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As he sits outside his designated cabin at Alpine Lake Camp and halfway through his first joint, Finney Blake thinks to himself that he’ll never love again.
Maybe he was young, maybe they were both young, but what could have been and never was will haunt him forever. The what-ifs at the mere thought of Robin have not dulled in the last four years, and he doesn’t think they ever will when he looks at Ernesto.
Ernesto, who looks like the spitting image of Robin. If it weren’t for the fact that he knew he was Robin’s younger brother, it wouldn’t be wrong to believe them to be identical twins. But no, because Ernesto- a sweet and relatively gentle boy- was no Robin. His Robin with his bloody and scarred knuckles, who was known as one of the toughest boys in their small shitty town, at only thirteen. Forever thirteen.
He remembers the first time he looked at Ernesto and was met with only the face of Robin. Robin, the last time he saw him. You’d think Robin was still alive, but no, Robin would have kept his hair longer, his ever-present bandana, and tank top, something that he would grow with. He could imagine his lean frame growing muscle as he got into more fights, as he picked up a more physical activity like boxing as they grew older. How his face would grow stronger and lose the stubborn baby fat that stuck to his cheeks which he would often jokingly bemoan about to Finney, how it would ruin his street cred, come on Finn just look at my face, I won’t be taken seriously looking like this when we get to high school.
Right. High school.
Most days, he couldn’t bear looking Ernesto in the face, in fear of seeing what could have been. In looking up and seeing someone with Robin’s face, but no Robin in sight.
He’d do anything to be able to see him. To give him one last chaste kiss, even to hold his bruised and brutalized body, to be able to say goodbye to him one last time.
But he couldn’t. He knew that.
The last time he saw him, Robin had been in a body bag. Then, in a closed casket.
He only had his dreams.
That is, when they were good ones.
Finney had more nightmares than dreams these days. Often replaying his time at The Grabber’s merciless hands, some worse than what he had remembered experiencing within those days down in the basement. Sometimes, he wonders whether these too are just memories, that what he sees is what he had actually experienced but refused to accept as truth. It wouldn’t be the most surprising revelation if so.
More often than not, Robin is a fixture in these nightmares. His least favorite and yet most common, as the months and years go by, goes like this.
He dreams that once he gets his bearings after just being grabbed and coming to in that basement, he'll wake up only to look down and find Robin. He’ll be too late, is what he knows, because he’d be confronted with his body, not a living, breathing version of his only love. Finney would look down and find that the only person who knew him wholly and truly had been brutally murdered. Taking in the terrifying image of blood pooling from a shallow cut across his neck and a larger knife wound through the heart, Finney remembers as his dream self would painstakingly crawl towards Robin’s rapidly cooling body with blurring vision and a panicked breath. He’d reach him only to hesitate as his trembling hand hovered over Robin’s chest, terrified of reaching out only to feel cold skin and an unmoving chest. He’d call out Robin and get no response. In his increased panic, he would reach out to shake him anyway and encounter only cold skin, but would ignore it as he continued to look for any response, cries of “Robin” and “Rob” and finally “angel”, as he is forced to confront the fact that the love of his too young life is gone.
Then, and only then, would Finney Blake gently lay his head down on Robin Arellano’s shoulder and tuck the rest of his body into his side as though it was the two of them alone in Robin’s dark room at night once more, Finney awake and feeling a calm settle within his body as he listened to the steady and slow beat of Robin’s heart. From there, nothing stops the brutal and hopelessly unrestrained sobs that forcibly wrench out of him from deep below his chest and inside his broken heart as he cries for his beautiful, brave boy. His angel.
He never knows how the nightmare ends because every time, without fail, he starts awake after an indeterminate amount of time with tears streaming down his face and that same agonizing feeling in his heart when he first realized Robin was dead and never coming back. Maybe that is the end, curled up into the side of the dead body of his beloved in a state of never-ending anguish as his own body loses the fight with his heartbreak.
The rare dreams, though, those are the ones he hoards within himself like a dragon to gold.
In his dreams, he remembers the good moments. Their stolen kisses in the safety of Robin’s room, sneaking into movie screenings they were often too young to be allowed to watch as they held hands in the darkness of the theater, Robin cheering him on during one of his baseball games, or the first time they met as two five-year-old boys who knew nothing of the grim future that awaited them a mere few years later, when the only thing that mattered was little Robin Arellano trying to cheer up little Finney Blake who always sat alone on the swings at recess time and never tried to join their other classmates at the monkey bars.
In his dreams, sometimes, he gets glimpses of a never-going-to-happen future where Robin lives, and they get to continue being Robin-and-Finney. They get to be more than a what-if because they simply are. They get their shit together, and one is never without the other henceforth. In these bittersweet dreams, they don’t get to be open, but there is a surety to their dynamic that was so different than before. The knowledge that grows as their relationship does, that the other loves them and represents safety in the brutal world they live in.
There is fourteen, where the relationship dynamic changes post-basement, and they fumble through the trauma and their feelings for one another together. There is fifteen, when their trauma gets the best of them, and their coping looks a little too unhealthy and destructive, but at least they know they have each other. Sixteen, where their assurance in one another has stabilized, and they’re able to move into the next stage of their lives and relationship with faith that nothing will tear them apart.
There is seventeen- now- where The Grabber is back, but he’s not hopelessly alone and struggling to live with himself and his past. Maybe they relapse, and their bad habits come back to bite them in the ass, but neither is without the other, and they're able to hold onto each other with all their strength and endure.
There are hardships, but they are not stagnant, because they have each other. They have someone who understands what they have endured because the other has endured the same and together have come out the other side stronger, if not often terrorized by their grim past.
This is also another point he rarely dwells on, mostly because he forces himself to, knowing it would only hurt him in the end, because it’s only a fantasy.
In reality, Robin dies in a cold and disgusting basement at the hands of the devil himself in the same way that four other boys before him have.
In reality, Finney was kidnapped and fought to survive with the help of his lost love and boys like them who only wanted for someone to survive what they had experienced.
In reality, Finney lives and continues to survive with the trauma, the loss, and the emptiness of a world without Robin in it.
Reality is much more brutal than what his dreams try to show him.
Now, all he ever sees in the world is the bad he tried so hard to ignore. Everything he was never able to see or chose not to in his childish ignorance has become blindingly inescapable. What once was something to endure and ignore- because it could be worse, right? He won’t always need to worry about schoolyard bullies, and he’ll get to leave this shitty town with his shitty dad and make something of himself- is only another notch in his internal list of proof that the world has never been right or just. So why fight with himself to throw around a smile and pretend everything was okay if the good thing in his life has been cruelly ripped away from him?
Before he realizes, a tear has slipped past, and it’s almost as though a dam breaks. It is only a matter of time before the rest come falling.
One thing that has stayed constant throughout the years has been his refusal to let himself cry over his life and loss. It is not that he believes mourning Robin is worthless or that he has no right to despair over his trauma, simply that he knows it does nothing to help him and that it isn’t something Robin would accept for his own lover. No, Robin would fight any force known and unknown to mankind for the right of his Finn to not only live, but thrive in the after.
(Somewhere, in a place far from here, Robin does just that. Even in death, they are one. Maybe in another universe, different from this one, they would be what many call ‘soulmates’.
This is not that universe.
But it does not mean that they are not the closest that has ever come to be in this one.)
With that final thought, and before his wandering mind chooses to betray one of the only pieces of control he’s held firm since then, Finney takes a final drag and puts out the last dredges of a joint long past its usefulness.
Standing up, he tells himself that it's no use thinking about the past or what-ifs, not when his baby sister and his last love’s baby brother could be in danger.
He messed with the wrong family if he thinks he can get away with that on his watch.
This time, he’ll make sure that piece of shit stays dead, for his sister, for the closest thing he has to a brother, but most importantly, for his angel who was taken too soon.