NOTE TO SELF

He drinks from a coffee cup that says may contain vodka. It's not his. He doesn't remember making the coffee, but he's glad that some version of him seems to have had the forethought.

didn't you start it?

like blue lightning in the brain. the kind of anger, sudden, that makes you laugh—unbelievable! the stumble, and then after, you look around hoping no one sees.

the seconds are moving on without him, and so are the feelings, and he is left to finger-trace the ink blot memory of them. or lack of.

he picks up a blank piece of paper from theo's desk, smells it. hint of lemon.

Time of Theo's inappropriate outburst on ██████ property: 08:58:49.

Time of Control's inappropriate outburst on ██████ property: 09:01:06.

He looks left, looks right.

he catches the tail end of theo's and then the beginning of his own. the rest is blank and now his hands feel clammy. back of his tongue disturbed. he looks at the clock.

MOODBOARD: margot verger & will graham.

@eyeshone + @bluedprints

he ashes into the small amber tray on the sill, inviting her to the empty seat across from him with the other hand.

proboscis. taking in the world by the strawful. which seems like a strange, narrow way of taking in anything. molly is not claustrophobic, but she drinks her water at home directly from the tap, leaning in over the sink, staining her shirt.

she sits.

"but the wing ones? nnnot really. maybe. sitting there i would think there'd be so many in a row... outnumbering me. in reality it was just two or three."

which would outnumber her anyway.

weirdly comforting to think that his and trevor's minds work similarly, and maybe even to similar ends. this is painful, too, the way nostalgia demands to be. as this occurs to him, he flexes the ditch of his elbow against the back of trevor's neck with affection, pulling him deeper under his arm.

chris' breath in his ear pulls out his words like teeth. he'd like to sew his mouth shut. point seven millimeter needle, the ones used for embroidery, stitch up some new things for him to say. something clever and neat, tie neatly down the edges so he won't fray, not-here-not-now.

"but only after i left. the connections, they," he opens the fingers of one hand slowly like an explosion or a sun with its heat spreading out, soaring while looking down at the table below, carnage-to-be, "you, don't just pick things up," he picks something up, "and put it down." to demonstrate, he holds on.

and with his face stiffly pointed forward and down, it falls to the rest of his body to follow the magnetism. he turns a little. he holds on. it's all wood and carpet in the room, quiet tones. neutral grounds, free space. but he is excited about the prospect of ruining something: his other arm snakes over the small of chris' back, in slow motion. he almost tilts his head in hopes to cheat chris' lips to his helix, skip a few steps. trevor setting his own rules, then hating having to play pretend.

theo's pulled the collar of his trenchcoat over his head in a futile attempt to shield himself from the rain. the thud, thud, thud of control's windshield wipers on full speed the only sound beyond the weather ticking away while he weighs up his options, standing dead still in the storm he's been watching creep closer and closer all morning on the radar.

he squints through the mist.

there really isn't a choice.

"you — okay."

begrudging. fine, if you insist.

even in the passenger seat of the car, he holds his briefcase to his chest. might as well be cuffed to his wrist.

a genuine sigh of relief, though it's tacking another link onto the already long chain that is today. he can't fully tell if he feels sorry for him the genuine, or for the version of himself that's in his place, in some other timeline.

but it's enough to crack the passenger door open for him. the dashboard radio bleeds static into his sternum as he leans over, holding his breath. the rain has time to darken the outermost fabric of the car seat before he gets in and closes it: forgive me this. beggars can't be. and all that.

he thinks he's due that, having stumbled into something that shouldn't have happened. they both seem to understand so given how the other man goes to collect the traces of his presence from the room.

“ he just left you here? alone? ”

the reason why this feels wrong is immaterial if it's not up to him; he scans across the living room to the open bedroom doors at the end of the hall—there’s empty graves on the walls where jayne had expected to see pictures. paintings.

all he finds are attempts to scrub jayne’s existence out of christopher’s internal world, smoothed over with plaster where the nails used to be.

sick with the challenge to assert which of them doesn’t belong, jayne turns back, confused and expectant.

like a large dark pool of shadow spreading slow on the floor. dripping, suddenly, from the outside. the real world made it in. everything he wants to explore now requires him to get elbow deep in it, he'll really have to pull it out like teeth. and he can't turn back to the shelves now, he'll only be staring at himself there.

trevor presses the smooth edge of porcelain to his middle chest. cold, too.

"in yourrrr." house. great.

where's the nearest window? will someone cushion his fall? his shirt is still on the floor of chris' bedroom. the wallpaper's changed color. he has to move now or he'll be stuck here and become the furniture. to die here sounded nice a second ago. but jesus christ, this guy is huge.

eden's soul's out there too, easily accessible to all who want to witness it. you get used to it, as the years roll on.

in truth he kind of prefers it to the full thing, and now he feels bad that he's gone out of his way to set himself apart from people, who aren't at all that far removed from him, really, who are really all that he has ever wanted to be, and he's here to see them. was.

(no titular panel this year: he sat in on a discussion alongside a bunch of horror ficlet writers discussing whether jumpscares are transferable to print.)