🗑️ for the emoji ask
also from timbrady teenage runaway au, here's quinn getting trashed <3
Brady’s dorm is not — ideal. Paper-thin walls, common rooms that never seem to empty, and a shared bathroom that never fails to make Tim feel like a shitty one-night stand. Brady doesn’t touch him at all on the way to his room. He waves to one of his neighbors as they pass through the common room. Tim thinks he must have learned his name at some point, but he can’t think of it now.
Brady has a roommate, technically, but he blessedly never seems to find his way home at the end of the night, and is usually only there from the hours of three in the morning to noon, if he skips his morning lectures. Brady says he just studies a lot — like, the library closes so he moves to the twenty-four-hour Perkins ten minutes away to finish up. Tim thinks this makes him a dweeb, but Brady insists he’s cool.
But that’s only most nights. Some nights, if Tim is deeply, deeply unlucky, he’s there. And tonight, Brady’s roommate seems to be in a very bad way.
“Quinn, come on,” Brady says. “At least lay on your bed and get off the floor.”
A sound that sounds only distantly human emanates from the face-down corpse that’s stretched out across their thin carpet.
Tim’s standing awkwardly in the doorway, peering over Brady’s shoulder because Brady had frozen in place the second he spotted Quinn. He sort of wants to turn around and leave. He sort of wishes he had just stayed at Josh’s dumb house show. The high’s worn off by now and so has the novelty of discreet sex, and Tim just feels slightly greasy. He wants to wash his hands.
Brady sighs and crouches down by Quinn, presumably to check his pulse. “I thought you were at the library again.”
Quinn mumbles something that sounds like “broccoli” and tries to suffocate himself in his own elbow. Brady reaches out to intervene.
“You knew this was gonna happen. They always do that.”
This time, at least, Quinn rolls his head over to squint up at Brady with one eye, cheek pressed to the floor. “’S fucking weird. They’re weird.”
Brady shrugs. “Sure, yeah. You don’t have to catch chlamydia from the floor because of it.”
“Ew,” says Quinn, and then something that might be an attempt at a chirp, but he’s stuffed his face in his elbow again.
“All right,” Brady says, “upsies.” He’s such an idiot. He hooks his arms under Quinn’s limp body and heaves him over onto his side, and it’s enough of a prompt to get Quinn to sit up at least.
“If I throw up, will you be mad?” Quinn looks bleary, bags under his eyes more pronounced than usual. “Oh shit, I was supposed to be writing my paper.” And that gets him on his feet.
Brady stares at him. “You’re not gonna try to write right now. At this point, you ask for an extension and pray.”
“I’m sober enough,” Quinn says, dropping heavily onto his bed. “Sober-ish.” He looks over at Tim in the doorway. “Oh. Hi.”
Tim raises a hand in a hesitant wave while Brady rolls his eyes.
“Just —” he turns away for a second to grab something from their fridge — the Brita — and starts pouring a glass of water.
Quinn stares at Tim for a second. “I feel like — you always see me like this.”
Tim shrugs, shoulder digging into the doorjamb.
“Brady must like you a lot,” Quinn decides. “He never drives me anywhere.”
Tim’s lost the thread of the conversation, but luckily, Brady swoops in with the water.
“Here,” he says, curling Quinn’s fingers around it and helping him lift it. “Drink this, and then go the fuck to sleep.”
“Paper,” Quinn says around a mouthful of water, and they lose a couple minutes to a coughing fit. Brady gives Tim a look that, under different circumstances, would have him breaking down in laughter. A look at me manfully resisting the temptation of murder look.
It takes another couple minutes to let Quinn change his shirt, and then Brady finally coaxes him horizontal on the bed, and he’s out like a dead man.
Brady turns to Tim, who has been no help at all through the whole ordeal. His shoulder is going numb against the doorway. Brady looks exhausted. “Fuck. God. Sorry. Let me drive you back.”
Tim knew that one was coming, but it still smarts. “Yeah.”
Brady catches him on the arm, just above the elbow. “Seriously, I’m really sorry. He’s such a shithead sometimes.”
“No, it’s —” Tim shakes his head, shakes off Brady’s hand. “I get it. Let’s just go.”
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