Chapter Text
If Tim strains to recall his very first memory, that which comes to him is one of his mother. He’d been sick as a toddler, burning with fever, and the dim picture in his mind is her soft hand against his warm face, her hair falling over him in a curtain, her presence solid and enveloping. The image is hazy, washed-out, like a photograph left in the sun, but the feeling is real, and it’s the safety of her presence that gives it weight and shape more than any visual clarity.
The next memory, his second oldest, is the day he met Jason Street.
Unlike his first, this memory is luridly visual: the Texas-blue sky above their elementary school, yellowing seas of schoolyard grass, brilliant white sun, brand new asphalt gleaming in the September heat like a pool of fresh tar. They were four and three years old, it was nearing a hundred degrees in the shade, and all these years later, Tim can recall with scintillating clarity the moment he’d looked into his best friend’s face for the very first time.
It was Tim’s first day at school. His father had dropped him off and departed rather unceremoniously for work, wrenching his hand inconspicuously out of Tim’s grip when at the last second, frightened, he’d tried to hold on. This, it would turn out, was fitting - Walt Riggins would be wrenching himself free from Tim’s grip in various ways for the rest of his life.
Left alone at the rim of the schoolyard with the other kids starting Pre-K, he’d dropped his head so that his hair hung in his face, hands squeezed into tiny fists, sulking. Through limp strands of his brown hair, he had watched the little boy who would one day have the highest pass completion rate in the nation walk directly up to him without hesitation.
“I’m Jason,” Jason had said, very courteously, Southern-polite from the start. He was big for his age even then; you could already tell by looking at him that he’d play football one day. He’d stopped about a foot from where Tim was standing and simply smiled at him. His face was sweet and apple-cheeked, hair bright blonde from the sun, and he wore a blue striped T-shirt that was newer and cleaner than anything Tim had ever owned. “What’s your name?”
There was an undeniable sweetness in the way he asked this, almost chivalry, a polite deference that screamed manners , that signalled in an instant the side of town where he’d been brought up . “Tim,” Tim had said curtly; even at three years old he’d cultivated a less-is-more attitude towards conversation. Jason kept looking at him, but Tim noticed something readjust minutely in his gaze, saw it happen without fanfare behind his eyes. He understood, without caring, that Jason had misunderstood something about him on this first approach.
“Are you a boy or a girl?” Jason had asked, as though to clarify - he was bossy even at four, but there was no particular slant to this question, it simply was, innocent of judgment in a way that this sort of question would never be again.
For some reason, Tim hadn’t answered. The right words were in his mind - I’m a boy - but they didn’t leave his mouth.
“You look like a girl,” Jason continued, in a tone that made clear he knew better now, but there was no reproach in it, none of the bullying that would come from their peers in the intervening years and that had already begun subtly at home by comments made by his father and older brother - only curiosity, and the same innocence of affect; the statement was completely matter-of-fact.
It made no difference to Tim. His hair was past his shoulders, he liked it, he was proud of it, he cried when his parents tried to cut it. No comment by his family or peers would change this. He simply shrugged. The curiosity read easily in Jason’s face, without malice, and then he smiled again, even brighter.
“Do you want to play?” Jason asked. Tim said yes. From then on they were best friends. They were best friends when they went home that afternoon, they were best friends when they started Pop Warner two years later, and they were best friends all the way up until the autumn in Jason’s senior year when Tim left him alone in the hospital for six weeks during which he slept around with his girlfriend. After a few months of this disconnect they were best friends again.
In a sense, Tim had never been without Jason until that year. Only that first hazy, precious memory precedes their friendship, possibly by no more than twelve months. There’s not another day in his entire history before Jason Street was part of his life.
Jason was there from the very start.
2005.
No one had ever explained to Tim how difficult it was to put pigtails in your hair: how hard it would be to divide them evenly without leaving any loose at the back where you couldn’t reach, that it was a chore to get them the same height on each side, or that when you pulled at the wrong angle the hair outside the elastic would slide open in a loop. He’s leaning over the bathroom sink on his seventh attempt, the smooth porcelain sides scattered with snapped elastic bands, when Smash Williams, dressed in full drag, walks by the mirror and slaps him insultingly on the ass.
“Nice boots, Riggs,” he says, and flashes his trademark baiting smile at the glass: magazine cover ready, toothpaste-commercial white. His own skirt was rolled up well past mid-thigh to expose several extra inches of skin. Tim, focused on rooting a minuscule elastic band out of the drain with his large fingers, ignores him until he walks away. The team’s cool annihilation of South Milbank last Friday had smoothed tensions between the two significantly, though this silent truce remains about as well as they ever get along.
With trembling fingers - the effort required to keep the tiny elastic open without snapping it again was shocking - Tim raises his eyes to the mirror as he he works the right half of his hair through the opening, once, twice, and then a final third time, the pressure cutting all the circulation out of his throbbing fingertips. Slowly, teeth sunk into his lip, keeping his eyes locked unblinkingly on his reflection in the mirror, he pulls the hair until it falls somewhat in line with the pigtail he’d already accomplished on the left side of his head. Then he lowers his hands and turns his head from side to side, a sudden thrill of excitement running through him when he judges them to be acceptably even.
Tim smiles at his reflection in the mirror, a genuine smile, as proud as if he’d scored a touchdown. No one had been watching him succeed in this herculean feat; everyone else had long ago hidden their short hair beneath crudely installed wigs from the drama department and had moved on to makeup, rubbing blush and lipstick borrowed from girlfriends onto their faces with rash, passionate abandon. The reek of hairspray lingered thickly in the small room.
Tim was foregoing this step on purpose - he wasn’t trying to go full faggot with the performance - but beyond this brash justification privately balked at the garish application of color he had seen from his teammates. He felt a strong, private aversion to doing a poor job of his makeup, oddly shamed by the confidence that he would look ludicrous and comical by the very nature of being a guy wearing makeup, even if he tried for understated and averagely pretty. Instead, fresh faced, only slightly flushed from the monotonous, perspiring effort of securing his pigtails, he steps back from the mirror to examine his full outfit.
He’s wearing a tight yellow v-neck, which the cheerleaders had decorated for him with ribbons and rosettes, adorning every spare inch of fabric with glittering trinkets and charms that weighed down the top considerably. The royal blue skirt - sized and hemmed to his body, no expense spared - hangs about to his knees, leaving a few inches of calf bare above his cowboy boots. The result is silly but not wholly unflattering. He’d stuffed the bra he was wearing (balled up socks, taking the lead from Smash, though unlike Smash he’d stopped at what he thought was a conservative B cup) and now lingers in front of the line of mirrors to admire the effect, his reflection tugging him back with an inexplicably magnetic fascination whenever he moves away from the sink. As they stand in the hallway outside the pep rally, awaiting their cue, his eye will be drawn irresistibly to every mirrored surface - the face of a fire cabinet, the windows in the swinging doors, the wealth of trophy cases lining the hall, through which his own name will shine up through the scrubbed-clean glass.
Tim looked forward to dressing up around the time of the Powderpuff game every year; it was fun, it was stupid, an honor bestowed only upon the starting line, all of them luxuriating in their private camaraderie and the glory that would be theirs after the bye week had passed, the next Friday night and every Friday night thereafter until State. Some players put on a show of embarrassment, but if it was authentic at all it was diluted by the pride of being chosen - the only thing worse than being asked would be not to be.
There was an element of play to it not unlike childhood, (memories of Mindy and Tyra endlessly yanking combs through his long hair, forcing him to act in humiliating skits they devised whenever he was visiting the Collette house as a child) and Tim gets the same enjoyment from this performance that he does from an unstructured pickup game, a lightness and freedom divorced from standings or consequences. There’s a simple pleasure and relief in doing something he won’t be hauled into Coach’s office to watch on game film come Monday, the only goal of which is to enjoy himself among his teammates and to make people laugh.
They’d loosely rehearsed, but at the end of the day it did not matter what they did; it did not matter that they were young men in skirts and makeup in a state that would otherwise crucify them for glancing sideways at eyeliner, performing a pitiful cheerleading routine with no particular sense of rhythm and their bare thighs on display in front of their families and friends. They were the titans of the school and they were thus unassailable, and would in fact end the night with significantly more female attention than they’d started it, in addition to having ample opportunity to scan the crowd and ponder which female students - separately or together - they each might end up taking to bed at the various parties taking place later that night.
Tim’s still hovering by the mirror when Jason walks in: team captain, though the title doesn’t exempt him from participating, and he looks as coquettishly feminine as the rest of them in bright pink lipstick and a wig of blonde ringlets. “Fifteen minutes,” Jason calls, striding among bodies with jocular authority, raising his voice to be heard over the music. Finally, his eyes land on Tim, and beaming, he favors him with a loud wolf-whistle that begins a cascade of laughter and heckling from the rest of the team, crowding around the hairspray-scented room in various states of undress.
“You make a good-looking girl, Riggins,” says Jason loudly over the din, not unkindly, and smiles, eyes sparkling at the joke. Tim meets his eyes, smiling back, even as the bottom falls out of his stomach in this incredible way he’s never felt before, a sensation like he’s missed a stair on the bleachers, only pleasant somehow, ripe and unending, and the muscles in his shoulders relax against his will as something warm and glowing heats inexplicably in the back of his neck and spills slowly, like golden sunlight, all the way down the length of his spine.
You did not cross gender lines in Dillon, Texas. The hair was a stretch, and it was something he only got away with because he was big and had learned young to hit anyone who gave him grief for it. It worked for him because every other aspect of his person had been fine-tuned to accommodate the role he was playing, a role that had existed for Tim Riggins as long as he could remember, to the point that it had become an eminent truth that even he himself forgot to question.
He had taken his first drink when he was nine; he had won his first fistfight when he was little more than three. He won fights often, lost them too, but unlike on the football field, no one in his life seemed to be keeping score; the myth was all that was needed, the outlines of the role he’d step into already solidifying, becoming more and more concrete. Tim partied religiously, the way others went to church. He was chronically tardy, attended class smelling like beer, and regularly skipped school entirely to hunt or play pool. He took women from all over Dillon to bed, from classmates at school to those old enough to be their mothers. This was the role written for him, laid out like a clean uniform in the fieldhouse before game day, so that all he had to do was step into it.
It wasn’t that he disliked the sex or the girls or the hitting or the drinking: he liked them very much and he was good at them, so that much of the role he was playing - most of it, even - rang with truth. That was the allure of the role: it was easy, it was even pleasant. The person he presented to the world - reckless, aggressive, perpetually hungover - was not altogether disconnected from the person he understood himself to be. Rewardingly, no one expected much of that person, save for Jason Street, (and he felt sometimes, guiltily, Jason's mother, who had been like a second mother to him long before his own had left Dillon when he was only seven years old.)
What he did not know how to describe to people was that these things came easily, incidentally, in a way they would not, could never, for people like Matt Saracen and Landry Clarke. Tim worked hard at football, in the weight room, but it was largely by pure luck that he had come into the traits that defined his character: physical size and strength, grit and talent on the field, a temper mounted on a hairpin trigger, a sturdy, red-blooded American maleness and the dangerous, unconcerned demeanour that the student body - girls especially - had decided was desirable.
The rumours of his reputation with girls - somewhat exaggerated, mostly true - preceded him into every room, and yet even this did not wholly account for the sheer, bewildering number of women willing to sleep with him: mothers, daughters, grandmothers, classmates, students from rival schools, politicians, bartenders, cheerleaders, grocery store clerks, members of the Booster Club, members of the Rally Girls, girls who knew him by name only, girls who vaulted down from the stands at football games and begged for his mouthguard, his wristband, a scrap of his uniform. He’d never had to try to attract women; the interest girls turned on him was so immense that it was dizzying.
This interest tripled at school before games, when he floated from class to class in his football jersey, carrying neither pencil nor textbooks, charming classmates into blushing with little more than a glance or a smile. Girls giggled about the liquor on his breath, the tightness of his jeans, the way he smelled; they moaned over the texture of his hair and the breadth of his shoulders, fought scratching and biting over him in the halls, spent late nights writing by the light of lonely desk lamps for the privilege of pushing a laboriously written essay into his hand that he could pass off as his own. All of this came to him without ever lifting a finger. He had stumbled into success and acceptance and popularity using only his size and his looks, combined with his proximity to Jason Street, whose bright, auspicious glow inevitably elevated everyone around him.
All he had to do to continue this adoration was to play football and otherwise live up to the town’s admirably low expectations of him. In doing so he was able to obscure aspects of his identity that were less readily acceptable: Tim was privately sensitive, deeply emotional, and sensed that both of these things were largely burdens that counted among the various reasons his family did not love him the way he wanted them to.
For the most part, it was all true. He liked to fight, he was good at fighting, and relished the nights he stumbled home bleeding and bruised after a good old-fashioned hell-raising, nursing a hangover and a broken rib through the next day’s classes. He was hopeless in the classroom, bewildered by numbers and language and literature; he found a cleansing pleasure in settling scores with his fists, a similar pleasure in sex, and never left a party without a girl or two in the bench seat of his truck. He liked to hurt people on the football field, felt nothing but sharp, exquisite joy when he lowered his shoulder and hit some big motherfucker on the other team with all his weight, sending him crashing helplessly to the ground.
Big Tim Riggins was hard-drinking and mean, he was careless and rugged and masculine and brutal. And when - infrequently, delicately, with the cautious precision of a surgeon slicing into skin - he imagined a world where he was born a girl instead, he was swallowed by a radiant, glittering desire so pure and so whole that it blinded him.
He can’t ask himself the real question, can’t even look at it directly. To do so would be something like staring into the hellish light of a solar eclipse. The horror that the very existence of that question evokes is so vast that it sends prickling waves of dread along his nervous system; the white-hot shame it induces feels like an icepick going through the center of his eye.
It’s worse than asking himself if he’s gay, if there’s a chance that the covert handjobs he exchanges with his best friend at away games are indicative of more than two guys simply burning off steam. It’s worse than asking why his mother left him, why his father stopped writing or sending money home, why sometimes he searches for love in Billy’s gaze and sees only a chagrined sense of responsibility. It’s worse than asking God why you dropped a certain pass, why you didn’t make the playoffs, why in the final moments of a crucial play your own mistake had brought your team up short. All of these horrible things Tim would bear, uncomplainingly, in place of the relentless hell of the question he refuses to acknowledge.
Sometimes in subdued moments of reflection, slouched in his truck in the glaring white heat of another Texas summer, he probes the very edges of the question, touching it for as long as he can stand. All that comes to him is certainties: no, he’s not gay, he can’t be a woman, he doesn’t understand why he feels the things he does. If he pushes beyond that, there’s nothing: no explanation, no meaning, no hope. Just a vast, empty blankness, pure and absolute, reminding him of a nightmare he’d once had where he’d fallen asleep on the team bus after an away game and awoken to find everybody had left him, everybody was gone: not just from the bus, but as he’d descended the steps of the bus and stepped out onto the concrete, helmet swinging against his thigh, he’d realized they were gone from everywhere - from the school, from the stadium, from the whole town, which stood empty and silent around him below the cavernous dark of an endless black sky.