the Operator’s darkness. It’s a different kind of grief, grasping the reach of what Alex had done. Of what Jay had done. He runs misty fingers down the spine of Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, worn and well-beloved. How many people were dead now, because of them?
Tim’s hand passes through Jay’s, the closest thing to a handhold he’s had in months, and he plucks Vonnegut from the shelf with a fond kind of sadness. The setting sun frames his face, light burning through his dark hair and showing the tears in his eyes, the sad smile he gives it. Jay wonders how he knew where to find this place, how he’d had a key. How he’d known nobody would be there to be angry with him.
He thinks the answers would break his heart all over again.
Tim moves to the bedroom on the left that night, and Jay spends no small amount of time running his intangible fingers over the stack of psych textbooks in the corner.
Tim looks up at the ceiling of the bedroom that had been Brian’s every morning, as if checking for the crack that spiderwebs all the way across, as if making sure that Brian’s name is still scrawled up on the side of the window frame with Tim’s. They never go away, haven’t been wiped away in so many years, but it’s comforting to know that not everything has changed, that this place still has room for memories.
Tim had come here with Brian, the first winter break after they’d met. He’d never really been on a vacation before- that took money, and parents, and a pass out of the psych ward, so he was more than a little out of luck on that front. On all of those fronts, really. Brian had begged him to come, in that way Brian had of making everything he did for you seem like it was really helping him, saying that he needed back-up because both of his sisters would be there along with his parents and he’d need at least one friend to even the score. Tim agreed to come, because he hadn’t caught on yet that Brian was doing this for Tim rather than himself. He hadn’t known what to expect- Tim hadn’t really had any examples of what a real family was like. The pieces he’d seen on tv only showed dysfunction and distress, sitcom laugh tracks and married couples who needed to get divorced stat.
Brian’s family had been real. His parents had been kind people, reasonable people, who never yelled at their children, never had to. Brian was. Well. He was Brian, all unexpected kindness and casual, piercing insight, foolish laughter and carefree selflessness. Julia and Mel had been bright, fierce girls, one always ready to undercut the other’s barbs with a kind of practiced competition. They’d been sweet, too, Julia outwardly callous and undaunted but secretly pining for a girl in her science class with a kind of dreamy sadness that had rung sympathy in Tim, Mel challenging and careless, but always ready to take her words back and apologize; gracious, maybe. They’d both had futures. Brian had, too. His parents had. All of them torn away from the canvas like so many scraps of paper, like Alex’s screenplay put through a shredder.
Because of Tim.
There’s a twisted kind of sense, he finds, in coming back to the first place he’d ever felt truly safe and realizing that he’d killed the people who made it safe in the first place. He’d woken screaming the first night, back when his meds were still evening out, and Brian had held him for an hour, murmuring softly that everything was fine. That he was safe. Tim had put so much trust in that, in Mel sitting in the doorway of the room he and Brian were sharing with a baseball bat, Julia making them all hot chocolate and passing it through the door frowning, pretending she didn’t care. He’d felt like crying, and he did, apologizing over and over to them even as they brushed his apologies aside.
They’d all piled into the front room that night, leaving the Thomas’ parents to sleep in the other bedroom, Julia and Mel and Brian dragging all the mattresses together on the floor and piling together in front of the fireplace to read. Tim was the only one who fell asleep again, and he’d felt terrible seeing the other three yawn all of the next day, but they just waved it off, smiling with dark-rimmed eyes, and said there was nothing to be sorry for. He’d nodded, back then. He hadn’t known just how much there would be for him to be sorry for.
He can still see Brian’s body on the floor, Brian’s body up against the wall, Alex’s hand fisted in his hair like some dark mirror to the way his hand had knotted in Brian’s hair while they kissed behind the Admin building on campus. He can still see Brian’s face that night as he pulled Tim to his chest, can still see Mel and Julia, dark outlines in a doorway, can still see Jessica in the dark, crouched between them in Rosswood, can still see Alex, bloody, can still see Jay, a dark outline against the wall. Ghosts, all of them.
Because of him.
Tim gets up. He brushes his teeth. He tries not to think of it.
Tim goes out early into the forest on the third day he’s there, prepared for the risks of nature. He’s dressed a little more practically than usual, thick boots tied almost up to his knees, green flannel sleeves rolled down and buttoned. He has a thick twig basket in his hand, cushioned with several layers of clean, stained cloth, the way he remembers Julia doing, and he grabs a pair of gardening gloves from the counter before he leaves. Tucking them into his belt, he feels halfway capable, halfway okay.
The blackberries along the riverbank are ripening. Striding out into the woods in the sunrise glow, dew splattering his boots and light hitting his eyes just the wrong way, he almost feels okay. The whole world smells deep and green, freshly turned earth and oakmoss, leaf rot thick and lush-heavy with the anticipation of autumn, and golden threads of light stretch over the ground with gentle warmth. Everything is almost fine, like this. Tim is almost fine. Summer reaches through him with ghostly claws, drawing out the blood of better days, and the memory of midnight’s tentative frost on the ground breaks under the weight of his boots, but in movement, in purpose, there’s relief.
He’s going to make something, with these filthy hands. He's going to take the bloodstains on his sleeves and cover them anew. Blackberries and earth, grass and river clay. Tim can’t wash the blood away, but he’s going to paint over it. He’s going to live with this. Somehow, he’s going to live with this.
As Tim continues deeper into the woods, the sun follows, limbless stretches of light pooling on the underbrush and dappling the trunks of trees around him, heat rising like a physical thing over the world and starting the hum of insects like an orchestra warming up in the wings. The world is so alive, around him, teeming with flowers and mosses and lichens and mushrooms, deer and birds and squirrels and weasels, frogs and fish and so, so many bugs. Tim’s not a huge fan of that last one, but he can live with it. Maybe he can live with all of it. The riverbank is hotter, somehow, the humidity of the air pressing the heat over him like a thick sweater and slicking his hair down as he picks through thickets of berries and vines.
Jay follows, unfeeling as the vines prick at his legs, passing through his skin like nothing. He stops dead in the briars, looking down at Tim. The wind blows through him, the sun shines through him, like light through a prism. Standing at the very edge of the river, water lapping at his boots, sand crunching beneath them, Tim looks like the loneliest man in the world. He stares across the river and Jay stares at him, unseen love washing in and out over him like the ocean. Jay waits, blown apart in the wind, for him to look back.
He doesn’t.
Crouching down to grasp a stone in the water, Tim cracks a rusty little half-smile, and says to nobody, “Jay would’ve liked it here.” He looks up at the trees across the river, at the sparkling blue of the river itself. He can half-see Jay standing on the bank beside him, camera sweeping lovingly across the view. In a better world, maybe. A world without Tim. “Yeah. Jay would’ve liked it here.” He nods, smiling still. He tucks the stone into his pocket, smooth and clean and just a little wet, and tugs the gloves from his belt so he can pull them on. “Should’ve brought him instead of me, Brian.” Jay steps aside as Tim walks back up the hill, eyes fixed to his face like the sun, and watches him crouch again, beginning to pick through the thick clusters of dark, flush berries in the thickets.
Tim feels so much lighter, out here, on his knees picking blackberries. The burden of responsibility falls away a little, the regret and guilt and shame pushed aside by the more immediate concerns of not crushing the berries in his hands and not getting thorns in his knees. It’s soothing work, and even as the sun reaches its apex, Tim still feels cool, feels calm. He half-hums to himself, snatches of the Beatles or half-remembered Nick Cave, single lyrics from the Pet Shop Boys overlaid with the melodies of the Proclaimers. It’s a mess, whatever he’s singing, but it’s a comforting mess. Sorting the colors of the berries gets harder as the day brightens- deep black-purple and deep red-purple start to blend a little as the colors bleach from his eyes under the sunlight, and he has to double-check more often than he’d like before he tugs fruit clean from the bush.
Jay sits beside him, half-in half-out of a blackberry tangle, and watches him fill the cloth-lined basket with dark, glossy berries, gloves slowly being stained a vibrant, deep pink and sweat staining the back of his shirt under the sun. His hair falls in his face, and his smile is small and half-hidden in his beard, and Jay is overcome with a sweeping, powerful love for him once more. He wants to hold this moment, this image in his mind forever, grasped firmly in his hand like a polaroid or a particularly precious tape. He wants to take Tim in his arms and hold him there. He wants to sit beside him and make fun of his nonsensical songs and help him fill the basket. He wants to feel the prick of thorns and smell the earth and the river and he wants to taste blackberries on Tim’s mouth and he wants to hold him, to feel Tim’s skin under his hands, to feel anything, anything at all, but mostly him.
Tim folds a white dish towel over the top of the basket, tucking its corners into the sides and standing, once-broken leg buckling a little as he rises. He stands, readjusting to putting his weight on it, and breathes in the air, still smiling. This peace is temporary, he knows, but it is peace nevertheless.
Jay sits on the counter, just corporeal enough to rest on it without slipping through, and watches Tim. He leaves the stained, sweet-smelling gloves by the door, pink turning blood red in the daylight shadows, sets the basket on the counter just beside Jay. Tim opens a tall cabinet and takes out several wire mesh colanders, each of them mismatched and worn with use, and separates the berries out by handfuls, like thick, once-living amethyst and garnets. Tap water splashes joyfully over them, Tim shaking and folding and turning berries with a level of intent and dedication that Jay was used to seeing him turn to driving, to a mystery, to impaling Alex Kralie on the blade of a knife.
For some reason that intention seems much more at home here, directed at washing fruit and shaking off the last few crystalline dewdrops as he deposits them on a clean, white cloth. He seems at home, Tim, humming a monstrosity of Sinatra and Blondie and setting a huge, shining pot on the stove. He’s still half-smiling, that sad little crook of his mouth that Jay wants to reach out and trace his fingers over, wants to kiss until it stretches full and wide and ruins the kiss.
Jay’s never seen anyone make jam before. The only way he’s ever encountered it was in the condiment aisle, set between the peanut butter and the apple butter, and watching Tim make it, Jay’s almost glad. It’s new and fascinating and impressive to him this way. There’s something enrapturing about watching Tim crush the berries he’d so carefully picked and washed and moved with featherlight touches, about watching him crush the paste through the same wire colander he’d so delicately rinsed the berries in, about watching him pummel it through the mesh until only seeds and pulp were left. A process of alternating sweetness and violence, first gentle, now rough, and Jay feels almost lucky, sitting there, watching Tim do it all with the utmost care.
Because Tim does everything with care- lighting the stove, adding sugar, cutting a lemon in half and squeezing it into the pot, even stirring it. He knows the process by heart, apparently. Whoever taught Tim to do this taught him well, with care and joy and love in the sharing of it, and he does it with love now. It makes him happy, Jay can tell, even as the steam of the stove beads up sweat on his forehead, even as his hands are stained pink and purple. Everything is stained with the scent of blackberry jam. He can’t quite smell it, berry mist fogging up the windows, but he remembers how it should smell, and it makes Jay hug his knees to his chest and smile to see Tim smile.
The huge pot of jam froths and boils and bubbles like a living thing on the stove, and Tim dances nimbly between washing dishes and stirring, beating it back down to a manageable height before darting off to scrub at the wire strainer again. It feels domestic. It feels warm and safe and most of all it feels like home, and Jay wishes he could be a part of it. That he could sneak a boiling hot spoonful of jam before Tim caught him, that he could help with the dishes and with ladling it into the assortment of jars Tim’s gathered from around the house. He wishes he could touch, taste, smell, feel, hold. Jay sits, eyes closed and legs swaying to and fro, and dreams of blackberries on his tongue.
Tim’s hand keeps going to his pocket, turning the river stone over and over. It’s a little like a good luck charm, in that every time he touches it it makes him smile. He feels foolish pulling it out and looking at it, but he can’t help himself. After all, he thinks, rubbing a thumb over its smooth surface, he thought he’d never see the color of Jay’s eyes again.
That night, Jay lies down across from Tim, just inches away from him on the bed, and watches him cry himself to sleep again. He reaches out with pale, ghostly hands and tries to wrap them around Tim’s fists, knotted up in his sweatshirt. They don’t quite sink through, just solid enough for Jay to hold them there, to hold Tim there. “It’s okay,” he says softly, even knowing Tim can’t hear him. “You can let me go.” He traces the lines of Tim’s fingers with one fingertip, drawing soft lines over his knuckles and the back of his hand, invisible and intangible. He doesn’t want to make things worse. He doesn’t want to latch into Tim. That thing- that parasite feeding on Alex, on Tim, on Jay himself, Jay doesn’t want to be that.
“I miss you,” Tim whispers, and Jay settles his head back on the pillow, eyes tracing every inch of Tim’s sad, sweet face. “I got so used to having you in my life and now I- I miss you.” He keeps looking at Jay, like he’s imagining him there, holding a vision of him in place where the real Jay lies, unseen.
“I miss you, too,” Jay whispers, smiling. He reaches up to hold Tim’s cheek in his cupped palm, like forgiveness will reach him through the touch of skin he cannot feel. “I’m sorry for hurting you. For leaving you.” He still remembers the break in Tim’s voice when Jay first attacked him, the confusion, the pain.
“I’m sorry,” Tim says, voice like a single broken breath, tight with grief. “I’m sorry that I failed you. I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you. I’m sorry that I- that you died because of me.” He buries his face in olive fabric, the faintest hint of melted plastic and motel soap. Jay’s hand hovers where his face used to be for a moment before he draws it back to his chest.
“I didn’t,” Jay says plaintively. “It wasn’t your fault.” It was his own. He fell so quickly, so fully, deep into an ocean of paranoia and hypervigilance, and he lost sight of Tim standing on the shore. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“I brought it to you. I brought it to all of you.” Tim blinks, dark eyelashes speckled with glossy tears, eyes wet and mouth screwed up into a little frown. His hands clench again in the fabric of Jay’s sweatshirt, and Jay’s heart aches. “Alex, Brian, his family, Jessica… you. Because of me.” Jay’s hand tightens on his, though he can’t feel it. It may have been Tim who brought the Operator into their lives. The image of Tim, a small, screaming child, in so much pain that it latched onto him, hovers before Jay’s eyes. The image of Tim, hunted and hurt by the thing in exactly the same way Alex was, only he wasn’t an adult when it happened to him. He was a child. A little boy, broken open and split in two, half-masked and half-blinded. Jay wishes, furiously, fervently, that he could hold Tim right now.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Jay repeats, more intently, as if Tim will hear him this time. “You didn’t know. You couldn’t have known.” He leans forward, presses his forehead to Tim’s. “You don’t have to carry this. You can let it go.”
“I can’t let you go,” Tim admits to the air, face twisting painfully. “I can’t- I don’t want to forget you. I forgot Brian ,” he says, and his voice breaks, wracked with pain. “I forgot so much, and I don’t. I couldn’t live with it if I forgot you, too.”
“You’d be happier if you forgot me,” Jay whispers, fingers stroking delicately over Tim’s cheeks. He doesn’t want to be forgotten. It scares him. But maybe it would be better that way. Maybe he’d be happier, without the memory of Jay. “You’d be free.” Tim’s eyes flutter closed, a single tear joining the shine on his wet cheeks.
“I’d rather die,” Tim murmurs, smiling bitterly. “I’d rather die than forget anything else.” He reaches out, palm flat on the pillow where Jay’s head would be if he were real. “Especially you.” He says nothing else for a long time, hand absentmindedly stroking the pillow, eyes distant and wet. Jay is lulled into quiet, unaware and unfocused, and he almost doesn’t understand when Tim whispers, “I love you,” to a ghost he cannot see.
The night is long when you can’t sleep, and Jay will never sleep again. He measures the hour by the light, slow blue shadows moving like sundials across the bedroom, tracing pillars of paleness and soft darkness over Tim’s face, over his body curled up tight under the blankets. Jay lies beside him and watches, heart tender and torn up by his thoughts. He wants Tim to forget him, to open his heart to life and let himself be pushed forward until he feels no pain, no regret, no loss. More than that, he wants Tim to remember. To love him, like this, to tie him to the earth and to Tim himself like a balloon on a child’s wrist, like a dog on a leash. He wants to stay with Tim forever, to be this for him, to keep him safe, to hold him close and comfort him. He wants to be alive again.
He’s glad he isn’t alive for the first time that night. Tim has a visitor, a tall shadow that creeps through the cabin like a wraith, a silhouette that tears at Jay’s mind, claws red-hot through his head and lets the pain overwhelm him so it can reach for Tim. But Jay isn’t a person anymore. He barely feels it. It isn’t like it was last time, outside of Alex’s cold, empty house, seizing on the ground and reaching for help that never comes. Jay is a ghost. An intangible thing, just like the shadow, and he can touch it on its own ground.
He can fight it. He can reach out and catch its arm, outstretched, and feel the resistance, the pressure in his hand, the fragmenting of reality around him. His other hand holds Tim’s, at once a conduit and a shield between the man he loves and the monster that’s followed him forever. The room breaks up, like tearing film, like pixelation, like impact glass, splitting into thousands of pieces, small cubes that become smaller and smaller and smaller until everything comes in focus again, but doesn’t realign. Everything is fluid, the whole world like shifting sand except for Jay and the Operator. And Tim. Jay grits his teeth and pushes, summoning all of the strength he can, funneling it all into his right hand, solidifying his will and his hatred, his love and loathing and guilt into one furious movement. The thing stumbles backwards, just a step, unstable, and fades into the warp and weft of reality, melting into the wall like it belongs there.
Everything goes dark.
Jay wakes up, and that’s odd enough after two months of not getting any rest at all, but what’s even stranger is that he’s in the floor. In it. As if his body had lost whatever tangibility it had, and he was just mist again. He manages to wobble to his hands and knees, head spinning, limbs trembling. It feels awful. It feels more like feeling than he’s felt in months. Stumbling to his feet, Jay has that same sticky feeling- his legs are submerged in the floor again, and he’s wading through it up to his calves. It’s like he’s gone backwards somehow. Like he’s used up some strength he didn’t know he had. He turns at the first small sound, and his eyes catch on Tim, limping from the kitchen with a mug of coffee and a small notepad. Relief. Jay feels relief, sweet and caustic, down his whole unstable body. He doesn’t know if he can keep doing this, but he’s going to try.
Tim reaches out after three weeks in the cabin. Jay isn’t sure what brings it on, what makes Tim decide to do it, but it feels almost early, almost too soon. He still looks a bit of a mess, beard uneven and hair growing out just a little too long, and his hands still shake when he looks too long at the pack of menthols on the windowsill next to the lighter, but still. Still. Three weeks past two months, he calls Jessica. The dial tone is long, stretching on like the drone of some unnatural wasp, a hornet in the back of Tim’s brain. The sting poised just at the back of his neck, ready to strike. Ready to sting. There’s a click, the silence of white noise, full of other noise drowning.
“Hey,” Tim starts, then pauses. His eyes flicker up and down, left and right, looking for a way out. A way to go on. Jay can hear Jessica on the other end of the line, holding her breath. His chest feels like it’s caving in.
“Tim? Is everything okay?” She sounds okay. She sounds alive. Like she’s gotten better. Tim sighs, rubbing a hand over his face. He reaches for the lighter, turning it over and over in his hands, phone locked between his cocked head and his shoulder, long cord spiraling down to the table. Landline. Brian’s family were smart like that, chose practicality over prestige.
“Yeah,” Tim says, before he remembers why he’s calling. “No, uh. No. Mostly. I just. There’s something I need to talk to you about.” He grimaces, clears his throat, runs a thumb over the side of the lighter. “There’s something I lied to you about, the last time we met.” Jessica stays silent for a long moment.
“What did you lie to me about?” Her voice is even, purposefully neutral. Jay rests his intangible ear on Tim’s shoulder, catching the conversation through the plastic of the headset and the low roll of Tim’s voice through his chest.
“I said that-“ his voice catches, Tim’s whole body tightening up and his mouth snapping shut. “I told you that-“ he chokes. It’s like a coin caught in his throat. He can’t say it. He can’t tell her. Jay is dead , he wants to say. He died alone. He was eaten by the monster under my bed, and I couldn’t save him. I lied to you. I couldn’t save any of them. I couldn’t save Amy. I’m sorry, he wants to say. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. The people we love are dead. All dead. Because of me. Hate me. Hate me. Hate me. Hate me. Forgive me. “I-“
“Tim,” Jessica says, more softly, more urgently. “Tim, breathe.” But he can’t. It’s like a fist, punching up from his heart and into his throat. It’s like a weight. It’s like a bottomless pit he’s standing on the edge of.
Grief. Such a small word for such a vast and inescapable thing.
“I’m sorry,” he manages to choke out. “I’m sorry. I lied to you, before. I’m sorry.”
“Where are you?” Jessica asks, concern and fear warring in her voice. “I’ll- I’ll come to you, Tim. Just don’t. Kidnap me again.” Jay could almost laugh at the awkwardness, the slight embarrassment in her voice. Tim does, a shaky little thing.
“I won’t,” he says, and there’s the faintest tinge of fondness in his weak smile. “I promise. I’m- I’m in Virginia,” he says awkwardly, tiredly, rubbing the beginnings of tears from his eyes. “You ever heard of Crabtree Falls?”
It comes back. That night. Every night. It’s exhausting, really, and Jay can feel himself waning, can feel that fragmenting feeling return every time. It’s terrifying to wait and see, to try and gauge whether this time it will be able to beat him, if this time his whole being will break under the force of it, if this time it will take Tim. He wishes Tim could see him. Just so he could say goodbye.
Instead he stands like a fucking rent-a-cop in Tim’s doorway, waiting just in case, waiting for horror to creep back in and tear away the only thing that matters to him now. It comes night after night, arms long and curling, shadows writhing beyond its false shoulders like a nest of snakes, like a thousand rats with their tails knotted together, and Jay does his best to shield Tim, to keep it away even if he can’t banish it outright. Sometimes a reaching shadow will slip past him and Tim will wake up the next morning drained and tired, eyes dark with illness and body bruised.
Every small failure lives in Jay like a tally mark carved into his chest. Tim has so little energy to give, so little of himself left, andstill, it wants more. Jay won’t let it take the rest. He can’t. Tim hasn’t relapsed since Alex, hasn’t had a seizure, hasn’t blacked out. He’s been doing really fucking well, actually, for someone dealing what what he’s dealing with, and Jay doesn’t think he could take seeing Tim break. Not now, not after everything.
He made it out. He was the only one who made it out, aside from Jessica, who… Jay can’t even say for sure that she did make it out. He’d thought she was dead- maybe she had been. Maybe none of them were going to make it out. Maybe she’s gone. Maybe Tim is next. Maybe Jay is here to watch, to see everyone he cares about wiped off of the fucking map. Maybe he’s here to fail. It makes him so angry, thinking of how much Jessica and Tim have survived, how much they’ve fought through, only to be cut down by a fucking faceless man.
“Fuck,” Jay mutters, turning and kicking the wall. The impact throws him flat on his back. He lies winded for a moment, surprised and bewildered. His foot had hit the wall. His foot had rebounded . He pushes himself to his feet, does a few perfunctory stretches, and throws himself at the wall.
He whooshes through, intangible, and lands on the ground outside.
Well, fuck.
He tries again, despair beginning to set in again. Every time. Every time he thinks he’s made progress, it gets wiped away. He can never move forward without losing something- one step forward, two steps back. The anger flares in him again, and he throws himself forward like he’s trying to break down a door. This time his whole body slams into the wall, solid and unmistakable. He’s thrown back again by the rebound, flat in the autumn debris. It’s like the aftermath of pain, that stinging numbness, and Jay scuttles up out of the dead leaves and underbrush to examine the mark he left. A single footprint square in the middle of the wall, just barely visible.
Jay wishes he knew what the fuck it meant.
Jessica comes two days after the phone call, eyes rimmed with dark sleeplessness and face drawn with worry. They hear her car before they see it, loud on the rough dirt and gravel, and Tim makes his way to the door, closing it behind him. He limps down the stairs to stand in front of the cabin like he’s waiting for a death sentence, shoulders heavy and face blank. She gets out of the car but stands behind the open door without moving. Tim can’t see it from where he stands, but Jay can see her hand white-knuckle grasping a crowbar just under the window.
“Tim?” She calls, voice shaky and eyes conspicuously steady. She looks like hell. Jay wants to scream. He wants to cry. She never should’ve been brought into this. He never should have called her.
“Yeah,” Tim calls back. He reaches up to push his hair back and Jessica’s wrist twitches. “It’s me. Just me.”
“Yeah, I figured,” Jessica shrugs, eyes flicking from the door of the cabin to Tim to the surrounding woods. “Just you and me. In a forest far from other people. Alone. With barely any cell reception and one landline after you called me out of the blue to tell me you lied to me. Cause that’s not suspicious.” She’s laughing a little, trying to pass it off as a joke, but clearly, clearly , judging by the crowbar and the circles around her eyes, it’s more than a little true.
“I just-“ Tim squints and breaks off. “Jesus, Jess, is that a crowbar ?” She looks away guiltily.
“I was worried, okay!” She holds it up, grimacing. “Last time someone called me out into the woods alone, he tried to shoot me! And the time before that, actually, he did the exact same thing! And if you weren’t trying to hurt me, I was worried someone was trying to hurt you ! You sounded like you were being tortured!” Tim just looks at her for a long moment before he starts laughing. “It’s not funny!” She insists.
“No,” Tim agrees, half-coughing a laugh. “No, I’m not- it’s not funny. It’s smart of you. I just… it never occurred to me that you’d worry about me.” He trails off, smiling ruefully as she closes her car door and trudges up to the base of the stairs, crowbar in hand. “The last person who did that was Jay, and he…” the smile dies. “That’s what I need to talk to you about.” Jessica looks at him, tired eyes softening.
“What’s happened?” She asks. “What- is he okay?” Tim doesn’t answer, just starts up the stairs, and she slams her car door shut to trail him into the house, still frowning. Jay can’t be here for this. He can’t. He won’t. He stalks off into the woods, hands trembling. He never should have called her.
“You might wanna sit down for this,” Tim says softly, gesturing at the semicircle of couches around the fireplace. “I can- do you want tea? I can make tea.”
“I want the truth, Tim,” Jessica’s voice is a little strident now, just a touch of worry.
“I know you do. You deserve the truth. I just-“ he strangles out some twisted gesture. “I just need something to do with my hands.” Her jaw clenches, her whole body tense, and she nods.
“Fine. Yeah, I’ll have some tea.” His head spins, just a little, and he can’t breathe right. He doesn’t want to tell her. He doesn’t want to have to say it. The water boils and makes a sound like a fucking siren. Tea bags- he doesn’t even know what they taste like, but they’re in the water now. He sinks down next to her, gritting his teeth at the pain in his leg, and hands her a mug. She thanks him, and Tim nods, stares at the ash in the fireplace while she sips at it.
“What happened, Tim?” Jessica asks again, and he shakes his head. He’ll cry. He can feel it. Something about the way she asks, the worry in her voice, the clarity in her tired eyes. He’ll cry if he tells her. He’s not certain if he’ll be able to stop. She waits him out, drinking the tea while he stares into his, until Tim finally clears his throat and begins to speak.
“I said that Jay was fine,” he says softly. “I told you he’d moved away, that he was- that he was fine and he’d talked to me.” The muscles in his jaw contract and relax. His tongue feels heavy and ignorant. “That was a lie, I- I lied to you.” She leans in, one hand on his back, one hand on the mug, crowbar loose in her lap. Tim sees it, thinks of the way Jay had looked into the camera, how he’d said I don’t care what happens to me, I’m making sure Jessica gets out . He’d want her to know. “Jay is dead,” he says finally, and it breaks him a little, to tell someone. He can feel the tears burning at the back of his eyes. Fuck. “Alex shot him. He had followed Alex into an abandoned building, was trying to- to stop him, I think. Alex shot him. Chased him down. He was- that thing took his body away. He’s dead.” He can’t help but think of Amy, of the way she’d screamed on that tape, the way Alex had told her to run. The way Alex’s voice had echoed in the tunnel over Jay’s phone, telling them to run. Echoes. Spiderweb cracks reaching out. Imminent collapse. His voice is dead in his throat, broken like glass, and the silence stretches too long between them.
“I know,” Jessica tells him softly, voice full of meaning he doesn’t quite grasp. He looks up, meets her eyes, and sees the sorrow there. “I didn’t- I didn’t know that I knew, but- I was in the tunnel, remember? I was there when he- when it pulled him in.” She bites her lip, looks away, then back. “When you said he was okay I’d thought maybe he got out like me, like. Maybe he was okay. Maybe we were all going to be okay. But I still had this feeling, deep down, this sinking feeling, like he wasn’t.” Tim’s cheeks are wet, tears forging rivers down his face and into his beard, but he doesn’t look away. He can’t. If Jessica had seen him- if Jessica had seen what happened to Jay, if she knew- “I saw him bleeding, Tim,” she confesses, and there are tears welling in her eyes, too. “I saw him bleeding and-“ her voice breaks, the mug slips from her hand, and Tim moves forward to wrap his arms around her. She feels so frail, held to his chest like this, all iron and silk and bone, tied together with a cardigan and long, dark hair. It’s the first time he’s touched anyone in two months. The first time he knows of, anyway. She’s crying. So’s he. They’ve both held it in for too long, and they cry like that for awhile, Tim’s wet face buried in her shoulder and her wet face buried in his chest, both of them grieving. For Amy, for Jay, for themselves. For each other.
“We’ll find her,” he whispers, and Jessica nods into his chest. “One day we’re going to go back to Rosswood and burn that fucking tunnel to the ground. And we’re going to find them all.”
“He and Amy-“ her voice cracks. “Are they- did it eat them? Are they gone?”
“I don’t know,” Tim’s arms tighten a little around her shoulders. “I hope- I hope not. Nobody deserves to be… they didn’t deserve that.” He thinks of the man in white, face scourged from his head, blank and wet and red, thinks of Jay like that, faceless and broken, and he feels a sharp, bright rage. “I hope not.” There’s a long, quiet moment, and Jessica pulls back, wiping the tears from her cheeks with graceless hands. “You okay?” He asks, voice rough. She nods, smiling a little.
“Yeah. I- I’m working on it. You know.” She shrugs, straightens his flannel, cringing. “Sorry about the tea,” she gestures at the floor. “And for. Crying on you.”
“I don’t mind,” Tim reassures her. He kicks lightly at the broken pottery and tilts his head at the floor. “I’ve got towels, it’ll be fine.”
“Tim,” she begins, cautiously. “Can I- can I stay here for a bit?” Tim looks at her, really looks at her, at the circles under her eyes, the distant, haunted look in her face, the way she looks at ease now in a way she hadn’t outside. Maybe she’s also felt alone. Maybe she also wakes up at night, screaming or sobbing, flinching away from a touch she can barely remember. Hiding from the darkness of the tunnel in her own dark room.
“Of course you can,” Tim says softly. “There’s an empty bedroom on the right and uh,” he looks away sheepishly. “A lot of jam in the fridge. If you like blackberry.” Jessica’s eyebrows go up, and she bites her lip, like she’s stifling a laugh. “Go on,” Tim grumbles good-naturedly. “I know you want to ask.”
“Why the jam?” She asks, just keeping a hold on the amusement in her voice. Tim rolls his eyes, a smile catching on the corner of his mouth.
“This place is… it was Brian’s family’s. He was my best friend.” Was. Was, because they were all dead now, even Brian. “He- Alex tried to kill him years ago. He succeeded, I think, because what was left- he was the man in the hoodie. The one who- we were in those woods with you. I’m sorry about that, by the way,” he says, grimacing. “The other- the version of me you met, he’s not uh. The most polite.” Jessica shakes her head.
“You were trying to keep me safe.” She snorts, looking off towards the window, a wry little smile on her face. “You kidnapped me, sure, that was a little weird. But you tried to stop him.” She shrugs. “You tried to save me.” He wants to believe her. Forgiveness is hard to come by, and Tim doesn’t expect to get it very often, but it’s difficult to believe.
“I failed,” Tim says simply, smiling bitterly. “I failed him, too. Brian and his family brought me here once, and… it was one of the first times I’d ever felt safe. First time I felt like anyone cared about me.” His fingers fidget with the hem of his flannel, and the feeling of it is almost comforting. “His sisters, he had two sisters, and uh, Julia, she was whip smart. She wanted to bring something back to this girl she had a crush on, so we went out and picked berries to make jam. It was winter, so we didn’t use blackberries but…” his voice fades a little, half afraid to admit. “I wanted to feel like that again. I wanted to remember them.” He looks back at her, at the sad smile and the warm eyes and the way forgiveness lingers in the way she’s relaxed and unguarded. He thinks of the tape, of the other version of him, defeated and despairing, taking off the mask and limping away. She made it out. On her own, with nothing, she had made it out.
He won’t be the death of her.
“For the record,” she tells him. “I love blackberry jam.” She sighs, some last, undefined tension leaving her with the breath. “We should make fresh bread to go with it.”
“If you can teach me how, I’ll just keep practicing,” Tim offers. “It’ll be a bakery in here.”
“Good,” Jessica says, with an intensity of feeling he didn’t expect. “It seems like you need hobbies aside from blaming yourself and crying.”
“Ouch,” he responds dryly, examining his own mug of tea.
“If it makes you feel better, so do I.” Jessica stands, tugging her cardigan around herself again with a kind of awkward vulnerability. “It takes one to know one.” She looks down at the broken mug, at the spreading brown stain on the rug. “I feel safe here, too.”
“Yeah,” Tim says, voice rough. “It’s special.”
His eyes flutter open, half-cracked with sleep, and Tim can just make out the silhouette of a tall, slender man in the doorway, and a smaller, familiar figure beside him. Ice jolts down his spine, fear crackling through him like primal panic. The faceless man. Jessica. Tim sits up, half-rolling out of bed to slam the light switch up, but his eyes don’t leave the doorway and he watches both silhouettes disappear as the lights come on. Both of them gone. Not Jessica. He breathes hard and heavy, watching for their return, but as long as he stands with his hand by the lights, they don’t come back.
It’s hard to tell compared to that thing, it’s so tall, but Tim tries to remember what it looked like, what Jay showed on that tape, when it had stood behind Alex like a fucking guardian angel. Maybe Alex isn’t done. Maybe, even now, he means to close off loose ends, to kill Tim and Jessica and anyone else who might have a shred of knowledge. Maybe he’s fucking haunting Tim. Leading it back to him.
“If that’s you,” Tim hisses to the ghost. “I don’t fucking want you here. I killed you once, Alex. I’ll do it again. You won’t get her. You sure as hell won’t get me.” He gets no answer. He didn’t expect one. Tim stands, watching the light spill out into the hallway, then turns the lights off, sees the pitch black silhouette of someone in the doorway. They don’t move, don’t say anything, just stand. He thinks it’s Alex. It must be. But still, nothing, no attack, no words, just pitch black silence. “You already took him,” Tim says, voice low and thick with loathing. “I’m not letting you take anyone else.”
Jay stands in the doorway, dead heart heavy, incorporeal body tired from the effort of holding off the Operator, and stares sadly into Tim’s rage-filled face. He can’t see him. He can see a ghost, but he can’t see Jay.
“It’s me,” he says plaintively. “It’s just me.” He reaches one tired hand up to brush Tim’s cheek. “It’s me .”
“What do you want?” Tim grits out between bared teeth. “If you’re going to try and kill me again, just try! I deserve it! You were right!” He’s yelling now, shouting at the shadow. “It’s all my fault! So kill me!”
The only response he gets is the shadow walking away, visible in the half-light of the moon, and Jessica skidding into his doorway to stare wide-eyed at him.
“What is it? Tim? Are you okay?” She asks, concern and confusion painted on her face. Tim sighs, leaning back against the door and letting his weight carry him down to the floor. His hands knot in his own hair, frenetic, frustrated, distressed.
“No,” he admits softly. “No, I don’t think I am.”
Jessica teaches him to make bread. It’s not overwhelmingly complicated in theory, but in practice, something always goes wrong. Tasteless, dense loaves of cooked flour and yeast litter the counters of the kitchen, spotted occasionally by covered bowls of new, rising dough or splotches of dropped flour. Oil stains Tim’s sleeves so deeply he’s beginning to think he’d be better off using the shirt as a torch than he is wearing it. None of his attempts thus far have actually tasted much like bread, and Jessica just keeps looking at him strangely, like he’s missing something.
“Are you sure you want to do this again?” She asks, hands on her hips and eyebrows near to the ceiling. “You don’t have to-“
“Yeah I do,” Tim brushes her concern off. “I need to make something. I need to get something right. I keep- people keep getting hurt because of me, Jess. If I’m going to live with it I need to know that I can…”
“That you can do more than hurt people,” Jessica continues for him. “Well, then you’d better hurry up, because these might actually kill anyone who tries to eat them,” she says dryly, gesturing at the array of failures and popping a blackberry into her mouth. Tim just grunts, putting a bowl of water and yeast on the counter. Jessica watches him as he adds sugar, oil, salt. “Why is this so hard for you?” She asks thoughtfully, crossing her arms and staring at him from the other side of the counter. “What’s making this such a struggle for you?”
“I’m bad at cooking,” Tim jokes humorlessly, adding the first cup of flour to his latest attempt at bread. He folds it in, ready to fail again.
“No, you aren’t.” Jessica rolls her eyes. “There’s a metric ton of blackberry jam in that fridge to prove you aren’t. Try again.”
“That’s what I’m doing,” he quips, and she glares at him, unamused. Tim stops, sighing, looks down at his hands. “I’m doing what you tell me, Jess. I don’t know what else to say.”
“Then don’t say anything,” she waves a hand at the bowl. “Just do what you think you’re supposed to and I’ll see what’s up.”
“Mm,” Tim says, shooting a dismal look at his slurry of yeast, water, and bread ingredients. “Where did you learn this, anyway?” He asks, as if to distract himself from the beige sludge.
“I spent high school working at a cinnamon roll shop,” Jessica hoists herself up to sit on the kitchen island, and Tim upends the bowl to set the dough onto a small oasis of flour on the counter. “Used to come in early to cut the rolls and put them in the oven, and then at night I’d make the dough so it could proof overnight.” She watches him knead the dough, swinging her legs in the air. “You have to hit it harder, Tim. It’s not going to feel it.”
“Don’t think I’ve ever been told I’m not being rough enough before,” he mutters, only half-joking, and Jessica frowns.
“Sometimes things need to hurt, Tim.” He looks up at her from the corner of his eye to see her staring distantly out the window over his shoulder. “You can’t spend your whole life using kid gloves on everything just cause you fucked something up once.”
“Wasn’t once,” Tim tells her softly, placing the dough back into the bowl with a tenderness that feels almost purposeful, almost rebellious. “It’s what I do, Jess. I fuck things up for people. I bring him to them and they get hurt.” He leans on the edge of the counter, flour-powdery fingers curling under the lip and holding there. “I’m not being too gentle with my bread dough because of my psychological issues,” he tells her sourly.
“I think that’s exactly what you’re doing,” Jessica tells him seriously. Tim scoffs, blows hair out of his eyes with the corner of his mouth. “It’s okay to be human and just. Break things sometimes. My parents spent my whole life telling me I had to be good, I had to be nice, I had to listen to instructions. I don’t. You don’t. It’s okay to fuck things up.”
“They know where you are?” Tim asks, holding up the bowl of bread dough so he can see the light through it. She scoffs, half a laugh, half a bitter grumble.
“If I’m lucky they might care where I am,” Jessica admits. “If I’m not, they’ve just written me off as a foolish, ungrateful child who wasted twenty-one years of parenting.” She smiles, forlorn, at the single perfect loaf of bread next to her on the counter- the example that she’d made for him. “So what’s your deal? Overprotective parents? Mom wouldn’t let you go outside?” Tim laughs, as if it’s been pushed out of him against his will.
“No,” he says, still smiling. “Not at all, uh… my mom dropped me off at a hospital and never came back when I was around five. I was in the psych ward until I was eighteen.”
“Jesus,” Jessica breathes, and Tim shrugs. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“Sounds like a bad time,” she says. Tim studies the floor for a moment. It was. There’s not really any debating it. He was haunted by the Operator, on a fluctuating regimen of antipsychotics and anticonvulsants, and going through childhood and adolescence almost completely alone. It was a fucking terrible time. But that was just the hand he was dealt. No use crying over it now. He had gotten Brian, a friend worth waiting for, a friend worth having. He’d gotten Alex, a little, before he’d lost it. He’d gotten Sarah and Seth. He’d gotten Jay.
“For awhile,” he agrees, finally. “But once I got to college it was like… for a little while everything fell into place.” He looks at the bread, rising. “I got to be happy for a little while. That’s worth anything else that happens.”
“That’s a mature outlook,” Jessica looks appraisingly at the bread rising and nods. “But I think you and I both know that that doesn’t make it better.” She looks down at her hands, her palms covered in flour. “It’s okay to be angry, Tim.” Tim watches her fists close, white-knuckle tight. “We deserve that.”
“You do,” Tim agrees. “But this is my fault, Jess. I brought it to them. I brought it to Alex and-“ he swallows the break in his voice and shakes his head. “Nobody would be dead if it wasn’t for me.”
“I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for you,” Jessica points out, pointing at him.
“You’d never have been in danger in the first place if it wasn’t for me,” he reminds her, pointing back.
“Stop making good points,” she says plaintively, pointing harder, and he laughs.
This loaf of bread turns out just as badly as all the others preceding it.
“Jess?” Tim asks, sitting up. It’s disconcerting at times, sleeping in this bed that used to be Brian’s and sometimes feels like it still should be. She’s standing in the doorway, arms crossed. “It’s-“ he glances at the clock on the bedside table “-three am, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she says, apologetically. “Nothing, I just… I’m too tired to sleep, I guess. Can’t make myself drift off.”
“What’s up?” He asks again, kicking off the sheets to sit up. Jessica shifts from foot to foot, chewing on her lip. It’s like she’s trying to decide, trying to figure out if she wants to say or if she’s just going back to bed.
“Nothing,” she says again, more firmly this time. She looks up, shooting him a fake smile. “It’s fine. I’m fine. Go back to bed. It’s okay.” Tim sighs, rubbing one eye with the heel of his palm.
“No it’s not. What’s wrong?” Her shoulders drop when he doesn’t take the out, but Tim could swear there’s relief in her face.
“I just- I had this terrible dream, and when I woke up- I saw… I thought I saw…” her eyes are distant and full of tears, and Tim stands to offer her a tissue.
“The thing?” He asks, voice low. But Jessica just shakes her head, sniffling.
“I saw Jay.”
Tim swallows. “Oh.”
They make bread. In the quiet of the night, kitchen lit only by the fireplace behind them and the little gold lights on the underside of the cabinets on the right, they each mix their own dough in companionable silence, Tim’s humming occasionally rising under his breath and Jessica’s muttered comments to the bread overflowing her mouth. It’s different, somehow, the underpinnings of sleep denied forcing Tim’s mind to quiet, forcing his hands to steady themselves. They take their bowls to the couches when they’re done, setting them before the fire to rise.
Neither of them says anything, just sits, watching the fire flicker against the grate, watching the bread proof, watching movies in their memory long concluded. Jessica leans in, lets her head rest on Tim’s shoulder, and he wraps an arm around her, laying his own head on hers.
“We’re going to be okay,” she tells him.
“I think so,” he agrees.
This time the bread turns out right. Light, porous, ripe for a bowl of soup. They eat it with their fingers like children, tearing off pieces and handing them to each other, slathering them with butter. It feels a little like communion, like something holy, sharing bread they’d made before the auburn firelight with clean grease on their lips and memory heavy in their eyes.
“Did he look like he was in pain?” Tim asks, finally, looking down at his hands. “Jay. Did he- was he hurt?”
“He looked sad,” she tells him, ripping off a chunk of thick crust and handing it to him. “Like he was waiting for something.”
“Can’t imagine what,” Tim muses wryly. “You’d think he’d have left us behind by now. Gone wherever…” his voice dies, and he swallows. “Wherever good people go.”
“Maybe he wanted to stay,” Jessica says, and there’s something wistful in her face. “Maybe he found something worth staying for.”
“Yeah,” Tim murmurs, trying to push down the melancholy of knowing that none of it was true. Knowing that Jay was gone, burned out by a bullet and the operator’s light. Erased from existence in all but memory. “Maybe.”
Jay didn’t know she could see him. She hadn’t before, even just a few hours before in the kitchen. He’d just wanted to make sure the thing wasn’t coming for her like it had for Tim, had just wanted to make sure she was okay. He was used to Tim looking right through him, so he hadn’t even hidden, hadn’t tried to crouch or anything like that- what the fuck would that do? Nobody could see him anyway.
Except Jessica had. She’d looked right at him, eyes wide and face full of horror. It was strange, really, to be a fixture of fear to someone after going so long unseen. He didn’t want to scare her. He didn’t want to scare anyone, he was just trying to- fuck it. It doesn’t matter anymore. He trudges out of the cabin, standing motionless under the wide white eye of the moon, dark-slick mud failing to cling to his shoes. He isn’t real. He’s just an echo of Jay Merrick, really. A shade. His feet begin to move again, and he trips and stumbles his way to the river. The brambles don’t affect him, the water doesn’t touch him. He might as well not be here. He splashes into it up to his knees, and still he feels nothing.
Jay thinks of Jessica, determined, insistent Jessica, who wanted the truth as badly as he did and for better reasons. Tim, broken and battered, but so full of compassion that it hurts him, stalwart and complicated and good. Both of them, good, and Jay wants terribly, desperately, to help them somehow. The water flows past him, time moving while he stands still.
He can feel the wind, blowing through him, can feel the water, flowing through him, can feel himself intangible and cold, stable enough not to be blown apart this time. He’s stronger. There’s more of him, more substance, more intensity. He’s no longer a memory.
He can no longer leave on his own. He cannot stay forever. Jay is caught, now, between two panes of glass, like a butterfly in amber.
It’s worth it, for them. For Tim, for Jessica. It’s worth it to stay.
Jessica leaves two days later, and Tim stands between the trees to watch her car disappear into the woods, mist rolling in behind it as if to erase her trail. It’s almost like she was never there. Tim stands in the frothing air, watching the fog close around the path Jessica’s car had cut through it, and Jay stands with him, unseen.
“She’ll make it home,” Jay tells Tim, even though he can’t hear. “She’s going to make it.” Tim doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know that there’s anyone to answer.
“She’ll be alright, won’t she, Jay?” He asks softly. Jay smiles wanly, can feel the burn that used to be tears in his eyes.
“Yeah,” he says again, voice nearly a whisper. “She's going to be just fine.” Tim keeps watching, even as the sun sets, even as the pallid grey light turns purple and blue and black over his face and shoulders. Watercolor and oil, impressionist’s palette, he looks like something old and worn without company. Now that Jessica is gone his shoulders sink beneath the weight of loneliness. And yet. And yet, he seems a little freer, a little softer. There is comfort, Jay thinks, in familiar sadness- grief so constant it becomes a companion, and Tim, sad, wonderful Tim, he’s been grieving for most of his life. Jessica’s help, her company, her friendship can only help as far as Tim is willing to stray from his familiar loss.
“If you’re here, Jay,” Tim says suddenly. “If you- if you are still here,” he stops himself. He shifts from one foot to the other, looking back over his shoulder at the cabin, then out at the road, invisible in the shadows now.
“I am,” Jay insists, standing in front of him. “Look at me.”
“You’re not. Who the fuck am I kidding. You’re not.” Tim sounds so tired. So lonely. Jay reaches out, hand passing through Tim’s arm, through his shoulder. He keeps trying, keeps failing, and it snaps something in Jay.
“I’m here!” He insists, frustration like a knot in his heart, like a writhing nest of snakes in his stomach. “Look at me!”
“You left a long time ago, the way you should’ve.” Tim looks right through him, pulls a cigarette from his pocket, drums it against the side of his leg with two fingers. “I’m not that lucky.”
“I’m right here!” Jay tells him, half-screaming. “I’m right- I’m right here, Tim.” He scrabbles uselessly at Tim’s shirt, fingers losing their grip, eyes wet with a parody of tears. He falls to his knees. “I’m here,” he sobs, slamming his fists into the earth. “I’m right here.”
“I hope you can see her,” Tim murmurs, staring out through the trees, through the fog, as if he can see the road Jessica is traveling from here. “I hope you’re looking after her. God knows you shouldn’t be here, no matter how much I’d like it.”
“I’m here,” Jay whispers, a broken wreck at Tim’s feet. “I’m here.”
When Tim turns and goes inside, Jay stays. Lets the frustration fester, lets the agony, the anger, the rage well up in him and burn in his bones. He feels luminescent with it, feels like every inch of him is so bright it could burn. He feels the same way he did before, when he had been afraid of Tim, afraid of everything, crushed like a lightning bug beneath the Operator’s light. It feels… separate from him somehow, like a purging of whatever was left of that light within him, whatever influence the operator had placed him under.
It makes a damn good shield between Tim and the faceless thing when it comes that night. It comes creeping, slim and black like a hungry black tree silhouetted against the night, and Jay stands between them, as always, resolute and outclassed. This time, when the winding, twisting tendrils of shadow reach for Tim, Jay’s outstretched hand blazes back at it, a flood of his own overexposure washing over its gnarled fingers. It isn’t- it’s not like it hurt. It didn’t burn him, didn’t scar or scourge, but there was a certain alarm, as if it was thrown back, as if a spotlight had suddenly come down over him in a crowded, dark room.
Jay dissipates, mist and memory, for a moment. It feels like being broken, like being a porcelain figure dropped from a great height, like coming apart down to the seams of your cells; the bonds between atoms fragmenting and tearing like paper. Jay dies, again, briefly. He comes to on the floor of Tim’s room, face pressed into carpet and body aching with the ghost of mortality.
Tim is asleep, still, face calm and arm outstretched, searching, maybe, for a person who was never there. Jay lies down beside him anyway, fragmented, ghostly body torn like fabric and wisping away into nothing in places.
“I’m here,” he whispers. Tim sleeps.
Tim harvests the garlic grown wild and rangy in the field. It’s been years since Brian’s family was last here, and what was only meant to grow for a year has since overtaken the bounds of its beds and run roughshod over propriety. There are dandelion greens, basil, spinach, even strawberry plants like leafy cephalopods sprawling over the ground. It feels good to have his hands in the cool, dark earth, to uproot aged things and harvest the fruits of the sun.
He goes inside with a bowl of strawberries, an armful of onions and chives, and a half-crate of unwashed garlic and shallots. Jay sits and watches him sort through them, admires the way his fingers so carefully ease cloves of garlic apart from the whole, the way he hums a reasonable approximation of clair de lune even though he is not, in fact, a piano. Jay wishes he could stay here forever, wishes Tim could see him smiling where he sits with his back to the pines. It’s nice, this afterlife. He could do without the faceless man, and he’d like to be at least visible to Tim, but. But.
It isn’t half bad, living like this. Dying like this. The sun dapples his face and Jay’s smile widens, warmth and cool shadow mingling like raindrops over his closed eyes. If things would just change a little, and then not at all, he thinks. Everything could be perfect. He can almost imagine the smell of the garlic cloves, peeled by Tim’s clever, steady fingers, all of his fidgeting funneled into purpose. He can almost imagine Tim sneaking over, leaning down to press a stolen kiss to Jay’s mouth, a quick little crime before he can open his eyes. The wind rustles in the trees, shaking down needles and leaves and errant pollen, golden snow drifting in the air. Garlic skin and the pink membranes of shallots drift over the ground like stray flower petals, like so much confetti. Jay breathes deep, drawing air he can’t smell into his empty lungs.
If only nothing would change.
Jay hovers, arms crossed, by the sink. He wishes he could speak to Tim, wishes he could communicate somehow, even for a moment, because Tim needs to know. He needs to remember. He’s been at the cabin long enough that he’s running out, and Jay’s been watching the pills in the bottle dwindle with growing fear, but this morning Jay drifted to the side of the sink to check and found that it was the last day. The last pill. Jay isn’t certain what medication Tim’s on, what it actually does, but he’s out now, and it scares him. The Operator is circling Tim like a fucking vulture. He can’t afford to run out now. He can’t. Jay couldn’t stand it if the Operator- if Tim died. Or worse, if Tim was lost. And that’s the worst part, really- he’s a ghost. He can’t do anything. If the Operator were to come, Jay could fight him off again, but he’s fading, now. He’s so close to dissolving. Jay won’t last forever. Jay cannot shield him forever, no matter how much he wants to.
He watches Tim sleep, face clear and calm, unfairly peaceful under the faint blue-gold of dawn cresting the horizon. He deserves that. Peace. He deserves to be happy, to be safe. But Jay isn’t sure how much longer he can give him that. Sighing, Jay unfolds his legs and pads silent and restless to sit on the edge of Tim’s bed, to look down at his face and wallow in self-pity for a few precious moments. He’s beautiful. He was always beautiful- when he was awkward and isolated in college, when he was confident and content, before Jay found him. And now, Jay thinks, trailing fingertips Tim can’t feel over the sweep of his jaw, grief written into every line of his face and hope half-crushed in his heart. He’s beautiful now, too.
“I miss you,” Jay murmurs, resting his hand on Tim’s cheek. His eyelashes begin to flicker, and Jay pulls his hand away as Tim wakes up. He rolls onto his back, sighing, and spends a long moment looking at the ceiling. Then, as if mustering strength, he kicks off his covers and stands, sparing a glance through the window at the dawn.
“Alright, then,” he sighs, and limps to the cracked sink, brushes his teeth, takes his last pill. He doesn’t look at the bottle, doesn’t even really seem to notice it. The lack of rattle when he puts it down doesn’t register in his mind, and Jay can’t reach him, no matter how much he begs and pleads with the air. Jay can almost hear the clock ticking down, can almost hear the countdown begin. Hours, now, until the Operator comes to rip Tim out of himself, until the thing shoves itself into his mind and makes a puppet out of him. Until Jay loses him.
He follows Tim like a shadow, sits by his side as he reads, leans on the counters to watch him cook. He waits for the operator to come, to seize on Tim’s waning invulnerability, but it never does. Jay clings, almost, spends all of his time at Tim’s side trying, in vain, to savor the last few moments of his life. Sitting with his back to the closed bathroom door, staring out at the room, listening to the shower run, Jay reflects on his choices.
He should’ve kissed Tim. He should have asked him out. He should have told him the truth sooner. He should have gone with Brian and Alex into the dark. He should have tried to talk to Jessica before she left. He should have believed Tim. He should never have gone to Benedict Hall. The knobs to the faucet creak, and the water stops. He should’ve killed Alex the moment he broke Tim’s leg. Tim shuffles around the bathroom behind him, knocks something over, and Jay puts his face in his hands. He should never have taken the tapes. He should’ve just stayed quiet. Kept his head down.
Tim pads out of the bathroom barefoot, wet hair dangling over his tired eyes and too-long sweatpants half-over his feet. He looks fuzzy around the edges, like if Jay were to touch him he’d be soft, like he’s less guarded. Less afraid. Like the control that his medication gives him is slipping. He falls into bed soon after, water from his hair bleeding out into the pillowcase in a pedestrian halo. Jay lies down beside him, reaches out as if to comb a hand through his hair. He can almost pretend things are okay. Can almost pretend that this isn’t the overture to the end of everything.
The Operator doesn’t come. The night passes, moon-blue and drowsy, and Jay feels a little more real by the time the sun rises again. Tim wakes up, jet eyelashes fluttering against his cheeks, and Jay feels the bright and terrible jab of love about to be ripped from him. He’s going to lose Tim. He’s going to lose Tim. Jay watches him stand, watches him make his weary way to the sink, and Jay pulls his knees to his chest, eyes fixed on his back. Tim freezes.
“No.” Tim scrabbles at the pill bottle, examines it, searching for any hidden pill, dives for his bag on the ground to root through it and search desperately, breathing hard and heavy as he recognizes that this is the end. The last pill. The final breath before he slips back into the storm he’s been running from for so long. “No, please. Please, please please, please-“ The coughing starts about twenty minutes later, and Tim tears through his things, searches every inch of the cabin for more medication, for any stray extra doses he may have brought, but there are none. The coughing gets worse, and Jay watches him weigh the consequences of a seizure mid-drive before resignedly setting down his keys. He leans back against the wall and slides down, horrified and cursing himself, on the verge of tears. “Fuck,” he spits, muffled and broken through his hands over his mouth. “Fuck.” Jay sits beside him, unseen and unheard, murmuring apologies to him.
The clock hits zero six hours later, with the sound of Tim stumbling, a glass hitting the floor, and a strangled noise of pain.
Jay runs to him, falls to his knees beside him as he begins to shake, as his breath begins to catch in his throat. Tim seizes painfully, stuck where he fell on the floor, and Jay’s hands hover helplessly just over his body- he cannot hold him like this, cannot help him up, can’t give him his medicine or drive him to the hospital. Jay is worse than useless right now, watching Tim in pain. He shakes, spasms, and Jay just kneels beside him, waiting like he can do something about any of this. “It’s okay,” he whispers. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.” He’s not sure who he’s lying to, but he knows it’s a lie. Tim chokes, a little, and Jay wishes he could do something. Anything. At least the broken glass isn’t close enough to hurt him.
The shaking stops after about a minute, and for a long moment Tim just lays there, eyes closed and whole body limp and weightless. He looks like a puppet with its strings cut, like a corpse, like- he breathes in, body moving in concert now. His eyes open, slow and deliberate, and Jay can see the void behind them, the emptiness where Tim usually is. When he sits up, face blank and eyes empty, he scans his surroundings with the quick, keen gaze of the masked man. None of Tim’s clouded sorrow or sharp suspicion, only wariness and the animal instinct of a predator. He takes in the cabin, the spilled water, the empty pill bottle- and he makes a sad sort of face, brow furrowing and mouth turning down just a little at the corners- and Jay. He sees Jay. His eyes go wide, more alive than Jay’s ever seen them as the masked man, and he breathes in sharply, a soft, hopeful sound that breaks Jay’s heart. One hand reaches out, curious and tentative; and then, like it’s the only thing in the world he wants to do, he half-lunges across the floor to wrap himself around Jay.
If Jay could cry... Well. He wishes he could, right now, looking down on this Tim who is not Tim, sprawled on the floor, bewildered and betrayed by the illusion of Jay’s return. He looks a little like a child, learning for the first time that not everything is true, that not everything can be held close and kept safe. Jay reaches out, as if to push Tim’s hair from his eyes, then falters. “I’m sorry,” he says softly, transparent fingers brushing at the edges of Tim’s hair. Not-Tim looks up, face blank again and eyes distant and hurt. “I’m sorry,” Jay repeats, leaning in closer, as if proximity will change this, as if he can be real if he only gets close enough. “I’m sorry.” And he is. For so much. For bringing Tim back into this, for not believing Tim, for going after Alex alone, for dying. For leaving him.
The masked man, bereft of his mask, looks like he’s trying to understand, like there’s something here, just out of his reach. Jay can’t give it to him. He reaches out again, Tim’s hands made clumsy and uncertain by his inexperience with using them gently, and passes his fingers through the cool mist of Jay’s form. It feels like air. Jay doesn’t feel anything. The masked man looks down at Tim’s hand, closed around a fist full of nothing. He looks at Jay, pleadingly.
“I’m a ghost,” Jay says, voice thick with tears he can’t cry. “An echo.” The masked man puts his hands over his face, draws his legs in like he wants to disappear. He looks so upset, so devastated by this. “He can’t- he can’t see me. I don’t know why you can, but could you tell him? That I’m here?” The masked man shakes his head, still hidden behind its hands. He taps the side of his head. “You won’t remember?” Not-Tim looks at him, points at his head again, and pulls his hand away, fingers spreading open like he’s releasing something into the wind. “Tim doesn’t- he doesn’t remember what you do. That’s right.” He looks over at the glass of water, at Tim who isn’t Tim. “I’m sorry,” he says again. The masked man shakes his head.
They sit in silence until it’s dark, and when he begins to get tired, the masked man lies on his side, eyes wide open, ramrod straight. It’s the weirdest fucking position Jay’s seen anyone sleep in, like a popsicle stick ready to be stacked. But over the night his posture loosens, his limbs curve, his body relaxes, and when Tim wakes up in the morning, he cannot see Jay.
All is right with the world.
Not Tim is a sweet thing, actually. He keeps reaching for Jay with gentle hands, ready to tug him back or pull at his sleeve or hold his hand, only to pull back at the last moment, remembering. It tugs at Jay’s heart, seeing him try time and again to reach out, to communicate with Jay in the only way he seems to have, only to remember that Jay can’t feel him. Jay talks to him as much as he can, tries to stay in his sight so he can feel… whatever it is he feels when he can keep track of Jay. He seems happier when he can, at least, and Jay wants him to be happy. It’s a little surprising- he burnt Jay’s house down, tackled him, broke into his home that one time- but now, here, the way he looks at Jay isn’t threatening.
His blank, empty eyes are soft-edged when Jay is around, and without the mask Jay can see the small shifts in his face- different from Tim, less worn-in, his whole manner foreign and unfamiliar, but a person . A personality. Not just a tool of the operator, but a distinct piece of Tim’s own mind and body. He comes and goes more often over the next month, Tim either too tired or too weak to muster the energy to drive to the nearest town and refill his prescription, but there’s less violence in it. It takes a seizure the first time, and the time after, Jay kneeling beside him again and watching over him, but soon the masked man bleeds into Tim like tension easing from a body. When Tim is tired, weak, when he’s had a worse day, he’ll black out sometimes, blink and come back stiff and inhuman. The first thing he does, every time, is look for Jay. Seek him out like Jay’s presence determines the rightness of the world, like if Jay is gone something will fall apart. He curls up in the same room as Jay, sometimes, other times beckons him into whatever room he wants to be in. He cares. He cares about Jay.
It breaks Jay’s heart a little, like rock candy under a hammer. He’ll sit and listen for hours, answering Jay’s questions with a nod or a shake of his head, pointing at things sometimes. He’s different, thought process stripped down like an animal or a child, instinct and gut reaction, but it means he’s honest. He doesn’t hide things. He responds openly, simply, to Jay’s questions, even when it’s something Tim would lie about.
“Were you always a part of him?” Jay asks one day, swinging his legs where he sits on the counter. The masked man taps the side of his head, then mimes breaking something in half with his hands. “You broke off?” He nods. “Because of the thing that was- that wanted him?” There’s no response for a long moment, silence ruling while the other man ponders the question. Jay doesn’t mind. Eventually, not-Tim shakes his head, taps his chest. “Because of Tim?” A nod, then the breaking motion again. The masked man mimes raising his arms in front of his face, like a child defending themselves from a punch, then taps his own chest again.
Oh.
“You’re his shield,” Jay murmurs, with a sharp agony in his chest. He wishes he could touch Tim very badly right now. Wishes he could gather Tim and his masked man together in his arms and hold them to his chest like so much broken pottery. “You protect him.” The masked man nods, points at Jay. “Me?” Jay asks, tilting his head. Not-Tim nods, mimes the shield again, then points at Jay, a blank, awkward little half-smile on his blank, awkward face. Jay swallows.
“Thank you,” he says softly. He steps off the counter, standing, then sits, just across from Tim. “I- I want to protect him, too,” he admits quietly. “And you. I- you’re both important to me.” The masked man blinks vacantly, looks away, then back. “What, no faith in me?” He shakes his head. “Ouch.” Jay smiles, watches him shrug, picking at the wooden boards with Tim’s strong fingertips.
He’s part of Tim. However twisted, battered, broken and bruised, he’s still a part of Tim, and Jay will care for it. He’s going to take care of them both.
Tim comes back from a blackout standing, which is the first thing that starts his heart sinking. He’d run out of his medication a couple weeks ago, but he hadn’t- he was always in the cabin when he woke up. The blackouts handy ever gotten as bad they had been before, and he’d hoped that maybe things were getting better, that maybe he was getting better. But he wasn’t. That thing, that- the thing that took his body from him was back. The thing that wore his face under a mask and wore his clothes and his life like a ghost under a bedsheet. It’s back, and it’s back now , back for good, not just a one-off, and Tim has no more pills to fight it off. He can’t get more, not like this. He’s screwed. He’s so fucking screwed. He wakes up every day thanking god or Heaven or whatever it is that he hasn’t burned the cabin to the ground yet.
This is… different. This time is different, he feels- almost urgently, desperately, as if something inside him is pushing forward. In his hands are a pencil and a piece of paper, crumpled. See J, it says, in clumsy, unpracticed writing. See J. Jay.
He crumples it into a ball and throws it, hard, at the wall.
“Fuck you,” he hisses, pacing a circle. He feels caged, feels hunted. He loops back around to look in the mirror, leaving forward on the counter to come in close. “Fuck you,” he snarls. “Don’t you bring him up. Don’t think about him, he isn't- he’s not yours .” Tim throws the pencil, too,voice rough. “He’s not yours.”
One night, five weeks after two months after Benedict Hall, Tim blacks out and it comes for the masked man. They’re sitting together in companionable silence, Jay stretched out on one couch and the masked man sitting awkwardly by his head. If they could touch, Jay has no doubt that he’d be in his lap. It’s an oddly endearing thought, really, that this sharp-edged half-wild piece of Tim, all instinct, just wants to be near him. It’s definitely flattering. And intriguing.
But the lights flicker, the air rends, and the unbearable scream of reality itself tearing open heralds the arrival of the faceless thing that haunts Jay’s every thought and breath. Not-Tim scrambles to his feet, violence threading through him, but Jay pushes him back, and he doesn’t realize, in the moment, that he touched Tim. He pushed him. He made contact. Jay’s mind is full of light, full of screaming, air raid sirens and the wail of a child he can almost feel is Tim.
He extinguishes the light.
The thing roars back, in its faceless way, but Jay stands, stronger than he’s been since before he died, and places himself between Tim and the thing in his doorway. “You can’t have him,” Jay says evenly, furiously. “Not as long as I’m here.” The thing reaches out, writhing, and Jay pushes back once more, the rage in his hands a lance against its barriers. He’s stronger, now that not-Tim can see him. More tangible. It’s almost like the recognition, the acknowledgment itself is fueling him. Like the very act of being seen was enough. Behind him, not-Tim reaches out, places a hand flat on Jay’s back, and it’s solid. He’s solid. Jay almost forgets what he’s doing for a moment, before blinking away the wonder.
The thing disappears, patience snapping under the weight of their resistance, and Jay turns, eyes full of wonder, to the masked man, unmasked. “You touched me,” he says, smiling, and then he’s wrapped, warm and much-beloved, in Tim’s arms. He can’t quite feel them, and once the hug gets tight enough they cut right through him, but it’s touch. It’s more than he’s had.
Not-Tim slips into sleep with his arms still around Jay.
The next day Tim is neck-deep in a closet, throwing all manner of things back over his shoulder until he finds what he’s looking for. Fishing rods, bait and tackle boxes, reels of fine, translucent plastic thread. Jay leans against the far wall, watches him haphazardly Chuck half of what he took out back into the now-empty space, face smeared with dust and cobwebs in his hair. He rattles through the kitchen drawers looking for scissors, and begins restringing the fishing rods with an expertise Jay didn’t expect.
“I didn’t know you could fish,” Jay says absentmindedly, eyeing the dusty spools of reel.
“What?” Tim asks, startled, looking over to stare at Jay.
“What?” Jay repeats, dumbly, staring back. Tim’s face goes pale, and he stands, abruptly. “You heard me,” he murmurs, then laughs. “You heard me!”
“Jay,” he breathes, and Tim looks at him. Really looks, eyes wide and mouth half-open, like he can’t believe what he’s seeing- and who can blame him, really, what with Jay being dead? Jay would probably be angry if he found Tim’s ghost in his house if their places were reversed. All this time, all of these months, radio silence, and now Jay shows up? Now? What a disappointment. But here he is, despite everything. Might as well make the best of it. “You’re here,” he says.
“Hi Tim,” Jay says simply, and despite the agony of it all, despite the fact that he feels like crying, like screaming, like wrapping his empty, mist-pale arms around Tim and holding him to his chest, he smiles. It’s the least he can do, is smile.
“Jay.” Tim repeats, voice rough and disbelieving, still.
“Miss me?” Jay jokes, lifting one shoulder like a shrug.
“Yeah,” Tim says softly, reaching out a hand. “More than you know.” He can touch Jay, now, but it’s like touching a veil. His fingers press in, go right through Jay, and he does exactly the same thing Masky did, drawing back and watching his fingers curl in on nothing. His eyes are so sad, so full of pain and regret, and Jay wishes he could soothe it away, could put his hands on Tim’s face and brush his hair from his eyes and apologize for losing his mind. He wishes he could do so much. Tim looks at him again, taking in all the things he hadn’t noticed the first time. “Have you- have you been here all along?” Jay nods. “Fuck. I- fuck. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”
“Me too,” Jay whispers. “Because I don’t know how long it will let me stay.”
“It?” Tim asks, brow furrowing. Jay just stares back at him, gaze even. “Oh. Oh my god, that was- that was you in my doorway.” He buried his face in his hands. “God. Fucking- I’m so sorry.”
“It’s coming for you, Tim,” Jay tells him sadly. “It keeps coming back, and I can’t- I can only do so much. It’s going to burn me out soon and I-“
“No, it won’t,” Tim says sharply, worry and determination mingling in his voice. “I’m not going to let it.”
“I don’t know that you have a choice, Tim,” Jay begins, but Tim whirls around like the statement personally offends him, places his hands on the delicate, thin surface of Jay’s face, and looks him in the eye with a blazing determination.
“I had a choice,” he says, and Jay thinks, dazedly, that his eyes have never seemed so dark, like warm ebony set in his face. “I chose you.”
“Oh,” Jay says. Tim presses his forehead to Jay’s, nose brushing his, closer than a kiss.
“Stay with me,” Tim begs in a broken voice, relief and regret, and Jay wishes he could feel right now, wishes that the warmth of Tim’s hands could penetrate his dead skin, could sink down deep and melt into him. “God, please, stay with me.”
“Always,” Jay whispers.
Outside, the leaves begin to rust.