#aka the moment that permanently altered my brain chemistry

[seasonsbloom]

swimming into you . bob

PART ONE : he's so pretty (when he goes down on me)

pairing ; bob floyd x female!reader

synopsis ; things between you and Bob are strictly business: he’s your backseater, and that’s all there is. Until he offers to help you let off some steam and you find out just how pretty he looks between your thighs…

wc ; 6k

warnings ; 18+ only; explicit language, angst, panic attack, reader definitely has PTSD, mentions of past character death

note: this has no smut which might be a surprise after the first part, sorry. but this needed off my chest, so... idk. i hope you enjoy it anyway, please don't be disappointed

desertsagecelestial aka sol i STILL owe you my life

Your life is a downward spiral, a maelstrom that pulls you ever deeper towards rock bottom, a rollercoaster on an eternal decline, a plane mid-crash, a…

“I swear to god, Spec, you’re the most dramatic person I’ve ever met,” Phoenix says, squinting at you over the rims of her sunglasses. “And I know Hangman personally.”

You can’t answer because you’re staring at those Ray Bans, and it’s making you think of Bob’s glasses in that bathroom, lenses fogged up, metal pressing against your naked skin, makes you think of sliding them up his nose, and then you’re thinking of his fingers and his tongue and his voice against you, and…

“Bro, are you dissociating?” Phoenix has tilted her head sideways. “Do I need to get you a doctor? What the hell is going on?”

It’s a sunny day, but that’s not surprising in California. You’re in the common room, lounging on nondescript beige couches. Outside the glass front, somewhere in the sky, Rooster and Hangman try and fail to shoot down Maverick. The radio crackles with the static of their comms, spitting out their taunts in endless circles nobody listens to anyway.

The other pilots are on standby in the hangar, and Bob is… god knows where. You hate that you’re so attuned to his every move now you notice even when you don’t know where he is. Part of you wants to write it off as the blind loyalty that comes with flying a two-seater, but you know that’s not true.

For a moment, you just look at Phoenix. Then you say, “Do you think Bob is good in bed?”

She blinks at you. A moment passes, then another, then…

“Specter, what the fuck?!”

You shrug. “I’m just asking.”

“Jesus.” Phoenix rubs the balls of her hands across her eyes like her head is about to split apart. “Why would you ever ask that?”

Because he ate me out in the Hard Deck’s handicapped bathroom, and I think it broke my brain, permanently altered my body chemistry, changed my actual life…

“Just… I don’t know. I was wondering.”

“Well, stop wondering,” she suggests. Then she gives you a suspicious look. “Did something happen between you two?”

You turn your gaze to the window, to the contrails like smoke signals on the canvas of the skies, to the roaring of engines that’s become your lullaby, to the sight of Bob crossing the airfield. Something in your chest hurts. Everywhere you look, he’s already there.

“No,” you say. “Nothing happened.”

+

The first time you met Bob, you looked right past him. There were bigger fish to fry here and bigger things to look out for, and Hangman was grinning at you and saying something stupid, so you walked by him without even realizing he was there. 

He’s got a habit of that - flying under the radar.

“Yo, Specter.” Phoenix draped herself around you, pulled you against her chest. You were both giddy to see each other again, to fly together once more. “This is Bob. He’s your new backseater.”

You don’t remember much. Remember only that he wore glasses and was smiling at you with something eager, something hopeful about his face. Remember looking away immediately, nodding once.

“Don’t try to get in my way up there,” you told him, and then you turned away to beat Hangman at darts.

Ignoring the way his face fell. Ignoring Phoenix nudging you. Ignoring the sinking, tumbling, crashing feeling in your chest.

It was the beginning of the end, and you knew even then.

+

Sometimes you think Rooster knows.

He’s always been kind to you, kind enough to keep you hoping at the same time it tells you not to dream too much. He’s kind to everyone, anyway.

“Why’d you wanna be a pilot?” he asks, waving down a bartender and putting both your drinks on his tab.

For a moment, you think about telling him the truth. All my life, I’ve been dreaming of flying away. All my life, I’ve been dreaming of escape.

It seems too much. You’ve never told anyone.

So you just shrug, take a swig of your beer, and say, “I like the thrill.”

Rooster laughs. “I know what you mean,” he agrees, winks, knocks his bottle against yours.

And just like that, the door is opened again. You dream the dream a little longer.

Part of the Rooster appeal, part of why you suspect your crush is so persistent, is that there’s no way it’ll ever happen. All of the thrill of the fall, with none of the fear of the impact.

+

“We need to talk about it.”

You’re fastening your helmet as you stride across the runway towards your plane. Maybe if you walk fast enough, you’ll be able to shake him.

“No,” you growl, but it’s diminished by the fact that you’ve been struggling with your clasp for a good minute. Your fingers are shaking too hard for you to get a steady grip.

Bob hastens his steps and catches up with you easily. His shoulder rubs against your own, and your breath catches in your throat.

“Specter,” he begins, but you cut him off.

“There’s nothing to talk about, Floyd.” It doesn’t matter how angry you sound. It doesn’t matter how the irritation boils and burns in you. Inevitably, inexplicably, your mouth always begins to form the Big Boy anyway, and then you’re back in that bathroom, back with him, and in your head, you pull him closer instead of pushing him away, and something about it makes you feel like crying. “It doesn’t matter.”

You stop by the plane. Bob’s lips purse, and he looks down at his feet, shoulders pulled almost all the way up to his ears.

“I just think…” he begins, then stops himself.

Payback and Fanboy walk past, getting to their own aircraft, and they’re laughing and chatting—jovial, easy, light-hearted. You envy them. You can’t remember the last time things didn’t feel heavy to you.

Only that’s a lie too. You do remember. It was with Bob Floyd’s face buried in your pussy and your mind somewhere off in the stratosphere.

“Shit,” you curse, frustration coursing through you, fingers still fumbling with the damned clasp, and fuck it all, you just want to fly, you don’t want to think, you don’t want to feel, you just…

Bob knocks your fingers out of the way and closes the clasp for you. Suddenly, he’s so close you can smell him again—your chest burns.

“Specter,” he says, voice soft, “we need to discuss it.”

You swallow around the lump in your throat.

“You promised we wouldn’t talk about it,” you whisper. He seems to want to say something else, but you can’t. You just can’t do it. The fear is there, and it’s making your head spin. “Please, Bob.”

Something about those words is choked. Raw.

He looks at you for a moment, brows furrowed, eyes gentle, and then he nods. Steps away. Doesn’t say anything else.

You climb into the plane and wonder when, oh, when, did it all get so complicated.

+

Phoenix looks at you like she thinks you’re going to fall apart right where you sit. You hate it. 

“You can talk to me, you know?” she says softly, leaning across the table in the mess hall, deep enough her chest almost ends up in the mashed potatoes. “You don’t always have to keep everything inside, Spec.”

It’s not true. That’s your first thought. You can’t talk to her, can’t talk to Bob, can’t talk to anyone. No one, you know this, is going to understand you now.

Your second thought is that you’re a horrible person. Phoenix is kind and genuinely wants to be your friend. She’s been extending hands across canyons for years now. But you just can’t take them. Too afraid you’ll drag her down into the drop with you.

“I hooked up with Bob,” you say, even though you should be telling her something else.

She obviously doesn’t know what to say to that. Opens her mouth just to close it again. Then finally settles on, “Why?”

Part of you wants to say you were the one who told me to let off steam. But this one, you can’t blame it on her. Can’t blame it on anyone but yourself.

“I don’t know,” you say with a shrug.

But you do know. That’s the problem.

You think of him on his knees in that bathroom. You think of him at your back in the air. How he breaks you apart. How he puts you back together.

“You know,” Phoenix says after an incredibly long time. “I always thought you had a crush on Rooster.”

It makes you laugh, even though it isn’t funny. Not even a little. Not even at all.

“Yeah,” you say. “Yeah, so did I.”

+

“So, Bob,” Hangman says, grinning in a way you can’t describe as anything other than villainous. If he, too, had a mustache, he’d be twirling it right about now. “Who do you prefer flying with: Phoenix or Specter?”

This was a horrible idea. Evenings at the Hard Deck should be barred for you from now on.

“Oh, come on,” you groan, going for nonchalance even as something inside you goes taut.

Bob looks decidedly uncomfortable, twisting his beer bottle around in his hands, fiddling with the soggy label, not looking at anyone.

“Uhm.” He shrugs. “They’re both good.”

Hangman’s having none of it.

“Nah, nah, nah, none of that diplomacy shit, Floyd. Gotta pick one.”

Coyote, always the shit-stirrer, claps a hand on Bob’s shoulder. “Yeah, bro. Who’s your best girl?”

Before responding, Bob casts his eyes down towards the floor, clears his throat. His glasses are riding low on his nose again, and you sink your fingernails into your palms to stifle the instinct to reach over and push them up for him.

“I guess… well, Phoenix is more consistent. Specter always… she’s a…. she’s a li…”

“Say it.” The words just burst from you before you can remember deciding to say them. Bob looks up then, eyes wide and face open. Your voice is venomous, and you feel like a rattlesnake about to strike. “A liability. That’s what you wanted to say, isn’t it?”

For a moment, Bob and you just stare at each other.

“I didn’t say that,” he says, voice gone soft. He’s going translucent as you speak, blending back into the chaos of the crowd.

“You didn’t have to.”

Everybody’s staring at you, but you keep your chin held high.

“I’m going home,” you say, and then you leave.

++

“You’re going too steep.”

Bob doesn’t have much hope that you’ll listen to him. You never do, apparently, unless he’s got you pinned to public bathroom doors.

It’s like a fever dream to him now, that night. Impossible that he was ever so close to you when all there is between you these days is distance and feelings tangled like thickets of thorns. When you won’t talk to him and won’t look at him, when it doesn’t matter what he says or asks.

Unsurprisingly, your answer is almost instantaneous. “We’re fine.”

The first time Bob met you, he couldn’t stop looking at you.

You were beautiful, in your uniform, under the bar lights. Beautiful and bright and brilliant and as decidedly out of his reach as the moon. You didn’t even look at him twice, not even after Phoenix introduced you. Drifted into his life and out of it like the specter that gave you your callsign.

And Bob never believed in love at first sight, still doesn’t, but there was something there, something beneath the thin veneer of arrogance you wore, you still wear. Something just under the surface, he thinks nobody but him sees—something he wants to keep as his secret.

You’re brilliant. The best pilot he’s ever met (even if half his friend group would balk at the idea), determined, clever, cut-throat. Stubborn to a fault. Witty and funny and always ready to stand up for yourself. The complete opposite of him.

Most of the time it’s admiration and curiosity, and then sometimes, it’s something else. When you slip from untouchable Ice Queen to something softer, when you lose yourself in the sky, in a book, in his touch in a bathroom at the Hard Deck… when you feel like nobody’s looking, that’s when Bob thinks he might love you.

Bob is a pilot. He gets up into that sky, and sometimes he deludes himself into thinking one day, one day, he’ll fly high enough, stretch far enough, and then finally, he’ll reach that moon. It’ll never happen, of course. The moon stays firm, beautiful and bright and brilliant, and achingly, eternally lonely. Never his to have.

The plane keeps climbing, steady, steady, steady, and Bob can barely breathe.

“Specter,” he chokes out. “Come on, girl.”

And then suddenly, abruptly, tipping like a pendulum, the plane falls. It’s an almost artful arch at the beginning, a ballerina angling her body towards the ground in a jump, and it leaves his stomach hanging somewhere above his head.

Then something changes. You keep falling.

“Specter, time to pull up,” Bob says, twisting to try and find Mav. Where is he?

There’s no answer.

“Specter,” he repeats, thinking you’re ignoring him for another reckless stunt, for another moment of you trying to recapture glory.

Still, you don’t respond, and that’s when he realizes something is horribly, terribly, awfully wrong.

“Specter!” he calls a third time, and now there’s a note of panic creeping into his voice he’s sure the others can pick up on over the coms. “Specter, you with me?”

The ground keeps hurtling closer. You keep silent.

“Bob.” That’s Mav’s voice, over the comms, right in his ear. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” Bob gasps, and he’s breathless, he’s chafing, he’s… “She’s not… Specter!”

“Is she in g-Loc?” Rooster asks.

Rooster, Bob thinks. He twists, searching the horizon for his friend, but he can barely see anything. His vision has gone blurry.

And you’re still, still, still spinning towards the ground.

“Specter,” Bob says again, and he’s never known fear like this before. Not the first time he flew on his own. Not when he and Natasha had to punch out. Not when Mav and Rooster went down. Not ever. “Specter!”

And then he’s just saying your name, your real name, your first name, the one he’s said a million times in his head and never out loud, straining against all the buckles as if he can reach you, stretching out his arm over a distance impossible to breach.

“Bob!” That’s Rooster again. “Bob, you gotta punch out, you gotta eject now!”

I can’t leave her. That’s all he thinks. I can’t leave her, I can’t leave her, I can’t…

And Bob isn’t religious, never has been, but he’s saying, “Please, wake her up, please, God, I’ll do anything, please wake her up, please….”

You come to with a gasp like tires screeching on the asphalt, like a choir of angels or something, and then you’re pulling up, you’re getting the plane back on track, you’re…

In his ear, you’re saying, “Sorry. I… sorry.”

Bob sobs.

+

He knows you won’t acknowledge it before you land. He knows you’ll play it off, smile about it, laugh like nothing happened.

But he saw the tremor of your hands. He heard the fear in your voice. You can’t hide because he’s seen too much of you. Because he knows you, even if you don’t want him to.

“Specter,” he says, racing after you across the runway towards the hangar.

Everybody’s there, standing in a crowd near the doors. Pale faces, drawn with a panic that should be familiar by now, that’s part of this job. A panic nobody ever gets used to.

“I’m fine,” you say. You’re smiling, but it’s strained, and it’s a lie. He knows it is.

And Bob is angry. Angrier than he’s ever been with you because it’s not fair, not fair that you’re shutting him out, always shutting him out when all he wants is to hold you, be there for you, love you…

“You almost died!” Bob calls, voice rising, and he’s pretty sure there are still tears on his face. At least his cheeks feel wet.

Everybody’s looking at him. He can feel their eyes on him.

Usually, it would be enough to make him want to draw his head all the way between his shoulder blades, but not right now. Not with that feeling still simmering in his belly. Not with the feeling of that plummet still in his bones and the echoing silence of the cockpit in his ears. 

You stop. For a moment, you gape at him. Then you say, “You would have died, too.”

He’s shaking his head before you’ve finished, frantic, saying, “I could have punched out, you were in g-LOC, you would have died, Specter, this isn’t funny, this isn’t a game, this is real….”

“I can handle myself,” you say, but something about your voice is chafing.

“I think what we just saw,” Rooster says, face solemn, arms crossed in front of his chest, “proves that even you can’t always handle yourself, Specter.”

By your hips, your hands clench and unclench into fists. Your whole body seems to pulsate to a rhythm nobody but you can hear, shoulders heaving, head nodding up and down.

You’ve always stood apart from them, even as you stood right next to them. Never letting anybody in.

I can help you, Bob wants to say. You don’t need to carry it alone.

But you’re shaking your head, pulling the helmet against your chest. Stand on that runway, a step from him, a million miles from him.

“I’m fine,” you insist one last time. Voice like a wind chime. Face like a ghost.

And Bob thinks it might be time to let the moon go.

++

A week later, Hangman goes down.

Birdstrike, both engines on fire, ejectejecteject, static on the radio, fire streaking across the sky, then the parachute opening and the wind howling and him floating, light as a feather, towards the ground.

You’re out of the room before you can hear how it ends. Stumbling through the hallways of the base like a sleepwalker, like a toddler, like someone on the verge of a terrible thing.

It’s growing in you, something you can’t name, something that mounts and mounts and…

In a corner, next to a water fountain, you crumble like a ragdoll. Fold yourself into a neat square of limbs, knees pulled all the way up to your eyes, face pressed into the space between them.

The panic flares into your body like electricity, tingles down your spine and into your legs, tugs at your hands and feet. And your chest is full of it, of that anxiety and that memory, so full the feeling crowds against your ribcage, threatens to snap the bones. There’s no room for oxygen.

I’m going to choke, you think. I’m going to…

“Hey.”

You know it’s Bob without looking up. You couldn’t do it anyway, even if you tried. Your muscles won’t listen to you, not now when your body belongs to the anxiety.

“It’s okay,” Bob whispers. He’s crouched in front of you, you know this because you can see his shoes through the gaps between your knees. Angled like a V, straining towards you. “He’s fine. Hangman’s fine.”

It should bring relief, but it doesn’t. You shake your head, forehead still smashed against your knees, and your skin tugs against the patellas.

No, you think. I can’t do it. Not again, not again, not again. Please, god, make it end, just make it stop, I can’t, I can’t, I…

“I can’t,” you say, and you don’t know what you mean.

All you can think about is the crash. The gravity pulling at your chest. A canopy exploding above you. The pain of that dislocated shoulder. And then the emptiness, the aching, endless emptiness of the after. The guilt, the grief, the fear, the fear, the fear.

“Can I touch you?”

Bob’s voice is so soft, even with the underlying current of firmness. Just like it was in that bathroom. And it should be an oxymoron - for someone to be so tender, for someone to be so unyielding. But it’s not, not with Bob. Bob, who seems to contain true multitudes.

You nod because you can’t find your voice.

He draws you into his arms, right there on the floor. Hands on your back, tugging you against his chest, urging your head into the space below his chin. He’s so warm, and he smells nice, and he’s everywhere.

“Easy,” he whispers. “It’s alright. You’re okay.”

And then it’s just him. The steady beat of his heart instead of the screaming of warning systems. The smell of his aftershave instead of the smoke and the gasoline. His fingers pressing into your spine instead of the straps cutting into your shoulders.

Bob holds you together until you can do it yourself.

You draw back, slowly, almost reluctantly, and the moment his touch is gone, you miss it like something intrinsic to you. Miss it like a limb.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper. You don’t want to look at him. You can’t look at him.

Bob exhales.

“Don’t apologize,” he says. “Can you… explain it?”

You suppose you should. Suppose you owe it to him after these weeks. After everything you’ve put him through.

“It… it scared me,” you whisper. It takes a lot to get that out, to admit that there’s anything, anywhere, that could scare you.

You don’t want Bob to know. You want Bob to think of you as someone above things like fear, someone strong and brave and whole. But it’s just all too much. You’re eroding, crumbling, tumbling off the tightrope you’ve been walking for so long.

If someone like Hangman, someone brilliant, someone fantastic, someone who burns brighter than life, can go down… then what about you? What about Bob?

“The rest, too.” At your questioning look, he elaborates, “Explain all of it to me.”

You could keep pretending you don’t understand him, but you’re too tired. Something about the panic has made you fuzzy, has blurred your edges, and you just want it to be over. You just want to be rid of everything clogging up your chest.

You want to feel again what you felt that night in the bathroom with Bob. You want somebody to carry the burden with you, so you won’t feel it dragging you beneath the surface of the ocean all the time.

“I killed her,” you say finally. The words are barely more than a whisper, but they burst from somewhere at the very core of you. Something you’ve kept hidden from view for years.

Bob pauses. Stares.

“... What?”

“I killed her,” you repeat, voice watery, hands shaking. “My last backseater. I killed her.”

He opens his mouth only to close it again—shifts his weight where he’s still sitting on the ground. Your knees are almost touching.

“Spec…” he begins, but you don’t let him finish.

“Everybody always said it, you know? That I was a wildcard, that I just… did whatever I wanted without thinking about others. Everybody but her. She’d always say, oh, you just don’t understand her, she’s brilliant, she knows what she’s doing, she….” You have to stop yourself, have to suck in a breath that sounds like you’re drowning, like your lungs are filling up with water. “And then one day we had a fight. She said that I… that I didn’t listen to her up in the air, that I always trusted myself more than I trusted her, and she… she called me a liability.”

Something in Bob’s eyes shifts, something like understanding flutters across his face, but the dam inside of you has broken. The river rushes without stopping.

“So I decided to prove her wrong. I wanted to go right, but she told me to go left, and I did. We got into a jet stream. I lost control of the plane. We had to eject. I made it, and she didn’t.”

You pause then. Blink against that horrible, unforgiving, brilliant sun outside the window. Your cheeks are wet.

“She was my best friend, Bob.” Your voice breaks, and you fold in on yourself, deflate. “She was the only one who ever believed in me. I knew her since we were eighteen, we did everything together, I only started flying two-seaters so I could fly with her, and you have to understand, I would have… if I could have changed it, if I could have died instead of her, I would have, I wouldn’t even have thought about it, I… And I know I’m not a… not a good person, I know I’m selfish and mean, and I hurt people all the time, and I know I hurt you, but I just… ” You trail off. Your voice is barely more than a whisper. “She was my best friend.”

It’s not nearly enough to explain what she meant to you. It’s all you have.

Bob doesn’t answer for a long time. When you finally find the courage to look up at him, you brace yourself for the inevitable: shock, disgust, disdain.

You find none of it.

Bob looks at you with a tenderness on his face that punches all the air out of your lungs. 

“Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?” he asks, voice soft.

It’s almost helpless, the way you can do nothing but shrug your shoulders.

“It’s not…” You can’t look at him anymore, afraid you’ll do something stupid, afraid you’ll kiss him or tell him something you won’t be able to take back. “I didn’t think you’d care.”

Bob’s brows furrow.

“Of course I care,” he says, as matter-of-factly as if he’s chatting about the San Diego weather. “I care about you, Specter. I always have.”

You don’t know what to say to that. It tugs at you with ice-cold fingers, even as warmth spreads through your stomach. And it scares you, hearing him say that. He shouldn’t care about you. Not if he knows what’s good for him.

“I’m sorry,” you say after a long, long moment. “I’m sorry for… at the Hard Deck, I think I needed somebody, and you were there, and it… I used you. I’m sorry for it. I made a mistake.”

When you look at him next, something on Bob’s face has changed. Some window that was previously thrown wide open is shut. He looks down towards his shoes, glasses sliding slowly, slowly towards the tip of his nose.

“Up in the air,” he says finally. “I get it now, I think. Why you don’t listen to me. But I… Don’t you trust me?”

Hearing him say it hurts somewhere at the very core of you. In the grand scheme of things, in the great failure of your life, Bob is probably the person you trust most.

“I do,” you whisper, shaking your head. Folding your fingers in your lap and biting your lip so hard the sting distracts you from whatever is going on in your chest. “I just… I trust myself more. I have to trust myself more.”

Bob is quiet for a long, long moment. Then he nods.

“I understand,” he says, but it sounds like he wants to say something else entirely. “Can we just… let’s be friends, Spec. Please.”

And he sounds tired. The kind of fatigue that goes bone-deep, that travels over days and nights and weeks, the kind of fatigue you carry with you wherever you go. You know how that feels.

It’s a horrible thought just how much you’ve hurt Bob, and so you’ve never allowed yourself to think it. Have brushed it off and brushed it away, under beds and under carpets and into handicapped bathrooms with broken locks. Have pretended you couldn’t tell in the cockpit, pretended you didn’t see it in the mess hall when his face fell after another scathing remark, another dismissal.

All the way, you told yourself you were doing it for him - it’s not good to get close to you. You’ve never learned how to build things, grow things. All you know is how to ruin them.

So you say, “I don’t want to be your friend, Bob. I want to be alone.”

Behind the sheen of his glasses, Bob’s eyes are wet.

“I don’t think that’s true at all,” he says, finally.

And then he gets up, walks away, and leaves you behind on the floor, a town buried beneath a landslide, a meteor crater, a canyon of sand and rock, and the lone survivor clawing his way over the edge.

+

“Nat says you have a crush on me.”

Rooster gives no greeting, simply slides into the unoccupied seat by your side with those words. He’s broad enough that he dwarfs the rickety chair, the Hawaiian shirt so out of place in the beiges and grays of this military base.

A week ago, maybe you would have been embarrassed. Now, you can barely muster a shrug.

“What’s it matter?”

Rooster raises an eyebrow. The television room is deserted save for the two of you - some movie is playing with the volume all the way down, but you haven’t even been paying enough attention to tell if it’s a romantic comedy or a slasher.

“It matters,” he says. 

You shake your head, staring down at the packet of gum in your hand. The whole room smells like mint.

“I wasn’t ever going to act on it,” you say, “that’s why it doesn’t matter. It’s just… there. It doesn’t change anything for you.”

Rooster is quiet for a moment. And then he says, “It doesn’t work like that.”

“Hm?”

“The way you think it does,” he elaborates as if that clears it up. “You think you can just walk through life and not affect others. You think if you’re just mean and closed-off, if you never let somebody in, you won’t matter to them. That you won’t hurt them. That then they can’t hurt you. That’s not how it works, Spec.”

You exhale. It feels a little like he’s just pried open your chest, pulled all your most private, darkest thoughts into the world.

“I… I don’t know what you mean.”

“It’s like this.” Bradley leans forward, sun-tanned hands reaching for you across the gray, gray expanse of the table. He doesn’t touch you, but he leaves his hands palms-up, an offering between you. “There are people here that love you, Spec. Even if maybe sometimes you don’t deserve that love. And you have the power to hurt them, just like they have the power to hurt you. You’re already in it. You’re just pretending you’re not.”

You grind your teeth. It’s too much. You can’t do it.

Eject, eject, eject, your mind is screaming at you, but it’s like you can’t find the cord.

“Bradley…” you begin, without knowing where you want the sentence to end.

“And you don’t have a crush on me.”

He says it like it’s a fact. He says it like he knows you better than you know yourself.

You’re beginning to suspect he might have a point.

“I think I know when I have a crush,” you say quietly.

“No, you don’t. Otherwise, you’d know you’re head-over-heels for Bob. Otherwise, you’d know he’s loved you since the first time he’s seen you.”

You think of Bob - Bob on his knees at the Hard Deck, Bob’s voice pulling you from the deepest, densest darkness of your life, Bob silhouetted by the unforgiving sun as you splintered into shards of glass right in front of him, as the contents of your life spilled across his feet and drenched him in your night.

It feels like being pressed into the seat at take-off - anticipation, fear, relief… You’re on the verge of something.

“Specter.” Rooster leans low across the table, his face in your field of vision. Kind eyes, kind mouth, kind face. The sort of kindness you don’t deserve. The sort of kindness that rips holes into your life and your resolve and your heart. “You don’t really want me. You just want to want someone and not be afraid they’ll hurt you. You just want to want someone without it being real. Because then it won’t hurt.”

I already know this, you want to tell him, but you can’t. Something about hearing it from him, something about realizing you’re not half as complex as you always thought you were, is strangely reassuring at the same time it makes your stomach churn.

“And you’re scared to want Bob. Because that would be real. Because that could hurt.”

Bob Floyd, who is so much kinder than you ever deserved. Bob Floyd, who has your back. Bob Floyd, who loves you, even when you don’t know how to love yourself.

“It already does, though,” you whisper, your voice impossibly small, your eyes burning. “It already does hurt, Rooster.”

And Rooster smiles. The sight of it plants a hope inside you you didn’t think you were capable of anymore - a sapling fighting its way through concrete. 

“That, Specter,” he says, “is how you know it’s real.”

+

Bob is crying when he opens his door.

He stands there in plaid pajama pants and a white shirt, without his glasses, hair no longer slicked back but curly and soft, and you remember sinking your fingers into it, remember wanting to ask what conditioner he uses, remember…

“Do you love me?” you blurt.

Bob blinks and opens his mouth. His cheeks are wet.

“I…”

You don’t let him finish.

“Because I don’t know if I love you. But I know that I like you. And I know that I’m scared, Bob, I’m so fucking scared. Every day of my life, I’m scared. I’m scared that you’ll die because I trust you, and I’m scared that you’ll die because I don’t trust you, and I’m scared that maybe I could love you, and I’m scared that you’ll hurt me or that I’m always going to keep hurting you and I don’t… I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do with all this fear, Bob.”

And then it’s Bob, the WSO. Bob the pragmatic. Bob the fucking best boy you’ve ever met.

He nods, says, “I know.” And then he takes a deep breath. Goes on, “You don’t need to know any of that stuff. You don’t even have to not be scared. Spec, fuck, I’m scared. I’m scared of how much I like you, and I’m scared of how much you’re hurting all the time, how tightly you keep that all locked up. I’m not asking you not to be any of those things. I’m just… I’m just asking you to talk to me. Let’s figure it out together.”

When he says it like that, it seems almost easy. Simple. Logical.

“For the record,” you say, voice a ruin, and you’re pretty sure you might be crying too, “I don’t think it was a mistake. What we did at the Hard Deck, I mean. I think it… I think it may have been the best decision of my life. I don’t make a lot of those.”

And Bob smiles. Steps to the side and opens his door to you.

“You wanna come in?”

You do.

In his bedroom, with his arms around you, it’s almost enough to pretend you’re whole again. It’s enough to know you’ll get there someday. To a point where you’ll know how to grow things instead of ripping them out of the earth. To a point where maybe, finally, you’ll deserve that love Bob hands out so freely.

In his bedroom, with his arms around you, it’s a little like drowning. It’s a little like flying.

[alisemartinez91]

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