#ive missed this

taylortut:

Tim supposes that this was a bad idea, all things considered. The glint in Elias’ eyse when he had wished him well was telling. Any boss who was so willing to let an employee take an indefinite vacation and remain on the payroll–though, he supposed he hadn’t looked at a paystub in ages, so who even knew if he was being paid at all?–was certainly up to something. 

Speaking of arsehole bosses, Jon would have been livid about this if he knew. He hadn’t seen the guy in forever, and when he did, he couldn’t say that he anticipated him putting up much of a fight. None of them did, these days, it seems. Tim is no exception. The world is going to end and here’s Tim, lying in a kayak in some river in Malaysia, feeling like death and wishing it would come but knowing that he would be too cowardly to take its hand if it did. 

Not for the first time since he’d left the archives, he leans over the side of the kayak to empty his stomach of whatever meager contents he’d been able to put into it. 

Suddenly, before his eyes, a memory appears. It’s so vivid that it’s probably part hallucination, considering how dehydrated and hungry he is. He’s been at the Archives for only a month, he’s madly in love with Sasha, and Jon hasn’t stalked his house, told him off for absolutely nothing, shaken hands with devils. Martin hides his blushing face from Jon behind enormous stacks of documents he has no idea what to do with and thinks he’s pulling either lie off well. Instead of coddling Jon after he spends another night hunting paranoid delusions in the catacombs, Martin cares for him in ways that make Tim want to be kinder. He brings twice the amount of lunch he can eat just for an excuse to pawn half of it off on Jon, who reluctantly takes a break to sit with them at the lunch table. Jon bitches about Elias and rubs absently at the perpetual knot in his right shoulder, which Sasha leans over to knead with her thumb. Sasha’s eyes are her own when she meets Tim’s across the table to silently share a laugh at something no one else would understand. 

He opens his eyes and he’s alone again, the warmth of the memory fading hard and fast enough to make him shiver. He’s lost time, judging by how low the sun hangs in the sky, and he leans over the side of the boat once more to dry heave. This time, he doesn’t even collapse all the way back in the kayak, instead just resting with one arm dangling in the water. 

The tides pull him back toward the shore and it all feels so inevitable that he doesn’t make a second attempt to sail away from it all. Instead, he groans loudly to drown out Jon’s voice in his ear saying “watch your step, there,” as he stumbles out of the kayak, something he always announced when he hit a tough curb with his cane. He fills his dirty hands and dry mouth with filthy lake water and it tastes like the London Fog that Martin placed on his desk when he started to come down with a cold. It was years ago. It was so long ago that they were all different people, and those people would never sit together agian, never go to a club and make horrible choices and wake up so hungover that the Archival department had had ot shut down for half a day again. Every time he falls to his knees as cabs passed him by, refusing to take him to the airprot, he had to pick himself up. No strong arms protect him from hitting the dirt, no bony hands probe him for injury, no soft voices tease him for his clumsiness. 

When life broke them open, they were rotten inside, every one of them. But God, he misses the exoskeleton. 

Sorry for the unexpected hiatus! I meant to start this blog back up at the beginning of January, but I’ve been busy with my other Tumblr blog.

But I’m back and ready to post here again!

Also I may or may not have started a twitter.