Unfortunately the anons right, hes alive. I'm sorry.
Tim turns the key in his hand, metal scraping against his layers of hard skin, and the car starts.
For some reason he hadn’t expected the car to start, nor for him to actually get away with being irrational. He was never irrational; scared, maybe. Maybe he was angry, like he was right now, or hurt, or crying, like he also was right now, but never irrational. No, Tim couldn’t get away with that, he couldn’t get away with hallucinating and being irrational, he couldn’t get away with having seizures and being irrational. Tim couldn’t get away with being intentionally stupid, he couldn’t get away with purposefully not thinking about his actions.
But this time, he had. And it felt sort of… freeing.
He backed up, to pull out of the driveway, and the camera in the passenger seat stayed lingering in the corner of his eye. It was real, Tim knew it was real, Tim was conscious of the decisions he was currently making, but in his current state of mind it reminded him of all of the things he usually saw out of the corner of his eye, of the things that weren’t supposed to be there, and he jolted to a stop.
Right now, Tim could be hit by a truck and be rolling underneath it’s wheels, crushing and crumbling all of his bones like his leg had been at one point, and this could all be a “what if” scenario showing a better course in life than the one he had taken, that had left him dead on the street with no one to care about him.
Tim sighed, heaved a breath in, and backed out onto the road. If he was dead, he would get to that later, because even in this idealized scenario nobody cared about him, so he might as well start driving.
He swerved into the other lane, the wrong one, a few times, but his vision always evened out in the end, so he kept going. He could still feel copper in his mouth, and he spit it up, red flecks muddying the tan jacket that had been wrung through the mud a few too many times, and the blue long sleeve he had on underneath it. He had worn blue today, and he thought blue meant something important, was something important supposed to happen today instead of this?
He coughed a few times, his stomach flipping, letting go of the steering wheel for a moment as red also spotted his hands, veering to the right once he realized the rumble of the middle of the road sounding underneath his car.
The eye of the camera was still staring at him, as well as Arcane’s mask he had thrown down haphazardly into the same seat (not like it could be broken). He was so used to a hand accompanying the rectangular little box, Jay’s fingers curling around metal, making sure the little red light was still blinking. Jay’s eyes, burrowing into him, wide, big, asking what’s wrong, why won’t you just talk to me? And Tim responding, choked up, that it isn’t that easy for him, nothing is ever easy for him, and that he will always be wrong and bad as his ribs twist into braids in his chest and he chokes in oxygen as he yanks the wheel into the nearest parking lot.
Tim’s eyes are bulging out of his head as he opens the driver’s side door and vomits bitterly onto the pavement, bile and coffee mixing with saltwater, not remembering the last time he ate although he was supposed to. He spits up blood again, thick fluids in his mouth not able to be swallowed, and his head pounds as he starts to breathe. It’s ragged, heavy, something weighing him down until he’s on the pavement on his hands and knees coughing, trying to clear his airways so he’s able to function like a normal human being for once, but Tim knows in his heart of hearts that that’ll never happen, it’s not possible, he’ll never be normal and he never was normal.
But Tim likes to pretend, he likes to pretend a lot of things, he likes to pretend that he hasn’t just made the second worst decision he’s ever made in his life, and he likes to pretend so much that he’s coughing up fluids onto the pavement again and sobbing as his chest heaves because he’s enjoying himself so much.
Arcane looks on like a ghost from the passenger seat, not able to do anything because Tim’s not in danger, Tim brought this on himself. Arcane only needs to take in the world with Tim’s fingertips and Tim’s fists when there’s danger, and there isn’t any unless you counted Tim as the danger, which very well might be true.
Tim groaned, blinking, trying to stick the multiples of objects around him into one. He stood up, using the car door and car seat as balance, dropping himself back into Jay’s car with a heave of strength he didn’t know he had.
The flickering neon sign that was now behind him had said “Pawn Shop”, and maybe that was fate. Maybe, just maybe, in this cruel twist of events, maybe Tim was supposed to pawn off Jay’s camera and throw away the mask again and drive until the car couldn’t drive anymore and then light himself on fire in the middle of the woods. Maybe that’s what he was supposed to do, maybe he was supposed to continue being a fucking idiot, one who couldn’t survive in the real world, one who would punch the metal of the gas tank until it got on his hands and he lit it with his cigarette lighter and then his hands started melting.
His hands were shaking. Trembling. He had curled into himself as much as you can in a car’s leather driver’s seat, and the drowning feeling reminded him of convulsing on kitchen linoleum with Brian awake when Brian shouldn’t have been, screaming for help, screaming while Brian made sure Tim was still breathing as Tim pissed himself like an 8 year old in solitary confinement, making sure Tim didn’t choke as Tim’s body malfunctioned at 5 in the morning.
Was he convulsing? His hands were in front of the steering wheel, white against black, and Tim reasoned that if he was convulsing he wouldn’t be able to think about if it was happening or not, so he went to turn the keys in the ignition again before realizing everything was still running.
Look at how stupid Timothy is now.
He buckled his seatbelt this time even though he really didn’t want to, and straightened himself out.
Plan. He needed a semblance of a plan, he needed something for the doctors to put on their clipboards and check off as they forced more and more medication into his system, he needed something so that when he reached Alex this didn’t happen again.
Tim’s hand shakily rolled up the sleeve on his right arm, and it was blank. Nothing. He should have nothing in his system, and even if he had, it was recycled back into the earth now.
He was going to keep the camera, and he was going to keep the mask, and he was going to keep the jacket he had on. In fact, he was going to bring the camera with him, into the ever-changing woods, and he wasn’t going to think twice about what anybody else would think, because the kindling in his chest that he had just drenched was flickering back now.
Tim circled his car around in the parking lot before pulling back out into the country road that had no paint on it, one that he wasn’t going to intentionally crash on, one that he wasn’t going to be thrown through the windshield on and inevitably stain with red.
Timothy was going to Rosswood Park, and he was going to find Alex even if it got him thrown back into another goddamn mental institution.
