Archive of Our Own

Jamie stood outside the club, the pounding beat of songs he’d heard too many times still ringing in his head. Everything had seemed stale tonight, worn through, which meant it probably was too late in the year already, and there wasn’t any point in him leaning on the cast-iron fence around the chunk of sidewalk that served as a patio, pretending to smoke an e-cig. And yet, it was still cold enough that the smokers at the other corner of the patio weren’t likely to notice that he wasn’t even vaping, the way his breath steamed in the air.

A silver sedan drifted through the gray slush as Jamie counted the seconds in his head. He’d never really smoked–the pictures of black lungs in his health textbook had gotten him halfway to the resolution, and then, a year or two later, he had decided he was going to live as long as possible–but he did take cigarette breaks. It was a good way to have an excuse to go outside for a few minutes every couple of hours, even–especially–in winter.

Another car passed by, red this time, the gloss of the paint reflecting the garish green of the club’s sign. It didn’t turn into the bank parking lot on the corner where most of the people going to the club parked, but that figured. This wasn’t the kind of club for people who drove clean red cars through dirty city slush in the small hours of the morning. It was more the kind of club for people who had been driving the same cars through the same town since before they were old enough to get in. Cars that only still ran thanks to friends of friends’ uncles’ stepbrothers’ whatevers, cars always getting a little rustier, cars with maybe a front panel or a door that wasn’t the same color as the rest.

Jamie was just about to go back inside, disappointed but not surprised, when an unmarked panel van drove past, blocking the view across the street for a second or two. When it had passed, he was there.

“Jack,” Jamie whispered, though the boy–still a boy, always a boy–had never said that was his name.

He turned his head toward Jamie and smiled at him, a cold, cold, smile, but a clean smile, too. It should have been familiar to Jamie. He’d seen it many times, drawn it more often than he’d admit.

It was never familiar.

Jack beckoned him, and he came. He climbed over the iron railing, sinking into slush that immediately soaked his socks and froze his feet. He waded through the gutter and out into the street, stumbling from the slickness of slowly melting ice to newly bared concrete and back to ice again, until he stepped up onto the sidewalk and stood before Jack. He shivered, realizing both that he hadn’t once looked away from Jack while crossing the street, and that he didn’t care.

“I was afraid I’d seen the last of you for the year,” Jamie said. “They’ve turned on all the fountains again, no one was wearing jackets this afternoon and–”

“Shh.” Jack placed his finger on Jamie’s lips. Even under the tarnished yellow light of the streetlamp and the neon from the club, his hair shone pure white. “How could I leave without saying goodbye?”

“The spring,” Jamie began, “I thought it was too late, too warm.”

Around them, the air grew colder, the trickling of water under the slush towards the gutters falling silent, the hems of Jamie’s jeans, his socks and shoes, stiffening. Jamie gasped involuntarily, and the shock of the chill made him cough as if he had been smoking. The steam from his breath broke up into tiny flecks of ice, giving Jack a glittering halo for an instant.

“Jamie,” Jack said softly, and coming from that mouth that could smile so cold and clean, his name felt different, like maybe something he should never have volunteered, like something that could make him do far more than just cross the street without looking. “Spring comes when I leave. It doesn’t drive me out. It can’t.”

“Then why do you always leave?” The cold had spread from Jack across the street, driving the smokers back inside the club, leaving Jamie and Jack alone for blocks in all directions. The ice on the road hardened, its surfaces growing cloudy with ferns of frost.

“Because no one ever asked me to stay,” Jack said.

Jamie thought he saw a flicker of something other than cold in Jack’s face, but he wasn’t sure how much he’d stake on it.

And yet. Jamie felt the street around him, felt how he knew it, and how he knew all the streets around it, what they were called and where they went. He knew that about too many people in the club, too: the people he had come with and the people he had used to come with. What they were called and where they were going.

Jack had even less to do with the club, even less to do with green neon and dirty slush than the red car that had passed through. And Jack didn’t have to pass through.

Jack’s not good, some part of him whispered. Jack’s not bad, another part protested. Jack’s different, said a last part, silencing the others. Jack made him want to panic. Jack reminded him that the word panic came from Pan. Jack did not, and could not, ever care about the color and cleanliness of the cars driving by, about cigarette brands or old songs. Jack had his own songs, Jack was his own song, Jack was his own? Or at least Jamie was his. He shivered, he had been shivering.

“Please stay,” Jamie said.