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They’re all tapping toes at the minute. ‘S how it always is, when you go red - the bloodlust thrums like a frequency under your skin, keeps you vibrating, on edge.
It doesn’t help that this game is so radically different from the ones that’ve come before, either. Usually, Joel has quiet nights and grace periods to keep him from going utterly mental from the rage. But here, they have twenty-four hours to live and counting from the moment that Grian said go, which means he hasn’t even slept.
It’s tense, up on the bread bridge, in their shitty little base. They hadn’t spent long on aesthetics - time that could be better spent preparing. The hours have ticked by upsettingly quickly since yesterday noon, and as of this morning, Joel has five hours left before he croaks it.
(Four hours. Fuck. How he’s managed to fall off the ladder and snap his neck on impact when they’re literally about to go and have another crack at killing Scott, he’s got no clue.)
But that’s alright, because he’s got a plan.
See, Joel might have four hours, but right now Jimmy’s only got three- two. Two hours. Damn it, Grian.
Point being that Jimmy’s as close to the line as he’s ever been. Jimmy’s watching the seconds, bobbing in place, nervous and excited and unprepared. And make no fuckin’ mistake about it, Joel would do anything for that man.
So he’s got a plan. And the plan’s not all that detailed, because he’s only had a few spare minutes to think about it, but he lives by the seat of his pants in the normal games anyway and he’ll die by them too if he can help it, so it goes a little something like this:
- Joel makes sure that Jimmy doesn’t leave his sight.
- If Jimmy is about to die, Joel will step in and die for him.
- ???
- Canary curse broken, everybody wins, wahey.
Brilliant, right? Can’t go wrong.
Grian has a plan too, apparently, although it’s a little more developed. They go to the rest of the reds for a conference, with the stated goal of taking as much of Scott’s time as physically possible. TIES are on board, which is a good start, and Scar even offers Jimmy a half hour off Bdubs straight off, which Joel appreciates. Jimmy turns it down, though, because apparently he’s stupid and doesn’t know when to give up on his honour.
“My hands are cold,” says Grian, “and I’m all jittery.”
“How are you cold,” says Joel, “are you not… I dunno, red?”
He frowns. “I am red, look at me.”
“You don’t get cold when you’re red, though.”
“Maybe not cold, then. I guess numb? Like when you stand up too fast and the blood all drains, but just my fingers, not my head.”
Joel nods distractedly. It’s always a little bit harder to think by this point in a Life game, but it certainly doesn’t help that he’s been up and moving the entire time, barely pausing for a sit down, all chasing victims and climbing ladders. He feels almost like somebody else has started piloting his limbs for him while he watches. The point he was trying to make is that it’s always felt to him like you get hotter when you’re on red, or like you have more blood, like it’s the fifteen hundreds and they’re trying to balance humours. Thank god they don’t have leeches in the water. Can you imagine? What an awful way to die.
He’s getting off topic. “Listen,” says Grian, “I’ve got an idea. If we trap Scott’s bed, next time he dies we get a second kill on him straight away, right?”
“Right.”
“We send Timmy to distract him, and -”
“Hey, hang on, we’re not doing that.”
Grian’s head tilts, beady black eyes looking straight through him. “Why not?”
“I’ve already decided I’m not leaving Jim to his own devices any more. If he dies and we’re not there -”
“He won’t die. Scott said he could have half an hour off him when it came down to it, right? And it’s coming down to it! So he takes the time off Scott, and when he respawns -”
“He won’t, though,” Joel points out, “him an’ his bloomin’ pride, he won’t take it until he’s right up against the line.”
“But if we tell him to, and then Scott pops up in his bed, sets off our trap, it’s fine!”
Joel grumbles wordlessly, drumming fingers against his elbows. Restless. Grian’s eyes are burning with excitement for this plan, thirst for the extra time.
“Why don’t you want to leave Tim alone?”
“Because he’s gonna die, isn’t he,” Joel says.
“He can keep himself alive for fifteen minutes while we lay a minecart.”
Fifteen minutes. Jimmy’s only got eight lots of those left. “No he can’t.”
“I feel like - like, I underestimate him a lot for the bit, but you’re being a bit uncharitable here.”
Joel fights the urge to bare his teeth. Fucked up, the kind of shit the red life does to him. “I’m not being uncharitable. We both know he’s hopeless. I just - I wanna be there, so I can do - anything.”
“What are you gonna do, solo Martyn when he comes to protect his teammate?”
“Yes, if it comes down to it!”
Grian looks over his shoulder. Jimmy is still parlaying with Cleo and Scar, all wide-eyed and earnest, either playing up his patheticness or totally unaware of it. You can never be quite sure with Jim - ego the size of a planet, but when he’s down he’s really down.
Joel huffs, a little more aggressively than he means to. He feels a bit like he’s going mad right here on the spot. “I wanna be there, ‘s all.”
“I don’t care about your suicide mission,” Grian says, “we’re trying to kill other people here, in case you’d forgotten, not ourselves.”
Joel falters.
“What is it no- oh, for goodness’ sake, Joel, you can’t actually want to kill yourself at hour twenty-one.”
“I don’t want to kill myself,” he defends. “I want Jimmy to live.”
Grian eyes him. One of his feet starts tapping. (At least he’s not bloody Mumbo, with the constant pacing back and forth, or this conversation would be impossible to follow. Joel’s already starting to see double from exhaustion, a tiny bit.)
“If he dies first, it’s - like, that’s it, then, isn’t it? Curse gets him again. They get what they want. So if I’m there and I die before him -”
“Listen, I’m sure this all makes perfect sense to you, but what I’m hearing is -”
Joel tunes him out as he keeps talking. His eyes have wandered to the conversation behind Grian’s head, where Jimmy appears to be done discussing whatever they were up to with the Clockers, and is now wandering idly in the direction of the Skynet ladder. “Jim!”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t leave without us!”
“Alright,” Jimmy calls across the stone, and starts to walk in a circle instead, evidently waiting for them to catch up rather than coming here.
Joel moves to do what he’s suggesting, but Grian catches him by the hand on his way past. “We’re not done talking about this.”
“What else is there to talk about?”
“I don’t know how to explain to you that - ugh. Get up Skynet, I’ll have Timmy explain it.”
The thought of Jimmy actually knowing about this plan that Joel’s been sitting on makes him feel like his entire skin has something under it, like a big worm or something, or maybe that’s just the red life, he’s not sure. He thinks he can hear his timer ticking as they climb the ladder, which is definitely not real. Are you supposed to hallucinate after one night of no sleep? Maybe he just sleeps like shit when he’s outside as well. Maybe, and this one’s a bit more likely, his outside self hadn’t been expecting this one to only take a day.
Maybe he’s going mad, like, independently. And that’s why he’s suddenly decided that killing himself so Jimmy gets to live is clearly the most rational course of action.
“Where we droppin’, boys?” says Jimmy when they’re up on the rail-thin strip of the highest layer, and thank fuck nobody fell off the ladder this time.
“Hold on a minute,” says Grian. Joel feels his stomach drop. “Before we find anyone, I just want to run something by you.”
“Yeah?”
Joel tries to shove Grian off the edge of the strip.
Grian catches himself, wings he’s not supposed to have right now (but he’s Grian so of course he does) flaring and keeping him in the air for long enough to let him regain his footing. In throwing his weight back the other way it came from, he clutches at Joel like he can’t decide whether he wants to deck him or wrestle him to the ground, his hands curling round the spiked edges of Joel’s collar. “What the fuck are you doing?” he screeches, two octaves higher than normal.
“Joel!” says Jimmy at his back. “What’s going on?”
“Don’t,” he growls through gritted teeth.
“Did you just try to murder me because I was gonna tell Timmy about your bad idea?”
He’s like an inch from Grian’s face.
Fuck’s sake, he is going crazy.
“Hang on, hang on, what’s this about, Joel?”
Grian loosens his grip. Joel wrestles free, and when he turns, he meets Jimmy’s eyes, and wants to be sick a bit. He can’t feel his fingertips, either, now.
“How long do you have,” he asks, and there’s this horrible cracked-ness in his voice that he doesn’t know where it came from.
“Two hours thirty,” says Jimmy quietly.
“He was gonna get himself killed so you don’t go out first again,” Grian snitches from behind his head. Joel wrings his hands out roughly with the urge to strangle him.
“I’ve got four,” he says instead, “Grian I don’t know.”
“Four and a half, what does this have to do with anything?”
“That’s time, isn’t it,” and isn’t it fucking irritating that they’re having this conversation on a one-block platform a hundred feet in the air, “he could use it.”
“Wait, you never said anything about us sacrificing our time for him, I’m not doing that. I want to win, if you hadn’t noticed. You know, the whole reason we’re doing any of this?”
It’s your fucking fault that we’re here, he doesn’t say. “Well, yeah, that’s not in the plan, I’m just - exploring our options, is all -”
“Joel,” Jimmy shuffles a little closer, not quite popping the bubble of space between them, “genuinely, what’s going on.”
He looks down. They’re over the clouds. It all suddenly feels like far too much. “I don’t want you going out first again.”
Jimmy doesn’t say anything for a couple of seconds that feel like forever. Seconds are all they have. Joel doesn’t want to waste them talking about his feelings and shit.
“So I just thought - well, if I beat you to it -”
He withers a bit under Jimmy’s gaze, which is stupid, because it’s not even judgemental or anything. Softer than that. The thing beneath Joel’s skin starts crawling, but there’s nowhere to go, trapped between his two Bad Boys at the top of the world.
Jimmy opens his mouth. Nothing comes out. His own wings, small enough to be useless protecting him from a fall (that’s why he gets to keep them), are half-extended behind him like they do when he’s thinking of making sudden movements. “Don’t,” says Joel.
“You don’t have to do that,” Jimmy tells him.
“I do, though.”
“What makes you think -”
“Because,” he takes a breath, “nobody else is gonna, are they?”
“Scott is! And Scar said -”
“That’s an hour, though,” Joel tries desperately to make it make sense for him, “that’s not your life. That’s not breaking you out of the loop.”
“You can’t break the Curse, Joel,” Jimmy says, “nobody can just do that ‘cos they feel like it. Unless you managed to do it while no one’s Watching, I dunno. Or Listening. But you can’t just do that, it doesn’t work like that.”
“But if I just get in the way, then -”
“Then I’d somehow manage to trip over a rock and die right before you did, Joel, that’s just - that’s how it happens. That’s how it works. You can’t reason your way out of it, you can’t… believe in me hard enough and I’ll make it.”
“But I don’t want you to die,” and his voice cracks on it, going up in this ugly spike of emotion he can’t bear giving away.
“Do you think I do?”
In what might possibly be an even worse decision than the attempted murder from a minute ago, Joel surges forth again, and kisses Jimmy.
His arms wrap around the back of Jimmy’s neck, leather on leather squeaking faintly. Something rustles behind him; Grian half-shouts. For a moment he thinks they’re being attacked, somehow, but then it occurs to him in the back of his exhausted brain that Grian must have thought Joel was going in for the attack again. (Even though that would be stupid. What, is Joel going to kamikaze them both off the ledge, take half an hour off both their timers for no reason?)
Jimmy, tense against him for a terrifying fraction of a second, leans into it after that, as much as he can with both their glasses clacking against each other. It doesn’t last long, primarily because a couple of neurons finally fire in the places that count, and Joel remembers that this behaviour is insane.
His eyes fly open and he sets them both a block apart from one another, arm’s length with probably too strong of a grip on Jimmy’s shoulders. God, that man is tall.
Jimmy’s tongue darts out to wet his lips, and Joel can feel the image burning itself into the back of his mind. “I -”
“That was a stupid idea,” he interrupts, “don’t - just - forget I ever did that. Please. Let’s just go kill someone.”
“What - no,” says Jimmy, “you can’t just -”
“Please,” says Joel.
He finds himself staring into Jimmy’s eyes, which feels illegal. His glasses have come down his nose, same as the way Joel likes to sit them at the end of the bridge, only Jimmy’s nose is flatter so his pair are in danger of falling all the way off his face. Behind them, pretty brown.
The red life, or the madness, or both, are making him breathe heavy.
“Joel, we have to talk about this.”
“No, we don’t.”
“After, then. When we get home.”
Okay, that he’d genuinely rather die than settle for. There is no after for Joel, not with these. When he gets home, back to his empire, he puts the whole business out of his mind and pretends it never happened. That’s not even beginning to think about Lizzie, who is another story altogether, who he knows won’t be upset at what’s already happened but who he still feels sick with guilt at even the thought of right now. If he goes back to Empires and Jimmy comes up to him in his stupid little cowboy hat trying to talk about this, Joel’s going to figure out how to kill him in a way that sticks.
Jimmy’s expression is scarily upset. “If you expect me to just push that aside like nothing happened, that’s - it’s not on. I can’t do that.”
He pulls his hands away. “You’re upset.”
Jimmy swallows. “That you didn’t ask me first, yeah. Or warn me, or anything. Not that - it happened.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
Another long pause, long enough that Joel starts to scan the empty sky behind Jimmy like there’s going to be anything, like they’re not at build height. He can’t stop sweating or control his feet. The urge to ask so can we do it again, forever, till our clocks run down is there, persistent.
(He really needs a rest.)
“But… yeah. I’m not carryin’ on anything with the - if it’s gonna be something that we only do when you’ve decided that it doesn’t have to count.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Like you said. Like this is all some bigger plan to get me out of my own mess, and not just ‘cos you want it.” Like it isn’t real, he wouldn’t feel this on the outside. Like it’s just because he’s red or going mad.
It occurs to Joel that he might not be going mad at all. He might just be tired and a little bit gay.
Jimmy sighs. “Go on, then, yeah. We’ll go kill someone.”
“Wh- no, you don’t have to -”
“S’what you want, innit? Make you feel better?”
We don’t have to just go and do what I want now. You’re the one who got upset. “Like you don’t feel it as well.”
“‘Course I feel it,” Jimmy says, “I’m just not - I don’t let it mess with me.”
“Well, you’ve already got a short fuse,” he mutters.
Jimmy raises an eyebrow.
“You don’t have to make me feel better.”
“Now I don’t?”
“You never did.” I’m the one who wanted to die for you. I’d do anything for you. You know that.
“Well, good, ‘cos I didn’t really want to, not right now.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I dunno. Sit down? Take a breather. Let that… sink in.”
“Okay.”
Jimmy watches him for another couple of seconds, and then, as if laying his weapons on the ground in a ceasefire, lowers himself to sit on Skynet. Joel follows awkwardly.
He turns his head. Grian’s already down, lounging back a couple blocks away, chewing on a strip of steak. He pauses mid-bite to make an incredulous face at the pair of them.
“What,” says Joel.
Grian snorts laughter. “I literally don’t know what I could possibly say.”
So Joel doesn’t try to make him say anything, just swings his legs down the side of the path and lets his eyes wander out and over the endless sky.
Beside him, Jimmy’s body heat is close enough to feel it. Another side effect of being red, Joel supposes. It’s nice, though. Really good. Not enough, even. He wants to press his whole self into Jimmy, wants to be his human shield, wants to feel him skin to skin until they both go cold and grey.
His knee lolls over, presses into Joel’s. It’s not nearly as much as he wants, but it’s enough to make his heart do something painful. His fingers drum against the side of the land, a restless rhythm.
Three hours and forty-eight minutes. Seconds are ticking. Time is addictive, and he wants more of it - he wants Jimmy to get more of it. Will do anything to make that happen, hand him kills on a platter, right up until the line where he can’t any more.
Jimmy seems to think that it won’t work, yeah, but he should know already that Joel won’t take that for an answer.