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Tim falls in love so easily. So so easily.
It’s everything and nothing to do with being a sick bastard shuffled in and out of the hospital every other year. Everything-- because he craves approval, attention that is spawned of pure interest instead of it being medically based because how fascinating is his broken mind, hmm? And, nothing-- because being sick doesn’t mean he’s fucking desperate. He loves who deserves his love, and it’s worth /something/, dammit, regardless of what his mother might’ve said in the past.
Brian deserved his heart and more than that. He earned the hearts of all those who met him, and though Tim presented him with this damaged shell that was ripped beating from his chest and soaked in his terrified tears, he still wanted it. Above everybody else’s, he wanted his heart and took it gladly.
Their love was one for the books in that it was romantic, dedicated and tasting of marriage, and platonic-- gentle and giggly and boyish.
Alex saw their love, caught glimpses during visits to Brian’s form. His eyes would linger in the none too shy holding of their hands and the injokes swapped between them at nearly a hundred miles per hour would earn them a raised eyebrow.
Alex is the sort of man to be obsessed with love.
That’s why Tim is sure he and Brian were in on it together, in dragging him to co-star alongside Brian in that fucking movie of his.
That. Fucking. Movie.
It ruined him, mind, body, soul, and heart. The first three are obvious in their effect. By the rattle of pills in his pockets. The raised lines that crisscross along his wrists. The purple craters that are his eyes.
His heart though, it hides away, unseen and lying in two pieces-- one half for Brian, who seems to never be coming back, and one half for a careless cameraman who can’t tell his right foot from his left at the worst of times.
Brian sits inside him like the rocks he once lived to climb: heavy and jagged, digging into the fleshy walls of his chest. His supposed last moments revisit Tim in his dreams, not in vivid memory but through the bits and pieces he caught off a YouTube video.
(He can’t figure out if he’d rather have been conscious when Brian found his form coughing out organs back in that ramshackle building, or… or if it would have been too much.)
Brian is gone. But he’s still with him and every time he so much as shows a hint of a smile at Jay when he gets excited over the slide of raindrops on the window or chases a pigeon down the street, Brian flashes in front of his eyes.
And he remembers he’s waiting.
He’s waiting for a hint that Brian is still here and that he ought to forget about Jay and give all his attention to the man who originally had it.
But Jay! Clumsy Jay, tripping on his feet, clinging to Tim for balance. Quiet, but observant, soft blue eyes never as threatening as the icy stare from the trees. Sincere, trying his best…
He’s so fucking flawed, too, though, he’s an awful shitty person when Tim is in a bad mood and needs to think of him that way, pick him apart so he won’t feel guilty in hating him.
But that’s human. That’s just human.
Human is what he never got in the hospital, at school, at home. He got scared children, looming doctors, impatient teachers, unchanging and unforgiving.
Jay forgives him if he yells, if he makes a mistake like forgetting the special sweet treat Jay had wanted from the market.
And tonight, the question that’s been sitting in Tim’s stomach and nauseating him comes rolling off his tongue. Maybe Jay looked at him too gently or was too kind in letting Tim have the last bites of their diner based dinner.
Either way it comes, trembling more than an earthquake ever could.
“Are you waiting for anyone?”
“What?”
“I-- are you waiting for anyone? After we’re done with this?” Tim tries, his face painfully hot. “Like. A girlfriend. Or someone who just means a lot to you.”
Jay sits up in his bed, hands folded in his lap. His pale face is utterly dreadfully blue now, lit by the laptop screen before him. His eyes scan the ceiling in thought before his skinny shoulders bob up and down.
“No. I didn’t hang out with anybody much before this. You… you’re my first, uh, friend in a long time, if you’ll pardon the pathetic nature of that statement,” Jay admits with little shame and something more akin to acceptance, as though he expects Tim to look down on him.
How can he, though?
“Pardoned a thousand times over for all the times I haven’t had a friend,” Tim waves off before lying back on his bed, clutching at his belly. Something fuzzy is playing inside him, and he silently berates himself, why, why does he have to feel like this when Jay isn’t even his type? Wasn’t Brian his type?
But then again, Brian was one of a kind, and so is Jay, as he turns the laptop slightly away so that he can pretend to Tim that he doesn’t look up cute animals between decoding sessions.
“…I’d have said I would’ve waited for Brian, if he was still around,” Tim says, steady as he can manage. The barrage of fuzzy creatures on the screen comes to a halt, though Jay himself doesn’t move. Tim picks at the garish yellow bedspread, rubbing it between his fingers. “I-- I mean I’ll always wait for my best friend, if he ever comes back, but, I don’t think I need to wait at all if I have someone I already like with me.”
Tim isn’t certain-- the lighting in this room sucks, with it being the single lamp that stands between the two beds-- but he thinks he sees a smile twitch upon Jay’s lips before he goes back to Google images.
“No,” he says quietly. “You don’t have to wait.”
And that, that’s all Tim needs for now. He faces the window with the drawn shades, arm tucked beneath his head as his heart thuds away behind his ribs.
It could be tomorrow, it could be days from now. It could be only once all this is over.
But he knows now that he has to tell Jay, no matter what’s happened to Brian.
Tim falls in love, so easily, and it’s always with the people who understand how much his love is worth.
Maybe he’s just lucky.