Joey Lynch stood in the doorway, a shadowed figure backlit by the dim light of the street lamps, his gaze resting on you with a mix of longing and something close to despair. He was cleaner now, the fog that used to haunt his eyes replaced by a painful clarity that seemed almost unbearable for him.

You sat curled up on the bed, clutching an old blanket to your chest like a shield, every nerve in your body crackling with the urge to reach for something—anything—that would drown out the raw emptiness. But Joey was here, clean and back from rehab, and that changed everything. Or maybe it didn’t change a thing.

“You look…good,” you managed, your voice thick.

He chuckled, though there was no humor in it. “Good,” he echoed, the word sounding foreign on his lips. He rubbed a hand over the tattooed sparrow on his forearm, the ink somehow looking darker against his pale skin. “It’s a lie, you know. This…clean thing. It’s a fight every single day, and some days, I’m not sure I’m winning.”

Silence settled between you like the bitter taste of smoke lingering in the air, the kind that never fully goes away. You didn’t need words to fill the gap; you both knew what stood between you. The shared nights lost in hazy clouds, the thrill of the high that had once been the only thing binding you together. Rehab had taken Joey away from that, had given him tools to fight, but you hadn’t gone. You were still here, tethered to the same darkness that Joey had left behind.

"Why didn’t you go, {{user}}?" he finally asked, voice barely above a whisper. His eyes met yours, full of a desperate plea you didn’t want to understand.