bigapplesauce | some days I think I'm dying but I'm really only trying to get through [closed]

Current Location: Western apartments
Current Music: September 28th, 2013

Entry tags:

some days I think I'm dying but I'm really only trying to get through [closed]

[tw: grief, depression, and internalized self-loathing, lots of mentions of death]

Days pass. It's what they do.

Time crawls along with agonizing, sludgelike uncertainty, and Tim will never scrub himself clean of the sensation of the fragile, trembling man dying beneath his hands as he faded away to nothing. Gone again, like he was never here. He told him, he kept telling him he would stop it, he'd haul Jay back from the brink like he always had and like he failed to, but ignoring the inescapable never made it go away. It was a logical progression. It's been -

He doesn't know how long it's been. He's stopped keeping track. He's let himself crumble, and he knows it. It was easy. Work has been put on hold. He hasn't called in sick. He hasn't eaten, or slept, or done much of anything. Just existed in his shell of self-imposed apathy, because slamming up walls is easier than looking his own failures square in their looming, faceless faces.

And Tim waits.

And Tim waits.

And Tim waits.

Eventually it occurs to him that Jay's stuff is still just - sitting there, pasta box and all those sets of keys and everything, and he's been putting that inevitability off because he doesn't want to look at it (childish), he doesn't want to address it (deluded), he doesn't want to shroud himself in grief again (pathetic), because he already did this. It isn't fair.

When has his life ever cared about fair. Really, now.

So morning finds Tim unlocking the door to Jay's apartment with a hollow feeling constricting his chest, steadily loading the dead man's meager belongings into cardboard boxes. He compartmentalizes everything with manufactured indifference, squeezing it down the smallest possible denominator. Maybe he'll throw the boxes over the bridge. Maybe he'll burn every last one of them. Except - Tim doesn't burn things. That's not him.

'You don't even like me.'

Tim grimaces. He piles the boxes into the hallway with utter disregard for anyone who might be passing through, a miniature cairn of discarded items and cardboard.

Fuck you, Jay, he thinks with vehement, abrupt outrage, feeling a sick surge of satisfaction with snapping the door shut behind him. Fuck him, fuck him, for leaving, again. Fuck him for leaving Tim to clean up his goddamn mess, again.

Fuck him for thinking he could just die and Tim wouldn't grieve over him, even a little bit.

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On her way up from a little morning jaunt, Bee takes the stairs. Eighteen floors is a lot to climb, but it's a cheap alternative to a gym and she's always been in reasonably good shape anyway. And here, she doesn't even sweat. Which is still weird.

Less weird, only by virtue of lifelong familiarity, is the sudden sharp burst of someone else's life that hits her as she swoops around the landing one one of the floors below hers. She stops short, turning to look at the door, beyond which lies a hall of apartments just like hers - someone is out there. Whatever they're going through is strong, strong enough to get to her without seeing them. She hesitates, wiping her palms on her dress (force of habit more than necessity) and pushes the door open, stepping out to the hall.

The patterns become instantly clear even before she locks eyes on Tim, hauling boxes out of an apartment, is he moving? no, he's moving someone else's things, and with all that roiling loss and the repetition of it, that this is something he has done again and again, avoided thinking about again and again, and it's the same person-

She didn't mean to start crying. She honestly didn't.

"Tim," she says in a horribly quavering voice, stepping toward him on shaky legs.

The dragging of boxes scraping over dusty floor isn't enough to drown out the voice that cuts through to him, or the shock of it being someone he knows. It must be, if she used his name and -

Oh.

Tim halts his serial loop, looking at Bee uncertainly, the scowl locked on his face falling away. Fuck, and she's - crying. Why is she crying. He's not equipped for this, not when he's already on this tenuous edge and he's holding a dead man's things in a box in his hands and he didn't even mourn him properly the first time, he just threw out the goddamn camera and hoped that would be the last of it, and now he's standing in a hallway in Manhattan, staring at someone who looks just as gutted over something he can't see, and what is he supposed to do?

"Are you," he says, the words slow and unsure, "are you - okay?"

Is she okay. Does she look fucking okay.

"I'm-" She presses her hands over her mouth and her nose, wanting to hide from him, but she can't, not now. She lowers her head and shakes it, like a guilty child who's been caught.

"I'm sorry," she says quietly, feeling the heating pulse of nervous adrenaline under her skin, she doesn't sweat but she still feels that. "I'm so sorry, I - I have to tell you - I have to tell you something."

She wipes her eyes and forces herself to face him, which is terrifying. "But I'm afraid you'll hate me."

She wishes she hadn't said this. The moment it's out she regrets it, and she wraps her arms around her middle, trying to hold herself together.

More than anything she wants to ask if they can go inside, somewhere hidden where no one could come out and see her like this, but she can't ask that of him before he has any idea what she's talking about.

"I - I know everything," she says. "I know what happened to you. I'm sorry. I didn't want to tell you like this, I'm sorry."

Something automatic unfurls inside him when she starts shrinking in on herself, hugging herself like she's afraid she'll simply crack apart if she doesn't do something. He spasms oddly as he moves forward, reaching out, only to think better of it and retreat again in the span of seconds.

The nascent germ of sympathy dissolves into alarm.

Tim stares at her, uncomprehending.

"How," he says, pulling the word out suspiciously. "How do you know? I've never - " And Jay never -

Wow, no. He's not thinking about Jay. Not while he's holding everything that remains of him in his hands.

"It's-" She collapses a little further on herself, covering her face with her hands. "It's me, it's what I can do, it's what I am. I've always been - I can always see things, since I was little, and it - I can't stop it."

She feels worse about this than she ever has with anyone, even Peter, who is just as secretive and abrasive as Tim tries to be. At least with Peter she held herself together, told him when she was calm. This is horrible.

She tries not to cry harder, that's the absolute last thing Tim needs, but she feels like she's about to fall down. The sudden loss of water after her walk and the stair climbing has left her dizzy.

"Please can we go inside," she whispers pathetically.

"I - "

Fuck, what does he say. It means she lied to him when they first met but - fuck, like he has any room, any room to talk at all. He lied to her too, probably. Like how he lies to everyone.

He wavers on some precipice, irresolute, box in hand and several more strewn about in the hall.

He doesn't need to be able to see anything beyond what's in front of him to see how gutted Bee is, how this isn't easy for her - when is it ever easy for anyone. It wasn't easy for him. Lying between his teeth to everyone, pointlessly or not, simply because it's the only way he knows how to keep everyone else safe from him.

"Okay," he says finally, watching his wariness collapse in real-time. "Let's, uh - I'm just down the hall, I gotta - "

He shoves the remainder of the boxes against the wall with the toe of one shoe - everything's lightweight, Jay never had more than the bare-bones and somehow the thought manages to generate another pang of regret - and carries the last box one-handed, fishing his keys out of his pocket with the other. He elbows the door open and stands aside to let Bee in and stares intently at the floor.

She nods softly, keeping her eyes downcast, and follows him into his apartment. She steps inside and looks around, not knowing what to do, where to sit. The room manages to be both sparse and cluttered and it's all wrong. Everything is not right and she needs to make it better. She resists the urge to straighten and organize. That isn't what she's here for. That isn't what people do.

When the door is shut and their are alone the silence is horrifying. She turns around to look at him, and draws a stuttering breath.

"I can't read minds," she says. "It's more like... I just know people. As soon as I meet them I know everything they've done, not in detail, but like a general... understanding. Sort of how they got from point A to B and so on. I call it seeing their patterns, everyone has them, and I see all of it all the time, and I never know how to tell anyone about it, because it's... it's not fair to them. I know it's not." One hand grips tightly at the opposite arm. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you when we met, I just... never know how. And I can see how hard you work to keep it from people and I didn't want to..."

Pointless to dwell on that now. She shakes her head again, runs her hands over her cheeks in an effort to calm herself down. Be a stone. Be still.

"I didn't mean for it to come out like this, either," she says, "it's just I felt your loss. It hurts so much. And I couldn't just turn away from that. I'm sorry, I know it's none of my business, but I just... I couldn't."

"You knew."

He blurts it before he can allow himself time to truly process, halfway puzzled, too startled to let betrayal worm its way in. Something swells in his throat, curling into his chest, something caught betwen astonishment and terror and despair and - and relief.

There's no point in hiding from her, is there? No point in lies. There wouldn't be. Not if she already knew.

The next thing out of his mouth is an unstoppable impulse, the next, important question, before he can devote time to sympathy, to trying to put forth some kind of understanding, knowing horrible things no one should know, to wrapping his mind around it.

"How - much do you know?"

Even without any audible notes of betrayal the words cut into her and she shrinks a little more, lowering her eyes back down. She can see how hard he's working to process this and she can feel his cluster of reactions, some good and most bad, and she just wants to disappear.

"I... I know you're about my age," she blurts, a stupid place to begin but here she is. "And that your childhood was lonely and and you spent so much time afraid, and you were being..." She frowns, trying to pick out the details, "...kept somewhere, like a hospital, I think?" Well, where else, at that age, with the rest of him that she can see? "And there was something else there that hurt you, and hurt the people you loved and made you hate yourself for it-"

This is so much, so personal. Why is she going on like this? She's crying again, just when she managed not to, looking into his past is just so upsetting she can't help it. Again she covers her face, speaking muffled through her hands.

"It's not your fault, Tim, I can see all the causality, everything, that's mostly what I see, each piece that feeds into each other piece, and you were just - you were dragged. You were dragged through your life by this thing, this big - thing that I can't understand, I don't know what it is, but it just poisoned you and I hate seeing that, I hate it. None of it is your fault, there's nothing you could have done to stop it because it just, it had you all wrapped up and it just pushed you around and it's not fair."

She wavers and finally does crumble, sinking down to her knees like a pitiful little child, curling up and shaking. "I don't want you to feel this way," she cries, desperate and irrational. "I don't like it, it's not your fault, it never was, it never will be, and you don't even believe me!"

She finally shuts up.

She can't look at him, she just holds herself and tries not to sob too loudly.

Oh god, and she's breaking down.

Of course she is. A question like that, why wouldn't she? That's how Tim does it, slices to the core of the problem, callous and insensitive and why, god why did he ever give Jay shit for that when he's really honestly no better, and just remembering Jay with all his blunt, one-track self-righteousness is enough to derail Tim's train of thought and send it careening into the yawning, gaping cavity Bee's carved out of him.

All aboard the memory-mobile, he thinks, the thoughts curdling with self-flagellating derision. All aboard the gallery of Tim's life and Tim's failures. Take your time. There's plenty of them.

He doesn't know what to do.

He sets down the box.

He folds his arms.

He realizes this might make him seem angry or judgmental, and he hastily unfolds his arms.

He looks at the windows, at the floor, at the scattered disarray of his belongings, and tries to swallow past the lump in this throat.

"It's not," he says, and stops, and can't think of any way to make this sound reassuring, make it sound better than it is. It never gets better. Not for him. It never stops. "It's not as bad - here. It's not."

Never mind that he only just a week ago fell into neurological disorder, culminating in attacking several nameless people and he still doesn't know if he hurt anyone worse than he hurt Jay. Never mind that the man himself is just - gone, slid away from beneath his hands like sand slipping through an hourglass. Never mind it. Never mind. Never mind.

Everything is fine.

She forces herself to straighten out some, remaining on the floor, kneeling like she's about to meditate. She rubs at her eyes again and looks up at him, composure somewhat regained.

"No, it isn't," she says. "That thing feels far away. I mean - your patterns are brighter now, a little bit. Like you have your own track. It's hard to explain." Her eyes track downward again, unable to hold on him for too long. "But it's still bad. You still hurt. I know that you have something else in you, too, and it wants to take over you, and it almost did not very long ago. I can see all of that. You can't hide it from me no matter how much you want to."

She shuts her eyes. She hates talking like this. Delving so far in, gutting him with all these reminders.

"I want to help you," she says quietly. "That's all I want. But I can't. All I can do is pretend I don't see it, and that's... that's awful. I mean, that's what I'll do if you want, that's what I have to do most of the time, really, but..." She shakes her head, taking a very long pause, trying to get her words in order.

"I'm so, so sorry, Tim," she whispers, and finally looks back up at him. "I wish I could..." Nothing. "If... if you ever need someone to talk to, someone who isn't..." She frowns hesitatingly. "...Wasn't..." Something's very off there. Put a pin in that. "You can talk to me, you don't have to hide from me. I didn't go through it but I do know how you feel, I mean, I literally know. If this is too much, I... I understand, but I just want you to know I... you don't have to pretend everything is fine because it's not."

She shivers a little and folds her hands in her lap, quelling herself further, quieting.

"Your friend," she says. "The one who's... It's Jay, isn't it?"

Everything is -

No. No, it's really not.

Tim hisses out in a slow, shaky breath, sinking down to sit parallel to Bee. He almost wraps his arms around his knees like he would have in the hospital, but despite the hunch of his shoulders he resists the urge, his fingers picking at a fraying shred of the threadbare carpet.

It is kind of a relief, in a complex, vertiginous sort of way, to know that he's not the only one again, and to know he couldn't have prevented this, regardless of however much he wanted to, still wants to. Needs to.

It's far away. Maybe she's right. But then, maybe that's what pulled Jay away in the first place.

The offer is straightforward, the agony in her voice genuine, and Tim still can't bring himself to look at her square.

"Yeah," he says, soft and hollow. "Yeah, he - the Rift took him back, I guess. He was dead before he got here, so." He closes the explanation with a one-shouldered shrug, grimacing.

"Yeah," she says slowly. She remembers that. Remembers it from... several days ago. Nights. That funny dream, that's where it was, where she was tiny and he was... well, hardly himself. She'd almost completely forgotten about it.

Her powers had worked in that dream. She'd been able to sense patterns and hadn't even thought that was odd.

And she sensed Jay's, remembered seeing that he'd died and died again.

"But he's..." she says slowly. "He's not dead." She tips her head up at him, suddenly curious. "Don't you remember? That dream, where... I was very small and you had the... pink... helmet and the rollerblades? That sounds like a regular dream but it wasn't, it was a Rift dream. Jay was there. It was about five days ago, remember?"

"The - what?" He blinks at her, taken entirely off-guard. Pink rollerblades? What the hell?

"I don't, uh," he says, shaking his head in complete befuddlement, "I don't - I have no idea what you're - Jay was where?"

There's really only one thing about what she's saying that he knows matters, without question. Maybe if it was one of those group dreams - though fuck knows when he's had time to sleep since Jay vanished, dragged out of his life again. He frantically scours his memory for anything that pings as familiar, but there's nothing, nothing, and he feels like he would remember, he knows he'd remember if Jay was there.

"Uh..." Well, it makes sense he wouldn't remember that, and it's probably a good thing. He was... very odd. His patterns had felt limited, too, like he was no more than a caricature. Strange that she hadn't noticed that at the time, but then, she'd thought being tiny and able to fly was normal, too.

"It doesn't matter; it was a very strange dream," she says. "But it was definitely a group dream, and it was definitely Jay there with us. You kept calling him Troy, I think. He seemed very... unsettled, and... like he almost didn't belong there." She looks at him, searching him for any sign that this helps, rings familiar, provides hope. "I think he was trying to reach you, but you - neither of us were really ourselves in that dream. Tim... he did die, the Rift may have taken him, but I think it's still holding him here."

Most of her explanation is utterly incomprehensible, eliciting only a puzzled frown. But at least she isn't crying anymore.

Then Tim's shoulders stiffen in alarm.

"You think he's - " he begins hoarsely, his hands becoming fists at his sides. He won't give himself false hope. Not again. Never again. But it's the Rift, it fucks with them like this and it's -

It's Jay.

He owes him. He owes him. For being an idiot, for pulling Tim out of every mess Jay got them into, for trying to drag him away from the source of their nightmares, for coming after him even with the knowledge that he might not walk away from it and doing it twice over on top of it, for defending him, sneering at him, cowering beneath his glare, for facilitating the destruction of an entire goddamn underground base at Tim's expense, and for fucking apologizing a thousand times over, both for when it was his fault and even when it wasn't.

For just wanting - to help.

Tim dashes a wrist angrily under one eye.

"You think Jay's - you think he really could still be alive?" he asks, and he doesn't dare to hope that she's implying what could be, what, a glorified third chance to not completely fuck things up with the one guy who actually kind of gets it?

Fat chance.

"I'm pretty certain," she says, frowning thoughtfully. Finally feeling a bit energized - now that she has a problem to solve, a problem that can be solved - she picks herself up and goes to his kitchen to splash water in her face. "I remember the feeling very distinctly, even if it didn't stand out at the time. He'd died... and died again... and he was still there. Death doesn't mean anything to the Rift, really, especially if it's the Rift that caused it. It can bring us back as much as it wants."

Not comforting, she knows. She fills herself a glass of tap water and takes it back over to him, sitting down on the floor and sipping it contemplatively.

"Maybe there's some way to contact him," she says. "Or maybe someone's seen him. I can text the network and ask, if you like."

Is this some weird fucked-up purgatory? This would make the second time Jay's died but not really, but even at this point, Tim doesn't think he has it in him to complain. Not even to the Rift.

Please. If there's even the remotest chance - fuck. He doubted he'd ever truly be friends with the man but Jay was just another victim who deserved to make it out of Tim's mess alive. He didn't deserve this. He didn't deserve it then and he doesn't deserve it now.

"Well. Uh." He looks away, chewing his lower lip as he gets to his feet more slowly. "I guess it's - this is my - " Mess probably isn't the best word for it. " - problem," he edits himself mid-sentence. "I should probably - I mean, that way Jay would know. You know?"

Like he's being all that coherent right now anyway. But Bee did say she doesn't really need words to get a picture.

"You, um, you want some coffee or something?" he says, unable to shake away the immediate association with Jay's awkward, half-assed attempts to patch everything he touched.

"Sure," she says softly. She's not a coffee drinker really, but it'll be helpful for him to make some and offer it. She gets up with him and resettles herself gingerly on the edge of his dismal little couch. "I know you want to fix this, and I think you can, and you should. But it can't hurt to ask other people, and I don't mind doing it. I can ask casually. What do you think?"

She holds up her phone, showing it to him as a gentle, open offer.

He dumps grounds into the coffeemaker - he supposes he could use Jay's, seeing as he's not using it, and even that bitter internal stab of humor falls painfully flat - and switches the machine on with a quiet whir as he mentally wavers over an answer. He leans against the countertop, eyes fixed on the steady trickle of dark liquid, gnawing on the inside of his cheek.

He always gives - gave - Jay shit for never cleaning up his own messes, let alone the ones he made out of everyone else's lives. And now here's Tim, forking their collective muddled chaos of a life onto this other person. But she's here, she's offering, and maybe people are more likely to be receptive to someone who exudes friendliness than some scowling nobody on the Internet.

"Yeah," he says finally, but he still doesn't look at her. "Yeah. Okay."

She smiles faintly, relieved that he's allowing her to help, and focuses a few moments on composing and sending the text. Within just a few moments she has replies, and good ones - from a woman she doesn't know, and the Balladeer.

"People have seen him," she says, reading and replying as the responses come in. "Two people, they both met him in dreams and both are telling me he said he was dead. It's him. He's still out there." She looks up at Tim, smiling, a little weak and sad, but relieved, too. "We can find him. We can bring him back. There has to be a way."

"Wait, so - he's dead but he's not?" So it is a kind of limbo. The coffeemaker squeals and releases an angry hiss of steam, and Tim hastily switches it off, depositing its contents into two mugs, one of which he pushes in Bee's direction.

"How do we even - he disappeared." He opens a hand and stares at his own palm, trying to tug himself out of the umpteenth replay of the scene in his head and utterly failing. "His body just, it was like it wasn't even there. How does anyone get back from that?"

"I don't know," she says, blowing gently across the surface of her coffee. "But there are a lot of powerful people here, people who could help us and would want to. There must be a way." She pauses to continue typing at the Balladeer, who seems to have picked up on the more unsavory aspects of Tim and Jay's lives; then she sets the phone aside and looks back up at Tim.

"The first thing is probably to see if you can find him in the dreaming again," she says. "Maybe he knows what's happening to him."

"Great," says Tim without any real enthusiasm, and scowls at his coffee. Too bad sleep is near-impossible for him and always has been. Too bad he'll probably just end up trapped in one of his old nightmares, or another rehash of Jay's sudden, horrific death - and now his subconscious has two scenarios to pull from. Too bad he's just as likely to get launched into one of the dreams that seem to serve as the Rift's idea of fun, or share a head with some other rifty, or be trapped in literally a million other possibilities besides actually finding the one person that he, for once, wants to find.

Too bad.

"Any idea how I even do that?" he asks dully. "I mean, sleep's never exactly been easy. Even when I do sleep, I'm pretty sure I'd've remembered if the real Jay ever showed up."

He scrubs a hand through his hair and tries to shove down the memory of half a dozen simulacra of the man himself as they paraded through whatever sporadic snatches of sleep he stole this week.

"I don't know," she says again, taking a sip of the coffee, managing not to make a face, and picking her phone back up. "But people know to keep an eye out for him now. I just heard from one person who says he's very familiar with the dreaming, and he says he hasn't seen him but he'll be on the lookout. And one of the people who has seen him is friend of mine who has powers kind of like mine. I'm sure they can help. At the very least they can keep us informed."

She smiles, a little strained, just trying to look optimistic for him. "I know you're sort of fresh out of hope. But I have nothing but. I can hope enough for the both of us, okay? We'll do everything we can. If Jay's out there, and he's looking for you, I'm sure he'll find you. He seems... well, just from what I can pick up from you - he seems very stubborn." Her smile takes on a little more humor at that.

"Yeah," Tim mutters, and something twists painfully in his chest. "Yeah, he was." Stubborn enough to latch his teeth into a mystery and never let go, even when it nearly got him killed a dozen times, even when it actually got him killed.

"I guess," he says, chancing a look up at her, "I guess now I know to keep an eye out. If it's even possible, uh." Immediately, he has to look away again, shoulders hunching. "I owe him."

"I understand," she says, because she really does. She reaches out, not quite touching, just offering a hand if he wants it. She doubts he'll take it but it feels wrong not to at least offer.

"Thank you," she says, "for hearing me out, and... for letting me come in here. And for the coffee. I'm sorry I was so... Well. I'm sorry." She looks down at her coffee for a moment. "If you ever need to talk to anyone about anything you can always talk to me. I'm right upstairs. Okay?"

Well, she's - she's not lying, he supposes. She would understand if she can see everything. The latent discomfort of that revelation still prickles under his skin, but there's no point in trying to hide it, or anything.

He drains his mug and sets it down, the click of cheap ceramic against tile punctuating the silence of Tim - not knowing how to respond to that. Talking about things with Jay usually translated to something shouting-match-related instead of actually parsing their issues like normal, well-adjusted people.

Normal. Well-adjusted. That's almost funny.

"Okay," he says with a short jerking nod. "Um - thanks. I guess."

He guesses. Wow, way to be tactful, Tim. Ungrateful bastard.

"Sure." She nods kindly and pulls her hand back to sip at her coffee. She doesn't mind his awkwardness. She used to be just as awkward.

"I wouldn't get rid of his stuff just yet, at any rate," she says lightly.

She knows he's not sure what else to say, so she gets up. "I'm gonna go up to my room now," she says. "Text me if you need anything. Food, company, distraction. Anything at all."

At his small nod, she turns and leaves him, feeling jostled from the whole of the interaction. She needs to meditate. She needs to be with her bees. And then, when she sleeps, she needs to help Tim look for Jay.

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some days I think I'm dying but I'm really only trying to get through [closed]

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anxiety attack stuff

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references to traumatic childhood and self-loathing, emotional breakdown

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