Disclaimer: Jay, Totheark, Alex, and all that Marble Hornets jazz belongs to Troy Wagner, Joseph Delage, and Tim Sutton.
A/N: Wow, a story that's not porn. XD This is an event!
This was written for this prompt on the Kink Meme:
Any characters, any pairing, any genre (angst, crack, whatever), as long as you include the phrase:
"I did it for you. I did it all for you."
Feedback: Yes, plz. Good, bad. Anything will do.
After finishing the last of the tapes Tim had given him, Jay was left with more questions than he had answers and he was getting desperate. He had tried to call Tim nothing short of twenty times and each call was met with a continuous dial tone. Fed up and tired, he was nearing the end of his ever-shortening rope, but what could he possibly do to rectify things? He still didn't know for sure where to look for Tim and Alex's whereabouts were as much of a mystery as they had ever been.
Then, one night, just after he had typed out a frustrated message on Twitter and was about to collapse on yet another stiff hotel mattress, his phone went off and startled him. He eyed the caller ID suspiciously. It was an unfamiliar number with an area code that was no where near Alabama. He hesitated before opening the message.
618 E. 123 S.
23:00
He blinked in confusion. A number riddle? Coordinates? If the E. meant East and the S. meant South, then it must be an address. He put the address into Google Maps. It brought up a location that was only about 15 minutes away. So that left the last part of the riddle. It didn't seem like another part of the address. He racked his overly exhausted brain. He really should have stopped at the 7-11 down the street to get some caffeine earlier that evening. Just then, a thought crossed his mind that made his eyes widen and his heart hammer against his ribs. The sign on the front of the 7-11's door had said it closed at 22:00. In military time, that was 10 pm. So 23:00 could mean 11 pm.
The time signature on the corner of his phone read 10:45. If he wanted to make it to that address, he had to go now. Without another thought for his own safety or the hundreds of messages he had been receiving from his Twitter and Youtube followers warning him not to do exactly what he was doing, he sprang up and rushed through the door, pulling on his jacket and grabbing his camera as he went.
It wasn't until midway through his journey to the address when caution kicked in and he began to have second thoughts. His stomach sank deeper and deeper as he drove on until he thought he was going to be sick by the time his GPS told him he was close. The street he was on was quiet and looked like a middle-class suburban neighborhood, a far cry from the dilapidated locations he had been forced to explore during this entire ordeal. His GPS blinked and the artificial female voice said that the address would be on his left. He stopped and blinked until his eyes adjusted to the darkness outside the car enough to see the numbers on the houses. There was 617 and 619 beside him and across the street there was 616 and 620. Between the latter houses...there was an empty lot.
He squinted and leaned forward. The desolate plot of land was out of place among the quaint, warmly decorated houses with lawn gnomes and walkway lanterns on either side. He glanced up and down the street, scanning for any signs of life other than the lights he could see through the windows of the houses. And a part of him that he didn't want to admit was there looked for any sign of the tall, faceless figure that was always on the border of his thoughts, like a shadow just outside the warm circle of a campfire.
The clock on his dashboard turned to 11 PM sharp. He was about to recheck his phone to ensure that he had the right address when an odd glow in the middle of the empty lot caught his eye. He froze. The glow was low to the ground and unmoving. He waited for several still moments before he got the irrepressible feeling that he was supposed to be making the next move. Slowly, as though he was wading through a flood, he stood with his camera held at the ready and made his way over to the lot, though not before making sure his door was securely locked.
The glow was coming from the blue stand-by screen of a small, portable media player that had a jump drive attached to it. But what drew his eyes as he came closer was a black converse shoe, one of a pair that he knew instantly had been Alex's favorite while they were at their university. The sole was marinading in a puddle of blood. Nearby was a basketball-sized, jagged rock. Most of the rock's face was painted with red and it didn't take much imagination to think that it had been used on the shoe's owner.
Jay staggered backwards, eyes darting around, looking for any signs of a body, dreading that at any moment, he would meet Alex's glazed, lifeless eyes gazing back at him. But there was nothing else other than the small display set up there for his benefit.
He picked up the portable screen carefully with one hand and pressed the play button with his thumb. The screen flickered to a scene of a thunderstorm that remained for several seconds before suddenly shifting to show a living room of a house that he instantly recognized. It was the one that he had been raised in from the tender age of five all the way through high school. It was Christmas, and a little, younger version of himself was giggling and rolling through piles of candy and wrapping paper, clutching a stuffed bear and a toy train to his chest.
The image shifted again to the stage of an elementary school play. The camera was centered on himself, dressed as a blossoming tree and obviously a few years older than the Christmas clip. The woman's voice coming from behind the hand held was his mother's. She was praising his performance as "adorable." Jay's throat filled.
The scene changed three or four more times, to different times during his life, all meticulously captured on camera: a couple family vacations; his driver's ed video project demonstrating how to change a tire; his high school graduation; and finally, the image of him from Entry 54, standing in soaking-wet clothes besides Seth. The video changed back to the thunderstorm, which had been tinted a crimson red. A digitized picture of a heart, made with slash-keys and hyphens, appeared. It blinked once before a large crack split it down the middle. Then, a series of numbers blinked across the screen before it went black.
Jay stood there, motionless, his jaw hanging open, before whipping around and hurrying back to his car, the media player under his arm. The ride back to his hotel passed in a blur. As soon as he got back, he pulled up a blank word document and set to work decoding the number code with the same alphabet that he had used with the Totheark videos. At the end, when everything had been translated, he took a breath and read the message.
I did it for you. I did it all for you.
How long he sat there, staring at the words, he didn't know for sure. When he could convince his body to respond to his commands again, he reached over and switched his camera off. He buried his face in his hands, rubbing his eyes with his palms. When he pulled them back, they came away wet.
"But, who are you?" He whispered. There were other questions, of course. How the hell had Totheark obtained the video clips of his most private and precious memories? Was Alex dead? Was this what Totheark had meant in the video claiming that Alex had celebrated his last birthday? But the broken heart seemed to have been beckoning to him and all he could think was, who are you?
The next morning, he gave a single thought to revisiting the empty lot, but he tossed it aside. He didn't need to return to know that the black converse and the bloody rock would be gone.
