Reluctant hurt/comfort? Why yes!
Both Tim and Jon have a bad time after the Buried.
cw fever, illness, vomit mention, suicidal ideation, grief. Also as a note, the night I wrote this was a hard one, and the day after was worse and this might reflect that. I don't think this is one I can go back through and comb for more cws, so hopefully that is warning enough. Stay safe, and enjoy something that was very cathartic to write.
The day after the Buried, it doesn’t even occur to Tim that he should be hungry. He hasn’t needed to eat in so long that he simply forgets. Just downs glass after glass of water in the break room after a shower that lasts far longer than the meager supply of hot water. He can’t be fucked that Daisy and Jon still need to wash the muck off. At least Daisy has somewhere to go, Basira is hovering around, ready to ferry her out of this hell archive.
Of course, it’s his own fault that he doesn’t have a flat.
He supposes he owes Jon. Or something.
He doesn’t care.
He’s still angry. And tired and filthy and depressed. The only thing the buried did was keep him from dying. Hell of a suicide watch to be on.
Sometimes when he closed his eyes down there, he could believe it was Jon or Martin lying on him. Keeping his fingers from itching to do harm… Well, almost, anyhow.
After that, he sleeps. And sleeps.
And, well, after that. He feels like shit.
Complete shit.
When he was a teen with soup for brains, Danny got sick. A bad flu, but he couldn’t keep anything down for three days. Three days of foisting broths and lucozade on his brother with little success. Should have been taken to hospital, by all rights, but their mother didn’t really believe in the whole modern medicine thing, and well. Dad was away, so Tim couldn’t even get Danny to an adult who could help, even if he didn’t give a damn. It had been awful.
He really thought his little brother was dying. Cracked and dry lips, fever so high that he wasn’t coherent. Three days he sat vigil. Praying to a god he barely believed in.
A fever that scooped out his brother until he was praying for a breathing corpse. Giving oblations of thin liquid.
On the third day, his eyes opened and he stroked Tim’s hand, as Tim shook with exhaustion by his bedside. He had to be propped up to sip at his broth, but it was far better than trickling it down his unconscious baby brother’s throat.
Pure helplessness. Both in empathy for his brother, who was probably having a worse time than Tim, and because he was next to useless.
Three days and Tim can’t keep down food. Gave up trying. Just shivers on the cot, gazing nearly sightlessly at the ceiling, muscles too wasted to move. He doesn’t know if anyone notices that he’s gone. He hasn’t heard any word from Martin. Basira and Daisy fucked off days ago, as far as Tim can reckon. Then again, he doesn’t have so much as a working phone. He doesn’t even know if it’s been three days or thirty.
His skin feels hot and tight. Like the Buried is taking a new approach to suffocating him. A dreadful thirst clawing at him, but he doesn’t have the strength to stand and get water anymore. Barely could limp his way there before the lack of food and probable fever stole what little he had left.
Is this just some divine punishment for prodding too hard at the forces of evil in the universe?
He’d finally come to terms with the abstract and incidental nature of these things, but he can’t help the hazy imagining that he deserves this.
Failed to keep his brother safe, for all his bedside bargaining and promises made to the wind on long walks after his brother disappeared. All the broken promises betwixt his savior and himself. Bitter words corroding promises that could have been harder than diamond.
It was his fault. Couldn’t hold up his end, and he deserves this dreadful heat and the foul desert of his mouth. His body generating his own funeral pyre.
He wishes he could bring himself to care. But all he’s known since Jon betrayed him has been anger and dissent disinterest.
There is an ache at his very core.
He lies there, on the cot. Tangled in the sheets. Bone dry. Dry as parched soil. For he has no moisture to spare for sweat. His own body out of anything that could bring his temperature down.
Finding Tim isn’t easy. Jon’s body betrays him after the Buried. Months of uneasy sleep, and days of pressure on all the wrong parts of him leave him poorly put together and his joints slipping apart at the slightest provocation. He spends days on the floor of his office, in too much pain to move, too dizzy to stand, and running a fever from the pain in his squashed and shitty joints.
His own fault, but a small price to pay for Tim and Daisy.
He would have stayed there if it meant getting them back.
One less monster.
Of course the Eye doesn’t let him die. Aren’t humans supposed to die if they don’t drink water for three days?
He spends most of his time passing out when he tries to stand.
And he can’t bring himself to care. He’s so tired. Too tired.
He didn’t expect anyone to come after him. Certainly not Tim. Not after everything.
Well maybe he hoped.
(He did).
(Damn his… well it isn’t optimism. Damn his longing for someone to give a shit if he vanishes for days. He should know by now that no one is coming. No one ever does.)
Groggy and foggy and battered.
He’s tired. He needs a proper mattress for just one night, but he can’t even get off the floor. Just lays in the remnants of mud, waiting to whither like the corpse he is, one just hasn’t stopped breathing yet (again).
But something draws him upright, more or less. Clinging to the walls, bracing his stilted journey on aching limbs.
It’s probably the Eye. Probably the Eye, or maybe Jon’s piercing curiosity, control slackened by fever, peering though a hairline fracture in the door of his mind.
He all but crawls to the cot, securing a half empty water bottle from somewhere he probably should be worried about, but he arrives to find Tim burning away before him as his own vision swims dangerously.
A face in front of his. Features obscure and unreadable. He can read the worry in those eyes. Even in the half light.
Tim couldn’t hear Jon in the Buried. His hearing aids long since ran out of life. All for the best, for the singing of the coffin in the rain will haunt his dreams (not only in a spooky way) for the rest of his life.
Only knew it was Jon by Jon guiding his (Tim’s) hand with too thin and gentle and burned fingers to his (Jon’s) mouth. So Tim could read his lips by feel. An imprecise thing, but better than nothing.
Filthy fingers against dry and dusty lips. Almost like a kiss. Perhaps more intimate.
The face hovers closer. Thin and careful fingers soothing his brow.
Pressing water to his lips. Mouthing words that are lost to Tim. And even if they reached him, he knows he wouldn’t understand them.
Is this Danny before him? Would he know his own brother? After all these years? After the Stranger chewed him up and regurgitated …whatever. Is he lost as much as Sasha had been? Like she’d been?
And what good would knowing that do? He would rather keep the memories he has, doesn’t want to know the creeping uncertainties that plague him when he closes his eyes.
He supposes that the advantage of the Buried is that it keeps the mind off things that aren’t the slow process of returning stone to stone in a way that obliterates everything in between. Everything but fear.
Not Danny, but Jon, Tim discovers. Pulled awake by uneasy stomach, and panicked breath, to find Jon fluttering out of consciousness by his side.
He wants to be put out that they are flush with each other, but …but they were closer still in the choking darkness with air thick with the soil that Tim swears he can feel coating his internal organs.
He’s drifting off again when he hears Jon gasp awake, looking nearly as unwell as Tim feels.
The small figure curled at his back is not his brother. But he feels as warm and as fragile as Danny did when he sat his vigil. Counting the seconds between breaths. His heart stuttering when they lagged and caught in his raw throat in the muted hours between sunset and sunrise. The hours that Tim feared if he stopped willing the next breath to happen, they wouldn’t.
But Jon is hardly human. His pulse is jittery and uneven. Each breath just a little more strained than they should be. Likely matching Tim’s own.
Some distant part of him… the distant part that can feel Jon’s pulse when the rest of him is floating away, untethered to a body too light and empty without topsoil and rich loam to brace him into and against the earth… worries that his own furnace of a temperature is too high and will roast Jon.
Another equally distant part of him is annoyed that Jon dares to share this pyre of internal heat with him. …If this is how he goes out, he wishes he saw the stars when he still had any strength.
Tim wakes again to cool water against his tongue.
Jon is mumbling to himself fervently. And Tim can recognize that look. That fear. That determination. The will of someone breathing for someone else. Holding their life-force steady in the mind. Knowing to let it faulter is a death sentence. With wild certainty that is bounded in something beyond reason, for when you are willing another person to breathe, you are often beyond the reach of science.
And Tim wonders who Jon could possibly be breathing for, because there is no universe in the extensive multiverse that Jon would ever will the life into someone who has spewed such hateful things and led another fragile being he swore to protect to his death.
And yet…
Tim exhales deeply. Sliding into what looks to be a restful sleep for the first time in uncounted months. Watching the rise and fall of his chest look more natural and less like an afterthought, what little strength Jon had found, abandons him. And he curls himself around Tim. A small and fragile and dusty shield. And is asleep in an instant. Knowing without a doubt that Tim will sleep comfortably through the night, and if anything changes, Jon will know. Both in body and from beyond the waterlogged door in his mind.