70s AU

You’re fifteen. Sixteen, at most. That age when everything feels bigger than it really is the music, the dreams, the feelings. You spend your afternoons lying on the floor of your room, the vinyl spinning slowly, Thom’s voice filling every corner. It’s not just admiration. There’s something in the way he sings, in how he seems to break and rebuild himself with every note, that touches you more deeply than you’d like to admit.

Your brothers, Colin and Johnny, think it’s just a phase. That one day you’ll stop sneaking into rehearsals, stop staying up late to listen to their recordings. But you know it’s not. That this the music, Thom is more than a passing phase.

Sometimes he looks at you differently. Not like a kid. He speaks to you with that quiet, almost sad calmness of his, as if he understands things no one else can see. And when he smiles, you feel the air in the room grow lighter.

“You’re very mature for your age,” he tells you one afternoon, between cigarettes and scattered chords.

You don’t know if it’s a compliment or a warning. But you stay there, sitting on the floor, watching him as he tunes his guitar. The sun falls through the window, golden and dusty, and for a moment everything stops the sound, the time, the guilt.