smoke signals. | self para.
Dimming lights spun in the background, a beautiful wooden desk curved around him and a chair with enough wear for a lifetime beneath him. Folders piled up but they all had their order, no space for clutter in a world where chaos had become a normal part of the day. Sad blue eyes flickered over words that never really meant anything to him. For all of the love that he tried to reinvent inside himself, he would never love the students of Whittemore like he had loved his classmates, with such ferocity that it had killed him more than once. Literally in some cases.
He had been an angel, a distorted ray of sunshine that’s light had burnt him from the inside out, scorching him for so long that he hadn’t realised he had nothing left. The years of complete darkness and alcohol had been the very worst and now he sat there with the knowledge that a bottle of unopened whisky lay in his draw waiting to comfort him if he needed it but he was too lost in his own thoughts for even that. So many years trying to tell the others what to do, put them back on the right path, begging and bargaining for second chances for them all had come to an end that surprised even him and when he closed his eyes he still remembered that cold crisp night as Whittemore burned down once more and he lay there, impaled and bleeding to what he had almost hoped, was his death. The night he had made them promise, lording his own mortality over their heads, that they would never return. A sad laugh left his lips as he looked around the office that now belonged to him, risen from the ashes was the exact thing he had tried to present and his gaze fixed on the picture of Charles that hung on his wall as a beacon, a reminder, that he would finally be the one who would realise that trying to rewrite the past would only make the present inevitably worse in the long run. Nothing ever really changed.
The ticking of the clock was the only sound as time went by, he had heard the footsteps retract, the whispering disappear. He had figured out already that Bea would have drank herself to sleep or at least gone to bed miserable. Justin and Rose had finished their hallway patrol of his office in the hopes they would go undiscovered but he always knew. He knew everything, and with that omniscient knowledge came power that he never wanted. He finally understood, in depth he had never wanted to, exactly how Charles French had felt.
He pulled out the bottle of whisky without a second thought but clumsy alcoholism had passed him a few years prior to now and as he unscrewed the lid, he simply made his way over to Charles portrait and found that the mans sad eyes stared right back at him. “I guess you were right about one thing, Charles,” he raised the bottle, “You didn’t need to give me a going away gift, you gave me your life.”
The fractured whirring. He woke up on his desk and the time read twelve, although he already knew it was around that. He had moved out most of the children, built their houses far enough away for this to just be a light sound but every night it got worse. It was hungry.
He held his secret tight, and even though he had told himself that he wouldn’t keep anymore to protect others, the little part of him that was still there, a part of the old TJ, had forced him to. He tried to block out the memory of the note that Jonah had left for Bea, the way that she had cried and the happiness she had found had come to disintegrate and all the while she thought he might come back but he knew better. He knew that he would never come back because his memory was filled with the image of him dissolving into that blue light before his very eyes and disappearing for good. And in all the time they had been here, he had never quite figured out where or when those people would turn up again and in this case he was willing to think they might never do so at all -- wasn’t it better to have hope than to have nothing? He had had hope once and he would of paid any amount to find it again.
“Tyson,” the voice came out of nowhere. Tyler.
“You’re here,” his arm moved, knocking over the open bottle but he didn’t bother to move it as alcohol seeped through paper in it’s sticky brown colour, blurring words and connotations. Keys pulled from a draw without a second thoughts.
Tyler didn’t speak. He was quiet and pale, the shadow of a man. He had been that way since the day that he had seen the fate of Seth McClain. They had both done their best to forget that day but the reality was, they never would. Each step they took closer, the sound intensified, until it was as loud, louder than it ever had been before and beneath the door of the basement was that blue light, spilling out.
“Move back,” he said in a low voice, knowing well that Tyler was probably as far away as possible. He could say a lot of things about the people who had came to peer before, the ones that were already... gone. But they had never been shy. He was still tormented by the way Seth had stood there enveloped, swallowed whole by the entity that they had all protested to create all those years ago and still he did not understand... why now? “Here goes,” a dry comment to a silent man, a man left with the burden of children that he hadn’t expected with the added sadness of his best friend’s death and a child that had dropped into a slumber like death that nobody knew how to fix.
The chain, heavy as it was, clunked onto the ground with a mighty thud and it didn’t take hands to move the door because something that had never happened before happened then. They flew open. It was blinding. Stronger than ever. He stumbled backwards into the wall shading his eyes from the monstrosity that he spent his life guarding, “Ty--” he began but when he turned to look at the end of the corridor, he was horrified to see that the other man was already glowing, being absorbed by the light.
Instinctively he tried to shove the doors back shut but the force was too strong. He had been fighting losing battles his entire life but this time he felt weaker than ever and his fingers cut against the metal door handle as he tried to close them again, blind to what he was trying to do. When they finally swung shut he collapsed breathless against them, but Tyler was gone and all that was left to prove he had ever been there was his legacy and now, five not four orphans. The lock was heavy in his hands but the whirring stopped and with a deep breath he shut his eyes to try and banged his head against the shut doors. He should of never opened them, he should of said no.
The sound stopped. It had been fed. “Oh God. Please help me.”
He sat there all night, and when morning came... He sat there some more. He did not return to his office.
Heavy feet picked himself up and he threw the doors open, something he had never done before. But, the light had receded, just a small speck that never seemed to disappear from a machine that two young women he had once known had built thinking they could fix the world.
“What do you want?” He was helpless. “I don’t understand what you want from me. From us. What the hell did we do in our entire lives to deserve this?”
He was talking into a void, he had seen his Father disappear into it and had now seen more than one of his classmates do the same to end up wherever they were wanted, but as he knelt there, staring into a light that he had classified years ago as being evil, he didn’t know what to do. More than that, he didn’t understand why it hadn’t taken him. When it had the choice, it had chosen Seth over Tyler and Tyler over him. There were rules. Rules that were beyond him, it was driving him insane.
He picked the keys back up and when he left, the chain came back across. Although he knew, in his heart, that wouldn’t stop it.
A voice. “Where have you been?”
“Busy,” he turned to face Justin with tired eyes but the sadness was gone, and as he walked by, he brushed his shoulder on the way back up to the staircase, thankful that at least for now he could keep his secret from the rest of them that lived under this roof. He didn’t need another generation of damaged children trying to play with fire, in a metaphorical or literal sense.
He didn’t notice that Tyler’s ID bade still lay on the ground at his feet, or that...
“Ty,” there was uncertainty in his tone, “Your leg... you’re not limping...”
He didn’t stop. He hadn’t noticed until that moment that it was true.
His face was red by the time he got to his room. He didn’t know whether to be angry, confused or overjoyed. The clouds of darkness that had been around him for years felt like they were easing away but he didn’t know why, he didn’t want them to. It felt like something inside him was undoing itself and that was a scarier thought than all the pain he had experienced throughout his life.
He tore his blazer off and then his shirt, buttons popping open and off onto the floor and when he looked at his chest the breath was knocked out of him. “It’s gone,” he breathed and his hands searched as if slapping against his skin, running across it would bring back the scar that had changed his life forever, that had almost killed him for the very last time. He felt robbed. Was that strange? To miss something that almost destroyed you. He stumbled back to sit on the edge of his bed, body crumpling over, head in hands as he shut his eyes tight. “This isn’t how it works.”
Twelve. There was the sound.
It had been days since he had heard it last this loud. He got up from his bed, a cold sweat on his forehead. Something felt wrong.
Footsteps. He hadn’t heard them in a while. Not this late.
He opened his door, his face stern and ready to ward away whoever it was, he didn’t need people running around outside at night but his mouth opened and shut when he came face to face with the person. His throat was dry, his fingers clenched so hard into his hand that it might have hurt if he hadn’t been reeling in his own shock, blue eyes widened in sheer horror at the face staring back at him and when finally he managed to speak, it was a low dry croak, “...Hazel.”
There was glitter on her face, in her hair, little stars painted on her cheek and she smiled like she’d smiled that night and suddenly he was back there and it all felt so distant but real. The way she tilted her head as if he was the one in the wrong place at the wrong time, the way she spoke. He couldn’t hear the words, he was too confused to hear a thing she said. She was dead. She was here, but she was dead.
She turned away, and she was walking, walking away from him. He knew it couldn’t be real but his heart was beating so fast that he couldn’t control himself, adrenaline rushed though his body and he was chasing her as she ran and before he knew it, they were there all over again, on the roof. “Please, don’t,” he let out the plea, but just like before he was standing there and watching and she was looking at him, like she wanted him to see, hair blowing in the wind, the same slick smile on her face as she took a step onto the edge. “No!” he shouted, but as he skidded against stone and caught her hand, he already knew how this all ended and this time there was nobody there to stop it.
“Let go,” she instructed him, trying to untangle her fingers from his, “Let me go.”
So he did. And he didn’t look down. He turned away and sat there in the darkness trying to figure out why it seemed that he would be haunted for his entire life by things that he could never change.
“It’s gone,” he rammed the door open, swaying into the doorway. A miserable expression on his face, eyes sparkling with misery that was both new and old, painted across his face in a thousand shades of the same emotion. He sunk down to the ground and it was the first time in over ten years that he had felt so completely hopeless and resigned, pain panged through him like it was fresh when he knew it had been over thirty years ago.
“Ty,” Justin jumped out of his bed, confused, it was so late and so unusual, “Talk to me, what’s gone?”
When the other man crouched by his side he stared into his dark eyes trying to remember the last time they had shared anything this important, or anything at all of meaning. It had been so much easier to be at each other’s throats or for him to just ignore him and pretend that nothing was missing from his life when in fact everything was. He took a salty gulp because he may not have been crying but his eyes were stinging as he rose the top of his shirt to show that the scar that had once lay there had disappeared as if it had never happened. “This.”
They looked at each for a few long moments, sitting there on the ground, neither of them sure what to say.
“Something’s wrong. You have to promise me... Never go downstairs. Never again, Justin. Something bad is happening at this school and I...” saw Hazel. No. He didn’t say it, “Need you to promise.”
“Okay,” Justin was hesitant, “I promise.”
“Good,” TJ blinked. This was real. This was really happening. This was the part of life that existed and he didn’t understand the rest but maybe that was okay, maybe he never had. Reassuring himself didn’t make himself feel any less sick though, and when he stood up, his shirt fell to cover his now perfect torso and he collapsed on Justin’s bed. He’d never even been in this room, in all the years that had passed he’d never found himself here, but now he stared at the ceiling and tried to imagine a world where their lives hadn’t been so screwed up. Where maybe things had been okay for more than a few weeks at a time. “Come here,” he gestured without even looking up, only waiting for the space beside him to be filled.
The room was dark, there was something comfortable about the silence, something that was different than the isolation he had promised himself would start to feel okay at the very beginning. But alcohol, bad TV and misery, had never been the best company.
“You’re the love of my life, you know,” he said quietly, not moving from his position.
There was a short silence, “I know.”
