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Timothy Wright was born to his mother in a hospital, and you were not with him then, not exactly-- you weren't born. You happen, you grow, unfurling like roots creeping along the ground inside his mind, and keeping close to him like roots to dirt.
Timothy is all you know. Or was all you know.
In a different hospital, this one with haunted bricks, Timothy sleeps. But you don't sleep. Not really. Or you do, but you can not-quite feel his hands and his feet, eyes, legs, voice if he's awake.
Sometimes the not-feeling is a blessing. Sometimes it isn't.
You wake up when you need to. It's not planned. Sometimes it takes longer than you thought it would and you remember, mostly, remember being small but bigger than the other one, and he was alone--
in a room and then a forest. There were things chasing him, you, without ceasing, and Timothy couldn't take it. His lungs, his throat, his tears couldn't make it. So you'd stepped forward, stepped in, and kept the both of you moving faster.
When your twists of muscles couldn't contract anymore you'd pushed Timothy back and down, enough that he couldn't even hear the screaming, even less feel it in his throat.
He doesn't remember any of it, you made sure, because he would splinter and shatter if he remembered even a fraction. You know. There are creeping things and wavering things that Timothy can't understand, though he see's them, same as you.
One thing in particular. Stretching and everlasting and incomprehensible. You don't try to comprehend, though: you know it’s a threat. You just move.
You don't have a name and your age is wrong. None of these things matter while you run. You find spaces where the thing doesn't follow you, and you wait... when you're sure the danger's passed you let Timothy wake up.
Back in the brick building you stay still as long as possible, until they threaten him, and then you fight.
Years go on like this.
When Timothy's twelve there's the medication, it eases the lightning in your head-- both of yours' head-- and makes coming forward harder but not impossible. If you need to, you can push.
There will be a time when you need to. You're sure of it. You wait.
*
You learn as Timothy learns.
Timothy changes his name to a shorter version that cuts off the edge of questioning sentences better. Other things change, and he leaves the haunted bricks for a brighter kind.
Community college, nothing fancy. More people milling around and textbooks and grades as there were for other long years of Timothy’s life. It makes him nervous, like most things do, but he tries. The books are the hardest part but Timothy can focus longer now than he could when you first came to be. He can ask questions. Even find answers, sometimes.
One day, he curls furtively over a computer in the corner of the college library and does a search for the words the doctors had written in whispers that stuck to his skin. He looks up 'schizophrenia', he looks up 'disassociative', and you read the articles too. Personas, alternating, electrical impulses, and trauma responses. Is that where you come from?
Another day, sometime later, Tim sits down. He’s holding a pen, and he’s nervous. He starts to write a note on scrap notebook paper: Who are y---
His hand shakes, although his head doesn't hurt the same way that shaking usually signals. He pauses, covering his mouth.
Then abruptly he crumples up the paper and shoves it into the trash can. He's up and moving, out of the door of the apartment, his cell phone crammed against his ear and ringing his doctor's line.
That's when you realize he was writing to you.
Later that night you look into the mirror while he's shaving. You see the two of you in his eyes but he can't hear you. He tried to write to you. He's never done that before.
And what can you do?
You write back. You step forward quietly in the middle of the night, grab a marker off the endtable by the couch where he'd fallen asleep.
The next morning you pay attention as he fills a cloth with cold water to wake himself and then looks in the mirror to inspect the damage. Timothy freezes.
Your “you are” frames both of your brown eyes. The marker's smeared, but still obvious. Your letters slope differently than his do; thinner, like spiders' legs. You hadn't noticed in the dark.
You wonder if he will be able to hear you now, if you’ll be able to talk with him. At least write with him. You hope.
But Timothy’s expression twists. He brings the facecloth up to the mirror in what’s almost a punch, pressing so hard you can both feel the glass bend. He scrubs at the words until they're shadows of shadows.
*
It's quiet again, for a while.
And then: the other boy with the camera and the glasses and violence. The nothing, the chasing thing that had followed you when Timothy was younger, trails behind him. It comes back.
You knew it would. You were certain, and it did, like a wolf tracking blood. A move into the quiet music of a flashlight-lit room and then suddenly Timothy cannot breathe.
You had to run so you did; long, long ways through the woods in the dark. Sometimes the woods twist and the trees are the same but the air is too cold and the sky is wrong, it's far too dark around you. With a jerk in your chest, you understand you've taken yourself way farther than you intended to. The world is wrong.
The fear of death is a strong hand around your chest, tightening. You wouldn't die if the nothing took you, not exactly, because you were never really born, and not even the fall leaves ever seem to fully let go in the shadow-filled inbetween place where the air crackles with static so you're not sure if dying is possible there, but this somehow only accelerates the fear. You panic, a little; then you push the panic into rage.
If the fright is a hand then your anger is a blunt fist rising to meet it. So much of your blood feels like it's boiling so much of the time, you wonder how you survive. You wonder how.
But you have to, because Timothy has to. Timothy who's a muted pulse in your chest, next to both of yours' heart while you move around. He doesn't hear you the way you hear him when he's awake but he is always there. Maybe your rage comes from somewhere in his head, or yours makes his worse. You don't know. You only shove at the dark around you, not giving up or crying out in fear, until it gives just enough for you to move.
You don't speak very often because there is no one to speak too, and yelling at Nothing is as futile as yelling at rocks or whisps of fog; but when you do speak, in moments of particular fear, it's a loud refusal. It rips out of your throat like thunder in the woods. Gives pause to things around you, just for a second, and you dive away as much as you can.
Nothing lets you run. It plays with you like a cat with a struggling bird. And then eventually it releases you, into cold, into dark, but into air.
You don't know why. Instead of questioning it you limp Timothy home and then let go, with relief, leaving him with the swelled joints and confused senses but no memories of the running, or the being tossed. You sink exhausted and you don't pay attention to his reality-- at least, not until when you're needed next.
And there is a next. And another. Eventually you exist only in limited, timeless, panicking spaces, without sense and all shadows. Continuing. Moving on. Further. Further again.
*
You aren't expecting the girl.
It's another night in the forest, another chase that fits into the long memory of all the nights and trees you've ever ran through. The air is blurry enough from your exhaustion and from the unstable nature of the woods that you aren't sure, anymore, if you're living or dead--
And then another body knocking you to the ground. You lashed out, instinctive and angry, so much of you is anger, but fingers clapped onto your face while a voice hissed for you to be still. There's the hiss of the nothing's anger crackling in the air, and you think breathing, you think eyes, so you freeze.
Freeze.
And nothing passes.
When the air's unlocked around you, whoever attacked you scrambled away, or you shove, or both. Within seconds you're yards apart, trying to catch up on air while eyeing each other for knives, or threats, or screams.
Neither of you have any of the first. You ignore the second-- something's always a threat-- and the third doesn't matter. You keep staring. Then, slowly, the other person creeps closer.
It's not the first time you've met someone in the forests, but it is the first time they haven't fizzled to nothing, and the first you haven’t been pulled away in a flare of static with agony behind your eyes.
The first time, really, you haven’t been alone.
That's why you follow her, to begin with.
She knows the thing that hunts and stretches over trees, same as you do, maybe better than you do. That's part of why you keep returning.
She shows you the not-faces. She shows you the cameras and explains the flood behind her head. What nothing does. You don't see the same as she does, but you understand waves even still.
She's not quite the same as you. She doesn't carry someone else's heartbeat in her chest or see through their eyes when she's not-sleeping. But she isn't quite like Timothy, either, or any of the people Timothy knows.
It takes you a while to understand. You go with her one day, to make threats and lay out clues. On the screen there's shadows over the picture and sound that she didn't record. It makes the outline of your not-face blur on the screen. She paused on it, pointing, this is me.
She doesn't mean the video. You stare, and then it fits together. You follow someone else's movements exactly, until you make your own. She was someone else who was hidden from view. Variations in the frequencies' hum. Afterimages.
But the blur moves in a way that the picture does not. She's someone else underneath, but she's also herself. So, for that matter, are you.
There didn't used to be anyone you knew that Timothy didn't. You think-- he does know her, but not her, only the person she's standing in front of when the footage moves. It’s a secret, but not one you hide for fear of breaking Timothy. You hide it because the secret's… yours. Yours and hers.
It’s a strange feeling. It could be a positive one, or it might not be.
Either way, it's new, and you haven't known any new things in a long time.
You decide to stay around her. For a while.
///