Author: Minervacat
Fandom: Homicide: Life on the Street
Pairing: Frank & Tim gen
Rating: R
Spoilers: all seasons, through the movie.
Summary: she loved those bright lights more than she loved me

He wakes up nights, still, even though he hasn't been Homicide for years. Wakes up with his heart pounding in his chest and sweat pouring off of him, and sometimes the people he sleeps with, the ones who stay around long enough to get around to looking in his closets - sometimes they ask why he's got so many sets of sheets, just one guy, just one bed, not even a spare bedroom.

He just shrugs, lets them write it off as a quirk, a tick, one more thing about Tim Bayliss that's not quite the dictionary definition of normal. They never stay very long, so what does it matter?

Who wants normal? And when he stops and thinks about it, who gets normal? Not him.

He got a pretty good job for a while, at least, and he got nightmares. For a while he got Frank. Now all he's got left is nightmares, cold sweats in the middle of the night and all he remembers when he wakes up is Adena Watson's body in the alley, Frank's face twisted in disappointment, disgust, despair, all of those a hundred thousand times over, all directed at Tim.

Who wants normal, anyway?

You never say please, you never say thank you.
Please don't be an idiot. Thank you.

He's got two kids and a wife and a teaching job; he's got a good brain and a body that betrayed him more than once. He doesn't have a partner anymore.

He misses coffee and he misses cigarettes. He misses Munch or Meldrick behind the bar at the Waterfront, even after he couldn't drink anymore. He misses having a partner and he misses having someone to watch his back when he's feeling shaky.

He watches his own back most days, because nobody's going to do it for him now. There's a lot less chance he's going to get shot in that back now, of course, but it's a metaphor for the way that, some days, he's walking down the street and he thinks he sees the slope of Tim's shoulders on the sidewalk ahead of him, and it always stops him, dead in his tracks, good as getting shot.

He misses having a partner, because if he still had a partner, the sight of someone tall and lean and lanky, moving like Tim through the streets of Baltimore, wouldn't blindside him half as much as it does now.

He doesn't miss Tim. Some days, Frank doesn't even remember knowing him.

I just don't know if I'm gonna be as good a detective as I am without Frank.

You've got to have a guiding principle; you've got to wake up in the morning and have a reason to get out of bed. A reason to do whatever it is you have to do.

He walked into the squad room all those years ago - and he'd walked into and he's walked out of squad rooms before and since - and he didn't know any better as where to find the coffee as to why he was there. Kay said, "We work for God," and that was almost it, and Beau gave him a look like he wouldn't last a day, much less seven years, starting with Adena and ending with Gee.

He would have floated along if it weren't for Frank, if it weren't for a phone call that he didn't want to take. He dreams, still, that someone else picked up that call - that Kay did, Munch, Meldrick, even Kellerman, who wasn't even there then.

He dreams that Adena Watson wasn't his case, he dreams that Frank was the primary. He dreams that he doesn't have to dream about Adena Watson anymore, and when he wakes up, he doesn't have a reason to get out of bed.

I'll call your wife. Your wife will let me come over. Your wife likes me.
God knows why.

He never wanted to be friends with Tim; he never really wanted a partner. Not for the reason that everybody always thought - the great Frank Pembleton, able to leap tall suspects in the Box in a single bound, he didn't need a partner. He didn't want a partner because every partner he'd ever had has decided that they've got to be friends, and Frank didn't need any friends.

He needed somebody to watch his back and somebody to be the good cop in the Box, and nobody had given him that yet.

He knew what he'd said to Gee; the way he worked. He knew what they said about him in the squad room, and he knew the first time he went out on a call with Tim that Tim had probably heard it already.

Tim stayed with him anyway; Tim went trailing along behind Frank for years, Tim always had an answer for everything Frank said, and Frank resented the hell out of him for most of them. Tim wanted to be Frank's friend, and try as Frank did to keep him at arm's length, Tim pushed in to Frank's life.

He couldn't be much worse than Felton.

I'm not people; I'm your partner.
Oh, you're my partner. I sit at a desk. I am of absolutely no use to you and I'm your partner.

He should have known better. Tim wasn't a stupid guy, he wasn't a criminal (he still hears Frank in his head, crime makes you stupid, Tim committed a crime, therefore, Tim is a criminal, therefore Tim is stupid - except he isn't), and Frank said it to him point blank: I don't need you.

He hears Frank on the roof, years, later: You son of a bitch.

He knows the truth: Frank never really needed him, not like Tim needed Frank.

Gee told him to follow his gut. Tim remembers: he had a cup of coffee and a cigarette and he couldn't find his lighter and he had no idea what he was doing with the investigation, and Gee told him to follow his gut. Tim followed his gut straight down paths he wished had been less traveled; his gut only batted about .500 when it came to Tim making good decisions.

He dreams about the squad room, empty, phone ringing so fast that he can't answer them all. He keeps shouting for Frank, come on, Frank, pick up this call, okay, just one, and Frank never does. He's in the empty squad room by himself. Nobody's ever watching his back.

I'm just speaking my mind here, Frank. I can do that with you because you are a man.
Well, pretend I'm a woman. That way you can keep your thoughts to yourself.

He always loved the Box, loved it better than anywhere else, because inside the Box, he always understood everything that was going. He could get inside the killer's mind in there; some days, he could stand inside the Box and wring a confession from a suspect and almost believe in God.

Never entirely. Not after Steve. Not after the way Tim's shoulders slumped when he walked out into the squad room, the box full of evidence heavy in his hands.

He told Tim once that Tim would never have a killer's mind; the difference between you and me, he said, is that I can get inside a killer's mind and you'll never be able to.

Tim could, though. Tim got right inside the killer's mind and then Tim expected Frank to corner him in the Box, wring it out of him like he'd done with every other suspect.

Except - always except with Tim. Tim was the exception to every rule. Except that Tim confessed before they even got in the Box. Tim confessed standing on the roof, and he expected Frank to do something about it.

Tim was the exception and the expectation, and Frank's not quite over that.

Look, look, look, it's not a permanent thing; I'm not asking for a long term commitment.

Frank committed to him the day they had Risley Tucker in the Box and couldn't get a confession from him. The clock ran out and they didn't have an answer, and when he pulled the pictures down from the walls in the Box, Tim just wanted to sink down to the floor and bury his head in his hands and cry.

And Frank walked in and stood there, his tie still done up like they hadn't been sweating it out for ten hours, and he told Tim that he was proud of him. In his own words, of course - Frank would never have said something like proud, and he wouldn't have given Tim any encouragement that wasn't halfway backhanded.

But that day, Tim stacked the boxes of evidence one on top of each other, and Frank reached over and picked one up. That was the moment - Tim remembers it like it was yesterday. Frank didn't have to say, okay, now we're partners.

He picked up a box and carried it out of the Box, and when the phone rang, Frank would have picked it up if Tim had let him.

That's how Tim could tell that they were partners.

There's no truth for me anymore, not anymore. I can't be out on the street. I'm never goin' back in that box ever again. It's done. I'm finished.

Mary tells him that Tim sat with him, after the stroke. Sat with him while his brain betrayed him, until the ambulance showed up and hauled him off to the hospital.

Tim called, too, when he was home from the hospital, and came by the house and cared about Frank, like they were friends instead of just partners. Tim never did know when to draw a line in the sand; friends, partners, they've never been the same thing. But Tim thought they were, or thought they should be, and Tim Bayliss with an idea in his mind was more tenacious than a bulldog, or Frank in the Box.

Frank cared about his partners far enough to make sure they didn't get shot - he had their backs, he had Tim's back, but that was it, and in the end, he couldn't stop the bullet in Tim's chest and he couldn't stop the shootout and the rest rolled inevitably out from a place where Frank was Tim's friend, and Tim was never anything more than Frank's partner.

Tim was just a guy who'd worked with Frank, and Frank couldn't do the right thing for him at the end of it all.

I had a clear vision of justice and morality. And no matter what has happened to me, whatever's happened around me, I still have that.

Munch always joked, You only leave Homicide when you're dead, and everybody always laughed, but sometimes Tim is standing in his kitchen, making a sandwich, and he remembers the way Frank looked on the floor, brain exploding into a stroke, and he hears Munch's voice in his head.

He doesn't laugh now; he left Homicide, he got the hell away, as far as he could go, and he isn't dead. Beau is dead; Crosetti, who Tim hardly knew, is dead. And Gee is dead; Gee is dead and that was one of the reasons that Tim ran away. You don't leave Homicide only when you're dead. You leave Homicide when there are so many other people who are dead that you can't take it anymore.

You leave Homicide when you kill somebody. When somebody else is dead, because you hunted him down and pulled the trigger.

It's all death in the end, and Tim has another life now and he hardly ever hears Munch cracking wise at the back of his head when he stands in the kitchen and makes himself sandwiches.

But even after all these years, death is still breathing down his neck, every time he turns around.

I admit it. I have no plan.

Sometimes he wonders where Tim ended up. He could pick up the phone and call Kay, or Munch maybe, but he never does. He sees Kay for lunch twice a year and they don't mention Tim. Munch calls from New York and he can hear the clatter of a squad room across the line, behind John's still cynical voice.

Someone else's deaths. Not his anymore, and Frank is still tired. He gets up in the morning, gets the kids off to school, teaches, and he is always tired.

He ran himself too hard for all those years; Mary told him so. Tim tried to. He's paying for it now; gets up in the mornings, looks at himself in the mirror and thinks, This is not my life.

But the sound of the squad room, when Munch calls about cases that he can't discuss, isn't Frank's life anymore. He likes what he does and he's good at it, but he's not great at it like he was at being a detective.

This is not my life, he thinks. This is not who I am.

But he doesn't know who he's supposed to be, either, and Tim isn't there to tell him.

author's notes: for katie, on her birthday. love and glasses of water. 1000 words about each of the boys, in 200 word segments. title and summary from gram parsons, "the streets of baltimore".