Chapter Text
Todd Anderson had always known his daughter was different. Quick-tongued, fast-thinking, her brain like a kaleidoskope (i don’t get why you englishers spell it with a ‘c’ so no) always flipping to the next color before the world had time to catch up. He’d recognized that restlessness. He’d once called it poetry.
Tonight, though, Robin looked nothing like poetry. She looked like a storm that didn’t know where to rain. It was nearly eleven when she knocked on his study door. One, two, three taps, uneven like her breath.
Todd set down the red pen he’d been using to grade essays and called softly, “Come in, Birdie.”
Robin slipped inside and closed the door behind her. Her hair was messy, messier than usual, and her blue eyes were rimmed red, the way they got when she’d been fighting herself for hours.
She groans and sinks down onto the sofa, opposite of her father's desk. “I’m dying. Bury me in the backyard with the garden gnomes. Tell the neighbors I went peacefully.”
Todd moves closer, sinking into the armchair next to her with the practiced gentleness of a man who spent years living in rooms where silence was safer than sound. “Want to talk about it?” He was used to her exzentriker (seriously too lazy to translate this fucking word it’s 4am when im writing this… maybe ill go back an translate tomorrow) by now, even though they didn't make sense to him a lot of the time.
Robin turns her head just enough to glare at him through a curtain of hair. “No.”
Then, deflating, “Maybe.”
Todd’s heart cracked in the old familiar way it always did when she sounded small. She pushed herself up to sit on the edge of the sofa, bouncing one knee, fingers tugging at the hem of her jeans. Todd waited. He’d learned long ago that forcing words made them brittle. Let them come when they were ready.
Finally she exhaled, shaky. “I think there’s something wrong with me.”
Todd fought every instinct to flinch. “Why would you think that?”
Robin swallowed. “There’s this girl,” she said, the word landing like a confession. “Her name’s Tammy Thompson and she’s… she’s stupidly pretty, like- like if Barbie had a cousin who read library books. And I-” Her voice cracked. “Every time she smiles at me I feel like my ribcage is melting. And the other day she touched my arm when she laughed and I thought I was gonna die. Like actually die.”
She was rambling, it was at the point of spiraling. Todd placed a gentle hand on hers. “Robin,” he said quietly, “do you like her?”
Robin stared at him, terrified. “You- I think I do. And I shouldn’t. I mean—girls aren’t supposed to like girls. Not like… that.”
Todd inhaled slowly. There it was. The real fear. He felt suddenly 17 again, standing in a snow-lit courtyard at Welton, a beating heart in his throat and another boy’s laughter echoing in his chest. “That’s okay, Birdie.”
“You don’t know that.” Her voice cracks. “What if something’s wrong with me? What if I’m—”
“Different?” Todd finishes gently. “Unusual? Not like everyone else?” He offers the smallest, softest smile. “Those can be very good things.”
Robin searches his face, confused. “You’re not… freaked out?”
“No,” he says, and means it with every breath he’s ever taken. “Not even a little.”
“But- Dad, I like girls.” She says it like a crime. And maybe it was, for the time at least. But Todd thought no such thing.
“And?” Todd tilts his head. “Girls are wonderful.”
“Not like that!”
“Exactly like that,” Todd replies. “And it’s okay.” He squeezed her hand. “Birdie, listen to me. There is nothing- nothing wrong with you.”
Her eyes filled despite the brave tilt of her chin. “How do you know?”
Because I learned it too late, he almost said. Because I didn’t get to tell him. Instead Todd smiled, soft and sad. “Because once… a long time ago… I fell in love with someone too.”
Robin blinked, thrown. “A woman?”
Todd shook his head gently. “No.”
Robin’s breath caught.
“He was… a poet,” Todd murmured, the word weighted with a reverence she’d never heard from him before. “The bravest, brightest person I ever knew. He made me feel seen. Like I was allowed to breathe in a world that kept telling me not to. He loved words and laughter and the kind of beauty most people are too scared to notice.”
Robin stared, sitting up straighter. “Dad…”
“I cared for him very deeply,” Todd continued, voice growing quieter. “The way you care about Tammy, I think.”
A tear slid down Robin’s cheek. She swiped at it angrily. “But I thought- I mean- don’t people hate-?”
“Some do,” Todd admitted. “But that’s about their fear, not your worth. And it doesn’t change who you are, or who you’re allowed to love.”
Robin let out a sob that shook her shoulders. Todd opened his arms, and she fell into them like she hadn’t done since childhood. He held her tight, resting his cheek on the top of her hair.
After a long while, she whispered, “Was he your first love?”
“He was,” Todd answered softly. “And he taught me things I’m glad I can teach you now.”
Robin sniffed. “Like what?”
Todd kissed her hair. “That your heart isn’t a mistake. And neither is the way it loves.”
She pulled back just enough to see his face. “What happened to him?”
Todd’s throat tightened. “He… passed away. When we were young.”
Robin’s expression crumpled. “I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” he said. “But loving him is something I’ll never regret. Not a single day.”
Robin wiped her face. “Do you think… do you think I’m going to be okay?”
Todd gave her the kind of smile that had once belonged to a boy who believed in standing on desks to say what he wanted. “More than. I think you’re going to be extraordinary.”
She laughed wetly. “Even if Tammy Thompson likes boys who wear too much hair gel and pubescent cologne?”
“Even then,” Todd chuckled.
Robin leaned into him again, and Todd held her, thinking of a winter night. A cave of boys reading poetry by candlelight, and a smile that had changed his life. He’d lost Neil, but he’d gained Robin. Brilliant, defiant, and awkward Robin.
Todd looks at the mantle again, at the edges of a life he once lived, the one that shaped the father he became. For the first time in years, the memory of Neil Perry doesn’t hurt. It warms. He thinks Neil would have liked Robin. She has his fire. His stubbornness. His tenderness, too, hidden just beneath the thorns.
Todd presses a kiss to the top of her head. “You’re going to be okay,” he says.
Robin closes her eyes. “Yeah,” she whispers. “I think I might be. Thanks, dad”
He would make sure she never felt broken for something as beautiful as love.
The house was silent again, almost too silent. Robin had gone to bed, leaving the faint scent of peppermint shampoo and nervous teenage tears in the air. Todd sat on the couch long after she left, hands folded, staring at nothing. He should have felt relief.
Pride, even. He had been the father she needed. But instead there was an old ache rising in him—slow, persistent, like the tide returning to shore no matter how many times he tried to deny it water.
Neil Perry.
Todd closed his eyes. It had been years since he let himself think the name fully, without flinching. He stood, wandered to the bookshelf, and touched the spine of a collection of Keats the way one touches a bruise—carefully, already knowing it would hurt. He opened it. A folded, yellowing paper slipped out. Todd’s breath hitched.
Neil’s handwriting.
God, he’d forgotten how alive it looked.
“T—
Meet me after study hall? Found something I want to show you.
—N”
That was all. Just a note. But Todd felt seventeen again, pulse quickening the same way it had the day Neil had slipped it into his book. The memory rose up around him—unavoidable, vivid.
Todd had been waiting in the courtyard, shifting nervously from foot to foot. Snow was just beginning to gather, tiny flakes catching in his hair. He remembered clutching the note so tightly it wrinkled. Neil arrived at a brisk jog, cheeks flushed, eyes bright with that spark he carried everywhere.
“There you are!” Neil grinned, brushing snowflakes from his eyebrows. “Come on.”
He didn’t wait for a reply; he just hooked his fingers lightly around Todd’s wrist, too light to be a grab, too intentional to be an accident, and tugged him along the path toward the woods behind Welton. Todd remembered the warmth of Neil’s hand exactly.
He remembered every second of trying not to think about it.
“Where are we going?” Todd managed, breath puffing in the cold.
“You’ll see.”
Neil always said that. And Todd always followed.
They ducked past the tree line, boots crunching in the frost. Neil finally stopped at a small clearing where stones made a rough, natural circle. Almost like a miniature amphitheater.
“I found it earlier,” Neil said, releasing Todd’s wrist. “It reminded me of… I don’t know. A stage. Or maybe a secret fort. Thought you might like it.”
“Me?”
“Yeah,” Neil said simply, as if that were obvious. “You get quiet when the others get loud. I figured maybe you’d want a place that’s just… ours.”
Ours.
Todd’s ears went hot. "But- But you're the actor, Neil. I'm-"
Neil hopped onto one of the stones, arms spread dramatically. “Picture it, Todd! A midnight performance. Snow as our audience. The spirits of fallen poets as our critics.”
Todd laughed, breathless from more than the cold. “Neil, it’s freezing.”
“So? Drama thrives in adversity.” Neil jumped down, landing too close, too easily in Todd’s space. His grin softened. “Besides… I needed to see you.”
Todd swallowed hard. “Why?”
Neil’s smile faltered. Not in fear, but in honesty. “Because I like talking to you. And you listen in a way no one else does.”
Todd felt that like a blow and a gift all at once. The wind whispered through the branches. Neil shoved his hands into his coat pockets, rocking on his heels.
“Sometimes,” Neil said quietly, “I wish I could tell you things I can’t tell anyone else.”
Todd’s heart hammered. “You can tell me.”
Neil looked at him. Really looked with his eyes lingering a second longer than friendship required. For years Todd had wondered if that was the moment. If Neil had almost said it. If he himself had almost answered.
But Neil just exhaled, a puff of warm breath in the cold. “Maybe someday.”
Then, to lighten the moment, he grabbed Todd’s hands and spun him clumsily in the snow, laughing like joy itself. Todd barely remembered the spinning. He remembered the warmth of Neil’s gloves against his own, the way Neil looked at him like he was part of the joke, part of the world, part of him. That night ended with Neil walking Todd back to the dorms, their shoulders brushing, both pretending not to notice.
But Todd noticed.
He noticed everything.
Todd opened his eyes, finding his study dim and too still. The memory left a tightness in his chest, painful, but also… treasured. He pressed the note between the pages again, fingers lingering. For years he had punished himself by avoiding these memories, thinking it was disloyal to feel joy when the story had ended in tragedy.
But Robin, sweet, brave Robin, had looked at him tonight with fear he recognized too well. He’d wanted to give her something he never had: the certainty that she wasn’t wrong for loving differently. And in doing so, he’d opened a door to his own past. A door he’d kept locked far too long.
Todd closed the book gently. “Thank you,” he whispered to the air, unsure if he meant Neil, or Robin, or both.
His heart hurt. But it also felt full. Maybe memories didn’t just haunt.