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Jeff's known Toby for less than 10 minutes, and he already fucking hates him.
It's 11:24 PM, the chill of the late November air has the entire mansion packed into the dining room, and for once in their terrible lives, they're having dinner together. As a group. Which is a fucking marvel, honestly, because none of them can really stand each other.
Jeff's got a forkful (which is a lot more than you'd expect, Jeff's a damn good noodle-roller,) of spaghetti in his mouth, and then, out of nowhere, this kid wearing these silly orange Goggles comes stumbling into the dining room. Now, he's lucky that Jeff's got his mouth full, because he's gonna say something real witty to him, but… again, his mouth's full of spaghetti. If spits any of that stuff out, Jack will probably kill him.
He watches Goggles (a short-lived nickname,) stand there, silently. He notices the way that his hands twitch at his sides as he stands there, watching the table as intently as they're watching him.
He notices the glisten of sweat and still-drying blood plastering his curly hair to his forehead, and the two of them lock gazes, just for a moment. Goggles' eyes are a solid shade of brown, but he's got this distant look in his eyes that just makes them look dull.
Goggles smiles, his lips curled too tightly against his face for it to seem anything close to genuine, and lifts up the sleeve of his hoodie. Every eye at the table locks onto the symbol carved into his wrist.
Dammit, Jeff hates that pale, skinny motherfucker! Jeff could live his entire life happily without seeing another one of these teenage quirkazoids, but the guy in charge seems to get off to the thought of adding another kid to his… his…
Whatever. Worst part is, Jeff's got a pretty good feeling that this guy's a proxy, which means that he's gonna be real fuckin' annoying.
The table gives Goggles a pretty underwhelming reception, after that. Clockwork lets out a quiet, unenthusiastic woo-hoo, but there's not much otherwise. They return to their dinner, and the sound of idle conversation begins to fill the air once more. Nobody speaks to the new guy, and he doesn't speak to anyone likewise. For a long moment, he just stands there… twitching.
Jeff furrows his brow as Jack (the clown, not the cool guy that Jeff actually likes,) turns to him and whispers a quiet "How old do you think he is?", which Jeff responds to with a graceful "Too old for you, I bet."
Clown Jack responds to that with a loud cackle, but Jeff wasn't really trying to be funny. Honestly, he thinks that LJ's a total creep, but don't tell anyone that he said that.
Jack starts whispering some vile, weird shit to him, but Jeff's too busy looking at the new guy. He's coming over towards him and Jack, probably because they're next to the only available seat, but Jeff really doesn't want to sit next to him. Why's he even sitting down, anyways, Jeff thinks, it's not like there's a plate laid out for him.
Casually, Jeff slides his leg out from under the table and hooks it around the side, pushing the chair further against it and effectively blocking it from being used without the removal of said limb. If The Boss's new puppet wants to sit next to Jeff The Motherfucking Killer? He's gonna have to work for it.
Goggles steps up and Jeff smiles at him, hoping that it comes across sufficiently as mocking. He tries to pull it back, not noticing Jeff's hold on it, but soon catches on, and flashes him a nervous smile. His face is covered in sweat.
"You're. Uh."
He looks like he's about to say something, but cuts himself off. His hand twitches as he uses it to point to the chair.
"Can I sit t-there?"
Jeff feels the corner of his mouth mold itself into a further sneer.
"Yeah, go ahead." He makes the pointed decision to not move his leg, and Goggles tries to pull the chair back again, but to no avail. He stares at Jeff for a moment after that, breathes in like he's about to say something, and then goes quiet, staring at Jeff's calve. Jeff snickers at him.
"Can't even pull out a fuckin'-"
Goggles lunges forward, grabs a fistful of Jeff's hair, and slams his head into his half-full plate of spaghetti. In the two seconds that he's downed, he hears a sharp gasp from the new guy's direction (what the fuck is he gasping about,) and feels a few strands of hair rip from his head as Goggles lets go of him. Jeff lifts his head, ready for a fight, but all he sees — well, hears — of the new guy is the sound of his footsteps getting further away in the foyer. (That motherfucker is FAST, Jack yells, but Jeff can't hear it very well over the ringing of his ears.)
He's got half a mind to chase him out there and give him a good beatdown, but the whole table's looking at him now. His face is stained in something red that isn't blood, his entire face is throbbing with pain — and you know the worst part?
For the first time in years, Jeff feels embarrassed.
He doesn't see Goggles for two days, afterwards. And when he does, it's arguably worse, at first, because he's all by himself.
Turns out, being a spooky immortal creature doesn't grant you infinite amounts of money. Well, it kind of does, but the Slenderman only puts it towards bills, so they don't have access to any streaming services, or anything like that. Jeff regards it as one of the luxuries that came with having living parents…or, like, a job.
Whatever.
So, in consequence of not having have a DVD player, paired with the hassle of casting pirated movies onto their TV, (because yes, the mansion has a television, they're not that poor,) is fucking inconvenient, the mansion-goers mostly just watch shit on Tubi. Stuff like Strippers Vs. Werewolves, for instance.
It starts out with Jeff, Ben, and Clockwork on the couch and respective armchair beside it, spaced out away from each other because none of them are really friends but they're all bored enough to watch a movie together. They get through a solid chunk of the movie before Ben nudges him with the tip of his dumb little brown boots.
"Jeff."
Jeff ignores him and looks over to Clockwork. She's biting her nail and checking her phone, her fingers shaking in a way that they only do when she's a few days off of… whatever it is that she takes. She's smiling.
"Jeff. I'm thirteen years old. Did you know that? You're showing a thirteen year old a movie about strippers." Ben's foot digs deeper into his shoulder, and he slams his fist against it, still looking away from him. Well, he tries to slam his fist against it, but fails, because Ben's non-corporeal. Instead, it goes straight through his leg. "And never in all of the many years I've spent being thirteen, have I seen such a bad movie about strippers. I'm out of here."
And then he phases through the couch.
God, Ben's such a fucking loser.
After that, it's just him and Natalie. Not for long, though, based off of the speed of her fingers as they type. He'll give her five minutes, and then she'll be gone, and he'll be stuck watching this low budget bullshit all by himself.
Strippers Vs. Werewolves is just as bad as he'd expected, and around the 52 minute mark, Clockwork stands up from the reclining chair and makes a beeline for the exit (one of those doorless arches,) and turns to Jeff.
"Hey, my dealer's being, like, super stingy, so I'm gonna go beat him into a pile of mush. You okay with watching the rest of this?" She pulls a pocket knife from her pants and absentmindedly tosses is between her hands. Jeff gives her a deadpan look, and then a nod, turning back to the movie. The sound of her footsteps grow further away, for a moment, and then comes rushing back into the lounge.
"Oh yeah! Jeff?"
He turns to her.
"Try not to drown in a pile of spaghetti when I'm gone, m'kay?" A loud cackle resounds through the room, before she runs off into the hallway. The sound of her footsteps continue for a moment after the back door opens, but Jeff doesn't think much of it.
Thirteen seconds later, Toby (he's heard his name in the hallway the day after "the incident", had heard hushed whispers of did you hear that Toby broke Jeff's nose on his first day? ,) comes barrelling into the room, and Jeff wonders if he should've.
He can't really see his face because of… well, he would say the goggles, but the muzzle on his face is taking up a lot more space. Honestly, it looks like something straight out of some old gay guy's leather-gear kink-drawer, but Jeff doesn't say anything about it. He tries to erase the thought from his memory, too, because anything involving the word "gay" just muddles his train of thought.
Toby leans against the wall next to the entrance and reaches his hands, clad in a pair of navy mittens, behind his head. There's an apparent struggle, Jeff notices, because his left hand grips a tangle of thick, curly hair, tugs, and doesn't let go. It jerks his head to the side, violently, and Toby stumbles towards the hand. The hand stays in place, however, continuing to pull the hair outwards in a motion that does not look pleasant, but Toby simply staggers over towards the armchair, continuing to fiddle with the backing of his muzzle using his free hand.
He pulls off the goggles easily enough, and the two of them lock eyes. Toby… looks weirdly happy, what with his eyes crinkling at the corners, and his pupils dilated like a… deer about to get hit by a car? Listen, Jeff isn't very good at analogies. A feeling of unease pools in Jeff's stomach, "I-"
he's about to say something when Toby stands, hand still planted in his hair, and plants himself on the couch besides Jeff.
"Can you unbuckle it?" he says, muffled.
"What?"
He's too close, Jeff thinks — remembering the feeling of his hand slamming his face against the dining table — and scooches back. After a moment of strong eye contact, he laughs, (a raspy, breathy thing,) and pulls Toby forward by the front of his hoodie.
"You think that you can just walk in here after that shit you pulled on Monday, Toby? I've got half a mind to fuckin'…" He pauses, letting go of the other boy when he leans towards his hand, which is fucking gross, "You can take that shit off yourself."
The other boy stares at him blankly, for a moment, before his eyes light up with recognition. Suddenly, the hand pulling his hair lets go of the clump and slams down against Toby's thigh with the same forcefulness that he had used to slam down Jeff's head. "Oh!" he says, and then laughs "that's who you are!" He laughs, harder, the sound coming out muffled through the thick leather of the muzzle — and then he's gasping for air and clicking his tongue, his twitching hands frantically reaching behind his head, and his fingers slipping around the buckle — as he lets out a quiet, strained "please?"
Jeff watches in stunned silence as Toby's hands scratch and pull at the muzzle, watches as the scratches and pulls turn into two half-closed fists pounding against the side of his head, and listens as his frantic breathing — along with the bizarre clicking — turns into a muffled, angry yell of "I want this shit off of me!" And, for some odd fucking reason, that's enough to get Jeff to reach forward and —
Toby's left arm rushes forward, tightly grips Jeff's wrist, and guides it towards the muzzle's buckle, tucked smack-dab in the middle of a damp tousle of hair. Jeff's pale fingers ease the metal prong out of the belt, and tug the muzzle upwards, pulling it off of Toby, who immediately turns from Jeff and hunches over, gasping for air. Jeff looks down at the muzzle, still in his hands, and notices how both the buckle and his fingers are painted with blood. It's different than the dried blood plastering Toby's hair all-too-familiarly against his forehead, no, it's fresh.
"Jesus, you had this shit on tight." He unhelpfully points out, and Toby turns to him, with his wide eyes and lips covered in blood and spit that smear over towards the hole in his face (how had he not noticed that before?) and smiles as if he knows something that Jeff doesn't.
Maybe he does, considering how quickly his mood's bounced from happy, to seemingly agonizing pain, and then all the way back to happy again.
"Huh," Toby chuckles, sounding more reserved than his previous laughs had, "I couldn't feel it. Is it b-b-bad?" He turns the back of his head towards Jeff, and spreads the hair that was under the belt with his fingers. The skin is rubbed raw, but altogether doesn't seem too bad. He shakes his head, and when Toby leans forward and tries to grab the Muzzle, he holds it out of his reach.
"Why the fuck were you even wearing this thing?"
Toby reaches forwards, and Jeff has a sneaking suspicion that he's about to climb onto him, so he throws the muzzle into the hallway and plants a tight grip around the back of Toby's hoodie. Toby groans and tries to tug away, but Jeff's about 2 years older than him and 40 pounds heavier, so he's got the advantage. Toby huffs.
"It's a part of m-my…" His head jerks to the side, his tongue clicking against the front of his gap-teeth, "my costume, okay? I just p-put it on too tight-" Toby tries to lunge over him, but Jeff pushes him back onto the couch, opting to hold him down by grabbing his ankles. (He's done it a lot of times, to his victims, but he feels a little weirder doing it to the new guy, for whatever reason.)
"And why do you have a weird… leather muzzle as part of your "costume?" What, are you…" gay, his mind supplies, "… into that shit?"
Toby pretends to gag, and tries to kick out of Jeff's grip. "F-fuu-huck no! Jack-" that rat fuck, "gave it to mmmmme, a-and it keeps me f-from biting my- biting my hands and kept me from making noises too loud during a mission- and- and… I-I fucking like it! It's just a-a-a little fucking hard to take off sometimes beca-" He kicks, harder, not realizing that using his arms is also an option, "stop fu-huucking harassing me!"
"You came to me!"
"I came to take- t-take my stuff off! If I'd known y-you were here I would have- would have taken it off outside, jackass!"
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah!"
"I don't know! Get-"
He kicks again and again and again, until Jeff finally lets him go and stands up, watching as Toby scrambles into the corner of the sofa, watching for Jeff's next move.
Jeff wipes his hands against the back of his jeans, huffs, leans towards the remote on the side table, turns off the TV —
and throws the remote at Toby's head.
The TV — the last remaining bastion of light in the lounge — turns off, and the boys are plunged into darkness. Jeff hears the thwack of the remote as it smacks against Toby's temple, and throws himself into action.
He moves towards Toby and grabs him by his right arm — wincing as Toby's other arm digs into his skin in retaliation — and throws him against the carpet. As quickly as Toby had the first day they met, he grabs a mass of Toby's curls and slams his head into the ground. "Now we're even, you fucking-" he starts, before his hand accidentally slips downward into Toby's face-hole, and before he can stop himself, his fingers are in Toby's Mouth, and Toby's biting them.
For some reason- it draws a laugh out of him. A surprised cackle, more like, and he pulls backwards, feeling the outer skin of his index scrape off against Toby's teeth. Quickly, he pulls himself to his feet, his eyes adjusting to the darkness well enough to see Toby standing likewise, and bolts into the hallway, making sure to grab the muzzle off of the ground before booking it to his room.
Toby's footsteps echo behind him, but by the time he catches up to Jeff, his door's already locked.
Toby slams his body against the door moments after, and continues to pound his fists against it as Jeff laughs himself into a stomachache. It takes a solid 2 minutes and a screamed shut the fuck up from his next door neighbor (thanks, Jason), for Toby to stop pounding on his door.
He sleeps with the muzzle under his pillow.
(Someone has to tell Jack not to give teenagers kink gear, Jeff muses.)
"Shit!"
Jeff hisses through his teeth as EJ cautiously removes the syringe from his shoulder, it's covered in blood, and the general after-pricking pain is stronger than usual. That's…not good, probably.
"…'s that supposed to happen?"
EJ shakes his head.
"I ruptured a vein," well, that's just fuckin' fine and dandy, isn't it? "… which isn't usually dangerous, but it will likely bruise." EJ turns to the drawer on the wall beside the portable cot, rummaging through the top drawer with his left hand. Jeff reaches toward the puncture site, while his back is turned, and is graciously rewarded with his hand being slapped away.
EJ turns back to him with a cotton swab and three different band-aids, each adorned with different recognizable cartoon characters. EJ got a big box of them in a dumpster last March, and Jeff's convinced that he only uses them to torment him, because he's never seen anyone else wearing one. Well, it's not like anyone else gets routine shot administrations, but EJ is weirdly insistent that Jeff is a… ugh, a "growing young man who needs to be kept in good health."
He doesn't even talk like that! It's all a part of the torment.
He dabs at the leaking blood with the cotton swab, quietly humming a song that Jeff doesn't recognize under his breath. The sound of water dripping against the dingy basement's floor makes Jeff turn his head away from the man, for a moment. He stares at the ever-spreading puddle and wonders if anyone's going to figure out where the water's coming from.
Probably not, he thinks. Because nobody fucking cares about anything, apparently. Everyone in the mansion just… lets shitty things happen because nobody cares enough to go hey, does anyone want to interact with each other like normal people to fix our problems? because, instead, it's more like hey, I'm gonna go gut a man and then get high… what do you mean all of the food in the fridge is moldy? that's none of my business!
And Jeff knows that he's a damn hypocrite, so he turns away from the dumb puddle of water and tries to stop thinking about it. Maybe someone will fix it, or maybe it'll just pile up until the entire basement floods.
Maybe EJ'll lap it up like a dog after Jeff leaves. Now that would be funny!
He thinks of EJ's face pressed against the cold, wet basement tile, licking the water. He tries to, at least, but his pin-straight hair is too thick, too curly. It's usual black has faded into auburn. The hard tile has turned to carpet, and there's blood smeared across the skin above not-Jack's lips. There's blood on the carpet, too, but not as thick as the water that his imaginary version of EJ had been lapping up before.
He must have broke Toby's nose, he realizes, and doesn't understand why the thought itches at him like it does.
He picks the Pokémon band-aid.
Before Toby came along, there were only two people relatively close to Jeff's age who permanently lived in the mansion. (Relatively is a strong word, because Ben is simultaneously four years younger than him and basically twice his age, but he disregards the thought.)
There had been other proxies, sure, but the younger ones never lasted long, and Jeff usually hated them regardless. The Suit Without A Face is a sick, sick man, and Jeff only lives under Him because he has no other choice. Proxies, on the other hand, willingly join him. They seek Him out, beg for Him to make their lives a living hell, and then try and find a way out when they realize that the whole killing thing isn't all that it's cracked out to be.
It never ends well for them.
Until Toby came along, it was just him, Ben, and Clockwork. And he was fine with that! He doesn't understand why he wants to see Toby again. Even if it's just them hardly brushing shoulders in the hallway. Even if it's them glaring at each other across the dining table. Even if it's both of them fighting again, slamming each other into walls and biting each other's fingers. Even if it's just a conversation. We're practically even, Jeff reasons. We've both slammed each other's faces into something, we could get over it.
He thinks about that a lot, too, the second time that they met each other. It was the memory of him slamming Toby face-first against the carpet, at the start. And then it was him unclasping the muzzle, feeling Toby's hair, slicked with blood, brushing against his fingers. And then it was him pinned to the couch by his ankles, hardly struggling against Jeff's grip until he started to ask him questions… and then it was something else.
Things that didn't happen, were not close to happening. The thoughts are almost exclusively violent. Sometimes Toby plunges a knife into Jeff's throat, and Jeff wonders what weapon he uses to kill. Something brute-force, Jeff imagines. Toby's fingers seemed too twitchy for something like a gun, but he imagines that, too. Toby presses the barrel of a handgun against the roof of Jeff's mouth, and pitifully fumbles with the trigger, leaving Jeff with a moment to look into his distant, brown eyes before his brains splatter across the carpet.
He wonders what kind of face Toby makes when he kills.
… So yeah, it's safe to say that, for a few days, he doesn't understand why he imagines these things, but nevertheless, the thoughts persist. The moments before he falls asleep each night are punctuated by violent, pseudo-sexual fantasies about the new proxy.
It hits him, one night, as he fishes the muzzle out from under his pillow, (he had actually forgotten about it, as fake as that sounds,) that Jeff has a debilitating, unwanted crush on a boy he's met twice.
Jeff carves a shoddy imitation of a proxy mark into a man's stomach, and pounds his knife into the center until his guts look like a pile of ground beef.
And then, suddenly, he sees him everywhere. Toby is at dinner, sitting as far away from Jeff as possible, enthusiastically speaking to the others as he digs into the sugary bullshit that Jack cooked that night. He's more energetic than he had been those first few days, and Jeff wonders if they could have met each other when he was like this. Maybe Jeff wouldn't have been so hard on him that first night if he hadn't looked so… pitiful. Nervous. Like he wanted to curl into himself and die at the realization that Jeff was making fun of him.
Toby's eyes lock with his and his smile falters. Jeff looks back toward his plate, and absentmindedly moves around the portions placed on it. When Toby turns back to the others, Jeff glances at him again, and there, seated on the bridge of his obviously broken nose, is a band-aid with Eevee on it.
Toby comes up in conversation during the two-week span where they don't speak to each other. He learns from Clockwork that Toby is… neurologically challenged. His twitching? Not just a nervous tic, apparently. Was actually caused by a genuine, real-ass disorder… "Torrutes," he thinks it's called? He'll have to look it up.
He learns that he can't feel anything, either, Clockwork points out as she reminisces on how the two of them had sparred — for fun, — and he hadn't even winced when she slashed a knife across his forearm. He had smiled, she says.
Jeff's memories of Toby, pinned to the ground and bleeding, become a little more twisted at the realization that he hadn't felt it.
It's not every day that Jeff can see his breath while he's inside the house, but it's not every day that the power's out, either.
Slowly, begrudgingly, he drags himself from the semi-comfort (because his bed is too shit to be actually considered comfortable) of his bed, and pads over to his dresser. Two shirts, (as well as a jacket,) later, he's ready to go…
...outside, where it's even fuckin' colder, so that he can turn on their backup generator.
He goes in his room and puts on an extra jacket, just for fair measure.
He walks through the hallway uninterrupted, probably on account of the fact that it's six in the morning and everyone else who would normally be bothering him is either asleep or out doing something, but Jeff appreciates the silence regardless.
When he opens the front door, a gust of air cold enough to freeze water mid-air slams itself into him. Somehow, the layers don't feel like they're doing enough for him, and he rubs his hands against the cotton of his outermost hoodie. His teeth bite down on his lower lip, drawing blood. Damn, it's cold, he thinks, and begrudgingly trudges through the thick snow, the cold seeping into his sneakers. Should've worn a pair of boots, he thinks, and then mumbles where the hell would I get a pair of boots? because he isn't fuckin' made of money.
He's halfway down the driveway when an axe- hatchet? Comes barreling out from the woods, flying right past his head. He hears it whistle as it narrowly flings past him, barely a few inches away from the tip of his nose. Moments later, he hears the rapid patter of footers, slowed by the thick snow but spurred with enough energy that it doesn't really matter, coming towards him, and turns his head toward the source of the hatchet. He's got a pretty good idea of who–
Yep, it's Toby. Fuck.
Toby, who is laughing, barrelling in Jeff's direction, wiping the fog from his weird orange goggles with the back of his sleeve. His laugh sounds like it hurts, what with the way that he's gasping for air and squealing like a child, and he's coming in Jeff's direction– he almost cracked Jeff's head open and he's– he's–
he's smiling, because he hasn't noticed that Jeff is smack-dab in front of his because he eyes are covered by his sleeve and he almost split Jeff's brain in half and he isn't wearing nearly enough clothes and Jeff can see the
tips of his fingertips turning white and Toby is closer to him now, heaving and panting so hard that the air in front of him has turned cloudy and he's
planing his cold, cold fingers (too cold, glistening white because his skin is probably fucking dying and he doesn't even realize it,) against Jeff's neck as he looks at him from behind his still-fogged goggles and laughs again, saying
"S-shhhit, Jaaack! Al-m-mmmost hit…" and then he pauses, actually getting a good look at his face, and the grin is wiped off of his face in seconds. He unpinches his hair and heaves himself off of Jeff, trying to walk away away for a moment before tumbling into the snow. He sits in the snow for a moment before standing back up, continuing his run over to the hatchet, now lodged into a tree.
Jeff almost follows him.
He screams into a still-cold pillow hours later. It's kind of like that scene in Mean Girls (which he swears he's never seen,) where the blonde chick screams and calls herself a skank. Only instead of writing in a book, he's clutching Toby's weird muzzle in one hand, and, in the other…
Okay, maybe it's not that much like the scene from Mean Girls.
Toby has a fun new trick to play on him, tonight. His fingers are blackened, the skin flaking off of them in little chunks as he shows Jeff how to play the knife game. He grips a sharpened kitchen knife– Jeff's kitchen knife, and nimbly slams the knife in between each finger.
He slips up, eventually, and giggles as the edge of his index is shaved off. He looks up at Jeff, still alternating the knife in between each finger. His cheeks are flushed, his goggles are worn so tight against his eyes that the skin around them is turning purple, and the right side of his face is engulfed by the ever-present gape of his cheek.
He smiles, and his hand suddenly jerks, slamming the knife into the middle of his ring finger. He breathes a sharp intake of air, giving Jeff an expression that Jeff can only guess is a wince, before it twists into a smile, and he keeps going at it. He plunges the knife into the wood beneath his thumb and forefinger, and starts to crack the blackened tips of his fingers from their knuckles. All Jeff can bear to focus on is his hair, but it's becoming hard to ignore the look that Toby's giving him…
… or, moreso the look that he isn't. It's not Toby, Jeff realizes as he bolts up from his bed in a cold sweat, because it's never been Toby. He doesn't know a single fucking thing about Toby that wasn't told to him, or inferred while tormenting him, or…
Fuck.
He thinks of a plan quickly enough, and when the next group dinner rolls around– which have been more frequent lately, probably something to do with the fact that it's around the time Thanksgiving would roll around If they had enough money to afford a big banquet, they would celebrate it… but they don't, so they won't.
The mood in the dining room is tenser than normal, he notices, and it has nothing to do with him and Toby. EJ's hoodie is caked in blood, Ben's eating the food without an accompanying YouTube video loudly playing on his phone, and Clockwork and Jason (the Toymaker) might as well be having a contest based on who can nervously tap their feet faster. Fuckin' crackheads.
And the pork chops are shit. Figures, since Jeff's the one who cooked them.
Members of the household begin to slowly trickle out of the dining room, and Jeff sits and waits, moving around the food on his plate and taking small bites any time Toby glances his way.
Soon enough, it's just him, Toby, Toby's muzzle (safely tucked in the pocket of his hoodie), and the two other proxies. Frowny and Dollface, Jeff calls them, but nobody really knows their real names. The two of them begin to lift from their seats, and Toby is quicker than both of them combined, lifting all three of their plates from the table and heading to the kitchen to dump them in the sink.
The proxies leave, and then only he's in the dining room, listening as the sink in the kitchen flares to life and Toby starts on dishwashing duty.
It's a lucky coincidence, Jeff would think, but he'd really just read EJ's chore spreadsheet.
He stalks into the kitchen, making sure to avoid the over-trodden floorboards underneath the arch, and fishes the muzzle out of his pocket.
He tosses it, after a few seconds of staring at the blades hooked around Toby's belt, and instinctively dodges as it plops in the murky water as Toby simultaneously turns around, a hatchet already in his right hand.
They lock eyes. For a good ten seconds, the two boys have an impromptu staring contest as Toby's other hand weasels around in the water, searching for the object with the kind of navigational skills that only someone who's actively actively focusing on something else can posses. When he finally finds what he thinks he's looking for, he tugs it out of the water and drops his hatchet to the floor, cradling it in his hands and giving Jeff a look that he can't decipher.
Can't decipher yet.
"…Hey, goggles."