Work Text:
Ray catches sight of him the second they pull onto the right street, Rose’s headlights illuminating the cluster of people huddled on the side of the road. You’d think this was the party, with all these B-list celebrities in their designer clothes drinking beer and God knows what else out of plastic cups, if it weren’t for the bright pink Porsche sitting crushed-fender-first in the ditch next to them.
And right in the middle of the crowd, lounged back on the dewy grass like he’s tanning, is Bobby. Sunglasses on. Drink in hand. Blood drying along his hairline. Laughing and flirting with his friends without a care in the world.
Ray grabs the door handle as hard as he can but doesn’t push it open, can’t get himself to move, even as Rose brings the car to a stop. He just can’t stop staring out the window at Bobby. He almost doesn’t recognize him.
It’s been like this, a little bit, like Bobby’s split himself into two different people, ever since he hovered in the kitchen doorway one night a few months ago and told Ray and Rose, “Hey, actually, uh… I think I want to go out tonight.”
It came out of nowhere, or seemed to at the time anyway. Bobby had been doing well, better than he had in over a year, but he still had his bad days and his worse nights, and he still stressed himself out to the point of physical pain whenever Ray and Rose had friends over and he had to keep up appearances, and he still got a little panicked, a little paranoid, if they left him alone, especially around June and July.
It’s September now, three years and change since Bobby moved into the shabby little townhouse Ray and Rose rent together. In those three years, Ray saw very little of the charming, cheerful rockstar Rose met at the Orpheum after his band’s sound check. Bobby never played music, barely even listened to it, preferred being alone to talking to anyone but Ray and Rose, and didn’t leave the house without one or both of them by his side.
Until one day in May, when he wanted to go to an open mic night at some club downtown, asked to borrow one of Rose’s guitars, stared them down with a tight jaw and his shoulders up around his ears but only steel in his eyes, and said, when Ray went for his coat, “No, I don’t want you two to come.”
At home, during the week, Bobby is as soft and loving as ever, bickering with Ray over the TV, sitting on the counter next to Rose while she cooks, playing board games with them until late into the night when that's the only way he can keep his dinner down (it’s all about keeping him distracted, keeping his mind focused on anything but the guilt telling him he doesn’t deserve to eat when food is what killed his best friends). But on the weekends, he becomes an entirely different person. He goes out to play music they didn’t know he was writing, comes home drunk and shaky laughing about celebrities they didn’t know he was friends with. He drinks, probably a little too much, which Ray finds concerning only because Bobby used to freak out about anyone drinking, much less himself. Some hotshot from a record label saw him play once, some song he refuses to let Ray and Rose hear, and he's been introducing him to all kinds of sketchy people, people who’ll be “imperative for his career” once he has enough other songs to sign a contract, people Ray’s seen more than enough about on TMZ and doesn’t exactly approve of Bobby spending time with.
Oh yeah, and he goes by Trevor now, sometimes, when he’s out in the world. Ray’s still not really sure why.
But he seemed happy, or at the very least determined, and even though Ray and Rose may not entirely approve of all his choices, Bobby hasn’t been doing anything illegal or too too dangerous, and he’s 21, and it’s not like he’s their kid, so there’s not exactly a whole lot they can do about it.
Until he was supposed to be at a party on some actress’s yacht and Ray got a call at 4am from a clearly intoxicated woman calling him Trevor's dad and telling him to come collect your son, he’s drunk as all fuck and he totaled my car.
Ray doesn’t think he’s ever been so angry in his life, or so terrified, as he was standing in the front hallway in his pajamas, listening to a voice he recognized from talk show interviews and Jane Austen adaptations tell him, “He’s fine. My car isn’t.”
Worried, maybe. He’s been worried every minute of every day for the last three and a half years, because Bobby couldn’t sleep or couldn’t eat or couldn’t hold a conversation with strangers without giving himself a migraine. But Ray’s never been angry at him, angry about him, not once, until tonight. Just the thought of Bobby, who lost his brother to drunk driving and usually can’t so much as sit in the passenger seat without having a panic attack, getting drunk enough to drive someone else’s car into a ditch made Ray see red.
He wanted to punch something. He wanted to scream. He wanted to go to that stupid fucking yacht party or wherever the hell Bobby ended up and drag him back home by his ear.
“Where is he,” he growled, clutching the phone so tightly the plastic cracked, and barely waited to hear the address before he slammed the receiver back down and stomped back to the bedroom.
“What do you want to do?” Rose asks him now, manicured hands curled around the steering wheel as she peers out his window with fire in her eyes. She’s better in a crisis than he is, knows how to carve her anger into something useful instead of letting it bury deep inside of her until it explodes. Ray woke her the second he got off the phone, not just so that she’d know what was going on with their rebellious charge but so that she’d do the driving, so that she’d take charge, because Ray couldn’t trust himself to.
Now that he’s here, though, faced with Bobby lowering his shades to squint into the headlights, now that he can hear Bobby’s voice through the window, loud and slurred and more vibrant than Ray’s ever heard it but in a way that feels forced and wrong, bemoaning to his friends, “Oh my god, you called them?” Ray’s suddenly able to breathe through some of his blinding anger, push down the instinct he inherited from his father to lash out and hit something.
Something. The car or a tree or the ground. Not Bobby or Rose, no matter how this night turns out. That tendency he made sure to leave firmly in his father’s grave.
“Do what you have to,” he says quietly, reaching a hand over to link his index finger with hers. “He lost the privilege of not being embarrassed in front of his friends.”
“Some friends,” Rose mutters, but with permission given, she shoves the car into park and kicks open her door.
Ray gets out, too, but stays hovering next to the car, feeling awkward as all the young men and women standing around the accident site instantly turn to look at him.
Rose doesn’t care what other people think of her. She wastes no time stomping across the grass to stand over Bobby, hands on her hips, and demand, “What the hell were you thinking? Driving drunk? Were you trying to get yourself killed?”
The conversations around them ground to a halt. All eyes are on Rose and Bobby as he leans back on one hand, raises his chin to look at her, and takes a slow, unbothered sip of his drink.
“What are you gonna do, Rosie?” His voice is languid and layered with drunken fury. “Ground me?”
That’s enough of that. Ray stalks across the grass to stand behind his girlfriend, not caring if it draws undue attention to him. Bobby looks tiny on the ground like that, even if he’s smirking like he owns the world. “Bobby,” Ray says, his voice low and as calm as he can stand to keep it. “Get in the car. Now.”
Something shifts in the boy’s expression, visible even with his dark sunglasses on. He loses some of his fight, some of his rebelliousness. He nods and gets to his feet, swaying a little, his drink abandoned on the ground. Behind him, his friends laugh, but Bobby ignores them. He walks past Ray and Rose to the car and climbs into the backseat, and before Rose can follow him, Ray holds his hand out for the keys.
“Yeah, that’s probably a good idea,” she mutters, handing them over, and Ray doesn’t think he’s heard her sound this furious in years. Not that he blames her.
The car ride back to the apartment is silent for the first half a mile or so, as Bobby sprawls across the backseat and Rose seethes on the passenger side and Ray focuses all his attention on driving. But they’re still a good twenty minutes from home when Rose takes a deep breath, turns around in her seat, and says, “Bobby—”
“Oh, shut up,” he snaps before she’s even gotten the word out. “You’re not actually my mother, Rose. I don’t need you lecturing me, I got enough of that from Lissy about her fucking car.”
“Her car that you drove into a ditch because you were too drunk to see straight,” Rose snaps right back. “What the hell has gotten into you, Bobby? You of all people should know how dangerous that is!”
“Well maybe—” Bobby leans forward in his seat, lowers his sunglasses onto the bridge of his nose, looks Rose right in the eye. “Maybe I wanted to do something a little dangerous, for once in my fucking life.”
“Why? Because you wanted to scare us half to death? You wanted us to wake up to some call in the middle of the night saying you’d gone and killed yourself? You were doing better, Bobby.”
“Says who?” Bobby’s shouting now, and Ray’s hands tighten on the steering wheel as he guides the car through the dark streets. He knows he should get involved somehow, should stop Rose and Bobby before one of them says something they can’t take back, but before he can even think of what to say, Bobby’s continuing. “Just because I put on a happy face for you and your friends doesn’t mean I don’t still hate myself every fucking minute of every fucking day. Maybe I wanted to do something dangerous and stupid, did you ever think of that? Maybe I finally realized that everyone I care about goes and fucking dies on me, so why shouldn’t I join them?”
“Bobby!” Ray slams his foot on the brake, bringing the car to an abrupt stop in the middle of an empty road. He twists around in his seat, points a trembling finger in Bobby’s face, and shouts, “Stop it.”
Next to him, Rose gasps and claps a hand over her mouth. The silence that follows is palpable and cold as Ray and Bobby stare each other down, both of them breathing heavily. Bobby’s eyes are dark and glassy where they peer over his sunglasses,so that Ray almost can’t see when they suddenly brim with tears. But before he knows it, Bobby is crying, loud and ugly, ripping his shades off to bury his face in his hands.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he blubbers, over and over again, and all the anger that had been burning inside Ray fades to a guilt-ridden smolder.
He drags in a deep, almost painful breath, turns back around in his seat, and puts the car back into gear.
Nobody speaks the rest of the way home, though Bobby keeps crying, and Rose breathes shakily, sounding like she’s halfway to joining him. Ray grips the steering wheel so tightly his fingers ache, and tries to swallow back the awful, nauseating guilt boiling inside of him. He’s never yelled at Bobby like that before. He’s never yelled in front of Rose like that before. He feels like he’s his own father, shouting his wife and children into submission, and he hates himself for it.
But what the hell else was he supposed to do?
By the time they pull into the driveway, Bobby’s cried himself to sleep, hunched over in the backseat of the car, so Ray just switches off the ignition and lets the car settle into darkness.
“I—” he starts after a minute or two of silence.
“Shh.” Rose takes his hand, pulls it off the wheel and into her lap, twists their index fingers together. “Don’t you dare apologize,” she whispers, her voice teary but firm. “It’s what he needed to hear.” She glances over her shoulder at the sleeping boy in the backseat. “But I don’t know what we’re gonna do now.”
“I don’t know either.” Ray squeezes her hand, breathes, shoves the white-hot anger that lives inside him deeper and deeper down. “Whatever we can do. But he’ll have to let us.”
Ray puts his coffee down when he hears a groan from the second bedroom. It’s his third cup, because of course he didn’t sleep at all last night. Poor Rose had to go to work at nine a.m. but Ray was able to cancel a few appointments and stay home to read the newspaper until Bobby woke up.
He fills a glass of water and takes it and a bottle of aspirin into the bedroom, places them both on the nightstand in easy reach. Bobby’s lying on his stomach amid the rumpled covers, face pressed into the pillow, and he groans again when Ray sits on the edge of the bed and lays a hand on his back.
“Come on,” Ray says softly. “Sit up, face the world, this is what you get.”
Bobby groans and pushes himself up, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Think ‘m dying,” he mumbles.
“Yeah,” Ray scoffs. “That’s something we’ve gotta talk about.”
Bobby goes stock still, his breath audibly catching in his throat. Very slowly, he lowers his hands but doesn’t look at Ray as he reaches over to take the water and pill bottle from the bedside table. He takes two Aspirins and drinks most of the glass of water, then puts it all back and folds his hands in his lap, stares down at them, presses his lips together like he doesn’t quite trust himself to speak.
Ray wishes he could wait until Bobby’s a little more awake and a little less hungover to have this conversation. But he knows that he needs to have it before Rose gets home, before one of Bobby’s stupid friends calls to invite him out again, before anything like last night can ever happen again. So he sits there quietly, giving Bobby a moment or two to brace himself, and then says, “You scared the hell out of us.”
Bobby ducks his head even lower. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t.” Ray shakes his head. “Please, I can’t—We don’t want empty apologies, okay? Or broken promises. We don’t want you to feel like you have to pretend you’re okay when you’re not. But we don’t want to lose you either, Bobby. We love you too much for that.”
Bobby swallows hard, blushing, but doesn’t say anything, so Ray takes that as permission to continue.
“If you’re going to pull something like this again, you need to move out.”
“What?” Now Bobby looks up at him, eyes wide, hands twitching in his lap like he wants to reach for Ray but won’t let himself. “Ray, I—please. I’ll be better, I promise, I—just don’t kick me out, please, anything but that. I don’t want to lose you either, either of you. I—I—”
“No one’s kicking you out,” Ray gently assures him. “But if you want to live here under our roof, you need to follow our rules. No more staying out all hours of the night. No more drunk driving.” Bobby shrinks back, embarrassed, gives a tiny nod. “And if you’d rather keep being a rockstar and partying with celebrities all the time, then you can do it while living by yourself. But know that if that’s the choice you make, we’ll be checking up on you more than you’d probably like. Because we’re not going to let you destroy yourself.”
“I bet Rose is furious at me,” Bobby whispers, a little teary-eyed again.
“She’s worried about you,” Ray corrects. “We both are. But Bobby—” He pauses, waits until Bobby looks up at him. “You were right about one thing, last night, amid all of the things you were very wrong about. She’s not your mother. We’re not your parents. And I understand if you feel a little trapped here with us sometimes, if you feel like you need a place to escape and be an adult without us breathing down your neck all the time. So if you need us to back off a little, with the understanding that you’ll take some basic care of yourself… If you need us to parent you a little less—”
“No,” Bobby cuts him off, breathlessly, grabbing a fistful of Ray’s shirt sleeve. He meets Ray’s eyes, and in that moment, looks younger than Ray’s seen him in a very long time. “No, please, I—” His eyes well up with tears. He makes no move to wipe them away as they spill down his cheeks. “Ray, please parent me. Parent me more, I—I need you to hold me back from myself, because I don’t know how to do it anymore.”
Ray’s heart breaks. He pulls Bobby into a hug and holds him tight as Bobby cries into his shirt. They’re still sitting there holding each other when Rose gets home half an hour later, and Ray meets her gaze above Bobby’s head and mouths, We need to help him.
Because that much he knows, even if he has no idea how.