tim stoker (withanaxe) wrote in noexits, @ 2021-10-21 14:32:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log/thread/narrative, ₴ inactive: timothy stoker, → week 023 (release the ghosts) |
The recorder hadn’t been there before, had it? Tucked away in a corner of his bedside table, as if he’d set it in there and forgotten it. What had he even been looking for when he found it?
He couldn’t remember.
Tim sat, utterly defeated, on the floor of his small room with his back against the bed, the recorder in his hand and quietly playing the voices from his past. He knew what the device was as soon as he saw it, but what was on the tape knocked the air out of his lungs. Jon, Martin, Sasha (that was Sasha, right? Was that really what her voice had sounded like? He couldn’t remember, oh god, he didn’t even know what her voice sounded like and he couldn’t remember what she looked--).
Elias. No, Jonah.
Fingers curled around the small tape recorder, gripping it, anger surging through his veins. How dare he. How dare he. Of course, this had been before Everything, when no one was any wiser to who or what Elias was, to the fact that they were all trapped at the Institute with no way out, to what Jon was in the process of becoming…
His throat burned. His eyes burned. His vision blurred. There was a numbness settling in him, the resignation he’d grown so used to in the few month’s before finding himself at the wax museum. Before he’d ended it. Before he freed himself from the Institute’s hold the only way he knew how.
There was a feeling like he was suffocating, beginning to overwhelm him and his heart was thumping loudly in his ears. Was the room suddenly growing smaller? He felt a sob wrapping itself around his vocal cords and Tim scrambled to get to his feet, keeping his head ducked as he moved from the bedroom to the one door that he knew would keep him safe. But that wasn’t on his mind; he needed to breathe.
He wiped at his eyes, shoving open the front door to Butler Hall and almost instantly feeling a relief as the cool air (or whatever you wanted to call it) of the void hit his lungs. It wasn’t much, but it was something -- he could breathe at least, even if it was shallow and tearful and--
“Ow, fuck,” he hissed through gritted teeth. His hand flew up to the side of his neck and he looked in the direction the pinching feeling had come from -- but almost instantly, his vision was blurring. “The hell was that for?” he managed, somehow, his speech struggling to stay coherent as he looked up at the figure behind him. He blinked once, twice, and then the realization dawned on him when he saw the syringe, just before he lost consciousness and the recorder fell to the stone step beneath him.
“...Shit.”