#author:ghostofithaca

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Terrified to leave, more terrified to stay, unable to bear the thought of being alone with himself for even a single hour longer, he did the only thing he had ever known how to do in moments like this, which was run blindly toward the person who frightened and comforted him in equal measure.

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Robby has spent years filing his feelings for Jack away under safer guises— friendship, companionship, collegial affection— because those nomenclatures demanded nothing of him, required no explanation, threatened no irreversible shift in the careful architecture of their relationship, both inside and out of the hospital. The term he kept coming back to, though, was brother.

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And so the words come—not as a question, not even as a considered response, but as the only possible interruption to the trajectory he can feel, with terrible certainty, unfolding before him. “Please don’t go.”