Archive of Our Own

They traipse up the stairs on heavy feet, shoes scuffing over the worndown stringbare runner, each skipping the second step from the top where the old wooden board is loose. Then to Robbie’s room, though he has his own, and the door closes behind them with an inevitable click. 

Robbie flicks on the lamp, and for the single moment before he pulls shut the curtains, Levon can see them both clearly in the thin glass holding out against bleak night. Suits skewed and scruffed, hair worked loose by sweat and movement, pale in their reflection. Twin ghosts. Levon shuts that fleeting thought down fast, and then the curtains are scraping along the rail anyhow. 

Robbie keeps quiet. Sits down on the bed, head bowed, exhaling long and heavy through his nose. Levon pulls out his cigarettes just to have something to do with his hands. Knocks out two, lights them in his mouth. Passes one to Robbie and receives a single grunt of thanks. 

Smoke hangs like dust in the lamplight, drifting up in faint grey swirls towards the papered ceiling. 

Sitting on the twinbed on his brushed, washed-out blue sheets, years-old quilt folded neatly beneath him, Robbie looks young. Levon supposes he must look young most of the damn time given how much trouble they get into with the fucking liquor officers, but he doesn’t act like it and he rarely seems it. Nineteen years old and to Levon he looks it in flashes only—when he’s laughing, mostly, or half-asleep in the passenger seat of the car with his jacket bundled up under his head as Levon tears the station wagon down ghost highways with his teeth grinding.

Here, now—Robbie is young and tired and strange in a way Levon finds hard to look at directly. Long lashes flushed dark over his cheeks as he looks down at the cigarette between his fingers, tie pulled loose, collar unbuttoned, throat bare and exposed. Flash of his pale teeth as he worries his lip between them absently.

Levon feels this ugly pulse of nausea rise in his throat and he turns to look at the bookshelf fast, smoking as he does. Pulls deep into shallow lungs.

New books and old records, the little scores in the dust they’ve left. Postcards, pictures, faces he knows, faces he doesn’t. A little tin car, red, dented, one of the few real pieces of Robbie’s childhood that he’s seen left out in the open. Imagines that kid on the bed rolling it over his knees with serious little hands while his daddy screams downstairs. 

Then he imagines the whole house gone. Heat, white, nothing.

He swallows it down, turns once again to look at him.

Robbie reaches to crush his cigarette out into the small plate on the nightstand. His hand hesitates, then, and Levon wonders if perhaps he is aching to turn on that little brown Bakelite radio a couple of inches away. Turn it on and twist ‘til he finds WLAC and let John R. carry them through the night. But switching on the radio means talk, means news, means letting the outside in, and they’ve both about had enough of it. So the little brown radio just sits there, cracked case and grime in the grooves, untouched.

Neither of them much know what to do with a silence. 

And it is silent. A grave.

“Me and Ronnie are goin’ south,” he says finally.

Robbie doesn’t say anything at all. For one long moment he just sits there and stares. Levon watches him carefully for any sign of—well, anything at all, and he gets nothing. Faintest tired flicker behind his dark eyes. “When?”

“I don’t know,” he replies, shrugging up tight with his hands shoved in pockets, feeling as tightbound as a coiled spring. “Tomorrow. Next couple days. If the world lasts that long.”

He is silent then, silent and boyish, and somewhat unreadable. Levon had gotten so good at reading him over the last couple of years, and the indiscernible wall behind his eyes sets him adrift like an unmoored sailboat. Then Robbie asks, impossibly, “What about the band?”

“Jesus Christ, Robbie, not everythin’ is about the goddamn band,” he blurts.

“Isn’t it?” he asks drily. Levon doesn’t know what he’s getting at, and he doesn’t elaborate. Clearly waiting for Levon to say more, hoping the scraped flint of his silence will spark something more genuine out of him.

It does. The admission comes suddenly, blunt—“I don’t wanna die in fuckin’ Canada.” And then Levon feels his face burn at the sheer openness of it.

Robbie simply stares, and that makes it all worse. Makes him feel all wrong and scared and unreasonable. Stupid.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“You got somethin’ to fuckin’ say, you say it. Don’t just sit there all quiet ‘cause you think I’m bein’ dumb.”

“I don’t think that,” he says, painfully reasonable in a way that sounds incredibly false. That, at least, Levon can see through. “Do you really think it’ll come to that?” Something under it, too, and Levon wonders - hopes, awfully - that perhaps the same fucking dark dread has been churning Robbie’s guts up, too. 

“You been listenin’ to the same goddamn news I have.”

“Mm,” he acknowledges. Looks down, a little lost. There, Levon thinks. He has been thinking about it, at least, got that same twitching fear in his bones too. No way he couldn’t, but Robbie’s so damned good at keeping all of it wrapped up inside. Sometimes Levon envies it. Only sometimes.

But Robbie seems different after that, scrawny and drawn in, and he feels himself talking before he can help it. “Ronnie says we can take the Cadillac,” he starts, gestures loosely. “Cross over before Detroit then go round, 'cause I ain't goin' through Detroit right now, then cut right down the middle of the country. We got the money. I mean, the Hawk says we got the money, ‘least for the trip.”

“What about when you get there?” he asks quietly, voice flat.

“I don’t know, Duke. Sit on the porch n’ fuckin’ wait for God, I guess.” Rather die with his goddamn boots in the dust they were broken in on. Rather die with the still air and the hoarse radio chatter in his mama’s kitchen than up in a foreign coldfront.

“What’s the difference between waiting there and waiting here?”

“Ain’t no difference where I wait. There is a difference where I die.”

Robbie sits. Keeps on staring, assessing. Something tight in his face and in his fingers. “Alright,” he finally says. 

Levon stares right on back. Had at least expected some kind of fruitless argument with him. Wanted it, too. “Is that it?”

“What do you want me to do, Lee?” he asks, a little sharper now. “Tell you to send a postcard if there’s still a fucking mailman?”

“Could at least act like you care.”

Robbie watches him with a kind of half-hurt incredulity, and Levon waits for him to say—to say something like, of course I care, you asshole, you dumbass, you sonofabitch. It doesn’t come. “Well, it seems like you’ve got your mind set,” is all he says, all passive-aggressive and dulled. 

He clenches his jaw. Wants to shove at him, shout, get him to…hell, he doesn’t know. Say something that’ll help make Levon feel less like ploughed dirt. Make him feel less like the world is ending tomorrow. 

As if either of them can do anything about that. 

In the end, all that comes out, before he can think better on it—“You comin’?”

Heavy pause. “What?”

Levon stands, wrong-footed with his pulse in his throat like a sickness, but he figures he’s in it now, might as well commit to the whole damn thing. “You wanna come?”

Robbie looks at him, small crease in his brow. “With you and Ronnie.”

“You gone deaf?” he tries, defensive, anxious embarrassment creeping up his neck.

“To Arkansas.”

Now he’s feeling it more and more. “You ain’t gotta say it like I asked you to go to the fuckin’ moon.”

“Lee,” Robbie says, terribly soft. The sickness swells like the Delta.

“Don’t…” he tries, then tries again, isn’t sure if he means to persuade Robbie or explain himself or something else entirely. “I know it’s a long trip. But you know we can make it in a couple o’ days, we’ve done it before, and there’ll be space in the car. Hell, if there ain’t, I’ll throw Ronnie’s fuckin’ suitcase into the interstate. And my folks’ll put you up, no problem. Ma’ll lay you out a feast.” His mouth is growing dry, palms sweating. “You ain’t gotta…”

“What?” he asks quietly. 

“Worry.” It comes out almost pathetic.

“Levon.”

There’s so goddamn much in that that Levon has to look away. Stubs his cigarette out next to Robbie’s on the little plate, spins away and paces for a moment—because he can hear it coming. Freight train rumbling in the distance. And for one ugly instant he hates Robbie, hates him with this gut-deep nausea simply because it’s easier to hate Robbie than to hate himself for asking it when the answer was always going to be no. 

“I can’t,” Robbie says, inevitably. 

“You can’t.”

He’s still looking at Levon, half-soft and silent. Something black and leaden starts to burn and sink in Levon’s chest, hot iron dropped in water. 

“Why?”

“Why? My mom’s here,” he says, like it’s obvious, and perhaps it should be. “I’m not going to fuck off down to Marvell and leave her up here on her own.”

“Ain’t stopped you before.”

“Don’t be an asshole. That’s different,” he’s a little firmer, something almost forced about it, a tremor in the back of his throat that he’s trying desperately to flatten down. “You’re standing there telling me you’re running home when as long as I’ve known you, you’ve never gotten even the least bit homesick, so you gotta know it’s different. You gotta know what you’re asking me.”

And he does. Levon does know, or at least knows enough of it that he doesn’t want to know the rest.

He knows he’s not just asking Robbie to take a trip home with him. Isn’t inviting him over for a bit of Southern hospitality and to feel the damn fine music he knows Robbie desperately wants to live and breathe and is only really beginning to get close to. 

He is asking Robbie to choose him. 

Choose him over home, over his mother, over familiarity and roots and duty, over the same things Levon is running to himself. He is asking Robbie to leave all of it behind and get in a half-dead Cadillac pointed towards Arkansas, simply because Levon is scared and he can’t stand the thought of being that scared without him. He is asking Robbie to be the one at his side when the sky caves in. 

Levon swallows. “I’m asking you to come with me,” he says, and it feels childishly huge.

Robbie’s face tightens, and when he speaks again, it’s a little strained. “I can’t,” he repeats, and Levon can hear it, the shiver in it, the flinch.

He thinks, selfishly, hopefully, that if he pushes hard enough, if he can just find the right thing to say to him—Robbie might give in. Robbie might give in because Levon asked him to, and he always gives in when Levon really wants him to. “Thought you’d follow me anywhere,” he says before he can help himself, and knows as soon as it comes out that it’s a dirty trick.

There had been talk, lately, a little, before all this—about maybe leaving Ronnie. Not enough to bring it up to the other guys yet, not even talk about it themselves in any real way. But they’d discussed it, the two of them, over palm-warmed beers and a ragweed joint, sat on the hot, dark hood of the Cadillac. About after and next and when, and Robbie had said then that he would. When the time comes, Robbie would come, and they could make it their own way.

Seems right now the time might not come at all. 

“That’s not fair,” Robbie says, and it isn’t.

Levon feels split open on it all the same. Overripe fruit dropping solid off a bough onto cracked earth in high summer. He huffs a short laugh. “Right,” he says. “Fine.” Turns again, feeling all anxious and electric in his legs, tensed up and twitching like a horse about to bolt. 

“Lee, c’mon.”

“No, Robbie, I get it.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Ain’t doin’ anythin’.”

“You are,” Robbie insists, almost a whine, and he looks down, dark eyelashes throwing broken shadows over his cheekbones. 

He looks young again, and Levon hates that, too—the ache it sets right in his goddamn marrow, the impossible, wrong impulse to kneel down in front of him on the hardwood and put his hands on his knees and tell him, never mind, don’t worry, I won’t go, not with you lookin’ like that. 

Then, “It’s not that I don’t…”

His heart throws a stubborn kick against his ribcage. “What?”

The muscle in Robbie’s jaw twitches. He looks furious with himself for one fleeting moment before it smoulders out into the admission. “Want to.”

Levon stares at him. All the idle heat in his chest shifts, condenses into this bright and sharp spark, sudden as a struck match. “You want to come.”

Robbie looks at him, something sad and heated and strange about his face. “Of course I do.”

Of course, like Levon should’ve known it. Like it’s obvious. Like Robbie has wanted it the whole damn time and hasn’t been hiding it at all. “Then come,” he tries again, softer.

“I can’t.”

“Jesus—”

“Why can’t you stay here?” It scrapes its way out of him harshly, as if he has been holding it back, as if the words have had to tear through something on the way out. Near enough to pleading—and Robbie never pleads, never—that it makes the fucking room tilt.

“I told you why,” he says, trying to hold his line. “I ain’t dyin’ here.”

“You don’t know you will.”

That gets him, then, catches under his skin like a splinter. “You suddenly an optimist, baby?” he asks, pointed, and the harsh spark of anger is so much safer that he grabs onto it with both hands. “I’ll call Ronnie up, say it’s all alright, I’m pretty sure ol’ Khrushchev’s just kiddin’ around ‘cause Robbie says so.”

Robbie sharpens too, stands fast, and Levon feels this horrible flash of relief and vindication. “You don’t know you’ll even make it to Arkansas either,” he snaps. “Might not make it to the border. Might die in fucking Bloomington, Indiana. Is that any better?”

“Least I’d be tryin’. Better than fuckin’ sittin’ here watchin’ the goddamn news and doin’ nothin’.”

“Running away is hardly doing something.”

“Well, what is there to do, Robbie?” he asks, bites, mean as a bad dog. “In your fuckin’ infinite wisdom. You want me to hop on some tugboat out to Cuba and tell ‘em to call the whole thing off?”

“There isn’t anything to do,” he replies, steady in the way Levon resents—like he’s trying to be sensible, more sensible than Levon, and he’s good at it, too. “It’s not going to make a single bit of difference whether you stay or you go.”

“It matters to me,” Levon replies, hard, because it does. 

“Fine.”

“And it clearly fuckin’ matters to you too.”

Robbie freezes. The bedroom is barely warm in the October night with the limping radiator sputtering breathy heat, but in that instant Levon feels the air thicken and burn. Incoming wildfire. 

He can’t resist it. Needs it, maybe, though he isn’t sure exact what. “Don’t it?”

“Levon,” Robbie warns. 

“It matters to you if I stay or go, huh?”

“You know the answer to that,” he replies drily, fists clenching at his sides and carefully steady. Levon feels all sharp-toothed and tetchy at it, spoiling. “I’ve made that perfectly clear. Why bother asking when you already know the answer?”

“Maybe I wanna hear you say it,” he says. “You keep it all bundled up so tight maybe I wanna hear you finally fuckin’ say something proper.” 

“Of course it matters to me.”

“Why?” Something anxious in him needs to drag it out of him, needs to do it so he’s not all alone feeling like this.

An incredulous beat. “Why?”

“Why does it matter to you, huh?”

“You’re being an asshole.”

“You always gotta keep your cards close to your chest, huh?”

“You want me to make a fool of myself?”

And maybe he does. Maybe Robbie is exactly right—because Levon’s been doing just that all evening, by his reckoning. If Robbie makes a fool of himself, then Levon won’t be the only one. 

Levon asked him to come with him, and he said no, and he feels like the biggest damn fool in the world. 

“Maybe I’m just curious,” he says instead of any of that.

“Bullshit,” Robbie says, finally drawing the knife Levon has always known he’s had in him. 

“Bullshit?”

“You’re not curious,” he snaps. “You know why it matters to me because it’s the same fucking reason why it matters to you that I’m staying. You just want me to say it so you don’t have to own up to any of it yourself.”

Levon squares up, puts his hands on his hips. “Is that right?” he asks, feeling like they’re circling now. 

“I know you.”

“Then you know I’m going.”

Robbie’s mouth twitches. “I don’t.”

“No?”

“No,” he repeats, “I don’t know that. I know you say you’re going, I know you talk big game, Levon, you always fucking have. I know you’re scared and you’d much rather run halfway across the fucking continent than sit still with it for a minute.” Robbie swallows, takes a breath as he seems to think for a beat. “And I know sometimes you throw shit everywhere when you want something because you’re still that same kid who threw himself on the floor of the grocery store ‘cause his mom wouldn’t buy him a goddamn watermelon.”

He feels his fists curl. “Watch it,” he warns, but this is what he had wanted, isn’t it? Wanted Robbie as sharp and raw as him, wanted him to argue and answer and react—but his heart is thudding fast now, static twitching all over him, and maybe he still didn’t realise just how precise Robbie could be. 

Robbie swallows it, mouth set. “But you are telling me,” he starts, low like a stalking animal, “here, alone, without Ronnie or the guys or anybody. And it’s not because you’re trying to be kind or to let me down gently or even just tell me you’re going. It’s because you want me to try and…” he trails off, searches, “to try and stop you, or to prove myself, or agree to run away with you like a dumb fucking kid at the carnival.”

For a second he can’t seem to draw a breath—because Robbie’s got him. Got him even when Levon hadn’t managed it himself, pinned him like an insect. “Fuck you,” he manages. 

“Maybe I’m wrong,” Robbie dismisses as if it could undo any of that. 

“You are,” he insists, hears his voice all low and rattling in his ears. 

“Then go,” he replies, waves him away vaguely. “Go now, Levon, I’m not saying any of it again.”

The horrible little thing underneath his anger turns, flares, opens. “You want me to?” 

“No!” It bursts out of him, flashbang, clearly unwanted, and when he speaks again, he hushes himself. “For fuck’s sake, Lee, have you listened to anything I’ve been saying?”

“I’m listenin’ just fine.” He isn’t used to Robbie being like this—not with him, not with anyone. Makes him feel all ashamed and dumb, like a fucking schoolboy, like a scolded hound. 

“You aren’t. You aren’t listening. You hear what you wanna hear. You hear anything that isn’t what I’m actually saying to you.”

“And what is it, then,” Levon says, very carefully. “What you’re sayin’ to me.”

“I don’t want you to go.”

He looks at him then, the awful ache yawning open between his ribs, wider, worse, trembling and wet like exposed flesh. Robbie looks right back, eyes bright and face soft, and Levon realises then that Robbie isn’t angry, not really. Maybe he never had been. 

“And it’s not because of the band. Not ‘cause of Ronnie, or the guys, or ‘cause we got plans, got a life,” he continues, closes his eyes like looking at Levon is too much, voice far softer now, rough around the edges. “I mean, yes, that too, but—Christ, I sound pathetic.”

Something too gentle catches in his throat at that. “You don’t,” he tries, tries to ease up too and feels not so much soft as half-rotted.

“I don’t want you to go. I don’t know who I’d be if you left.” 

He stares. It’s too plain. This is why they don’t say anything plain, goddamn—it hurts. “Well,” he manages, inadequate. “Alright.”

He opens his eyes again, sees him. Just looks at him straight with a buried hurt. “Then why are you still looking at me as if I’ve failed some test?”

Levon swallows. He doesn’t know. “Maybe you did,” he says before he can help it, trying to…hell, he doesn’t know. Get some control back. Ease this all back to someplace he recognises. Put it all back in the box. 

“Sure,” Robbie replies, jaw tightening. “Sure, maybe I did. Maybe I should come. Maybe I’m a coward. Maybe I’m a shitty friend. But I can’t, and I won’t, and I need you to see that it doesn’t mean I don’t—”

Care. Need him. Love him, maybe, though Levon is sure neither of them can survive that one. He wants it anyway. “Don’t what?”

“Lee.”

“Say it.” Please, he wants to say, wants to hear it not out of a desire to win or to have Robbie throw himself on the rocks for him but simply because of that need, a need like food or air or water.

A guarded look begins to creep up around Robbie’s face, and Levon wants to reach out to him, to touch, to ease, but he can’t seem to move. “Why, so you can laugh?”

“I ain’t gonna laugh.”

“So you can call me a girl?” 

He aches. “I wouldn’t.”

Robbie closes his eyes again, shakes his head. “I can’t go with you,” he says, and it’s not quite what he meant, but close enough. “But I want to. I want to so badly I feel sick. Is that enough?”

“Robbie.”

“Tell me,” he asks. 

Levon can’t. “I just wanted to know you’d miss me,” he admits, and it suddenly feels incredibly fucking immature.

“I’d more than miss you,” Robbie says, then an animal surprise flashes in his eyes like there’s something far more dangerous underneath it and he’s just shown Levon his hand. 

Levon feels something start to build in him, something start to rumble, and in this instant he has no idea what it is. “What does that mean?” 

“I don’t know.”

He scoffs. “Bullshit.”

“I don’t,” Robbie insists, strained, cracked, standing there hapless and lost. “I don’t know what I mean. I just know I don’t want you to leave me here.”

His breath catches. 

“I want you to stay with me,” he says. Real. Standing there with empty hands and his head tilted down like he’s disappointed with himself for letting it out.

There is no choice in it. Pure impulse, knee-jerk, hand on a hot stove. The second Levon realises he can move he crosses the room in two quick steps and kisses Robbie directly on the mouth. 

Too hard, too fast, teeth knocking and noses pressed together and hardly even lined up right; he feels Robbie inhale sharply through his nose, go entirely and perfectly still for all of a breath like a rabbit caught in the shadow of a hawk—

Until he suddenly gives way underneath Levon. He softens, tilts, mouth opening all easy and warm, tasting like smoke and Coca Cola and something else indistinct, half-bitter and all-mellow that must just be him. Robbie’s fingers catch his sleeve, first, then the lapel of his jacket. Steadying, more than anything, but nothing close to pushing away. For one solitary moment the world falls away—no bedroom, no city, no country. No world to burn. 

And then Robbie makes a caught sound into his mouth, hoarse and high and so goddamn sweet, and it cuts so sharply through Levon that it wrenches him back into himself and he realises exactly what he’s doing.

His hand comes up to Robbie’s shoulder. Pushes. 

They fall apart, space shoved violently between them.

Silent, then, staring, breathing—great heaving breaths, hot wind rattling the cornfields and throwing free the dust. Robbie’s mouth is wet, lips parted, eyes dark and wide and dazed in a way Levon has never seen before. He’s beautiful, he thinks, briefly, instinctively, and the instant he notices it – the instant he realises it isn’t the first time he’s thought it – he feels the earlier nausea return in a great tide. 

He takes another step back, ankle near twisting on nothing at all. Robbie just stands where he is, face going from that golden daze first to a rapier presentness, and then to hurt, because Levon has shoved him away and there’s no dressing that up as anything else.

“Lee,” he says, a warning, a plea.

Too sharp and too loud, he replies, “Don’t.” 

Robbie’s mouth slams shut. That defensive cool starting to crawl up him like clouds folding over the Ozarks, more plain to him now than it’s ever been. 

Levon scrubs a hand over his face hard, lips still wet, tingling. He wants to do it again, he realises with a great twist in his gut. He can’t want that. He won’t. His heart flutters in his chest like a trapped bird and he clears his throat, and he manages, “That didn’t happen.”

Robbie’s coolness flickers, not yet set, still too fresh and raw to cover it all up, especially to Levon. 

“It fuckin’ didn’t,” he insists as Robbie looks at him.

He holds his gaze. Brave, maybe, a kind of vague understanding in his face, even if he looks a little like he’s just been punched. “Alright.”

And that—the way Robbie can pick himself back up, look at him like that, can shut it all down while Levon feels like this—only makes him– angrier, maybe, but he doesn’t feel very angry at all. Anger would be familiar, would be comfortable. This is something else. A twist-gut panic, a torsion. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Go all calm like you’re a fuckin’ monk.”

“You want me to stand here and shout?” he asks, dry, jaw tightening. “That gonna make you feel better?”

He huffs. “Might do.” 

“Well, I’ll know better next time,” Robbie replies, too cold.

“Ain’t gonna be a next time.”

“No,” he says, “I guess not.”

That should make him feel better, maybe. Be some great relief that Robbie seems happy enough to let it go and bury it. But it doesn’t. It gets right into his bones like that, painful and tugging as if something in him might just snap. 

He paces, once, quick, to the shelf and back. His hands are shaking now, and he shoves them into his pockets to hide them or steady them or simply to make them do something else.

“You kissed me back.” 

The words come out without thought. Robbie stills. 

Levon feels the panic eating through him, tearing like locusts through crops. “You did.”

Robbie pales, so slightly. Satisfying and sickening, both. “Yes,” he says.

There is no fight to him, and Levon wishes there was—but they so rarely fight. Bicker, sure, often and healthily, but they don’t fight. He needs it, though, he needs Robbie to let him, to join in, to give him something big enough for them both to hide inside. “You were the one who said all that,” he says. “You were the one standin’ there sayin’–”

“That I didn’t want you to leave,” Robbie interrupts, careful. “That’s what I said.”

“You said more than that.”

“I know what I said.”

“You made it sound like—” he stumbles, nearly doesn’t say it, but now it’s crawling up his throat he can’t help it, wants to make himself think it because it’s easier than anything else. “You made it sound like something else.”

He stares at him. 

Levon feels heat rise in his face.

“Something else,” Robbie repeats.

“You know what I mean.”

“Spell it out for me.” Harsher now, sterner. 

Levon swallows. Feels suddenly and viciously defensive, ashamed, awful—all of it. He can hardly pin it all down, and getting any of it into words takes a beat too long, and by then Robbie has assumed it anyway.

His control slips. His voice near-cracks, and Levon can tell himself it’s because he’s nineteen fucking years old but he knows it’s not all of it. “Don’t you put this all on me.”

“I ain’t,” he bites.

“You are.” Robbie’s hands clench at his side—to keep them from shaking, probably, Robbie has never been one to so much as think of throwing a punch, least not at him—and his voice shudders. “You kissed me.”

“You kissed me back,” he says again. 

“I know.”

“Well, there you go.”

“What the hell does that mean?” he demands. “What are you trying to say?”

Levon opens his mouth. Hesitates. 

There are a hundred things he could say. Old words. Easy ones. A long fucking litany of them tracing from here to the fucking barroom they came out of a couple of hours ago, all the way back to the ramshackle church he was goddamn baptised in. And maybe if Levon was not who he was, and neither was Robbie, he could find enough ugliness within himself to throw them at him. 

He can’t. 

He can’t, but he gets closer to it than he would like. Close enough that Robbie sees it, and Levon knows Robbie sees it, because he watches the last pale glimpses of openness in his eyes dim even further. 

“I’m not queer,” Robbie says, quietly. 

Levon flinches before he can help himself. “Don’t say that.”

“What, queer?”

“Shut the fuck up, Robbie.”

“I’m not,” he says again, and there is a desperate edge to it. “Whatever you’re thinking right now, I’m not, Lee, you know I–”

“I said shut up.”

“Fine.”

They stand there, silence crowding in around them. He can’t breathe right, feels his lungs locked up and empty, drowning in the open air. He wishes Robbie hadn’t said it. Wishes he hadn’t put that fucking word into the room with them. Robbie isn’t supposed to say it.

The closed door feels thin. Dim hallway light spilling in around the edges of it, sharp and ghostly. He looks at it. The whole, unknown house on the other side of it.

“Nobody heard,” Robbie says, guesses, voice soft. Kind or practical, Levon isn’t sure, and both get right into his teeth.

“You don’t know that,” he snaps, sharp, half-resentful that Robbie worked that part out, too.

“I do. It’s an empty fucking house, Lee,” he says, “I’m not exactly shouting it from the rooftops.”

“And if someone did?”

Robbie swallows. “They didn’t.”

“But if they did.”

“They didn’t,” he says again, firmer.

Levon hears his own voice drop, dragged down by the weight of all of this, by fear and disorientation and worse. And, unthinking, he simply says, “Wouldn’t look good for you.”

Robbie looks at him quickly, eyes wide. Levon hears what he’s said only then, what he meant by it, the thing that lies beneath it all rotten and obvious—that Levon could play this however he wants. He is older, he’s Ronnie’s right arm and often his other limbs to boot, and he is—though Levon doesn’t like to think about it all that much—better liked. Easier to, almost.

If Levon says Robbie started it, if he says he kissed him, or came onto him, or anything at all—

Robbie understands that. Of course he does. Robbie is always incredibly aware of his own place in a room, what he needs to do to stay there. The little colour remaining in his face drains clean out of him, and Levon wants to cut out his own tongue.

“I didn’t mean—”

“Yes, you did,” Robbie says.

“No.”

“You did.”

Levon steps forward then, as if he can pull it all back in, as if he can chase after what he’s just said and implied and done to Robbie here in Robbie’s own fucking home. 

Then he stops. 

He stops, because Robbie tenses. Shoulders tightening, only just, but it is an undeniable brace. He’s made his best fucking friend—the best friend he’s ever had in this world, the kid he knows trusts him more than anybody—flinch. The sight of it near kills him. 

“I wouldn’t,” Levon says, quickly, raw and strained, his throat unacceptably tight. “I wouldn’t say that.”

His mouth twists. “I just heard you say it.”

“No, no, I mean—to the guys, to Ronnie. I ain’t sayin’ nothin’, I swear. I wouldn’t do that.”

Robbie watches him carefully for a long moment. Levon cannot move under it, feels this great need to stand still. Prove himself, somehow, not to be a threat. He can see that Robbie wants to believe him, and worse still that he is trying to, trying because the alternative is too hard.

“Say something,” he asks as the silence draws in, long, painful as a blade. 

He laughs, sharp and small. “I don’t know what you want from me, Levon,” he says, tight. Looks briefly and terribly like he might cry, but Robbie doesn’t cry, so it can’t be that. “You kiss me, you shove me off, you tell me to forget it, you act like I made you…” he trails off, breath catching. “I don’t know what you want me to do.”

“I don’t either.” 

And Christ almighty, he really doesn’t.

“I don’t know,” he says, quieter, almost entirely to himself. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.”

Robbie’s face softens, again, still giving him a fucking chance, and that is entirely unbearable. “Lee.”

“No,” he says, needs very suddenly to make this all stop. He needs to go. He needs to get away from him. “No, don’t.” Levon feels the great rush in his veins, electricity jumping in his muscles and his bones, and all he can feel is this unstoppable impulse to run. He turns for the door.

“Levon, wait,” he tries. 

He nearly does, just because it’s Robbie asking. He can’t. “I’m goin’,” Levon says, hand on the doorknob. Cold under his sweaty palm. “I ain’t doin’ this.” Yanks the door open. 

“Is that it?” Robbie asks, all rough and half-annoyed and sad. 

Levon cannot look back at him. “Don’t follow me,” he says, and storms out into the hall.

The rest of the house is dark, still, single jaundiced bulb from somewhere above the staircase lighting the way out like a dream. He strides along the corridor, thunders down the stairs, rattling the wood, sweaty hand sticking to the bannister. Blood rushing in his ears and the taste of Robbie’s mouth still in his own. 

He is going. That’s what he’s going to do.

He is going to head out into that grim night, find his way to Ronnie. They’ll leave tonight; he won’t even pack a bag. Get out of the city, cross at Detroit, cleave their way through the continent until the air gets warm and heavy even in October, radio on and Ronnie cursing all the way to the state line. Then he’ll be home, he’ll see the old porch in the fat Arkansan sun and his momma will smile through it and hold him close and when he gets up to his own boyhood bed there won’t be anybody in it trying to skin him alive. 

Levon gets all the way to the front door. Hand on the knob. Then—the lingering smell of grease from the kitchen. It tugs something loose. It does not make him think of home anymore but of Mama Kosh, of Robbie’s mom writing his, getting her wilted greens recipe just to make Levon feel welcome. Of Robbie sitting next to him at that timescratched table the first time she made it and his pleased, gap-toothed smile, the way his eyes crinkled at the edges and he looked at him all warm and pleased and happy with his fucking lot, and Levon had grinned back because it had all felt so damn good. The kind of warmth he’d thought he’d grown out of. 

Levon presses his forehead to the cool wood of the door. Can practically feel the rigid city on the other side, cold and damp and full of shadows. He thinks of what it means to leave Robbie properly. 

That is what he is doing, here, if he goes now. 

The world might end. That had been the entire goddamned point, hadn’t it? That had been the whole reason for this fucking mess, the whole reason he’d come back here and shut them away together behind thin walls and done any of it—the fact of not wanting to die in a borrowed city under the northern sky. If it happened now, if he leaves and it happens then, if it all goes up in flames, then Robbie will spend the last minutes of it alone, believing Levon is disgusted by him. 

The house is still. Occasional creak in the rafters from the wind and the rain, the house settling as the air cools. No movement, and Levon imagines Robbie up there. Stood in the same place he left him, maybe, or sat on the thin bed. He thinks of leaving him in there, surrounded by his books and his records and the stupid fucking tin car, packing himself away piece by piece. Thinks of cutting him off and choosing some other road because the truth of it all is too much. 

It would be something awful to leave him, he thinks. Truly goddamn awful. 

He presses the heel of his hand against his mouth. Still feels Robbie there. The ghost of him, fading. “Fuck,” he says to himself, and he doesn’t have to even turn before he knows that he ain’t going nowhere. 

His other hand drops from the door. He stares at the woodgrain for all of a minute before he twists, and then he is walking his way back up the stairs. Steady, over the loose board, along the corridor.

He pushes Robbie’s door open with two fingers, the light spilling out into the hallway like a cut throat, and steps through it into the bottle of the room. Quiet, and for a moment Robbie seems to not even notice him, sitting on the edge of the bed again with his head bowed. 

Then the door catches on a draft, and is tugged quickly and violently closed. 

Robbie jolts. Looks up and flinches, or flinches and looks up, Levon cannot tell. Only knows this—he cannot stand it. 

For a second they just look at each other. Levon can’t find the words, Robbie neither. He isn’t sure that either of them are even breathing. 

The quiet is a physical thing, unbearable, unbearable and taught, stretching, settling into every line of him with desperate, bundled energy, tighter and tighter until it tears clean through, and Levon cannot hold himself back anymore. 

He crosses the room fast, and without thought he is tumbling down, knees planting either side of Robbie’s thighs on the hard-springed mattress just as he gathers his face into his hands and kisses him again, hard. Open-mouthed and clumsy, teeth clacking, and when Robbie doesn’t immediately shove him away he pushes him further up the bed awkwardly, heart pounding in his chest as Robbie opens up under him, mouth hot and wet and pulsing, hands grasping, pulling at him.

Levon parts, gasps, can’t bear to go more than an inch from the living warmth of him. “Tell me no,” he says.

But Robbie just looks up at him, hands clutching in Levon’s shirt under his jacket, his honeybrown eyes bright and burning, and he simply replies in that low, crackling voice of his, “Levon.”

He has never had any restraint. Maybe he should, maybe he should fucking talk to him, say something, wait and think for even another second. But Robbie is looking at him all breathless and lovely, cheeks pinked and tongue darting out to swipe away the bead of spit on his lower lip, Levon’s spit, and the pulse of want he feels in every fucking part of him is almost enough to make him ill, and Levon kisses him again. 

Bites at his lip, tongues into his mouth, and Robbie makes a low grunt in the back of his throat that Levon wants to fucking swallow. Levon shrugs out of his jacket without parting, and it drops onto the floorboards with a quiet whoosh. Robbie’s hands slide up under his shirt immediately, big and dry and hot enough to make Levon shiver as those clever fingers trace over his ribs, the knobs of his spine. 

He pulls back briefly, just to look at him, lips swollen and eyes dark, and he feels the wind knocked clean out of him. “Robbie,” he says, “Robbie, shit.” And then he’s tugging at Robbie’s shirt, getting the buttons undone, laying him down on the bed with his shirtfront splayed open so he can see his shuddering chest. Fall-paled skin, the dark scatter of hair on his chest, tracing its way down his body, disappearing under his waistband. Levon’s mouth is dry, so dry. Parched. 

Skin ablaze, hands half-shaking, he spreads his palms over Robbie’s quaking ribs, desperate just to touch him, touch him places he never has before. He thumbs over a nipple and Robbie breathes in roughly, hums a little half-trapped sound, and Levon leans down to kiss him again. 

He kisses down his throat, teeth scraping at the thin skin there, over stubble, tasting of salt and smoke and day-old cologne, feeling the rapid flutter of Robbie’s pulse under his lips. Robbie tangles a hand in his hair, holding him close, and the scrape of his short fingernails against his scalp sends a pulse of electricity down his spine. 

Levon finally shifts over him, cants their hips together desperately, and the hard line of Robbie’s arousal against his own makes him hesitate for all of a moment and then groan, low against his skin. He rolls his hips once, savours the gasp it gets out of Robbie.

“Lee,” Robbie manages, grasps at him, hands sliding down to grab at his ass through his wool pants. 

Suddenly the feel of fabric against his skin is too much, painful, and besides that he needs to touch Robbie, feel him close to his body, entire. The whole world narrows down to this room, to this bed, to Robbie, and Levon wants to stay here forever, hold him close and let all the rest of it fade away. 

They fumble at each other’s clothes, clumsy, juddering, Robbie’s pants off entirely and Levon’s half-shoved down his thighs, shirts open and gaping, and they come together in a tangle of fabric and electric warmth. Levon lies down with him, presses close to him sideways in the single bed, and the sheer heat of Robbie’s skin against his own is hotter than any Arkansan summer. Plenty of that shivering heat he was running to right here with him, and if he cannot find shelter there then he might be able to find it in him. 

Foreheads pressed together, Levon slips a hand down Robbie’s chest, over his stomach, until his fingers brush the waistband of his boxers. He waits there with his fingertips at the bunched cotton, barely touching, his own breath shaking and hot between them, feeling the weight of Robbie’s cock somewhere beneath his hand, not even an inch away. 

Robbie’s breath catches. “Please,” he murmurs. “Please, Levon, touch me.”

He can’t turn that down. He palms him through the fabric first, the hard, straining shape of him in his hand, and the sound Robbie makes, the caught moan, the way he ducks his head closer to Levon’s, impossibly closer, goes straight to his gut. He fumbles him out, gets his hand over him, wrapping around the length of him. Hot, velveted. “Yeah?” he asks, prompts, wetting his lip. “Good?” He needs, deeply, for it to be good.

Robbie’s mouth falls open and he presses his head against the pillow. “God, Lee—”

Levon strokes him slowly, watches his face and listens close to the breathy sounds he makes, desperately wants to do it right. He tightens his grip a little, twists, and then Robbie surges forward to kiss him.

He reaches down, shoving at Levon’s underwear until he can get a hand around him too, and the shock of that warm, callused grip on him makes Levon bury his face into his neck and swear. 

They cling together in twisted sheets, tangled in each other half-naked and sticky with sweat, hands working in unsteady rhythm. Half-bitten moans and the shaky creak of the mattress springs, the way Robbie says his name, the way it makes him feel like nobody has ever said it properly before, ever—he is swallowed up by it, every nerve alight. 

All too quickly—Levon could have this for an eternity—Robbie comes with a choked cry, spilling over Levon’s fist, thighs trembling, hooked around Levon’s own. He huffs, near wheezes. 

The sight of him like that, cracked open, undone in a way Robbie so rarely is in front of anybody, the sound of him all hoarse and desperate, drags Levon right on over the edge after him, hips stuttering forward as he comes in a great roiling wave. 

They lie in the heat and the sweat and the sheets, twisted with each other like braided rope, scorched and still. 

The radiator clicks. Patter of rain at the window, a low drizzle. Robbie’s breath and his own evening out slowly. Head resting on the pillow, too heavy to lift, Levon watches him, his eyes closed and that familiar crease between his brows as he pants. The sweat at his temples and the way his hair clings there, the slope of his nose, the curve of his swollen lips. He brings a hand up, careful. Traces slow fingers through the air just above him, not daring to touch as if it could break the moment, but he cannot resist for long.

Fingertips light at his temple first, feeling the dip in the bone, the dampness. Robbie’s eyes slide open, deep and curious, but he doesn’t talk and so Levon doesn’t stop. Traces from his temple to his forehead, smooths the errant strands of hair away. Then his cheekbone, high and sharp, and along his jawbone before he reaches his chin. Tips that handsome face up with two fingers, and Robbie goes with it. He kisses him again, soft, sweet, just ‘cause he wants to. 

Robbie’s eyes close. When they part Levon allows his hand to move, shift from his chin to his throat. Rests his fingers there to feel that jumping pulse, settling now, thrumming beneath his touch. Alive, he thinks absurdly. Alive. 

Levon tries very hard not to think about all that brings. Tries to pretend the whole world goes no farther than this room, no farther than the mannish boy stretched out next to him, pretend that there is no panic still fracturing his ribs. Pretend that there is a tomorrow, and that there isn’t. 

Robbie’s eyes slide back open, and Levon can see the very mirror of that in them. His fingers tighten on Levon’s waist, slide down to his back against his cooling skin, a thousand questions piling up behind his reddened lips. 

“You gonna go?” Robbie asks eventually, voice low, almost neutral. 

He swallows. The great wave of it all is still there, towering above him, the need to get out and get home. But despite it all, Levon believes that there is nothing that could make him leave this room right now. “Not tonight,” he replies simply, which is about all he can offer truthfully.

He accepts that, hums, and for a second Levon can practically feel the weight of the unsaid between them, wonders if Robbie will break the comfortable unknowing again. Ask about tomorrow, or Arkansas, or maybe something worse. But Robbie doesn’t, doesn’t say anything at all, and Levon is enough of a coward not to offer any of it, and silence settles over them. Levon tugs the quilt up to soften it.

Robbie drifts, starts to doze right there in Levon’s arms, unguarded. A heavy ache settles in Levon’s chest, and after he feels he’s waited long enough, he tucks his head into Robbie’s shoulder like a child. 

The rain swells at the window, heavier now. Siren in the distance, the sound of wheels slow on wet asphalt. End of the world, he thinks, and the world keeps on not ending outside. Pitch night through the crack in the curtains, and in Robbie’s arms, Levon shuts his eyes and holds tight against the idea that the dawn will never come. 

Or, worse still, that it will.