happy to be in your shadow // tim wright x reader

A Helping Hand

I know how I ended up outside, pulling Tim to his car. But, at the same time, I don't  know how I ended up outside, pulling Tim to his car. It felt abnormal to have an effect on something, or somebody, for once. I wedged an arm under his, supporting him, guiding him across the parking lot.

"God, what the fuck are you doing... I don't need any help..." He mumbled between nagging coughs. Still, despite his protests, I could feel his weight leaning against me, finding temporary relief. His body allowing me to direct him as we made our way slowly but surely to his vehicle.

"Yeah, and you totally don't look like a walking corpse right now."

"Ugh, It's-"

I turned to him, peering past the hair falling into my eyes from all of the jarred movement.

"-Shut up, and just let me help you."

——

"Keys." I held out my hand expectantly as he exhaustedly leaned over the hood of his car. He didn't acknowledge my words, still trying desperately to catch his breath.

"Keys," I repeated, curling my fingers.

"What is this, payback?" He cocked a just-barely-a-smirk smirk, dug his hand into his jeans pocket and pulled his key ring out and tossed it over to me. He was too tired to object, and I thought for a moment that if I wanted to, I could have stolen his car and left him there. Stranded, like he had done to me. But I wouldn't, and that consoled me. The choice felt as simple and easy as breathing.

I turned his keys in the ignition and pulled out with him in the passenger seat. I looked over at him. Is this how he would have seen me just a couple nights before? I backed the car out of its tight parking spot, the insistent thrumming of un-powered electric guitar strings playing on in the background of my mind.

I pulled onto the main long stretch of road that I had just biked that morning. The busy roads bordered by tall oaks and pines, that then broke away into vast crop fields. My eyes swept the fields and tree lines in methodical frantic glances, worried if I were to see that thing again. I felt as if it were in the car the way it reverberated in my head like the rocks under my tires.

"You look like shit." My heart thudded in my chest. "How did you even drive like this?" Tim's eyes were closed now, his head tilted back, mouth agape, like a man dying of the plague on the streets of Victorian England.

"There's no one else to do it, so it was either that, or I die silently at home." He wheezed out.

"You don't have any cold medication?"

"Used to," He shifted in the passenger seat, feet pushing further up under the dashboard. "It all expired, had to flush it."

My head pounded painfully and I pressed a knobby knuckled hand to my forehead with one hand still gripped tight on the steering wheel.

"...Where do you live?" I gagged up, mouth dry.

Getting no response, I turned to him. His head now directed forward, eyes staring beadily at me.

"What?" I questioned.

"You've seen it." Tim's dark eyes stared beadily at me.

"Seen what? 'Nothing is in these woods except you and me,' isn't that what you said?" I chuckled briefly, hoping that he would mirror my feigned disregard.

But his eyes persisted and my smile fell– he knew I was faking it.

"I thought.. it wouldn't go after you. I thought it would leave you alone."

I swallowed heartily, "I told you what I saw." I gripped the steering wheel with both hands again, eyes trained forcefully ahead.

"You need to get out of here."

"Get out of here? We're on the road!"

"I mean away from me! Out of this town!" His voice broke with strain, screeching along like an untrained violinist. He was no longer laying halfway across the passenger seat, he was now sitting upright, every muscle tensed. He looked like a deer in the headlights, one that was ready to run further into oncoming traffic; destroying himself in his body's last futile biological attempt at survival. He looked pained, and at first I wanted to tell him that it was him who had come into my store again after that night. That it was him who had offered himself back up to me. But I couldn't muster it.

"Why?.." I began cautiously. "What is it?" The question seemed to make Tim sick.

He shook his head, finger curling hungrily. He knew what the answer was, but it was an answer of unknowability. Something that was always his answer but he seemed to hate to admit every time he needed to say it.

"It's this stupid fucked up thing, that wants to destroy my life."

He looked like he didn't know how to shape it into words, to articulate it into something physical. I could feel it. Its feeling. The one that I had felt before out in the fields. Of something both inhuman and human, something both god and animal, I understood.

"What do you mean a 'thing'?" I snickered. "Like, a monster?"

The tapping in my head became more violent, scavenging the corners of my mind, looking for something, desperately.

"I don't know— I just don't fucking know." This answer upset him. He hated that he couldn't even define it, couldn't keep it restrained by words.

"So– it's a monster, this thing that I keep seeing off the side of roads, and the thing picking at my brain right now!?" I scoffed. The persistent grinding in my head pushing me to the edge.

"I swear this isn't some sick fucking joke!" He attested vulgarly. A piece of him cracked, a sliver of porcelain, chipping away, a fraction of orange flame cutting through the smog.

I could believe it. Oh god, how could I believe it?

I gripped the drivers wheel with unease, now feeling physically sick. I wondered if I had caught his cold.

I pictured myself hitting a deer and my car careening off of the side of the road and into a tree.

"It takes people," he swallowed hard. "-and it wants you now."