(no subject)
Let me just preface this by saying that I have not written fic in a long time.
No, no, scratch that. Change it to, 'I have not written good fic in a long time.' Maybe ever. Certainly not as far as FNL is concerned. (I have seven - count them, SEVEN - attempts at Tim/Lyla in my notebook, none of which will ever see the light of day, so help me.)
But this has been stuck in my head all weekend (possibly it should've just stayed there), and so tonight (this morning), I am going to post it and run. And say, 'SCREW YOU, BETTER JUDGMENT!' and not care.
Okay?
[That's certainly not to say that I won't want to shoot myself in the morning, since there are tense-switches and grammatical errors the size - breadth? scope? whatever - of Mississippi - the word, anyway, since the state's really not all that big. So maybe the proper term would've been 'long' - and I don't even know where I was going with this sentence, so never mind. Uh.]
YOU KNOW WHAT, JUST READ IT. (Or don't. But, y'know, do.)
Title: Draw a Line in the Sand
Fandom: FNL
Pairing: NONE. HOW SICK IS THAT? It's Tim-centric, I don't know how that happened.
Word Count: 1,480
Rating: PG? PG-13? A couple of swear words maybe. And by a couple, I think I literally mean about two.
On Saturday mornings when he’s six, Tim wakes up at 7:00, pads out to the kitchen in this stupid old pair of Superman footy pajamas Billy used to wear, pulls his Ninja Turtles bowl out of the cupboard, and pours Cocoa Puffs into it until they spill over the edge and bounce off the counter. He eats them in the living room while he watches cartoons; usually from the floor, ‘cause Mom’s always passed out on the couch, and Billy won’t let him use the red beanbag chair, on account of how he accidentally ripped a hole in the last one.
Tim likes cartoons okay. Not as much as he likes football, no way, if he’s going to play for the Panthers, the rule is that he has to like football best, but they’re still pretty funny. Yosemite Sam’s almost always his favorite; he has a big-ass beard, and he shoots things too, which Tim would do if he could find a cool gun somewhere. (Sometimes, when the toaster’s not dead and there’s bread in the house, Tim makes toast instead of cereal, nibbles it into the shape of a pistol, and points it at the TV screen. Just because.)
Dad’s never home on Saturdays (or Tuesdays, or Thursdays, or Sundays or Mondays or Wednesdays, for that matter), so Tim sticks his bowl in the pile on the counter and waits by himself until 9:30, when he’s finally allowed to ride his bike to Jay’s.
Mrs. Street doesn’t let Jay play at Tim’s house very often. Tim heard her telling Jay’s dad he’s a bad influence once when he came in the back door for a drink of water; that his home situation makes her nervous, and that she’s very “awarey” or something about the type of environment Tim’s growing up in. Tim doesn’t know what the hell “awarey” means, but he figures it probably has something to do with the way he just eats the marshmallows out of his Lucky Charms.
Jay never gets Cocoa Puffs or Lucky Charms - Mrs. Street says his teeth will rot out of his mouth if he eats too much sugar - so he's stuck with plain Cheerios, or Raisin Bran, or whatever other nutritious, organic crap she buys from Safeway.
Tim’s mom doesn’t care about sugar content or anything like Jay’s does. Tim’s mom just wants to make sure she gets her check in the mail every month, so she gives Billy a few bucks to buy food every week, and since Billy‘s only fourteen and hates healthy stuff as much as Tim, they have a cupboard-full of cereal, a tub of Rocky Road in the freezer, and three six-packs of soda in the fridge.
(Tim thinks this whole sugar thing’s a load of crap anyway, since Jason’s lost about a thousand teeth so far this year while Tim’s only lost two - neither of which have gone under his pillow for the Tooth Fairy. One’s somewhere around the monkey bars on the playground where he got into that fistfight, and one’s in the grass out back from the time he tripped on his shoelace and fell on his face practicing tackles.)
At 9:27, Tim decides he’s sick of waiting and heads to Jay’s, where he will break his second window this month playing catch, and then watch Mrs. Street’s face turn red, even as she tells him it’s okay, “but for God’s sake, be a little more careful next time.”
*
On Saturday mornings when he’s seventeen, Tim wakes up with the sun in his eyes, a giant hangover, and a full bladder. He pops three Ibuprofen and heads to the bathroom, smacking his big toe into the coffee table on the way.
Billy’s gone when he comes back out to the kitchen, probably working. Dad’s likely halfway to New Mexico now that Tim’s kicked him out, playing golf and pool and hustling people out of money. No-one knows where Mom is, exactly; she took off in her truck one night when Tim was in fourth grade and never came back.
There’s one Eggo left in the box. Tim thinks about putting syrup on it, but that would involve walking across the room, and his head is pounding, so he’d rather stay here on this stool at the counter and pretend he doesn’t exist.
Friday nights are usually a blur because there are games, and after the games there are parties, and at those parties, Tim gets plastered.
He doesn’t really know why. It’s a habit, maybe. He doubts he can even go out now without downing a red Solo cup of something.
He’s not sure when that started, either. He remembers getting drunk for the first time with Jason, because they were twelve and stupid, and wanted to see what the big deal was. And that was enough for Jay, just to know that he’d done it, because even when he was twelve and stupid, he was still smart enough to know that if he wanted to keep going in the right direction (the Golden Boy Direction, Tim liked to say sometimes) - if he wanted to play quarterback for Notre Dame and get himself recruited by the NFL - drinking himself under the table every weekend probably wasn’t the best idea.
So while Jay went off and got himself a cheerleader girlfriend and made Panthers Varsity freshman year, Tim became the screw-up because it was easy, he was good at it, and everyone expected it anyway. He never washed his hair, and never paid attention in class, and somehow managed to keep half the female population of Dillon High at his beck and call all the same.
And somewhere along the line, becoming a screw-up's turned into becoming Mom and Dad. When Dad went out, he drank, so when Tim goes out, he drinks too. When Mom didn’t want to think about anything or care about anyone, she’d drink and forget. Sometimes (a lot of the time, really), Tim doesn’t want to care about anything either, so he does the same.
He stopped for awhile for Lyla - maybe thinking she’d actually start talking to him for real if he did, probably more because she gave him some idealistic view of the kind of person he could be if he was sober. Something more than himself - more than a slacker, or a pathetic teenaged drunk, or any of the other things he’s been called so far.
Until the next minute Jay found out about the two of them, and the team made State, and Dad came back, and all the old shit started piling up all over again, sobriety went to hell, and before he knows it he’s right back where he started: sitting in an empty house, working on his next hangover.
It hits him first that there’s something seriously wrong with his life, and second that he really doesn’t want to think about it. Ever. So he takes his crap breakfast to the couch - his spot, now, for sitting and sleeping and, occasionally, passing out - and switches on the television.
There’s an old Bugs Bunny episode playing - one of the ones with twangy country, a saloon, and a random shootout in the middle of nowhere. Tim hasn’t watched cartoons in forever, but he remembers these. They’re always the same: somebody draws a line in the sand and tells somebody else not to cross it. But then there’s another line down, and the first is stepped over, and another after that, and there goes the second, and now past a third, and suddenly over a huge cliff that no-one (or is it everyone?) saw coming. And as stupid as it sounds, this is so completely Tim. This is what he’s been doing to himself, over and over and over, for as long as he can remember. Drawing the line (he doesn’t need a drink; he doesn’t even like drinking that much) and immediately stepping over it (maybe just this one); tricking himself into going over the edge every single time.
He can’t keep doing this forever. Because whether he likes it or not, this is real life. And in real life, there’s no falling three hundred feet, smashing into rocks, and then standing up accordion-style, all better. Maybe sometimes luck plays a part, but the thing is, eventually, even that has to run out - Jay’s proof enough with his dead legs and wheelchair.
It’s time for Tim to make a change - break the cycle. Not for Mom or Dad, or Billy or Lyla or anyone else. Tim owes it to himself to get his shit in order; to have a little self-respect and maybe live to see his eighteenth birthday.
So at 10:43 on a Saturday morning, with Elmer Fudd lisping in the background, he shuffles into the kitchen, opens the fridge, and pours every last bottle of beer down the drain.
And that’s the end of that.