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Tim looks like a walking advert for a horror movie. He fiddles with a piece of plastic shrapnel he’d pulled out of himself, small but sharp and completely coated in drying blood. There’s blood crusted around his left eye too, from where he tried to seal the cracked plastic, painting it with suspiciously steady hands. The skin on the body fit perfectly, no sagging, but there’s still a wound seeping old blood in his abdomen and his shirt is long since missing.
The legs are surprisingly steady too, considering he broke them off at the hip bone to reattach to the main body. Whoever’s body it is now. Nikola, Tim. One in the same.
There’s a hunger gnawing at Tim, not in his fucked up stomach but behind his mismatched eyes. Something telling him he needs to eat.
He barely pays attention to where he’s going, doesn’t think about taking the left towards the sound of laughing. It’s big guffaws that can be heard from a block over, and when Tim approaches he sees that it’s a man, maybe late forties. He’s flushed and happy, singing and laughing to himself in drunken revelry on what could be his front step, could be some random building. He’ll do, Tim thinks to himself unthinkingly.
Tim is aware of what he looks like; bad. That doesn’t stop him from approaching with full confidence.
“Got a smoke?” He remembers the anglerfish case well. He leans against the wall next to the man.
The man peers up at him from his seat on the step, and smiles. There’s no recoil at the horror show Tim makes, no immediate fear. Is that the drink or is that Tim? Who knows.
“Sure, love,” the man digs in his corduroy jacket’s pocket for a minute before emerging with a battered pack of sterlings. He taps one out and hands it to Tim between two fingers, a cheeky smile aimed at him through the man's fringe. Tim keeps his face pleasant and leans in, biting it out from between the man's fingers. He has nice hands, he notes as he pulls back just slightly. The man flicks open a zippo and offers it up to Tim too, who lights the smoke without removing it from his mouth.
The man's smirk seems to get wider as they smoke in silence, stretching his drunk flushed face around the point of his own cig. The hunger behind his patched together skull throbs as the seconds tick by. The smoke leaves a stale taste in his mouth, but that’s it. There’s no rush of tobacco. Interesting.
Tim gets up from his lean on the wall after what feels like a lifetime, stubbing the useless cigarette under the heel of his boot. Showtime.
“Mind following me, stranger?” He tries to put it on coy. It’s not like it matters if the man doesn’t follow right away. He does though, getting up from his seat with a grunt and trailing after Tim as he leads him down the alley a ways down from where they rested.
Nothing for it then. Tim rounds on the man after he deems them a safe distance away from the early morning street. Gets real close with a smile bending lips that suddenly barely want to move.
The pleasant smile on the man is gone now, as whatever Tim has become is revealed to what he can see. There’s real fear there now, tight around his mouth.
It’s where he starts, dragging the small plastic piece from the corner of his previously smirking mouth to his ear. The cut glides like a hot knife through butter, cutting into the meat of his cheek and showing his tobacco stained teeth on the other side. He repeats it on the other side. The man does not scream, but that’s alright. He won’t be able to in a minute, regardless.
“It’s alright, it’s alright. Wrong time, wrong place, yea?”
It’s later by the time Tim has finally finished. If he’s going to be doing this regularly he’s really going to have to start getting better at this. Skinning a man alive can’t take three or however many hours every single time.
Christ. Tim just skinned a man alive. He drops the fingers he’s been contemplating—the man really did have nice hands. No, Jesus what is he thinking.
He looks at the mess the alleyway has become. Blood drips off the wall where the rest of the man lay. It pools around Tim’s shoes and suddenly he can’t breathe. The skin sags in pieces against a nearby dumpster, hung up for Tim’s later perusal and what was he thinking oh god . There’s a steady plip plip plip of blood hitting the puddle it’s made, mixing with the gross water under the dumpster.
Tim looks at what he’s done. There’s no gnawing behind his eyes anymore. Fuck!
He books it out of the alley like a bat out of hell. Running as fast as his cobbled body can take. The streets are no longer empty, filled with early morning employees and people with their lives together. They don’t look at Tim for more than a second as he rushes past, he’s back to whatever normal skin he wears when he’s not trying to eat.
Eat. He ate that man. Technically.
He slows down after a couple blocks, legs burning. Wasn’t he supposed to have left that bit of humanity behind already? Pain and all that?
Is he even human anymore?
Tim’d stopped in front of a shop window, dark still in the early hour, and he peers at himself in the shiny black glass.
He doesn’t recognize the man in the window. There’s no illusion covering his own senses, he sees everything.
His eyes, one ice blue one familiar warm brown, are glassy like he’s not all there anymore. There’s still blood smeared around the brown one, for all that it does to cover up the cracks spreading up his temple into his hairline. The hair is his sun bleached, but he’s never had it that long before.
His torso is uncovered, and all his, but he knows that if he were to be run through nothing but sawdust and plastic would spill out. He doesn’t want to think about his legs.
Tim is...afraid. Maybe that’s what being one of these monsters is really about, not feeding off others’ fear but your own.
It’s only going to get worse. Whatever is in Tim’s chest stops as the thought hits. Oh god it’s going to get worse. He needs...something. He needs something to ground himself. Keep himself from being swallowed by the skin he now inhabits.
He doesn’t know why he ends up back at the Institute. Maybe because it’s the beginning of the nightmare; something tug-tug-tugging just under the skin like a fishhook, reeling him back to the source of the problem. He misses the days when all he had to worry about was his somewhat standoffish boss.
He has no infiltration plan past just walking in through the front door, which he does. Elias will see him whether or not he actually attempts to sneak around. Might as well just go in when it’s early and hope no one’s there to say anything.
Walking into the Archives, Tim’s at first confused. The ever pressing feeling of being watched is still there, but it’s. Faint. Trying to peer through a foggy street, an outline at best. Did Martin’s plan work?
The thoughts are idle, he doesn’t really care. It makes walking towards his desk much more pleasant though. He should have something in the drawers that can be used to keep him human.
When he gets there though, the desk is completely devoid of any of his personal effects. Did they replace him already? Jesus. He looks through every desk drawer anyway, but they’re all empty.
At a loss for what to do now—go home and hope his landlord hadn’t tossed his things too? Jesus he hasn’t been gone that long has he—Tim meanders around the Archives, tries to see if there’s anything of his at all left over.
Jon’s office at the back of the bullpen is shut tight. Tim wonders if he made it out. Martin’s desk is still cluttered with knick knacks and half finished statements, though they look old. Where has Martin been?
Completing a circuit of the bullpen leads him to the break room. He flips on the switch into the tiny kitchen-with-a-couch they called a break room, when he sees something.
It’s the picture of him and his brother, taken maybe five years ago. They looked so young, both of them. Next to it is a shirt, he thinks one of Daisy’s spares? There’s also a note from Jon, chicken scratch telling Martin to look into Wolverton Kendrick, whatever that is.
What is this? An altar for fallen coworkers? He wonders who started it, Martin or Melanie. Maybe Basira, he doesn’t see anything of hers here. That means she made it out! That means Jon...didn’t. He doesn’t know how to feel about that. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
Tim sighs. Picks up the photo, unhooks the back and takes the picture out of the frame. Leaves the frame on the grave on the counter.
He is not the man in the photograph. He is barely a man anymore. At least now he has a memory of what he used to be.
He could even become something better than what he used to be. Maybe.
Tim leaves the Institute with his memory in his pocket. He’s only prepared to deal with the one right now. Can’t stand the thought of facing his old life in his apartment as whatever he is.
He continues his aimless, still shaky walk, wandering into the city alone.