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It would be an outright lie to say that Link dislikes thunderstorms. He loathes them. They’re goddamn horrible. Like some higher power is opening up the sky and saying fuck this region in particular, I want to make every living soul here’s day worse. It’s all just pressure and wetness and shifting ‘fronts’ like a subway too full of people. He could live without. He’d love to live without.
It’s always easier when someone else is around, though. When there’s another beating heart nearby and he can secretly think to himself if I’m going down, you’re probably comin’ with me. Like having a buddy on the ferry to the afterlife is some consolation. When there’s no buddy–on a poorly timed maelstrom like tonight, where Rhett is out doing something–he lets his lizard brain take over.
He hides in the floor of the closet.
Childish? For sure. But it’s not the rain hammering against the windowpanes, or even the rumbling thunder that fucks with him. It’s the wind. When it kicks up, it personifies in a hissing scream, like the sky itself keeps stubbing its toes on buildings. Nothing puts Link in quite the same breed of jumpiness.
That’s probably why Rhett’s in such a hurry when he throws the dorm door open and spills in like a man late to his child’s birth. Link can’t see him, but he can tell: the knob bangs against the wall, there’s the sopping fwump of an umbrella hitting the carpet, and there comes the unmistakable sound of grocery bags dumped on the floor in a plastic hush. It’s silent for a second, and Link revels in it. Know he’s looking for him, checking the desk and beds, wondering if that lump of blankets on the top bunk is thick enough to be his best friend.
“Bo?” he asks softly, and the worry there makes Link’s chest tingle. He cares. Link loves how he cares.
But caring stems from knowing, and this drill’s been done enough times that his next go-to is the closet. The entrance folds away and light spills in and wouldn’t you know it, there Link is. Curled up in a bundle of dirty clothes on the floor. Nothing for entertainment in the dark save the company of paranoia and fear every time the building groans around him.
Speaking of. He trembles and look up. “Hey, Rhett.”
“Link.”
He hates the brand of disdain-wed-worry that Rhett eyes him with as his lips press thin. Like he’s a dog who’s pissed the carpet–but who also has a bladder problem, and so can’t really be punished for it.
“What’s up?” Link asks lamely. He raises both eyebrows high with interest, like he’s just run into an old buddy out at a bar and not like his roommate has just found him shamefully nesting in the bottom of their closet. Again.
Rhett hesitates. Looks like he’s going to offer a hand to help Link up, or maybe even just take his wrist and drag him out into the room like some form of fear-exposure therapy. But instead he kneels, and Link’s throat goes dry and tight with how close he is. On his level.
“I was gonna ask if you’re scared,” he starts, head tilting back and forth in consideration. “Buuut that would be dumb. You doin’ okay?” The question feels like it should’ve been followed with a condescending kiddo, but that’s not fair, either, Link realizes. Rhett’s just being kind. Looking out for him, like he always has.
“I’m fine.” He presses the words out with a smile, like he’s running register somewhere and that’s the script to keep customers happy. “How much longer…?”
“Prolly ‘nother hour.” Chewing the inside of his lip, Rhett looks at him long and hard and waits for a response.
Another hour of this? Link’s well practiced. That’s a drop in the fucking bucket. “‘Kay.”
“You wanna come out?” For all the energy behind his words, Rhett might as well be smiling and nodding and trying to subconsciously make Link agree with him.
“No. I’m good.”
When his face falls, it’s almost satisfying–until a particularly hard gust thrashes the window and Link recoils instinctively, caught with his guard down thanks to Rhett’s presence. His adrenal glands squeeze, dousing him with completely unrequested terror at the smallest of sensory inputs, and the next thing he knows, Rhett’s climbing into the closet, too.
“What’re you doin’?” Link demands. Rhett grabs the door and starts to pull it shut before hesitating and shooting a look at him over a broad shoulder.
“You feel safer in the dark?”
“Rhett–”
“Yes or no?”
Link swallows. The only noise loud enough to compete with the howling outside. “Yeah.”
And with that, the door fits its frame, and they’re left alone in the dark, side by side.
Even when Link can’t see him, Rhett takes up so much space. He’s a big person, yeah, but he also carries a magnetism and weight around him, like the space he’s occupying bows to him and thanks him for using it. His breaths are soft and steady and Link kinda hates the way they sound next to his own labored panting. Which–he guesses Rhett can still hear, too, cause he reaches out and touches Link’s arm gently.
If he expects Link to startle at the contact, he’s mistaken.
“What?” Link wants to sound self-assured and cool and not like the panic-consumed idiot he really is, but Rhett knows better.
“I was readin’ this article the other day, in a magazine. While in the student center?”
Okay? Like he had to justify why he’d be reading a magazine to Link.
“And it was sayin’ how… durin’ thunderstorms, or fireworks shows… recent studies have shown that dogs calm down significantly when they’re bein’ hugged.”
Oh. Oh, no.
Link’s not going to hug Rhett–he’s not a fucking dog, despite all earlier intrusive thoughts–and that’s the first certainty in his mind, because how fucking pathetic can someone be? A twenty year old guy, so shitless that he can’t even handle something lots of people go through every day. Folks’re more likely to die in the shower. Or, hell, driving a car, and that doesn’t make him bat an eye. This fear is unfounded–it’s totally bat-crap crazy, and that’s why Link doesn’t need to be coddled. ‘Cause he’s fine.
If only any of those answers had come out instead of the complicit silence that Rhett takes as permission.
Slowly he reaches over and collects Link, pulling him close in the dark and letting him be as small as he actually is compared to Rhett, right against his warm and steady chest. His breathing is even, and his heat of life is comforting, and his heartbeat isn’t a racket.
And it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to spend the next hour in his arms.