It rolls at him like waves of smoke, coiling around Jay's arms and over his mouth, sinuous and streamlined. It's not tangible but it's not not - it's some bastardization of the state that exists between the two. It's huge, hulking over the both of them as it pins Jay against the wall and swarms over and around him, practically engulfing him, but grasping for some kind of solid body part to grip and pull at just sends Tim's fingers cresting through formless dark mist even as it thrusts him back.

"Let him go," he says, pleading now. His voice hardens, his jaw locking. "Let him go."

Not a plea.

Not a request.

It flows easily over Jay's face and doesn't answer.

He braces one elbow against the wall and rises slowly, deliberately to his feet, eyes trained on the thing's unblinking flat gaze, the pale blur of its eyes buried in its amorphous, shifting shadow.

It doesn't look right.

He's looked worse things in the face.

He gets fingers around one of the appendages wound around Jay's wrist, digs his fingernails into the not-flesh and pulls.