Work Text:
The hardest part about all of this is that it loves you.
Your name is Tim, and you are sick, and the Operator looms over you like coughing, like seizing and choking and vomiting blood. And the Operator looms over you like a friend, like a father, and it loves you.
Your name is Tim and you are a boy and you walk into the woods of Rosswood because nothing. Because you are a child, and children wander, and the woods beckon like a fairy tale, and youngsters like you have always been so eager to get lost. And Rosswood Park is nothing more than a field and woods except that the Operator likes it, likes lurking there, likes watching silly little people lose their way. Men who love hiking wander into the woods and most of them wander out and high school girls’ track teams follow the paths and none of them yet have disappeared and families come to hike, and they bring their children, and mothers always hold their little ones’ hands. The little ones are always duckling-following after those mothers.
You are not the first child to walk in with complete disregard for the paths, for the prospect of being lost. You are not the first child to crave that lostness. You are, however, a particularly unlucky child, because rather than eating you (or killing you, or snatching you away, or whatever it does with those it draws in) it chose instead to love you.
It is a beast love. It is a kind of love so foreign you can barely conceptualize it as love, but you grew up with it, this alien thing, this base instinct care draping itself around your neck. It is an infection. It is a sickness. It is attention, particularity, curiosity, it is understanding yourself as the Operator sees you: child-human-prey-care-prey-love-prey-prey-child. And you have always understood it.
(That’s the big lie you keep from Jay, that’s the one you really don’t want him knowing, the one you dreaded totheark publishing every night as you ground your teeth in your sleep. You didn’t know how they’d find out, but they seemed to know so much. You knew so little. You forgot even more.
You forgot almost everything, but you never managed to unlearn that instinctual comprehension: that it loved you. That it liked you, even—that it liked Jay, and Alex, and Brian and Jessica. It liked the shitty college film Alex was making. It liked seeing you perform, and god, has that always been sickening.)
Your name is Tim and you have not always hated your tormentor (your companion, your father, your God). The seizures left you dazed and the night terrors were debilitating, but as a kid none of it had connected in your head quite yet with the Operator. Back then it wasn’t scary but curious, but a smartly-dressed specter that spoke of mystery and intrigue. You fancied yourself a protagonist, the Operator your call-to-action. You didn’t love it—your young body was hardly big enough for love—but you liked it. Or something.
You wonder sometimes, traitorously, if maybe the child-you was right. Maybe the Operator’s love was something you could have embraced, and maybe your sickness was a worldly thing, something infectious that you unwittingly passed on to your friends. Medication treated it, after all. Could a pill really drive away a poltergeist’s machinations? Could your sickness, their sicknesses, have been coincidence?
(It’s hard not to remember, after all, who did the killing. Alex killed Amy and probably Seth and the unnamed man and Jay and you killed Alex and you both drove Brian off that precipice and the Operator—that beast, that deity—never killed anyone.
Alex claimed it was the Operator that drove him to do it, but—well. You of all people know how powerful delusion can be.)
None of you ever figured out its nature, really. There’s no way to know what it truly was or did to you. Still, you’re not about to let it back in to find out, no matter the itch in the back of your mind that makes you wonder, no matter that your shoulders have long gone cold (no matter that you miss it).
The hardest part about this journey, and the thing that makes your hands clench so tightly they hurt on the steering wheel as you drive away from Alabama, leaving three dead bodies behind you, is that love has always been the root of things. Sick love. Infectious love.
The Operator followed you because it loved you and Alex killed your friends because he loved them (he couldn’t bear to see the sickness spread to them, too) and Jay took the tapes from Alex at the very beginning because he loved Marble Hornets. Because it killed him to think that Alex’s passion project would go to waste, that all the time and energy and love put into one shitty college film would be lost.
It was always, always about love. Everything human is about love and you were human. You were all human.
(The hardest part about all this was that it loved you, the Operator, your oldest friend, and the hardest part about it loving you was that it wasn’t something that hurt. Everything else hurt, yes, but not this—not the silent protector in the night, that made you brave enough to tiptoe down your dark childhood hallway to sneak cookies after Mom went to bed, not the specter that held your hand in the forest, not the phantom that followed you, enraptured, as you made a movie and took notice of your friends. Not the quiet whisper in your ear that told you hello, I see you, I love you, in such sharp contrast to your mother who turned away from you whenever she could and the doctors who saw your symptoms but never met your eyes and your fellow patients who gazed through you, not all there.
The hardest part, the hardest part, was that for all the time spent running, you were always scared of the moment you’d finally get away, because never in your twenty-three years of life had you ever been truly alone.)
(The hardest part is that you are driving away from the only three people (three dead bodies) that might have understood, and that Jessica never quite counted, and that your pills are running out.)
(The hardest part is the trip to the pharmacy every month to refill them.)