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It is close to four in the morning, and Alex Kralie has nowhere to go. He cannot go home, because when he is home, it comes with him. Tries to touch his things and stands by his bed and reminds him of where he keeps the weapons. He cannot go to any of his friends, because he doesn’t have many to begin with, doesn’t trust himself not to confess to any of these sins if they ask, and Jay will ask. Alex knows Jay will ask, and he will not let Alex leave until Alex drops to his knees and confesses. And while Brian and Seth might not ask, they will suspect, and it will be silent and uncomfortable and Alex will not speak and they will not ask, but everyone will know.
And so Alex Kralie has nowhere to go. He walks down the street, trembling all over and soaked through with sweat. Coughing and choking and gasping and even as he walks, he can feel the presence looming behind him, attached to his shadow, sewing itself to him. Alex cannot escape it even as he walks, but at least he won’t have to deal with the painstaking game of hide and seek they play in his bedroom, where he hides under the covers or in the corner or inside his closet and it finds him every time, expressionless and empty and somehow still grinning, hissing found you found you found you found you until Alex thinks his ears are bleeding.
It is very hungry. Alex knows what it wants, and Alex is weak. Has always been weak. He knows sooner or later, he is going to give in and feed it. And then nothing will be the same and he will not be able to come back from what he has done. But for now, Alex keeps walking and pretending like he has somewhere to go.
He stumbles to a halt at a crosswalk, leaning against the big metal pole with stop lights dripping liquid red and green in the smudges of his glasses. He lets it support his weight, because he feels like any moment now his legs will give out beneath him, and he will become what his stalker feeds on. The longer he waits, the weaker he becomes. The less he’s worth. But it plays the long game with him, and Alex numbly watches the colors change yellow red green yellow red green yellow red green. He thinks maybe this street corner can be the place he has to go when it becomes too much to stay in bed with. He can just stand here forever, until he dies or it gives up. Whichever comes first.
He stares blankly into the road, and at one point, another man asks him if he’s going to cross. Alex looks over at him, sees nothing, sees It standing just twenty feet away, and Alex does not answer. The man crosses the street, and Alex keeps standing there until the light turns green again.
Eventually, the sky has gone from black to gray, and Alex wonders when he last slept through the night. It has to have been days by this point. Alex can’t remember if they were supposed to film anything today. He could give Jay a call, Jay who has practically become Alex’s Keeper at this point, what with the way all interactions seem to go through Jay like he’s Grand Central. Nothing reaches Alex that hasn’t been told to Jay first that he can then pass along.
Alex thinks that even for all of Jay’s bad habits, waking up before six in the morning is not one of them. And he knows this, because he checks his phone, and can see the time, and remembers that most people don’t wander the streets all night, drunk on the stench of death in their homes. Alex stares at his phone, which contains the day and time, and one missed call from Tim Wright. He stares at this part in particular. Mostly because of how abnormal it is. The call was sent to voicemail twenty minutes ago, which is even more abnormal.
So Alex calls him back. He hears a click and then nothing. But Tim has answered after two rings, so Alex speaks anyway.
“Why did you call.” Alex doesn’t say it like a question, too tired to intonate, though it is one.
“You’re outside my house,” Tim answers. “You’re still there.”
“I am?” The surprise masks the exhaustion.
“Yes. Across the street.”
Alex lifts his head from staring into the road, looks down the street he hasn’t crossed for two hours, and sees a figure peeking out the window of the house directly across from him.
“I didn’t know you lived on a corner.”
“Why are you outside?”
They sound like two people who have never had a conversation before, but the bluntness is relaxing to Alex. Too many other people dance around what they mean. Alex is used to doing it, but Tim doesn’t seem to be. Alex wonders if he could stop dancing around words and just talk. He doesn’t think Tim would judge him. Doesn’t think he would care even if Tim did. They weren’t friends. Just coworkers. Sort of.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“But why are you outside my house?”
“I didn’t know you lived here. This is just where I ended up.”
Tim sighs through the receiver. Alex thinks this might be the third time they’ve ever spoken on the phone.
“I can leave,” Alex says, skipping Tim’s turn to speak. His sigh was his dialogue.
Tim doesn’t answer. Alex pushes off the stop light, and his knees buckle.
“Did you just fall?” Tim asks, a spike of alertness in his voice.
Alex mumbles something, wrists aching from where they took the brunt of the force. His phone is somewhere else. He can still hear Tim’s voice, but Alex is just sort of on the ground now, like he was about to start crawling into traffic. He wanted to ask Tim to take out a gun and shoot him from here, just put Alex out of his misery already. He felt like a sick animal, wild and undomesticated and so so ill, so injured and sick and pathetic, it had to be inhumane to still keep him alive.
He feels the thing creeping up behind him. Can see it even with his eyes closed, even facing away. It’s presence is no hug or embrace, but the chills erupting along his back feel like touch either way.
Alex stays on the ground, bent over, weak weak weak. And he doesn’t move until a pair of warm, real hands wrap around his shoulders. Alex lifts his head, blinking up at Tim Wright, the sun still unrisen but the glow of the traffic lights behind him like a little red sun anyway.
“Are you on something right now?” Tim asks, brows knit together and mouth frowning deeply. Alex doesn’t know how to tell Tim that he is, quite literally, high on life, or perhaps the lack thereof. High on the insanity being drip-fed into his bloodstream. Alex thinks he can see It reflected back in the dark of Tim’s eyes. Tim sighs again, and then helps Alex onto his feet. His legs wobble but hold this time.
“I’m not on anything,” Alex answers at least a minute late.
“You sure?” Tim mutters, wrapping an arm under Alex’s shoulders.
The light turns green some time after Tim get’s Alex stable on his feet, so they wait for it to turn red again. When it does, Tim helps him cross the street. It doesn’t follow them, for now at least. When Alex looks over his shoulder, he finds it standing where Alex himself had just been. He shudders violently, feeling sick and cold and hot all at once. He coughs weakly. Weak weak weak.
They walk into Tim’s house, and Alex sits on Tim’s couch. He drops his head into his hands. His hair is shaggy and his face is unshaven and his glasses are so dirty they give him headaches.
Alex’s fingers knit themselves together. He feels like he’s his own source of darkness. The lamp in the corner can’t reach him. Tim turns on a hall light and Alex now has to squint against the new angle of brightness, illuminating his gaunt, pale face.
“Uh. You know.. I smoke. I’ve tried quitting cold turkey before, so if this is like-”
“It’s not that.” Alex’s voice is low and seems to tremble at the ends. He’s a filtered image overlaid onto a skeleton.
“..Okay.”
“I can’t talk about it.” Alex doesn’t want to breathe in the air here. He feels like with each exhale, a visible cloud of poison fills Tim’s home. Alex is spreading a disease. “I should go.”
“I’ll call Jay or Brian to pick you up in a little bit then.”
“No. I’ll walk.” Alex makes no move to stand. Tim seems to wait for a second to see if he does.
“Are you sick?”
Alex almost says no and then thinks better of it. He is. “Yeah. It’s probably contagious. I have to go.”
He coughs. It's not for emphasis, but it's not like it even sounds like a real cough anyway. The thing he's trying to hack out of his lungs isn't mucus, its rot. His body is molding from the inside.
“You need a ride?”
“I can just walk.”
“You shouldn’t walk home if you’re sick. Your place is a little while out there.”
“How do you know?” Alex looks up, vision almost blurry. It's too bright. He can see it in his mind, but he doesn’t think it's really there. It just feels like it should be.
“I’ve been to your house before, Alex.” Tim fidgets where he stands, and then sits down on the couch next to Alex. “Did you really not know I live here? I’m sure you’ve been over before.”
“I don’t know.” Alex drops his gaze. He is on another planet. He is outside of his body. He is not dying.
“If you want to go home, I’m driving you. We can go now if you want.”
It will follow us, Alex wants to say. It will climb in the backseat and not be there but it will be, and it will follow us, and then I will be alone again.
“I can’t be alone again,” he says out loud, though he doesn’t mean to. Half his thoughts come out of his mouth these days, he isn’t even surprised anymore. Nothing stays in his head. Nothing he thinks goes unheard. Nothing inside his head is just his anymore.
“Alex, I’ll be honest. You’re not making a good case for yourself if you’re trying to convince me you’re feeling good enough to walk home.”
Tim is achingly blunt, a breath of fresh air, a gasp of clarity in his lungs. Alex eats it up. He wants to be blunt back. Wants to spout illegal honesty until he’s finally been emptied of all the secrets that have been chewing him up.
Alex parts his lips, and almost does. But they slam shut again, and Alex braces his forehead against his knees, bent in half, crumbling down with gravity.
“Jesus,” Tim mutters, and Alex can only agree. He might be. It reincarnates itself into him every night, and Alex wakes up less human than before, more prophet, more just a pile of spare parts being sifted through and rebuilt in an image. Alex will look in the mirror one day and find something blank and sanded smooth. He will find himself wearing the skin of it.
“Should I call someone?” Tim asks. Alex doesn’t answer. He can’t think of anyone who would want to help him.
There’s a long quiet beside him, and then Alex faintly hears the sound of a phone ringing, muffled as it presses to Tim’s ear. Alex’s eyes snap over to stare at Tim from in between the tangle of arms and legs he’s pried together. Tim looks uncomfortable under the look Alex has planted on him, and saves himself by avoiding Alex’s face.
Alex hears the dial tone through the muffle. Tim doesn’t look surprised, and hangs up before it goes to voicemail.
“You actually called someone.” Alex’s voice doesn’t turn it into a question like it's supposed to.
“Yes?” Tim’s voice does, though it’s probably not supposed to. “You and him are friends,
“Why?” Alex snaps, sitting up fully and scowling.
“There he is,” Tim intonates dryly. “You weren’t being enough of an asshole, I thought maybe you’d been possessed.”
Alex’s entire face twitches at the too close to truth unreality of it. Swings to his feet, swaying and wild. Staggers over to the other side of the room, thinks he can hear voices or footsteps above them, even though Tim’s house looked like just one story from the outside.
“Where are you going?” Tim demands.
“Why do you care?!” Alex snarls, looking over his shoulder to sneer at Tim.
Tim gets to his feet, “Dude, calm down. You could stand to be a little nicer since I did, you know, let you in my house.”
“Really? Could I? I thought I wasn’t being enough of an asshole.”
Tim scowls. “Fuck off, then. If you don’t want my help then I won’t offer it anymore.”
Alex rocks backward on his feet, bumps into the wall behind him. There’s a piercing wail blaring in his brain, scrambling his thoughts. He feels violent. He feels like crying. He feels wrapping his hands around Tim’s throat and squeezing. His vision is dark and cloudy, and Alex is so crushingly tired. Sitting had been nice. He doesn’t want to go wandering miles again.
“I didn’t say that,” he mutters, dropping his gaze and feeling along the wall he was pressed against. Leans against it to keep from tipping over. He was sweating bullets, and felt freezing. The wail turned to screeching, pots and pans bashing together, metal crushing itself and decomposing, the earth exploding and Alex was watching his skin vaporize off of his body.
It wasn’t happy that Alex had said that.
He should leave. He’s not supposed to stay, not in any timeline. It always ends with him dying and dying and dying.
Tim’s expression soured, but it didn’t look as angry anymore. “Well… then calm the eff down and stop yelling at me, or you’re out.”
Alex couldn’t yell even if he wanted to, voice drying up. He was being eaten from the inside. Weakly, Alex stumbled back to the couch, feeling feverish and like he couldn’t get warm. When he spoke, his teeth were chattering.
“I don’t know what to do..”
He braced his head against his knees, bent in half again and burying his arms over his head.
“Drinking some water and taking a nap might be a good place to start.” Alex peeked up and found Tim with his arms crossed, looking down on him.
His throat was pretty dry, if Alex actually thought about it. He didn’t have any water with him though.
“Water?” He repeated, blinking in a way that seemed to creak and rust.
Tim exhaled, cheek indenting where he might be chewing it. “I can get you some, if you want.”
Alex didn’t want to move anymore. He wanted to go still and let himself be reclaimed until he was just bones and poisoned soil. “Please..” he whispered, hoarse.
There was a pause, and Tim sounded marginally less frustrated when he answered, “Okay.. I’ll be right back. Just stay there.”
He has nowhere else to go anyway. Couldn’t move if he wanted. There’s a nail-on-chalkboard static ripping his eardrums apart, so loud he can’t hear Tim’s retreating footsteps. He closes his eyes again. Stupid, pathetic coward. Weak, useless idiot. Couldn’t follow directions, couldn’t think critically, couldn’t do anything right. The floor was moving underneath him, rising and falling like ocean waves. Alex tucked his knees up to his chest, propping his sneakers on the very edge of the couch so they didn’t get dirt on it. Something was screaming bloody murder upstairs. There wasn’t even an upstairs here. Wrong house, idiot , Alex thought contemptuously. Mine is the one with two floors. Not Tim’s.
The rocking of the floorboards was making him nauseous now. They weren’t near a fault line, shouldn’t get earthquakes, and yet Alex didn’t know what else it could be. Unless hell itself was tearing through the ground to drag him down. He should run. He needed to get out before he was caught. Alex was wasting time and energy here. He felt so unhinged that he wasn’t even connected to anything anymore.
Tim returned, and Alex flinched so hard it made his head hurt. Tim approached with an uneasy gait, a look on his face like he really didn’t know what to make of Alex.
“Uhm. Here…” He handed Alex a glass of water, which ALex took in his hands like it might explode any second. Putting it to his lips and drinking, the cool water smoothing over his dry throat like repaving potholes.
Alex shuts his eyes as he downs the rest of the glass, hands trembling a little. When he opens them again, the floor is no longer rocking, and the screaming has faded out. Tim is hovering nearby, watching him.
“...What?” Alex mutters, lowering his feet back to the floor, unfurling tentatively and staring like Tim was the weird one here. Tim scoffs.
“Well, you look like a wreck, man. I’m trying to figure out what to do.” He sounds tired. Alex can fix that, if he’s been so exhausting to deal with.
“Don’t do anything then,” he snaps, standing and stalking away. He feels uneven, not angled properly, prone to falling at any given moment. The floor remained still. “I’ll leave and get out of your-”
“Alex, just chill out!” Tim groaned. “Quit being an ass.”
“Oh, I’m being an ass?” He whirls around, sees static sparking around the edges of Tim’s frame. “Am I? Maybe you shouldn’t have let me in, then. Maybe you should have left me outside, just ignored me until I went away. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do with wild animals? Just ignore them until they leave?”
He’s speaking nonsense, and Tim is visibly confused, looks uneasy.
“Stop shouting. Seriously.”
Alex shuts his mouth, leans against the wall, feels his knees want to give out and locks them instead.
“You’re not a wild animal. What are you even talking about?” Tim finally says. Alex wants to bite down on something until he touches bone.
“I’m not,” he mumbles, the rot clogging his throat and filling his sinuses. The pressure is a teetering tower due to fall at the next pinwheel wind.
“You’re not,” Tim repeats. There’s a little touch against his arms, and he shivers so hard that his ribs seem to rattle in his chest. “You’re okay.”
“I’m not.” Alex’s voice is hardly above a whisper, something breaking in it. “I’m really not.”
“What part’s not okay?”
Tim’s voice is soft, weirdly comforting. Alex recalls Brian praising how kind and selfless of a person Tim was. Alex had never experienced it for himself. He wonders if this is what Brian meant.
Alex is a dying candle that Tim is desperately cupping his hands around to keep from going out, despite the strong burn of the flashlights available to him. The metaphor was weak. Alex was too. He starts breaking in Tim’s hands.
“Nothing,” he breathes, cracks. “Everything. It’s so bad. It’s really bad.”
“What is it?” Tim asks again, and Alex shakes his head, couldn’t get the words out even if he wanted. Locked down so tight that muscle memory wouldn’t allow him to speak them. He’s tearing at the muscles when he speaks.
“I think I’m going crazy.” He latches his gaze onto Tim’s, holds on desperately as the floorboards roll again. The walls bleed. The dawning sky is pure grain and static.
“Crazy how?”
Alex looks at him and imagines them in a confessional. Alex pleads forgiveness, begs for the chance to repent. He thinks he hears screaming from the upstairs that doesn't exist, thinks he hears scratching from the walls behind him. The c
“It’s- a lot,” Alex manages to say staggeringly.
“I’m sure it is. Tell me.” Tim is steady.
“I’m-” his mouth is dry. He’s choking down a cough. He is not supposed to be doing this. He snaps his neck, dies, keeps going.
“Seeing shit. Hearing shit. I’m not myself anymore. Everyone’s turning against me and I can’t stop them, I can’t stop myself from making them. It's changing me and I don’t want it to, but I think I’m already gone. I don’t know what to do.”
There is a long silence. Alex’s eye contact breaks away at some point, watches viscera drip from the ceiling and puddle around them.
Tim looks at him for a long moment, and says, “I believe you.”
Alex doesn’t expect that. There’s a metal screech in his ears, and he says, “You do?”
“Yeah.” Tim nods. His hands resting reassuringly on Alex’s arms.
“You… you’ve gotten different. From how you were at the beginning. I think we’ve all picked up on it, at least some. What you said though..” he breaks their eye contact, looks at the walls that are shuddering and breathing with the living shadow trying to nest in here while it begs for Alex to leave. “I get that. So I believe you. And I can try to help.”
Alex crumbles. He didn’t think he could still cry, but he supposes this has been building up for a while.
At some point, Tim gets up off the floor, returns with more water and some medicine, sits back down beside Alex and tells him it’ll help his headache. Alex can barely breathe through the pressure and the electric fog clawing away at his skull, but he takes the pills without asking any questions. He curls back up into his knees, and Tim’s hand rests on his back again. Alex shudders under it. His head isn’t clear, but he thinks if it comes to kill him, Tim will at least be there to see. He’ll at least know that Alex has been running. Has been hunted for months now. That if Alex’s legs give out, it isn’t his fault.
“You wanna come to the doctor with me today?” Tim asks, and Alex physically recoils.
“No-” he hisses through a strangled breath. “No. I don’t want- no therapy. No doctors.”
Tim rubs his back. Alex forces air into his lungs. “They could give you medicine that might help some. It helps me, most of the time.” But Alex had been lying, had been half making things up. He isn’t the kind of crazy that can be cured.
“It won’t help-”
“It might, though. Try.”
Alex looks at him helplessly. He knows it will not help. He is ungodly ill and nothing can ever save him. He will die this way.
“Alex,” Tim says again, staring back. Hauntingly sure of himself now, at least compared to earlier. “I know what it’s like. I can help you. But you gotta let me.”
They hold this stare, and the world is erupting around Alex. He thought he had been keeping it under control, but the way Tim is looking at him makes him want to listen.
“Do you want to get better?”
Alex’s face twitches, fresh heat prickling inside his eyes. His breath shudders out of his lungs.
“Come on. Let me help you.” Tim’s voice is so sincere. Everything he aches. And Alex falls forward, sobs crumbling out of him, twenty years old and weaker than ever.
“Okay, okay-” he chokes out. “Make it stop. Just make it go away.”
“I will, I’m gonna help.” His fingers thread through Alex’s hair. Less than six hours ago, Alex was fairly sure Tim didn’t even like him.
And now the air feels lighter. Alex can breathe. Tim has chased the static away.