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The anger that warms Tim’s heart is a familiar heat by now. It has been his closest companion since. Well since Sasha. Maybe even longer, really. Who’s keeping track anymore? Certainly not any of his coworkers .
He looks into the dead, plastic eyes of...Nikola. He knows its name, and its face, and he knows that whatever lies it has up its sleeves, it is irrelevant in the face of the detonator clenched too tight in his hand.
The white knuckles means this is real.
“Jon, I don’t know if you can hear me, but if you can…then I don’t forgive you. But thank you for this.” The mannequin in front of him snarls.
“You can’t save him, you know. It won’t end like this,” the plastic mouth doesn’t move, but the hands by its side reach out to grab at Tim. He takes a step back, calm in his burning fury.
“I can’t save him, no. I doubt I can save anyone at this point. But I know I can hurt you.” Tim squeezes the detonator.
A scream echoes for a second, like a dying animal, cuts off just as the explosion reaches the main auditorium where they stand. Tim only has that second to wonder about Jon near his feet when everything goes dark.
He wakes up what feels like only a moment later, in a pile of still smoking rubble. He feels like hell. Tim sits up with not a small bit of effort, leveraging himself with rubble that hurts more than it should as it digs into his palms. He takes stock of himself, looking down.
He can’t see the bottom half of his torso in the dark of the night. He can’t feel it either, but with the rubble he’s not sure why. He doesn’t want to think about it.
Tim looks around instead. There are doll parts everywhere, plastic melted beyond recognition and clumping the smaller foundation bits together in smooth-warped chunks. He wonders in a daze, about the others. Jon and Basira and Daisy. Christ he hopes they made it out.
He stands up, pushing away the drywall and debris sticking to him. Hm. No time to think of that. Tim jerks over to where he hopes the street is, although he’s struggling to focus his eyes on anything past his own stumbling feet. Blood runs down both legs, and he’d be worried about it but it’s a worry only in the back of his mind.
Something is screaming at him, telling Tim something is wrong with him but he can’t seem to focus on that either. He keeps walking. Eventually he comes to a stop, the smoke is cleared a little here and he can see resting in front of him is Nikola Orsinov. Or, what was left of it.
The torso down is covered by a large piece of what can be assumed to be the ceiling, and one of the plastic eyes is missing. The head is mostly intact, though spiderweb cracks cover the entire left side by the missing eye. The ringmaster hat it wore is on the ground next to the head, almost perfectly intact.
Tim huffs. Leans down and picks it up, something in him screaming at him to not, but he can’t hear over the tinnitus. He brushes it off, what little superficial damage it sustained in the explosion. He puts it on.
Tim then scrabbles in the dust, grabbing Nikola by the scorched shoulders and hauling it out. There’s no skin below the chest, all burned away. The plastic is still solid though.
Nothing for it then, hm? His hand reaches down, along his own abdomen, hands stinging. He finds the wound through his small intestine, a large jagged cut that can not be felt or really seen in the dark blood that stains his clothes black in the night.
He reaches into himself, past the blood and shrapnel that still resides on a surface level. He reaches in and grabs a hold of the skin along his stomach. Grips it tight and pulls. It comes away like glue from your hands, just as easy and satisfying to peel.
There’s no other wound on his stomach so he keeps on tearing flesh away from organ and bone, unsticking it from each rib with care. There’s another scratch along his clavicle, perfectly placed really. The scratch really is that, a scratch, a scrape, barely breaks the skin. It’s still enough for Tim’s left hand to push up against the skin from the inside, piercing his own skin with nails slightly too short for the task. The right hand joins from the outside.
Eventually both hands manage to create a hole large enough to really start peeling. They strip the skin right off the front of Tim. He smiles idly, and goes about lining it up with the plastic body laying in front of him. The wound pulses lazily, no pain emanating from this. The back is a little easier with the exit wounds already there, it’s as easy as shrugging out of a coat. He drapes that over the body too.
It’s starting to look more like him. The familiar nicks and small scars, the hair, half faded stick and poke from when he was a teen. His life story, transferred over and ready to start again.
He looks at what else is missing. Oh, the eye. Very funny. Tim grimaces and wipes his hands on his already stained pants. It doesn’t help much, but at least they aren’t dripping wet red anymore. He reaches up to his eye and digs in with his fingers. They’re clumsy, and blood starts to pool at the corner of the eye and stream down his face like a masquerade of real sadness.
The fingers may be clumsy but they get the job done, and Tim’s left eye pops out with a squelch. This doesn’t hurt either, and he's starting to wonder about that. He pops it into the mainly intact skull of the mannequin.
He looks down at the mannequin's mangled legs, and then at his. Hm. He settles down in the dust and pools of his own blood, sitting next to the body like an old friend. He pulls the biggest rock he can carry towards him and gets to work.
The light from the rising sun cuts through Tim’s thoughts. It's been several hours since the explosion, at least. He knows he doesn’t have much time left, someone will come investigate the wreckage or call the police soon. He’s surprised it hasn’t happened yet.
With newborn shaky legs, he stands. The dust has settled fully now and he is covered in plaster and blood. Whatever clothes either of them had been wearing had either been torn or burned to hell. He needs to...settle into this. Figure out what he’s become.
Tim does know one thing though, and that’s that he can’t feel the ever present eye on him anymore. He’s free.