Some 100 miles away from Rosswood Park, Alex wakes up alone, covered in dirt and his own dried blood.
He takes his phone in hand, as if to call someone, but... who would he call? And besides that, his phone is dead. God knows how long it's been since it was charged.
Which reminds him. He distinctly remembers dying (vividly remembers dying, actually), and yet, here he is. If this is what the afterlife is, a fucking ditch somewhere in the middle of Alabama with a dead cell phone and a layer of crust, Alex decides he would prefer nothing. At least nothing has a type of poetry to it. This is just gross.
He slowly breathes in, smells the grass that he's lying on, and stands up.
-
His phone is dead, so he can't check where he is on GPS, and he can't exactly go to a gas station looking like this. His shirt crunched when he first moved his right arm, blood flaking away from it in little chunks. (These clothes are ruined.) And nobody's going to pick up a hitchhiker looking this way either.
So Alex walks.
-
At some point, when he realizes he's nearing civilization (and he's tired, and hungry), Alex sees a figure in the distance, standing in the middle of a field; there's a rush of rage and exhilaration and fear and pain when he mistakes it as the Figure with a capital F until he realizes that 1) the figure is a normal height and 2) the figure is coming towards him. Quickly, by the looks of it. And he's too tired to realize that means he should run or even move, instead slumping forward and staring as the person gets closer and closer and closer up until the moment they make contact with his body and oh, hey, it's Brian.
Oh, fuck, it's Brian.
Alex takes a hit (or two or three) before Brian stops, looks over him, and scrunches up his face. "Somethin' got you, huh?"
"Tim," Alex croaks out. It seems like it's been a while since he's spoken. Or had water. "Stabbed me."
Brian, in that fucking yellow hoodie that seemed to haunt Alex for years, laughs and fist-pumps. "I'm gonna have to give him props for that when I see him."
"Great," Alex says. "Now are you gonna kill me or can I get back to town and take a fucking shower before this blood becomes a permanent part of my skin."
"I wouldn't be too flippant if I were you, I might do just that." Brian stands up and helps Alex up with a hand. "Not right now, though. Water under the bridge. And you probably don't want to go into town looking like that, 'cause you look, uh."
"Like shit," Alex supplies.
"Yeah." Brian looks Alex up and down again before repeating himself with a "Yeah, like shit."
Alex rolls his eyes and takes his phone out of his pocket to uselessly try to turn it on. There's still nothing. Brian claps him on the back mock-cheerfully. "Looks like you're stuck with me."
-
It takes about another two hours, but Brian and Alex reach a truck stop and, after hiding Alex's blood-covered situation with Brian's hoodie, desperately go for the showers. There's no sense of common decency that could stop the two of them in their current state from showering right next to each other. There would be awkwardness at any other time, but right now all Alex can think is a desperate chant of "get this blood off of me, get this blood off of me", and he gets the feeling Brian is the same; as quickly as he can, Alex strips off the hoodie and shirt in one move and starts to scratch the blood off of his skin.
The two of them are lucky that nobody else seems to be needing a shower at this time of the night (Alex thinks he saw a clock that said it was 4 a.m. in the lobby), because the sight is something to see. Rivers of red-brown and hard clots drop to the floor and run down the drain. The sight is not enough to make Alex feel sick, not anymore, but it is unpleasant, he'll admit that.
Brian is less unbothered. "Alex. Jesus."
"Stop looking at it, then."
-
Alex and Brian clear out of the truck stop and buy some new shirts on the way; Alex hopes to God that the cashier won't call the police, because he had to ditch the bloody shirt in the trash by the showers, and "it's fine, it's mostly my blood" isn't a great defense, especially not for Alex, who's had footage of his crimes uploaded to the internet already. Onwards.
Alex and Brian, decked out now in the ugliest fucking shirts Alex has ever seen, manage to catch a taxi that Brian fishes out a handful of tens from his wallet for. He's fucked anyways, he rationalizes. Doesn't matter if he spends all his money on a cab ride to his apartment.
Brian curses and points out that they should have bought phone chargers or external batteries at the truck stop or at least plugged in for a bit when they make it up to Alex's door and he fumbles for his keys. Alex heaves a sigh of relief when the key still works; nobody new's moved in, although he's definitely fallen behind on his rent, and he can plug his phone in and use his computer, finally.
Nausea seeps in when he realizes how long he's gone without a camera. Too late to think about that now, though. He turns on his computer while Brian starts to dig through his fridge full of expired food, shakes his head when Brian opens an old carton of milk and smells it.
It's September 28th. He's been gone for three months or so. Well. Not gone so much as dead, but there's no use dwelling on that.
Alex looks up at Brian, who's now checking in the cabinets for dry food. "There's a jar of peanut butter on the left side."
Brian looks up at him, gives him a thumbs up, and grabs the jar before dropping down onto the couch near Alex, kicking his feet up onto the other side. "So why are we alive?"
Alex shrugs. "You think I know? All I remember is waking up in a ditch by the interstate covered in my blood with a dead cell phone. I can't even see, I haven't had glasses in months."
Brian laughs and frisbees the lid of the peanut butter jar at Alex. It bonks into the side of his head. "Fine, then, let's pretend it didn't happen."
"I didn't say I'm gonna do that."
-
"Well, that was a fucking waste of time," Brian says through a mouthful of peanut butter. "Now all we know is you didn't actually kill Jessica and Tim is just, like, fine. We have no clue where he is."
"It was the only lead I had," Alex replies, and he groans and pops his back when he stands up to go rifle through his cabinets to find food as well. He thinks there might be a box of Grape Nuts hiding somewhere on one of the shelves, and he's starting to realize how hungry he is. The tap rattles to life as he runs water into the bowl of cereal, and Brian lets out a shocked, disgusted sound.
"Are you putting water in your cereal? You're an animal."
"You're drawing the line at my cereal habits?"
-
Alex and Brian go to sleep in silence.
-
Alex wakes up to Brian kicking him, and he shoots up when he realizes why. In between the blinds, the morning light is shining in through the front window, but there's also somebody outside, and without his glasses Alex has no clue who it is. It could be a cop, or his landlord here to kick him out after several months of no contact, or something worse. Brian gestures for Alex to scurry off into the bedroom, and Alex does so quickly with a quick nod as thanks.
He pressed an ear to the wall to listen to the situation. Brian opened the door, and there was nothing for a long moment, and then Alex hears a faint voice say, "... Brian?"
Alex feels his brain wash with adrenaline. He closes his eyes and slowly reaches to his dresser, where he knows his spare pistol is laying. He closes his hand around the grip and begins to creep forward to the door of his room. If he swings around the doorway, he'll be facing the front door. The safety is off, they'll be right there, he can get rid of them and he'll be safe and they'll be gone and he'll be here, damn it, he'll still be here and they'll be-
Brian's voice breaks through the haze that was starting to build behind his eyes and between his ears. A hand reaches forward and snaps in front of Alex's face.
"Where the fuck did you get another gun?"
"What?" Somebody says from the living room. Alex's hand flexes around the grip of the gun. The trigger rattles.
"Who is that," he asks, voice crushed down in his throat to be a harsh whisper that's barely audible above the hum of the air conditioning.
Brian moves his hand to the gun and takes it by the barrel. "Give me the gun and I'll tell you."
Alex nearly jerks his hand back, but in a moment realizes that the safety being off a single squeeze of the trigger would fire a round into the floorboards and the apartment below his, so he slowly loosens his grip until Brian can ease it away from him and flick the safety on.
"It's Jay. You don't need to shoot him again, right?"
Alex's hands itch for the ounce of protection afforded to him by his worst habit.
-
Alex begins to work through the end of his first anxiety attack since middle school in his living room while Brian microwaves a stale bagel that Alex doesn't even remember buying.
Jay talks while Alex stares at his coffee table. Jay is always talking. Normally, Alex would be fed up with it, but right now it comes as a welcome distraction from the world collapsing around the three of them; everything might be so fucking wrong that the dead are literally coming back to life, but there is one constant and it's Jay's complete and utter inability to shut the hell up and mind his own business.
So when Jay woke up in a similar situation as Alex had, his first thoughts had been something along the lines of "I'm probably closest to Alex's apartment, and if I'm lucky I might be able to get some information from him and if he kills me he kills me," which Alex wants to say is an insane train of thought, but given that Alex's thoughts were about getting his phone charged and getting a different shirt on (fuck, Alex realizes, he's still wearing the awful novelty shirt he picked up from the truck stop), maybe his priorities are actually the misguided ones.
Jay obviously hadn't known that Alex had died, but after seeing Brian in his apartment in the yellow hoodie and then hearing the panicked breaths Alex had apparently been breathing from the hallway, Jay managed to do some mental math and piece together part of what happened. Alex hasn't been able to form words for a few minutes, but Jay's been talking plenty.
Jay looks bad, is the thing. Alex knows he shouldn't judge- God, he needs to shave- but Jay looks as sunken as he did the last time he saw him, with additional bloodstained shirt and bullet hole shaped scar. (He did that, he caused that, he knows. He cannot have time for regret now. There is work to do.) Out of the corner of his eye, he notices Brian turn and see Alex's eyeline resting on the bloodstain on Jay's shirt. Jay hasn't noticed yet; he's too busy rambling and fidgeting in the air with a non-existent camera. Everything fucked him up, didn't it.
Brian saves the situation. "Hey, Jay, you can take a shower here if you want," he says. "I'll find a towel somewhere in the mess."
Alex hadn't even noticed the mess. He lived here- scattered across the floor, pens and markers bleed onto notes and laundry. A gun- unloaded, Alex thinks- sits on a cardboard box in the hallway. The walls by the stove are yellow from grease and smoke staining. The apartment is disgusting. It got bad after Jay's visit, when he stole that tape; something that Alex had blocked out while he was focused on his mission was dragged back into the forefront of his mind.
He can't remember the last time it was this bad. No, literally. He knows it was, he saw the footage from when it was, but that memory does not exist in his mind. He doesn't remember most of the filming, actually. Everything- well, for the most part- after filming is crystal clear, but he can't even recall the face of some of the people on the cast of the student film that managed to ruin his life.
Jay laughs a bit at something Brian said. It's a humorless laugh- it's that apologizing one he always did in college when he showed up late to a hangout or a class.
Alex jumps out of the way as something sails past his head and lands on the coffee table in front of the couch. "Je-sus!" he yelps out, and then he's able to take it in. "Did you just throw a fucking towel at me?"
Brian calls from the hallway- when did he go to the hallway? "Yeah, it's for Jay. C'mon, get out of the way so he can shower."
Alex scoots back on the couch and pulls his legs up onto the seat to clear a way for Jay to-
For Jay to pass him, dirt-covered and blood-soaked. The present crashes into the past Alex had been momentarily reliving. Jay looks at him with his eyebrows knit together like he's already trying to figure something out. No, there's nothing there to figure out, stop putting clues together, stop-
Alex blinks and it's ten minutes later. He knows because Brian is punching his shoulder to get his attention because Jay needs clothes to wear so Alex gets to be the one to make the trek to the dresser in his bedroom and find him a pair of pants and a shirt.
As Alex walks to the bedroom, Brian adds "Preferably one with no bloodstains!"
-
Alex shoves a fistful of half-folded clothes in through the cracked bathroom door.
Jay's voice comes through the door. "You yelled at me to stop. Do you want me to stop looking at you?"
No. "Yes." Alex pinches out, bitter and tired. "You give me a headache. Now put the clothes on and get back out here so we can figure out what the fuck is going on before we get our asses handed to us again."
-
Jay and Alex hang around Brian, who's sitting at Alex's laptop, because as the resident totheark member, he gets to take point on tracking people down.
"I did successfully cyberstalk and normal-stalk both of you for five years," Brian says. Jay looks down and blinks.
"You what?"
Alex remembers suddenly how little of the quote-unquote 'wrap-up' Jay got to see. "Brian was totheark," Alex says, filling him in. "With Tim. And Seth, at the beginning. Brian was the one in the hoodie."
Brian shrugs. "I have a natural talent, I guess. Better than I was at acting."
"You weren't that bad," Jay says, faintly, with his eyebrows down again. "You burnt down my apartment?"
"Nope." Brian says, popping the P. "That'd be Alex."
Jay looks up at Alex and pales. "You were trying to kill me that early?"
"There wasn't a single time after the student film when we talked that I wasn't trying to kill you, Jay," Alex says, splitting his focus between talking and thinking. "It wasn't personal."
"I'm sorry," Jay laughs, "But it kind of feels like it was, considering I was trying to save your life at the time!"
"Your mistake," Alex replies, squinting his eyes at the laptop screen. "You can read that?"
Brian's been looking through hotels along the interstate they saw Tim driving on in his last entry and copying phone numbers to a text file to go through and call. "It's a long shot, but it's the best we have, considering Tim didn't leave us much to go off."
"That was intentional," Alex says. "I've gotta assume he knew there was a chance somebody else would want to try to find him and did his best to remove revealing information."
Jay looks around, cluelessly. "What the hell are you two talking about?"
Brian looks up at Jay. "Oh, right, you haven't seen it. Tim ended the videos on the channel after you died. We can show them to you if you want?"
Alex clears his throat. "If we have to. Or we could focus-"
"Jay's not stupid, y'know, he could have insight we don't."
"You wanna watch the tapes of our deaths again, fine." Alex slams the heel of his hand into the back of the chair and crosses the room to pick up his phone. "Go right ahead. I'll just be over here actually trying t-"
Jay tilts his head and holds up a finger. "Shut up, hold on, let me think, I don't need the videos. It was on the interstate going south out of here, right? I wouldn't have gone out of state. I think I would have stopped at a motel far away and then turned back around and come back, at least partially. It makes it seem like you're leaving the state, throws people off of your trail. Then you can just come back and lay low. Look for places in town or just out of town."
Alex stares at Jay, both in shock at having been shushed that abruptly and at the strangely confident and competent way Jay talked about something absolutely insane and outside of an ordinary experience.
Brian clicks his tongue and does a finger gun. "We needed a hiding expert, not a seeking expert. Hotels and motels in town or on the interstate going north to south within, what, 100 mile radius?"
Jay nods. "That's where I would have started looking for a place to stay. And Tim and I were pretty similar in that regard. If not much else."
-
The search turns up a lot of hotels, but it's less than the original idea of every hotel on the interstate. Alex makes calls, Jay checks the activity on his Twitter (without updating it, obviously), and Brian continues to take inventory on the non-molded food hiding in the various cabinets of Alex's abandoned apartment.
Eventually, some things do come up. Brian finds a can of tuna and a bag of Chex Mix, Jay finds a thread started by some of the people he was in contact with during the channel's operation, theorizing on what happened at the end, and Alex finds a motel that had a Tim Wright booked for a few weeks, although he ended up leaving early. It's better than nothing.
It's better than nothing, which means Brian decides it's time for a break. Everybody gets a third of a can of tuna and a handful of Chex Mix, and Brian lies down on the couch in a way that completely stops Jay and Alex from sitting on it at all. Alex would think he's doing it on purpose if he had any idea why he would be. Jay ends up sitting in front of the laptop and Alex ends up clearing shit off of a spot on the floor where he can sit down and stab a fork into canned fish and pretend he's normal for twenty minutes until it's back to phone calls and hunting down Tim Wright and yes, he died, but did anything fucking change?
Alex hisses to himself when he bites down on a forkful of tuna a little too hard and the reverberation rattles in his teeth. Jay turns to look at him. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine." Alex picks up a rye chip from his pile of Chex Mix. "These are shit. That's all."
"Well, give them to me, I like them. You can have my pretzels."
"I don't want your pretzels," Alex bites out. It comes out harsh and sour. It's a weird tone for a statement about pretzels to take. It even drags a laugh out of Brian.
"Just take the man's pretzels, they're not gonna kill you. Unless you've got some kind of deadly allergy you've failed to tell us about."
"If I had a deadly allergy to pretzels you'd probably be a lot better off," Alex says, and begrudgingly scoots closer to Jay so they can trade pretzels for rye chips. "I'm just. Whatever, it doesn't matter."
"You need to shave," Brian says, a few minutes later. "Your goatee looks like shit, you look homeless."
Alex flips Brian off and swallows a mouthful. "Yeah, I was homeless. I might still be, depending on how long it takes for the landlord to notice I'm back in here."
Through a mouthful of tuna, Jay mumbles "to be fair, your landlord didn't notice me breaking in here," and Brian snorts.
"Yeah, there's that. I'm not sure Sandra's the most attentive person out there."
Alex straightens his back and chokes on a piece of rice Chex. "You know my landlord's name?"
"Yeah, stole a key from her. S'how I got that birthday tape."
"Happy birthday, dear Alex," Jay mumbles, absentmindedly. "That scared the shit out of me when I saw it. Jesus."
"Scared the shit out of you?" Alex says, somehow even managing a laugh, though it comes out stilted and weird, unused for so long. "HA. Imagine how I felt."
-
Alex blinks awake first the next morning, before the sun is up, and he stands up and walks slowly to the window. He's spent a long time being paranoid about what's on the other side of these blinds, but right now, all he sees are streetlights and a glimmering dawn.
He knows he doesn't deserve this, but he's okay with taking it for now. The sun comes up slowly over the cityscape, and the sky changes from black to orange to purple to blue, and the night turns into a hazy morning. Jay wakes up, and if he hears Alex, crying under his breath, he's polite enough not to say anything.
-
They find a motel Tim stayed at two days of nearly non-stop work later, and they pray to God he'll still be there when they arrive.
He's not.
-
The three of them live out of Jay's beat up car for a week or so, stopping in at cafes to use the internet or charge their phones. They ransacked Alex's apartment, took all of the food and unstained clothing they could find, and left that building, hopefully for the last time. They shower at the truck stop when they remember to, they ration their food and eat very little, and they sleep sitting upright in the car.
And they find Tim's new apartment. They've been desperate to find him, so desperate they've been living out of a car and eating trash trying to conserve their money for the drive to wherever it is. Tim's apartment complex is right on the edge of town, and as soon as they locate it, Jay wants to start driving.
Brian stops him. "Not to spoil the excitement, but are we sure we want to drag Tim back into this?"
"Drag him into what?" Jay says. "We've been sleeping in a car for a week and nothing's happened. Nobody's been following us around, none of us have seen that fucking-" Jay locks up and stops talking for a moment before sucking in a breath and thumping the steering wheel with his hand. "It's fine. We need to find Tim."
-
The drive is uneventful. The part where they knock on his door is the stressful part. They actually do spend a few minutes in the parking lot trying to decide who has to stand where so that Tim doesn't immediately shut the door in their collective face; they end up deciding on Brian and Jay in the front, with Brian in front of the door and Jay to the side further away from the window, and Alex behind Jay, but not so far behind that he's visible.
It's not the best plan, Alex will admit. What were they supposed to do, though? Call ahead?
The three of them get out of the car and their plan is immediately thrown out the window when Brian realizes (and communicates to Alex and Jay via shoulder punch) that Tim's door is already open and Tim is standing in the doorframe, staring down at the three of them.
"No," Tim shouts. "Stay down there. I'll come to you in a second."
The door slams, and Alex stands around uselessly, staring at a second floor closed door from the first floor parking lot, squinting to see.
Brian blinks and shrugs. "Guess we're waiting."
-
"You guys didn't consider what would happen if I came to the door and saw Jay's car?"
Jay's hands come up to the front of his chest and fidget with nothing. "We thought we'd at least make it to your door."
"You're handling this surprisingly well." Brian looks relaxed, at odds with the situation.
Tim looks up and gestures vaguely. "Well, it's gone, and you three aren't the first to come back, so. What the hell else am I supposed to do, run screaming?"
"We're not the first?" Alex asks, standing behind the other two and having to lean a little to the side to see Tim from behind Jay. "Who was the first?"
Tim looks Alex over with an expression halfway between a sneer and a glare, taking in the full look Alex has been saddled with by circumstance. His face goes from disgust to mocking judgment in record time. "... This," Tim says, gesturing to the area around his own chin and mouth, "is not good. You look like the mugshot of a guy who robbed three convenience stores with a hunting rifle. And the roll tide shirt's not helping."
Alex drops his head into his hand and rubs his thumb along the bridge of his nose. "That's not even remotely an answer. Thanks." He spins around and walks to the trunk of the car to lean against it.
He can still hear the conversation perfectly clearly from here, but it looks like he's too mad to pay attention. This is intentional.
"So what, he's on our side now?" he hears Tim ask.
And Jay: "He's been trying to help figure out what's going on. We've been trying to give him space."
To which Brian replies with some joke about Alex needing space more often than helping, and then the conversation moves back to the actual matter at hand.
Jay asks Tim Alex's question again, and gets an actual answer this time: firstly, Jessica had actually died, when Alex left her to, and her return was a resurrection, the same as the others, and secondly, Seth had already come by one of Tim's motels to check in on him, despite being long dead by Alex's recollection. The second time he killed him was still far before he killed Jessica; he must have come back and laid low for a while.
Brian and Jay ask a few more questions, but Alex tunes them out to think; halfway through thinking, he loses himself in the wrong thoughts. He supposes once you've established one way of distracting yourself from reality it's not easy to stop, and Alex finds himself reminiscing on his college days again, against his will. It's only when Brian yells at him that he snaps back into reality.
"Did you hear what I said?"
"No. And if I had I probably would have done something about it." Alex comes back around to Jay's and Brian's sides. "What?"
"Tim invited us in on the condition that we don't bring your expired food into his apartment."
"What?" Alex asks, and looks around- Tim is back at the door to his apartment. "Like, to stay?"
"It's a probationary period," Tim calls down. "Now get your clothes and come up here before I change my mind."
-
Alex, Jay, and Brian move in with Tim. It's uncomfortable at first and does not get better for a long time, and Alex will admit that it's mostly because of him.
Not that he's actively trying to make things worse. It's just that (for good reason) Tim takes issue with his presence (although he would remind Tim about who killed who if he didn't think it might get him kicked out), so Alex's day to day becomes memorizing Tim's work schedule and synchronizing Tim's time home with Alex's time holed up in the closet with his laptop on research duty.
Alex and Jay are still desperate for an explanation for why nobody involved in the- well, the everything, including the student film, the drama surrounding the student film, the years of Alex's life after the student film, Jay's channel, and stalking Jay- can seemingly stay dead, with Jessica (according to Tim) fully aware that she died and the information she shared on camera being fabricated for safety- Tim hadn't wanted people to track her down after he shut down the channel, which wasn't a bad choice. Alex probably would have hunted down Jessica first if he thought she knew anything. That being said, it does make Alex's head hurt that Tim still refuses to tell them (well, tell Jay, Alex hasn't bothered asking himself) where she is. Jay is a little hurt by this, Alex thinks, likely because of whatever it was that he had with Jessica- they had something, romantic or platonic or whatever. Alex doesn't care.
Alex does care, actually, if only because he feels newly bad about holding the two of them at gunpoint in the middle of the woods now that he's having to actually work with Jay. Their working relationship did kind of fall apart for obvious reasons, but when they're actually trying to work together they're not a bad team. Alex is well-versed in cyberstalking people- a skillset he never would have thought he'd both develop and be proud of, once- and Jay is good at hiding from people who are cyberstalking him, or at least he is now. He was pretty shit at it for a while.
Additionally to all of this, Alex still doesn't have glasses. This is so minor compared to everything else that it shouldn't even register, but it's such an inconvenience at the day-to-day level that it infuriates Alex more than anything else. He keeps misreading shit, all the time, and his handwriting is getting worse by the day- according to Jay, the notes he takes look like they could be in a different language, but Alex wouldn't know, because he can't even read them. Being farsighted is shit, and Alex is fed up with it.
He snaps one day, turning off his brain-to-mouth filter and ranting on and off for something like five minutes about how enraging it is to not be able to see anything no matter what he does. Tim hears this, Alex realizes he hasn't actually mentioned this to Tim, and then Tim leaves the room and comes back maybe three minutes later with Alex's glasses in hand.
"What the fuck," Alex says.
"I found them while I was cleaning everything up. I decided to keep them."
"Why?" Alex takes the glasses from Tim's hand and puts them on, squinting as his eyes adjust for the first time in- God. He doesn't want to think about it.
"Y'know, as a keepsake. We used to be friends."
-
Alex stops reworking his schedule to hide from Tim.
-
There is not a miraculous breakthrough in the case of "Why are the dead up and walking?" Alex is starting to get tired of spending all his time working on something that doesn't actually seem to be helping anything. Even Jay is starting to move on from the obsession, something Alex nearly thought was impossible, because hello, it's Jay. He can't give up an obsession to save his life, and Alex is being deadly literal. There is some kind of illness hard-coded into his and Jay's minds, he thinks, something that fills them with the need to see, and its effects are not kind, longterm.
For one thing, both of them died.
For another thing, Jay does not lose the habit of holding his hands to his chest like he's changing the focus on a chest-mounted-camera that does not exist. Alex never developed that particular issue, but he does have things he does now which he hadn't even noticed until Brian pointed them out to him. He checks to see if he's armed, the sheer existence of the windows in the front room sets his teeth on edge, and he has this habit of swinging first when startled.
So, like, not great, though he's only actually hit somebody once. Jay is still hesitant to get Alex's attention.
-
Tim is warming up to Alex again. Alex is okay with that.
That being said, Tim and Alex getting along does mean Alex's excuse for not shaving- "Tim doesn't want me to use his razors"- is getting worn thin, and he's beginning to worry that if he doesn't get rid of the goatee somebody's gonna do it for him in his sleep.
So he heads into the bathroom while everybody else is out, takes a razor from the little tray they're in, rinses it, and holds the blade up to his face.
Looking at himself in the mirror feels wrong.
His hair has been growing back out, just a little bit shorter than the old floppy haircut he had, and with the glasses back, the only thing that marks him as different (other than the general wear and tear that comes with the years) is this God-awful facial hair. He could shave it off and he'd look just like himself.
Isn't that a fucking thought? Look like yourself.
Alex shaves the scruff without another thought, washes his face, grits his teeth, and takes himself in.
A small part of him that he thought was dead curls up in his chest.
-
Another week in, and Alex remembers Amy.
It's not that he forgot she existed. It's just that in his head, despite knowing full well that he killed her, she is somewhere else, blissfully separate from the Figure and unconnected from the swirling whirlpool of shit that is his life.
He snaps his head up from the laptop when he realizes, and he looks around for the others. He's alone in the living room right now, but he knows at least one of them has to be home. Alex scoots the laptop off of his lap and heads into the kitchen, where Tim is leaning against the counter, holding a mug of coffee in one hand.
"Want some?" he asks, turning to the machine, and Alex blinks, shakes his head.
"Where's Amy? Is she back?"
"Of course she's back," Tim says, pouring another mug of coffee, despite Alex's refusal. "She's been back for a while. She's living with Jessica again, last time I checked in."
Alex turns his head down, stares at the mug being pressed into his hand. "I didn't think to look for her."
"I mean, do you think she wants to see you?"
Alex has to admit that the answer is no. There was a betrayal in every life he took, but it was more with her. "She's probably better off without me," he says, looking into the black coffee. "She's definitely better off without me."
"You're not gonna find me arguing," Tim says. "I'll ask if she wants to talk with you, but I can't make any promises. Are you gonna drink that or just keep looking at it?"
"I don't normally take my coffee black," Alex says, voice trailing off at the end of his sentence so it sounds more like 'I don't normally take m... bl...'. His vision is blurry, and he can't blame it on not having his glasses anymore.
Alex was never the most stable of guys. In college he was normal, but that doesn't mean he was good at handling- well, any emotion, really. He used to even be wary of happiness, out of some sense of being undeserving. He learned to take happiness as it came, or at the very least contentment, but that was then. This is now, and now isn't a happy time to be, not when something he doesn't remember how to deal with is creeping up on him from behind, clawing at his back and shoulders and his lungs feel weirdly tight, and something just dripped into his mug-
"Are you crying over coffee?" Tim asks, and Alex snaps back into focus.
"Fuck off," he says, with all the force of a scruffed wet kitten.
"I can get you sugar, you don't have to cry."
"It's not the coffee, dickhead." Alex walks to the counter and sets his drink down, pressing his hands against the edge and squeezing his eyes shut. "I'm fine, give me a second and I'll get my own sugar."
"It's not the end of the world if she doesn't want to talk to you."
"It's not the end of your world," Alex corrects. "I was dating her since high school. She t- she trusted me and I killed her, I k-"
Alex can't see Tim through the everything, but he hears a sigh, and then his glasses are being taken off his face. He wants to protest, but his throat is closing up, and his face is burning, and his head is starting to pound. His mug is moved away from right in front of him, set off to the side along with his glasses, which are clean now, and the cupboards are opening and shutting.
"How much sugar do you take?"
Alex makes a strangled noise that doesn't sound anything like a word in the English language.
"I'll add a teaspoon. You can add more if it's not enough. Creamer? ... I'll do another teaspoon, actually."
Alex heaves a sigh and forces air back into his lungs. He feels gray at the edges. Like a vignette.
"Two," he crackles out.
"Two teaspoons of creamer? This is a blonde roast, you're gonna lose a lot of complexity," Tim says, but he adds the creamer anyways, and Alex takes in a long, slow breath through his nose, shakes his head to clear the fog, and washes his face in the kitchen sink.
He puts his glasses back on after a moment, takes the coffee, and takes a sip. He's had cups of coffee since coming back to life, but none that tasted as good as this one. So he and Tim stand in the kitchen, leaning against the counter next to each other, drinking coffee, and Alex begins picking at the threads in his brain that are hanging loosely off the edge of the knot.
-
Amy does want to talk to him, but over the phone. He understands- he's disarmed if he's far away, and that makes him safe. Because he's not safe.
Anyways, Alex finds this out literally moment-of, when Tim hands him his phone and says "It's for you," and Alex takes the phone and holds it up to his ear, and Amy says really quietly-
"Alex? You there?"
Alex does not respond.
In college, when the two of them lived towns away from each other, too far to make it a regular drive, Alex and Amy's relationship was built on phone calls. He used to build his day around being able to make a regular phone call at the end of the day to talk to Amy. The sound of her voice, quiet over the phone, is enough to knock him back in time, remind him of-
"Alex, are you zoning out again?" Amy asks, and Alex's mouth goes dry.
"A little bit," he says, quietly, trying not to sound too fond or too cold, desperate for this conversation to end later rather than sooner. "Um. Hey."
"Hey," Amy says back. She doesn't sound fond or cold either. The two of them must be walking the same line here.
There's a void in the conversation, where Alex and Amy silently sit at opposite ends of a phone call, and then Amy starts "So-" at the same time Alex says "I'm s-", and then both of them break off.
Tim squeezes his eyes shut, stands up, and leaves the room. After another moment, Alex tries again. "I'm sorry."
"You're sorry," Amy says, almost hollowly. "For what? Killing me?"
There's no graceful way to apologize for killing somebody, so Alex falls quiet again, doesn't respond, and then Amy sighs.
"I get it."
"What?" Alex says. "What do you mean y- huh?"
"I- I don't mean I get what it's like to kill somebody. I know nothing about that, I don't get it at all. I just mean... I get that everything now is hard. And confusing."
"Yeah, that's... that's one way to put it."
"Did it work?"
"What?"
"Tim told me why you killed us. Did it work? Did the tall guy stop showing up?"
Alex's voice catches in his throat, and he swallows, clears it. "I... maybe. I haven't seen it since."
"So it worked." Amy is quiet for a moment, and then she clears her throat, and the sound makes a little crackle over the line. "Would you do it again?"
"No," Alex says, with no hesitation. "I- I would never- I didn't want to do it the first time."
"But you did it anyways," Amy says. "What am I supposed to think that means? It doesn't make you safe just 'cause you don't want to do it. 'Cause you did do it."
"I know," he says, after a moment. "I'm not... I don't want to act like it didn't matter. It's fine if you don't want to talk to me ever again. If this is our last phone call."
"I... I didn't say that," Amy says, but there's no real warmth to the words. Alex feels a little scratch at the back of his head. "We can call again."
"I'd like that," Alex says, and he means it, he isn't lying, but the air in the conversation is starting to chill, and he's starting to think that despite what they're saying, this is going to be the last time they ever speak.
-
It's not. Amy calls again, this time to Alex's phone, and the two of them talk about something shallow for half an hour- Amy talks about her coworkers, Alex mumbles shit back about living with the others, and then they hang up, and they had basically gone through their old routine from school, but it doesn't feel right anymore.
They keep it up. Maybe eventually it'll start to feel better.
-
There's a deep exhaustion that rolls through Alex every now and then. He's getting better at keeping himself upright now, but that doesn't mean it's not hard, doesn't mean that that day in the kitchen was the last time he had to lean against a counter and cry. But it's easier. Part of what helps is that there's a sort of routine that they've all put together. Tim works a day job, and everybody else's schedules are sort of wrapped around that. On the days when he's at work, Brian goes out, and Jay and Alex stay home. They actually manage to work out a way to work on the workdays- set up through Tim's bank account info and identity, Jay and Alex do data entry now, and as a way to supplement Tim's income to offset the cost of housing and feeding three extra people it's not bad. On Tim's days off, everybody stays in, and on Fridays in particular they clean. Four people is a lot for a one-bedroom apartment, but they make it work, and barring the days like the ones when Brian is less of a chill roommate who likes to take it easy and more of an on-edge, animal wreck, nearly rabid from fear, the type of Brian who grabs Alex's arm and digs his nails in so hard he draws blood, they all manage to work around each other pretty well. It's almost like a well-rehearsed dance.
Which is why it's so disruptive when on a Thursday evening, at around eight, with no warning, there's a knock on the door, and Tim answers it to find Seth.
Alex considers trying to escape the situation and hide in the hallway, but before he can even move the bowl of dry cereal off of his lap, Tim and Seth are already moving into the room. Alex watches Jay look up and raise his eyebrows, his eyes bouncing around Seth's face, and then Jay looks distraught, confused, and despite Alex not being the best at reading facial language, he's pretty sure he knows what's happening here.
Alex leans closer to him, mumbles "It's Seth. The cameraman."
Jay turns to him, still confused for a moment, and then his shoulders set, and he looks back at Seth with recognition in his eyes. Seth darts his eyes away. "You're totheark," Jay says, flatly.
Seth nods and tilts his head to the side a little. "Uh, yeah. Technically."
"Don't 'technically' me, I already know. You, Brian, and Tim were totheark. You cyberstalked me, on occasion you actually stalked me."
"It's n- it's more-" Seth laughs nervously. "It's more complicated than that, I think."
"In what way."
"It's- I- I had a good reason?"
"Not that it worked out for you," Alex pitches in, and Jay rolls his eyes. "What?"
Seth looks at Alex, and underneath that kind of awkward demeanor that Seth's always had, there's this intensity that Alex finds a little too much to keep seeing. Alex looks away. "I had a good reason," Seth reiterates.
"Alright, I get it," Alex says, pulling his chest in, trying to take up less physical space. Makes for a smaller target. Not that he thinks Seth is likely to attack him in Tim's living room, especially since he hadn't already done it, but instincts are instincts, and Alex's instincts are telling him to do his best to avoid getting hit by one of the two men currently in the room who used to live in the woods and act with the sole interest of killing him.
Brian tosses a grape at Seth, who fumbles for a moment before catching it against his shirt. "Tim got Alex in the end, dude. Like, Tim. Not wearing the mask."
"Y- really?"
-
"So. Your apartment is, like, a half-way house for the risen dead?" Seth has started to settle, leaning against the wall and kicking a leg up.
"Well, kinda. Halfway house implies they're gonna move out."
Seth looks around the room and gestures vaguely. "Aren't they? It's kind of a small place for four people."
"Well- Alex can't really go anywhere, he's a wanted fugitive." Alex does a little wave to the two of them, not taking his eyes off the laptop screen. "Jay could probably figure something out legally, but he's not in the best place mentally."
"I'm fine," Jay mumbles, around the fingernails on his left hand that he's started to chew. Alex bats his hand down away from his mouth. Jay looks down and frowns. "Sorry."
"And Brian is, um. Well. You know."
Seth awkwardly crosses his arm over his chest, and Brian snorts.
"I'm fine right now, you don't need to beat around the bush." Brian kicks his feet up onto the coffee table. "I'm fucked up, dude."
Seth darts his eyes to the side, wrinkles his nose. "Yeah, uh-"
"Don't bother apologizing, none of us were gonna get out normal."
Tim shrugs. "It's the best we can do right now, and we're making it work."
-
Seth and Brian are in largely the same boat in terms of lingering issues. They start to feed off each other in the worst ways. On one of the worse days Alex can name off the top of his head, Brian actually drew blood swatting at Seth, which seemed to trigger something weird in him, and the two of them had to be dragged away from each other. (Tim pulled Seth away, Alex hooked his arms under Brian's to hold him still. Alex has the little scratch marks to prove it.) Brian and Seth are almost always normal, but their bad days are bad.
Not that Alex is just fine, but. At least he isn't attacking the others.
As long as we're not counting his reflex when he's startled.
-
Time continues to march on. Everybody is a bit fucked in the head, but most of the time they can handle it. The routine doesn't actually change that much with Seth's reintroduction into the group. They have to change things a little bit, because it turns out Seth has a major issue with the sound of the fridge ice maker, which Alex does have to admit makes a pretty bad noise, but once they figure out a way to stop the ice maker from constantly making a racket, Seth slots into the routine with almost no effort. He and Brian (when they're not beating the shit out of each other for no reason other than having been stuck with each other for years made them crazy) are basically a dream team when it comes to the rehearsed song and dance of deep-cleaning the living room.
So it takes Alex a while to figure out why he's been getting paranoid again.
It hits him like a fucking freight train when he realizes there's only one person he hasn't heard from or seen that was involved in the making of Marble Hornets (and by extension, was killed by him). Sarah. Where the hell is Sarah.
He does ask Tim, who, amazingly, has no clue. He assumed Sarah was either dead permanently or after coming back she disappeared for good. "Worst comes to worst, you have another crime added to your wanted poster," Tim offers, but Alex is not comforted.
Partially because that's a really uncomforting sentiment, but he understands the idea- it's not likely that Sarah, who, as far as Alex is aware, was never involved in any of the several stalking and cyberstalking subplots related to the group, would end up hunting anybody down, least of all Alex, who would be from her perspective the last person she ever saw, and from there it's not really hard to piece together he might be responsible for her death.
She's one of the ones he didn't actually, like, shoot, though, so maybe she wouldn't get there. Maybe she'd come to the same conclusion Jay did when he first watched the tapes, that Alex was a victim, a guy who was wrapped up in something beyond his control. The thought is not comforting.
-
The worries do not get resolved. There is no magical moment when Sarah shows up, Alex gets a conclusion on what happened to everybody, and she either heads back to her old life or decides to stay with them or with Jessica and Amy.
Sarah is never seen again, at least by this group. The most they have of her is video uploads of tapes she was on from years ago.
-
It's the middle of the night when Alex microwaves himself a plate of pizza rolls, heads into the main room where Brian, Jay, and Seth are all sleeping, sits down on the couch with the laptop, and decides to get an early start on his share of the work today. He's almost begun working when he hears a tap at the window.
Several things happen in very quick succession.
Firstly, Alex flashes through several scenarios in his head, each one more horrifying than the last, starting with raccoon and taking a detour through human attacker and landing finally on the capital-f Figure. Secondly, Alex realizes he's unarmed, completely helpless, and the Figure will not have any trouble getting in should he try. Thirdly, Alex in his panicked fear fumbles his plate of pizza rolls, and it lands on the hardwood, making contact with a loud crash that both leaves painfully hot pizza sauce and shards of glass strewn at his feet and wakes up the other three in the room. Fourthly, Jay sits up, confused, and looks around, before looking at the window, and, despite the blinds being down, seems to understand, and pales in shock, and there's nothing anybody in the room can do until-
Finally, Alex blinks awake, disoriented in the mid-morning light. Brian is asleep, leaning against him, drooling on his sweater. Alex crinkles his nose and pushes Brian away, and Brian snorts and and blinks awake before rolling his eyes and mumbling an apology for drooling on his clothes.
"It's fucking gross, dude," Alex says, but Brian is already asleep again, leant now against the arm of the couch. Alex rolls his eyes and gets off the couch, turns to look at the window.
There's nothing but pale blue sky and spring-yellow sun streaming in.
-
It goes like this: world-shattering tragedies happen all the time, and afterwards, you pick your shit up and keep moving.
Jay is neurotic, seemingly always on the verge of a panic attack. Tim can keep a steady job for now, but circumstances change, and things might fall apart again. Brian and Seth are never going to be normal, after they spent years lying in wait in the woods. Amy and Jessica have struggled hard to get their lives back in some semblance of order. Alex is going to carry his weight with him for the rest of his life.
Sometimes, though, getting to stay alive is worth it. Sometimes life itself is enough reason to keep living.
We always carry our past with us. And then we build something out of it.