man on the run • shyan

and in my misery bloomed you

A/N: wattpad deleted this draft like twice so thanks.

Act II

It's been years.

When a mysterious man by the name of Ryan leaves the city and his job as an editor for good, he doesn't leave much of his belongings behind.

Instead, he leaves a detective by the name of Cecil Tinsley distraught and lamenting for something that had never been his to keep in the first place.

Tinsley wonders if the hollowness in his heart might have been less excruciating if they had left on a better note.

He decides he doesn't care.

It's been four years since him taking up the original Ricky Goldsworth case and he has marked it unsolved.

He did solve the case, he just didn't like the answer he had come across.

∆

Cecil Tinsley did not believe in the undead, he didn't think the evidence for a life after death was compelling enough.

But he was daily haunted by the ghost of him.

There was a painful charm in visiting places that hurt the most, a dark nostalgia that stings but feels too familiar to stay away from.

Tinsley hated heroine, but he injected large doses of hurtful memories into his bloodstream until his body hummed with the numb high of being completely devoured by his sadness.

He wallowed in the past, his vessel as tired and decomposed as he felt.

∆

Tinsley starts dating again, at the request of his friends and family who aren't sure why he was so moody but still wish to help. They claim he needed someone to cheer him up, give him another reason to wake up in the morning, a fresh breath of air.

So he goes out, begrudgingly.

There are women and there are men, all polite and civil, all nothing like he was.

They were normal people, people Tinsley were sure would fear him if they had known all the time he spent with a notorious criminal.

The dates, they're fun, short and never last the night.

Sometimes these strangers enter his bedroom, most times he bids them goodnight with a kiss on their cheek without any intention of calling them again.

Regardless, nothing does manage to smother the burning hole that Goldsworth had carved into his chest.

If anything, it worsens the flames, the longing.

Every time he held someone's hand out in public on the way to a nice cafe, he wonders if this could have been them if they had met in different circumstances.

Had Goldsworth not been a monster, but a simple man would Tinsley have him safely in his arms without any of the guilt or the hurt?

Would Tinsley even still him if he were just that, a simple man.

Or was it all the danger that seduced him and suffocated all of his clear morality.

Tinsley decides he doesn't care.

There was no cure to this disease that Goldsworth has implemented in him, burying it deeper than the crevices of his bones, infecting him with nothing but longing and misery.

Perhaps he was already infected before he's met Goldsworth, maybe Goldsworth was just an excuse.

He spends too much time overthinking this.

∆

He feels eyes on the back of his head.

A clever pair, following him all the way home, making the hairs on the back of his neck raise in fear.

It is dark out and Tinsley is returning alone once again, the warm street lamps the only source of light that doesn't reveal much to the paranoid detective.

He pulls his coat closer to his body and walks faster home.

∆

He has someone in his bed for once.

A man, shorter than average height and ethnically ambiguous, with cropped dark hair and bright green eyes.

Well, it isn't his bed.

It was the guest room, plain and bare except for the occasional knick-knack and their strewn clothes on the floor.

Bringing someone else into the space he shared with Goldsworth and replacing his heat on Tinsely's bedsheets was simply something the detective couldn't bare doing despite knowing it would be for the best that he did.

It was late at night, perhaps even morning.

Tinsley studied his partner in the dark, squinting his eyes so that he could forgo his glasses. He traced every outline and every curve of the generic named man's toned back but every single one of his nerves screamed wrong.

His chest isn't broad enough, his eyes aren't the colour of liquid onyx, he never smiles at Tinsley like he holds the sun.

Tinsley was comparing each and every one of his one night stands with Goldsworth and he knew it.

He sighs, a gentle thing that the breeze carries away.

The sense of being watched plagues him again despite his sleeping partner so he pulls the sheets tighter around his waist.

And he pretends to sleep as the feeling leaves.

∆

When Tinsley wakes, his partner is missing and his bed is cold, a usual occurrence for him it seems.

There's a serviette by the bedside with a familiar motel logo that couldn't have been left by his one-night stand.

Tinsley grabs the note greedily after processing his surroundings, his eyes blinking wearily and his pulse pounding.

His breath hitches and his heart stutters as he traces a small cursive R. at the corner.

The note is empty save for a short address scrawled in the centre.

Tinsley grins to himself.