Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In the days and weeks since the dust settled on the US Institute, Tim has been learning. (How to be a parent; how to help a traumatized child; how to resist the need to keep them within eyesight all the time so you know they're safe.) And re-learning or honing skills he'd let go years before. (How to live with someone you are only just getting to know. How to make healthy meals for more than one person.)

Tim's not dumb - he's one of that rare set who has street smarts and book smarts - but he's. He's not sure he's the right guy for this job. He's trying, God he's trying, and he's not planning to stop anytime soon. But he doesn't know-

Anyway.

Right after The Institute fell, Tim was amazed at how well Luke was handling everything. A week or so later, he started seeing the cracks in the kid's façade and he felt a little ball of panic take root just under his ribcage.

The first time he woke up in the middle of the night to stifled sobs, he froze. Should he knock on Luke's door? When he'd been 14, decades ago, he would have been mortified if anyone had seen him crying, but kids now maybe don't have that problem? The cries settled before he could make himself move, and the only sign that anything was wrong the next morning were the boy's red-rimmed eyes when he came to the breakfast table.

Tim put extra chocolate in his milk, slathered extra butter onto the toast before he put it on the kid's plate of eggs and bacon.

"How you doin', pal?" he asked, looking at Luke's face for only a second before turning to give him some privacy, in case he didn't want to talk about it.

"Rough night," Luke croaked, trying to hide his scratchy voice in his enthusiasm for the food. 

Tim nodded, gently ruffling his curls as he passed behind him with his own plate. 

"You know I'm here if you wanna talk about it, ok?"

Luke nodded, ducking his head in a pretty clear indicator of how much he wanted to chat at this moment.

Tim didn't hold a grudge about it; he'd offered out loud, and that was what he wanted to do that morning. They ate their breakfast with the radio playing quietly in the background, and when Luke offered to help clean up Tim smiled and accepted it, unable to resist smoothing the back of his blonde hair in thanks. 

The rest of the day had been smooth sailing, and as Luke shuffled off to his bedroom, Tim hoped the night would be kinder to the kid than the one before.

He'd fallen asleep close to midnight, Trauma-Informed Foster and Adoptive Parenting open on his chest. Only an hour later he was woken again by quiet crying coming from the other side of the wall.

By the time he'd untangled himself from his blanket and gotten into the hall, the cries were almost over and there was lamp-light shining from the crack around Luke's door. He knocked gently, anyway.

Luke opened the door, not hiding the fresh tear-tracks on his face or the tired and haunted look in his eyes.

"Hey," Tim started, then stopped. What do you say to your traumatized adopted teen in this situation? "Can I do anything for you, bud?"

Luke gave him the smallest smile - small, but genuine. "No," he answered, voice scratchy, like maybe Tim only caught the tail end of his grief tonight. "Sorry for waking you up."

Tim shook his head. "Don't worry about waking me up." He studied the boy in front of him. "Nightmares? Memories?"

Luke just nodded sadly. "I'm just gonna sit up and read for a while, I think."

"Ok," Tim said as he stepped away. "Please wake me up if you need- or want-"

"I will. Thanks." Luke closed his door and Tim went back to his bed, still tired but feeling like he'd never sleep again.

Tonight, Tim doesn't know if he's cut out for this. He thinks about the stack of parenting books he has on his nightstand - all three on helping kids through trauma, and wasn't that a gut punch when he started to think about why there was this whole specific subset of adolescent parenting books out there - as he lies awake and stares at the ceiling. He thinks, maybe if he stays awake, Luke's sleep will be kind. He's never considered himself superstitious before, but maybe he's only just found the necessary mix of abject helplessness and fierce, protective love that makes believers out of the most grounded or skeptical. He wonders if this is what people who are devoted to sports teams feel like. If his secret vigil works tonight, will he never want to wash these clothes again?

He must have nodded off, because the clock on his nightstand suddenly says it's almost one, and the most heartbreaking, tragic sound he has probably ever heard is coming from the next room. He scrambles to the door, tripping on a bedsheet as he goes. Terror grips him.

He knocks on Luke's door again, "Luke? Luke, buddy? Can I come in?" The wailing doesn't stop, and Tim makes an executive decision. "I'm coming in, kid."

Luke looks so small in the middle of his bed, his knees pulled up to his chest as he rocks back and forth. Tim kneels in front of him even though every bone in his body is screaming for him to wrap his arms around the boy. 

"Luke?" he asks, then stops. He doesn't know what the rest of his question is. Can I help? Can I hug? Can I fight someone for you? Everything seems too late, not enough, useless.

Luke shakes his head into his arms. "I'm- fine. I just. It was my mom and dad. I'm fine," he says again, even though he is still actively sobbing and Tim can see him shaking.

Tim rests a hand on Luke's arm and gives the gentlest tug, and that's all it takes for Luke to press himself into the older man's embrace. He's still in a ball, still trying to make himself so small that his nightmares can't find him, but Tim hugs him anyway. His knees hurt after a few minutes, though, and he has to stand. Luke pulls away, thinking Tim is going back to his room now that "comfort the sad kid in my house" is checked off of his to-do list, but Tim guides him to his feet, too. Pulls him close, again, back into the shelter of his arms. Luke still seems like he thinks Tim will push him away in a moment, but Tim has no intention of doing that. Ever.

Tim half-carries the boy to the living room, Luke clinging fast to his shirt. He wraps the kid - his kid - in a soft blanket, nudges him down onto the couch, and finally wraps him back in a firm hug, tucking the tear-streaked face into his neck. He's not sure how exactly he should feel when Luke starts crying harder, but Tim hopes it's like cleaning out an infected wound so it can heal.

Tim would die for this kid, kill for this kid. (Again). He doesn't say it's all right or shh or try to calm Luke down, just rubs his back and says "I'm so sorry, kid. I've got you. I've got you." and holds him tight. As tight as Luke is holding on to him.

After what feels like hours, Luke settles. From the dead weight and deep, even breaths, Tim is pretty sure he's fallen asleep. 

The older man indulges himself for a few minutes longer: tucking the teen closer, concentrating on pushing feelings of safety and calmness and, let's face it, love toward the front of his mind in the hopes that they reach Luke and keep any further nightmares or bad memories away.

Eventually, as the sky is turning grey in the pre-sunrise hour, Tim transfers Luke gently to the couch itself. He tucks the blanket tight around him before dipping back into his bedroom to pick up one of the books from his nightstand and splash some water on his face, rinsing away the traces of his own tears. Back in the living room, he pulls his chair close to the couch and props his feet on the coffee table, settling in to read while keeping an eye on his traumatized teen. 

He wakes around ten, slight crick in his neck from the way he slumped as he fell asleep, Luke still breathing deeply and evenly on the couch - and picks up his book from the floor before gently disentangling the hand that's made its way to the calf of his pajama pants. He smoothes Luke's hair and moves into the kitchen, getting eggs and milk and bread out to start on french toast.

When Luke finds his way to the table right as Tim is topping off the second plate, he wonders if it's his imagination that the boy looks a little bit lighter around the eyes. He plops the warmer plate in front of him before settling in front of his own, and they eat in a comfortable quiet, the only sounds the clinking of their forks and the soft crooning coming from the kitchen radio.

Chapter Text

Tim is set for his Friday night. He doesn’t drink, really, when Luke is in the house - he isn’t worried Luke might get into it, and he isn’t worried he might get blitzed and do something terrible. He just feels weird drinking when the only other person in the house is a.) not old enough to drink and b.) not interested in it.

So anyway, he got a six-pack of beer on his way home from dropping Luke off a street away from the sleepover he’s at, with friends from school. Real friends. Tim thoroughly background checked every adult even slightly related to them, and Luke promises he’s never gotten any weird TP vibes from the kids or any of their parents. Tim’s a little bit worried, and a little bit missing the sandy-haired ball of energy who has been kind enough to share an old man’s home for the better part of the last year, but trying not to think about it. Hence: the Perfect Friday Night plan. He’s got his softest sweats on, and the holey shirt he’s had forever but is embarrassed to be seen in by any other human. He’s splitting his attention between picking a movie for the night and deciding on what takeout to order. Something Luke doesn’t like… Something spicy. Indian, maybe? And a cheesy action flick. Does he want a really good movie, or a really terrible one?

He’s scrolling through Netflix on his phone, taking the first swig of his cold beer, and kicking his feet up on the coffee table when Luke’s face pops up on his screen. Tim glances at the clock: it’s been around an hour and a half since Luke sent his mandated “got here safe” text, his half of the deal they struck after Luke threw around words and phrases like “mortifying” and “you treat me like a little kid” and “no one else is gonna be dropped off right there, come on” and “social pariah”. Tim smirks a little half-smirk, wondering if he’s the first crank call of the night or if they’re already warmed up.

“Hello?” he answers, pretending that he neither has Luke’s number in his contacts nor memorized. Is this gonna be a classic, like is your refrigerator running?, or are they working off something more modern?

He waits expectantly for three, maybe four seconds, before he hears a distinctly unfunny noise in the sound of a stuttered breath. He sits up straight, feet on the floor, beer on the coffee table.

 “Luke?” he asks. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t wanna be here anymore,” his kid whispers, breath catching. Tim can hear him struggling to breathe normally. “I don’t- can you come get me? I don’t want- I wanna come home, please.”

Tim’s got his feet in his shoes and his keys in his hand, is grabbing a hoodie off the coat rack to cover his heinous shirt, and is locking the door behind him before Luke gets to ‘please’.

“What’s wrong? Are you ok? Where are you?” he asks, trying not to let his panic show through in his voice.

“Bathroom,” Luke answers. “No danger, just. I can’t breathe and I feel sick and I don’t want to be here.”

“Ok,” Tim comforts. “Ok, I’m on my way. It’ll be ten minutes. Will you be ok or do you want me to stay on the phone?”

“I gotta hang up. I don’t want them to think- god, this is embarrassing. God, I’m such a baby.”

“Hey,” Tim scolds, voice firm. “That’s not helping.”

“I gotta go,” Luke responds. “I gotta go.” And then he hangs up.

Tim doesn’t call him back. Luke said he wasn’t in any immediate danger, and Tim trusts that Luke was telling him the truth about that. All Tim can do is concentrate on driving safely, and a little bit on a plan.

By the time Tim pulls up to the house, he knows how to get his kid and how to not make him a ‘social pariah’. He knocks on the door, and the host’s mom answers with,

“Oh! Hi, Mr. Johannsen! We weren’t expecting you.”

“Hi,” he answers back, looking over her shoulder. “Is Luke here?”

Kathy blinks in surprise, but steps back to let him come in. “Ah- yes? Yes, it’s Devon’s sleepover tonight. The kids are all upstairs playing video games - Mario Kart, I think? Why-?”

“He’s grounded; I told him he wasn’t allowed to come and he snuck out anyway.” Tim sets his jaw in his best approximation of angry-but-not-scary, and he thinks he must do a pretty OK job because Kathy rolls her eyes sympathetically. 

“Teenagers,” she comments, closing the door, before leading him up the stairs and to a very loud room. She knocks on the doorframe to get the kids’ attention and starts to talk, but Tim makes eye contact with a clearly ill-at-ease Luke and hopes the kid’s reading his intentions right about now.

“You’re in big trouble, buddy,” he says, firmly but without raising his voice. “Sneaking out? Not gonna fly. Get your things, I’m taking you home. And you’re grounded for the rest of your life.” He motions a ‘hurry up’ as Luke grabs his bag and his friends wince in sympathy. A small chorus of “bye”s follows them back down the hall, and Kathy sees them out.

“Well, bye, sweetie,” she says, seeming genuinely sympathetic to the kid, too. Tim is impressed. “If you ever get ungrounded we’ll see you again. Sorry about this,” she says to Tim.

“You didn’t do anything,” Tim says, a hand between Luke’s shoulder blades as they both try to get to the truck asap. “Luke and I get to have a long talk about listening and lying, now, and I’ve got a whole weekend of yard work lined up for him. I’m sure you’ll see him again, once he’s done his time.” Luke climbs into the truck, head down, dropping his overnight bag on the floorboard as he closes the door. Kathy and Tim exchange one last wave before he gets in, starts it up, and slowly, calmly, drives away.

“Are you ok, kid? What happened? What’s wrong?” Tim asks as he drives. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Luke shake his head. The kid’s breathing still seems off, and Tim doesn’t like it.

He pulls over once they’re a couple streets away, killing the engine before turning in his seat and trying to catch a look at Luke’s face. He waits expectantly for the kid to get his thoughts together.

“It’s so stupid,” Luke says, pained and so, so quiet. “They were just- we were all just goofing off and Matt started talking about like, sleepover stuff he’d seen in old movies or whatever but never in real life, and Joey said ‘nuh uh,’ that his older sister knew someone who actually got their ears pierced with just a needle and like an apple slice or whatever, and some of the other guys started saying something about lip piercings or eyebrows and I- I just couldn’t breathe, all of a sudden. I felt like- I thought I was gonna puke. And, like, cold and hot all over.” The boy scrubs angrily at his face with the cuff of his sweatshirt, gritting his teeth. “I can’t even go to a well-supervised party without being a baby. And-“ Luke’s voice grows a little more anguished, but he still won’t look at Tim. “Then I fucking- called you to come get me like you’re my- and you were having like one night of your own life without me-.” He breaks off, pressing his forehead against the window and struggling against whatever is happening inside his own mind as his hand worries at his ear.

Tim remembers being fifteen. It wasn’t even easy for him, and he’d never heard the words The Institute or been a child genius or struggled every day with the knowledge that his parents had been killed because some creeps wanted him for themselves. He stares through the windshield, thinking.

“I’ve gone through some shit in my life, Luke, you know that. Mostly a lot longer ago than what you’re dealing with. I still have bad days.” He glances over to the passenger seat to check if Luke is listening. “When I can’t get out of my head, you challenge me to a game of HORSE. Or ECHIDNA or whatever weird animal you’ve decided on that day.” Luke gives a small, wet huff that Tim counts as a laugh. “When I can’t face the uncertainties of daily life, you put on a show or movie I’ve seen a hundred times. When I can’t imagine trying to scrumble together a meal with any nutritional value, you bake a frozen pizza and open a bag of salad. Those are things I never even asked you for, just things you figured out how to do on your own. Cause we’re a team, right?”

Luke shakes his head restlessly, breaking in as Tim is finishing: “No, it’s different. I was doing fine and now I’m just suddenly overreacting about nothing again. It’s different because I need you, but you don’t need- you never asked for a kid, much less one who can’t stop backsliding every time things start to feel ok”

“Hey,” Tim says, low and strong and solid. He shakes Luke gently. “What have I told you? What are the rules between us, huh?” he asks, squeezing the boy’s shoulder.

"I call, you answer" Luke recites, still hiccoughing as he tries desperately to calm himself. He clenches his jaw again, crossing his arms stiffly across his chest.

"You need me?” Tim prompts after a moment.

"I need you, you're there," Luke continues. "I'm scared, you protect me, even if it's just- in-" he gestures to his head, the sentence ending abruptly as Luke starts really crying. Tim is actually happy about that, because it means the boy isn't a breath away from hyperventilating anymore.

"If I've told you once, I've told you a million times, and I'll tell you a million more: you are my priority, Luke," Tim says, softly, his hand on the back of Luke's neck as the teen buries his face in his hands. "You're gonna be a grown man one day, with a family and everything, and if, on the other side of the world, I got wind you were scared or hurting you'd have this 65-year-old and two suitcases at your doorstep in 24 hours or less. I love you, kid, and that's not gonna stop because you get older. It's not gonna stop because you have a life outside of me - which I am thrilled with, by the way. I love seeing you grow; I love having you around; and I want to make sure that you know I mean it." 

For a moment, Luke looks up at Tim, tear-streaked cheeks and all, before leaning over the console and burying himself in his surrogate father's arms. Tim just holds him and cards his fingers through the blond curls, even though the position is less than comfortable for either of them, and lets him cry it out.

It only takes a few minutes for Luke's reservoir of grief and fear and shame to be used up, and he hugs Tim tight before settling back into the passenger seat. Tim hugs him back and lets him go.

"I'm betting you didn't get to eat dinner before I showed up?" Tim asks, restarting his truck.

"No," Luke shakes his head, wiping his face with his sleeve before Tim directs him to the tissues and baby wipes in his glove box. "Pizza only got there a few minutes after I called, and I couldn't eat anything, I felt- sick."

Tim nods thoughtfully. "Sounds like you had a bona-fide panic attack, bud. Sorry about that, and welcome to the terrible club. How's diner food sound?"

"Perfect," Luke agrees, shoving his crumpled up kleenex into his jean pocket. "I need something salty and greasy and probably also a chocolate malt."

Tim smiles as he pulls away from the curb. "Well," he muses. "You're the genius." 

Chapter Text

Two Weeks After the Institute Fell:

Luke Ellis is dead.

The official story is that his body was found in a state park, with the people who kidnapped him and killed his parents having then turned on one another only meters away. The case is closed. The boy is to be buried with his parents, exonerated after death. When the story breaks, he goes from being wanted for double parricide to being the tragic, tortured boy he is in two minutes and twenty-five seconds.

Tim shows up in the close-knit community a couple of days before they find “Luke” in the park. Whatever special arm of the US Marshals is handling the kid’s - and, by extension, his - witness protection assignment gives him a couple of expertly-faked photos and does something with the Ellises’ will to help the man pose as their next-of-kin. They’d left everything to Luke, anyway; it’s just going to have to go though a few more steps, first. 

The news breaks while he's eating lunch in a local restaurant. He forgets, for a moment, why he is there and what the plan is when they flash Luke’s face on the screen and start talking about his tragic, violent death. He doesn’t - can’t - finish his lunch, throws down some bills on the table before staggering out to his rental car and treating himself to a little panic attack. He knows where Luke is, and he knows what they staged in the park, and he knows that it’s not true. And he spends a few minutes remembering how to breathe.

He spends the days after they close the case numbly making arrangements to take custody of all of the family's earthly possessions. This also means that he has to sit through an hour of the most gut-wrenching triple memorial service he could ever have imagined, one with his kid's face front and center in the family portrait that’s the focal point of the affair. He doesn't even need to act. He thinks this is what Hell must be like. Several attractive, apparently single people around his age (give or take ten years) make sympathetic noises and not-so-subtle passes at him at the reception, after. He feels like he might puke.

He follows Luke's instructions on the matter of bequests to his friends. He pictures the teen holed up in a hotel room four hours away, alone, unable to attend his parents as they're being laid to rest, and he thinks he plays his part well. His voice gives out as he gives one boy a jersey and basketball, "I think he'd want you to have this." Another friend gets some card collection that Tim wishes Luke would’ve kept, but Luke insisted. Tim worries that Luke is trying to put his childish things behind him, despite still being a child.

After the moving truck is packed and the hands are wrung and the backs are patted, Tim leaves the town that his kid can never return to, thanking the Ellis parents in his mind as it shrinks in his rear-view. He promises he'll do as right by them and their son as he can.

He stops a few towns later, buys a full new set of clothes at the WalMart, and changes in the bathroom. He throws his things in the back of the van with the contents of the Ellis family home. He stops being worried about electronic tracking devices. It takes him seven hours to get back to Luke, driving the most circuitous and annoying ways he can to throw off or shake anyone tailing him. 

After the Marshal runs a very thorough sweep of the van for unauthorized electronic devices, Tim and Luke move everything they’re not taking into a storage unit. Luke picks several boxes of his family’s things to bring: photo albums, home videos, his mother’s jewelry box, his parents’ wedding rings, so many miscellaneous things that Tim will be happy to hear him talk about, one day. Whenever he’s ready. Almost the entire contents of his room are coming with them, too.

The last thing Luke picks up is a small shipping bag, addressed to his mom. It’s unopened, and Tim learned during his time as Luke’s bereaved uncle that it had arrived a few days after Luke’s kidnapping. Probably the last thing his parents ever ordered. No one had the heart to open it and find, what, an eight-pack of kitchen sponges, but Luke rips it open and reaches inside.

The plastic floats to the floor and Luke holds up a folded sweatshirt with MIT stitched onto the front of it. His eyes fill with tears and Tim blinks his own away, squeezing Luke’s shoulder in comfort. Tim sees the moment Luke realizes-

“I don’t get to go, anymore, do I?” 

Tim and Marshal Jackson share a look, and Tim is gratified to see that even he looks very sad.

“I don’t think so, bud,” Tim responds. “I’m so sorry.”

Luke just nods, sniffs, wipes his cheeks on his sleeve, and throws the sweatshirt onto the nearest box. “I’m done now,” he says. “Can we go?”

“I’ll meet you in the truck,” Tim answers, handing over his keys and watching the teen walk away.

Marshal Jackson lets out a pained sigh. “That fucking sucked. I mean, it always fucking sucks when there's a minor involved but-. Poor kid.” Tim can only nod. “Ok- last few things.” He hands over a file pocket and Tim opens it, glancing through the papers. “All of your ID needs, birth certificates, vaccination records, and so on. Your gun permits, too. Normally I or another Marshal would be coming with you, but this case is-. Special. You can always call if you need to get in contact with me, but I’m gonna bury your files under so much bureaucracy and red tape that I’m hopeful no one will even ever come close to finding you.”

Tim nods, thinking. “What if Luke needs protection? It’ll take you more than a minute to make it from Arlington.”

“We’ve got someone already established in your new town as an EMT; a sort of particular deputization for a very unusual case. You’ll know her when you see her.”

“Thanks for everything, Marshal,” Tim says as they shake hands. He picks up the discarded sweatshirt and tosses it into the last box he has to carry out.

“For you two? My pleasure. He’s a good kid; I hope you all can find some sort of normal life.”

“Yeah,” Tim says, glancing back as he starts walking to the truck. “Me, too.” They wave one last time as Tim navigates his pickup and the U-Haul trailer out of the lot and toward their new home.

Tim and Luke Johannsen make it to the sleepy suburban street before the sun sets, carrying in only a couch and a few bags and boxes before the pizza delivery gets there. They spend the night the way Tim always has, when moving his whole life to a new place: eating pizza in a mostly-empty kitchen and bringing in the bare necessities to be able to sleep. They only have the energy that night to bring in their mattresses. They sleep in the living room because they haven’t picked bedrooms yet and they’re exhausted from everything that’s happened in the last month.

But the next day, they move everything else in. They choose rooms on the ground floor for their bedrooms so they don’t have to carry the mattresses up the stairs. Tim registers Luke for the local high school a week later. They meet their EMT in the supermarket and she looks Tim up and down and invites them both to a ‘welcome to town’ dinner. (Tim looks her up and down, too, happy and astonished and trying to hide both.) They settle into a routine. They live reasonably normal lives for two people in witness protection, one of whom has superpowers.

Several months go by, and Tim finds himself at the supermarket at least once a week. When he’d been living on his own, and even when he’d been living with his ex-wife, they could go two or three weeks between supermarket trips, depending on how much delivery they were willing to buy and how many pantry staples they were willing to cook with. This does not work with a newly-fifteen-year-old boy in the house, especially not one who sometimes has his teenage friends over. There is no such thing as a pantry staple. Tim has watched Luke’s friend Devon eat dried Barilla pasta right out of the box like it was potato chips. No food is safe in his home.

Tim puts the frozen things in the bottom of his cooler, the chilled things in the top. He might stop by the bakery on the way home, he thinks as he loads the last of the several room-temperature grocery bags into the back seat of his truck. Luke’s had a tough couple of weekends and Tim wonders if a triple chocolate cake would be enough of a comfort. Then he wonders how he would hide this hypothetical cake from Devon. And Joey. And Matt.

He’s walking back to his truck from the cart corral when an older man waves him down.

“Oh, excuse me,” the man says when Tim walks closer. “Would you help me load this pack of water into my car? They were kind enough to help me get it in my cart inside, but,” he chuckles, “now I can’t get it out of the cart.”

“Oh, sure, no problem,” Tim says. His eyes linger on the man’s lined face. He looks kind of familiar, but Tim just can’t place him. He doesn’t think he’s just seen him in town. Must be one of those faces. Tim grasps the 40-pack of bottled water and heaves it into the man’s backseat as his mind chugs along and finally, moments too late, supplies the image of where he’d seen this man before:

Sniveling to Sigsby outside of The Institute before it all came crashing down.

Tim makes his hands let go of the plastic packaging. He starts to turn around, slowly, but before he can even straighten up half way he hears a series of rapid clicks and then feels incredible pain in the side of his neck as the stun gun’s contacts meet his skin.

Chapter Text

Tim is in a park. It’s a beautiful summer day. He thinks he can hear children shrieking in play at the playground behind him, but he’s looking out for one in particular.

Luke comes screaming towards him, an oversized plastic wand leaving iridescent soap bubbles in his wake, with chocolate ice cream allllll over his little face.

“Daddy!” he yells, throwing himself into Tim’s arms. Tim laughs and lifts the five-year-old into his lap. “We had ice cream!”

“I can see that, munchkin,” he laughs, and wipes the giggling boy with baby-blond hair clean as he squirms and squeals. But wait. No. Tim?? Never knew his kid at this age. He's seen pictures? Maybe a home video? He's not-

-

He wakes, disoriented. He’s in a large, darkish room, sitting upright. He can’t move his arms or legs. He remembers the supermarket. He remembers the man sitting behind the desk in front of him, lit by the glow of a computer screen.

“Glad you could join me, Mr. Jamieson. Or should I say Mr. Johannsen?” he smirks knowingly. “My name is Dr. Hendricks and I’ll be taking care of you today.”

Tim grits his teeth. “I know who you are.”

“Oh, how nice. Do you know what I want?” Hendricks turns on a lamp next to him and the light claws at Tim’s eyes.

Tim isn’t 100% sure, but he’d guess this creep wants his kid.

When Tim says nothing, the scientist sighs and picks something up from the tray beside him. When it hits the pool of light, Tim can see a sickly green liquid loaded in a mean looking syringe.

“If you won’t talk, we’ll have to do some testing, so that no one’s time is wasted.” Tim doesn’t know how he didn’t see the cruelty behind that smile in the parking lot. It’s so clear as the man injects him with- whatever that stuff is. "Now," Hendricks says with an irony in his voice that Tim doesn't understand, "tell me if you see The Dots."

-

Tim is standing in his kitchen. It’s late afternoon. He hears the front door open and close as Luke gets home from school.

“Tim! Tim?” he calls. Tim turns toward the sound, smiling.

“In here!” Tim smiles a little wider as the teenager rushes in, eyes bright, cheeks pink with excitement.

“Can I go to Joey’s?!”

“Tonight?” Tim asks, a little surprised at the short notice.

“Yeah!” Luke exclaims. “Just for like two hours. They just got a foosball table and he invited a few of us over to have a foosball tournament. I’d be home in time for dinner!”

Tim’s smile softens. He loves this kid. He reaches forward and fixes some hair that’s fallen forward onto Luke’s forehead. Luke makes an indignant noise and dodges him, ruffling his hair deliberately in protest. Tim laughs.

“Two hours. Back by six, text me when you get there and when you’re leaving.” Tim tries to sound stern, but Luke launches himself into his arms and gives him an enthusiastic hug. Tim gets to pat him on the back once, twice, before Luke is bolting toward the door again, calling back:

“Thank you! Love you! Text you when I get there!” And then the door slams again and Tim sees the teen jogging down to the last house on the street, his friends meeting him just two houses down and jogging the rest of the way with him, jubilant. Tim, though, feels wildly apprehensive.

Tim doesn’t remember- that was months ago. Luke got second in the foosball tournament. But why-

-

He fights the restraints holding him in place and empties his stomach over the side of the arm rest. His clothes are soaked through with sweat and - probably other things. His chest is heaving. He doesn’t know how long it’s been, but he remembers where he is.

"Where is Luke?" the man in the white coat asks him. Fury blinds Tim.

"You keep his name out of your mouth," he snarls, though he worries the effect is somewhat dampened by the gasps and the involuntary shaking.

The man types something quickly on his computer before getting up and looking closely at Tim’s face. “Did you see any Dots?”

“I see a sniveling, delusional old man,“ Tim growls, flecks of blood and spittle flying into Hendricks’s face. He sees the man recoil in disgust and has a second to wish he'd thought to actually fully spit at his torturer before his world lurches again with the feeling of another syringe in his arm.

-

“Dad? Are you back here?” Tim turns away from his planting toward the sound, wincing as he straightens. His joints aren’t what they used to be. He dusts off his hands as Luke rounds the corner, tall and strong and grown. They hug, and Tim can’t resist saying,

“Hey, kid,” into his hair. They part and Tim glances at his watch, surprised at the time. “I didn’t realize it was so late. How was the drive?”

“Good,” Luke answers, taking the gardening supplies from the older man as they walk back around the house to the front yard. Tim hears a minivan door sliding shut, and a loud, tiny voice saying something he can’t make out. “The kids even slept almost the whole way, so we got to listen to things other than Ralph’s World and the new Wiggles stuff.”

The minivan comes into view, an adult and two small kids on the walk next to it. Tim tries as hard as he can, but he can’t make out faces for any of them. One of the kids can barely toddle, but the older one must be four or five and steady on their feet as they shriek 

“GRAMPAAAAA” and leap at him, trusting that he’ll catch them. He does, his heart beating so fast with joy and, if he thinks about it too hard, confusion. The little one in his arms buries their face in his neck and he hugs them, tight. Luke wraps his arm around Tim’s back, kissing his oldest on their hair as he does so.

“Hi, munchkin,” Tim says, knowing that it’s the correct thing to say but not knowing why. They keep walking toward the front door, meeting the second adult and small child on the way, and Tim hears himself say “Your brother said he would be here around dinner time,” as they step through the door into a house with four people in the photos. If he focuses, he can see himself, and Luke, but who-

—

Tim drags a labored breath in as he lifts his head. Hendricks doesn’t mince words, this time.

"I will ask you again, Mr. Jamieson. Where is Mr. Ellis?"

"Eat a dick" Tim chokes out, feeling something warm trickle down his chin. If he concentrates, he can taste the hint of copper from it.

"Now, now. I wouldn't tolerate that sort of attitude from children; what makes you think I'll tolerate it from you?" 

Every molecule of Tim's body is on fire, but his mind feels like it's suspended in something cold and viscous. He can smell burning flesh and knows it's his own.

The fire stops and Hendricks walks back behind his computer, setting the stun gun on the table at his right hand as a reminder for his victim of what will happen if he doesn't start playing along.

"Frankly, Mr. Jamieson, I'm amazed that you're still conscious, let alone verbal. We are, admittedly, in uncharted waters for me; I don't believe this compound has ever been tested on someone without a Gift. Of course, even when we were testing on our subjects, we weren't overly concerned with either their physical or mental state after we were done with them." Tim is incensed. He tries to lunge for the monster who haunts his kid's nightmares (and tbh his own) but the restraints at his wrists and ankles hold him fast. The fight drains back out of him quickly, overcome by exhaustion. Hendricks, fully unconcerned, walks leisurely over. He pointedly checks Tim's pupil response with his penlight, giving a rather unhinged-looking grin at his victim's pained groan. The scientist smacks his cheek none too gently in a cruel mockery of affection. "Would you like to try again?"

Tim grits his teeth together and tries to sag against his restraints less. "Get fucked." His world whites out again. Tim isn't sure whether it was more of the juice or another hit of the stun gun, but-

-

Tim is in a crowded mall, still in a sea of screaming, running people. “Luke?” he yells, frantically looking over the masses’ heads. “Luke?!”

Tim is in an uncomfortable chair in a sheriff’s office, handcuffed to the bench with a kid in the same situation next to him

Tim is holding a crying teenager

Tim is drowning-

-

 -when he comes back to himself Dr. Hendricks is sitting on his stool, diligently writing in a notebook.

"You sick fuck," Tim rasps. "Are you taking notes?"

"I'm a scientist, Tim - can I call you Tim? In science, we take notes so we know what works and what doesn't, and especially when we get an outcome we never could have predicted." He makes hard eye contact, strangely cold through his apparent happiness. "As far as I'm concerned, you're a medical miracle. Stronger men than you would have given up by now, either told me what I want to know or been begging me to let it end - but you. You've surprised me." Tim lets his head loll as he stops paying attention to the mad scientist gleefully noting down things that probably tell him how much more Tim can take before he dies, and notices that it's dark outside, now. It was morning when he went to get groceries.

He figures this only ends one of two ways: one injection or one shock too many, he goes into cardiac arrest and shuffles off this mortal coil; or, his brain gets fried so bad from the drugs and the electricity that he's basically gorked and Hendricks kills him because he's outlived his usefulness or entertainment value. He knows Hendricks is assuming a third option, one where Tim tells him where Luke is in exchange for a quick and relatively painless death, but there is no universe in which Tim trades Luke's life or freedom for anything.

The thing he can't stop thinking about, though, is how will Luke be after losing his third parent in a year?

The thought reignites the fury that Tim holds in his chest to keep him going on his worst days, and he picks his head up even though it takes almost all of his effort.

There's a question hanging in the air, something Tim didn't hear but knows from the expectant silence and the look on Dr. Hendricks's face.

"I'm not gonna tell you shit, motherfucker."

Dr. Hendricks notes this down in his book and then swivels back to the computer.

"All right, then, if you insist."

-

The world is sort of blank. Grass, yes, cloudless sky, yes, but. Nothing else. It’s still. Tim is alone. Except: A little boy is walking toward him. Brown curly hair, brown eyes, a smile on his lips. Tim is out of his depth.

“Hi,” he says as the boy gets closer. He squats down so he’s not towering over the newcomer. “Do you need help?” He looks around, seeing only the endless expanse of grass and sky in every direction. “Are you lost?”

“I knew you would say that,” the little boy says, a brief giggle as punctuation. He cocks his head to the side and studies Tim. “You’re Luke’s new dad, right?”

Tim feels like he’s been slapped. That’s not even in the realm of what he was expecting. “Sure,” he says, kindly. “I’m sort of like that.”

The boy furrows his brow. “You love him like you’re his dad, right? And you take care of him and he lives with you and everything?”

Tim nods. “Yes, that’s right.”

The little boy rolls his eyes. “Ok, so, you’re his dad now.” Tim can’t fault the logic, sweet and innocent as it is. The child looks sad, suddenly. “I miss Luke. And Sha and Nicky and George and- everyone.” Tim’s breath catches.

“Is your name Avery?” he asks, cautious and wondering.

“Yeah!” the little boy nods, smiling. “You know my name??”

Tim gives him a soft, soft smile. “Luke’s told me about you. About how brave you were. I know he thinks about you all the time.”

Avery’s own smile softens in response. “Can you tell him I’m ok? His mom and dad are looking after me, over there.” He gestures to the horizon he came from. Tim feels himself choking up, even though he feels like it’s very hard to be sad in this place. “I just had to come back to do one thing real quick.”

“I’ll tell Luke,” Tim answers, tears blurring his vision. He blinks them away and reaches up to wipe a smudge of dirt off of the little boy’s cheek. He’s solid; Tim’s hand stops and he can rub off the dirt and everything, but he can’t feel any sensations coming from his fingers. Or his hand. Or anything. He pulls back his arm, a little disconcerted with the wrong-feeling and with the way Avery seems to be looking through him. “What one thing did you come back to do?”

Avery steps closer and puts his little hands on Tim’s cheeks. Again, Tim has the realization that he can feel the pressure of touch, but not a temperature or texture or scent or anything. The little boy looks, very seriously, into Tim’s eyes. “Wake up,” he says.

Tim furrows his brow. “I don’t-“

In response, Avery yells“WAKE UP!” and pushe-

-

Tim is lying on the cement floor of whatever warehouse he’s been in. His vision is swimming, hands shaking, it feels like his heart is trying three times as hard to do half the work. A face comes into focus above him and it’s-

No, god no.

“Tim?” Luke asks. He catches Tim’s hand as he flails, trying to push his kid away.

“No, no, Luke,” he gasps. “He wants you, he’s after you. You can’t be here.” His voice is so raspy that he guesses he’s been screaming. “You have to run. Run.”

Luke holds Tim’s hand harder, his eyes sliding over toward the computer desk. “I don’t think he wants anything, anymore.” Tim looks past him to see a section of cement and plaster ceiling, collapsed, and Dr. Hendricks’s body half-buried in the rubble. Despite his nature, Tim thinks vengefully that he wouldn’t go check for signs of life even if he could make his legs do what he tells them. He hopes the cruel man is dying, slowly, and that it hurts. A lot.

Nicky appears over Luke’s shoulder as Tim forces himself to look away from the very precise destruction. Tim blinks in surprise, but Nicky is talking to Luke:

“Gotta get going,” he’s saying. “I can hear sirens.”

Luke and the older boy each take one arm and haul Tim up towards his feet. Tim can’t make himself take any of his own weight. He feels like his bones are made of Jell-o. He feels like his brain is wrapped in cotton.

“I can’t-“ he gasps.

“It’s ok,” Luke pants as the trio make their way outside. Tim sees his own truck parked there, waiting for them. “We just have to get to the truck.” He makes it sound easy. Tim lets out a strangled laugh, and directs his attention to the boy on his other side.

He slurs a bit as he asks Nicky, "What're you doing here?"

Nicky tries his best to shrug while carrying most of Tim's weight. "Luke called. I answered."

"Good man." Tim pretends not to notice Nicky stand a little taller at that. Shit. Did he just get another kid? He’s got the room. He could probably-

Halfway to the truck, Tim throws himself out of their hold to heave into the bushes. Nothing comes up, but he's sweatier and shaking worse after. He tries to hold himself up on all fours but it's excruciating. He feels Nicky and Luke pulling him back to his feet and groans but doesn't try to fight.

Luke's hand brushes the side of his neck and Tim very involuntarily gasps, white-hot pain radiating from the marks there and the scent of his own singed flesh stuck in his nose forever. They get to the truck and Tim can’t stay awake anymore. He lets himself sleep.

He wakes up some time later, in dry clothes, clean, and in his own bed.

He would panic if it weren't for Wendy, curled up on the comforter next to him, an extra blanket tucked around her and a novel pressed to her chest.

He moves to touch her shoulder, to wake her, but he can't manage that much movement. His muscles feel like they've been shredded. Whatever pained noise he makes does the trick anyway, because Wendy sits up, instantly alert.

"Oh my god, Tim, you're awake," she breathes. The clock behind her say 2:37. Tim wonders what day it is.

"Hi," he grits out, trying on a smile. "What- How did I get here? I remember getting to the truck-" he breaks off. It even hurts to use his voice. Wendy offers him a straw from a cup of water on his nightstand as she answers.

"The boys got you home; Luke texted me when they found you and I met them here. Got you cleaned up, checked your vitals. Bandaged some of your more obvious wounds. Got your fever down. How do you feel?"

He swallows another sip of water before pulling away from the drink. "Like I've had the flu for a year," he confesses. He quirks an eyebrow at her. "You changed my clothes?" 

"Nothin' I haven't seen before," she says wryly, a little smirk on her face as she brushes back a strand of his hair. He acknowledges that truth with a somewhat self-deprecating wince of his own before glancing away.

"I guess Luke's asleep," he says, feeling a little flutter of panic in his chest that none of this is real. He'll have to wait til morning to see him, then.

"He is," Wendy agrees, "but he made me swear on my mother's life that I'd wake him if you came to before sunup, and I love my mom, so." She starts to move off the bed. Tim isn't sure if he can wait that long, already feeling sleep pulling him back down.

With effort, he reaches up past his head, next to his headboard, and knocks. Twice, then a pause, then twice more.

Before the third knock is done, he hears Luke's bedroom door open. His is not far behind, and soon he has his arms full with his pajama-clad teen. He hisses in pain even as he wraps his arms around the kid, and Luke pulls back, face wet.

"Oh, god, sorry, I-"

Tim shushes him, pulling him back and tucking his boy's head under his chin. This, this is real. As he breathes deeply he can smell the shampoo on the blond curls - shampoo that Tim bought on sale at the supermarket last week and Luke fussed about because it smelled like strawberries. Luke is wearing a pair of his dad's old college sweats, soft with age, but one of Tim's old shirts. He can feel his kid shake a little with his tears, and the sleep-soft body heat coming from him. None of the hallucinations in Hendricks's lab felt like this. Like incredible physical pain but also like - god - like everything he's done in his life to now has been worth it, to be here with this kid, now. Seeing the woman he loves - and maybe, might be in love with? He's not sure. They're complicated. - rub Luke's back for a moment before she gets up to usher Nicky back into the hall. Tim knows he's got tears on his own face as he makes eye contact with the older boy.

"You all right, Nicky?" he asks, so so quietly.

Nicky smiles, a bittersweet quirk of his lips, and nods. "All I did was drive and help collapse a ceiling," he demurs, happy that Tim's awake but with something like envy in his eyes, before following Wendy into the kitchen. 

"You all right, Luke?" he asks after a minute, temple to temple, thinking of the images of his kid as a baby and a toddler and a little kid and a bigger kid and a preteen that he never got to meet - the versions of Luke his parents saw in their son every day but are also the only ones they'll ever have known, now - and holding him a little tighter even though it hurts his arms. And his back, fuck.

Luke shakes his head and burrows further into Tim's embrace. Just for a moment. He calms, pulling away and noticing every wince that Tim tries to hide. Luke wipes his face on his sleeve.

“I couldn’t find you,” he confesses, terrified. Tim squeezes his hand.

“I know, bud, I’m sorry.”

“No,” Luke says, shaking his head. “After we got there, and you were in the chair. I couldn’t find you,” he repeats, eyes wide, and Tim understands. “You were still breathing, barely, your heart was still beating, barely, but. It was like. You were gorked. I couldn’t- I couldn’t find you,” he says again, his face crumpling as Tim pulls him back into a hug.

Fuck, that hurts, damn.

“I’m so sorry. What did you- How did you-?” Tim trails off.

Luke shakes his head into Tim’s shoulder. “We got you out of the chair, put you on the floor. Nicky couldn’t find you, either. And then- you were just awake. You woke up.” 

Tim thinks of little hands and knowing eyes and wonders.

“Help me out to the couch, kid,” he directs gently after Luke has calmed again.

“Wendy said-“

“I know, I bet I’m supposed to rest. I just want to sit up for a minute. I’ll go back to being an invalid asap, promise.”

Luke levers him out of the bed, both of them making pained noises. Suddenly, Nicky is there, taking much of Tim’s weight again, and the three of them make it out to the living room. Wendy has made four mugs of cocoa and moved the coffee table, and soon Tim is propped up by Luke on one side and Nicky on the other. Wendy pulls a chair close and puts a comforting hand on Tim’s leg.

As best he can, Tim tells them all what happened. How Hendricks got him in the first place; a short version of the juice and the stun gun and the questions about Dots; he talks about the hallucinations - except for the one with the spouse and little kids and kid-in-law he couldn’t bring into focus; that one’s gotta simmer for a little while - and when he gets to the wide expanse of unbroken land and sky, he pauses.

“I met a friend of yours, I think,” he says, glancing to his right and left. His voice is going scratchy again, so someone helps him take another sip of his cocoa. He’s almost done with it, now. His eyelids feel so heavy, but he wants to tell the whole story before any of it slips away.

“Hendricks was not-“ Nicky starts, but he stops when Tim shakes his head.

“He said his name was Avery.” He hears a gasp in stereo, each boy freezing.

“You met-?”

“That last time before you two got me,” Tim explains. “I think I was somewhere he could find me, and that’s why you couldn’t.” Tim can’t hold on to his mug anymore, but a hand takes it and puts it on the coffee table before the last sips spill. “He said he misses both of you - and Sha and George. He asked me to tell you that he’s ok-“ Tim stops for a second as he wrangles his hand to the back of Luke’s neck and his eyes to his kid’s. “He said your parents are looking after him.” There are no dry eyes, in this house. “He said he’d come back to do one thing, and then he told me to wake up and- I was awake. With you two.”

He feels Wendy’s hand in his, Luke’s hair in his fingers, Nicky’s arm around his back as he feels himself falling- and then, landing, softly, stretched out on the couch. He feels someone throw a blanket over him. A hand stroke his cheek. A forehead pressed to his. Someone arranges the pillow under his head, but he’s already asleep. It’s warm and safe and dreamless, like a gift.

Chapter Text

As far as Nicky understands it, Luke had two wonderful, loving parents from the moment he was born until the night they died trying to protect him, which seems like some sort of miracle by itself. But then, Luke got another one - just as loving, just as willing to die for the kid - almost immediately thereafter, which seems impossible. Impossible.

Nicky kind of understands it, because Luke is smart and kind and brave and sweet and probably the perfect kid, and all Nicky knows how to be is trouble. It’s not like he thinks Luke doesn’t deserve it, it’s just.

Nicky hasn’t had great experiences with adults. From the time he was put in the system all the way through The Institute, the adults around him were at best uninterested in the child he was and at worst very interested in what value they could extract from him. Being trouble served him well at The Institute, but as he creeps closer and closer to 18 he wonders what good he is, now, in the real world.

The way Tim looks at Luke makes Nicky’s throat burn with envy, loving and protective. A protective adult is unheard of, to Nicky. But Tim was willing to risk his life to protect Luke, is still trying to protect him even while he’s still kitten-weak from finding out first-hand what the shots for dots taste like. Nicky’s stood on the steps in awe and watched Tim skim a shaking hand over Luke’s hair with the world’s tiredest smile and-. 

Nicky wonders what’s wrong with him, that he doesn’t get that. He shoves his hands deeper in his jacket pockets, the first chill of autumn creeping through this improbably quaint and Hallmark-esque town in upstate New York that Tim and Luke and Wendy have all landed in.

He gets back to Tim and Luke’s, the tip of his nose gone just a little numb from his walk around the neighborhood. He closes the door behind him and hangs up his jacket and shivers with how warm the house feels.

“Luke?” Tim calls from the hall.

“Just me,” Nicky answers, rounding the corner to see Tim leaning heavily on the wall next to his bedroom door, a throw blanket wrapped around his shoulders.

“Hey,” he greets shakily. “Would you give me a hand to the couch?”

Nicky thinks of the bag that everything he owns is in, upstairs in this very house and always packed in the mornings because today might be the day he’s strong enough to leave this place.

“Sure,” he answers, letting Tim put an arm around his shoulders as they shuffle into the living room together. He can’t say no, to Tim or to Luke. He loves being needed. He loves this kind dream he’s fallen into, and he doesn’t want to leave it. He can never bring himself to take his packed bag with him when he goes out in the afternoons because he likes it here, even though he tries to tell himself that he doesn’t like it more than anywhere else.

He settles Tim in the living room and turns to walk away, but the man rests a hand on his arm. He’s not holding Nicky back or anything, not like he could in his current state, but Nicky stops anyway.

“Sit with me for a minute?” Tim asks. Tim asks. And Nicky knows that he can say no and Tim will let him go without a fuss, let him walk up the stairs and get his bag and leave forever forever forever without demanding he stay.

Nicky sits. Tim keeps the hand on his forearm.

“What have you been doing with yourself, since..?” Tim asks, resting heavily against the cushions. He doesn’t need to finish the sentence.

Nicky shrugs one shoulder. “Rambling, really. Town to town, seeing where the time takes me.”

Tim smiles. “I’ve done that. Not all it’s cracked up to be, I think.”

“I like it,” Nicky lies. “It’s freedom. Nothing to hold me down.” Tim hums, and Nicky notices too late how sharp Tim’s eyes are despite his fatigue.

“Nothing to keep you from floating away, either.” Nicky doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. “Listen. When Luke picked this house, I thought, ‘Four bedrooms? One for him, one for me, and two separate guest rooms that no one will ever use? What do we need two guest rooms for?’” Nicky’s stomach clenches with something - not fear. Not anger. His mind swears he’s not following this train of thought, but his body is. “Maybe I don’t disagree with him so much, anymore.” Tim sighs, turning a little more toward Nicky. “I know you’ve been on your own for a while now. And I know you’re basically a grown man. But Luke loves having you here. I love having you here. What do you say we just call that room your room, from now on?” 

Nicky’s throat is closing, Nicky’s having a heart attack, the hope that started in his stomach threatening to burst free and making his face hot and his eyes water. “What?” he asks. He’s telepathic but he’s lost. He didn’t see anything like this coming. His ears are ringing. He’s going to die.

Tim grips his arm a little harder like he knows it’s the only thing anchoring Nicky to this world. “I’m not saying you have to live here all the time, or even most of the time. But if you say yes, you can live here any time. Any time. You could show up at three am in the middle of a hurricane, knocking on the door because you lost your key and you would be welcome. You wouldn’t just be a welcome guest. You’d be home. If you want that.”

Nicky isn’t sure he’s breathing. The world is all blurry. The hope that he has denied for almost his whole life is swelling, screaming VINDICATED through the blood rushing in his ears and this is not something Nicky is designed for. This is not something Nicky knows how to handle. There is no fight, no blood, no anger. There is only the desire to belong somewhere and the answering call that he’s found it. That this is where he belongs.

“What.” He’s not sure if he makes any actual noise. He feels Tim let go of him, readies himself for the crash back down to Earth and the logical retraction of the offer, but instead he feels a gentle hand brush the tears from his face and he realizes he’s crying.

“Luke and I have some very important rules, and I think you should learn them. They apply to you, too. Even if you don’t want to live here. Even if you don’t want to call this your home.” Tim’s eyes are a warm brown, searching his face, and Nicky thinks this is maybe what Luke sees when Tim looks at him. He tries to take in air.

“Rules?”

Tim nods, cupping his cheek. “You call, I answer.” Nicky just starts sobbing. He never cries. He never lets himself, even on his worst days. Seventeen and a half years of pent-up sorrow and fear and the belief in his own worthlessness erupt from his chest at the same time and he doesn’t know how he’s still alive. He thinks it must be down to Tim’s hand, gentle on his face, and Tim’s eyes, seeing through him no matter what he does. “You need me, I’m there. You’re scared, I’ll protect you, even if it’s just in your head.” Nicky can only nod, over and over and over. He thinks Tim might be crying, too, but that doesn’t make any sense.

Nicky wraps his arms around his stomach, curling into himself, but Tim knows that move, too. Tim puts the lightest pressure behind his hand and Nicky obeys, letting Tim hold him. Letting Tim card his fingers through his hair the way he’s seen him do with Luke. Letting Tim tuck his face into his neck like he belongs there. Like he’s welcome there. Like he’s wanted.

Like he’s home.

— — — —

Kathy isn't sure what to make of Tim and Luke Johannsen. Luke is just one of the sweetest boys, but Tim.. oh, he says so many of the right things at so many of the right times, but that's what made her alarm bells start ringing in the first place. And then there's the way he keeps to himself. Not outwardly, just.. he always keeps conversations at the surface level, you know? Never lets it get deeper. Never brags about his son. Never tells them what happened to Luke's mom or what he did for work or why they moved here or why Tim's eyes go panicked sometimes when he can't find Luke in a crowd. 

She doesn't know what all this means, but she has some ideas. And none of them are good.

Poor Luke has been looking anxious lately, and the word around town is that Tim recently had a bad bout of pneumonia and is having a rough recovery, helped along by that cute little EMT who lives over on Maple checking in on him every few days.

So anyway, when sweet Luke asked if he could catch a ride to and from the boys' weekly basketball game at the park, because of his dad's "illness", she jumped at the chance. Anything for this sweet boy, but also, like... she's gotta know. Is it drugs? Is Tim on drugs??? Or - into gambling? Or is his attentiveness to his son in public hiding some terrible secret about their family? Does he hurt Luke?! She can't imagine anyone hurting their kid, especially a kid as sweet as Luke, but she knows it happens. And there is definitely some big secret, in that house.

She picks Luke and Devon up from their basketball game at the park at 4:30 on Friday, just as planned. She drops her son off at home first, because it's on the way to Luke's house, but also because she has made a lasagna just for the Johannsens. If Tim is really as sick as people say, they'll need a few hearty, homemade dinners.

Plus, it gives her a perfect excuse to go inside when she brings Luke home.

"Oh, thanks, Mrs. Watson," he smiles, "but if you just tell me the temperature and how long-"

"No, no, no," she admonishes gently. "You have things to do, I'm sure. Homework, or-. Just let me stay long enough to pop this in the oven and set a timer and I'll be out of your hair." He accepts politely and leads her inside, pointing her left to the kitchen as he goes right, presumably to check on his father. She turns the oven on to preheat as she hears a door open and close again, followed by the soft padding of Luke's stocking feet. From the far side of the kitchen island she can see into the living room, and the light she turned on to get to the oven spills onto the man in question, asleep sitting up in the easy chair with a blanket wrapped around him like a cape.

Luke walks in from the other side of the living room, saying "Tim?" - almost always Tim, almost never Dad, Kathy thinks - and the older man starts, instantly alert.

"Sorry, sorry," Luke says as he steps closer. "I didn't mean to startle you."

"No, no," Kathy hears Tim say, and his voice sounds like shit. Maybe he really was sick. Luke crouches next to the chair, looking up into Tim's face. "How was basketball?" the man asks.

Luke gives him a wide smile. "So good. Mrs. Watson brought us a lasagne; she said it would be a little while before it's warmed all the way through. You can rest a little longer, and I'll tell you all about the game over dinner, k?"

Tim stares at him blearily. Luke's smile dims from megawatt to a soft incandescent and he stands, putting a hand on the back of the chair and pushing as he flips the lever to recline it. Tim doesn't resist, answering with a soft smile of his own. Luke drapes a second blanket over his father, and as he leans over to do so Tim raises a shaky hand towards Luke's face. Luke doesn't seem surprised or scared or anything, catching the hand and bringing it to his own cheek, like he could tell that's what Tim wanted.

"Everything ok?" Tim asks, voice quieter and his eyelids drooping even as he brushes a thumb across his son's cheek.

"Everything's ok," Luke answers with a still-smaller smile, close-lipped but genuine. "You need your strength. Sleep."

Tim obeys before Luke even finishes tucking his arm back under the blanket.

Kathy watches as Luke refills the humidifier and picks up a mug from the side table. She's still watching when Luke turns around and sees her watching. His cheeks go red and he ducks his head as he moves to the sink to pour out the tepid tea.

Kathy clears her throat as the oven beeps that it's preheated. "Take this out in 50 minutes and let it cool for at least 5 before you eat it, ok?" she asks, putting the lasagne in. She peeks in a couple of cabinets before finding the plates and pulls a couple out just for something to do with her hands.

"50 minutes," Luke replies, nodding. "Cool for five."

"Good," she says. Then, turning to him, "Can I do anything else for you two?" she asks, not glancing back at Tim with the bandage on his neck, the split lip, the bruise on his jaw. The marks on his wrists, visible in mottled blues and greens even from the kitchen.

"No, thank you. We're ok," he says as he puts the dirty mug in the dishwasher. Kathy looks around and notices that the kitchen is not the wreck hers would be if Devon were the only healthy one in her house. “Thank you for the ride home, and dinner. I really appreciate it."

"You're a good young man, Luke," she says. "Call me if you need anything while your dad is getting better." He nods and she leaves, having witnessed first hand the devotion in each of their faces when they look at one another, when they think they're alone. 

Kathy doesn't think about the butterfly knife taped to the inside of the freezer, behind the bag of freezer-burnt, desiccated peas. She doesn't think about the fingerprint scanner on the small gun safe she saw recessed into the wall behind the plates, hidden in the cupboard. She just thinks of the sweet boy who sometimes - just for a minute - looks afraid of her for a reason she can't figure out, and of the gentle, protective way the very injured man looks at him, and thinks that maybe there are some questions that don't need asking and some answers that warn off any further curiosity.

Chapter Text

It takes Tim the better part of a month to get back to maybe 80%. He still tires easily. He still finds out that he’s been awake too long or doing too much by almost passing out when he stands. 

Nicky gets less sure about his place with them as Tim is increasingly able to fill his parental role again. Tim can see him withdrawing more every day, like ivy growing in reverse - pulling its runners out of the wall it’s clinging to, making itself easier to get rid of - and he doesn’t know how to stop it. Luke makes his happiness at Nicky sticking around no secret, and neither does Tim. It doesn't seem to do much to convince the older boy, no matter how direct or indirect they are with their actions. The guy can literally read minds and still doesn't believe that Tim and Luke aren't lying to him. That he’s not an invasive plant in their metaphorical garden. He tries to pretend, but Tim can tell as he pulls away a little bit more each day.

When Tim is back at 95%, Nicky brings his bag downstairs. Tim and Luke try to hide their sadness, neither wanting to keep him here if he really doesn't want to be. They drive him into the Amtrak station in Albany together, the boys sitting in the back and making promises to each other.

"You'll call me every week, though?"

"I will," Nicky swears. "You'll text me all the time?"

"Yeah," Luke answers, sniffling just a little. In the rearview mirror, Tim sees Nicky wrap an arm around the younger boy's shoulders.

Tim hugs him at the platform as the train pulls in, squeezing him tight.

"Stay safe, kid. Call or text or come home, any time," he begs, pulling back to look in Nicky's eyes. 

"I will,” Nicky lies.

He hugs Luke one last time and climbs aboard, his shiny new Johannsen ID and a fistful of cash in his wallet. Tim hopes that it's enough, at least for a little while.

He wraps an arm around Luke as they walk through the parking lot.

"He'll be back," Tim insists, not certain but hopeful.

"I know," Luke nods, leaning into Tim as they walk, anyway. "He left a couple of books. In his room."

Tim just nods and rubs Luke's arm before letting him go. The drive back home is sad.

Time passes. The nights grow longer and the days grow shorter and Tim keeps getting closer to 100%. School busses clog the roads in the mornings and evenings. It's still warm in the mid-afternoon, but in the early mornings and after nightfall you can smell the crisp chill in the air that tells you that autumn is truly here.

Tim doesn't love being woken in the small hours of the morning by a ringing phone, but it is what it is. He frowns at the unknown number, but knows if they called him enough times in a row to break through his do not disturb setting it could be important.

"This is Tim," he mutters, clearing his throat a little.

"Tim Johannsen?" the man on the other side of the line asks.

"That's me," Tim answers, blinking the remaining sleep from his eyes.

"I have your son down here at central lockup-" Tim's heart clenches "and his choices are either get bailed out or he can stay here until the judge can see him in a couple of weeks."

"Is he there? Is he all right? Can I talk to him?" Tim asks, now fully alert and pulling on the jeans he wore yesterday.

"He's in processing right now, a little banged up, but he's fine," the officer answers, clearly unconcerned.

"Is he being charged with something?" Tim demands. "What happened?" 

"There was a fight," the man answers dryly. "He was the aggressor. Probably going to be charged with assault."

Tim stops in the hall, confused. He takes his phone away from his ear and eases Luke's bedroom door open to see the boy still asleep. He pulls it quietly closed again and walks toward the kitchen.

"I'm sorry, where did you say you were calling from?" The floor is cold beneath his socks. The shirt he was sleeping in is not warm enough for this morning.

"Central lockup," the man answers. "Philadelphia. Pennsylvania."

Tim lets his forehead rest on the door jamb. Nicky. This.. this makes more sense.

"In my opinion some time here would probably be good for him," the officer continues. Tim ignores him. He isn't sure if he's imagining the furious yelling in the background.

"What's the address?" Tim writes it down, shoving the small paper in his jean pocket when he's done. "I'll be there in five hours," he says, hanging up and sighing.

He pads back into Luke's room, shaking the boy gently.

"Luke."

Luke blinks awake at him. "Hm?"

"I have to go get Nicky," he whispers. Luke, still half-asleep, looks alarmed. "He's ok," Tim reassures. "We'll be home before you are." Tim smoothes his kid's hair and Luke puts his head back down. "Text me when you get to school, ok?"

Luke mms and nods. "Text me when you have Nicky."

"Will do, kiddo." Luke is basically already back asleep as Tim kisses the side of his head.

Tim grabs some yesterday-coffee from the fridge, a couple of granola bars from the pantry. The blanket from the couch, because he doesn't know if Nicky has a decent jacket.

Last thing he grabs before he heads out is a dog-eared catalogue he's been flipping through in the evenings lately, stashing it in the pocket on his door before settling in for the long drive. All in all, it takes him five minutes from picking up the phone to being on the road.

4 hours and 45 minutes later, he walks through the door of central holding pulling out his checkbook and ID. The cop at the desk sounds like the same one he'd talked to on the phone, and he looks as unimpressed as he sounded almost five hours ago.

"I woulda let him cool his heels here for a while, if I were you," he says, pretty condescendingly, as Tim pushes across the last form.

"Well lucky for him, you aren't. Can I see my kid, please?" Tim snaps, annoyed at the guy’s tone and that he’s been signing papers for ten minutes and hasn’t seen hide nor hair of Nicky.

Tim hears a bit of a scuffle, and another cop has Nicky by the back of the sweatshirt as they enter from the corridor behind the desk. Tim scowls at the new man, who releases Nicky none too gently and pretty much shoves his duffel at him. Nicky seems surprised to see Tim, but ducks his head as he moves to stand behind him so he doesn't have to make eye contact. Tim sees the shiner, anyway.

"You should say thank you to your father for even coming to get you,” the second man scolds, and Tim says,

"I need my receipt,” with a glare as he moves to intercept the cop's gaze. “And whatever forms you need to petition for a remote hearing." 

Tim and Nicky are in the truck before Tim pauses to look at him, hard. Nicky still won’t meet his eyes, and that’s ok, but Tim does catch his chin gently to see the damage.

“Is this the worst of it?” he asks, and Nicky nods. Tim cups his cheek for a second before pulling away and digging some Advil and a bottle of water out of his console. Nicky takes them, swallowing a dose with a swig and then crossing his arms as Tim starts the engine, staring out his window like he hopes Tim won’t talk to him. Like he hopes Tim will forget he's there.

Tim was right, by the way. The worn sweatshirt Nicky has on isn’t anything like a suitable jacket for late October in the northern US, and Tim thinks he’s gonna have to fix that ASAP. Along with many, many other things.

Tim grabs the throw blanket from his backseat as they’re waiting at the light to get on the highway, dropping it in Nicky’s lap without saying anything. He doesn’t push it away, and Tim thinks that’s something. Slowly, the teen unclenches and settles the blanket more comfortably on his lap.

“Thanks,” he hears, almost too quietly in relation to the engine. He hums and nods a response designed specifically to not spook the stray cat in Nicky back into hiding.

The sun is well over the horizon when Tim pulls into a rest stop. They meet back up in front of the fast food counter, Nicky hunched and grumpy-faced and burrowed into his sweatshirt, looking for all the world like a moody teen who has been dragged on an outing with his estranged father.

“What do you want?” Tim asks, nodding to the menu, and Nicky shrugs.

“I’m not hungry,” he mutters sullenly. Tim refuses to draw attention to it.

“We’ve got another four or five hours to go, kid,” Tim says neutrally. He’s kinda worried if he talks too kindly that Nicky will either fully retreat or push him away. “You’ll be hungry at some point and I’d like it if there was something for you to eat in the car in case we’re in rush hour traffic when you realize you’re starving.”

Nicky remains silent when Tim starts ordering, but when Tim glances at him again he shrugs and mutters a meal number. Tim’s heart, as cringey and melodramatic as it sounds, soars. He tries not to show it. Let me buy you warm meals and warm clothes, a part of him begs. Let me keep you safe. He hopes it isn't loud enough that Nicky picks up on his rather embarrassing paternal internal monologue.

They get back on the road.

As they begin hour three of the drive, Tim finally asks,  “What happened, Nicky?”

Nicky slumps down even more, glowering and crossing his arms, closing himself off again like the last two hours hadn't even happened. “You don’t already know? Didn’t they give you the report with all your forms?”

Tim shakes his head. “I didn’t ask them. I want to know what you say.”

“Why?” Nicky snaps.

“Because I don’t care about them,” Tim says evenly. “I care about you.”

There’s silence for a minute as Nicky works his jaw and jiggles his leg a thousand miles an hour. Finally:

“This guy was saying just some terrible shit, about his friends and the guy next to me and the women across the room - just awful, rancid shit and he wouldn’t stop. He wouldn’t stop. And I just- lost it.” Tim hears the emotion the boy’s trying to wrestle in his voice. It doesn’t sound like he’s winning.

“He hit you back?”

“He did and also a couple of his friends,” Nicky responds angrily. Tim doesn’t say anything, he just- thinks.

“He actually said the terrible shit?” Tim asks, and he already knows the answer by the way Nicky completely freezes, but he waits for Nicky to say it.

“No,” he chokes out, reluctantly. He’s been seen.

“Nicky,” Tim sighs, not annoyed so much as sad and mad and a dozen other things. “You can’t throw yourself fists-first at everyone who thinks terrible thoughts in the assumed privacy of their own minds,” he says, and Nicky throws his hands up before burying them in his hair.

“I know that,” the boy says, frustrated and angry. “You think I don’t know that?! It’s easy for you to say but it's so hard. It’s so hard to hear what these assholes are thinking about you or their girlfriend or anyone and not to- not to want to make them stop. To make them think something else, anything else.” Tim, very carefully, does not look at the teen as he furiously wipes his eyes on his sleeve.

“That sounds exhausting, kid,” he laments. “I’m so sorry.” Nicky swallows hard and nods, shrugs, hugging himself and looking out the window as a few more tears escape. “Luke has been having a tough time with his TP, too. Maybe you could work on it together?” Tim offers, hopefully.

Nicky snorts, trying to build his armor back up. “I’m not planning on staying long, old man,” he says spitefully, embarrassed from his tears and trying to make Tim want to be rid of him. Too bad for him that Tim is not an idiot and is, himself, a rather contrary man.

“Oh, yes you are,” Tim argues back. “At least a couple months.”

“Like hell-,” Nicky starts, but Tim cuts him off by digging the catalogue out of his door and tossing it over.

"I can't stand by and watch you self-destruct, kid," he says firmly. "You’re gonna take at least one class, minimum eight weeks."

Nicky stares in horror down at the community college mailer in his hands and starts to protest.

“It doesn’t have to be an academic one,” Tim continues, “but it’s gotta be in-person. Campus is about 20 minutes from the house.”

Nicky flips through the booklet and scoffs at the marked-up pages. "You're not as good as you think you are,” he says, after a minute.

"How's that?" Tim asks casually.

"Luke wouldn't be interested in almost any of the ones you’ve circled,” the boy sneers. “You've been pretending to be his dad for over a year and you don't even know him. Not really."

Tim takes a breath through the hurt, and powers through it. "I didn't circle those because I thought Luke might like them," he answers evenly. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Nicky stiffen. Sees him swallow, hard. Hears him take a breath.

"You looked through all of this this morning?" Nicky asks, trying to put new pieces in a puzzle he thought he'd solved.

"No," Tim answers simply. Nicky flips over the booklet to see the postmark and he frowns, confused and uncertain.

"You got this a few weeks ago?"

"I did."

"But.." Nicky opens to a dog-eared page, tracing his finger over 'The History of Rock Music' fall session 2 and the enthusiastic scribble around it. "How did-? How did you know I'd be back in time to register for any of these?" He brushes his fingers over 'The History of Civil Protests in the USA 1860-Present' and turns another page.

"I didn't know," Tim answers, keeping his eyes focused on the road ahead. "But I hoped."

There is a charged silence in the truck for several heartbeats as Nicky comes to terms with this new knowledge, this tangible proof that Tim has been thinking of him even when he hasn’t been there. The boy closes the catalog again, softly this time, and looks at the smiling model graduates on the front of it. Tim is not a mind reader, but he thinks maybe Nicky is realizing a path he never expected is open to him, now.

Tim hopes he takes it.

The car dings with a new text to Tim’s phone, breaking the stillness, and the automated voice reads aloud: “Luke sent a text: ‘OK, I’m at school! Tell Nicky hi and I’ll see him later love you’. Luke also sent a picture of two boys standing in front of a bay of blue lockers.” Tim lets himself smile.

Nicky sniffles a little bit, pulling the blanket tighter around himself even though the heat in the truck is working well. He opens the glove compartment and rustles up a pen and a memo pad, brushing his hand surreptitiously over the bag with his sandwich in it as he sits back up. Tim can feel himself being surveyed out of the corner of Nicky's eye. With another deep breath, the boy opens the catalogue, and the memo pad, and - finally - his food.

Tim’s smile lasts the rest of the drive.

Chapter Text

Tim, despite being genuine and honest and unashamed of showing emotion in general, has a bit of Little Shit in him. He is penitent and devout and adoring to those few people he has decided deserve those qualities from him, but also loves to gaslight people who should mind their own fucking business.

When Nicky starts at the community college, word quickly gets around that his last name is Johannsen. That he lives in one of the upstairs bedrooms in Tim Johannsen's house. That he and Luke play basketball in the driveway of that house, roughhousing until they're exhausted and drag themselves inside for refueling. That he soaks up Tim's generously doled-out approval and love the same way Luke does. Someone an aisle over from Tim in the supermarket mentions they have seen with their own eyes Tim bullying Nicky into wearing a jacket one chilly fall morning, and that the tough-looking boy did not immediately remove it when he was out of sight of the house. Tim hears it all, and he relishes in it - accidentally creating a little mystery that even the busiest bodies in this town will never get an answer to.

When people Tim doesn’t know, or barely knows, work up the nerve to ask him about his family’s new addition with a “So, you have another son?”, Tim sometimes answers “Just the two.” If they hit him with “How long has Nicky been with you?” Tim responds with a stone-faced, “Well, he’s eighteen, so.”

The parents of Luke’s friends are surprised when Luke starts talking about his older brother, but they have the sense not to ask. Luke has a brother. Tim has two sons. That’s all they need to know.

Chapter Text

Sometimes, Tim dreams. Not how he used to, where the images would fade from his mind before he’d brushed his teeth, but of moments - moments that burn themselves into his brain and onto the inside of his eyelids so he can't escape them. On good days, it's the newly-familiar:

His own old bones, gardening. That grown and safe and happy Luke, bringing his family to visit. Two little golden-haired cherubs who call him Grampa and want to be held by him. Kissing Wendy, her face lined and her hair streaked with silver and looking more beautiful every moment, as he passes through the living room. Nicky, settled and comfortable in his skin and content in his life, walking through the door with a grin and a bag filled with souvenirs for himself and for the people he loves. The house with four bedrooms still only having one guest room even though his boys have grown into their own men. Warm sunlight. The smell of baking cookies. Sometimes a glimpse of the woman he loves, curled up in his arms under the covers, her face relaxed and happy in sleep. Whispered intimacies in the dark. Boldly flirting with one another as they walk hand-in-hand through the supermarket.

He thinks of these as his golden dreams. That's on the good days.

On the bad days he barely makes it to the toilet in time to be sick, images that don't bear repeating clutching at his brain and never letting him forget them, even when he tries to push them to the back of his mind, to bury them amongst the junk piles of things he's known but no longer has any use for. Even when he begs them to go away.

And there are other nights, the in-between nights. Tonight, for instance:

Tim wakes up in a cold sweat, a headache building behind his right eye, and throws himself out of bed. The night is chilly even though the heat is on, and the moisture cooling on his skin makes him shiver, his arms and feet bare. He stumbles, unsteady on his feet, having begun movement before the dream even faded at all. His head is spinning.

He wrenches open his door and knocks loudly on Luke's as he passes it toward the stairs. He hears Luke's "mm?? What?" and the bedroom door open as he takes the steps two at a time. He hears Luke start shuffling up behind him but he calls 

"Go outside," as he reaches Nicky's door. He knocks. Waits. Knocks again. No indication Nicky's woken up. He opens the door and sees the older boy, mouth open in sleep. He shakes his shoulder. "Nicky. Nicky. Wake up."

It seems like a struggle for the boy to open his eyes, but Tim sees a sliver of brown as he squints against the hall light that Luke has just turned on.

"What's happening?" he asks, groggy and sluggish. Tim levers him up, the boy not resisting but apparently unable to help much, and with Luke on his other side they wobble down the stairs.

They’ve just hit the ground floor again when the carbon monoxide detectors start screeching. Tim freezes for a heartbeat, surprised and confused, and he sees Luke slowly turn to him and stare.

“Come on,” Tim says, getting them moving again. He pushes this new spike of alarm down to be examined later (or never). “Out on the porch.”

It’s chillier out here, and Tim settles the boys on the front steps with blankets from the couch wrapped around them. He doubles back into his bedroom to grab his phone before heading back to the front door. His head is fucking killing him - the high-pitched electronic screaming is not helping - and he sees Luke and Nicky leaning against one another with their faces screwed up against their own headaches.

The fire department sends a crew of firefighters and paramedics out asap, lights on but - mercifully - no sirens by the time they pull up at the curb. Tim is huddled up with Luke and Nicky as Wendy and one of her coworkers wrap them in more blankets and put oxygen masks on them. The others are walking around in the Johannsens’ house with air tanks and masks and a thing that looks like an old walkie-talkie but is meant to help them find the source of the deadly gas.

They’ve turned off the detectors, thank god, but now that it’s quiet and he’s bundled together with his boys and he knows that Wendy’s looking after them, he’s so tired.

Wendy shakes him awake. He’s still groggy, but his headache isn’t as bad and they’re taking his oxygen mask off, so that's good. Luke and Nicky blink awake on either side of him as one of the firefighters tells him that their furnace needs to be replaced and can’t be used until then. Tim can only stare at him blankly, his brain not quite engaged.

Wendy takes them to her house, both for monitoring and for warmth. The teens get tucked up together on the fold-out couch. Tim she tucks into her own bed, curls up with a hand on his chest and her head on his shoulder. He likes them all under one roof. He feels centered.

As he falls back to sleep, he doesn’t worry about the cost of replacing the furnace - he has good insurance. He doesn’t worry that he and Nicky and Luke didn’t get enough oxygen - he knows Wendy and her crew wouldn’t have let them go if they weren’t ok enough that regular air will do the rest of the job. 

He, very carefully, does not worry about the dream that woke him up earlier, where the shrill shrieks of the CO detector were already telling him he needed to get his family out of the house. The dream that made Luke study him the whole ride over to Wendy’s. He doesn’t worry about it. He doesn’t.

Chapter Text

Nicky doesn’t fucking understand how to live in this house. He’s lived in a lot of places, with a lot of different people - group homes; foster homes; a long time ago his family’s home. He doesn’t remember the last one that great. But, like, the best places all had one thing in common, and that was the day you got there and the adult(s) sat you down and told you the rules you had to follow and what would happen if you didn’t follow them. Restrictions, chores, and, finally, removal. The worst places had rules that they didn’t tell you and they expected you to abide by, and removal was the first consequence if you were lucky.

He’s been here for a little over six months and Tim has not once sat him down and given him rules besides him having to take a class and him having to do the community service the judge in Philly gave him. He did the community service, easy - 100 hours done in two weeks and then he just kind of kept volunteering at the community center because he likes the kids and he likes seeing them go wild with their art supplies, even if they are Rose-Art and the kind of paints that come in 5-gallon buckets. He took the one non-credit class in Fall session 2 and then Tim saw that he was looking at Spring classes and made a happy-but-casual noise that did something to Nicky’s brain and all of a sudden he had signed himself up for a full course load and he, Tim, and Luke were driving into the main part of town to get his books and stuff and have lunch and make a whole day of it.

He keeps waiting for another shoe to drop - any shoe. There have been no shoes, basically, at all. Tim lets him have friends over, even if they’re not working on a group project. Tim got him a used car that isn’t flashy but has good safety ratings and gets good gas mileage and goes whenever he asks it to, and he doesn’t scold him for going places other than college or for not taking Luke with him. Tim got him registered or whatever with the same therapist Luke goes to, since they’d already been heavily vetted both by that US Marshal of theirs and also by several children with varying degrees of telepathy. (Nicky likes his therapist, but he’s not sure he’s doing therapy right.) Also, Tim acts like he’s happy to see him every time Nicky walks into the same room as him??

And then there’s Luke. He loves Luke - he’s always wanted a sibling, and he and Luke have a shared trauma that really makes their brotherhood realistic. The only thing is, now that they’re not plotting to escape from living hell or trying to keep the household running while Tim recovers from 8 straight hours of vengeful-crazed-scientist torture, Nicky sees all of their glaring differences:

Luke is just so sweet and so good. First, he’s a literal genius who has to aim NOT to be in the top 5% of his class.

He’s never met a 15-year old boy who wants to hang out with his parent so much. Nicky has walked into the kitchen on a Thursday evening and encountered Luke, draped over Tim as he was cooking, harassing him in a way that was making Tim laugh so hard he cried. And they looked at him, as he walked in the door, a.) like they were happy he was home, and b.) like he was welcome to interact with and, therefore, change this scene of familial bliss.

Luke will cry and is almost never mad at himself about it; almost never tries to hide it. Nicky doesn’t know how to do that. Nicky doesn’t think he has the guts. (15-year-old Nicky certainly didn't.)

Plus, Luke still thinks Nicky is cool even though they’ve been living together as normal teenagers for half a year. He and his friends invite Nicky to do stuff with them in a way that is truly heartwarming and wonderful, and sometimes Nicky even takes them up on their offer. They always seem very excited when he comes to do a sport with them, or lets them pile into his car and drive past their friends and get ice cream together. He doesn’t understand it, but Tim and Luke and the gangs they have both formed around themselves act like they like Nicky even when he isn’t doing anything for them. It doesn’t make sense, and it’s driving him crazy. 

This whole semester, Nicky has been waiting. When he doesn’t get a great grade on something, he can’t help but look at Tim out of the corner of his eye for a week, waiting to see if he gets disappointed or angry. When he feels a little tired and decides to stay home because he’s only got one discussion class that day and he’s pretty solid on the material, he freezes when he and Tim cross paths in the hallway or kitchen or living room or wherever. Sometimes, he stays up too late and ends up asleep sitting up on the couch, and Tim will gently wake him and tell him to go to bed. Nicky can never see any of the emotions he expects in Tim’s face as he’s ushered up the stairs with a “good night”.  

Even tonight. He and Luke were both studying for finals at the kitchen table after dinner, and Luke is going through some sort of low-stakes high school drama so he was sniffling every now and then which is fine, but it was kind of starting to get on Nicky’s nerves. And then, Nicky picked up a pen that was apparently Luke’s, and Luke wanted it back, and Nicky didn’t see the big deal and then suddenly they were screaming at each other and Tim was sending them both to their rooms with the promise that he would come talk to them when he’d finished cleaning up dinner. Even then, Tim didn’t yell at them about it. He wasn’t mad at them about it. Nicky doesn’t know what it’s gonna take to make Tim show his true colors. Nicky doesn’t know why he’s still pretending.

Nicky hears him go into Luke's room below his and hears the frustrated cry-yelling that Luke does when he's got Too Many Emotions. He can hear Tim's low rumble calmly responding, and over the course of the next five to ten minutes he hears the sadness and anxiety Luke's been dealing with bleed out of the younger boy until he can't hear any talking anymore. He hears Tim close Luke's bedroom door and he imagines Luke having exhausted himself - almost certainly in Tim's arms, at least by the end - tucked up in bed, hair kissed and emotions soothed.

Nicky clenches his jaw and turns over to face the wall as he hears footsteps starting up the stairs, brain already working itself back up. Not gonna catch HIM venting to Tim. He can understand Tim’s endless patience with Luke, golden and sweet and smart and perfect Luke. He's not precious, like Luke. He's dirty and tarnished and worn out, a workhorse instead of a jewel. The kind of thing people knock around and don't care about much when they have to replace it. The kind of thing no one is ever proud to call their own.

Tim knocks.

"What?" Nicky bites out, petulant and angry and hurting and hating himself.

His door opens and he hears Tim just stand there. A rustle of fabric that sounds like he's crossing his arms. 

"What's the matter, Nicky?" he asks, in that same way he talks to Luke. Like he cares.

"I don't want to talk," Nicky snaps. "Leave me alone."

Tim stands there for another long moment, and Nicky can feel himself being scrutinized. He pulls even his mind away from Tim, and the sensation of being studied fades.

"All right," Tim says at last, and his footsteps move back into the hall. "Good night, then," he says and closes the door, going back downstairs.

You did it, a mean voice inside Nicky gloats. He's finally done with you. He sees you for what you are, now.

Nicky doesn't sleep well. He wakes several times in the night wanting Tim or wanting Luke or wanting to pack everything and leave before they wake up - even though over the last several months Tim has made it so all of his stuff won't fit into one bag, anymore. Or even two.

The last time he opens his eyes before morning it's to the sound of his bedroom door opening again. 

"Get up," Tim says, and Nicky rolls over to look at him. He glances at his clock.

"It's five in the morning," Nicky says stupidly. Tim throws him something soft and drops something less soft on the floor at the side of his bed.

"Get up and get dressed," he says, no nonsense but not exactly unkind. "I want you downstairs in five minutes." He closes the door behind him and Nicky blinks several more times before he sits up and looks at the things Tim had brought in with him. He thinks about locking his door and going back to sleep, but he doesn't.

Nicky's downstairs in his sweatshirt and joggers and running shoes before Tim comes back up to rouse him again. He makes his face the grumpiest he can, but inside him, the small voice that has been growing over the last almost-year whispers "he loves you. This is what good parents do with their trouble children. He knows you're not Luke and he loves you."

Tim runs faster than Nicky usually does, since Nicky is usually trawling for other 18-24 year olds and hoping someone looks him up and down and notices how fit he is and wants him, and it means that Nicky couldn't chat even if he wanted to. Just when Nicky feels like he's gonna drop, Tim slows them to a jog. And then a walk. Nicky's jaw and shoulders relax.

When neither of them are panting anymore, Tim loops an arm around Nicky's neck even though they're both gross and drenched in sweat and pulls him in to kiss the side of his head. He relaxes his arm but doesn't take it back, leaving it draped around Nicky's shoulders.

"He loves you," the little voice whispers again, excitedly. "He loves you. You." 

Nicky spills his guts as they walk home, his hopes and dreams and anxieties and fears - even the secret fear that claws at his throat as he says it, trying to stay hidden where it's been growing in his heart. He says it, and he feels Tim react in some way that Nicky can't figure out without looking at him. But he just can't look at him, right now.

He feels a strong and endlessly gentle hand on the back of his neck. Feels himself pulled closer again even though their steps never falter. Feels Tim tip his head against Nicky's and leave it there. Any other man - any other adult - did any of this shit to him, Nicky would be fighting or flighting in a heartbeat. With Tim, he just feels safe. He only ever feels safe. He doesn’t understand it.

"Nicky," Tim starts, soft and low and more suited to a nursery or library than to Nicky. Just above a whisper. Low and gentle and unshakeable directly into Nicky's ear, like it will bypass all of the voices that try to keep good things away if he says it close enough. "I didn't ask you if you wanted to be part of this family only on the days you're happy," he says. "I didn't ask you if you wanted to be Luke's brother only on the days you two get along. I asked you if you wanted to be a part of every version of this family as every version of you. Families fight. Families need space from each other, sometimes. But you're always gonna be a part of us. You're always gonna be my kid. I'm always gonna love you. Even if I get mad at you. I'm always gonna love you. And that's not conditional."

Nicky feels raw but like a neglected wound that’s finally getting taken care of. His mouth makes him say “But- you and Luke-“. Tim cuts him off before he can figure out how he wants that sentence to end.

“I don't want two Lukes. I want one Luke and one Nicky. And that's who I got.” Tim knocks his head lightly against Nicky’s. “You're my kid, Nicky. I'm gonna love you until the day I can't love anything, anymore." Tim stares at him until Nicky nods that he heard him. He doesn’t make Nicky look him in the eyes. He kisses the side of his head again and leaves his arm casually slung across Nicky’s shoulders and they make it back home just after the sun has fully risen.

As Nicky showers, he can’t help but cry a little. In a few minutes, he’ll go downstairs and apologize to Luke - there will probably be a hug, because as a family they’re very hug-oriented - and he’ll offer to help Tim with breakfast or dishes or anything, and he’ll let his runners dig into the cinderblock of the walls, and he’ll start to believe that he’s a welcome presence in the garden Tim is cultivating in upstate New York. 

But right now, he leans his head against the cool shower wall, lets the hot water scour him clean, and cries for the childhood he didn’t have and the person he’s had to be. And some of his tarnish comes off.

Chapter Text

Tim tries to remind himself that this is normal, and that normal is what he wanted. This... doesn't feel like getting what he wanted.

"I'm gonna be the only one not going," Luke protests hotly. "Literally. Literally everyone else is going to be there."

"I'm not everyone else's- Everyone else is not my concern. My concern is you and your safety, and you're not going and that's that."

Luke's face is red with anger and frustration. "You never let me do anything! I hate you!" he shouts, fists balled, foot stomping. Further in the house, Tim hears a door slam. 

"You can hate me all you want but you're gonna go to your room and stay there until I call you for dinner," Tim asserts, pointing a sauce-covered spoon in Luke's direction. Luke lets out a very teenage scream of anger, a plastic cup flies off of the counter and hits the wall with a loud smack!, and Tim hears Luke's bedroom door slam again. "Hey! Cut it out and march."

Luke spins on his heel, and Tim knows that the next slam he hears was done by hand. Music starts, loud. Tim scrubs his face with his wrist, stomach churning, and picks up the cup to put it in the sink. Normal, normal, normal, he chants in his head, taking a few deep breaths. He's a teenager and this is normal and that's all you want for him.

When he calls Luke for dinner, Luke's color is still high but most of the rage has gone, leaving him sullen. He slumps in his chair and Tim lets him pick at the food for a minute before talking.

"I'm sorry Luke," he says, lowly. "I know it sucks. I know it's unfair. I wish to god you only had to worry about the things that your friends are worrying about, but the- that choice was taken from you years ago and we gotta live in the world they built for us. I'm not telling you no to be mean. I don't want you to suffer. I don't derive joy from denying you yours. But there are some things that you don't get to do the way that everyone else around you does, and I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But," he puts his hand on the teen's forearm, "I need you to understand." He dips his head to catch the boy's eyes. "Tell me you understand."

Luke clenches his jaw, eyes watering, but there's no heat in his voice when he says, "I understand."

"Ok. Good." Tim squeezes the boy's arm, gently. "You can be mad at me, you can hate me, that's- fine," he says, hating the way his voice breaks but unable to undo it, "but please don't put yourself in danger to spite me, please. Please." He holds Luke's gaze for another moment and then straightens, moving back to his own side of the table and picking up his fork. Normal, normal, normal, he reminds himself.

He's surprised when Luke speaks up, again. 

"I don't hate you," he says, scratchy voiced and stuffy nosed and looking down at his food. Tim sighs, relief and sadness mixed.

"I know, kid."

"I hate them," he whispers through clenched teeth. "I hate them. I hate them."

Tim stands and moves to hug Luke but pulls back at the last second. Angry sixteen-year-olds don't want to be hugged by their substitute parent, he scoffs at himself.

Luke leans over, though, dropping his fork onto his plate and wrapping his arms around Tim's waist, burying his face in his chest and screaming, "I hate them, I hate them, I hate them," into his shirt, and all Tim can do is hold him tight and squeeze him back until the emotion passes.

Chapter Text

Nicky has never lived in a place like this. There’s a palpable sense of community in their neighborhood. People wave at people when they drive by. People pick up trash they come across, even if it’s not in their yard. Nicky went to Albany with some friends from his classes for a week earlier this month, and when he came back people actually said “welcome back” and “how was your trip” and “I hear you really impressed Dr. Beers last semester” and it made him feel like.. loved? Not just because these neighbors pay attention to him, but also because it means Tim brags about him. When he’s not there. 

At the end of every July in this idyllic upstate town, the neighborhood gets together at the baseball diamond in the park and has a sort of midsummer bonfire. They don’t have a beach in town, and the diamond is the biggest patch of un-foliated earth within walking distance from most of their homes. They do it up right, too: families walk over together, everybody brings a snack or a drink to share and their lawn chairs. They always have a crew of paramedics and firefighters, just in case, and they even get to partake in all the food and non-alcoholic drinks available. The little kids run around in the outfield playing tag or flashlight tag or spin-until-you-fall-down; the teens have one side of the bonfire and the adults have the other side. Supervision, but space. It’s nice.

Nicky is sitting at the outskirts of the adults, a little farther away from the bonfire because he’s been enjoying sitting back and people-watching lately, but also because sometimes he still dreams of going up a chimney except he’s awake when it happens.

Anyway.

Tim is sitting with his book club friends - Kathy, Devon’s mom, Becky and Vic, Matt’s moms, Carly, Joey’s stepmom. A few others Nicky doesn’t know as well. A couple of them are wine-tipsy, but Tim has been nursing the same drink all night, just happy to be here. He looks as relaxed as Nicky feels, smiling and laughing with his friends. Checking in on Luke and his goofy friends with too-soft eyes. Glancing back at Nicky every so often to make sure he’s still having a good time. It’s. It’s so nice.

A lot of Luke’s friends’ dads have huddled up; someone brought a guitar, which means someone is always playing the guitar. They’re a jolly bunch, and they’re reliving glory days with uproarious laughter or singing along to half of a Creedence song played with little skill but wild enthusiasm or looking at their kids and pointing out the parts of themselves they see there. “His mom’s eyes but my innate sense of athleticism,” etc, etc. It’s joking and adoring and if Nicky had seen it in a movie five years ago he would have decried it for being fantasy.

Not everyone there has kids, or has kids who are around. Everyone was invited, and plenty of them came: elderly friends who remember the times of soda shops and like to talk about the changes - good and bad - the years have wrought. People with shorter-term leases in town for some extended business thing Nicky doesn’t understand. One of Nicky’s professors came with her sister, and they’re both holding court with the 30-35 year olds who have the real estate between the bookclub moms (and Tim) and the heyday dads. It’s not, like, strictly divided or anything; people just kind of found groups and smaller groups and settled in near one another.

Some of the business guys can be standoffish - probably because they don’t know anyone well, which is fair. They’re dotted around the fire in groups or two or three with locals they’ve run into enough times that they have a rapport. 

Some people are the kind of cranky and mean that makes Nicky wonder why they bothered coming to a community event at all. Solitary lawn chairs, biting words. The kind of people who want to make your day worse just because it makes them feel good to do it. Nicky doesn’t like those people, and he tends to steer well clear of them.

Anyway, mostly everyone is having a good time. Tim said he could have a beer if he wanted, but Nicky did enough unchecked drinking at The Institute that it doesn’t hold any mystique for him anymore. Luke and his friends are high on sugar and caffeine and childhood freedom, and every now and then the heyday dads land on a song that they know and scream along to. Looking at them from across the fire, Nicky can’t tell that Luke’s any different from his friends. He just looks like a kid. Nicky really likes that. He understands why Tim looks at them sometimes with overwhelming joy when they’re not even doing anything. When they’re squabbling or playing basketball in the driveway or when they’re sharing the couch on a rainy day and agreeing to watch the same thing at the same time.

One of the guys Nicky knows by sight from Hickory, a few streets over - the kind of guy who wouldn’t give your ball back if it landed in his yard, never leaves his porch light on for halloween, etc. - has been bitching to the world at large for too long about anyone and everyone else around. The dads are being too loud, the moms are being “shrill” - which, fuck him by the way -, the littles are being too hyper, the teens are being rowdy. Why the fuck the asshole came and stayed is anyone’s guess, but Nicky bets he just loves to hear the sound of his own voice. Nicky tuned him out a half hour ago.

The teens are in their own little cliques, and at this moment, Luke and his friends are playing a laugh-filled game of keep-away with a half empty water bottle. It’s funny to them because it’s stupid, and it’s funny to be earnest about extremely stupid games.

Luke tosses the water bottle - Joey is the one they’re ‘keeping’ it from at the moment - across to Matt, who tosses it to Devon, then back to Luke, etc etc. By the second round of this, Joey has the idea to get to Luke before the bottle does. Luke absolutely fucking cheats: Nicky can feel the kiss of TK he hits the bottle with so it still lands in his hands instead of Joey’s as they jump for it. Joey does not foresee this turn of events, for obvious physics-based reasons, and knocks into Luke’s chest as they’re landing. Luke over corrects and pitches into Hickory’s arm, knocking the dregs of the man’s drink to the ground.

Nicky watches as Luke evens his keel and apologizes to the guy, even as his laughter is still dying down. He gestures, and Nicky thinks he’s asking if he can get another one of whatever he spilled for the guy, and then-

The man is on his feet and Luke is on the ground by the fire, shock on his face and his hand coming up to his cheek. There’s an outcry, quickly choked off, as parents spring to their own feet. Hickory reaches down, still grousing about something, and grabs Luke’s arm and hauls him back to his feet.

Nicky’s shocked. Everyone- it feels like everyone is stun-locked except the man from Hickory, mouths open, barely breathing, disbelieving. Everyone but Tim.

Tim is there in three long strides, and now the man from Hickory street is on the ground clutching his nose, screaming “what the fuck man” and “you broke my fucking nose” and Tim is pulling Luke to him with his left arm, clutching Luke to his chest as the teen starts to cry, tries to shrink himself into Tim, doesn’t know whether to clutch at his Tim or his own cheek and so just holds his shaking hands in front of him in the universal sign for “Please, no more”.

Tim’s right hand is shaking, too, the knuckles split from where they met teeth and bone and cartilage with all his weight and strength behind them. Nicky’s on his feet and clutching at Tim’s bicep, and he isn’t sure if he’s holding him back or trying to hide behind him. The almost-year he’s spent as part of this family has sloughed off several of his protective layers and rounded his sharp edges in a way that means, apparently, fight is no longer his primary fear response. The parts he’d had because he was the only one who was going to look out for himself didn’t need to be there anymore, so they left. That’s almost as scary as this.

Luke’s hands find purchase in Tim’s shirt and Tim’s hand finds itself, as always, pressed against Luke’s hair,. It’s been maybe two seconds, maybe forever, and the man from Hickory is still talking about his own nose.

"You come near my kid again, I'll fucking kill you," Tim snarls, all teeth, low and quiet and still perfectly audible over the whining, cradling the back of Luke's head as the boy huddles in the curve of his arm and cries into his shirt. Moms and Dads and Older Siblings have all clumped up with their younger charges, holding them, staring in disbelief at the scene in front of them.

Wendy’s there, now, in front of him and Tim and Luke. Luke shies away from her gloved hand, trying to get closer to Tim, trying to hide. Wendy takes a step back.

“Hey, buddy, it’s just me,” she says soothingly. “I just wanna look at you, ok? You can stay right where you are, but I wanna check you out.” He does clutch Tim harder, but he shakily turns his face to her and lets her come close. She keeps up her soothing tone, telling him exactly what she’s doing and what she’s about to do as she checks his pupils, his teeth and his hands. Pupils reacting as normal. Blood in his mouth, but luckily only a cut cheek from his own teeth. Hands and forearm full of grit from where he tried to catch himself. He even lets her clean the scrapes. Nothing she can do for the bruise that’s already blooming.

She finishes up on his hands and takes her gloves off, slowly reaching out a hand to squeeze his shoulder. She doesn’t tell him he’s ok, or he’s strong, or it doesn’t look bad. She just squeezes his shoulder and catches his eyes and projects love toward him as loud as she can.

She moves on to Tim’s hand next, pulling his arm away from where he’s using his elbow to theoretically keep Nicky back. Nicky can still hear the man from Hickory screaming about his nose but nobody seems overly concerned with him. There is a paramedic with him, but they’re moving slow and they don’t seem to be trying to soothe him at all. Nicky isn’t trying to get anything from anyone, but his TP is kind of flaring out and pulling away from people without his say-so, and he’s half-overwhelmed with the fear coming from Luke and the fury coming from Tim, but Nicky can just pick up the other medic thinking that one of the people who got hit tonight deserved it. 

Wendy cleans Tim’s knuckles and wraps his hand in a bandage, giving him strict instructions to ice it when he gets home. She’s using her Professional Voice and Professional Eyes at him, things she only pulls out either when she’s really mad at Tim or when she really wants to get her hands on him in a distinctly non-professional way.

Nicky is surprised when she turns to him next. She’s pulling off her second set of gloves and studying him, and Nicky manages to choke out

“I didn’t even-.” with a shakiness in his voice he doesn’t expect and can’t control. Wendy just cups his cheek with a warm hand and he hears the echo of her voice, so many times, admonishing him to be gentle with himself, too.

“Ok, Nicky?” she says out loud, and he swallows hard and nods, suddenly blinking back tears. Luke is shaking like a leaf and Nicky feels like his legs will give out at any second and he has no idea how they’re gonna get home - and then Kathy is telling them to call her if they need anything as they get out of her minivan in the driveway, with Luke still in the protective curve of Tim’s arm and a worryingly dead-eyed stare on his face.

Nicky misses how it happens, but they’re inside and he’s already in sweatpants; the kettle is coming to a boil on the counter in front of him, and he fills the three mugs someone (he?) has laid out and already added cocoa to when it beeps. He can hear Tim talking as he and Luke change on opposite sides of the same open door, a technique they perfected just after they met and have only had to revert to a few times.

Then Nicky’s in his room, sitting on his bed, his cocoa mug empty and his hands tingling like they’ve been asleep and are only just getting feeling back. He’s so cold, and his face feels like he’s been crying. He lets the mug fall onto his bed as he stands, joints stiff like he’s been in the same position for a while. He wants- he wants to see Tim or check on Luke, just to see they’re ok, that they’re still there. He blinks again and he’s at the bottom of the stairs, turning toward their bedroom doors.

Nicky is a little surprised that Luke’s light is still on because it’s almost midnight. He peers around the doorway. Tim is awake, sitting up against the headboard with his hand smoothing Luke’s hair the way he did in the early days - the days when Luke was still learning how to live in a world without his parents and the future he'd imagined for himself; how to live in a world post-Institute. Luke's wedged himself on Tim’s far side, his back pressed against the wall and forehead pressed to Tim's hip. Nicky starts to turn around because he doesn’t want to intrude or wake Luke, but Tim just says, 

“Come here, kid," and Nicky can't fight it, doesn't want to fight it - lets his feet move him forward, compass points drawn to Tim's true north and he curls up on Tim's near side in a mirror of Luke. Tim looks tired, like all his energy burned off with the anger from earlier. The blanket gets tucked around him. He feels Tim's hand - bandaged and radiating cold from the ice pack secured to it - stroke his hair, too. 

If Nicky squeezes his eyes shut he can still see Tim standing outside the ruins of The Institute, his blood-stained Carhartt jacket coated with a fine layer of concrete from the way he hugged Luke. He can still taste the bitterness, the acid at the back of his mouth as he looks at them, can already see the love and devotion and goodness in the man from barely a minute's encounter. He can still feel the hollow rawness in his chest as he longs for that. As he sees the plans he'd made for him and Luke, orphans in arms, rambling around the country together because they didn't have anyone else, going up in smoke like an old film reel burning in the projector.

He feels Tim, current Tim, real Tim, now Tim, lightly scratch his scalp to pull his attention back into the present. Nicky opens his eyes, alarmed by the tears in them. He looks up to meet Tim's gaze, soft and warm and loving and, most improbably, for him.

"Go to sleep, Nicky," the man says, carding fingers through his hair again, and his voice is even better than the comforter. "It's ok. I'll be here in the morning."

And so Nicky does.

In the morning, Nicky wakes to see Tim's head tipped back against the wall, asleep, a hand still on each of the boys' heads. He glances to Luke and is surprised that he's already awake. That he doesn't look so shaken anymore. Nicky surveys the younger boy's face and - so slowly and so gently - chucks him on the chin.

"Hell of a bruise you've got there," Nicky says, his voice scratchy with sleep. It takes Luke a second, but then his eyes get a little glint in them and he quirks the corner of his mouth and says:

"You should see the other guy."

Later, when they're all squished on the couch together because no one wants to be out of arm's reach from anyone else, the kitchen door opens. Tim gets up to see who it is, and when he yelps and gets pulled out of sight, Nicky jumps up to see what's happening. What he sees when he peeks around the doorway is Wendy, in her street clothes, her hands fisted in Tim's sweatshirt, his back bent with her strength, his hands coming to rest on her waist and the small of her back as they kiss. 

Nicky goes back to Luke on the couch, half embarrassed and half entertained, and when they hear the kitchen door open and close again a minute or two later and then Tim drifts back to the couch in a daze no one says anything, but the boys share a smirk before unpausing the movie.