Chapter Text
Jay can’t place what it is that hits him when he sees Alex’s face looming in the doorway of the damned shack he’s been visiting for answers, shrouded in shadow and dust.
It’s nauseating, heavy, he might call it excitement but this just misses the mark, straight shoots into adrenaline. His brain jumps about, screaming, the same three words over and over again: I found him! I found him!
Rather, more appropriately, Alex found Jay. He never stopped /trying/ to find him, exactly, but coming here, the last thing he expected was his long gangly silhouette to approach him. This decrepit shack, with the trash bags taped over its shattered windows that rustle at the faintest touch of wind, there’s no way anyone would willingly be crashing here.
Nobody who has a full grasp upon their sanity, anyway.
“Alex,” Jay utters, breathless. Air no longer comes to him, not easily, and his chest heaves as he gasps, swallows down the musty atmosphere. Alex’s appearance hit him square in the stomach; he might as well have punched him.
But Alex doesn’t speak. He moves, like a dream, and maybe it is a dream, Jay is dreaming inside his car and his wishes are leaking into his sleepy mindscape. Blinking once, he opens his eyes to see that Alex is in front of him now, close enough to touch. Jay has to restrain himself to keep from doing just that. Just to prove it to himself: Alex is here, after all this time, after all that effort, and he fucking wiggles into Jay’s life again like it’s nothing out of the ordinary.
Alex raises a hand, crooks a finger over his thin-lipped mouth. Jay takes the signal to heart, closing his own mouth, though his chest has gone tight, his heart thudding fast in the hopes of breaking free. What? Why does he have to be quiet?
He doesn’t want to look behind his shoulder. But Alex’s eyes drift over, staring at a spot that he cannot see unless he turns around, and he has no choice.
So he turns, his camera finding the offending spot before he does-- and it’s too late.
Wooden planks crash and crunch underneath feet that come banging into the room, slam, slam, slam. Bright white, a face appears, no-- a mask, /the/ mask, the person who has chased him, teased him, broken into his home and showed him that privacy is no longer a luxury he can revel in.
Alex yells something, swears, and the two bodies bolt toward each other, Jay caught in the middle. He whirls away, instinct driving him but he’s slower than they are, can’t dart out of their collision path fast enough. Solid muscle and bone hit, crunching and sending someone to the floor-- Jay falls alongside them, clutching his chest, cradling the camera protectively. He peers down, gives the camera a onceover. Jay thinks he saw a knife and it’s better to worry for himself /but the camera/, it’s all he has.
No, no, he has Alex, he needs to defend him too. But Alex is fine, he’s on top of the masked one, scrapes against the floor and pushes flailing fists to the ground. Jay struggles out of the debris, trash and broken glass, jeans ripped and knees bloody, and he hovers over the scuffle, tries to ask Alex if he’s okay before realizing that’s the stupidest fucking question.
He reaches into the flurry of fists and knees to the stomach to try to separate the two, and--
“Shit!”
Alex screams, ripping away from his attacker and clutching his arm. They writhe, holding their mask to their face, the fastening string torn away and, if Jay just, he just… he could see them, find out who has been screwing him over this whole time. He rushes them, camera all but forgotten on the floor, and he rams his shoulder into their chest, winces inwardly at the bone on bone contact. Hitting them in the sternum sends them flying back onto the floor, Jay toppling down alongside them as gravity and luck simultaneously choose to gang up on him.
He reaches, has a hand on the mask, covering the nose and hearing a voice beneath, uttering protesting noises, when it hits him: there might be nothing under the mask. It may be someone he has never met, or worse-- they are like the creature that lurks in the background of his videos, gazing, head to the side as though fascinated by his fruitless struggles for answers. No face.
A void.
That moment of hesitation costs him, though, and he curses himself for it when a fist crashes into his gut and knocks the wind from him. He gasps, flopping over to the side and feeling a broken plank dig into his back. One wrong push and it could thrust into him, into his spine. Paralysis, or death?
The masked one is on top of him, straddling his chest before he can so much as find his feet. There is a split second where he swears that those painted black lips twitch, like they might be smiling at him but that can’t be, but, but anything /can/ be in these times and their fists are on his shirt, lifting him up, and, thud.
Floor. Back of his skull. Crack. Thud. Repeatedly. Cannot register the pain, doesn’t let himself acknowledge it for the sake of staying awake but he can’t, he feels the black creeping over his eyes and attempts to blink it away-- to no avail.
Brown eyes peer out from behind the holes carved into the mask, and for a second, he’s relieved. This isn’t a monster that has him in its grip.
But it has him nonetheless, and he has no choice. He’s gone.
--
Jay’s eyes sting when he first blinks them open, like they tend to when he is stuck on the laptop all night, battling his current hotel’s shit Wi-Fi. Memory states that he was nowhere near a computer the evening before, though-- no laptop, no phone, not even a television left on for a vague semblance of company.
The sting spreads when he sits upright, moving much too fast and too soon. His head pounds when the blood rushes away from it and splashes around his tired bones. Stinging? Not anymore, no, a pounding, a beat playing against his skull, his legs. Was he running?
Cushions lay beneath Jay, keeping his prone body safe from the solid concrete floor he feels beneath his wandering fingertips. Blinking the sting from his eyes shows him that he’s inside a small square room, nothing unordinary about it. In his eyes, it’s as remarkable as any other abandoned place he’s been stuck in. Food wrappers litter the spot he was lain out upon, cheap candies and chips. They aren’t dusty, not when compared to the ground. Swiping his fingers across the concrete brings him back a thin layer of dirt. Whoever ate these, they were here recently.
“Hello?” he calls out. His voice echoes back to him, bouncing throughout his seemingly empty surroundings. Desolation and isolation? Great, he can do that, he’s fucking used to it. The problem is, it’s a little bit frustrating to be waking up with a shady sense of memory and find that there’s nobody around to help jumpstart it.
“Hello!” Jay reaches out again, straining his voice so that anybody beyond this room might be able to hear him. There is a single doorway, albeit one that’s lacking a door, or hinges for it to be on. Splintering chunks of wood on the floor before it suggest that there might have been a door once, but... god knows what happened to it.
This time, when his voice comes echoing back to him, it brings a companion: Alex’s voice.
“Nice to see you’re not dead.”
Tall shadows bounce into the room through the doorway, accompanying his arrival. He stands upon the wooden debris, making it snap under his weight. Seeing him triggers dream-like sensations within Jay, filling his head with trembling images of three men, one of them himself and the other two-- Alex, the masked creature, upon each other, eyes dark with ill intentions. He remembers a weight on top of him, solid ground coming at the back of his skull, and, that’s it.
But it’s the answer he’s searching for. It’s why he’s here.
“Oh,” Jay mumbles, reaching to the back of his skull to rub the painful lump forming there.
“Yeah, /oh/,” Alex shakes his head before crossing the room to stand before Jay. He crouches down, takes Jay’s face in his hand and grips his chin, tilts his head this way and that. “I don’t think you have a concussion. Couldn’t wake you up, though. Jesus could have returned and you’d have slept through it.”
“Sorry,” Jay mutters, uncertain just why he feels he has to apologize for something he has no control over. He attempts to stand, his wrists struggling to support his less than ample weight. “Where’s the masked person? Did they get-- where’s my camera?”
Alex rolls his eyes before reaching into Jay’s jacket pocket, drawing the missing camera out into the open. He flushes red at his touch, caught off-guard; he forgot what friendly hands felt like. The last time somebody brushed skin with him, he was about to be arrested for trespassing, and he split and ran, their harsh voices following him into the night.
“They got away, yeah,” Alex continues after a moment of fumbling, watching Jay switch the camera back on. “I got them off of you when they had you on the floor. Soon as they were up, though, they slipped away before I could do anything. Didn’t want to leave you here, so I didn’t chase them very far. I doubt it’s going to be the last time we see them anyway.”
“Yeah, no, they’re like a shadow,” Jay sighs. He pushes to stand, closing his eyes and concentrating on finding his feet. The ocean in his brain has yet to calm, waves crashing and rocking him off balance. Clearly he hit the floor harder than expected. “I don’t know if I can leave like this.”
“It’s alright. My car isn’t far off. I didn’t want to go dragging you out there with this broken glass everywhere.”
An arm slips beneath Jay’s shoulders and suddenly his weight is upon Alex, who’s stronger than he remembers. Not that he exactly remembers Alex’s strength before he vanished into thin air, but going off of the old tapes, he was not this thick in the arms in their past life. He’s strong and Jay wants to know: for what purpose?
“Where are we going? Aren’t we going to go find them? It’s--”
“We’ll go looking when you’re not stumbling around like a drunk,” Alex insists. There’s no fighting him when Jay’s head is swimming, his vision blurring when he keeps his eyes shut for too long. He does have a point anyway, what use is Jay when he can’t walk properly? But then, that leaves the masked stranger to scurry off as far away as they please.
He bites the inside of his cheek, resigning himself to the idea of /another/ wild goose chase in, hopefully, the near future. Next time, he isn’t going to let himself get hit in the head. No more of this knocking out shit; he loses consciousness enough on his own, he doesn’t need help.
“I’m taking you to my apartment. We should be safe there.”
Safety. Jay could laugh if his mouth wasn’t so dry, his throat dryer. Asking for water seems like a stretch, though, like he’ll be asking for too much on top of Alex making sure he’s somewhere secluded, away from danger.
He is being awful nice. Not that friends wouldn’t do this for each other, but when years and years go by without so much as a message on Facebook or a three AM text message, one tends to assume that friendship is over.
Maybe Alex doesn’t see it that way.
Nonetheless, Jay has to bite down this feeling that something is off, silently wonders if Alex is telling him everything. Information being withheld from him… but what questions does he ask to unlock it? There is something beneath the surface and if he hits the right spot, it will emerge from the dirt.
But for the moment, he has to keep his mouth shut and his head down, taking comfort in the fact that he’s staying somewhere that doesn’t have him paying nightly for providing a roof over his head.
For now, that’s enough.