remind yourself you made it [closed]

[deadeyedchild]

It's been a couple days now since Jay narrowly avoided another gruesome death, and he's starting to feel normal again. He's been avoiding Tim for the most part, and for no real good reason - just embarrassment at how much he fell apart, as if that's something Tim's never witnessed before.

It's stupid.

It's been even longer since Tim impulse-bought him Plan 9 From Outer Space, but that's what's now sticking in his head. That was nice. A little overture of normal friendship behavior. Tim's been doing a lot of that lately, asking Jay about himself, getting him things... patching him up isn't very normal but it was nice of him. What's Jay done?

So it is that on his way home from work he finds himself making an impulsive purchase of his own.

This is, also, possibly, stupid.

He doesn't exactly have a lot of loose cash hanging around, even with Aziraphale's generous wages. So much of it will always go into food and transit money and the stash in his sock drawer for tapes, just in case, for old time's sake, there's not much left over for non-necessities.

But this might be constrewn as a necessity.

It's something worthwhile, at least.

He lets himself into the apartment building, aggressively not regretting the purchase. He rides up the elevator alone, the musty scent of Aziraphale's shop still stuck in his nostrils. He hope it doesn't linger too noticeably on him.

He gets out on his floor and heads straight to Tim's place.

May as well just get this over with. Maybe Tim will think it's stupid. Maybe he'll like it. It'll get the reaction it gets.

He knocks.

Comments

[postictal]

He perches absently on the arm of the couch, absorbed in the meticulous task of fine-tuning his spontaneous new gift.

Tim snorts.

"Nothing good," he says dryly. "It's really been a while. Never actually took lessons or anything. Pretty much just learned by ear, picked up stuff as I went along, that sorta thing." Tim's sort of thing, this weird, off-beat interest that happens to be the one thing about himself undefined by cryptic bullshit. It was never wrapped up in him so deeply it could never be extracted. Just some dumb college kid's hobby.

He smiles, wry and one-cornered. "Probably Brian's fault I got interested in it in the first place. So encouraging it was obnoxious sometimes."

[deadeyedchild]

Jay chuckles. There's a definite pang at the mention of Brian, the knowledge that he was so good to Tim before everything got so fucked, but he determines stubbornly not to let things wander down that path. Tim's almost smiling. He did a nice thing and he's not gonna ruin it. For once.

"Well I don't think I'm a good judge of what's good," he says easily. "I never had much of an ear for anything."

He doesn't want to sit here like an expectant spectator, though, so he gets back up and heads to Tim's kitchen to make himself some coffee. "Anyway now you can... figure out new stuff."

[postictal]

Figure out new stuff. Yeah. He'd never have thought he'd be grateful for the Rift for dumping them both here in this godforsaken universe but - in its own roundabout way, it's made things easier where they weren't, before. That thing doesn't stalk him every minute of every day, the oil slick of nightmare wrapped around the trace edges of his mind.

It's like they can be normal, almost. Living with their respective shit instead of vehemently denying it ever existed.

"Yeah," he says. He strums the tuned instrument thoughtfully, pleased at the sound that comes arcing from the strings. "Yeah, who knows? Maybe go busking sometime."

[deadeyedchild]

"Yeah, that'd be good," says Jay, turning to lean against the counter and watch Tim dick around on the instrument. "You can make decent money off that, I think. Like... Union Square or somewhere." He shrugs.

He pours coffee for himself and for Tim and carries it over to the little table, keeping quiet while Tim continues to fiddle around. He doesn't say much else, alternately watching and tooling around on his phone, and trying to cling hard to this feeling, the sense of normalcy and contentment. Hanging out, having a good time. This isn't going to last forever, he knows that too well, but he's going to grip onto it for as long as he can. Try to remember how it is, for those times when shit falls apart.