I always talk about him Josh I mean do you know how many times I've censored myself in our conversations? he just keeps on coming up again and again and ugh I just didn't want to make things weird or awkward but they kind of already are
like i said its totally normal probably even more so if i really do remind you of him maybe you just need to get it out? but i get if you feel like you already got more getting it out than you wanted between last time and everything else
maybe? I don't know when you're friends with someone for SO long and then something like this happens I just wanted to cut him from my thoughts or at least my small talk I don't know what I should feel or think and if people ask "oh hey who're those guys you're always talking about!" that's a bit of a loaded question
well i dunno what you should feel or think either that psychology science babble isnt really my field and all i know from experience is that the more i try to clam up about something the more of it i accidentally drop everywhere like its simultaneously hot and a potato but my grossly uneducated opinion is that maybe a better question is what DO you feel and think?
that he was a goddamn fucking asshole and some days I hate him because if he never asked us up to the mountain and he never put me and Chris in those fucked up situations then I wouldn't be this shade of bad but he was still one of my best friends
do you want to talk about it from the beginning i mean i get the gist of it but i could stand to fill in some of the blanks though again no pressure and dont go into anything you dont want to touch
it wasn't always like this but as of a year ago we had this little group me, Chris, and Josh, our friends Sam, Mike, Emily, Jess, and Matt, and Josh's twin sisters Hannah and Beth some of us were closer than others. I mostly hung out with the guys I'd known them since I was like ten and they were my first really long-term friends anyway but we spent all of high school together the ten of us hanging out in different groups and getting along in various ways and dating oh boy Emily and Mike were like the It Couple always but Hannah she she always had a crush on Mike I don't know why maybe it was his charisma or his looks or something Mike's always been a bit of a dick
but Hannah was head-over-heels we all knew it was obvious like me and Chris obvious apparently anyway each year Josh and his sisters invited us up to this mountain lodge in Canada their parents owned Blackwood Pines on Blackwood Mountain Mt. Washington we liked to call it I started going when I was thirteen and slowly the whole group was invited it was a big fun thing we'd all do together the older we got the less supervision we needed until it was just us kids which was always much more fun
in the weeks leading up to it I got this text from Jess we all kind of had this THING where we'd play pranks on each other it was just fun and we were all good at it in various ways and Jess said this next one would be great and it would fix a lot of the growing tension between the group because Hannah's little crush was CUTE but it was making things weird and it'd all be good fun she'd understand she was our friend
so Jess' plan was me, Jess, Emily, Mike, and Matt were in on it once Josh and Chris passed out from drinking like they ALWAYS did because there's no way Josh would be okay with this and Chris is just too good we'd leave out a note for Hannah to meet Mike in one of the unused rooms in the lodge the rest of us would hide Jess and Emily just watching Matt filming me helping him hold the damn selfie stick Mike would throw her this line and before it went too far we'd reveal ourselves and ha ha there it is Hannah we got you good and show her the video it was supposed to I don't know show her that she was being ridiculous or something it was stupid
Hannah was always a sensitive girl I knew this and still I didn't want to I don't know rock the boat make waves I thought it'd be awkward and weird for awhile but it'd fix everything I didn't think she'd take it that bad because I was because I just wanted everything to be fine so I pretended it'd be fine and if we did this then Hannah would get over Mike and we could all keep being friends and things wouldn't get WEIRD
obviously that didn't happen Hannah found out and was devastated she ran out of the lodge sobbing and Beth saw and
yelled at all of us and then ran after her it was snowing so hard that night and Sam said there was no way Hannah would want to see MIKE of all people or any of the rest of us and we just waited for Beth to come back with her and
they never came back josh woke up a few hours later and i had to i tried to tell him and he was so angry and we spent the whole next day looking the day after that took off time from college but we never found them the rescue parties never found them
i didn't know until now they were dead but em she this year when she she got stuck in the mines when everything started going bad and she found evidence that they died down there because of what we did
sorry that was long i just all at once fuck i'm such an asshole
im not going to make excuses for you its pretty clear youve already thought a lot about what happened and where you fit into it and anything ive got to say whether its right or not isnt going to budge you either way but its always hard to say no to friends when theyre stoked about something you dont want to let them down and you dont want to be left out and friends give each other grief all the time especially about crushes i mean fuck ive done it john and rose have teased me about mine whether they existed or not the consequences arent normally lethal and whatever share of guilt you should bear for hurting hannah i dont think blaming yourself for not taking surprise death into account really makes sense when its always been safe before
second thing the other times youve told parts of this story you always emphasized that the girls were joshs sisters and i suspected but it really brought home this time that look they were your friends too i understand that you feel like shit about what you did and YEAH they DIED thats a big deal but when you only call them joshs sisters you make the grief all about josh and let him own it solely when it sounds like yall lost two good friends too and so im thinking did you ever let yourself feel just sad about that instead of guilty and terrible because ashley its an ok thing to feel sad about
i miss them so much dave hannah was just the sweetest person and beth and i were never that close but i knew them for so long when we were kids i spent so much time just hanging around them girls with the girls and boys with the boys but it meant we got to know each other and beth taught me how to knit and hannah talked with me about silly ya romance and god i miss how it was so much i never meant for them to for ANYTHING to go like it did and i've spent every day of the last year wishing i could just take it all back and they'd be alive again and sam would talk to me more than once a month and josh would stop being haunted and distant and the others would stop being the damn mess they are and chris wouldn't get this sad look like he failed all of us or
i just i miss them but more than anything i miss how we all were happy and able to be stupid kids playing stupid pranks on each other that didn't get anyone killed
its nothing dramatic we just it was like that on the meteor with me and rose and the trolls rose used to love to knit and write and tell jokes but as time went on she just well she started drinking and me and terezi started falling apart almost before we hooked up so i could only watch from afar as she threw her life down the load gaper and it was just i dont know it was a crappy three years i guess so i know what its like
that still sounds like something really horrible watching the people you care about going to pieces i'm sorry god we're a pair aren't we? i'm sorry that it just got that bad for you
you know the funny thing in the end basically the only one who had time for me was karkat and im pretty sure the dude HATED me at first but we both just got so sick of sitting around getting our sad asses ignored that we just sort of had to shelve our differences or be mutually the two most pathetic losers in space and it ended up working out hes a really good friend once he gets over acting big and loud anyway for real sorry i didnt mean to interrupt
ok but you know when all my feelings are out and getting worked through i guess i'm not gonna let you off the hook because YOU have a lot to work out too ok?
anyway uh jeez i don't know if i'm still going "from the beginning" then next comes the year of weird awkward drifting where i still spent a lot of time with chris but things were strained and i barely saw the others because the rest of us went to different schools rarely spoke with josh he dropped out of college big blowup happened with the rest of the group too sam barely talked to the rest of us since well hannah was her best friend and mike and emily broke up and then mike and JESS started going out later relationship drama all that but it was important because it means emily started going out with matt and it just threw off any remaining shreds of closeness anyone had
so like we were all worried about josh and we get this video invitation sometime in november annual blackwood getaway and he looked fine saying we should get together and all have this big party like we used to for him and for the twins and just it was on the anniversary of their death how could any of us say no?
[He's glad she goes on with the story. It means his lack of answer to her question just looks natural and they can both put it out of their minds.
And he really does, Shroedinger's unstated agreement/disagreement forgotten instantly as setup climbs inexorably into dread, like the rattling climb up a roller coaster's first drop, or the creeping knowledge of someone behind you whose shape you can't quite see in the reflection of your shades.]
oh my god is that when he he USED them like that??
[Ashley reads that and stares blankly for a moment. She laughs; there's nothing funny about it.]
in his mind he was probably doing it FOR them so of course he didn't USE them
there's a lot about josh i'll probably never understand dave the person i saw at the mountain after he revealed himself i'd never seen that josh before i was scared of him and for him now that i think about it so in this i can only explain what happened and what he did not why
Edited (emphasis is important) 2016-03-06 05:24 (UTC)
we all went back to blackwood and at first it wasn't that bad? weird and awkward and i was scared to be there but i kept thinking of it like the place i had fun at tried to forget
bad idea we all ended up kind of in little groups jess and mike went off to a cabin josh told them about to well have some alone time since jess and emily being in the same place was just asking for trouble em left her bag somewhere? i don't know she and matt went to go find it i think josh planned on both of those i never got to put it together with everyone else because things kind of went off the rails so i don't know if they saw anything out there that he set up but sam went to go take a bath and it left me and chris and josh and he started talking about a spirit board and
well he i really thought it was beth's ghost or hannah's but it was just something josh set up of course made the pointer move and acted like he was being freaked out or maybe actually freaked out he started getting really unhinged there the point is he ran off all upset and me and chris got these clues something in the library proof that someone killed hannah there was this secret passage and a freaky message and chris said there was a poster he and sam found about an escaped convict with a bad history with josh's family and well in case it wasn't obvious all that was a set up we didn't know it then of course it got us all worried and scared or at least ME all worried and scared josh knew just what to do after all
and um i heard him screaming somewhere in the lodge and i didn't think i just ran to go find him but a man in a mask josh he grabbed me and knocked me out with something i think it was chloroform he must've got chris too but next thing i knew i was
i was tied up in this shed in the woods it to a board by my wrists couldn't even touch the floor it was all dark and josh he i thought he was tied up next to me and unconscious but it was a body double or something i don't know it just wasn't real but i didn't know that chris found us after awhile and it a pre-recorded freaky saw-inspired message just there was a saw blade on a track pointed at me or josh and chris had to
he had to choose who would he made him think he had to choose who would live and who would
sorry
chris said he'd save me the saw went to josh and it was a body double but it looked so real and he started screaming i couldn't look i didn't want to look but it was full of blood pig's blood and it got all over me and
yeah chris got me out of there and em and matt found us went to go get help while we went back to the lodge where
hold on i need a moment
[text] Now including vague allusions to past child abuse!
[Saw. He's seen those movies. Bro loved that low-budget torture porn shit, how many versions of that asshole Billy the Puppet did he have? Those ugly fuckers are probably still dangling lifelessly from the ceiling of their apartment or chilling in the kitchen, webcams whirring in their eyes, recording nothing unto nothing for a man no longer living to enjoy the footage.
HELLO ROWLF. I WANT TO PLAY A GAME.
Heeuurgh. Bluh bluh bluh. Dave gets up and paces the room a couple times, trying to shake the feeling of being watched, of metal threats waiting in the shadows. He needs to chill. He needs to focus. He returns to his 'Gear and forces himself to read it again, but his skin won't stop prickling, heart thumping like a captured bird against the bars of his ribcage.]
god god ashley what the fuck thats so fucked up im so sorry
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
[text]
he tried to eat my cape
[text]
chris told me about this time he and josh
oh dammit
[text]
thats pretty normal
talking about people i mean
you shouldnt feel bad about it it just kind of happens naturally
[text]
Josh I mean
do you know how many times I've censored myself in our conversations?
he just keeps on coming up again and again and
ugh
I just didn't want to make things weird or awkward but they kind of already are
[text]
probably even more so if i really do remind you of him
maybe you just need to get it out?
but i get if you feel like you already got more getting it out than you wanted between last time and everything else
[text]
I don't know
when you're friends with someone for SO long and then something like this happens
I just wanted to cut him from my thoughts or at least my small talk
I don't know what I should feel or think and if people ask
"oh hey who're those guys you're always talking about!"
that's a bit of a loaded question
ugh poor phrasing
[text]
i dunno what you should feel or think either
that psychology science babble isnt really my field and all i know from experience is that the more i try to clam up about something the more of it i accidentally drop everywhere like its simultaneously hot and a potato
but my grossly uneducated opinion is that maybe a better question is
what DO you feel and think?
[text]
and some days I hate him
because if he never asked us up to the mountain
and he never put me and Chris in those fucked up situations
then I wouldn't be this shade of
bad
but he was still one of my best friends
and we did start the whole thing
[text]
from the beginning i mean
i get the gist of it but i could stand to fill in some of the blanks
though again no pressure and dont go into anything you dont want to touch
[text] this got long
it wasn't always like this but as of a year ago we had this little group
me, Chris, and Josh, our friends Sam, Mike, Emily, Jess, and Matt, and Josh's twin sisters Hannah and Beth
some of us were closer than others. I mostly hung out with the guys
I'd known them since I was like ten and they were my first really long-term friends anyway
but we spent all of high school together
the ten of us
hanging out in different groups and getting along in various ways
and dating oh boy
Emily and Mike were like
the It Couple
always
but Hannah she
she always had a crush on Mike
I don't know why
maybe it was his charisma or his looks or something
Mike's always been a bit of a dick
but Hannah was head-over-heels
we all knew
it was obvious
like me and Chris obvious apparently
anyway each year Josh and his sisters invited us up to this mountain lodge in Canada their parents owned
Blackwood Pines on Blackwood Mountain
Mt. Washington we liked to call it
I started going when I was thirteen and slowly the whole group was invited
it was a big fun thing we'd all do together
the older we got the less supervision we needed until it was just us kids which was always much more fun
in the weeks leading up to it I got this text
from Jess
we all kind of
had this THING where we'd play pranks on each other
it was just fun and we were all good at it in various ways
and Jess said this next one would be great and it would fix a lot of the growing tension between the group
because Hannah's little crush was CUTE but it was making things weird
and it'd all be good fun
she'd understand
she was our friend
so Jess' plan was
me, Jess, Emily, Mike, and Matt were in on it
once Josh and Chris passed out from drinking like they ALWAYS did
because there's no way Josh would be okay with this and Chris is just
too good
we'd leave out a note for Hannah to meet Mike in one of the unused rooms in the lodge
the rest of us would hide
Jess and Emily just watching
Matt filming
me helping him hold the damn selfie stick
Mike would throw her this line and before it went too far we'd reveal ourselves and ha ha there it is Hannah we got you good
and show her the video
it was supposed to
I don't know
show her that she was being ridiculous or something
it was stupid
Hannah was always a sensitive girl
I knew this
and still I didn't want to
I don't know
rock the boat
make waves
I thought
it'd be awkward and weird for awhile
but it'd fix everything
I didn't think she'd take it that bad because I was
because I just wanted everything to be fine
so I pretended it'd be fine
and if we did this then Hannah would get over Mike and we could all keep being friends and things wouldn't get WEIRD
obviously that didn't happen
Hannah found out and was devastated
she ran out of the lodge sobbing
and Beth saw and
yelled at all of us
and then ran after her
it was snowing so hard that night and Sam said there was no way Hannah would want to see MIKE of all people or any of the rest of us and we just waited for Beth to come back with her and
they never came back
josh woke up a few hours later and i had to
i tried to tell him and he was so angry and
we spent the whole next day looking
the day after that
took off time from college
but we never found them
the rescue parties never found them
i didn't know until now they were dead but
em she
this year when she
she got stuck in the mines when everything started going
bad
and she found evidence that
they died down there
because of what we did
sorry that was long i just
all at once
fuck i'm such an asshole
[text]
two things
im not going to make excuses for you
its pretty clear youve already thought a lot about what happened and where you fit into it and anything ive got to say whether its right or not isnt going to budge you either way
but
its always hard to say no to friends when theyre stoked about something
you dont want to let them down
and you dont want to be left out
and friends give each other grief all the time especially about crushes i mean fuck
ive done it
john and rose have teased me about mine whether they existed or not
the consequences arent normally lethal and whatever share of guilt you should bear for hurting hannah i dont think blaming yourself for not taking surprise death into account really makes sense when its always been safe before
second thing
the other times youve told parts of this story you always emphasized that the girls were joshs sisters
and i suspected but it really brought home this time that
look
they were your friends too
i understand that you feel like shit about what you did and YEAH they DIED
thats a big deal
but when you only call them joshs sisters you make the grief all about josh and let him own it solely when it sounds like yall lost two good friends too
and so im thinking
did you ever let yourself feel just sad about that
instead of guilty and terrible
because ashley its an ok thing to feel sad about
im sorry you lost your friends
[text]
i don't really think i ever did?
i miss them so much dave
hannah was just the sweetest person and
beth and i were never that close but
i knew them for so long
when we were kids i spent so much time just hanging around them
girls with the girls and boys with the boys
but it meant we got to know each other and beth taught me how to knit
and hannah talked with me about silly ya romance
and god i miss how it was so much
i never meant for them to
for ANYTHING to go like it did
and i've spent every day of the last year wishing i could just take it all back and they'd be alive again
and sam would talk to me more than once a month
and josh would stop being haunted and distant
and the others would stop being the damn mess they are and
chris wouldn't get this
sad look like he failed all of us or
i just
i miss them
but more than anything i miss how we all were
happy
and able to be stupid kids playing stupid pranks on each other that didn't get anyone killed
[text]
...Oh.]
ashley
sorry brb
[text]
of course i
dave
are you ok?
[text]
yeah i just
had to
uggghhh ok i guess not totally
i just
it reminded me of stuff and i had to go splash water on my face
[text]
i can stop if this is too much we
we don't have to talk about it
or you could talk to me
[text]
we just
it was like that on the meteor
with me and rose and the trolls
rose used to love to knit and write and tell jokes but as time went on she just
well she started drinking
and me and terezi started falling apart almost before we hooked up
so i could only watch from afar as she threw her life down the load gaper
and it was just
i dont know it was a crappy three years i guess
so
i know what its like
[text]
really horrible
watching the people you care about going to pieces
i'm sorry
god we're a pair aren't we?
i'm sorry that it just
got that bad for you
[text]
in the end basically the only one who had time for me was karkat
and im pretty sure the dude HATED me at first
but we both just got so sick of sitting around getting our sad asses ignored that we just sort of had to shelve our differences or be mutually the two most pathetic losers in space
and it ended up working out hes a really good friend once he gets over acting big and loud
anyway for real sorry i didnt mean to interrupt
[text]
but you know when all my feelings are out and
getting worked through i guess
i'm not gonna let you off the hook
because YOU have a lot to work out too ok?
anyway uh
jeez i don't know
if i'm still going "from the beginning" then next comes the year of weird awkward drifting
where i still spent a lot of time with chris but things were strained
and i barely saw the others because the rest of us went to different schools
rarely spoke with josh
he dropped out of college
big blowup happened with the rest of the group too
sam barely talked to the rest of us since well hannah was her best friend
and mike and emily broke up and then mike and JESS started going out later
relationship drama all that but it was important because
it means emily started going out with matt and
it just threw off any remaining shreds of closeness anyone had
so like
we were all worried about josh
and we get this
video invitation
sometime in november
annual blackwood getaway
and he looked fine
saying we should get together and all have this
big party
like we used to
for him and for the twins
and just
it was on the anniversary of their death
how could any of us say no?
[text]
And he really does, Shroedinger's unstated agreement/disagreement forgotten instantly as setup climbs inexorably into dread, like the rattling climb up a roller coaster's first drop, or the creeping knowledge of someone behind you whose shape you can't quite see in the reflection of your shades.]
oh my god
is that when he
he USED them like that??
[text]
in his mind
he was probably doing it FOR them
so of course he didn't USE them
there's a lot about josh i'll probably never understand dave
the person i saw at the mountain
after he revealed himself
i'd never seen that josh before
i was scared of him
and
for him now that i think about it
so in this i can only explain what happened and what he did
not why
[text]
ugh sorry ill quit interrupting
so yall went back to blackwood
[text] full-on psychological torture from here on in....
and at first it wasn't that bad?
weird and awkward and i was scared to be there
but i kept thinking of it like the place i had fun at
tried to forget
bad idea
we all ended up kind of in little groups
jess and mike went off to a cabin josh told them about to
well have some alone time
since jess and emily being in the same place was just asking for trouble
em left her bag somewhere? i don't know she and matt went to go find it
i think josh planned on both of those
i never got to put it together with everyone else because things kind of
went off the rails
so i don't know if they saw anything out there that he set up
but
sam went to go take a bath and it left me and chris and josh
and he started talking about a spirit board
and
well he
i really thought it was beth's ghost
or hannah's
but it was just something josh set up
of course
made the pointer move and acted like he was being freaked out
or
maybe actually freaked out
he started getting really unhinged there
the point is he ran off all upset and me and chris got these clues
something in the library
proof that someone killed hannah
there was this secret passage and a freaky message
and chris said there was a poster he and sam found about an escaped convict with a bad history with josh's family and
well in case it wasn't obvious
all that was a set up
we didn't know it then of course
it got us all worried and scared
or at least ME all worried and scared
josh knew just what to do after all
and um
i heard him screaming somewhere in the lodge and
i didn't think i just ran to go find him
but a man in a mask
josh
he grabbed me and knocked me out with something
i think it was chloroform
he must've got chris too but
next thing i knew i was
i was tied up
in this shed in the woods it
to a board by my wrists
couldn't even touch the floor
it was all dark and josh he
i thought he was tied up next to me and unconscious but
it was a body double or something
i don't know it just wasn't real but i didn't
know that
chris found us after awhile and it
a pre-recorded freaky saw-inspired message just
there was a saw blade on a track pointed at me or josh and
chris had to
he had to choose who would
he made him think he had to choose who would live and who would
sorry
chris said he'd save me
the saw went to josh and
it was a body double but it looked so real
and he started screaming
i couldn't look i didn't want to look but it was full of
blood
pig's blood and it got
all over me and
yeah
chris got me out of there and
em and matt found us
went to go get help while we went back to the lodge where
hold on
i need a moment
[text] Now including vague allusions to past child abuse!
take your time
[Saw. He's seen those movies. Bro loved that low-budget torture porn shit, how many versions of that asshole Billy the Puppet did he have? Those ugly fuckers are probably still dangling lifelessly from the ceiling of their apartment or chilling in the kitchen, webcams whirring in their eyes, recording nothing unto nothing for a man no longer living to enjoy the footage.
HELLO ROWLF. I WANT TO PLAY A GAME.
Heeuurgh. Bluh bluh bluh. Dave gets up and paces the room a couple times, trying to shake the feeling of being watched, of metal threats waiting in the shadows. He needs to chill. He needs to focus. He returns to his 'Gear and forces himself to read it again, but his skin won't stop prickling, heart thumping like a captured bird against the bars of his ribcage.]
god
god ashley what the fuck
thats so fucked up im so sorry
[text] we're just hitting trauma bingo here
[text] This single tag is safe but it's also four words long
[text] the calm before the storm
[text] Ohhhhh boy
[text] flicks lights on and off WELCOME TO HELL WELCOME TO HELL
[text] OHHHHHH BOY
[text]
[text]
[text -> audio]
[audio]
[audio]
[audio] Okay those vague allusions are no longer so vague or allusive
[audio] SO NOW WE GOT CHILD ABUSIVE IN THIS THREAD TOO
[audio]
[audio]
[audio]
[audio]
[audio]
[audio]
[audio]