"Shut up," he says, unable to infuse the words with any rancor whatsoever. "It was me. I was the source of it."

It'd be kind of hilarious, almost. Two idiots trying to heap unequal amounts of blame on themselves instead of each other for once, a dizzying reversal of that spat-out conversation in a darkened parking lot. There's something mildly, bitterly amusing in that.

Or there would be, if Jay didn't happen to be dying.

"You weren't even you half the time," he says, and now he's just seizing words for the sake of talking and keeping Jay grounded and here for however long it lasts - because he refuses to think, entertain at all, that this might be something permanent, that this might be the Rift's fatidic little warning that it's going to be dragging Jay back.

It can't. It won't. It can't and it won't. Tim's stood up to something so big it stretched his mind into unknowability before and he can do it again, can't he?

He doesn't - he can't - he won't let himself be alone again.