“Did you listen to anything I said? You’re not going to let me down,” Robbie says adamantly. He rushes so Vance can’t protest. “You know how I know? You’ve had so many opportunities. Times where even I could’ve seen why you’d do it.”

He thinks about fights, about the early days of being Speedball again where the struggle to be normative was constant, arguments of principle that Robbie was certain weren’t going to go his way.

But then, they did. Because Vance swing the argument by strength of will, and all of Robbie’s pre-emptive anger disappeared. Vance can’t disappoint him. There’s some sort of universal constant in play. “You can’t just let me have this? Everyone's got this power where they say something and I get all turned around and nothing looks the same anymore. Just let me know something again.”