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The third time Ragh said no to a shot, Fabian resigned himself to the fact that he would have to be a friend and have a meaningful conversation about why. He wasn’t sure what a Bastion City Buccaneers party would look like when they won and game, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to find out. Everyone was shouting and dancing and trying to convince someone else why they should leave to go to some other club, clearly working off plenty of steam, while Ragh sat in a booth staring at the table in front of him.
Fabian slid into the booth next to Ragh and set his drink down on the table. “You played well, you know,” he said, on the off chance it would be a quick fix.
The look Ragh gave in response made it abundantly clear that was not the case. He said, “We lose as a team,” because that was the kind of guy he was. It also meant he knew he’d played well, and that wasn’t the problem.
“Then how come your team is losing their minds and you’re sitting here moping? That’s not the crab king I know.”
Ragh took Fabian’s beer and drained it in one sip. “You’ll never defeat me,” he said in a monotone.
“That was almost impressively sad, man.”
“Sorry,” Ragh said with just a little more emotion in his voice. “Tonight was kind of a lot.”
“It was a tough game,” Fabian said, and he wasn’t just saying that to be sympathetic. They’d lost in overtime because of a stupid mistake that was only mostly outside of the Buccaneers’ control. Ragh had still played great, because he usually did, but it never fun to lose.
But Ragh said, “Not the game,” and it seemed like he wanted to say more. Instead he put his head down on the table and groaned.
“No, no, pick your head up,” Fabian coaxed.
Ragh waved him off and said into the table, “I’m having a weird gay moment and you feel like maybe not the right person to have it with.”
“Come on, dude,” Fabian said, and actually started to tug at Ragh’s arms to try and pry him up. “You don’t think I’ve had weird gay moments?”
“No, you haven’t.”
“My dad was a pirate. Weird gay moments are practically my birthright. I just don’t yell and cry and make a big deal about it like some people we know,” Fabian said, and signaled the bartender for two more drinks. Lord knew he needed both of them, although he thought it was best to try to be kind and let Ragh have one.
Ragh finally picked his head up off the table to look at Fabian, wide-eyed. “I try to be chill about it, I promise.”
“I was talking about Kristen, actually,” Fabian said. Ragh wasn’t subtle—he’d died twice for the first straight boy he fell in love with—but even Kristen she was the messiest person in Spyre, and every day she spent more and more time explaining the intricacies of everything she had going on with Tracker and Gertie and, inexplicably, a resurrected Lucy Frostblade. There had been a lot of tears and even more late night cottage cheese á la mode. “I can call and have her corroborate, if you want. I’m very supportive.”
Ragh started to drop his head forward onto the table again, but Fabian was quicker. He put one palm on Ragh’s forehead and held it there until Ragh said, “It’s embarrassing.”
“Okay, this is getting ridiculous.” Fabian took his hand away and Ragh, in a truly baffling moment of self pity, let it fall forward and full-force slam into the table. He picked it back up again, unfazed. “We fought the Nightmare King together. You were there at the first shrimp party when I threw up marinara sauce into the third hot tub. You watched me try to make Aelwyn Abernant think I was cool for an entire summer. Nothing you say can be more embarrassing than any of that.”
It seemed like the argument worked, because Ragh grabbed the drink the waiter brought over, downed it, and said, “I think I just now realized I need to get over Gorgug.”
Well. “Shit.”
“See?” Ragh said, but at least he kept his head up of his own accord. “It’s way worse than whatever weird shit you and Aelwyn had going on.”
“Respectfully, Ragh, you have no idea what was going on behind closed doors.” He would’ve said more, but that didn’t feel like the sticking point of the conversation. Or maybe it was just that they couldn’t really get into the conversation, or any kind of introspection, with the music thudding and the lights flashing and Ragh’s teammates bellowing over by the bar. For a brief moment Fabian was concerned about the humidity of summer in Bastion City, but then he remembered that he was a good friend and asked, “Do you want to go for a walk?”
Ragh nodded immediately and gathered up the empty glasses on the tablet take to the bar on the way out. Fabian didn’t help him, because the bar had employees for that, but he did wait on the sidewalk and try to think of the most empathetic thing to say in his situation. It was a hard puzzle to solve. There was the fact that Ragh had hooked up with plenty of hot guys Fabian knew about and probably more that he didn’t, but that seemed maybe insensitive. He could’ve brought up all the stuff that was annoying about Gorgug—he stated the obvious a lot, was slow to open up, and he was kind of messy—but that stuff was so outweighed by the good that it felt almost laughable to list out. So, then, the only thing that remained was to talk about how Fabian had gone through the exact same thing the summer before. Life got worse, and then it got better. Gorgug stuck around. Granted, Fabian had never told anyone about it, but that didn’t change the results.
Ragh stepped out of the bar and looked around for a second, the entirety of which Fabian let himself spent believing he would run away and never tel anyone what he’d just admitted to himself. Then he called out, “Over here!”
“Want to go down to the water?” Ragh asked once he’d caught up. Fabian nodded and so he led them down the street, away from the crowds of people and towards the wind coming off the harbor. “I walk a lot. I don’t have a car, you know, or a lot of people to give me rides.”
He trailed off, the unspoken truth that they’d all spent the past year with Gorgug on speed dial for rides in the van hanging in the air. It tangled with the humidity to get heavier and heavier until Fabian was forced to break the tension by saying, “You’re not the only one who’s had a thing for Gorgug, you know.”
Ragh kept walking, hands in the pockets of his shorts. “Yeah, I know, dude. There was Zelda, and then Unit, and now-”
“I wasn’t talking about them.”
“It makes sense that people at school were into him, so I figured-”
“Ragh. Please. Use context clues,” Fabian said, and then as an extra hint he pointed to himself with both thumbs.
The look of surprise on Ragh’s face as he caught on bordered on cartoonish. He stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk and said, “Shit, dude. You never said anything.”
“I got over it pretty fast,” Fabian said, “but it was a rough few months.”
Without going into too much detail, Fabian told Ragh about the previous summer. Long weeks spent in the Hangvan helping Gorgug paint the sigil because he was the only one who knew calligraphy, the miles covered alone on his bike when he needed a break, knowing Gorgug was breaking up with Zelda and listening to Kristen talk him through it, the inevitable role reversal when Gorgug had to stop her from drunk texting Tracker at every stop they made. “It was a horrible idea,” Fabian admitted. “I think it would’ve gone really badly. It for sure would’ve messed with the party, and it probably had more to do with me than it had to do with him, but still. He’s fundamentally one of the best people in the world. It’s hard to stop noticing once you start.”
They’d made it most of the ay to the water. The soft sound of waves lapping against the dock punctuated the long silence before Ragh said, “He was my first, like, real kiss. I know it was complicated since I died right after and there was a dragon there, too, but I kind of always thought more would happen one day. That it was cosmic or something, instead of just being a way to stop me from hitting you guys. Which is definitely what it meant, so.”
“Gorgug has plenty of other ways to take people out of fights,” Fabian said, and he meant it. The guy had soloed a purple worm for like a whole minute during the Last Stand. There had probably been better odds of him succeeding if he’d just swung at Ragh with an axe. “But that’s the problem with Gorgug, you know? He didn’t hit you because he loves you. He just doesn’t love you like that.”
Ragh scuffed his shoe against the ground and said, “I guess I’m just worried that my crush on him was the only thing keeping me a good guy.”
“What?”
“I was an asshole for most of high school. I did everything Dayne told me to do because I was in love with him, and then I started doing what you guys said and I was good, but what if I start dating someone bad?” Ragh scrunched his face up and a tear still managed to escape and dash down his cheek. “I’ll probably do whatever they say and you’ll have to kill me again.”
If Fig were there, she would’ve known exactly what to say. Kristen would’ve talked him out of his doubt before they even left the bar, fuck, even The Ball would’ve known how to tell Ragh that nothing he was thinking was true. There’d be some logical way to explain it, maybe with a corkboard. But Fabian wasn’t any of those people, so he did what he thought was best: He put his head down and launched himself forward.
Ragh wasn’t easy to knock over, even though he was caught completely by surprise. Fabian had to shift his weight down and pick him up off the ground a little first before slamming him down, the sidewalk rough against his knees and arms. “What the fuck, Fabian?” Ragh said through his teeth as he fought. When he got his feet down and started pushing up it was game over and Fabian let himself be thrown off and onto the ground.
Both boys looked up at the sky. There were only a few stars visible because of the lights in the city, but it was still nice. “I just proved you wrong,” Fabian said.
Cicadas chirped in time as Ragh caught his breath. “You fucking tackled me.”
“Yeah. I did something bad, and you stopped me. But you said if you had bad friends you’d be like them, which is clearly not true,” Fabian reasoned.
“That seems like an oversimplification-”
“Since when do you use words like oversimplification?”
Ragh sat up and scrubbed a hand over his head. “When they’re right for what I want to say.”
Fabian skipped sitting and leapt straight onto his feet. He was dancing for no one, sure, but the audience wasn’t what dance was about, and also, Ragh seemed to enjoy it fine. He reached a hand down and pulled Ragh with him, brushing off the thank you in favor of saying, “You’re good. Okay?”
“Okay,” Ragh said, and hung his head like maybe he really believed it. “I got kinda mad at Gorgug, though. Or upset, I don’t know. I think I thought this weekend was going to go a certain way and it didn’t.”
Fabian knew exactly what he was talking about. He and Gorgug had come down from Elmville together to see this game, but it was against the Dune Fort, and Gorgug’s parents had surprised him by coming down for a visit. He’d gone out to dinner with them after and he was probably going to stay in the extra bed they had in their hotel room. Fabian hadn’t thought to miss him because he saw Gorgug all the time. He had a lot more context about how Ragh felt about that, now.
Ragh pulled a fistful of rocks out of his pocket—God, had Fabian really hit him that hard?—and said, “I wanted him to be here to see me, or something.”
“That’s the worst part about it!” Fabian said, because now that he’d tried violence, he could stop trying to live up to Fig’s example and start being honest. “He really was here to see you, and he spent the entire game telling his mom about how cool and fun you were in high school, but he’s like everyone’s favorite guy so there’s never time to notice it for yourself.”
“And that’s what’s so fucked up! It’s impossible to be mad at him.” Ragh pulled another fistful of rocks out of his other pocket—okay, now it was getting ridiculous—only this time he hucked them out over the harbor.
Fabian listened to the splashes as they hit the water. He thought about Gorgug’s floppy hair and the way his smile would start out shy and then break into something like the opposite of shy, like welcoming, and the stretch of his shoulders as he worked with his Artificer’s tools. It was enough for him to reach down and grab his own rocks, throw them into the water with a shouted, “Fuck you! Be worse!”
The look Ragh gave Fabian was nothing short of delighted, and it didn’t change as he launched more rocks: “I can’t do better, but I can do just as good!”
“Yes, Ragh!” Fabian jumped over and put his hands on Ragh’s shoulders. “More!”
“I’m a catch, and you used to really struggle with passing plays!”
“Specific, but good. One more.”
Ragh crouched down and grabbed something that could only be described as a decorative boulder. He planted his feet and pulled upwards, straining with the weight of it, and Fabian could see his rage ripple through his muscles and into his fingers as the rock inched its way up into the air. Just as quickly it was sailing through the air, landing in the harbor with a deep, almost cartoonish splash. “I don’t have to love you to be good!”
They stumbled back up the street towards the club, laughing, shouting, and by the time they got there the team was long gone. By the end of the night Fabian and Ragh were sitting in a dive bar they’d found on the way to Ragh’s apartment, arms around each other, butchering the Cig Figs song that was playing on the speaker. During the bridge, when Fig-in-the-recording was truly shredding on her bass, Ragh turned to Fabian and said, “Sorry I doubted you. I’ll for sure come to you with my next weird gay moment.”
“Please don’t,” Fabian said, clapping him on the shoulder. “This was so fucking stressful. You have to take everything I told you to the grave.”
Ragh got deadly serious. It took a terrifyingly short amount of time for his lips to quiver and his eyes to fill with tears. “I’ll take it further, bro. Like into the afterlife.”
“Yes, perfect. Bartender! Bring us more rum, we need to make an oath!”
They took that oath, and then maybe they took a few more, neither of them could really remember. And the next time they came down for a game and Gorgug did make it out, it was twice as fun. Partially because Gorgug really did make everything better, but also because Ragh found a hot guy to dance with, and Fabian called Mazey so she could say hi to everyone. And when the three of them walked down to the harbor, tipsy and swaying, all the rocks stayed on the shore.