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Who: Jay Merrick and You
What: Jay fell unconscious in Rosswood Park and woke up on a magic island. He's not yet sure if this is a good thing.
When: January 29th, morning
Where: The Storyteller's Temple
Warnings: Language, Jay being an anxious wreck; will update as things come up!

This is wrong. Deeply, deeply wrong. He's either still dreaming, or he's still hallucinating, or he's dead, because the only remaining option doesn't just happen.

Sure, maybe the supernatural exists, but it doesn't talk to you in your dreams, and it doesn't spare you from getting your memories scraped out of your head by ~~that thing,~~ and it doesn't drop you off in...okay, maybe it does drop you off in an overgrown, abandoned building, but not one that looks like this.

He leans up against something that definitely isn't a mana pool, because mana pools don't exist. His phone is gone. His camera--shit, his camera's dripping, and the viewfinder screen won't light up, and it won't even turn on, it just keeps making this thin, whining noise before fizzling out again, and come on come on COME ON this can't happen

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God, what a pair they make.

One with a black eye, the other wrestled to the ground. Both liars, in their own stupid goddamn way.

Jay snorts, rocking his head back to watch the treetops. On instinct, he tips the dead camera to match.

There's a lot--a lot Jay still doesn't know, but this, right now? This is closer to clarity than he's felt in months. Years, maybe.

If he can ignore the island, the magic, the talking rabbit, the massive gap in time, if for a second he squints hard enough that the leaves above him look like oaks, like pines, then he can pretend the pieces sliding into place are important. Significant.

They feel that way, even if he doesn't.

He's not sure what that means. Probably nothing, if he's honest. This hasn't gotten him any closer to tracking down Jessica, to figuring out Alex's motives for coming after them.

But maybe, after this, Tim Wright makes a little more sense. That's something.

"Yeah," he mumbles back, parroting Tim. "'Course you'd be mad."

"Well, what can I say?" He shrugs a little, crunching through the jungles of Ensō. Jay at his back, following him. Feels like moving through Rosswood in some respects, but...it's the furthest thing from it. The climate's wrong, the camera's busted, and they're actually talking to each other instead of making snippy commentary about what they do and don't remember.

"I've had...a lotta time to think about it. This. All of it."

With the shit that this place throws at him, he's had almost no time to do anything but think about it. No choice in the matter. When the specter of the man you failed repeatedly tells you in no uncertain terms that it's your fault that what happened, happened - well, he knew that already, didn't he?

He'd accepted that he'd never see Jay again. He'd accepted a lot of shit that's now come to pass.

He's learned to take it in stride.

Two years. Right. Makes sense he wouldn't be as wound up about it as Jay was.

Maybe Jay didn't even have to apologize.

...No, he probably had to. Great. At least he can take solace in that tonight, lying awake beating himself up for being a fucking coward.

At least he's out of Rosswood.

Breathe in, breathe out.

"Yeah, and I've had..." He moves to check his phone, but--right. Not here. Just a rock. "A couple hours, tops?" He shoots Tim a sideways look, eyebrows raised.

Time is weird, even without outside forces screwing around with it.

(Wait, is Tim older than him now?)

"Yeah, I..." What does he say to that? It's completely correct. It's not as if Jay's had ample time to process this. And, god, what happens when he has to tell him what happened to him? He should probably do it sooner rather than later - do it under his own terms and under his own power, before the islands pick an inopportune time for him.

He's just not sure how one goes about opening that conversation. You'd think that after years of awkward conversations like, hey, so I shared souls with a quantum clone of you and now I know your entire history, he'd be a lot better at this, but no. No, it turns out there's just not a manual for that kind of thing.

"I can't fix what I fucked up," he says, finally. "I can't...undo that. But I can say that I'm sorry about it. And I wish to god that I'd...gotten that voicemail."

"I mean, I...it's not like I can either."

Jay watches his shoes. It's easier to look at than Tim's face, than what Jay's pretty sure is complete, honest sincerity. Feels like cold hands on the back of his neck. Feels like he's doing something wrong.

"And, I mean, at least..." He runs a hand through his hair, eyes still locked on the ground. Tim should've gotten the voicemail. Tim wishes he got the voicemail. Maybe then, they could've worked this out back home. Maybe Tim could've called back. Hell, maybe he could've picked up. Maybe he could've driven out there, yanked Jay out of Rosswood before that thing found him. Maybe they could've stumbled back through the tunnel, back through the parking lot, back to their cars, back to some cheap motel. Maybe things could've gone back to normal--well, not normal. Familiar.

Maybe Jay's wasting his time thinking about bullshit that didn't happen.

"At least I got out of there somehow." With a broken camera, no phone, and no way to get home. "And we...we met back up, even it it wasn't...yeah."

He doesn't know how to do this. Doesn't know how to talk about this. Doesn't know how to think about this.

Tim's throat closes.

"Yeah," he says. The word's a little rough, a little rasping. Meeting like this is better than...better than what actually comes of it. Is he just delaying the inevitable? God, he is, isn't he? He has to say something, he should say something now, but -

But he doesn't know how to broach the subject, and Jay's...he just got here. For fuck's sake, he just got here.

"So," he says, regrouping, "the place is called Denny. And it's...I mean, it looks like it was built here, 'cause it was. So it's not like an Arby's or anything. But there's food and water there and pretty much everyone here is a little weird so nobody really stands out."

"That's real reassuring; thanks." Jay feels a muscle twitch at the edge of his mouth, a half-formed smirk. So Tim thinks Jay won't stand out in a crowd of weirdos. He can't say he's surprised.

"Didn't think anybody'd miss home enough to build a whole Denny's from scratch, but, uh."

He spots the mural. There's rabbits, some other stuff and...

WE GOT FRE SHA VACA DO

"Who, uh...who painted that sign?" He can hear it in his voice, the exact same tone he's heard people take with Alex. He hopes to god that mural wasn't Tim.

"That was Connor," he says, deadpan. "I dunno what any of it means, but I've learned not to ask."

He's long since accepted that he will not understand a good seventy to eighty percent of what Connor says, and he is okay with this. They come from different points in time. There's just no avoiding it.

The interior is..."rustic" is probably the nicest possible word for it. It looks like it was built out here, mostly because it was. The chairs and tables were put together by hand, the cutlery has been alternatively transmuted or carved by hand, and so on.

Tim navigates the place with an easy familiarity. Hopefully the question won't arise of how he knows this place back to front.

Connor. He mentally files the name away.

Tim steps inside Denny, and Jay follows. He didn't consider how much of a relief inside would be, but there's finally a real roof over his head, walls, a visible perimeter. He can see where this place ends. The dull pain in his chest eases slightly.

Still, he takes a wary glance out the windows, keeps his back to the wall.

He tries not to stare too long at the other patrons.

He holds the dead camera close to his chest.

The place looks like one of those old frontier towns, all wooden planks and uneven edges, but it's a hell of a step up from anything in Rosswood. This place is clearly being taken care of.

More interesting: Tim walks like he knows where he's going. He sidesteps a loose floorboard that Jay trips over, snakes between the clusters of tables and chairs like it's nothing. Maybe he's a regular. Two years is more than enough time to learn your way around a restaurant.

It's all a lot to take in, all things considered. It's enough to make the words stick in his throat, buried under all the input. Still, he follows after Tim, eyes wide and jaw locked shut.

"You, uh." Well, how's he supposed to do this? Here, have some dried meat that came from a tigershark. Literally, it's a tiger-shark hybrid. It's edible, though, so don't worry. Yeah, no. He'll just stick with "meat." It can just be meat. "You hungry? Anything like that?"

He moves toward the back, and then...no getting around it, is there? He ducks behind the counter and starts picking through the baskets upon baskets of assorted shit piled on the shelves. Most everything is in baskets.

He definitely knows his way around, though.

Feels almost like they're robbing the place, even though Tim already explained the whole no-economy thing. Nothing's gonna happen. Tim looks like he's done this a thousand times.

Is he hungry?

How long has it been since he's eaten?

"S...sure." His jaw aches. His head aches. He can hear the murmur of voices behind him. He wants to know what's in the baskets--that's something he can act on. That's something he can do something about.

He rounds the edge of the counter, peering over Tim's shoulder.

~~If Tim wanted him dead, he would have done it already. You can't poison somebody with this many witnesses.~~

~~Quit being so fucking paranoid.~~

He reaches out to one of the shelves, about a foot away from Tim, and lifts the lid of one of the baskets. There's a strong scent--something fermented, maybe, or preserved in salt. Jay wrinkles his nose. "What is all this?"

"Mostly just stuff that people drop off. I mean, if they're not gonna use it, we might as well." They've got some eggs. That's not nothing. They're hard-boiled, but that'll still do. "A lotta dried meat and stuff. Eggs too, if you want 'em."

It's not like he can swing a ketogenic diet here, however much he'd like to. And - fuck, what does he do about meds? He's gonna have to ask the Storyteller, maybe, 'cause he can't imagine Jay being willing to admit that he might need them full time now.

Or maybe he will.

He doesn't...know what happened past that. Does he?

Briefly, Jay weighs the benefits of picking what looks good off the shelves versus letting Tim pick.

If they were in a 7-11 or something, the answer would be obvious: he'll pick. He'll cover the cost.

Unfortunately, if his mental model of the island is right, then there aren't enough people for an FDA. No standards, no quality control, just "stuff that people drop off".

~~And again, nobody's gonna try and poison him with this many witnesses around, least of all Tim.~~

Jay sighs, shrugging. "Whatever's good, I guess."

Well, that covers it. Tim gets a plate and sticks a smorgasbord on it - dried meat, some eggs, a bit of dried fruit just to round things off.

"So. This place is...Denny."

Might as well get that out of the way. It was on the mural, but it pays to mention it. It's not Denny's. Just...Denny. Singular. Chara's suggestion. He's not gonna get into the deal with Chara, though, in part because they're not here anymore. No need to bring it up.

Right?

"Denny." He shoots a brief glance at Tim as he sets the plate warily on the counter. He keeps a hand on it, keeps it in his line of sight. "'S this like the thing...?" He gestures vaguely with the camera, hoping Tim will catch on. "Where they find an old sign and there's, there's a letter missing, but nobody knows any better, so they just call the place, like...well, Denny?"

Tim knows better. Though, from the patchy memories Jay can scrape together of their time on the road, chances are Tim hasn't seen any of the movies he's talking about.

Maybe for the best, as far as that crap Planet of the Apes remake is concerned.

And that's more rambling from him than Tim probably wanted to hear, so Jay picks whatever looks safest--beef jerky, he thinks--and shoves it in his mouth.

Oh god.

Oh god, he hasn't eaten in a while, has he?

It's all he can do to force himself to chew, to take his time, to not swallow the piece of jerky whole and take another handful off the plate. Three pieces of jerky and two hard-boiled eggs in, he realizes he's failed.

"No, that's just...what it's called. By choice, I guess." He has no idea how to admit that he's the one who named it that at the behest of a small child with a devilish sense of humor, so you know what? He's just not gonna go there. Not a lotta people know that anyway. Jay hardly needs to know it too.

Right away, it's apparent that Jay hasn't really eaten recently. This is, based on what Tim remembers of Jay's lifestyle, not all that surprising.

"Don't make yourself sick or anything," he warns him, frowning, before filling a cup with water and setting it down in front of him.

Jay hears Tim set the cup down and reaches blindly for it, eyes still on the food. He grabs it, pulls it to his lips, tries to breathe for a second before taking a sip--

--and gags, throat burning. He clenches his jaw through it, tries to breathe through his nose. His face is hot. Distantly, he wonders whether it's the nausea or the fact that he's being watched.

Failed step one.

He has to keep this down, though. Given the way this place looks, given what Tim's told him so far, he can't afford to waste food. Beyond that, it'd make him a pretty shitty guest. He likes to think his ~~mom~~ taught him a thing or two about hospitality.

He pulls the cup up to his lips, wrenches his jaw open, and tries to take a sip. It stays down.

"You, uh...you good?"

He's pretty sure the answer to that is "no," but that Jay's personal answer is going to trend more toward "yes," because that's usually where iet always ends up. Not that Tim has much room to talk. He's the same way.

"Take your time. 'S no rush." Does his best to make his tone matter-of-fact rather than anything that could be construed as patronizing. 'Course, Jay might just read it that way anyway. It all depends on how charitable he's feeling in interpreting it.

Take your time, he says. No rush.

Just for that, Jay tips the cup of water back, gulping the rest of it down. His throat burns, raw from the acid. Stupid.

He doesn't cough. He just...wheezes slightly, suffocating the rest of it. It's one part pride, one part trying not to set off any alarms. Doesn't need Tim hovering any more than he's already doing.

~~Honestly, hovering's better than the alternative.~~

~~Not thinking about that.~~

Instead, he's thinking about the food, focusing on the now picked-over tray. (He knows Tim's eyes are boring into the back of his head. He knows.) There are a few pieces of dried meat and an egg left.

Tim always brought back packages of jerky and unsalted peanuts, sometimes trail mix. More satisfying than chips and coffee. Hell if he knows why. Maybe Tim's got experience; maybe he's had to live like this before.

"I'm not, like...eating all the food you've got stored up for winter, right?"

He may have been forced to read Little House on the Prairie once or twice in school. This and The Zombie Survival Guide might constitute the majority of his knowledge of roughing it longer than a week without access to fast food. Maybe.

'Course, Jay's not gonna listen to that. All right. Fine. Whatever. Tim resists the urge to roll his eyes at that, and instead answers patiently.

"We got plenty." He shrugs. "Lotta people drop stuff off here. We're like...a deserted island or community, or something. So we all help each other out."

That maybe sounds a bit more in charge than he wanted to sound. Sure, he's technically the guy in charge of Denny here, but that's where his expertise and authority ends. It's not something he's ever had to consider - bringing something like that up to the people who knew him.

He just kinda figured he'd never be seeing those people again.

"Or a commune, maybe." He's mostly joking, but not completely. Shared resources, isolated location, and all that. Jay's sure some perfectly fine communes existed out there somewhere, but he's mostly run into the word in two places: online articles about cults, and some relative whose face he can't remember complaining about hippie bullshit.

Tim doesn't really strike him as a cult type. Still, there was all that running around in the woods with a mask on and sending Jay all that pseudo-religious art installation stuff, though, so he can't exactly be sure.

Jay's eaten a whole platter of food and glass of water, and he's neither dead nor tripping off his ass, so he'll take that as a good sign.

He clears his throat, muffling the sound.

"You, uh, end up here a lot?" Sure, there's the fact that Tim knew exactly where to reach on the shelves, exactly which floorboards to step over without tripping. But Jay also remembers the smoking disaster that resulted when the two of them tried to throw together a decent meal out of remnants of a continental breakfast and a hotel microwave, and it doesn't exactly paint the most optimistic picture of either of their cooking abilities. Hanging around a restaurant with free food makes sense.

Then again, he's been there two years. Maybe he's learned a thing or two about food preparation. Or maybe Jay's projecting, Tim's been a decent cook all along, and the microwave incident was a fluke.

"More or less," he says. Not really an answer. What else is he supposed to say? Yeah, I built this place over a period of months. He had help, and he was building on the skeleton of an existing building, but it's still a hell of a thing to spring on somebody who knew him.

Besides, he doesn't do the cooking here. Never could.

"Not sure you could call it a 'commune' when half the population here hates the local god, but yeah."

Maybe "hates" is a strong word. Sure as hell don't trust them, though.

That's an evasion if Jay's ever heard one.

Then, somehow, Tim manages to say something interesting enough to rip Jay's attention away from whatever the hell he's not saying about Denny.

"People hate--?" He's not surprised, exactly, but it's been too much information, too quickly, to really get a chance to pick apart what they told him, to look for inconsistencies. And--no, the camera's still busted, so Jay can't even do it properly. He's got to remember. "You're talking about the, uh, the...dream...rabbit...thing, right?"

"Yeah. I mean, among others, but they're the one that we see...the most, basically." He resists the urge to make a face at that, but only shakes his head like there's more he should say. It's not like they haven't helped too. But his limited interactions with Ozuma soured him on the idea of higher powers helping people out before he even got here.

"They've been here the longest. Like to yell at us in our dreams sometimes, I guess."

He files that away. They've been here the longest. They're the one everybody sees the most. He woke up in their temple; maybe that's a factor.

"Great." So he's got more rabbit dream invasions to look forward to. And if people aren't fond of them, there's got to be a reason why. "Guess, uh, passing out in Rosswood counts as dreaming enough for them."

Passing out is an understatement, he knows. He knows. He's done enough research after watching Tim seize on the floor of his bedroom to know what people say it feels like from the inside. He knows what happened.

It wasn't supposed to happen to him.

~~He can't remember the other times, even though he's seen them on tape.~~

"Is it just the...the dream thing that pisses people off, or...like, is there more to it?"

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cw: emetophobia

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regrettably, tim, you know him too well.

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