Chapter Text
So, there are sidewalks here.
Robin hadn’t expected that—he hadn’t really known what to expect. But he definitely didn’t expect the aching normality of concrete underneath his sneakers, cracks where weeds push up green and stubborn. The air is warm; but it’s not like the all-encompassing dry heat of summer in Colorado. It’s warm instead like a memory of heat–like somewhere in the space between living and dying the memory of what warmth feels (felt?) like had slipped away; and he can’t quite remember how to get it back.
He walks, because there isn’t a lot to do. The streets are the same, but they’re empty. Quiet in a way they never were; and it disconcerts him. Robin doesn’t like the quiet—he never has, and he doesn’t envision that changing anytime soon. The crawl of silence underneath his skin has him shifting, slightly; biting at his nails like he always used to when he slipped underneath a stream of endless thoughts. Same houses. Same telephone poles. Same peeling paint, sun-faded lawns, mailboxes dented in ways he recognised, though he couldn’t remember when he’d ever taken the time to look at them when he was alive.
There’s no screen doors banging. No dogs barking at nothing, no cars, no sound altogether aside from the steady, rhythmic inhale-exhale of his breathing. Not even that seems to stir the air—not in a way that matters, anyway.
He jams his hands deeper into the pockets of a jacket he doesn’t remember putting on. It’s a fair enough distraction from the urge to keep biting at his nails—oye, deja de hacer eso, he hears his mami’s voice saying. The jacket is worn at the wrists; soft, almost threadbare, like something broken in by years of use. These are the kind of things he notices now; and it would be like he has all the time in the world now except it’s more like he has all the time and none of the world. Things just exist here, he’s come to realise; no questions asked, and no answers offered.
Robin does not think of Finney.
Well, he tries not to, at least.
That’s the thing about being dead, he supposes—things are easier to avoid to a certain extent. But when it comes to Finney, Robin knows he’s never been good at leaving well enough alone. Once the thought of soft brown curls and even softer hazel eyes is in his mind, it echoes. It thuds; low, dense, like a heartbeat, pressing him down into the concrete.
He kicks at a small stone—watches the way it bounces once, twice, before it skitters to an uncertain stop. The sound disappears quicker than it began; swallowed up by the warmth in the air and the cracks in the concrete and the sudden, crushing ache that sits in the centre of Robin’s chest.
“You’d hate it here,” he’s muttering, and he hears the sound like he’s a stranger to his own voice; registers the words before realising that they come out of his own mouth. It comes out strange; not loud—there is no loud here—just distinct. Like every word holds its own space, sitting with weight and value and meaning on the tip of his tongue, and floating out into the not-quite-summery air.
He blinks.
It’s not like he’s ever been a quiet person, by any means—no, he figures he has a mouth, and what’s the point in never using it? He likes to talk; hates the silence that falls over him and threatens to press down hard when he doesn’t. But this? Speaking into the air like it’s listening—or maybe even like Finney’s listening (and look, Robin wishes he was, but he’s nothing if not realistic)—is not him. He’s not crazy. He doesn’t speak to things he knows aren’t there.
It stalls him. The words feel foreign coming off his tongue; not weird, per se. More just like the words don’t fall—not like when he usually speaks and the words fall down, down, down and he just watches them go (because what else is there to do?). No, the words float; they fly, they drift, and with them goes some of the weight that has been sitting on his shoulders since he died—the weight he wasn’t sure if he would ever shed. He’d kind of just resigned himself to the fact that it was his now, whether he likes it or not.
“Too quiet. You think too much when it’s quiet.”
He stops walking. Doesn’t know why he continues to speak—because as we’ve established, he’s not crazy. Not like that, at least; he can attest that for all the fights he’s wound up in, all the people he’s beaten down into the ground (he’d tell you that they deserved it, firstly; but hey, that’s not the point here), he has never, ever heard voices or any of that other crazy shit that you don’t see, but that you hear about in hushed whispers in the hallway and conversations that people try to keep behind closed doors.
Robin’s body turns—and it’s not entirely by choice. There’s something inherently instinctive about the way he shifts; like it’s leftover muscle memory from a long fucking thirteen years of awareness. The house across the street reminds him, loud and clear, that the ache in his chest isn’t going anywhere. Maybe it never will, he thinks as his eyes survey a chipped front step, a gutter hanging slightly out of place and a porch light that looks like it should flicker, but never does.
He doesn’t look at it long—he doesn’t need to.
Because the memories don’t live in that house across the road anymore; they don’t sit inside picture frames or cling to the wallpaper or even drift like particles of dust in the stagnant air of the bedroom with the window on the left side of the house (the window he distinctly remembers tumbling through on a number of different occasions). No, the memories live underneath his skin; and live they do, because he can feel the way his veins start to buzz with flashes of moments that don’t quite feel like they belong to him anymore.
Finney laughing—that startled little laugh, the one that sounded surprised to simply exist.
Finney standing just an inch too close, like he didn’t know he was allowed to want to (and maybe, just maybe, this one is accompanied by a twisting and fluttering in Robin’s chest that never really went away since it first set in, but he would never, ever admit to it).
Finney looking up at him, like Robin was something he had decided to believe in.
Standing across the street, Robin presses his tongue to the back of his teeth; grounding himself in the familiar, dull ache of pressure. It reminds him that he’s real (or was real?)
Robin does not cry.
Even here—where there’s no one to see, no world to harden himself against, no incoming fists or noise or even a semblance of any threat—he holds the line. He holds the line like it’s the only thing he truly remembers how to do; and maybe that’s because it is. He doesn’t know anymore, and doesn’t really care for finding out. Everything is a little bit duller here, everything aches a little bit more; and his focus on that seems to take away his fire for the things that might have mattered to him before.
Well…most of the things.
There are things, he’s found, that you can’t fight in the afterlife. Not in the way he wants to, at least—with sharp punches and an even sharper tongue to accompany.
And memory is one of them.
Robin sits down on the curb—notices the way the concrete sits smoother in some places, grainier in others. He plants his elbows firmly on his knees; the same way he always used to when he was a kid and life started to feel a little too heavy for someone so young, and he sits.
He stares at the asphalt. It sparkles underneath the not-quite-sunlight in the not-quite-summery air—tiny flecks of mica glinting faintly. He hadn’t noticed things like that when he was alive; the world was always too loud for the finer details.
Here, there is nothing but the details. Here, where he doesn’t talk to Finney—not because he doesn’t want to, but because he can’t. Maybe even wasn’t meant to. But his mind reels things with a clarity that feels like a knife sharpened too-well; not tactically cruel, but precise enough to sting inadvertently anyway.
Robin recalls a flash of the way Finney’s hands had shook the first day after everything. He distinctly remembers standing there, lingering in a corner of that house for a very, very long time the morning after the whirlwind of blood and basement and police and fresh air again. He remembers the way he’d wanted to say something, anything—I see you, I’m not going anywhere, I miss you, I—
The words had caught behind his teeth, of course, mainly because he was dead; and Robin Arellano was raised Catholic and so no he does not believe in the supernatural shit—not one inch of it. But also partly because saying things like that meant admitting they mattered. Like the way Finney looked at him sometimes—like Robin was the only stable ground in a collapsing world—didn’t shake him to his core; didn’t scare him beyond even the worst horrors that he had comprehension for.
Robin’s throat tightens. He tries to fight the feeling.
He had never regretted something as viscerally as he regrets this. Didn’t regret the fights, never, ever looked back wishing he didn’t stand in front of all those people and dare them to try.
But Robin regrets not saying it.
Not once, not ‘I care about you’ or ‘you are the closest thing I’ve ever had to belonging somewhere’ or ‘I would have stayed if I had a choice, I really would have.’
He didn’t say it then; and so now, he never will.