rotten work (the end) | robbe x sander
Chapter word count // 13k
Warnings // (offscreen) violence, unhealthy attitudes/self-loathing wrt mental-illness, dealing with trauma, robbe being the gentlest soul and best boyfriend to ever walk this earth, sander being too perfect for this world
Summary //Â Robbe is a college freshman whose reckless habits and excessive drinking are starting to look an awful lot like calculated self-destructionâthough his loneliness might be the thing that kills him first.
Sander is a visual arts major a few years above Robbe, with a face nobody can forget and a fuck boy reputation he canât seem to shake.
Everybody warns Robbe to stay away from the Sander, unless he wants to get burned. But Robbeâs the kind of boy who likes playing with fire.
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Robbe didnât think there were another pair of hands as ferociously beautiful as Sanderâs. They were masterful on the fretboard of his guitar, spider-quick and arrogant in their competent dexterity, a second-nature savoir-faire that was all the more thrilling because Sander seemed entirely indifferent to how good he was. Â Robbe was transfixed by the flutter of tendons in Sanderâs paint-streaked clever capable hands, the twist of veins in his forearms, the hollows of his wrist-bones, even his bitten-down nails. It seemed unfair to Robbe that Sander should be so casually good at this too, like he was at everything else. Sander didnât even care about being a musician: he just did this for fun.
The rest of him was just as damnably gorgeous to watch on stage. His hips were knife-blades. His torso was slinky and slippery with sweat, the colors of his tattoos luminous under the oscillating strobe lights. Never had Sander been more angular, more rangy, the sinews of his body taut and tormented and alive with fierce energy. He was worryingly skinny, but Robbe knew firsthand how deceptively strong Sander was. He could lift Robbe up or flip him over or manhandle him into whatever position he liked without blinking an eye.
Robbe shivered. This venue is bigger than their ordinary house-party gigs: the art department booked an entire bar, a big one, and it was full to the brim. It was hot. And yet he shivered.
Sanderâs eyes were on him.
There was nothing quite like being in a room full of people, and meeting your loverâs eyes across the room. The deliciousness of your secret, private intimacy, ricocheting without notice between all those other living bodies. And there were many bodies between them. Sander had never played before a crowd this huge.
But he was born to play on a stage like this. Sander was his own electromagnetic field. Onstage he sulked and stomped and terrorized. He could be cool and aristocratic as a vampire one second, and then swing without warning into overdrive, wild and unhinged. He looked like a burnout junkyard hero, a libertine, a king. A degenerate poet, a decadent dirtbag, a beautiful nihilistic ringmaster. Every flick of his eyebrow captivated. Every quirk of his mouth. Every time he tipped his head back to sing, exposing the glorious undulation of his golden throat, every jerk of his hips spoke directly to each and every cell in Robbeâs body. Sander had him in a voodoo-chokehold. He was under a spell. No one escaped his seduction. Not one eye wandered. Robbe looked around: the room was a sweating gawking mass of punchdrunk fools, a hundred fish caught on Sanderâs indifferent hook.
The thing about Sander was that this was no facade, no mask, no performance: this, too, was Sander. He was the soft tender-hearted boy Robbe discovered in the sheets every morningâeach day an archaeological wonder, a new unearthing, a revelationâand the charismatic force-of-nature who could bring an entire room to its knees with a careless snap of his fingers. It was all Sander. He was a jewel with a million edges, each one more stunning than the next. Robbe couldnât help but feel a little jealous, a little possessive of Sander, with all those strange eyes on him.
But he was proud, too. Because he was Robbeâs. That was the most exhilarating thing of all. When Robbeâs gaze met Sanderâs over that writhing crowd, they might as well have been alone in a quiet room.
(Read the Final Chapter on Ao3)
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