#btw not condoning Britt's actions but Robbe is def the kind of person who won't stay mad

[if-you-built-yourself-a-myth]

As the World Falls Down

Robbe sat in the hospital waiting room all night, even slept in one of those uncomfortable plastic chairs near the front entrance. He couldn’t bring himself to return to the flat—how could he meet Milan and Zoë and tell them what happened, especially since they would beg to know the surprise as soon as he pushed through the front door? He left his backpack at the hotel suite. It didn’t matter. The cleaning staff could pawn off all his belongings to the highest bidder, so long as he could see those bleach-blond waves and look into a pair of brown eyes. He needed to know how Sander was doing.

Around four in the morning, Britt went home. She didn’t see Robbe sitting only a few feet away as she exited. He wanted to hate her for everything she’d said to him hours earlier, but she looked so tired and sad that he couldn’t conjure the emotion. Maybe he would be able to later. He couldn’t picture her getting any sort of retribution for her actions, just the tears streaming down her cheeks and the hopeless air that followed her into the city as she retreated. He pitied her.

The woman Robbe had seen in the ambulance—Mrs. Driesen, he guessed—gathered her own belongings to leave a few minutes later. Robbe was surprised to see her with her purse, jacket, hat, and scarf, heading towards the double doors. He expected she would spend the night with her son as he rested on medications in a hospital room. He jumped from his chair to stop her.

“Is Sander okay?” he asked. He hoped his hair wasn’t too messy. This was not how he envisioned meeting Sander’s mother, not even in his wildest nightmares. She looked like Sander might look, minus the bleached hair and snarky smile. 

She blinked at him. “Who are you?”

“Robbe.” Robbe extended his hand for a handshake. “Sander was with me when…” His voice caught. “I just want to know if he’s okay.” He paused. “Can you let me see him?”

Mrs. Driesen moved her mouth helplessly for a second, looking for something to say. She finally settled on a clipped sentence. “You should ask his mother, when she gets here.”

“She’s not here now?” So the woman was not Mrs. Driesen. It must be Mrs. Ingelbrecht.

“No, I gave her a call. He had Britt listed as his emergency contact.”

“Oh, thanks.”

He took a step back and watched her leave. That meant Sander was all alone, in a gigantic hospital, right after one of the most traumatic experiences of his life.

No way in hell was Robbe letting it stay that way.

His mother took a turn for the worse a year ago. He watched her lay in bed day after day. He knew she was scared to be by herself in the room, frightened that everyone she loved would abandon her and the world would continue without her in it. He did not want to imagine Sander feeling the same way. Robbe knew his life was better with Sander, just as it was better with his mother as a part of the story.

He headed straight to the nurse’s station in the center of the waiting room. “I’m sorry, what room is Sander Driesen in?”

The nurse looked him up and down. “Relationship to the patient?”

“Boyfriend.”

She made a weird face, something that told him Britt had described herself as Sander’s girlfriend. Sander might look like a cheating, two-timing bitch now, but Robbe found the expression funny. He needed something like that. A reason to smile.

“The girl in here earlier,” he said, “was his ex. It’s complicated. I just have to see him.”

The nurse stuttered a little before she replied, “Visiting hours begin at eleven. You can wait in the waiting room—”

No. Robbe had to see Sander now. He couldn’t go back to the flat to face Milan, Zoë, and Senne knowing that Sander was all by himself, even if he knew that Sander’s mother was on her way. He felt tears pricking at his eyes.

“Can I please see him now?”

“If you were family, I’d say yes.” She continued to type on her computer. The click-clack of the keys made Robbe feel even more anxious than before. 

“I have to see him, okay?” he pleaded. Now there were full tears bubbling beneath his eyelids. He swiped the back of his hand across his face to keep his composure. “I was with him. He was with me when everything…” He felt helpless. He had to be with Sander, he just had to. 

He didn’t need to finish his sentence. The nurse looked around at the nurses’ station, then pointed down the hallway. “Room 24,” she said. 

-~-

Sander looked smaller than ever curled up in the hospital bed. While his eyes were closed in the guise of sleep, he scratched at an exposed section of his neck with reckless abandon. The walls of the bedroom were painted a calming shade of blue, not unlike the walls of his mother’s room in the institution. Robbe approached as quietly as he could and placed a kiss on Sander’s forehead. He sat down in the bedside chair.

“Sorry,” Sander mumbled without opening his eyes. How he knew it was Robbe, Robbe didn’t know.

“No need to be,” Robbe replied. He tried to slide his hand into Sander’s, but Sander pulled away and rolled over so that Robbe couldn’t see his face.

“I was trying to stop it, I am trying, I can’t get out of my skin…” Sander’s voice trailed off. Robbe didn’t know what kind of medication they put him on, but he was surprised that Sander spoke to him at all. 

Robbe’s mother did the same thing when he went to wake her in the mornings. She would roll over. She would look away. She would stare right through Robbe as if he were made of glass, his father too, and nothing they did could help her. They cared for her until it was no longer within their control. Fuck, Robbe wasn’t sure if he was ready for that. He’d watched as it stretched their family to its breaking point.

This was not something to take lightly. He couldn’t assure Sander that he would always be able to handle his illness with grace and perfection. 

“It’s hot in here.” Sander pushed off the blankets. “It’s so hot everywhere. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not, I’m not.” Sander began to clench and unclench his fists. Robbe wondered if he should call a doctor into the room to give Sander something more, maybe to calm him down. The movement wasn’t violent, though, so he let it be. “Not.”

Britt’s words came to the forefront of Robbe’s mind again. Sander was asleep before he came in here. Maybe everything was his fault. 

Then again, if it was, there wasn’t much he could do about it now but stay.

He decided to  channel and old memory. He had been sitting on the edge of his mother’s bed, stroking a hand through her hair. It was something consistent he could do for her to show her he was beside her, without making her look at him or speak with him. That day was not the worst of days. If anything, it was one of the better ones. He learned how to braid on YouTube that morning and decided to weave her hair into millions of tiny ones. She told him once that she liked to have him near her. She liked to feel that he still cared.

As he made his way to the fifteenth braid, she cleared her throat.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“No, I’m alright.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“No, I…” 

Robbe got up from the one side of the bed and made his way around to other. He sat in the indent his father used to leave behind when he woke up for work. “What is it?” He looked around. “Do you want me not to touch you? I can stop.”

“No, it’s not that.”

“Then what is it?”

She stifled a sob. He hated hearing her cry, especially since it had become the soundtrack to his life. He wanted to make things better for her—at the very least, act as a painkiller for whatever horrible things were happening in her mind. Illness didn’t disappear by the power of love. He knew that, too.

“I—” she began.

“Yes?”

“I don’t want you to feel like, like any of this is your respo—” 

Robbe sighed. She had said this to him before in passing, on the better days when she felt good enough to make French Toast on the stovetop and hummed along to the radio. “Mom, I know—”

“No, listen.” She took his hand, one of the largest movements from the past few days, and placed something in his palm: a necklace, the one she used to wear to church, with a picture of a cherub beveled on the side. She used to say it protected her from demons. Her voice was delicate as eggshells. “You have to understand. None of this is... you didn’t cause this.”

“I know I didn’t, it’s fi—”

“—and nothing, I mean nothing, in my head can change my love for you. Nothing.”

He tried not to get choked up. He wanted to be strong for them both. “I know.”

“I love you.”

After that, she’d gone back to sleep. It was the last time he watched her pull her face under the covers before she left the house completely to go into treatment. He knew, as he watched Sander’s form in the hospital bed, that this wasn’t his fault either. Britt was wrong. It wasn’t fake and it wasn’t caused by him.

Robbe found himself speaking. “I don’t know what Britt told you, just what she told me.” He kept his voice low and soothing. “I want you to know that I don’t care.” Sander shifted in the bed. Scooting further away from Robbe in the chair at his bedside. Robbe continued anyway. “I know stuff is fucked up right now and nothing makes sense to me, but it’s not going to change how I feel about you.” He inhaled. “I thought you might like to know that. Tonight does nothing to change my feelings for you.”

It wasn’t much, and it didn’t make Sander face him again. 

“You’re always going to leave me,” he heard the other boy whisper. “They’re always going to leave me.”

“I’m going to stay here until your mom arrives, okay?”

Sander nodded, more to himself.

Robbe placed his hand on the bed, within Sander’s reach should he choose to grab it. “I love you the same.” He hoped this would be enough to make Sander understand.