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Part 11 of Whumptober 2021
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Published:
2021-11-07
Completed:
2021-11-12
Words:
9,440
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3/3
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589
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91,633

Echoes of You

Summary:

Graveyard mud, heavy and dark, clinging to a stained and torn suit. One shoe missing, a leg bent awkwardly and blood staining a bare foot.

Milk white skin beneath the mud, black hair hanging in muddy clumps around his ears. Blue eyes staring back at him, animal-bright and dilated in the brief moment before he flinches back from the light with a cry of pain that stabs through Jason to the soul.

His shaking hand closes around the flashlight before he can even think about it, cutting off the piercing beam and letting it spill out in shards between his fingers. For a petrifying moment as his eyes readjust, he’s sure that when he looks again, there will be nothing there.

“Tim?” he whispers.

The lean and ragged figure, tiny, god he’s so small, lowers his hands away from his face, away from his eyes wide and glittering almost silver in the moonlight.

Hands, mud-covered and torn. The red of his shredded fingernails is sickeningly dark in the broken light.

He’s vomiting before he even feels the bile making its way up his throat.

Day 30: DIGGING YOUR GRAVE
major character death | left for dead | ghosts

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes and other works inspired by this one.)

Chapter 1

Chapter Text

It’s not like waking up.

There is no murky border between not-awake and awake for Tim to pass through. There is only nothing, and then there is bright, searing agony.

He exhales a shriek that dies down to a keen, bouncing back deafeningly from the darkness that’s packed in tight around him. He doesn’t even notice, his ribs shuddering as they threaten to splinter around a sob. His body tries to curl in on itself, but his knees strike something hard above them, the impact rattling through him as he cries out again.

His fingers scrabble, gliding along smooth fabric. Satin. Beneath it, something hard and ungiving as he presses against it. His eyes roll, seeking light, something, but there’s nothing. There’s just satin-covered wood, pressing back at him, threatening to crush him.

He cries out again, calling out for - for someone. He wants - what? He wants his -

Words escape him.

He touches his ear, trying to find - something.

Nothing.

There is nothing, nothing but him, his every rattling breath a thunderclap in his own hollow ears.

The nothing hurts.

The breaths aren’t enough, they feel like they’re breaking him but they’re not enough. He needs more, he needs - out.

He pushes at the walls around him until his palms are bruised. And when that doesn’t work, he starts to claw. Satin threads catch and tear, wood splinters embed themselves under his fingernails, and he doesn’t care. It’s nothing, nothing to the way the bones in his ribcage shift and grind as his lungs suck in air that tastes stale and rotten against his dry mouth.

It’s not until dirt begins to trickle onto his face that his terrified desperation gives way to true panic.

Because suddenly the trickle becomes a stream, flowing down the sides of his neck, filling his mouth and clogging his nose, surrounding him, drowning him, and it is so much worse than nothing.

He’s not in charge of his body any more. It doesn’t matter how much it hurts to rake his hands through the heavy earth, how his ribs buckle when he contorts them through the hole he’s scraped in the wood, how his left leg drags behind him as he pulls it upward along with the rest of his useless, painful body.

It is good, maybe, that his body fights without him, pushes the pain back and leaves it buried beneath him.

The earth is endless.

Maybe he got it wrong. Maybe he is not clawing upwards at all, maybe he is digging down, down, a tunneling rodent trying to escape the flames above, all that soil raining back down alongside him with every fistful he rips loose, until -

His hand plunges into nothing.

He hooks it into soft grass and clotted soil, hauls. Aching shoulders scream. Earth breaks like a wave against the cliffs, and then he’s choking, the dirt and the nothingness competing for space in his sore throat.

The nothingness wins, and suddenly he can breathe again.

Small stones scrape his skin as he pulls himself free of the clinging ground, tiny pains that nonetheless feel unbearable against his overstimulated body. One foot, the lame, throbbing one, is still stuck when his arms give out beneath him, and he collapses against the ground, sucking in air that still smells like rich soil rot. There’s a small stone caught beneath his tongue, but he can’t muster the strength to spit it out.

He’s shivering.

It takes effort to lift his head, shuddering. The ground is so cold beneath him. His breath comes out in soft clouds that don’t look like they should feel as sharp in his chest as they do. He’s cold, he wants - he wants -

He lets out a low, soft and wordless cry, a question. It hangs in the air, unanswered but for the quiet whispering of the trees, the moonlight casting churning shadows beneath them.

His wide eyes watch the shadows, sure somehow that what he wants is among them if he just looks hard enough.

The shadows taunt him, but come no closer. They start to blur, and he realizes there are tears dripping down his cheeks, only adding to the chill that touches him.

It hurts, standing up, like everything else. His hands protest bitingly when he tries to put his weight on them, and his left leg won’t bear his weight at all.

But it hurts to be on the ground, too, and he so desperately wants -

No words will come, so he doesn’t try to call out for whatever it is he’s looking for. He just limps towards the trees, leg little more than a dead weight beneath him.

The trees are loud, up close. Everything is too loud. His feet scuff the ground unevenly, and the wind isn’t quiet for a moment. It hurts, and it’s so much, too much on top of all the other hurts. He whimpers. His hand keeps coming up to his ear, and he doesn’t know if he wants to cover it or not. His tattered fingers keep brushing against it, like there should be something there, something he could press against, something that would make the hurt better.

There’s nothing, and he keeps whimpering as he stumbles along through the endless trees and the shadows that don’t reach back for him.

A new sound cuts through the night, the sharp crack of a dog’s bark. Tim flinches, teetering on his one stable leg. Another bark. He tilts, and rough bark scrapes against his skin as he tips against a tree. He leans into it with another loud keen. It’s too much, too much too much -

The dog is a rush of shadow as it darts out of the trees. Moonlight glints off of pale teeth, it’s low growl humming beneath the rustling leaves, growing steadily louder as it prowls forward.

Suddenly, the moonlight isn’t the only thing lighting the clearing.

The flashlight beam might as well be a spotlight as it illuminates the great dane, creeping slowly forward, and Tim cowers back from the blinding light with a fractured cry. He yearns desperately for the shadows to pull him in close, to shelter him.

And miraculously, the light dims, a hand partially covering the bulb, and he is able to blink away the searing starbursts against his eyes.

A man stands in front of him, dark hair a mess and face almost as white as the streak that runs across his temple. The plastic flashlight creaks where he grips it, wide green eyes reflecting the moonlight so brightly they might as well be glowing themselves.

“Tim?” he croaks.

Bark, sandpaper against his skin as he turns slowly to look at him, the name tugging on something deep in his caved-in chest, and his lips try to form an answer that won’t come. He tastes dirt on his teeth.

The flashlight sweeps across him before pausing on his hands, the beam trembling as it rests on the red flesh peeking out from under the caked soil, fingernails ripped away and the tips of his fingers shredded nearly to the bone.

Jason retches violently into the underbrush, and Tim keens.