we will drag you from where you are to where you belong [closed]

[postictal]

[tw: some brutality and beating, later some panic and flashbacking to hospitalization]

Keep your head down, stay off the radar, just act like the normal person you aren't, and everything will be fine.

That was the general idea.

Was.

But then, he should've expected something like this. When you come home from work and the door's not been open a minute before a couple ominously stone-faced guys come striding in, it generally throws up a few warning flags. And when opening your mouth to ask um sorry, but what the hell incites one of them to bring you down in a hard tackle that sends your cheek stinging against the carpet and your knees scraping along the ground, pure fight-or-flight impulse kicks in. Fight and flight, actually, and Tim manages to crack one of them a solid right hook across the jaw that leaves a darkening bruise before they wrestle him into submission. Maybe if he wasn't him right now - fuck.

In the end, there isn't much he can do against two guys who look to have something like six inches on him, and a few minutes of hopeless thrashing and several well-placed kicks to his ribs later, it's pretty much a lost cause. The apartment interior's a wreck; Tim definitely heard something shatter on his way to the ground, and he feels the distant, bizarre urge the apologize to Jay for being responsible for fucking things up yet again. He's sorry, Jay, really he is. He didn't mean to this time, honestly.

And that's when one of the guys sinks a fist into his stomach, and Tim loses track of things for a little while as his entire respiratory system promptly goes to shit.

He wakes in a little square room of concrete walls and windowless gloom.

Fuck. Fuck no. He lurches to his feet, all dizziness and nausea, and pounds at the door that looks more solid than any locked hospital door fuck, and he screams let him out and is anyone there? and please I need help please until his voice rasps into hoarseness and his vocal chords feel wet, as if they're torn and bleeding. His fists sting from banging against the door, its impassively hollow tone drumming against his ears. His jacket's gone. His medication. They fucking took it off him, they took everything, they took him away, and if there's anything he can do to help his situation, it's think and be calm and be compliant and be cooperative and not panic right now, which he isn't, who would even think that?

Because he's not a scared little kid anymore. He's not, he swears he's not. There's nothing tall and specter-like in the room with him, and he's not curled in the corner with his knees drawn up and his arms wrapped around them and he's not huddled like he's eight years old again, because he's not the lost little boy crammed into a hospital room with a plethora of confusing and contradictory symptoms. He's not.

It's just a dream, and any moment he's going to wake up.

Comments

[deadeyedchild]

Jay's expression hardens, slipping from bewilderment to indignation. "No," he blurts. "What are you - no. Nobody's locking you up, Tim, jesus."

He still feels sick when he thinks about Entry 66. He can't even imagine, doesn't want to, wants to avoid thinking about it as much as he can, Tim curled up in the corner losing his absolute shit drowning in that fucked up childhood, trapped in those little rooms.

And all Jay could say about it was you're not like Alex, at least not entirely.

"Look, if you - if that happens, then we'll deal with it," he says. "Somehow. But you don't deserve that."

He feels weird, strangely exposed, speaking so vehemently about this. He draws a breath and shrinks a little, curling inward. "We'll figure something out," he murmurs.

[postictal]

"Yeah?" The amount of effort it takes to keep his voice from rising in pitch and volume and outrage is damn near impossible, and he doesn't quite manage it. Sheer incredulity still skews the word too high, too sharp, the you've got to be joking more than implicit.

"It was in our heads." They both know, even if they never really talked about it. "It was in our dreams. We both saw it, in the trees. You know what that means." Because if that's not confirmation, then Tim doesn't know what is. He'd lied to push them ahead in the moment - and it's what he does, and it's what they say about roads to hell being paved with good intentions, what totheark always said, LIAR LIAR LIAR. He's not gonna be okay, he's never gonna be okay, and insisting otherwise is the same pointless, optimistic bullshit the doctors fed him his entire goddamned life.

We'll find a way out of this, Tim.

Normal life's just around the corner, Tim.

Just hang in there, Tim. Hang in there, because everything's gonna be fine.

He got so good at distinguishing the right tone of voice for a lie. All the little signs and twitches and darting of eyes. And they kept insisting, and there came that point, he's not exactly sure when - that he just stopped believing it.

[deadeyedchild]

"So what?" he says, head snapping up, vehemence flowing right back because it's better than this. "It's always been that way. Alex tried to fix everything and he couldn't, I tried to fix everything and I just made it fucking worse. You're the only one that made it, Tim!"

Other than Jessica.

Let's not talk about that.

"You stood up to it, you saved my fucking life that night." Has he ever acknowledged that? Ever thanked him? Probably not. "You did all of that without being locked up like some kind of freak so just - yeah, they took your pills and it's still there but that doesn't change anything, it doesn't mean you should just give up."

Jay never gives up.

Not ever.

He goes until it kills him. That's fine. That's probably what he deserves. Asking for it, charging headfirst into so much bullshit. Tim was always the one who deserved to fucking make it, he feels like he's seeing that clearly for the first time.

[postictal]

And just like that, it's easier to slide back. To flare up, incensed, teeth gritted against the fierce sense of optimism Jay's so stupidly good at.

It's just weird that this time, bizarrely, the argument is in Tim's favor, spat out like the angriest compliment he's ever received.

"We have no idea what it's capable of here," he insists from under lowered brows. "The Rift might make it stronger. The Rift might make it worse. You might be okay risking it - I'm not." A muscle in his cheek twitches as he unclenches and reclenches his jaw, glaring. "And it's my body that thing uses to wreak havoc wherever it feels like it."

Does that justify him, at all, to apply any kind of unilateral reasoning to it? It's his body, sure - but once that thing steps inside, that question kinda goes up the air.

Maybe he would be better off, they both would, if he left that little freak in Jay's hands whenever he? it? takes over.

[deadeyedchild]

"So far this hasn't affected anyone but us," he argues, looking straight back at Tim now, no longer ducking and avoiding eye contact. "It's only been in our fucking dreams, like always, dreams are different here but other than that..."

All right, fine, so this isn't really helpful. He lets out a frustrated grunt and rakes a hand through his hair.

"I went in and got you out because I had to," he says. "It was my fault and I'm not gonna let anyone - I fucked up, Tim, okay, I know that, I fucked up so much, but I'm not - I'm not leaving you again, okay? That's all I have, I can't do anything else, I can't fix this."

Oh god.

His hands are shaking.

Because he's never said that before, never admitted it really, he can't fix this, it's broken, he's broken, they're broken, and they cannot be fixed.

Alex was right, he wasn't making anything better, he made it all worse, and he never saw that until now. He had to die and be brought back to life somewhere else to see it.

"I don't know what's gonna happen and there might be nothing we can do," he says, his voice losing its edge and dropping into a sort of pathetic wobble. "But I wasn't gonna leave you there and... and I'm not gonna let anyone..."

Yeah, yeah, what are you gonna do, useless little fuck. It was Daine who kept you from the same fate, who got you in, and Seth who unlocked the door. All you did was lead Tim out again. Run without leaving him. That, at least, is a first.

"You're all I have," he says finally, and it comes out really small and stupid and pathetic, and he drops his head down into his hands, fingers tangling into his hair. "And I feel like if I make anymore mistakes I - I can't afford to, and I can't afford to lose you because without you I'm dead. We've seen that. That's what happens. I need you, Tim."

Jesus Christ.

He feels like he's gonna cry. He better not.

This is so stupid. He wants to just disappear. Right into the earth.

"I don't know what else to say," he whispers right before his voice gives out altogether.

[postictal]

It's nothing new, sure. They never addressed it but - it was always there, like the very tall elephant in the room. They were the only two people they knew who would get it, to some extent. Jay might not have grown up with the damn thing hanging over him, but he knew, he knew what it was like having that sliver of madness nestled behind every dream and breath and closed eye. That had always been a thing. And Tim had gotten that, however reluctantly, and sure, he'd avoided the subject whenever they could and talked circles around it and never really addressed it direct - but he got it.

They were the only two people in the world who might understand what the other is going through, always, perpetually, daily.

Except Alex. And Brian. And fuck lot of good either of them are doing now, huh. They're dead, Tim.

Because you fucking killed them. In cold blood.

So now he's shackled to Jay, more or less. They're not left with a whole lotta choice, really, since starting over is a doomed prospect and running away will only take them as far as the island limits. They're stuck here, together.

The air in this stupid little hotel room is too hot and too thick and too heavy, like everything Jay's spilling out got tangled up in it, saturating every breath with a dense significance he doesn't want to look at.

"Cute," he says dully. Something twists in his chest to say it. It's cruel. It's - well no shit Jay never breaks out this kind of sincerity if this is the only way Tim has to cope with it. He can't ignore this, he can't - do anything but force it roughly aside. Downplay whatever he has to acknowledge and disregard the rest. "Doesn't change anything. Whatever I do to keep that - thing from getting loose is my business."

[deadeyedchild]

Cute.

Okay well he probably deserved that.

He doesn't look up again, appropriately scorned, like well you opened up and this is what you got, which is why you don't ever open up.

"I know," he mumbles, looking at the floor, hands braced loosely on the edge of the bed.

What more can he say? There's nothing, really. Nothing left. He sits there, shoulders slumped, curled over like a kicked fucking puppy, and he doesn't want to just sit there feeling sorry for himself, he can't stand that. He could kick off his shoes and go to sleep, he's suddenly so tired that kind of sounds great, but that would look so petulant.

Instead he rubs one hand over his face, like trying to brush it all away. Yeah, good luck with that.

"You hungry?" he says softly, fairly toneless. "Let's order something."

[postictal]

He doesn't even wanna look at Jay. He doesn't wanna think about what he might see there - disgust, or contempt, or the kind of defeated, crumpled look to him, like the one he got the night Tim tore into him in that parking lot, snarling about how he knew about it, and he never said a thing. Jay's sort of sadness is the opposite to Tim's, the howling, outraged veneer that lashes out at everything to stitch together what's broken inside. Jay's silence simply takes on a new weight, his shoulders a little lower, his shape a little more shrunken, he's eyes a shade more downcast.

He doesn't need to see it to know it's what's happening.

"Sure," Tim says tonelessly, looking fixedly at the wall. "They didn't really feed me in there."

[deadeyedchild]

Jay fumbles with his phone, happy for something to distract himself with, looking for a place nearby. "Pizza?" he suggests dully. "There's a place a few blocks away that'll deliver. Cheap." And hey look they have an online order option. That's a relief. He starts automatically punching in an order. He remembers what Tim eats. It's not like they've never had to do this before.

[postictal]

"Yeah." He shrugs lifelessly. "Sure."

Just like old times. Hotel rooms, aggressively not talking about their problems, cheap dinner. Though the lack of gas station food is a plus.

And just as easily, it's like nothing's changed.