Prism
""I'll come back for you!" Like a white light suddenly passing through a prism and dispersing into a rainbow, he was washed away by scenes echoing those final moments. Those words spoken again and again before the end of the story itself. Before the end of time, and existence." Or: Jesse makes a promise, Tim has an existential crisis, and Warlin Door offers him a coffee.
Relationship: Tim Breaker/Jesse Faden, Tim Breaker & Warlin Door ♦ Words: 2527
[on ao3] ♦ [read on site]
The motel was a war zone. Where it originally had small ceilings and old cozy yellow wallpaper it now stretched beyond recognition, concrete spilling from the ripped wallpaper; where Tim hadn't been able to count ten bedrooms now he ran past countless doors making a mockery of the hallway. Red light spilling for a second from under the closed doors, except the rooms where he could see inside, an unnatural white glowing from the windows before the red flashed again from out of the corner of his eyes.
"Come on, why're you stopping!?"
"I thought I saw... something."
The red haired woman —Jesse, it still felt so strange to put a name on the face on his dreams— looked at him for a moment before looking behind him to the men... to the creatures that were behind them, and she quickly grabbed his hand to keep on moving. Tim wasn't someone who got self conscious, but he was glad that she didn't look like he was insane, for a change.
"We gotta hurry." She said instead. Tim wanted to think there was an implied you can tell me later, even though they were both fighting for a chance to have that later.
"Where are we going?" He couldn't see an end to the hallway, its muddy walls blending together into infinity. "I'm pretty sure we passed your door already!"
"We're not going to the Oldest House."
"What?"
Her grasp on his hand tightened, and just in that moment the doors at their sides opened violently. Beings that once were human tried to wrap their appendages around them, some of them pulsating with a nasty red light and a noise that made his skin crawl. Jesse cursed, and before he could react she pulled him into a hug, or so he thought. In a second, the warmth of her embrace was replaced by a cold wind hitting his entire body, the dizziness of movement hitting him right after. Holding onto her back and pressing his forehead on her shoulder to steady himself, he almost didn't notice the way they'd left their enemies far behind, when he heard the chain explosions in the distance.
"Fuck..." Sometimes Tim forgot about her abilities. As he took a second to close his eyes and catch his breath he could feel how she dislodged a hand from the embrace to shoot the closest few enemies that didn't die a moment before.
"That probably bought us some time..." Silence, and then, two hands on his arms, keeping him standing. "Hey... you okay?"
"Yeah, yeah, just... gimme a sec." He ignored the coming wave of nausea, the same way he ignored the feeling that he should be used to the motion of slipping through time space like that already. The odd feeling of familiarity making him uncomfortable. Instead, he took a deep breath as he held on to her arms, bracing himself. "You would think that with everything going on I'd get used to this."
A smile peeked through her lips despite the situation.
"Something I've learned is that the world is much stranger than we originally think it is... It's hard to get used to things when something always tops the last weird thing that happens."
Tim laughed.
"Thank God." Jesse looked at him quizzically, and he smiled. "It'd be a pretty boring life if we ever ran out of things to be surprised at. Don't you think?"
Jesse raised her eyebrows, but laughed nonetheless, her eyes shinning in agreement.
"It really would."
Despite his appreciation for the strange —it felt vindicating, in a way, to know he had always been right, that his dreams meant something— Tim also cherished those quiet moments. He had seen her so many times, in dreams, in nightmares, to see that she was real and to be able to pull apart all those misleading visions and actually get to know her meant the world to him.
After what it felt like an eternity their arms disentangled, and she helped him get back on his feet, almost in time for another flash of red to pulsate through the building.
"You remember how this place worked, right?" She asked, a cautious hand wrapping around his wrist and tugging as they walked. Tim remembered what she'd said earlier, that they weren't going to the Oldest House, and what was left of the smile of his face got replaced by a cautious frown.
"Tug the cord three times, if I remember correctly." She nodded, eyes scanning the rows upon rows of doors in a way that made his insides twist. "Jesse."
"Yeah?"
"Where... are we going?"
"Somewhere safe."
"I thought you said we weren't going to the Oldest House."
Her pace didn't falter, but she didn't respond. The telling silence soured his mood immediately, the implication clear, and Tim tried to tug his arm free to not avail. Somewhere, a door opened.
"No."
"Tim."
"There has to be another way."
She finally looked back without stopping, eyes pained, but still looking at him with resolution. The so-called mighty Director made her mind already.
"Look, Tim. Things have been going to shit in the Oldest House lately. It's never been safe there but now it's been too goddamn unpredictable. I can't send you back there without knowing what's wrong in the first place."
"I can go through literally any other door-" The grasp on his wrist tightened.
"Yeah, and risk having you end up in dimension number fuck knows what where the air is poisonous and you slowly turn into a monster? No way!" Something about the way she said that made him wonder if she'd lived through something similar. Her eyes told him everything he needed to know.
Still, the idea of going back to the Dark Place was less than pleasant. He was about to say no again and turn around when something out of the corner of his eyes glimmered, and the sight of a floating man-creature holding a chunk of metal in mid air before throwing it down took the best of him. Before it could hit any of them and before Jesse could react defensively he jumped at her, making sure neither of them get hurt in the process, his body acting like a shield.
The fall did hurt a bit, but she quickly threw part of a wall to the flying man despite his weight on her. Bless telekinesis.
Maybe it was bad luck, or an equally bad omen, that just around the same time when Tim helped Jesse get back on her feet before any other enemy attacked them they both noticed the spiral on the closest door, and before he could either run away or do anything at all, the woman used his surprise to tug him inside. Tim struggled against the closing door in the threshold.
"Tim, please, I—!"
"Jesse, I don't—!"
"I'll come back for you!"
Somehow those words made him stop, looking at her like she'd just knocked the air out of him. Her eyes were wild, but other than that she didn't seem to recognize those words that Tim felt at the tip of his tongue. Her eyes expressed the same pain he was feeling, though.
"I'll come back for you, okay? Now that I know that you're here, I can..." Flashes of red bled through the air around them, doors opening left and right and above, and Tim's grip on the threshold faltered. Jesse looked around in a panic, and then finished pushing him inside the empty room with only a light cord hanging from the darkness, and a painting behind him that he couldn't care less about at the moment. "I promise. As soon as I'm done with this here, I'll come back for you, I will find you," she repeated, eyes pleading, "do you trust me?"
They've only known each other for a couple of days, but Tim knew he would trust her with his life. Regardless, he was too stunned to reply, and Jesse simply took a good look at him before shutting the door closed.
Sounds of fighting muffled by the towering darkness made his skin crawl, but as much as he tried rattling the knob the lock wouldn't budge, and something told him a mere police gun wouldn't be enough against those monsters.
Knocking the door with his forehead, Tim wondered why the situation felt so familiar, before he sighed. Now that the door was closed the only way forward was into the unknown. Resigned and angry, he tugged at the cord. First it painted the room a rich blue, then a golden yellow, and finally, the flicker of a light blue akin the sky drowned his senses, before he was thrown into the most utter darkness. Again.
He tried tugging at the cord again, and again and again, but this time nothing happened. Like a drowning man he threw his arms around in search of a light switch, or a wall, or anything at all inside that oppressive darkness, when he felt a knob underneath his fingers and he turned it in desperation.
When he saw the light again two immediate thoughts occupied his mind.
One, how the Hotel seemed like a perversion of the Oceanview Motel, despite him having known the Hotel for far longer. One could argue that it was impossible to know who came before, or if they were even reflections of each other, but it only made sense.
Two, why the words spoken by Jesse left such an impression on him.
Like a white light suddenly passing through a prism and dispersing into a rainbow, he was washed away by scenes echoing those final moments. Those words spoken again and again before the end of the story itself. Before the end of time, and existence. Abstract terror filled Tim —Jack?— —Shawn?— by the realization, left paralyzed by a dozen questions and a dozen impulses with slight deviations sparking inside of him.
Would he ever see her again? Would he ever come back? Or would he grow old in this place so alien to his reality? Why was that so familiar?
His hair stood on end when he suddenly heard a sound he rarely heard anymore, before forcefully relaxing. It was the sound of coffee being poured in a cup. That could only mean a friend, right?
Walking carefully to the main hall, Tim saw a man he had seen countless times in dreams and nightmares. A face that also looked familiar from seeing it in the city, even though that didn't make any sense. Warlin Door —or... was it Hatch?— sat at the coffee table next to the elevators, pouring not one, but two cups, and then nonchalantly drinking from one of them.
Tim looked at him like everything suddenly stopped making sense. One face, two faces, three personalities, a seemingly unassuming business man with a hidden agenda, the Master Of Many Words ready to destroy him, and... a mystery. He had wanted to ask him so many things across the years, both expectant and dreading the answer, but right now, he could only come up with one thing.
"Does it always end up like this?"
For the first time in Tim's actual life, Door looked at him. The question seemingly surprised him, his eyebrows arching, before flashing a smile.
"Always is a bit of an overkill, don't you think?" His cheery attitude felt jarring against everything that Tim was feeling at the moment. "A bit too... finite."
"And... isn't it? Finite?"
"Of course not. Coffee?" The man pointed at the steaming cup in front of him, and Tim was too lost for words to say anything at all. His body too tired to reach for his gun once again.
"What..." The questions came back exponentially, and a slight migraine threatened to settle on his mind. Holding on to his head, fragmented bits and pieces from lives unlived flashed before his eyes.
"Don't try to take everything in so quick, my friend, we have all the time in the world." He chuckled to himself, before quietly setting down his own cup, and getting up.
Tim tensed when he approached him, the increasing drumming on his head keeping him bolted to the floor as images flood his senses. Jesse skating, and twisting her ankle badly. Jesse diving into the lake. Jesse suddenly older and brittle looking at him like a phantom, like an angel. Jesse getting shot in the middle of her face, as the bullet passes through his skull, unharmed. Jesse...
With a hand on his shoulder, the noise stopped, and Tim was left with his last impression of her, eyes wide, scared yet hopeful, as she saved his life.
"But to answer your question," Door kept talking, "…does a branch always end up looking like every single other branch of a tree?" He smiled, enigmatically. "I'm sure sometimes that's how it ends, a dozen, a hundred times, maybe. Would that be enough for you to stop looking?
"...Can I get a straighter answer?"
"…Sometimes," Door said, slowly, the smile off his face, and Tim wondered why exactly he wasn't as terrified as he felt he should be, "a person dies. And because you only have one life, they remain dead. Sometimes you're given a second chance and you try to fix it, but fail, and because you only have one life, it must mean that every single choice you had would end the exact, same, way."
Tim felt a knot on his throat.
"...But... it doesn't?"
Door smiled. With or without malice, he wasn't sure.
"Of course, sometimes wanting to save them is the very reason why the universe eventually breaks down," Tim froze, as Door hummed, "although whether that's such a bad thing or not, well, I've got my reservations, but I digress."
Taking his hand off his shoulder, Door returned to the couch as some of the images came back, of frozen people, and time overlapping. But his head didn't hurt this time.
"The point I'm trying to make is, even if you could see every life, every timeline, every loop, where one of your loved ones, or even you died, would that that make you stop looking? Stop trying to help?"
Tim looked at him as he picked his coffee cup again, lost for words. Just who was that man, who until that point he thought only wanted to destroy him, yet offered something completely different instead? What exactly was he offering, Tim couldn't say, couldn't even begin to comprehend despite the images that crossed his mind, backing his words. What was his agenda, if any, also remained far from his grasp...
"…No." He eventually answered, truthfully, as he carefully sat in the opposite seat. The only thing Tim knew for sure.
"Good. Now, I'm sure we've got a lot to discuss." Warlin Door smiled, and finally pointed at the steaming cup once again, completely nonchalant of the time that must've passed already in the real world, the outside world, and the multitude of choices and paths that were beginning and ending in that exact moment, mere echoes refracting with every wave of it's surface. "Coffee?"