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Tim’s on the edge of falling asleep when a sound jerks him back into alertness. A brief half-awake moment of panic before he realizes it’s just Marius.
Marius does a little hop-jump-skip over the piles of junk and machinery on the floor and flops into the bed, tugging up the blanket around him and curling up into Tim’s side.
“Bad night?” Tim puts his chin on Marius’ head, and he ducks his head further into Tim’s neck. The tangle of limbs is familiar like it always is. Marius doesn’t look exactly like Bertie, but he was the same height and his hair was similar and if Tim closes his broken-breaking-bleeding eyes he can pretend that he’s still mortal, that he hasn’t killed trillions of people, that he’s not doomed to an eternity of suffering, that his best friend didn’t die.
“Mm. Y’know how it is.” Marius tucks himself around Tim tighter, clinging to his coat. “It’s stupid. It’s been hundreds of years.”
“Thousands, for me.”
What happens if you manage to destroy a Mechanism utterly, down to their core, is something not too well known, due to the fact that anyone who tries will be dead before they can say “Oh fuck, is that a gun?”, but Tim has still grown acquainted with this mechanic over his millenia of living. If you truly break a Mechanism, in the literal sense- destroy their entire body in one go before they have a chance to regenerate- they are sent back to the state they were in when they died. Tim will be thin as a skeleton and unsteady when he tries to stand, and he will be dying from an infected bullet wound. The others have their own brand of pain; Tim has not seen everyone’s, but he’s intimately familiar with Jonny’s and Marius’. It’s funny- in Jonny’s efforts to rip himself apart any way he can, to inflict pain and make himself the monster rather than the victim, to build up an impassable barrier of steel around himself, he’s never looked younger nor more vulnerable.
Marius has a mess of an upper arm, a thousand small injuries, and of course he’s just as starved as Tim. It strikes Tim, not for the first time, just how small Marius is. Curled into each other like this, he can feel every one of Marius’ ribs and the ridge of his backbone. He’s light as hell- Marius can jump up on Tim easily, rides about on his shoulders and complains with all the drama of a dying maiden in those old romance novels everyone knows he reads behind his medical textbooks when Tim refuses to carry him.
“D’you want to talk about it?” Tim asks after a minute of silence.
“Same as usual. Is it weird that I still miss Leo?”
“I miss Bertie.” Tim reaches for his neck, grabs onto nothing- he lost their dog tags centuries ago, but he still hasn’t gotten rid of his unconscious habits. “Every day.”
“Yeah but- everything that happened. In the end, we hated each other.”
“I never met them, but from what you’ve said you were each other’s everything for- a long time. It makes sense that you can’t let go of that.”
“I guess.”
Marius trails off for a long time.
Tim nudges his shoulder. “You asleep?”
“No!” Marius yelps, snapping back into alertness. “I just- sorry. I’ll stay up, in case we gotta hi- in case Jonny comes in with, like, a gun.”
“Marius,
get some sleep.
I’ll take first watch.”
The tension drains from him, and he curls back into Tim. “Thanks. G’night.”