It Doesn't Matter Anymore (Tim x Jay "Jam") Marble Hornets

Entry #3: Something's Wrong...

       Tim wasn't sure how things had spiraled out of control so quickly.

One day he and Jay are running around with their cameras trying everything they can to find the answers they were looking for, and the next day... Jay was sick. Really sick. To a point where they both ended up holding up in their current hotel for a lot longer than they had originally planned.

After Jay's seizure, he had begun to rapidly decline, Tim had noted. His mental state warping and fading to where he would just... wander, like a lost child who doesn't quite understand they're lost. Tim had even started giving Jay some of his meds to try and null the Operator's effects as much as possible... and it seemed to help a bit, but not by much. Going on two weeks of Jay being almost entirely incoherent and numb... Tim was doing the best he could.

It was strange to Tim, being the one with his head on straight for once. So often in his life, other people had to keep a constant eye on him just so he didn't lose his mind in the corner of his room, but now he was the one doing the watching... and now he knew why the nurses were always so stressed.

Taking care of someone mentally detached from reality was hard. Most of the time it was all Tim could do to get Jay to eat, let alone function. He would stare at the wall for hours on end, motionless and numb until Tim intervened. He was restless and constantly either on the verge of either a meltdown or a seizure whenever Tim turned his back.

Watching Jay scribble demented drawings over and over, stacks of crude pages that mirrored what Alex had been scribbling on the tapes... It was terrifying. It was terrifying to think that the only person he had left was one minor inconvenience away from completely losing his mind.

Tim absently wondered if this was how his nurses felt back then, having to take care of a 6 year old kid that would hallucinate and cough his lungs out until he was seizing on the floor or sobbing in a corner somewhere. He could still remember the days where he would throw up from crying after telling his nurse about "the tall man with no face" in the corner every night...

But luckily... after a while, Jay's mindless wandering began dropping in frequency. He began to eat more, actually looking over at Tim whenever his name was called, and Tim was relieved. If he kept improving like this, They could continue their investigation. Things could go back to normal... Although... What counted as "normal" in this situation?

The constant hostility between them, the tension from never knowing what was around the corner, the stress of not knowing if you could even trust the person beside you... Jay was both an open book and a closed casket; he was easy to read and naively trusting, but he was impulsive and secretive, never telling anyone what he was doing unless forced. Did Tim really want to go back to that? Never knowing whether Jay was keeping something from him or not, arguing with him over every little thing... The past month or so had given Tim a lot of insight into Jay's head that he didn't previously have. Jay unfortunately knew quite a lot about how bad Tim's psyche was (since Jay had read his medical files), but up until now he hadn't known anything about Jay's.

...Why did his reality check have to be at the expense of the only person he's got left?

—--

It didn't take long for Tim to convince Jay to get some rest that night... his improvement had hit a snag when he seemed to have forgotten his name for several hours, but at this point Tim was used to it.

The cigarette he lit just outside in the parking lot that night was everything he needed that night. He tried to focus on how the smoke burned his lungs and how the buzz in his nerves jolted him down to his core, the cold night air piercing his well-worn cargo jacket.