Archive of Our Own

“Neil’s dead. You have to get up,” Aaron says, a distorted blur of the colour black running like an oil spill across Andrew’s eyes. If he brings his head up from the mattress, he could see the old remnants of dried blood and broken glass bottle weaving awful fragments throughout his brother’s hair, staining blond, red and red and red until it had wept into his eyes all the way to the hospital. There had been traces of it, streaks of Aaron’s blood on Andrew’s fingers, underneath his nails like something sickening and festering that would’ve stayed clean had he been fast enough, there enough, good enough. It had marred Kevin’s neck, the watercolour bruises of Andrew’s fingertips underneath were slick with Aaron’s blood, but it hadn’t stopped him from watching the oxygen bleed from Kevin’s face or stopping his eyes from fluttering black inside his head until hands – otherly, unknown, awful hands – had ripped Andrew away.

He remembers everything, condemned that way, Andrew supposes. Even when Aaron is clean, stitched up all back together like something that had never been broken, and the finite indentations on Kevin’s throat faded, Andrew cannot see anything else but the way the world had looked that night. It won’t let him go.

“It’s been weeks,” Aaron tells him as if Andrew hadn’t been counting every second, every breath he’d taken since the riot. But Aaron is a fly on the wall, an annoying buzz from an undying insect that won’t give up after having been drowned in poison, and maybe Andrew wishes that he’d never held steady, broken hands to Aaron’s head that had kept bleeding out and out and out in the centre of the fray. If he hadn’t, maybe he wouldn’t have let Neil go instead.

But Andrew had his promises, and Neil had been one of them until he hadn’t. He’d been something of pipedreams and impossibilities and finality, and he had been a promises Andrew had held onto until his hands were bloodied and deformed and showing bone – and then Neil had told him to simply let go as if it were just that fucking easy. Look where he was now; look where that had gotten him.

He's pretty certain Kevin’s nullified their deal when Andrew choked the air from his lungs on the bus just before they left for Maryland. Aaron, in awful familiar fashion, had given up on his own as well, Neil no longer around to make the cheerleader convince him to go to therapy, and Andrew not even wanting to fix them anymore.

“Andrew, get up.”

Andrew does not get up. He grits his teeth together, aware of the distant taste of rot within his mouth and the pain radiating against his jaw from the force of it all. His tongue is lead, mouth cotton, and he can’t remember the last time he brushed his teeth; but he can remember how he’d bitten down on his hands to stop from crying when he was seven years old, or the way Neil’s hand had wrapped around his wrist in those awful sticky, sticky sheets like Andrew were something worth saving.

How dare he, Andrew wants to ask. He’d scream it if it could, fray his fucking vocal cords into smithereens and embers of ash and razor blades of diamonds, and then he’d laugh at the bloodied remains of the flesh in his throat because maybe, his ruins would look like Neil’s. Maybe Neil had screamed as his own father cut him up into a mosaic of muscles and ligaments and bone marrow that the FBI damned as ‘evidence’.

But here Aaron was, ruining everything, fucking up Andrew’s day and all his wonderings about the many pieces of a corpse he’s already planning to threaten the US Government to give back to him.

Give him back to me. Give him back.

“He was a nobody.” Aaron is seething, Andrew knows. He’s somewhere above the pile of blankets that Andrew has confined himself to. He can’t see Aaron’s face, hidden behind his astray, mattered hair and refusing to look anywhere else but the back of his eyelids, but beside him, Aaron doesn’t seem sorry. “He was a lie in every sense of the word. He ingrained himself in our lives like an infection!”

He knows what Aaron is doing, and Andrew doesn’t care for it. It’s all the tough love Andrew’s ever used against everyone else, but Aaron’s doing it wrong. Some things would rather stay broken, and then there’s no fixing them.

Andrew feels Aaron’s gaze stuck on what may as well be the corpse in the sheets. He has that irritated look in his eyes as if he’s known that despite Neil dying, he would never be dead enough to go away. At least not to Andrew. Aaron had still lost, all the same.

And Aaron knows this, too. “You were his shield to hide behind and something to fuck when he was bored because you were easy and you were there, and he doesn’t have the fucking right to do this to you!”

Oh? Is that so? In that case, Aaron should’ve said something sooner! Or he should’ve done what Andrew would’ve done and stuck a blade between Neil’s ribs or smashed his skull open with a racket or severed his body into thousands of tiny pieces, so his father didn’t have to! Because apparently Aaron knows everything.

Well, here’s what Andrew knows:

They had fit together. They did. They had fit together like identically scarred upturned hands that could hold onto each other for no other reason than that they wanted to. They had been broken pieces of shattered glass that had fused together after existing apart for so very, very long. Together, they had the same flesh, the same mouth, the same sickness of belonging to the other as two not-quite-people-but-almost who had never known what it is to have.

He had given Neil a promise, and then he had given him more, piece after piece of himself until he was everything but a body that didn’t know how to exist, because suddenly – or not so suddenly – Neil Josten had the fucking ability to make Andrew Minyard feel real, feel human, feel at all again and again and again.

Neil had been dangerous, but not in the way Aaron thought he was. He was dangerous in the way letting someone in was dangerous. It was a different kind of danger that he’d never felt before – sickeningly sweet cough syrup coating his tongue, rich oxygen filling his lungs, an entity that Andrew didn’t know how to forget. Neil had become the gritty earth embedded underneath his fingernails, nestled in between his flesh like the scars that condemn his forearms broken. He’d become the jagged, suffocating warmth Andrew wanted to lie next to, and maybe Neil could’ve gotten up and walked away and left his body to rot, but Andrew can’t.

Fuck him. Fuck you.

The bedroom is littered with cigarette ash and Kevin’s bottles of vodka, and briefly, Andrew thinks through the sobering haze, of all the things Neil left himself behind in. For someone who was so ingrained to be a nobody, he left himself in places that Andrew hadn’t even been aware he’d touched. Lost, little fragments of whatever had been Neil Josten were scattered within the half-smoked cigarettes leaving dust on the bedside table, and the indentation of Andrew’s car keys in his pocket, the ghostly feeling of his warm lips underneath all the grime plaque and rotting decay that had become Andrew’s mouth since Baltimore.

Andrew’s familiar with the concept of pain. He’d felt enough of it again and again and again before he was old enough to understand that that kind of pain is not something children unlike him were promised.

But it didn’t matter. He had taught himself to bury it. It had begun like a little game in his head. He hadn’t played with love-me-nots, with star charts, or with cloves and diamonds and kings and hearts.

He had played in the gallows, and each pain was a feeling to be pushed down inside of him until he drowned it alive as if the feeling would strangle itself had he not. Feelings were for children, he would think. Then nothing would hurt anymore.

But Neil isn’t any kind of pain he’s survived.

Andrew pries his eyes apart, stares up towards the mouldy, cracking ceiling, counting those stupid glow-in-the-dark stars Nicky had put there months ago, and then thinks about the real ones, the ones outside in the dying sunrise burning awful constellations of deadlight. They have the audacity to keep existing, only because Andrew can’t take out his knives and cut them clean from the sky, and make the whole universe come crashing down with it.

It wasn’t fair. Ha! Of course, it wasn’t fair!

He could feel the warmth of his burning veins and his flesh tearing itself apart from his bones as if all of this were his destiny, as if dying with Neil was how it should have been from the start.

And maybe Aaron can see that thought across his face. Uh oh. He comes closer, kneeling beside the head of Andrew’s bed and sneers, too quietly, too concretely, “He was never anything real to you, and you sure as fuck weren’t anything real to him.”

“I’ll kill you,” Andrew says, and the words don’t feel real. Aaron doesn’t move but he doesn’t turn away either. Andrew opens his eyes and watches him. Aaron has a shaking, raw hand clenched in the other, achingly as if to reach out, but will never quite make himself desperate enough to do so.

And Andrew loathes him. Aaron, who is real and tangible and painfully, undeniably beside him, but never in any way that matters. He is suddenly the only one here because, awfully, he is tied, just as Andrew is, together through their own noose of a promise. After this, Aaron will never have the strength to break it, and after Neil, Andrew will never let him. He’s sinking again, going down, down, down the drain like Aaron’s blood in the hospital basin, like Neil in Baltimore.

“So get up and do it,” Aaron says, voice biting and cold and all things awful but the threat isn’t terrifying enough to make Andrew get out of bed. It isn’t enough to make him want to grab the knife underneath his pillow and gouge it into Aaron’s stomach, because killing Aaron is pointless. He’d make a mess of the sheets in all their sticky red watercolour humanness and then where would he sleep?

He does think about stabbing him though, until he sees the glowing stardust morph into taunting constellations upon the ceiling. They shouldn’t do that, Andrew thinks, but what does he know about Nicky’s ceiling stars and astronomy?

“Stop mourning dead pathetic Josten and get the fuck up.”

Andrew doesn’t have the energy to roll his body over to face the other side of the wall, so instead, he shuts his eyes, pushing his face into the pillow. Letting his brother scream all his frustrations about Neil was entertaining enough, but it’s tiresome now, and Andrew’s done speaking today. “Goodbye, Aaron.”

“You can’t just stay here,” Aaron says, and if Andrew had the breath to laugh, he would because he can stay here, thank you very much. He can stay here forever until his body carves into the folds of the mattress, and his skin no longer smells like Neil’s lungs, and the whole fucking building crumbles away forevermore until everyone inside it becomes the embers of earth to which the sugarcane in glass bottles and wood in Exy rackets and tobacco in cigarettes grew from.

Aaron moves as if to walk away, but then, almost as an afterthought that just happens to slip past his lips like something awful, something condemning as gangrene rotten plaque and bile of Andrew’s unbrushed teeth weeping from his lips, he says, “Make another deal with me. You get up. You start eating. You go to class. You get your shit together. And I… I will give you whatever you want.”

Andrew thinks Aaron loves him. The weight of that love is a rope of a promise he’d rather strangle himself with than give up; it is condemning himself to his brother because he doesn’t know how to let go; it is a racket in his hand and a man dead on the floor.

Andrew thinks he loves Aaron. His love is hands buried into Aaron’s hair around all the shards of glass embedding themselves into his skull; it is grasping onto empty words and meaningless oaths like a noose whilst drowning alive because he doesn’t know a concept such as that wouldn’t save him; it is a car wrapped around the median and a body-shaped hole through the windshield.

Or at least that is the kind of thing that they could have been capable of in a world that should have been kinder.

Andrew opens his eyes again. The same eyes stare back at him and he vows, “I get up. I eat. I go to class.” The words fall out of his mouth like the crimson stains that had fallen into his eyes in November, or the glass cutting into his palm from Aaron’s skull in March. He can’t remember what Neil’s hand had felt like within his own because he had never held it.

They’re empty and empty and empty, and they don’t shake anymore. They’re still against the metallic weight of the knives in his armbands, scars rotting underneath, marring everything a masterpiece of awful unlife and all the things Andrew could not hold together the way he could’ve if he were better.

The next words are a whisper, he thinks. His mouth tastes disgusting, and he thinks Aaron knows that, too. “And you will never talk to me about Neil again.”

Aaron nods, swallowing bile as if he hadn’t chosen to damn himself to this, commit himself to a coffin in the gallows that had become of this bedroom, even after the promise Andrew had made to him before this one.

Whatever. Aaron knows what it is to make deals with Andrew, and Andrew knows of what it is to make deals with Aaron. So be it.

“Deal,” Aaron agrees, and Andrew gets up.

Somewhere above the South Carolina sky, the stupid fucking sun exists underneath the horizon line, like everything it touches hasn’t become so terribly misplaced. The stars are falling out of orbit and breaking free from their aligned constellations, coming undone at the seams into stardust.

Because –

Because they could, and that was enough for Andrew not to question it – enough for him not to question anything anymore. He no longer questioned why sleep had become this alien, annoying sensation that terrified him, or why the nightmares became so frequent he could no longer distinguish what was reality and what was fantasy, what his screaming subconscious ached to tell him – if anything at all – when it wasn’t condemning him to relive the hospital in Maryland that Neil’s empty body had made a grave out of.

But with idiotic finality, the constellated stars burned like embers of flame cascading down upon the unforgiving rooftop, because it had finally happened.

Andrew had lost his mind. The rooftop is empty until it isn’t. Andrew is leaning over the edge until he isn’t. He’s letting go of the concrete underneath him until he isn’t.

And then –

“Hey,” Neil says.

Get fucked, Rabbit, Andrew thinks at first. And then, oh hello.

Andrew remembers sitting at a thousand dinner tables, one for each day of the week, seconds of an hour. A new family of strangers would sit beside him, destined to dwell in different suburbia of California that seemed like planetary solar systems and far away galaxies, and he would sleep in their alien beds, eat their strange foods, lived their nuclear lives like an imposter desperately trying to belong. And he couldn’t control the otherworldly outer space homes and families and cities he lived in, no more than he could control those night sky constellations he could never understand even now, but he can control this:

What’s inside, what’s empty. How and when it hurt.

He liked the routine of carving masterpieces into his forearms, of smoking enough cigarettes to suffocate, of contemplating the call of the void as he stood silent and swaying on the edge of the world.

Andrew turns around to where the sunset can’t reach him, and looks at the ghost. He takes the half-burned cigarette from his lips and lets the embers flicker between his fingers.

Falling apart is Andrew’s way of falling back together again, but Neil – standing here with him on the rooftop – smiling like he doesn’t have anywhere were left to be, is fucking up everything.

He’s pale, Andrew thinks he notices first. Bloodlessly ashen all over like snow. Rosy cheeks standing out against the biting cold that hadn’t yet bled away from the March embers.

And then –

You aren’t real, Andrew thinks at last. I hate you.

The real Neil, outside of the one he’s fabricated inside his mind with blurred memories and borderline insanity, knew this. But he is not Andrew’s constant anymore, and all Andrew has left are ghosts.

“Fuck off. You’re in the wrong place,” he says, bored and bland and uninterested. If he were someone who could feel things the way real people do, he’d scream. Andrew’s mouth ached to roar, to cry, to laugh because it had finally happened. Amongst all the numbness and the anger and the wasting himself away in a rotting bedroom, he had lost it. Sanity was a fragile thing, and after Neil, after New York – his own mind finally crumbling into agony-fuelled hallucinogenic psychosis just made sense.

But Neil just shrugs, looking content and tangible and human.

“No, I’m supposed to be here,” the ghost of Neil Josten says, and it sounds like him. It feels like him, even though outside of this rooftop, he is gone, and maybe every rational part of Andrew is clinging onto that suspension of insanity, because otherwise, that notion makes him gone again a thousand times over.

Andrew scoffs. “So that’s it? I really am as batshit as they say? Should I call Bee and have her institutionalise me again?”

Neil looks at him, up and down and inside out as if he’s the only person in the world who could possibly begin to understand the anomaly that is Andrew Minyard and not fall apart while trying. He takes a step forward, and Andrew sees the breaths he breathes in the air, little puffs of warmth amongst all the coldness.

Andrew blows smoke in his face, ashen and heavy in his lungs, but Neil doesn’t faulter.

“Do you need to call Bee?” Neil asks.

“No.”

“You were going to jump off the roof,” Neil tells him plainly, like he knows these things about Andrew that maybe Andrew doesn’t even know himself.  There isn’t judgment, but Neil knows what Andrew is doing, and Andrew isn’t sure what he wants to do about it. He inhales more smoke, taking a breath from inside his aching lungs and breathes out a steady soundless breath until his chest burns as his throat swells from all the nicotine and tobacco and acid, that will kill him eventually, if not for a little slower.

It tastes like Neil.

“I’m not now,” Andrew says, like he’s talking about the weather and not swan diving off the four-storey-high building. Maybe talking to ghosts isn’t exactly saner but it would hurt less. Maybe. “I’m talking to you.”

“Yes, you are,” not-dead-Neil says, and Andrew feels his gaze upon him with that happy-sad-numb look in his eyes as if he’s known all along that, yeah, Andrew is insane and damaged, and that sometimes he needs to almost throw his body off the edge of the world for the sake of feeling anything at all and that sometimes, apparently, he sees his dead teammate’s ghost as he does it.

But then, “I missed you,” Neil says, and it hurts more than it would to shatter all his glass bones against the concrete.

“Shut the fuck up,” he tells Neil. Neil who is here and staying and painfully, undeniably beside him and Andrew is sinking again, going down, down, down the drain like blood in the sink, like dinner in the toilet, bones in the morgue. He had seen Neil’s body, all thirty-five knife wounds, all amputated limbs, all cigarette burns, all beautiful eyelashes, all auburn curls that Andrew had run raw, bleeding fingers through.

He doesn’t give his dead teammate more than a second glance before turning back towards the fading sunset, saying, “I’ve had psychotic episodes more real than you. You’re still nothing, even in death. Neil would never say such things.”

And because his mind is broken, so infinitely damaged in a way that perhaps is irreparable, the fragments of himself that is clinging onto the ghost of Neil Josten says, kindly, softly, “Andrew, I’m right here.”

“Prove it.” Andrew takes a drag, feeling the smoke in his lungs enough for it to burn. He stays facing the remains of the sun, somehow desperate for it to just stay above the horizon for just a little long, but also wishing that it would finally bleed itself away, so he’d never have to face it again.

“Step back from the ledge,” Neil says from behind him, and Andrew wonders if he’s thinking about the sun too, before remembering that Neil was always more interested in the stars.

“Maybe,” Andrew shrugs simply, because he is tired and a ghost, some of the time, all the same. “Are you a ghost, too?”

Neil rolls his eyes, blue and clear and no longer haemorrhaging. They’d been open on the autopsy table, too. His hands are stuffed into the pockets of his hoodie, the nauseatingly orange Fox jumper that Andrew had been hiding in the ceiling tiles since New York. He’s shivering slightly, as if he’s cold, breathing air as if he’s alive, and mocking Andrew as if he’s always been the kind of stupid that cannot differentiate reality and dream. “Did you really just ask me that?”

Well, maybe after everything, Andrew is that kind of stupid. “Are you a hallucination?” he tries again, not bothering to look back at Neil for his answer.

“I told you I wasn’t a pipedream,” Neil says so fucking easily as if he didn’t ever have to think about it.

Sunset. Maybe their symbol of infinite carved like a wound across the South Carolina sky existed as a wonderful contradiction of mortal life itself. Maybe the sound of their names whispered upon each other’s lips served as a haunting memory to whoever remained. Maybe the ones left to live until they ceased to breathe themselves were to bear witness to the relics of those who hadn’t.

Andrew turns away from the ledge.

“Are you real, Abram?” Andrew asks.

And –

“Yes,” Neil tells him. After that, everything solidifies.

“I want everything. Tell me everything.”

Neil Josten is dying.

And then he’s not.

Something you need to know about the Hatfords is that –

They can fake a death.

His uncle digs the barrel of the gun so hard against Nathan’s skin that it burns it, all black and ash and brain matter splattered across the walls of the basement. It’s so hideously beautiful that Nathaniel laughs and laughs and laughs and doesn’t stop until he runs out of air to breathe.

He could feel the corpse, his father’s undead eyes, stare at him within the hollows of his carcass, and solidify upon his own like cooling mercury.

And it was so fucking funny!

How stupid, how awful, how easy, it had been to kill Nathan Wesninski! Nathaniel’s veins, his skin, his organs are cold despite the smoking gunfire. Neil is choking on the ash, on the awful asphyxiating anguish that has polluted his entire being since he first made the choice to stay and to be. Gun smoke had made its way into his being like infectious weeds claiming him to the ground and now his father’s blood clings to him like it will be there underneath his fingernails for days and years and millenniums.

Andrew will still hold his hand, though. Neil knows that.

“Bloody hell,” Stuart says because he’s English and that’s how British people talk, obviously. All proper and stereotypically posh and so Mary-like that Neil starts laughing again. “Nathaniel, are you alright?”

“Are you saying I look bad?” Neil asks, after catching his breath. He studies the unmoving body on the concrete, eyes unable to ever leave it. If he blinks, it will move, he’s certain of it; if he looks away for a single moment, it will axe his body into smithereens, just as Nathan said so when he was still alive.

Neil feels down the front of his wet hoodie, his worn jeans, considering the wayward drops of his own blood that had managed to mar the orange material, and hums, looking at the growing puddle weeping through the cracks in the cement. His father bleeds an uninteresting shade of red.

He only stops watching it when Stuart breaks the silence. “Half your face is gone.”

“Good,” Neil says, because it is. It’s suddenly the best thing he’s ever heard someone speak. Almost. It could have been everything, except something like that, could only ever be every single word that came out of Andrew’s mouth. Neil wants to go back to him. He’s smiling his father’s awful, hideous smile when he turns to his uncle. “What now?”

Stuart looks back at him, perhaps as one might look at a ghost, but he doesn’t falter. “Now,” he says, lowering the gun pointed at the remains of Nathan’s body. “You die.”

Neil smiles even wider, something insane and manic, so wide his cheeks hurt, his teeth, his eyes. “Excuse me?”

Stuart puts the gun away into the pocket of his suit blazer. He takes a step closer, only ever looking to the side of Neil’s face that is still clean and unmarred and human. “My guys are bringing a body in. We’re staging it as you. The remains of the Wesninski blood have died tonight.”

Neil’s body falters at the words. Stuart’s eyes don’t leave him, and Neil sees the ghost of the gun that had killed his father in his uncle’s hands. They’re completely still, unshaken.

And now, Stuart is offering freedom.

The burning embers of gun smoke and flesh and lighters makes him think his lungs have started to burn a fragment more each second, they stay here in this basement. Neil has been forever breathing in his father’s freshly-dead victims, the smell of bloodied silver that clings to each cleaver against the brick wall, and the remains of his dynasty rotting up through the house’s catacombs, but outside–

Outside, there is air.

He wants to leave this fucking house, he wants to see his teammates, he wants to be the person who has become the mosaic of all the things those who have kept him – wanted him – had made Neil Josten from.

“Okay,” he says, making it real and real and real.

“I’ll be bringing you back home to London,” Stuart continues. “You’ll assume a new identity. Nathaniel Wesninski is dead. Do you understand?”

“Let Nathaniel die,” he says, the words themselves suddenly an absolution to everything that he is. It feels so fucking good that he might cry this time, crazed and smiling and sobbing all at once. But – something is wrong, he realises. Stuart is wrong. He’s wrong and wrong and wrong. “But London isn’t my home. I’m staying in Palmetto.”

“Are you suicidal?” Stuart asks.

“What’s it matter if I’m already dead?” he says. Their family tree is nothing but a rotting dead thing in the middle of an abandoned forest, and Neil is burning it to the ground.

Stuart takes a step towards him, and Neil meets him there in the centre of the basement, shoes bloodied and leaving traces of his father’s blood across the floor like a masterpiece. “Nathaniel–” Stuart starts, low and cold.

“No,” he says again. “My name is Neil. I’m not leaving my life here, not when I finally have something to live for,” he finishes, words concrete and embedding themselves into the basement walls like scars that can never fade. Neil watches as Stuart stares back at him, suddenly looking into him like he’s never seen this person before.

Something, he had said.

Neil has a something – warm in the way the moon is – standing with him and all his scarred glass fragments like Neil is something to piece back together. Something has Neil’s lips against theirs as if they had always somehow meant to be there. It hadn’t mattered if Neil had shattered his body into a hundred pieces, or if he changed his name for the third time in a month, or if he chose to keep breathing again and again and again – but it does now. It matters to–

“Who is this something?” Stuart asks.

“Nothing,” Neil says. Andrew is nothing. He looks like a stranger most of all only because he isn’t one. Neil knows the way he tastes, its seared into his organs. His body is all teeth and graveyards and meadowsweet. Neil’s carried Andrew’s mouth around with him since he’s existed as the thing he has now become, and he had realised that him and Andrew were made of the same dirt, the same fragments. He pauses, coming back to himself and changes his mind. “He’s everything.”

“Bullshit,” Andrew says. “You’re bullshit.”

He walks away, leaving the ghost behind him. Andrew ignores it as it calls out, “I’m your bullshit!”

So maybe it’s not bullshit, because –

“Hi,” Neil says.

Neil says.

Neil says.

He’s watching from the doorway, haunting the empty bedroom like the familiar ghost who lives in this dormitory and inside his head, buried alive. The silent, unbroken air between them rings like bullets cascading against titanium, against the blood that had dripped down the sink at the hospital, and the sound of Andrew pulling a kitchen knife from his flesh years and years ago.

“What do you want,” Andrew says in return because Neil Josten is fucking back in all the worst ways. “I told you to go.”

And even though he knows he should turn away, join the others at morning practice, ask Bee for haloperidol, Andrew cannot turn away from Neil. He sees his reflection in the mosaic pieces of the bedroom mirror, leaning against the doorway and smiling like he doesn’t have anywhere else to be. He is calm and whole and there, and Andrew is frozen as if his body is no longer his own, and he lies dead with the ghost Neil should be.

And maybe he welcomes it; maybe he misses it; and suddenly Andrew is red like the human crimson on a bus in New York, the corridor of a Baltimore hospital, the colour of all his flesh and body and brain that don’t seem to work the way they should because he’s empty and ruined and nothing.

“No,” Neil shrugs, walking closer to the bed. He’s wearing plain, unremarkable clothes, loose enough that they hide all the scars Andrew knows are underneath, but casual enough so that if anyone were to see him here, they’d never know the things he and Andrew did. “You told me I was bullshit.”

“You are,” Andrew says.

Neil ignores him, kneeling beside Andrew’s bed, face gentle and unaware. “I’m just happy to see you.”

“Well, I’m not happy to be crazy again.” Andrew almost scoffs, words aching inside his throat life something that could tie a noose around his neck and strangle him.

Neil looks enough like the thing he used to be when he was alive. Andrew’s real Neil, the dead one, the one outside of the one he’s fabricated inside his mind with blurred memories and borderline insanity and suicidal ideation, was everything. But Neil is not Andrew’s constant anymore, and all Andrew has left are ghosts. When Neil died, he took Andrew with him, just perhaps, not all the way.

This is the in-between, it must be.

But, “You’re not crazy,” Neil whispers as if saying it enough will make it true. “I really am here.”

“Good for you,” Andrew deadpans, studying Neil’s face for anything that deems him wrong, a mistake, an illusion, but either Andrew is too tired to find it or his brain too fucked up to try, so the Neil that is somehow still Neil in front of him stays as he’s always stayed. A little less a math problem, and a little more the Bar exam, the eighth wonder, an anomaly in time and space, something of the things supernovas are made of. Everything is a mathematical equation inside Andrew’s head. Neil had died, but he hadn’t. He is a paradox, something that shouldn’t exist, and Andrew’s destiny is to solve him, and so he would.

And because he is so undyingly, infuriatingly Neil, he says, “You’ve already missed morning conditioning. Are you going to practice later today?”

Andrew resists the urge to turn away, and in the end, is unable to bring himself to do it. He shoots back, “Are you?”

Neil bites his lip. He walks over to Andrew’s bed, studying Andrew’s eyes the whole time. Neither of them can look away. Neil sits down, cross-legged in front of Andrew, and he is so real, so there, that Andrew stops breathing for a moment. The bed doesn’t move but maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it doesn’t need to. “I can’t,” Neil says weakly. “I’m still recovering.”

Andrew’s blood is ash. He looks over Neil, studying the bruises and scars and flaws of his skin like he was charting star constellations in a black hole. Nothing is amiss. Everything is wrong. There are slight litters of freckles upon Neil’s noise, almost spreading across to his pale-tinge cheeks. His hair is the same length it had been that day in March, and it was still its soft reddish auburn. None of his scars were showing, hidden underneath his black long-sleeved shirt, or the band-aid at his cheekbone.

“Show me,” Andrew demanded, cataloguing away every piece of Neil.

Neil shakes his head, looking at his hands tangled together in his lap. “Not now.”

Andrew reaches out, his fingers needing to lift the fabric of his shirt, despite of them shaking in fear of what they’d find there, buried like all the other secrets that made up the cartography of Neil Josten. “Can I touch you?”

“No,” Neil says, because always wasn’t always.

Andrew drops his hand, waits for Neil to look back up at him, and after eight finite, overtime seconds, he does. “Okay.”

Neil smiles. “Do you want to have some breakfast with me? You eat if I eat?”

“Only if you cook,” Andrew decides. His tongue tastes like lead, mouth cotton, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had anything to drink, but he can remember how he had been thrashing in the sheets drowning in sticky stale sweat last midnight, or how he’d collapsed down onto the floor hunched over his stomach a week ago, and bit down on the back of his hands to stop from vomiting up nothing.

Andrew Minyard had been a child, so damningly young, when he’d survived the things that were not made worth surviving through, and so, eating and sleeping and breathing shouldn’t be this hard, but they were.

And Neil rolls his eyes, suddenly as if he knows all of Andrew there could ever be, and doesn’t mind what he finds there. He stands up from the bed, face cast in an infuriatingly unreadable look, and waits by the doorframe, bored, for Andrew to follow him.

So Andrew goes with him, Neil bringing him along into the space of the kitchen like a red string drifting out into the wider universe and commanding him back home. They walk through the doorway together, and their shoulders don’t touch.

Neil goes around to the other side of the kitchen bench, pulling out different ingredients and crockery with an aching familiarity like he’d never left Andrew’s dorm, and despite already mixing milk and butter together, says, “You hate when I cook. I always burn the eggs, or drown the oats with milk, or add not enough cinnamon to the pancakes.”

Andrew sits on the breakfast bar stood, both elbows of the bench and his chin resting on his hands. He takes the spoon Neil had been mixing honey with and licks the sweet syrup. Around a mouthful of sticky honey, and the spoon still between his teeth, he says, “Well, I don’t feel like cooking today.”

“Okay,” Neil says playfully hesitant, almost huffing out a laugh, and there’s half-stirred flour in between his fingers, grains of granulated sugar under his nails that Andrew would study as he’d hold Neil’s hand. “But it’s you that’ll be eating my shitty pancakes.”

“Maybe,” Andrew shrugs, this time taking a spoonful of batter, and maybe it’s that he hasn’t eaten in a day or two, or that these pancakes are nothing like the unsweetened, flavourless bullshit that he’d expected Neil to make, but Andrew swore that they could’ve been the best thing he’s ever tasted. The honey is sticking in between his teeth, coating his lips that Neil used to kiss, and maybe Andrew’s mouth aches with a bittersweet sick feeling he can’t get rid of, but maybe, it doesn’t matter; maybe he doesn’t want it to.

He's content to sit there, letting Neil sift flour and measure vanilla extract and pour milk, and take comfort in the absurd ordinariness of it all. There’s nothing here, in this moment, and Andrew holds onto it, selfishly, a little longer than he should have; a little bit longer than it takes for the world to stop smothering itself with its own neck. Instead, he is with Neil, making pancakes, as if that is enough; and it is.

“Keep me company?” Neil asks as if he needs to.

Andrew pretends to think about it. “Fine.”

“It’s nice to see you, Andrew,” Renee smiles, her cross-necklace dangling from her neck, knuckles wrapped bloody, a knife in her other hand.

Andrew’s response is a fist to her jaw, and it collides with the palm of her hand as she blocks it.

She keeps smiling like they are two old friends having coffee and not beating the shit out of each other with knives. She drives him back up against the brick, forearms pinning him to the wall. “How are you today? You seem better.” 

He twists around, smashing the back of his head against her chin, and shoving a knife to her throat once Renee hits the carpet. Her nose is bleeding, his head is throbbing, and the adrenaline of a fight for the first time since New York is rushing something sick through his veins, but Andrew doesn’t stop.

Because –

Because in his dorm, in his bedroom, in his bed, is something that shouldn’t be there. Neil looks at him, him and his blur of stupid idyll bullshit that strangles Andrew like a lifeline. He and his fucking audacity to stand there and cook as if he didn’t disappear weeks ago because he fucking died.

So new plan: maybe reincarnation is real. Maybe ghosts exist. Maybe religion will explain this fucking bullshit, because Andrew sure as hell knows Neil won’t.

“Tell me about your faith,” Andrew says, the words tasting like ash, his breath heavy against the cross dangling from her neck.

Renee doesn’t falter. She throws her body weight into her shoulder, pushing him back. “I believe that once someone dies, they are brought home, given back amongst the angels.” Her voice is easy, calm as it always is, and Andrew sees blood weep into her mouth and feels his own lace underneath his tongue, too, savouring it. “It’s peaceful and it’s safe and it’s kind.”

She lands a hit on his cheekbone, fist colliding with fragmented bone, and for a second, Andrew sees stars. She takes the opportunity to pin him to the ground, trapping him underneath her body, and Andrew completes biting her forearm before deciding he’s not that feral. She presses her arm against her neck, threatening his oxygen, while her knife in the other hand is positioned at his groin.

Typical.

“That being said,” Renee continues, sickeningly sweet, all warmth and contentment that shouldn’t be there. “I do not believe this was fate, or Their will, or that it had any purpose at all. Nothing would be better than if those who should not have died were still alive here with us, but it’s a soft ending, at least. It’ll never be enough, but it is something. Humanity can be ugly, and it can be cruel and unfair, but there has to be something beyond that gives us what we deserve.”

Renee answers him, and somewhere distantly, Andrew hears Neil’s voice from the abstract, intangible essence of his mind, laughing at him. Andrew wants to laugh, too. He wanted to die laughing, manically surrendering to where-ever-the-fuck you went after your father murdered you, because he knew the after beyond the end wasn’t rapture. Peace wasn’t made for Neil Josten. He would rot for the sins of the world a thousand times over because that is the kind of children they had been, people they had been made to become.

Maybe that is why he’s still around.

Andrew locks his legs around her hips, reaching for his knife, and twisting his body on top of Renee’s. She’d been expecting it, he knows, but perhaps with not as much force as he used. He has both knives, crossing over one another at the flesh of her neck. When his heart stops pounding, stops aching like something he cannot get rid of, Andrew moves so that their faces are almost touching, whispering vermillion undying words, “What makes you think Neil deserves peace?”

Maybe Andrew doesn’t deserve peace either, and that is why the ghost of Neil Josten never went away.

“It’s not about him,” Renee says quietly. “He’s gone and we can’t change that. It’s about us. I need to believe that he found it.”

She makes Neil Josten out to be something of medicine, something of stars and something of ash that Andrew can’t brush away from his mouth; and it hurts. He hurts something of the pain killers Aaron overdosed on when they had been sixteen, or the bird bone fists that had attacked Nicky that awful night in October. Neil’s dead and Andrew still wants to kill him.

“You make something so violently ugly sound merciful,” he sneers, voice a whisper that doesn’t quite carry to the end of the room, unlike the metal of their knifes against each other’s, the sound of their bodies hitting concreted carpet.

“It will never not be ugly. Death is a tragedy.” Renee says, letting herself lie under his weight despite that she could save herself if she wanted to. “It’s not for you to join him, Andrew.”

“I’m not killing myself, Renee,” he states bluntly. It’s true, he is sick, probably very sick in all the ways most people would never be, but he’s also alive. Undyingly, contractually alive, and it’s so rude for Renee and Ghost of Christmas Past, Neil Josten, to think he’d break his deal like all the other’s who’d let him down with their own promises, secrets.

Andrew just happened to know the taste of his own teeth, and the number of eyelashes in his bed, and how to love with shards of glass in both hands, where there should have been roses; and sometimes learning that every piece of himself had come from who he had been before, was entirely the problem. Living is a disease all the same, and Andrew was going to live for a very, very long time. “You’re wrong about it all.”

He gets up from the ground, his body moving off Renee’s, deciding that this is over. He hadn’t won, not really, too sure that Renee could’ve fought back in the end if she’d wanted to, but they hadn’t come here to fight, and Andrew knows she knew this.

So, “Maybe,” she agrees easily.

Andrew waits for Renee to say something else, but she doesn’t. She’s looking at him like she’s searching for something.

“He’s not gone,” Andrew says after a moment.

She nods, smiling, her lip split and bleeding red seeping down her chin. “Of course not,” she says, sliding her knife away. “In my faith, he lives on through everything.”

“No,” Andrew says, because she doesn’t understand what he is saying. “Neil didn’t leave. He’s still here.”

All Renee says is, “I know.”

That night, Andrew – or something in his brain that’s too condemningly broken to still be here – decides, that maybe, he shouldn’t care about it anymore.

“Come here.” Neil’s voice is the first thing he hears when he wakes up. “You had a nightmare. Let’s breathe together.”

“You’re still here,” Andrew feels himself saying, falling and falling and falling down to the ground.

His knees hit the floor, the flesh still bruised from that time he’d collapsed in Baltimore, in the morgue, and it still hurts the way it did then, all the way into his bones. He feels his body aching to mourn Neil like glass cutting into his insides, the tainted bone marrow leaking all out over his scar-broken skin, and he wonders if the blackholes eating away at his organs will ever seize. He knows Neil had died, but he also knows Neil hadn’t, so he muses, probably not. The pain of losing Neil is infinite, just as it is finding him all over again. It hurts so much Andrew could die.

Maybe it doesn’t need to make sense anymore. Maybe it shouldn’t have to.

He shouldn’t be alive. He shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t be this beautiful; but he is.

Neil sits on the ground with him, free from the sheets and wearing the same clothes he had been this morning. Kevin, Aaron and Nicky are still sleeping in their beds, unaware of either of Andrew and Neil and the bedsheets that lie on the floor.

“Of course, I am. I don’t lie to you.” Neil’s voice is strange. His face is strange, his hands, his body. Andrew knows it is him, he does, he really, really does. But even so, Andrew still wants to shrivel himself into the corner of the room and count numbers on his fingers until he reaches infinity. He wants to tear the flesh from the bones of his body until dawn bleeds in through the curtain. He wants to scream the fucking one single syllable of Neil’s name because he doesn’t think it exist anymore, died somewhere in-between the cities and their stars.

“Except every time you do,” Andrew says.

When he is sane, the dead stay where they should, and when Andrew is crazy, Neil crawls out of graves and Andrew rots with him, all the same. Neil leans in closer.

“Andrew,” Neil’s breath is hot and awful against his neck. “I’m not lying about this,” he says, like it’s that simple. That somehow being dead was something that would wilt away, heal, along with the cigarette burns in his knuckles or the knife wounds at his cheek had been in the morgue, and he will be fixed once again when Andrew lets his sanity go enough to believe it.

But he’s perfect now. His skin had bruises and scars and flaws in Andrew’s nightmare, but this Neil in front of him is just as Andrew had left him.

“We’ll see.”

“Breathe, Andrew,” he says, and Andrew tries to match Neil’s. Andrew watches the rise and fall of his shoulders as if Neil’s breath were some sort of illusion, but they weren’t. Neil’s lungs were something significant, something finite – and Andrew feels the epitome of all the sleep he’s never slept because he was too busy counting Neil’s breaths in case they stopped.

“Shut up.” The remnants of his nightmare are infecting him like a poison, and Andrew can feel ligaments and bone marrow and the flesh in Neil’s corpse underneath his fingernails, and it just won’t stop. “I can’t,” Andrew says.

Neil is an impossible anchor that shouldn’t exist here. “Do you need to call Bee?” He asks, no matter that it’s two in the morning, that Andrew’s whole family is still sleeping in the room with him, or that the dream he had dreamt was just that: a dream.

“Why? I have you, don’t I?”

Neil pauses, blinks. “Of course you do.”

“Can I touch you? Yes or no?”

“No,” Neil says as easily as the last time, sitting not even a metre away from Andrew.

Andrew runs his fingers through his hair, pretending they are Neil’s, interlocking his hands in his lap and willing them to feel the way he wants them to feel. “Don’t do this for me. I can take care of myself. I know what I need.”

“Tell me what you need.” Neil suddenly looks very young, the kind of young that he isn’t – the kind of young that’s always had comfort, the kind of young that’s never had to ask for love; it’s as if he doesn’t understand –

“I need to touch you! Give me your pulse.” Andrew’s voice is a strangled, raw noise that leaves his throat; his hand reaches to wrap around Neil’s wrist. He hurts the way it did when he had lied against those awful sticky, sticky sheets in a different November, and maybe Neil, knew this. His hands are bloodlessly pale, shaking as they grasp to hold on something – anything. They look like Neil’s bones. He cannot know that, but he does. Neil moves his wrist away.

“You can’t have it,” Neil says, and suddenly the bedroom is red and red and red. “You’ll just have to believe me.”

“I was the one who was supposed to kill you!” The words fall out of Andrew’s mouth just as the crimson watercolour had in New York had stained his hands He cannot let go of his own palms, a mocking contradiction to the way he couldn’t hold Neil and all of Neil’s organs, his problems, his promises together the way he could’ve if he were someone who knew how to be good. Instead, all he knows is this – screaming at ghosts at two in the morning because he didn’t get to kill them first. “You didn’t have the right to fucking die. You were supposed to be the one who wouldn’t leave.”

“Andrew, I’m here.”

“You’re not!” Andrew can’t look at him anymore – doesn’t want to. Neil, laid out in front of his eyes like this piece of spacetime and bone marrow and promises, looks like everything he has ever wanted, everything he will fall for, and everything he cannot save. It’s too much. Neil Josten made Andrew Minyard want, and Andrew will never stop hating him for it.

“I’m here,” Neil insists, leaning his face in close, his body touching the discarded sheets underneath.

Andrew moves in closer, so close that they could’ve kissed if Neil would’ve let him. “Liar,” he whispers.

“Fine,” Neil whispers back. “I’ll tell you everything.”

Neil Josten is dying.

And then he’s not.

Something you need to know about the Hatfords is that –

They have magic!

It’s different for everyone. Each of those with blood from England’s most powerful family possesses a superhuman ability that awakens during their most dire hour.

His mother had been a Healer. Yes, she had healed things. She’d stitch wounds together with nothing but blood and magic, and had told Neil stories of all their ancestors who could defeat their own demons, the way they would once do with Nathan. In the stories, there were summoners and psychics and reality warpers and death whisperers and endless amounts of superhuman enhancements that the rest of the world couldn’t possibly dream of.

However, the Hatfords’ powers were sometimes unreliable, sometimes counterproductive, harmful. Sometimes Mary, when she’d heal, she brought upon pain – broken flesh and drowning lungs and sepsis. When she tried to use her magic in California, it broke her. It broke Neil.

After the beach, he had shut himself away from it all.

Well, until Baltimore.

“Quick, Nathaniel!” Stuart is shouting, his visage an invisible cloak of nothing that is physically in the room, but nowhere to be seen. Neil’s never known what ability his uncle had until now.

But none of that matters. Neil knows he’s right. From his position by the corner of the basement, he can see his father coming towards him with that horrible axe, and suddenly, an insane idea comes rushing into his head.

“Use your powers!” Stuart yells, and for the first time since his mother died, Neil doesn't hesitate to think it through.

It only takes a second. He brings his hands together, an orb of beautiful, blue light manifesting itself like a thousand fireflies in this shithole of a city, lighting up all that is dark and dead inside the Wesninski catacombs of Maryland.

Neil waves his hands in front of him, casting the ball of light into the ruins of his father’s basement, and Nathan watches in horror as Neil warps gravity and spacetime and the entirety of the fucking multiverse, because –

Neil Josten can time-travel.

The portal opens up before him, and on the other side, is a high school locker room. It’s artificially bright, scattered blotches of unknown stars are shining beyond its indefinite sky. The atmosphere of last May, one of a million, is right there in front of him, creating an impossible chaos of wind that ignites the room, and in the eye of the storm, is Neil’s finite beacon, a portal – a promise – that gives him the opportunity to do any of it, all of it, everything at all, again.

Neil is getting good at defying what is written for him, making fate’s stars bleed to his whim, mixing and matching supernovas with the lives of people he had been until he had become someone real, someone who had a name, someone who could kiss a man that knew the most awful, most real things about him and despite everything, despite it all, still told him to stay.

Neil Josten refuses to die here. Each person in this cruel storybook of a multiverse is a fragmented shard from a broken mosaic, infinitely empowered with the ability to build themselves back together again from the ruins, and Neil decides that he deserves that, too. He is a Fox, after all and after everything, and he will grant himself another chance than what the world wants to give him. He will not let the world condemn himself to a universe where he is destined to die alone, unloved, nothing. Instead, Neil Josten would rewrite his history, put himself right back in to where it all started; and try again.

“Hurry! The portal is closing!” Stuart shouts, fighting with his father who is losing against an invisible force he can’t see.

But Neil doesn’t need to be told twice. He doesn’t need to see Stuart finally smash his father’s skull against the wall. He doesn’t need to be in this reality anymore.

He steps forward into the storm of blue, screaming light, and –

Millport, Arizona. Again.

A racket smashes into his stomach.

“Better luck next time.”

“I hate you,” Andrew says, like he had ever stopped.

Neil just blinks at him, smiling like he knows otherwise. “That’s okay.”

“Never become a writer,” he tells Neil.

“How about an astrophysicist?” Neil asks, standing up from the floor and motioning for Andrew to follow him. He does. Neil picks up the sheets off the floor like they’re something worth saving, and pulls back the covers to Andrew’s bed, telling him to lay down without any such words.

“I will pray on behalf of the future of astronomy,” Andrew deadpans, picking himself up from the ground, feeling his legs shake underneath him. He grasps the bedside table, steadying himself as the bad-sick feelings from his panic attack drown themselves underneath the surface of his organs where they will eventually come for him later.

Neil waits for him, holding onto the covers. “You’re an atheist,” he points out.

Andrew looks at him, still agonizingly infuriated with the way Neil will lie and lie and lie when it comes to every part of himself, and Andrew’s too tired, too gone, to do anything but let him. “And you’re dead.”

“Can’t be. Still here,” Neil insisted. “Besides, I think we’re both destined for other things.” He waits for Andrew to get into the bed, pulling the cover back up to his shoulders when he says, “We deserve that much. But we’re not ones for soft endings.”

“We could try,” Andrew says, his voice a whispered rasp that catches in his throat like cigarette ash. Distantly, he remembers not having smoked since the rooftop, the taste of them too much like homesickness.

Neil sits with him on the bed, the sinking, an indentation within the blankets, just another space in the world that Neil left behind, until he didn’t, not until Andrew found him again. They’re a breath apart, eyes flickering, and Andrew is cataloguing everything away as if he could ever forget the thing that is Neil Josten.

“I wish I could kiss you,” Neil whispers.

“Why can’t you?” Andrew whispers back.

There’s a shuffling within the sheets, the bunk above his bed shaking, wood creaking with the weight of a body suddenly coming to life in the middle of the night. Andrew is still looking at Neil when Aaron peers his head over the railing.

“Who are you talking to?” He asks, voice heavily in sleep and grit and something else that Andrew doesn’t care to decipher.

“Do you care?” Andrew says, not bothering to look at him. Neil’s eyes are soft and wandering, and though Andrew knows he’s never cared to interact with Aaron before, it seems that he wants Andrew to. “I had a nightmare,” Andrew says at last.

Aaron narrows his eyes. He can’t see Neil from where he is on the top bunk, but he seems to search the space around Andrew anyway. He’s more awake, more insistent when he asks again, “Who are you talking to?’

“Doesn’t matter,” Andrew sneers, having enough of the stupid, easy smile across Neil’s face. He throws himself back down onto the pillow, only to flip them both off with each hand. “He’s a fucking idiot, and a liar. And he sucks shit at interdimensional time travel logistics.”

Aaron keeps his gaze on Andrew, the two of them now facing each other without anything in between. “Get some sleep,” Aaron tells him.

“Then stop talking to me,” he grunts. Andrew curls in on himself, facing the wall, and watching Neil on the end of the bed, leaning against the bedframe. He stays there all night, and then cooks him pancakes again for breakfast. They don’t taste the way Andrew would’ve thought they’d taste.

They’re good.

It’s easier after that.

Eat. Practice. Homework. Talk. Eat again if he can.

Neil was nowhere and now he’s everywhere.

Honestly? How fucking rude.

Walk. It’s Wednesday today. Andrew walks down the hallway to Bee’s office in Reddin, and Neil trails behind him. It was his idea, because of course it was. Neil had hated the idea of Betsy and her psychoanalyses of his psyche, and he still does, but he seems to think that Andrew needs this. He doesn’t. Maybe he did when he was broken and rotting and starving on his mattress, lying there with all his eyelashes on the sheets, but he feels okay. He feels nothing again, and that should be enough for Neil.

They knew, of course, that they’d been broken before. They were grains of sand and glass that had shattered like a thousand pieces throughout their young, barely two-decade-old lives. And, yeah, they would break again as if it was somehow foretold, written into their made-up destinies the way the unchangeable stars constellated the sky. Maybe into smaller pieces, maybe into ones that seemed unfixable.

But when Andrew turns his head before he walks through Bee’s door to look back at Neil sitting in the chair outside, he knows everything is okay. It’s perfect in its own imperfect way; they are each other’s things to have, belongings to each other in the same way they share hoodies and bandages and nightmares and painkillers.

So what if this is the first time Andrew moved from his bed in three weeks? Just because something broke didn’t make it irredeemable. It made it reconstructable, recoverable; gave him the opportunity to rise into something better from the ashes and smoke of their own lives, and Andrew was alright with that.

He didn’t need to be fixed anymore. Neil did it for him.

He gives Neil a quick look before shutting the door behind him and flopping down on the sofa across from Bee. There’s a cup of hot cocoa already brewing on the coffee table in front of him, and he notices that Bee had used his favourite mug. It’s black, patterned with various anatomies of moths and their species names in Latin. Andrew had forgotten he’d had a favourite.

He's wondering what kind of mug Neil would like, if he’s bored sitting there and is actually polite enough to drink the hot chocolate this time. He still contemplating if he should go back outside and ask Neil if he wants something to drink, when Betsy asks, “How has your week been? You’re back at practice now.”

It’s true, he was back. It had only been three weeks since New York, one since Neil had come back, and though every Fox had been granted exemptions from practice, no one had actually been utilizing them except for Andrew. Well… and Neil. Andrew didn’t want to spend his hour-long therapy session talking about Exy, yet it seemed like it was going to regardless of what he wanted, and so, Andrew resisted staring down the door where Neil sat beyond.

“It’s boring,” he says, taking the mug with both hands, deciding that he and Neil should go to a coffee shop after this. Maybe they’ll even call it a date.

Bee takes a sip of her own. “Different boring than how it was before?” she asks, too knowing, too terrifying. Her words are not gentle nor soft enough to be patronizing.

Andrew refuses to say anything for two minutes, drinking his hot cocoa until it’s half-full and lukewarm. “Neil’s not there, so yes,” he says at last. “It’s different boring.”

And then comes what he’d been expecting. Bee nods empathetically, her words calm and patient as she goes on to talk her way through grief, through stages and resources and all the things that he appreciates, but are, ultimately, useless to him.

“Shh,” he cuts in, and she quiets. He puts his mug back down on the coffee table, the liquid slightly splashing onto the wood. His hands have started to shake, and he can’t have that, not now, not here, and so Andrew tucks them into the pockets of his team jacket. It’s Neil’s. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

Bee moves on easily, casual when she asks him, “Then what do you want to talk about?”

Andrew refuses to speak again. His throat hurts, voice raspy and raw from not having used it this much in so long. “It’s boring because he won’t come.”

Bee studies him without looking like she’s trying to. “What do you mean by that, Andrew?”

Andrew scoffs. “It’s stupid how obsessed he is with his fucking stickball, but won’t bother showing up.” He gestures to the closed door and Bee’s eyes trail to it. “But in my dreams? In the bedroom? On the rooftop? Boom! He’s there and won’t ever leave me alone.”

She stares at him, pauses, and asks neutrally, “You’re talking about Neil.”

Andrew rolls his eyes, throwing his head back onto the couch. “Keep up, Bee,” he sighs dramatically. “Who else would I be talking to you about?”

Betsy has her notebook open now, writing words down that Andrew can’t see. It’s something she hasn’t done in a while, but he doesn’t care. “How long have you been seeing him?” She asks.

And, um, rude.

Andrew flicks her a look, narrowing his eyes and says, hopefully in an uninterested, bored tone, “Besty Betsy, I don’t see why that’s any of your business.”

She doesn’t falter. “I meant since New York,” she amends, and Andrew just stares at her. It’s an oddly strange way to ask such a thing, and he doesn’t know what to make of it.

“He came back a couple weeks after that,” he says.

“When you see Neil, what kinds of things are happening in those moments? What kinds of things does he tell you?” Betsy asks simply, nonjudgmentally, so effortlessly with knowing eyes that shift as Andrew relaxes into the sofa again.

Andrew crosses his arms over his chest. “Lies.”

“Does Neil ever tell you to hurt yourself?” she asks, and, um, what?

“Bee, no buzzing today. He told me not to jump off the roof,” Andrew drawls out, childishly rude and annoying because if Bee is going to ask such a stupid question, he’s going to treat her with the same idiocy.

Her next question is more logical. “Do you still want to jump off?” Bee asks and Andrew thinks, that’s more like it, I love therapy! before thinking about what she just asked him.

It does sound like something Andrew would do; or at least what everyone else would think Andrew would do, so maybe that’s why people keep asking him such. Sometimes, Andrew is a little (a lot) fucked up and too damaged beyond saviour that nobody would take him in anymore. It always happened, home after home after home, and maybe it’s happening again with his real family. Maybe one day, Aaron won’t recognise the fragmented pieces that Andrew, his brother with the same face, had collapsed into for him to be able to recognise. Maybe Andrew would fall apart into a million glass shards of unrelenting insanity and the contractual concept to love through conditions, through promises, would eventually rot and die from his tainted, blood-stained hands.

Yeah, on those days, sure, Andrew could do it. He could really, really do it. But falling apart is too much effort right now, and maybe if Neil came back from the dead, Andrew could too. Maybe Neil didn’t die at all and everyone in the world is actually immortal. Maybe they can’t die. Maybe they – everyone in the whole fucking world – would just decide they wouldn’t. Wouldn’t that be fun?

“I don’t want to kill myself,” he says truthfully because Andrew doesn’t lie. Not the way Neil does. “I’m not hearing voices. I haven’t had a panic attack all week.” He takes a knife from his armband and holds it casually in his hand, pointing it lazily at Bee when he talks. “Tell me something, if you would: do you honestly think that if I wanted to kill someone, whether it be myself or someone else, that I would fail so spectacularly at it so many times?”

That answer doesn’t seem to satisfy her, not completely, at least. “Are you caring for yourself? Eating, bathing, sleeping?”

“Neil’s helping with that,” Andrew says like it’s obvious.

It’s Bee’s turn to talk again, but she waits for a moment. She lets them both sit with the silence. She’s hesitating, he realises, and Andrew doesn’t like it.

“That’s kind of him,” Betsy says softly, “I’m glad he’s still caring and watching out for you. You deserved to have someone like him,” and then there’s something awful in her voice that he can’t take, when she says, “But Andrew–"

“He’s not dead,” he insists, and it sounds like a laugh, a manic, crazed, fucked-up bubble of hysterical glee, because it feels so good to finally say it. He would step outside to bring Neil in from the empty hallway, prove it to her, but Neil doesn’t like Betsy, and Andrew’s not going to make him do anything he wouldn’t want to do. “He told me.”

Bee waits for Andrew to continue, and the silence lasts for what feels like forever. She puts her notebook down on the coffee table and Andrew can’t read upside-down, but he could probably guess what it says, and rolls his eyes.

“You said it yourself; he’s a liar,” Betsy says, not unkindly. “Sometimes, after traumatic experiences, our brains confuse reality and dissociate from those memories. Sometimes the brain shuts off rational reasoning and wants to believe things that it perceives to be safer than accepting what is true. It can be a part of how we grieve sudden deaths such as Neil’s. Having these delusions protects us from the pain of experiencing their loss.”

“Stop,” Andrew snaps. “I thought I was crazy too, but he’s alive.”

“I’m not saying you’re crazy,” Betsy tells him, voice too gentle, too soft it hurts. “I’m asking you, is it possible that the Neil you’re seeing is a delusion? A symptom of your grief?”

Somewhere distantly, Andrew hears screaming voices from the abstract, intangible essence of his mind, and he wants to laugh at them. They’re not human, and sometimes, they try to convince him that he isn’t human either. They make him want to die laughing, manically surrendering to where-ever-the-fuck you went after you killed yourself, because the voices knew that The End wasn’t rapture, no matter what Renee believed. Peace isn’t made for Andrew Minyard in the same way it isn’t for Neil Josten and the sometimes voices who sometimes live in his head that sometimes sound like people, tell him so. Sometimes.

But this isn’t that. He hasn’t been that broken in a long, long time. So, “This isn’t an episode,” Andrew tells her.

“Okay,” Betsy agrees easily. But then, “Why don’t we work through it?” she asks.

They’re only thirteen minutes into the session, but Andrew’s decided those thirteen minutes have been enough. He wants to see Neil, he wants to go home, he wants Betsy to stop thinking he’s making it all up.

“No, I’m done,” he says, standing up.

“Andrew,” she tries. “I think you should stay–"

But he’s down the hallway, side-by-side with Neil when he calls out, “I said no.”

Afternoon practice is over when he returns. Neil won’t face any of the Foxes just yet, so Andrew pretends he’s not sulking about it when he really is. Everyone is waiting for him in the foyer, and he doesn’t give anyone the simple courtesy of acknowledging them back as he leans against the far wall.

He feels Wymack keep his stare, staying on Andrew for too long to be comfortable for either of them. He opens his mouth to say something, maybe a ‘Nice of you to join us’ or ‘Did therapy fix you enough to protect the goal today?’ or ‘When are you going to get Neil back on the court?’; but he just closes his mouth again, and looks away.

“Hello, Andrew,” Renee says coming up beside him as Andrew’s still watching Neil slip out the door and run back to Fox Tower. He lingers his gaze on him for a little too long, because Renee asks, “Do you need to leave?”

Andrew forces his eyes away, crossing his arms against his chest and finding comfort in the knives that rest inside his sleeves. “I don’t need anything,” he says.

Renee accepts that easily with a nod and a smile. “Okay.”

Kevin is the only one refusing to look anywhere. He’s sitting in the armchair, alone and terribly small hunched over his knees like that, head bowing down to the ground. He hasn’t said much since New York, and definitely not to Andrew since having his airways suffocated by Andrew’s own hands. It’s not surprising in the least that Kevin seems well on his way to being completely wasted. That he’s been drinking this early is a little worse. Someone should really care enough to pour all his vodka down the sink, but he doesn’t think anyone does.

Aaron and Nicky are on the couch, squashed next to the two Freshmen. Nicky had tried to hug Andrew back in the hospital, sobbing and hysterical and spluttering Neil’s name, and Andrew had pulled a knife out before Aaron shoved Nicky back. And Aaron… well they have their new deal now, and though Aaron’s vowed to never talk about Neil, he’s also elected to not talk to Andrew at all.

 It’s comforting as it is terrifying, everybody that Andrew could have had were slipping through his fingers, blood in the drain, vomit in the kitchen sink, as Andrew just lets them. Everybody but Neil who keeps coming back, and damning everyone else in the world ephemerally obsolescent.

The rest of the Foxes, it seems, are still in their ruins.

“I didn’t even know them. I’m not going to that fucking thing. I left that shit behind in high school,” the new freshman says. Jack is his name, and it’s stupid. The aggravatingly aggressive Striker is basking within the glorious Kevin Day’s shadow and relishing in it. Sheena is the other one, and it’s just as bad. Honestly, Andrew hadn’t even been aware the group of new Foxes existed. Why they would want to join a team that was as much of a bad luck charm as an active war zone, he didn’t know or care. Kevin and Aaron didn’t need nor want protection anymore, so if they were threats, so be it.

“Bullshit you even got asked to go to these kinds of things in high school,” Allison says, studying her French-tip manicure as if it was the most important thing in her world, while her new teammates are specs of dirt underneath her fingernails. From what little Andrew’s observed of them, they may as well be.

“Fuck you! I got prom king,” Jack insists, voice so annoyingly loud, so demanding that it’s probably true.

Allison hums, shrugging. “That only serves to reiterate that you’ve already peaked in life. Congrats. And FYI, this isn’t prom. This is a university event which makes it fancier.”

“Hey, cut it out!” Matt interrupts, voice reaching over everything, commanding it silent. There’s an emotion to it Andrew can’t place, something sad and human and hurting that Andrew could never feel, lest he come undone and unmask pieces of himself that he’d needed in order to live through. He’d been crying, that night in the hospital, after Coach got the call. So had Dan and Abby and Nicky, and Andrew had –

Hm.

He doesn’t remember.

“It’s a memorial,” Wymack says, and then the room grows cold. He’s watching each of his Foxes like they are all tiny suns existing in the room, bound to explode, until their ashes are nothing but casts of blackened silhouettes across the Foxhole Court. Something awful twists inside Andrew’s gut, the feeling nauseating and empty – almost like a storm erupting inside his chest, beginning as little earth embers.

There are insignificant pieces of coal and ruins and ice in his stomach, and then they are suddenly morphing into the rising swirls of all things chaos, coating everything in shadows. The ice in his chest, the phantom pain of someone’s undoings throbbing throughout his chest, contorting the fragments of himself, and makes them drift into the places he cannot find anymore.

He doesn’t want to hear this. Coach, he can’t. Nothing is wrong anymore, except everything that is. David, can you shut the fuck up? David!

David does not shut up. “The school district is hosting along with the NCAA who think it’s a good idea to celebrate the lives of the two Foxes we’ve lost this season. There’s going to be reporters and press and cameras and we need this to make our team look unified after such tragedies.” His eyes run across the whole room, lingering onto Andrew at last, looking at him in the same way he does when he looks at everyone else and sees them beyond the things they want him to; knowing what they are before they do themselves. It’s infuriating just as much as it is terrifying. “We’re Foxes,” he says. “It’s what we’re made for.”

Sheena rolls her eyes. “I’ll be sure to pray to the stars for a miracle.”

“The stars wouldn’t give you shit,” Allison says.

With Neil now destined to become vice-captain, Andrew can already tell the new Foxes are going to be a problem for him just as much as they will be for everyone, and sure, Andrew’s done with Kevin and Aaron and Nicky, but Neil? Neil, he will fight for. Neil, he would kill for. Neill, he could live for. Always, it’s Neil Neil Neil.

“Enough!” Dan shouts. "First things first, everyone has to come. Everyone has to be sane. Everyone has to be so well put together and presentable because this is how we’re honouring Seth and N–/#/REDACTED/#/

“Extra points for those who bring dates to display the fact that they have the ability to form an emotional, romantic or otherwise meaningful connection to another human being,” Allison chimes in, looking so condescendingly sweet when she turns to the freshman. “Aw too bad, you two. That sucks for you guys.”

Jack shouted back some immature obscenity that Andrew didn’t care for.

“Do you want to go together?” Renee asks quietly, and doesn’t have to think about it before he answers her.

“No,” Andrew says simply. “Neil will come with me.”

Everything stops. Everyone’s eyes are on him.

Then Andrew sees bodies move from the corner of his eyes. Kevin lifts his head from between his knees for the first time, and their eyes meet. Andrew can see the way his hand is twitching, shaking the way it did in New York. Aaron and Nicky are strangely close together, closer than he’s ever seen them be. Aaron is more cautious than anything else, but Nicky beside him looks tearfully miserable in the seconds it took for Andrew to speak at all.

Andrew can see it in the way they start to move, the way they breathe. The remnants of his family are clinging to each other like they’d otherwise come apart, and Renee, desperate to defend him, is breaking as well. He doesn’t move closer to her, but he knows she wants to.

He feels himself twisting to get away from them all in this impossible space of the foyer that had just become an ‘Andrew and Neil are dating!’ announcement. He should deny it, or rather he should want to want to deny it, but he can’t. He was sure that they’d figured it out just after the riot in New York, but maybe they all are just that stupid; the kind of stupid that Neil was before Andrew had to spell out wanting to suck his dick.

Everyone is looking at him, and the way they do makes him think their stomachs are eating away at their organs, rot that tastes of sickening irrational grief for someone who had never died devouring their insides.

“The fuck did he just say?” Jack says, the first one daring to break the silence.

It’s Allison who talks next. “Andrew, sweetie,” she says, so uncharacteristically soft that it seems sacrilegious of her to speak to him this way, let alone at all. She’s sat up from her chair by now, drifting closer to Renee like branches of a willow tree coming together.

He steps back.

“Is he serious?” Matt asks, voice heavy, a whisper of sorts that carries like a storm throughout the whole room. He looks to Dan and then to Wymack. “I can’t tell if he’s joking or not.”

“Andrew,” Nicky sniffles. “Why would you say that?”

And then there’s laughing. Sick, awful laughing making the world undo itself. “Ask him! Aaron, you speak psycho monster, right?” Jack scoffs, cutting and violent.

“Hey, Monster,” Sheena bites. “You need to be medicated again.”

“Fuck off,” Aaron cuts in, and oh, that’s unexpected. With hollow, dead eyes, Andrew stares down his brother, and Aaron refuses to look back at him. “Don’t talk to him,” Aaron declares instead, a steady, unbreakable tone that is demanding the rest to believe him in some absurd Aaron-less way that doesn’t make any sense at all. Aaron has cared enough to kill for him, but never enough to have a conversation; never enough to defend him. It’s Neil who defies what everyone else wants to condemn as real when it comes to Andrew Minyard, to unconditionally know what is true and what is false, and choose to want him anyway.

He doesn’t care what that makes him.

“Did you miss the part where Wilds mentioned being ‘sane’?” Jack sneers.

“He thinks he’s funny,” Kevin tells them all. His head drops back down to the ground. “It’s fine.”

“This goes for any of you,” Wymack barks, looking at all his Foxes. His eyes land upon the Freshman when he says, “If you’re going to say shit like that, I will ensure you can partake in these formal atrocities every week.”

Sheena laughs. “Does that mean you’ll kill one of us on a weekly basis? Memorial for each Fox?”

“Can we vote on who gets murdered first?” Jack asks back.

And this time it’s Matt, furious in a way Andrew’s never seen before – never thought he could be before, despite everything that they’d done to him – stalking over to Jack, shoving him up and against the wall. He slams him a second time, the sound of feet scraping against the floor, bodies hitting drywall, Matt demanding, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Everyone, shut up! Boyd, let him go,” Coach orders, the shout of his voice silencing the room to sick stillness in seconds. He has this look, something so hurt and horrid and enraged that it makes Wymack not look like Wymack anymore. Matt relinquishes his hold on Jack reluctantly, the latter shoving back, and sinking into the couch again next to Sheena. Coach jabs a finger to the two freshmen. “You two, get lost before I put you on a plane so that you can crawl back to whatever hellholes you came from.”

Then, he looks to Andrew. “And Minyard,” he says, the words strangely heavy, painful. He’s the first to move, and Andrew feels his body pull away. He hadn’t even realised he’d made the choice to. “Andrew–"

“I’m leaving,” he says.

“Andrew, may I come with you?” Renee says and nothing within her wavers. She’s calm and steady like an anchor that’s always been there, and something for him else to keep coming back to, keep holding on to, if only he needed to.

But he has Neil.

“Don’t.”

Neil is waiting for him when he returns home. He’s changed out of Andrew’s hoodie, the one he’s been wearing for days, and it’s now discarded on the bedroom floor with another pile of dirty laundry that Andrew’s been ignoring for weeks, building up and up and up until it had just become a permeant fixture like the aching walls Andrew needs to sleep against or the ghosts that sometimes live here. A pile of clothes and bones and Neil Josten are at Andrew’s feet as soon as he steps into the room, and suddenly Andrew isn’t doing anything but sitting there with them.

“Hey,” Neil says, leaning in close, elbows resting on his knees, head in his hands. “How was therapy?” He stays on the floor with all of Andrew’s clothing around him, and distantly, Andrew realises more than half of it is Neil’s anyway. He can’t remember how or when all their dirty laundry must have gotten here, but now that it is, he finds he doesn’t have it in him to put any of it away.

Andrew mirrors him, sinking down to the floor and daring his face to press into Neil’s space, lying right next to the clothes he’d been wearing that day in New York. He remembers changing out in the locker room, leaving Neil behind as the last one to leave it. He’d been wearing a grey hoodie, armbands hidden underneath, and he’d kept his hands stuffed in the pockets until Neil had come out. It had felt warmer, impossibly, all of a sudden, all at once, in some existential, universally impossible way Andrew wouldn’t try to make sense of.

“You don’t care,” Andrew says.

“I do,” Neil says back.

They stay like that for a long moment, silent and still, staring at each other to see who will break away first and staying like that when neither of them can. They’re the only people here, Andrew thinks – in the dorm, in the building, in the world. It’s so nauseatingly cliché that he’d remembered laughing about the poetics of love when reading Shakespeare in English Literature courses, but fuck, maybe that old, decomposed bastard was onto something.

“I’m not thinking about poetry,” he tells Neil… obviously, and receives a flat look in response.

“I didn’t ask.”

They sit there within the nothingness for too long again, willing the other to give up, go away, stand up, and for the first time, Andrew seems to realise they can’t. They’re stuck here, with each other, with their laundry, on the floor like old piles of dust and bones, and maybe they’ll rot together, maybe they’ll like it.

“Come back to practice,” Andrew finds himself saying at last without really meaning to. They’re so content here, he doesn’t think they should ever leave, and it doesn’t make sense why Neil should want to stay here forever. He’s changed since he came back from Baltimore, and like history’s past repeating itself over and over – a serpent eating its own tale until it chokes on it – the pieces of Neil aren’t adding up. He’s an enigma all over again, and unlike the first time, Andrew wants him all the same. “They’re still assholes without you there, but at least they’re easier to tolerate.” He shrugs. “Some of them miss you.”

Neil ignores him as if Andrew had never even spoken in the first place, and says, “Come take a bath with me.” He breaks away first, he loses whatever game neither of them had known they were playing, and picks himself up from the floor. The pile of laundry doesn’t move with him.

“Why?”

From the bathroom’s doorway, Neil narrows his eyes. The yellowish-pale lighting from inside makes him look strange, airy. “When was the last time you showered?” he accuses bluntly over the sound of the pipes aching throughout the bones of the building. The smell of half-empty coconut bubble bath clings to the evaporating steam spilling from the bathroom, sickly sweet like syrup fusing with the stale, sickish smell of everything else beyond the walls of the bathroom.

It’s nauseating and overwhelming and distantly, he thinks he might be mildly allergic to those artificial additives, but he decides he likes it. Andrew picks himself up, walking over to the same archway, letting the awful stark lighting of the bathroom reach him all the same. He wonders if he looks terrible in it – all hollow-boned and sickeningly pale and matted hair, that Neil had finally had enough of looking at. He wonders if it hurts him too. “I don’t know,” he says honestly.

“You look like shit,” Neil whispers wryly, smiling when he says it. They’re close enough that Andrew could lean against him if he wanted to, and he does, but he won’t.

“You’re such a romantic,” he says instead, one hand to the tiles.

“Only for you.” Neil’s voice is a tiny whisper that melts off the walls of the bathroom, and the feel of his breath against Andrew’s reminds him something of graffitied poetry and broken hearts in permanent marker scarring the aching walls of their dormitory with everyone else who had come before. How stupid, how awful, how funny that these walls, baring all these scars from all these people who just happened to live in the same place they do, have the condemnation of also seeing theirs.

“Idiot,” he says. He can’t think of any way to say any of it. Somehow, Andrew already thinks Neil knows.

It is terrifying and comforting in a strange sort of way, what had become of Neil Josten to Andrew Minyard. He had been an indescribable thorn wedged underneath Andrew’s teeth like a sickness he couldn’t get rid of, and then he had changed. Those butterfly lies had broken free from their cocoons, and when they did, they had strangled him. Neil had morphed into something different, something more when he hadn’t even been paying attention, and Andrew – Andrew had let him, because that had been easier than admitting he had.

Andrew isn’t sure what to do with that. He lets the bath water fill up and he lets himself sit in it. He’s still wearing all his clothes and shoes, because taking everything off seemed like too much effort, and sometimes, some days, you have to take what you can get. Some days you bathe with all your dirty laundry because you have to make it work somehow.

Neil knows this too, and doesn’t say anything. He gets in the other side of the bath in all its artificial coconut bubbles, peeling his clothes off one-by-one as they reach the water. Shoes then socks then sweatpants then hoodie then t-shirt, all soaked, all laying on the bathroom tiles like puzzle pieces to pick up sometime later. He’s drowning the floor alive. The water never moves, but Andrew somehow doesn’t expect it to, doesn’t even care.

The man sitting in front of him, drags his hand along the in-betweens of the bathroom tiles where wall meets bathtub, and Andrew looks between the bubbles to see skin ruined in a hundred different places. He’s something of a masterpiece constructed of collapsing paper mâché and wet glue that Andrew had held in his hands at one home or another, and he doesn’t know what to do about that. He’s someone Andrew thought of as this infuriating, beautiful thing that he needed to unravel like twine and string in his unkind, bloodied hands and inexplicably, impossibly it was as if he would die if he could not.

Neil hands Andrew a hairbrush. “Your hair is so matted that it’s falling out,” and then feels the need to say, “You smell. I’m surprised no one’s said anything.”

Andrew makes a show of sinking up to his neck into the water, letting the hairbrush fall to the bottom of the bathtub before using it. “Oh, don’t worry. They say enough as it is.” He rolls his eyes when he remembers what the freshmen had said. “Though usually it's uninteresting bigotry.”

“Does it upset you?” Neil asks.

“I don’t feel enough to be offended,” he says, blinking once. He runs his fingers against the white tiles, looking down at the soaking sleeve of his armbands, heavy with the weight of the water and his knives. His fingers are leaving behind marred lines against the porcelain as he watches his fingers move with an unreal feeling buried within himself, akin to radio static or boundless white noise. The steam and the bubble bath are making his head dizzy with something like contentment, but not quite. “They could never hurt me.”

“I make you feel,” Neil says, then asks, “Do I hurt you?”

This isn’t real, Andrew thinks. His mind is becoming cloudy within the fevered heat and the sickening smell of bubble bath, but he is lucid enough to know that Neil seems too out-of-place, his words too sweet against Andrew’s tongue, each scar on Neil’s body too clean.

“I want to touch your scars,” Andrew says, reality becoming something of an illusion time and time again as if someone had sketched it anew with graphite or charcoal or grey-lead, and made the Neil sitting in the bath with him something of their own to refine and reshape and rewrite.

And then Andrew blinks again, and then everything is perfect, all of it down to the way Neil’s body seems to fit within the water, within the world, is so familiar Andrew could map it as if he were a cartographer. Neil had said something similar once, hadn’t he?

Today he says, “No, Andrew. Just look.”

Andrew does, noting all the new markings of Neil’s body down, knowing that once he files each scar away in his memory, they will never leave it. Everything’s there, everything’s awful. The iron burn, the road rash, the knives – and then the new ones. The cigarette lighter, the blow torch, the knives. “They look different. There’s more.”

“Yes. But I’m still here. I’m not going anywhere.”

“I don’t need you,” Andrew says, his lungs starting to burn from the smell of the artificial coconut bubble bath or maybe something else.

“Do you want me to leave?” Neil asks him.

“I just got you back. I’m never letting you go,” Andrew decides for the both of them. He’ll scream it until he loses the breath to speak, carve it into the unchangeable stars. He’s never had the privilege of wanting since he was seven-years-old, but he has this, he has Neil, and that’s nothing only because it is everything. Somehow Andrew knows, they’ll be here all week, all year, together for the rest of forever without ever having to say it. The lies don’t matter, anymore, and maybe one day, Andrew will kiss them all away. Neither Andrew nor Neil would ever admit to something as terrifyingly infinite as that, but there’s an unspoken unconditional promise that they’ll never need to. Maybe one day they’d get there, and maybe one day they’d say it aloud and maybe one day they’d realise that it didn’t matter to them as much as it seemed to matter to the rest of the world and maybe one day they would give up.

“Next week, will you go to the Ball with me?” Andrew asks at last, because he was Andrew Minyard and he should’ve been able to do the insignificantly mundane, immensely human task of stopping himself from feeling, from falling – but he hadn’t. For Neil, he couldn’t.

Neil’s eyes, glazed over in the feverish warmth of the bathroom, find Andrew’s. His upturned palms are pressing away from the edge of the bathtub, aching to reach out to Andrew’s but won’t. The surface of the water hasn’t moved once. The world is too calm. He sits in the other end of the tub like a silent storm that out-rivals the sea. He looks like someone who is in love. He looks like someone who is guilty. “This isn’t a fairy tale,” he says, and it just might be the first real thing Neil’s said in a long, long time, Andrew thinks.

“No, it’s not,” Andrew says, a whisper of breath, barely anything at all as if to not be mistaken for a prayer, an epilogue that could unravel everything into its destined place and condemn the things they had defied. None of this is a lie if he says it quietly enough. “But does it matter?”

And Neil smiles. “No. I guess it doesn’t.”

The first time Neil is around the others goes like this:

They’re alone together, mostly, for the better half of the morning. Kevin spends more time at the court than he does in the dorm. Nicky and Aaron have generally stuck to themselves. The only time they’re anywhere near their own home is when they’re sleeping. They don’t say things about the piles of soaking clothes or stacks of plates with ants drinking pancake syrup, and Andrew doesn’t say anything about the empty bottles of vodka and stolen whiskey. They go and they leave and they come back and Andrew hadn’t cared where they all disappeared off to when they weren’t around him, but all three of them are here now. Nicky and Aaron stay in the kitchenette, both sparing Andrew lingering looks, and he ignores them. Kevin leans against the doorframe with his helmet in his hands like it will give him all the unknown answers the universe has left to offer.

No one acknowledges Neil and he doesn’t acknowledge any of them. But it’s fine. It’s only been a week and a bit. It’s hardly even March anymore. Neil’s back in their lives like he’d never left, and suddenly, everything is okay. All of Andrew’s family are back with him again, and everything is as it should be. Life is happy and perfect and good and fine and –

Oh. Midterms. School work is the biggest problem in Andrew’s life.

“C’mon, you know this,” Neil whines. He’s sitting on the windowsill above Andrew’s desk, blocking all the sunlight because he’s rude and a nuisance and his attempts to make Andrew study for his midterms are having an opposing effect. His feet hit the top of the wood, jostling Andrew’s practice papers and making him have to reread the case study he’s been stuck on for the last ten minutes.

Behind them, Aaron is washing the fry pan Neil had used to make pancakes this morning like he does every morning. He doesn’t clean up in-between. Some of it must be a few days old. Aaron is muttering something about how disgusting everything is. Something like, “Why are you always making pancakes if you’re never going to cook them?”

But Andrew doesn’t talk to Aaron ever. He answers Neil instead.

“I don’t,” Andrew mutters, head in his hands.

Nicky looks over at him, sitting on the bench.

Assist Defence Counsel by identifying any further ground(s) upon which the Accused could seek to exclude the evidence of Dr Smith, paying particular attention to arguments that may be made in relation to how the Accused’s hair sample was obtained.

The Defence Counsel can go fuck itself.

Neil smirks, leaning forward. “I don’t believe you.”

Andrew takes his eyes off the paper to glare at Neil. “I know.” His space on the desk is possibly more of a mess than Andrew’s head. Criminology textbooks are littering the ground, all sorts of practice exams and note cards are sprawled out around them. He can remember it all as soon as he looks at it, but he has to see the content first.

There’s a notebook Neil has in front of him, and on the page, he’s doodled hearts and paw prints and Andrew’s own name hundreds of times like he thought he’d ever forget it. The letters are barely legible, but Andrew decides he likes it, all chaotic symbols and uneven scripture and maybe, despite everything, his own name making no sense at all.

Andrew narrows his eyes at him. “Don’t you have your Spanish worksheet to do?”

Neil tilts his head. He smiles, looking upside-down at Andrew’s paper, seemingly content with the two words that bare the scripture of the entire page. He doesn’t take his eyes off it. “I thought we’d discussed that I’m studying astronomy now.” He blinks innocently, fluttering his eyelashes, drawing random dots onto the paper. “Look. Circinus.”

Andrew takes his pen and violently draws lines back and forth through whatever constellation Neil had thought he’d connected. “This university doesn’t even have such a major, idiot.”

“Fuck you, I’ll study the stars anyway,” Neil huffs, crossing his arms and leaning back against the window. He reads a random question on the practice exam upside down, nodding to it with his chin. “What’s a ‘proper basis certification’? Go.”

And that’s when Kevin fucking Day has to interrupt whatever peace they’d managed to salvage, stalking over to Andrew’s desk, commanding not asking, “Hey. We’re practising now.”

“No,” Andrew says back, detached. Neil flicks him an annoyed look in response that he doesn’t so much as see but feel.

Kevin ignores him, because he’s Kevin Day and he thinks he always gets what he wants. The Foxes came so far and had to drop out right before championships, the Ravens won, Kevin’s hand is still out, how very, very sad; but here he is, always demanding what he thinks he deserves of other people. “We are. You might’ve started going back to the Court, but you’ve missed three weeks. I know you’re not studying, either. You’re scribbling nonsense into your notebooks. Why’ve you written your name so many times?”

Andrew points with his pen to the mess of blue and black ink and illegible scripture in Neil’s notebook, and looks at Kevin like he’s stupid. “It’s Circinus.”

“It’s concerning.”

“You’re astrophobia is not my problem.”

“Andrew,” he says.

Andrew finally looks up from the paper when he says to Kevin, “Ask Neil. He hasn’t stepped foot on the Court since the Bearcats game.”

A glass shatters. Neil recoils, hitting the windowsill without touching it, it seems.

“What?” The word comes up strangled, a broken noise from Aaron’s throat. He tears his eyes from the dirty dishes he’d been vacantly staring at for an unnatural amount of time, and looks at Andrew. Nicky is beside him, staring at the glass like it had left its soul behind when it broke, and then draws his eyes to his cousin as well.

“His obsession is nauseating but the lack of it is unnerving,” Andrew admits, a heaviness settling itself inside his chest all over again. He looks at Aaron, pale and cold, the plate he’d been washing up in thousands of fragments on the kitchen tiles, and distantly, Andrew feels like he is sinking again, going down, down, down with the cheap porcelain crockery as it falls from outer space, from the sink, the dish soap bubbles eating him alive when he shatters at the bottom. He swallows against the awful lump in his throat, looking away from his brother who won’t fucking move away from the mess he made. He swallows. “Someone should go ask him if he’s feeling okay. Nicky?”

Nobody moves for an infuriatingly long second. Neil is still behind him, looking down.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Kevin orders at last.

“Andrew,” Nicky says like he can’t remember how to say anything else. His voice aches the way Aaron’s did, a little more hollow, a little less controlled.

Andrew turns to face Kevin for the first time, feeling Neil’s eyes bear daggers into the back of his head. He’s still sitting on the desk, leaning against the glass, so still and quiet that he could be dead. Kevin is an awful pale ash colour, and his helmet shakes in his right hand.

“Dear Kevin,” Andrew says, lolling his head lazily in Neil’s direction. “You should focus on him, no? Run off into the bright, stupid orange sunset together and never bother me again.”

Kevin steps back, body hitting the sofa behind him. Glass crunches underneath Aaron’s shoes, and suddenly he’s walking across the tiles to come closer to them, fragments weaving themselves into the carpet. Andrew had dropped a glass like that before, had lived with broken porcelain on his bedroom floor for months because it just never occurred to him to pick it up. But it hadn’t been a problem. He had just simply always worn his shoes inside.

Aaron says his name. “Andrew, why would you–”

Someone’s crying. It’s not Andrew because that would be embarrassing. Nicky is, because of course he is, and Andrew doesn’t like it, doesn’t understand.

“What, Nicky? Hm?” He asks innocently.

“Just stop,” Nicky whispers. “Stop talking like that–”

Andrew narrows his eyes at his cousin. “Stop crying.” He glances over at everyone, at Nicky’s quiet tearful mess of a face, at Aaron’s agonizing silence, and then to Kevin’s scrutinizing, awful eyes. He finds himself looking back at Neil when he asks them, “Why aren’t any of you studying for midterms?”

Neil shifts uncomfortably, facing down to look at his drawing of the stars. The pen isn’t in Neil’s hand anymore, it’s in Andrew’s. When did that happen? Who actually drew the constellation of the stars? Neil had, hadn’t he? Neil is studying astrophysics now.

Aaron comes closer again, closer to him than Kevin is and asks, “What are you trying to do?”

“Study,” Andrew says, sounding the kind of innocently unaware that they know he isn’t, and when he speaks, he sounds homesick in a way Foxes could never be. “You’re interrupting our study date. Go. Leave us alone. I’m only going to the Court outside of practice if Neil will, fair?”

“Andrew…” Neil whispers. His hand reaches for the paper, covering it with his hand. His fingers move carefully, erasing over the single constellation with a kind of savoury the unkind world would burn out of him, all fevered flesh and searing bone.

Break. Everything breaks again.

 “What the fuck is wrong with you?!” Kevin screams, voice sounding like steel wool on glass, like Aaron shattering the cup on the tiles. “You know he’s not ever–”

“I can’t–” Nicky cuts in, voice raspy and wet and awful. “I can’t listen to this.”

“Just everyone shut up!” Aaron yells.

Andrew scoffs, turning back around to his brother. “Fuck you. Neil–”

But –

“Oh, Andrew,” Nicky rasps. Neil flinches. “Just stop, please–”

And there it is. That word inside Andrew’s head. Somewhere, everywhere, a shadow in the shape of a man is carving up the walls of his mind, infecting every inch of his skull, his skin and making an agonising home for himself within the ashen doll-like paper folds of his bone marrow, all because someone had said that fucking word –

Something hits the ground again, and this time, it’s all of Andrew’s textbooks. He hadn’t thrown them, but he didn’t know how else they would have gotten there. Neil keeps his eyes on Andrew like nothing had happened at all.

“Don’t!” Aaron interrupts, angry and lost and red, staring at the mess that is their home, he supposes. “Kevin shouldn’t have asked. We get it!”

“What does that even mean?” Andrew asks him.

Aaron looks at him for far too long before shaking his head and turning to the door. “I’m not cleaning this up.”

They’re talking about him. He doesn’t think they know he knows but Andrew does know, and how rude of them not to include him in the conversation if he isn’t even there to talk about himself, too! Andrew leans against the doorway, shoving his hands in his pockets, eavesdropping because they’re out in the hall blocking him from the stairs. He doesn’t want to have to acknowledge them. Seriously? Can’t they talk shit about him in private? What is this bullshit?

“Did you talk to Coach about him?” Matt asks, and Andrew rolls his eyes. There’s no need to bring Wymack into any of his business and he’s pretty sure Wymack knows well enough to stay away.

“Yeah. But it’s – it’s not like there’s anything wrong wrong with him,” Dan argues, uncertain. “He’s eating again, he’s showing up to practice, he’s going to class. It’s been, what, two weeks of him doing better? These are good things.”

Andrew crosses his arms over his chest, then uncrosses them. He counts the seconds as they pass, wondering when the upperclassmen will decide to stop discussing his eating habits enough to leave him alone. There’s pancake batter in the sink that he drank earlier, they can go check if they like.

“This isn’t normal,” Matt says, sighing.

“Andrew isn’t normal,” Allison mutters, and yes, Andrew does have to agree with her on that. He doesn’t think sane people eat raw pancake batter, because well-adjusted people would have the energy to cook them, or bathe without their clothes on, or study without seeing stars. “Foxes will never be normal.”

Dan speaks next. “Do you think he’s in denial?”

“No, it’s – it’s more than that,” Matt says, and it’s strange. Andrew has never cared about the things people say about him, but this is different. There’s a tightening in his chest, a painful cold to his lungs when he breathes out. He steadies himself against the doorframe with one hand, and then the other.

Neil’s waiting for him. He just has to leave the dorm first.

“He’s pretending,” Kevin says, and oh. That’s interesting. Kevin hanging out with the upperclassmen? Such betrayal. Andrew would care more if he wasn’t having such a hard time breathing. “He’ll get bored of it eventually.”

“Maybe,” Dan says, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.

Against invisible sirens going off, Andrew hears Kevin mutter, “He’s bringing up Neil to hurt us.”

Andrew’s never had such a headache like this one.

“He’s not evil,” Matt says. “He’s unwell.”

Oh, okay then. Thank you, Matthew for that revelling diagnosis of Andrew’s psyche.

Andrew lays his head back against the door, breathing unsteady air that feels deranged within his heavy lungs. The phantom smell of hospital and bile and raw pancake batter sweeps throughout the kitchen like a serpent seeping throughout a ruin of wreckage in some other distant echo Andrew’s been condemned to in his tainted twenty-year-old life. It’s suffocating his airways as his own reflection had all the way back in the bathroom mirror this morning, and he cannot escape the smell of lighter fluid and antiseptic and spoiled milk. He closes his eyes, screwing them shut enough to make them hurt. Stupid fucking Circinus that he’s never seen before besides on paper, and its sickeningly morphing ability to tangle itself into a mangled kaleidoscope across his vision. Andrew chokes on it, collapsing as it falls from the sky.

He must’ve made a noise when he hit the ground because the next thing he knows, all the upperclassmen are suddenly quiet. “Shit,” Allison mutters and Andrew pictures them all staring at his door wondering if he’ll open it first.

He doesn’t. He shoves his head between his knees and forces his lungs to take in air. In for four, hold for four, out for four, box breathing just like Bee told him to. He’d said it was stupid back then, and he still thinks it is now, but Neil is going places where Andrew can’t reach him and everyone else thinks he’s fucking crazy and drinking pancake mix for breakfast didn’t seem like all that good of an idea anymore –

Renee’s here. Renee who is real and tangible and almost painfully light. A little bit like a sun against the shadow damning everything black, and she sits in front of him, far away and close all at the same time. It’s the same space Aaron had dropped the glass days ago, and though it had been cleaned up, maybe there were still some specs of glass left behind.

“I didn’t let you in,” Andrew says, but his hand is reaching behind him, still on the doorknob, closing the sliver of open doorway. “Don’t sit there.”

“I’m sorry you heard us talking about you, Andrew,” she says, pushing herself up from the ground and standing near the counter. “We didn’t mean to upset you.”

Andrew rolls his eyes, willing the shakiness from his voice. He can’t hear any of the others out in the corridor. “You couldn’t. Neil and I talk all kinds of things about you guys, so no worries.”

Renee studies him and he looks up at her through unimpressed, hooded eyes. “It’s not like that,” she says after a moment. “We’re worried about you, Andrew. I think you should talk to Betsy.”

“I do. We talk every week,” he says, then points to the sink. “Do you want those pancakes? They’re a week old and raw.”

She doesn’t break her gaze on him. “Did you tell her about Neil?”

Andrew laughs. Andrew laughs. What the fuck? It’s a bitter and raw and ugly thing, and he spits out, “She asked if Neil told me to hurt myself! Ha! Like Neil could be capable of such a thing.”

“Andrew,” she tries to say, but –

Renee’s got him talking and suddenly he can’t stop. Something old and buried is being dug up from inside of him, and maybe Andrew recognizes what it is, but he also doesn’t care to place it. “He’s always cooking with me or helping me run a bath. And if he’s not making sure I sleep through the night, he’s making up fairy tales. Nicky was upset the other day. Aaron and Kevin were so angry.”

He's standing up now, all the blood rushing to his head making him dizzy. He doesn’t stop to let the sick faintness fade, and instead grabs his textbooks and notepads off the desk. He shoves pencils into his jean pockets and his laptop charger into the sleeve of his hoodie because he can’t quiet remember what he did with his backpack. He knows his computer is in it, so he probably doesn’t need the charging cord, but hey, sometimes you need things that you don’t actually need. Or whatever.

Renee is perfectly still in the centre of the room, watching him carefully. “And Neil?”

Andrew’s response is immediate. He even stops himself from pacing around the room any further, making sure that he’s calm when he talks to Renee because this is important. This is it. “He’s perfect,” Andrew says, something awful like love sickness sticking to his gums when he says the words. “He came back with a hundred more scars, but he’s the same. Still a liar; still a lie. If I didn’t hate him the way I do, I’d have to love him. What an awful thing to do to myself, no?”

Renee isn’t saying anything. She couldn’t possibly know the feelings Andrew feels. She hasn’t fallen that way yet, and for that, she’s so fucking golden. Andrew had thought of himself as immune, too, until he hadn’t. “Is it still March? Who are you taking to the stupid ball? Allison? Has she sent you photos of her tits yet?”

Renee doesn’t faulter at his question. She ignores him, rude, and instead says, “Andrew, I have an appointment at Reddin with Betsy now. I think you should come with me.”

“Can’t,” Andrew interrupts because all this talk about needing to see his therapist is boring. He has things to do today, a laptop charger inside his hoodie, and a ghost to eat lunch with, so he really should get going. “I’m getting coffee with our resident bag of bullshit. Neil’s waiting for me.”

He was wrong about his teammates leaving. They’re all waiting outside as if to see Andrew covered in blood with red footsteps trailing to reveal Renee’s corpse inside. They’re all so pale and still when he meets their eyes.

He salutes them all with two fingers when he walks past.

“Thought you’d forgotten about me,” Neil’s voice doesn’t carry enough to be heard by the swell of people around them. He’s there, waiting for Andrew, in the little nook at the furthest table away from the door. That is where Andrew finds him.

“I wish,” Andrew says. He sits down opposite Neil, two coffees in his hands. One is a blond roasted, toffeenut iced affogato latte with golden foam and the other is an americano. “I don’t think you’re something made for such a concept.”

Andrew places both drinks down on the table. Neil smiles down at his coffee, wrapping both hands around it but never taking a sip, never moving it. “Well, not for someone like you.”

Andrew drops all the other things he has on his person onto the ground. Pencils and notepads and textbooks scatter against the floor, and neither of them even spare a glance towards all the mess. Andrew doesn’t say anything.

“Are you going to drink that?” Neil asks, motioning to the abomination of a latte that’s dripping sticky sweet ice-cream into the cracks of plastic into the table. He looks up at Andrew. “You didn’t eat much for breakfast.”

“You weren’t home when I woke up,” he accuses, and Neil stares at him for so many seconds that Andrew loses count. “Felt sick,” he shrugs instead, the word feeling not quite right, but he can’t find any other way to describe such a feeling. Maybe raw pancakes and undead unboyfriends just do that kind of thing to the human body. “I don’t want anything.”

Neil crosses his arms on the table, leaning his head right in the middle, and looks up, smiling like he’s caught Andrew. “Then why are we in a cafe?”

Andrew leans back, away. “You chose this place.”

“Well, when people go on dates, they tend to go to cafes and order coffees and talk about their lives and fall in love,” Neil says, blinking and smiling as if such terrifying concepts are that of children’s games, as if they are so simple, they will never not make sense to him. Yes and yes and yes, he keeps saying, always, because he is so fucking naive. “I thought we could try that.”

“We mixed the order up,” Andrew says because for once in his whole fucking life, he doesn’t know how to say anything different.

And Neil hums like he knows. “We’ll always be something else.”

Andrew feels warmth suddenly at his palm and notices Neil’s steadier, anchoring grip almost reaching for his own hand across the table. He stares at Neil’s face and he looks like the way he did in the bedroom, in the bathroom, in the catacombs, all gentle features and wondering eyes and having the want to whisper something Andrew doesn’t want to hear from impossibly forgiving lips. Neil won’t make his hand reach out all the way, and Andrew cannot meet him there despite how agonizing it is to not to.

Andrew wants to warn him. Neither of them are made for this. Neil should know there’s no such thing as soulmates in the same way there’s no such thing as ghosts. But Neil is something of stardust and Andrew is the ashes, and somewhere amongst this undying universe Andrew wants to want to love him. “Hm,” he says, as if he isn’t thinking about anything at all. “Have we fallen in love?”

Neil blinks at him, unfazed.

Here in this small space of an exhausting, unkind world, in a campus cafe that feels much too warm than it has the right to ever be, Andrew realises that he wants to exist for this person for the rest of his life. He wants to smoke cigarettes on the rooftop as sunset spills across the concrete, and breathe in the smell of smoke and cheap shampoo as Neil breathes against him. He wants to see him graduate and play all across the world so Andrew can follow him there, and make Neil cups of coffee he has no intention of ever drinking himself, and then he wants to kiss Neil’s mouth, always, because maybe this is what it is to be known by someone, and maybe it isn’t as terrifying as he had once thought. Sometimes it is three AM and his mouth tastes like a graveyard and rotten pancakes and fire embers that catch on the gasoline rainbows, but Andrew’s never known a thing like Neil that can so seamlessly make it seem as if he’d never known what it is to hurt.

How dare he, Andrew thinks.

Neil sits up. “Did you bring your law textbook?”

“Don’t do that. Stop taking care of me.”

Neil didn’t know, not everything, not yet, not it all – but for the first time in so very, very long, since the beginning that Andrew had condemned the ‘end’, since his seven-year-old body had laid in a bed with a man, reeking of sex, Andrew thinks he might be able to tell him.

“Make me.”

No. It’s wrong. Everything is wrong. Nothing is –

It still makes his chest hurt and the unbelievable grief that isn’t grief finds its way into his skin, as if begging to be felt for the first time all over again, weeks later. Is it March? The smoke, perhaps real or perhaps intangible, is everywhere and Andrew feels himself waiting to sink down to the gravel to find oxygen that died with something that isn’t dead. He buries it all back down.

“If you want to take care of me, give me the truth about Baltimore.”

“Here?” Neil doesn’t look anywhere but at Andrew. There’s milk screaming as it boils, porcelain mugs clattering down onto wooden tables, voices and voices and voices talking louder as if they’ll never be heard any other way. But, yes –

“Anywhere.”

Neil Josten is dying.

And then he is not.

Something you need to know about the Wesninskis is that –

Nathaniel was not their only child.

Neil’s twin brother comes out from the shadows, slow clapping an awful agony as Neil keeps Lola’s gun trained on Nathan.

Their father’s body lies in the centre of the training room, a mere carcass of bones and flesh, red bullet wounds constellating his body like a sickening mimic of a galaxy that not one soul in this fucking house, it seems, has ever seen. The Wesninskis will never leave this basement. The impermanence of their father’s mangled skin look like the stars Neil and his brother would map together, pretending the way children who were not them pretended.

Everyone else is dead.

Neil is still holding a gun to the body when he hears his twin brother speak for the first time. He tears his eyes away from the corpses scattered around the room, and glazes harrowingly towards the man wearing his own face. The sickening sound of hearing his brother speak makes Neil want to collapse underneath the stone beneath his feet, come undone just as his father had, shatter his knees as his father had promised he’d do himself.

He is evil and just as much as a villain as Nathan was, and so, Neil’s twin drawls his words in a comical way that seems awfully cartoonish. “This is what you ought to be, Nathaniel,” he says, stalking closer, taking slow, measured steps around all the corpses Neil had shot dead before they could kill him first. “It’s in your blood.”

He stops dead in front of Neil once his feet met their father’s body, staring down the gun in his hands as if it were nothing, not even flinching as Neil raises it, pointing it to him. “This family is your destiny,” he studies Neil, a perfect mirror of himself that neither of them have looked at in eight years. “You defied it all to be something other than what you were made for. That’s not fair.”

They are the Wesninski twins, born to be the next Butchers of Baltimore, inheriting the crown from their father’s legacy – only things turned out differently.

Neil cocks the gun. “Get over it.”

“Mom’s dead. Dad’s dead,” his brother tells him, like Neil hadn’t been the one to watch them both die, even after murdering the latter. He draws his own gun to Neil. “I’m the only thing you have left,” he says, voice that of delicate songbirds and bone-decaying poison. He doesn’t sound human, the same way his father had never sounded human, and wonders if he sounds like them, too.

“No,” Neil says, “I’m the only thing you’ll ever have. I already have a family. I don’t need you. You want your brother back, but we are not children anymore.”

“We never were,” his brother scoffs, seething with all things hate and fury just underneath the surface. He is a perfect mimic of their father in looks and in stature, and he was the one who would’ve made Nathan proud. “The child I was died the day you ran away with our mother.”

His brother is the exact thing their mother had saved Neil from becoming. It hurts to look at him, undead faces haunting Neil everywhere.

“She couldn’t have taken you with us. Our father would have found us. If both of us fled, we’d be caught. She didn’t want that for you.” Neil swallows, his throat tight, heart pounding. Quieter, he amends, “I didn’t want that for you.”

Neil hides his face away from his brother and refuses to look anywhere else but the bloodied concrete painted with the remains of Nathan Wesninski, perhaps in a way one would take in a masterpiece. He’s infatuated with the moss seeping within the stonework and how it can grow inside his desolate basement so infectiously, despite nothing else surviving. He finds that his brother cannot look away from it either, and wonders if they are thinking about the same things.

They’re not.

His brother looks back at him, knowing that it hurts Neil, and liking the way it does.

“You don’t get to decide such things,” he accuses, words heavy and suffocating. He is steady with the gun, his hands don’t shake, but ache in a way that makes Neil think he’d rather hold their father’s cleaver. “You could have saved me if you wanted to.”

“Maybe I didn’t want to,” Neil admits quietly. “I was ten-years-old and drowning all the same. I couldn’t save you.” Saying it aloud still makes his chest hurt and the unbelievable guilt find its way into his carcase, as if begging to be felt for the first time all over again, nine years later. The cigarette smoke, perhaps real or perhaps not, is everywhere and Neil feels himself waiting to sink down to the concrete to find oxygen he isn’t worth breathing. He looks at his brother and buries it all back down.

“You’re a bad person, Nathaniel,” his brother tells him.

And some things, Neil thinks, are just too far gone.

“Yes,” Neil agrees.

With his gun still trained on Neil, his brother picks up the cleaver by their father’s fallen body. He clings to it with a sickening addictive ease, and Neil wonders how many times his brother has held it. How many times has he cut with it? How many people has he killed to survive their father? How many people has he killed because he wanted to?

“He was worse after you left,” his brother says, rising from the ground. Neil thinks this is when he should pull the trigger, but he can’t bring himself to do it. “There wasn’t anyone but me anymore. He always made it hurt more. Or maybe I just couldn’t take it as well with you gone.”

To Nathan, The Wesninski brothers were regarded as two broken things that needed to rebuild themselves again and again from the ashes their father had left them in. They were tragedies that had the ability to become something grand until they hadn’t. Pain is a gift, Nathan would tell them when they bled, when they cried, when they’d suffocate on their own lungs, and couldn’t distinguish from what was not broken anymore.

Neil had felt sick every time he'd say those things. Pain has destroyed whatever had become of his brother’s mind, mutilating his body to the thing that had never moved out from the shadows, and that is not a gift.

“But I get it now,” his twin brother continues. “Unbroken things cannot heal. Father needed me to break so that I will mend unbreakable,” he says, the words so heavy they are painful. It’s terrible.

“He was wrong,” Neil says at last. Their eyes meet, and Neil finds himself needing to make a promise that he can hold on to. “I’m leaving, come with me.”

“You left me,” his brother says, and looks at Neil unable to turn away. He’s staring at Neil as if his brother is a demon, an abomination, a mirror image of everything he hates about himself whenever he sees his own reflection. Together, they are the sons of Nathan Wesninski, condemned with a blood-tainted legacy that they shouldn’t possess, both of them so intertwined with the concept of death, that it’s become as simple as breathing. Neil had thought running away had made him the exception, but it hadn’t.

He left his brother to become the thing of all his nightmares, murdering the little boy who used to keep him up at night, charting stars and sneaking candy and playing two-person Exy. His brother had always been the goalkeeper. If they were not whatever it is that they had become, Andrew still would’ve hated him, Neil thinks.

“This is me coming back,” Neil whispers.

The response from his brother is a cleaver thrown towards Neil’s head and two gunshots echoing throughout the basement. The axe embeds into the wall behind him, and only one bullet struck its target.

We choose the things we become.

Nathaniel Wesninski’s twin brother collapses to the ground, right next to their father. “Dad broke Mom. She broke you. You broke me,” he says, coughing blood. “I don’t forgive you.”

Neil can see everything, shadows claiming what is theirs, the expanse of these ruins stretching into the city, a piece of Nathan that will never let Neil go. Neither moonlight nor streetlight can find them here, the world too condemned in a colourless overexposure. Everything is an infinite neon radiance in the dark light of Baltimore’s catacombs, and Neil realises at last, that he is going to watch someone else die here.

Neil looks down at the ruins of his family. “I want to forgive you.”

Neil thinks his brother will open his mouth to scream or laugh or cry, but he doesn’t. Instead, he simply says, “You can’t.”

“No,” Neil says, and leaves Nathaniel with them, burying their dynasty in that basement.

Neil stops. Andrew opens his eyes, watching the universe behind his eyelids fade into embers of themselves, and stares at the absurdity that is this fucking man in front of him. “And I’m the insane one.”

Neil smiles. He smiles the way children who were never Foxes smile, the way people who are not dead and ghosts and alive and liars smile, the way people who are not Neil smile, and leans into Andrew’s space like he’s telling him a secret. “Never.”

“I’m so over your shit,” he says, mouth tasting of the remnants of Baltimore that are seeping into this cafe. It’s disgusting. There had been a corpse or maybe a doll or maybe nothing at all in that hospital. Everything is lies and lies and lies, growing like weeds, like wildflowers that he’d plucked from the edge of the California desert. But this isn’t something of fairy tales; the wildflowers had died in his hands, and they had never come into the house because it was so, so dirty. It had been marred with thorns, jagged needle-like organs stemming from its stalk in the red dust. He thought it could have been an azalea, perhaps in another life, but his foster mother had screamed that it would bring in fire ants.

But what does any of that have to do with anything? Nothing! It doesn’t matter!

Andrew buries his hands in his hair, his eyes never leaving Neil’s. He needs to watch for every discrepancy, every fault line, every tell that gives him away. He’s lying, he’s lying, he’s –

“So, you have an evil twin now?” Andrew makes himself say.

Neil laughs like all of this is so, so funny. “Crazy, right? Makes two of us!”

Something twists in Andrew’s stomach. “If you had a twin this whole time then what’s his name?”

“Aaron,” Neil says.

“Neil.”

Neil shrugs. “Fine. It’s Daniel.”

“Daniel and Nathaniel,” Andrew says.

Neil pulls a face. “No, I’m lying. His name is Jonathan. Jo-Nathan. My father wasn’t creative. And fuck you, neither was Tilda.”

“Who’s older?”

“Who knows?”

“Where’s he been all this time?”

“Being evil with my father, of course!”

“Your father was in prison up until January.”

“Right. So, Daniel – I mean Jonathan, wait no – whatever, Evil Twin must’ve been training in an evil secret academy in Poland until my father got out. Well, until he died too, of course.”

Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.

He doesn’t have the time to dwell on it, doesn’t have the sanity to put together timelines and break lines and lies in order to sift through what is history and what is tall tale. There’s a hurt so vicious inside his chest that it suddenly consumes him, all teeth and red rose agonies and basement catacombs. Andrew suddenly falters from where he sits, leans in close to face Neil and spits out, “Stop fucking lying.”

In Baltimore, on that cold, silver table, Neil’s skin had been ash. His body had been covered by a clean, white sheet, covering the canvas of his body all apart from his face. It had been a mangle of alighting embers and charred chunks of charcoal had buried themselves in his face. His cheek had been condemned black. It had still smelled like burnt meat. He had been a corpse made of shattered bones and fractured skin that left the sheet concaved where pieces of him had been severed, removed.

Andrew had thought he himself had died before, seven-years-old wearing spiderman-pyjamas and a man’s semen. It had hurt so terribly bad. All his overwhelming confusion, his child-like guilt, had become exposed like an open wound that he hadn’t yet decide to let go from the way he could when he would become older.

But, in that hospital room, Andrew felt the same agonies. Years and years and years of learning how to shut out every single fucking emotion had suddenly become an obsolescent memory upon seeing Neil lying there. Everything was pain again.

“I saw you,” Andrew says, as sure as he knows his own name. “I saw you in the morgue.”

“It wasn’t me,” Neil shrugs, smiles. “That was him.”

He says it so easily. So fucking irrefutably, undeniably, undyingly easily –

Nothing about any of this had been easy. Andrew can still feel Neil’s bones in his hands, scarred skin in his own fingers, staying there like his own pulse; and Andrew can still taste Neil’s saliva – sticky and sick bile ash that had bled from his own mouth when he talked and when he breathed. The indentations of Andrew’s teeth are buried underneath Neil’s lips, and he had watched those scars as Neil stayed cold and cold and cold, because Andrew made them. He is them.

“No,” Andrew decides. He doesn’t even have to think about it to know what is truth and what is not. Neil is made up of all the things that have come before him; he is everything he has done and everything he has not, and just because Neil has made Andrew old fairy tales and half-truths and make-believe stories, doesn’t make him any different to what Andrew knows he is. “I would’ve known.”

Neil pauses at the statement. He falters in a way that makes Andrew think he has other things he had wanted to say as well. Instead, he asks Andrew, “Would you have?”

Andrew feels his mind fraying, an endless seam of disintegrating cotton and old bandages in a hospital in Baltimore. The past is cold; it is bloody; perhaps even familiar like the ache in his chest whenever he cannot outrun the emotionlessness that made it easier to forget. Neil isn’t one of them. He can’t be. He won’t be, despite Andrew trying so ungodly hard to make him meaningless, make him nothing.

“I would’ve known!” Andrew says again, louder this time. A part of him is shouting, he thinks. A part that doesn’t sound at all of the things he has built himself to be, all mundane and bored and unfeeling.

“Andrew,” somewhere someone insignificantly unimportant calls out.

“Fuck off. I’m Aaron,” he says because that usually works in getting people to leave him alone. But shit. It would if it wasn’t Aaron the one standing here, calling his name in the first place. “Oh,” Andrew blinks, staring up at his brother. “Quick, let’s both think of something only the real Aaron would know! Neil, after you’re done lying to me, you decide and shoot the one that’s–”

“Get up, we’re going.”

No. Andrew is still thinking over everything, losing himself in his mind, his hands, his chest, and he can fucking smell Baltimore’s azaleas coming in from the horizon. The city, the basement, the morgue is a cloud of thick, grey smoke blackening the expanse of every dead thing inside this cafe. Andrew can see it, the charcoal seeping in before as he remembers where it is on planet Earth that he is today. Aaron reaches out to grab his arm, and Andrew pulls back, the affogato shattering coffee and glass and ice-cream all over the floor. “You know better than to fucking touch me.”

Everything that was once on the table is on the ground. When did that happen? Who fucking knows. It’s fine. He’s drank off the floor before when getting a glass was just too much.

Jack. Dumb fucking track crack nutsack dingbat Jack is here. “Fuck, the Monster’s talking to his d–/#/REDACTED/#/ boyfriend again!”

“If he doesn’t quiet down, he has to leave,” some stupid, moo-pid, groo-pid says, and he knows they’re talking about him. There are enough people crowding into the cafe that Andrew can barely breathe again. Everyone is surrounding him, pressed together like they’re cattle riding the farm carriages to the slaughterhouse and the claustrophobia of the world inside this fucking cafe is making Andrew feel bad, so bad and bad and bad. He’s trying to keep his eyes on Neil’s face around the table, but Aaron is standing in front of him. Andrew is thinking about all the many people who could also weave themselves between them, how easy it could be to rip everything away from him, and how long it would take to die in here if everyone else in the world stole all the air and he suffocated, but Aaron tears his thoughts away before he can drown in them again.

All the same. All the same. All the same.

“Andrew, let’s go,” Aaron says. Nothing rhymes with Aaron, how fucking annoying.

Neil is standing up from the table now. Andrew isn’t sure when that happened. He blinks and everything is fuzzy and Neil is hollow, is different, his colourless, but he is saying, “Let’s leave. He’s right, Andrew. We should go.”

Andrew breaks. He’s screaming when he speaks again, and everything is red, everything is as it was that day in Baltimore. “I’m not leaving until I get answers!”

“No one wants your crazy bullshit here,” Jack mack black slack says. Why is he even here? It’s a trick! That’s it!

“I’ll kill you,” Andrew says because that’s a thing the real Andrew would say. Wait, what the fuck was that thought?

“He’s not worth it,” Neil says back.

“Andrew, calm down. We’re going.” Someone's hold on him was tight, and Andrew had thought that his lungs started to burn as he breathes in the crumbling ash of wildflowers, rotting red desert dirt, and diseased flora sprouting from the coffee in the centre of the floor. He could feel the rot spreading up his shoes, slimy and infectious and bittersweet milk, wrapping around his socks like intangible weeds in overgrown wastelands, desolate of human existence and left to succumb to the world’s gallows or maybe just fucking California.

“Take your schizophreniac of a brother and leave his ass in the asylum, for fucks sake.”

“We need to get out of here,” Neil says and Andrew stares and stares and stares at him until –

“Is he here right now?” Jack laughs, shouting towards where Andrew is looking, his eyes going through and through and through Neil’s body. “Hey, faggot, go towards the light!”

He’s dead.

“Andrew, don’t!”

Neil’s not fucking dead.

“Let’s go home!”

No one’s going home.

There’s a drip drip drip of broken porcelain and cold coffee as it leaks from Andrew’s fingers. A piece of glass is in his hand, and then a second later, it’s at Jack’s neck. The floor tiles are all ice-cream and blood and latte milk. The edges of the porcelain dig into Jack’s skin as he pushes him to the wall, the jagged edges digging into his own skin as they fall together.

Glass bottle. Head bleeding. This has happened before.

It’s

just

so

familiar.

Ow.

“Ow.”

Aaron is looking at him like he is going to be sick.

This is fine. Time jump. Time travel. Time and space and place. Thyme doesn’t taste very good, but Abby’s store-bought rosemary had been lovely. It smells a little like peppermint in here.

Here.

“You have to stop it.” Andrew is sitting on the bathroom counter in Wymack’s apartment when Aaron says this.

His brother had come into the room, a dishtowel in one hand and the first-aid box in the other. He is pressing the cloth into Andrew’s hand in the same way Andrew had done to Aaron’s in the riot, and together, they look like an awful, fucked-up mirror of each other. They’ve travelled backwards, going back and back and back until they’d found the start again.

“How did we get here?” Andrew asks. If it’s 3 o’clock in South Carolina, then it is 3 o’clock in Baltimore, and 12 o’clock in California and 3 o’clock in Perth but the other one. Three in the morning, yes.

“Are you listening to me?”

No, he’s thinking. Perth is opposite from here, Aaron is opposite from him, the opposite of guilty is not.

Andrew leans back against the mirror, choosing to look distantly at the overarching window’s horizon becoming more obstructed as people flicker in and out of the street below like ants, like fireflies, like desert dust. The world is never this desolate, though the further away Andrew stares at the window rather than through it, the ruins become more prominent. Maybe, beyond this bathroom that he sits in, buildings are decaying. Maybe the Earth is being eaten away by arid smog, and maybe that is why everything always smells of smoke. And peppermint.

There aren’t catacombs here. Not like in basements in Baltimore. If everyone here were to inexplicitly, infinitesimally die, their bodies would make gardens within the streets. They’d flower with moss that grows within the stone, taking over the pavement like nothing more than litter. The stench would fill the whole campus, the whole city, the whole bedroom Andrew sleeps in. He’d have to walk by the corpses, dragging his feet through the bloodied embedded ivy, and try not to lie down with them as he goes to class.

Neil is outside, just beyond the other side of the door, or the universe. Andrew feels him watching through the wood.

“He deserved it,” Andrew says, only then taking a second to really look at himself. Jack had broken a glass bottle over his head, the pieces are in his hair like stars. His hand is wrapped in gauze even though he can’t remember ever cutting it. Campus police had been there and then the real ones. How did he get here? Maybe his hand is just stained with coffee. “Did I cut through his jugular?”

Maybe. The first thing Wymack said to him once they got back was ‘Minyard, you can’t murder your teammates in broad daylight!’

Aaron refuses to look at him, too. That’s just how they are, and they’re too stubborn to try and change it. “You know I’m not talking about that.” He picks another tiny shard with tweezers from Andrew’s hair, drops it into the sink. Aaron’s fingers occasionally lace through his hair, gripping at the shards and tugging at them enough to make his scalp bleed. Andrew tells himself it’s okay, ‘You can touch me it’s hurting always.’

Andrew’s eyes meet Aaron’s in the mirror only to test what he will do. “Do I?”

Aaron ignores him. “Hold still. I’m not done.”

Another piece hits the sink. “You could be gentler.”

Aaron scoffs at the words, his scornful facade breaking at the seams just enough for Andrew to see the way he slips before he can mend himself. “So could you,” he says before he recovers and is able to piece the parts of himself back together enough to remember to be angry, to be hateful, to be just. They’re not 14-years-old anymore, looking at each other through a visitation screen, plastic landline phones in their hands and never saying a fucking word, even if they forget that sometimes. Andrew doesn’t let himself back down.

Fuck you. Andrew shoves Aaron’s hands away and is left staring at his own reflection in the mirror while Aaron looks at nothing at all. His skin is Andrew’s skin, his teeth are Andrew’s teeth, and while Andrew has been left as whatever the thing that is looking back at him in the mirror, Aaron is something that can walk away, leave, not look at all. “I saved you back in New York, in Columbia, in California,” Andrew grits out. “I saved Nicky and Kevin and Matt and Neil–”

“Stop,” Aaron finally looks at him, his hands hitting the counter, the metal tweezers landing in the sink with the rest of the glass. Spacetime has stopped again. Aaron isn’t supposed to look at him like this, he isn’t supposed to look at him at all. “I know what you’re doing,” he says, whispering even. “You want to pretend like he’s still alive, and I was okay with letting you let him be if it helped your conscience-stricken psyche. But I don't think this is helping you anymore. Whatever deal you had with him, it doesn’t matter.”

Andrew’s eyes flicker briefly to the closed door. “Don’t,” he warns his brother.

“I know I said I wouldn’t bring him up again, but you can’t keep doing this. You’re scaring the others. You’re scaring me,” Aaron says, slowly and carefully, a little like his brother cannot understand the simple syllables of his own name anymore, because maybe, Andrew can’t. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be. He looks like he wants to run his fingers through Andrew’s hair, holding his body in his own as if they will somehow fade away. Someone’s hands are shaking, and Andrew can’t tell whose they belong to. All the glass is gone.

“I’m not doing anything,” Andrew insists. He doesn’t want to feel anymore, and so he tells himself he can’t, but it doesn’t work the way it has since Neil. That is how he knows–

“Andrew–”

“Neil is alive.”

“It’s just us,” Aaron tells him. “You can stop.”

“I can’t stop,” Andrew insists, leaning in. They could touch if either of them wanted to. “He’s alive. I’ll prove it.”

But the moment is gone within a second. Andrew jumps off the counter and storms passed Aaron through the door leading out into the living room.

“Sit down. There’s still glass in your hair,” Aaron says when there’s not and just needs a reason for Andrew to stay. He follows after his brother.

“Neil, you can come back,” Andrew says, stopping halfway across the room. Neil has his back to him, looking out at the window just as Andrew had done before him, through the wood with x-ray vision or memories maybe. “Aaron wants proof of life. He thinks I made you up. Now behold, dear brother.”

“Andrew, sit down,” Neil’s voice is strange. His face is strange, his hands, his body. Andrew knows it is him, he does, he really, really does. Something’s wrong, so Andrew decides to bury it. He wants to curl himself into the corner of the room and count numbers on his fingers until he reaches infinity. He wants to tear his flesh from the bones of his own body until the time zone morphs into the one before this one, after this one, and scream the syllables of both their own names because he doesn’t think they exist anymore.

The feeling is never quite concrete, never quite infinite enough for him to grasp, but it is there, underneath his teeth and laced within his tongue like lead. It feels like this when Neil isn’t there to wake up beside him and he’s out in the shadows, distorted, blurring into Wymack’s living room the way he is now.

“You sit down,” he snaps back. He’s not the one that’s sparkly and see-through and black and white. “Stop doing that. Come back to me.”

The sun’s bleeding awful shadows are lingering their way down to Neil’s face, and Andrew watches the embers of the dust caught against the hazy light flickering out against Neil’s body, skin, teeth. He can feel the frown from Neil’s lips against his mouth from across the room without ever needing to touch him, and then he peers at Neil more closely. The thing about Neil is that he’s a paradox. He’s a fake. He’s alive. He’s a lie. He’s here. It’s probably the most damning thing about him, and the first thing Andrew came to know about him, too. He says, “Let Aaron take care of you.”

All of Neil is back now. Every part of him is perfect.

“Fuck you.”

“Andrew…” Neil says like he is tasting the syllables around on his mouth as if they are delicate, finite. His eyes shift behind Andrew to Aaron’s, awful and contrite like he’s just been caught existing.

Oh.

this

is

bad.

The tension in the air is choking Andrew, its thick, burning smog smothering his airways and he can taste the gasoline within the apartment. One wrong word, a single match; one false movement, one ember. Everything will burn them all away. It’s all peppermint anyway. Andrew isn’t looking behind him, but Aaron’s footsteps fall suddenly silent.

“You… you aren’t pretending,” his brother whispers, fingers digging into his own palms as if reaching for the sanity underneath Andrew’s crumbling psyche, needing to bury himself there in his own flesh like he could otherwise change it. Andrew’s never heard Aaron sound like this and it is frightening, almost. He knows all the sounds of his brother’s screams and what he whispers to himself after he has a nightmare, when he doesn’t think Andrew is awake to hear. He knows what Aaron sounds like when he lies, and Andrew realises, he doesn’t sound the way he does then.

“Aaron, are you finished?” Nicky calls out from the kitchen. “Andrew, are you okay?”

Andrew’s mouth twitches, turning to his family’s direction, and then back at Neil when Aaron’s awful, still, silent eyes become too much, “Why yes, Nicky, how nice of you to ask!” He motions for Neil to come towards him, circling in the centre of the room like a dying firefly. Neil stays where he is and no one else moves, so Andrew paces enough for all of them. “Go on, Rabbit. Do your whole ‘I’m fine’ spiel. Tell Aaron how sane I am.”

Nicky enters the room, stopping behind Aaron, looking confused. “What’s he–”

“Unlike Neil, I’m no liar. If I say he’s alive, he’s alive.”

Aaron and Nicky’s faces are paling beyond what Andrew could see, and if only for a moment, he searches them to see if any of it is making sense the way it does to Andrew. It’s reincarnation and time travel and magic, and who the fuck is Andrew to fix all of this so that it won’t seem any less crazy to people who have deemed him insane regardless of it all.

His eyes gravitate towards Neil, solid and human and broken and fine by the windowsill in this fourth-storey apartment, mocking him. “Andrew, something’s wrong,” he begins, unable to finish the sentence. His voice is strangled, wet-sounding, throat raw and mangled and terrified.

Sometimes Andrew used to sound like that too; but then he would get over it.

“Oh, God. You’re not okay,” Aaron says, looking to Andrew like he is trying to find any other possibility for him to be standing next to Neil Josten.

Andrew is wearing his armbands and Neil’s hoodie and all of his eyelashes are inside, speckled like coffee grounds, his face is red and burning and Andrew’s breathing in a way he shouldn’t be, and Aaron is looking at Andrew as if he can’t.

Box breathing, do it now, don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop.

He’s breathing too fast for someone supposed to be fine. The hurt of knowing what he is is lingering like a disease. Every other time this had happened, Neil had been the one who helped calm him down. There were other things, complex things, that Andrew’s mind can remember, is built to, is destined to, and it’s not that terrifying, not all the time.

“Of course I’m not okay,” Andrew says and laughs, laughs some more.

“Andrew, stop,” Neil says like it’s just that easy. “Let them help you.”

“Quiet. I don’t need help.”

“You – you think he’s actually…” Aaron starts to say, losing his words, mixing them up, finding them all over again. “You really believe he’s alive,” he finishes at last, and then, “Did you take something?”

Oh, brother!

“Ha! Maybe I am the real Aaron!” Andrew is unreservedly hysterical now. His own thoughts are getting so loud and his stomach hurts and his skin is killing him. He thinks he laughs until he can feel his own lungs in his throat. He feels like he might retch and throw up into the sink with all those little pieces of glass and stars and sparkles. Isn’t it funny that he gets to taste his own rotten teeth and Neil’s cold tongue and the galaxy of Circinus like a last meal over again. Over and over and over again. He turns to Neil, clutching his stomach because he can’t stop laughing and he’s going to vomit. “Neil, that’s funny, laugh!”

But no one gives a shit! Neil doesn’t move. Aaron and Nicky don’t move, but they stare and stare and stare. They aren’t moving to condemn him anymore, throw kitchen knives into his chest or scream at him until he shoves his own into his neck. They aren’t looking at him the way everyone else does, and that in itself, is worse. He’s still crazy, a murderer, a monster – but instead of hatred, it’s fear. Cold, undying, infinite fear from all of the ones who had thought he was just a broken thing they lived with that didn’t work quite as well as it was supposed to. No. He’s worse.

“Oh, Andrew,” Nicky says, and the sky is falling. “This is… I can’t, I can’t–"

But who gives a shit!?

Remember that time he had to release the spirits in his wrists, because if he didn’t, they were going to take over his body and slaughter everyone? Drake thought it was so funny that he bit down on them, all abstract lines and monster boroughs and Google-ing ‘how to bloodlet because I can’t take this anymore I can’t I can’t I’m dying whatthefcck’.

But who cares? Wymack cares.

Wymack is barging into the room. Andrew knows it’s Wymack because his footsteps are the heavy ones, the angry ones, the not-Neil ones. Everyone’s still standing around him in a fucking circle except Neil who stays, always, close enough to him but never enough at all. Not enough to touch him, not enough to make any of this fine.

“What the fuck is going on?” Coach shouts, and Neil doesn’t flinch, but Andrew does.

Aaron cuts him off because he’s rude and he should know better but he had a terrible parental figure growing up so maybe he wasn’t taught anything at all about human decency. Maybe that is why none of them are decent. Maybe that is why none of them are human. “When you were studying,” he whispers. “You said Neil was… Oh, God, how long–”

Wymack takes one look around the room, at Aaron’s growing horror and Andrew’s beaming, breaking, rotting smile, and says to them all, “Tell me what’s happening.”

Nicky can’t because he’s crying. Neil can’t because he’s bone-still. Aaron can’t because he’s angry angry angry. But don’t worry, everybody! Andrew’s got this!

“He is alive. This is real!” Andrew insists, pointing to the windowsill. He retches for real this time, choking on his laughter, but Andrew is feeling and it's glorious and it’s excruciating and it’s–

“This is a psychotic break!” Aaron screams.

Andrew smiles, clutching his stomach as he looks up at his brother. “I would know if I was psychotic.”

“But you wouldn’t!”

“All of you,” Wymack interrupts. “Just sit down.”

“Andrew, there is no one there!” Aaron keeps insisting, waving his arms hysterically to where Neil is. Despite it all he screams again, “Neil is dead!” He turns desperately to Wymack. “Coach–”

“Aaron, stop! This isn’t helping.” Wymack steps in, always at the ready to defuse and bring his Foxes all back together in their hundreds of jagged pieces that he finds on his living room floor. He’s holding out his hands, a calm, reassurance that Andrew can see right through. He sees the flicker of Wymack’s familiar steadiness pulling at the slightest corners of his face, his words, as if to beg them all to be calm and be void, burying themselves within the burning anger-borne ashes.

“You’re lying,” Andrew laughs, stumbling back into the wall. He’s heard this before. The past is a demon, coming down from the ceiling masquerading as the cracks in the drywall, and it is standing over Andrew, over Neil. It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real, his mind begs in every language he knows, but it doesn’t matter.

Andrew is seven or ten or thirteen years old, and men who pretend to be his father, his brother, tell him lovely, sweet butterfly lies, too. They love him. They do! They love him so much that they come into his bed, and suffocate him until he cannot scream, and their sweaty fingers touch up and down his chest and stomach and thighs until they leave behind finite watercolour bruises that will stay forever and ever and ever. They love him! They love him with tainted hands and bourbon kisses and the weight of their entire body on top of his own. They love him so much they make his private parts hurt! And hey! Why would they do that?! They’re called private parts for a reason! But whatever, who fucking gives a shit? Andrew is seven-years-old, so what would he know about love?

Their large, scary hands would grab in between his legs, make bile rise in his throat, and smother his mouth until he swallowed it back down in heaves and chokes and vomit that made his stomach fill with that of their cigarette syrup breaths and their thousands of vile cocoon kisses.

“All of you are fucking liars,” he smiles with all of his teeth, the rotten, yellow, vomit-stained, Neil-kissed ones and they feel as if they will fall out of his fucking head. He can’t keep his eyes in one place, moving from each deformity, each deception of humanness and not, and then somehow, always, they find themselves back to Neil’s.

This hour, this minute, this second, is a day where he doesn’t look like broken film, like an infected corpse amongst decaying graveyards. He’s shifting from foot-to-foot, uncomfortable and aching, beautiful and here, and he just looks like Neil. He’s making the dying organ that is Andrew’s stomach feel full and carcinogenic and unmade. The fire ants, the moths and butterfly lies, the fall of falling, the fall of falling in love, the fall of falling apart is looking at Neil in this fucking moment and feeling like he will die the next. Neil did this to him! He unmade Andrew within the constellations of his star maps, and Andrew can see Aries within the ruins of his vomit on the carpet, the glass in the sink, the remains of all his eyelashes in Neil’s pockets.

Maybe this love will be enough to kill him. Maybe it already has!

He turns around, slowly and slowly but then suddenly all at once. The world is spinning with him, a sickening cycle that will never end, and he smiles at Neil and doesn’t stop. He leans in closer. “What did you do to me, Rabbit?”

Each word makes Neil flinch, moving further and further away from Andrew until he hits the window glass. It doesn’t make a sound; it doesn’t move an inch. He can hear everyone else breathing harsh and hard and cold, everyone except fucking Neil. Nicky gasps, cries, chokes on his own fucking spit and blubbers, “I promise you, Andrew,” he says like Andrew has never heard those words before. “You, Coach, Aaron and I are the only people in the room.”

Shut up! Can’t anyone see Andrew is trying to have a conversation with this fucking lie of a man? Can’t they see that he needs to decipher all these anomalies, these rabbit holes that he’s fallen down down down into? Can’t they see that Neil Josten was supposed to be the one thing that Andrew thought he knew?!

“Stop looking at the corner as if he’s there!” Aaron screams.

“Aaron, calm down or walk away,” Wymack shouts back. He’s shoving a sobbing Nicky behind him, approaching the brothers and Neil like wild animals, wild foxes! Ha! That’s so funny! Someone should run them all over like roadkill! Andrew can! He’s experienced!

Aaron shut up! Roadkill doesn’t speak! It doesn’t scream! But Aaron is just so annoying that it’ll never end. “I won’t!” he yells over Wymack, and God, Aaron looks so fucking angry and wild and terrified that he looks just as Tilda had! All glass skin and bloodied screaming and gravelled bones, laying there with her spinal fluid marring rainbows into the tarmac, roadkill on the highway! Clean up my mother on aisle I-77!

But Aaron’s not dead. No one else can be dead. Andrew made sure of it. He promised, he promised, he promised! No one can die unless Andrew kills them!

Andrew turns to Neil, silent and still in the corner of the Earth like something that isn’t quite here all the way. “Neil, tell them you’re real. Tell them you’re not dead,” Andrew demands.

“I–” Neil starts. His voice is strange. His face is strange, his hands, his body.

Andrew knows it is him, he does, he really, really does. He can prove it. He’ll tear the flesh from the bones of Neil’s body only to see the colour of his organs that lie beneath. Neil bleeds rainbow and orange. Andrew will prove that he didn’t die somewhere in-between the cafe, in-between the bath, in-between the stateliness and faultlines of New York and Maryland and South Carolina and God, maybe California, too. He cannot be dead. Andrew is scattered across the country in awful pieces, and he needs Neil to give them back to him.

Maybe Andrew is the one who is sick. Maybe Andrew is the one who is dead.

Andrew wants Neil to take him into his arms and fix all of this. Aaron cannot help Andrew. Him trying to makes Andrew feel like his entirety is crumbling against the falling stars and pale bodies he dreams of sometimes, and Andrew can’t take it anymore. It isn’t fair, but he’s falling to the ground, to Neil. It hurts all the way into his bones. He feels the wet carpet-like glass cutting into his insides, the tainted bone marrow leaking all out over Wymack’s floor, and he wonders if the chaos from the little lying butterfly-moths eating away at his organs will ever seize. He knows Neil and the truth are contradictory conceptions, so he muses, probably not. The pain the truth is, is infinite, and Andrew knows this ephemerality of space and time and universe in Wymack’s apartment is true because – this is agony.

So yes, that makes sense to Andrew. Never mind everything else.

“Andrew, I’m so sorry,” Nicky says, and Andrew tears his eyes up to meet his cousin’s, and Nicky stares back, looking at Andrew as if he were someone that is no longer human, something that he has never seen before, something that he can’t fix.

And Neil isn’t fucking saying anything!

“Neil, tell them!” Andrew screams.

Neil opens his mouth, no words come out. He tries again, voice breaking. He looks like he’s in pain, he looks like he’s dying. He’s so sad sad sad sad sad. “I…” Neil whispers.

He never finishes. Aaron is running his hands through his hair, there’s no glass there’s no glass anymore but–

“I think he needs a hospital,” he says. “We should call Dobson. I can’t fix this.”

“I don’t want you to!” Andrew says.

“You need help!” Aaron screams, stalking into the middle of the room until he’s an inch away from Andrew’s face. “You’re sick!”

Andrew looks down at the ruined carpet. He has the space dementia! The asteroid psychosis! The north and south and up and down bipolar! “I didn’t throw up pancakes! They were on the floor when I got here.”

“You’re fucking psy–!”

Wymack yanks Aaron back, dragging him from his brother and shoving him back to Nicky. “You two, get in the office now!”

Aaron tries to shove back. “I’m not leaving him alone!” he screams.

And oh, that’s fucking rich! Andrew moves over to Neil, feeling the eyes of everyone in the fucking world watch and watch and watch him as he does. All of them are watching as if they are witnessing a tragedy, an airship cascading down upon the city in flames and ruins, or a car colliding off the highway into the median until everything in its wake is smithereens. Aaron, do you remember what you said after that? His brother in the hospital; windshield glass in his eyes; his spine held in place by breezeblocks. He could kill Tilda with a breezeblock, leave her body under breezeblocks, run the car into breezeblocks! But Aaron loves her. He loves and loves and loves her, and when she puts her fists through his eye sockets and lets him choke on her oxycodone, he still wants her!

Andrew hates them all!

He wants to scream at everyone until his throat is raw and bleeding, he wants them to weep against the floor until they are nothing, he wants them to feel the way he does because they’ve all condemned him here with promise after promise after promise, and it should be them who lay catatonic, covered in pancake-vomit, undead in the catacombs, but it won’t be because Andrew didn’t tell any of them they could leave him! There are irrevocable, undeniably and eternally condemnable things in this fucking world, and Andrew knows this because he is them. He’s awful and irredeemable and damned, but he is what they made him, and fuck them for thinking he could be otherwise.

“Andrew,” Neil says.

“Shut up! I hate you! I’m not lying! Tell them I’m not lying about you!” Andrew tells him.

“Stay here, all of you.” Coach has his phone out, he’s dialling someone. Aaron breaks away from Wymack’s hold amongst the chaos, and goes up to Andrew again.

“Andrew, pl–” Nicky starts to say. Naughty naughty!

“No!” Andrew screams louder because maybe they just can’t hear him. “You need help if you can’t acknowledge Neil who is standing right next to us!” Andrew pushes Aaron away with shaking paper arms, but he is not a ghost unlike the others he knows, and Aaron does not disappear like Andrew had expected him to. Andrew turns back to Neil. “Neil, say something!”

Neil meets Andrew’s eyes, and for the first time they aren’t just sad, they are sorry. He takes one step forward, backing away from the window. He won’t touch Andrew, and he has that heartsickness in his eyes that tells Andrew, he is sorry here in this moment, and God, does that feel terrifying. Neil is so sorry, so fucked-up, so guilty that it’s fatal. It feels like the end, and Andrew sees it now.

Neil Josten, what have you done to me?

“Andrew… They can’t see me.”

Everything solidifies. Everything breaks.

“A pipedream,” Andrew says, empty and empty and empty, his stomach of bile and honey milk and marrow spills like oil paint, twisting as if it's got anything else left. His skin is paper, his teeth are yellow, and he bleeds as Neil did. Andrew cannot see the stars any more than when he could the night he found Neil lying there. The world is in overexposure, a picture of pure white radiance, and there’s a memory somewhere of Neil standing in the centre of the frame like the ghost that reminds Andrew of himself, but suddenly – or not at all – Andrew can’t tell them apart anymore. He doesn’t know anything anymore. He’s not as smart as he thought he was.

“I need to tell you something, Andrew.” Neil’s eyes are sad and they are kind, full of rue and ivy and fire. They are looking at the wreckage of the tragedy that is Andrew Minyard, and finally seeing him the way he is, the truths never being quite enough anymore. How dare someone do what Neil Josten has done to Andrew Minyard.

“No,” Andrew says. He watches his own hands as they shake in place, watching the undying grief lose itself underneath his fingernails until it becomes him. Neil has seeped underneath like unclean earth until the bone fragments inside Andrew’s fingers are rotting through his carcass. Maybe somewhere out there, pieces of the person he could have been would weep, because Andrew has made friends with all his ghosts. Neil’s too human but not quite enough and Andrew wants to want to hate him. “I don’t want the truth anymore.”

These are the promises Andrew’s palms are tainted with from those who are condemned to love him whom he cannot save despite loving them back and never being taught how. It never works the way it does in movies, with children who get to grow up loved, in people who become what they deserve. Why could Neil think Andrew was worth something?

“One of us needs to make it.”

“Why can’t it be both?” Andrew asks, and his teeth hurt, his mouth is bleeding Neil’s bone marrow and his pancakes, tasting the way Andrew does. He has bloodied, bloodless lips that Andrew wants to want to forgive.

He made his hands for Neil; Neil is what Andrew made him; something of the glowing fragments of outer space that fall from his ceiling, or the cigarettes burning infinities into the rooftop’s pavement, or the taste of Neil’s wounds that Andrew had let go of in March but took with him anyway.

“You know it can’t, Andrew,” he says, so close it hurts.

“I don’t want to be here without you.”

“And I can’t let you die with me,” Neil says. “Yes or no?”

Andrew doesn’t even know it is happening until it is. “Yes,” he tells Neil. Neil who is every part of him, in every way, in every sense. He has his lips to Neil’s for the first time since New York and it should be gentle. It should be beautiful. It should be that of stars. It should be what they deserved, the ever after that Andrew had been waiting for his whole life; the one, Andrew knows, that Neil had wanted, too. It should rewrite over everything else, all the tragedies that had come before, all the condemnations that had happened to their bodies and their minds and their scars – and their grief should drown itself.

Andrew collides their mouths together, like it’s the only thing he’s ever known, like he’s done it a thousand times over and then some. Like they are each other’s fates. He knows the way Neil tastes; it's seared into his organs until it is all he is. He cannot taste blood. His breath is all Perth and spacetime and the colour orange. Andrew thinks he will carry the shape of Neil’s mouth around with him until they fall again.

And then there is nothing.

Andrew falls through the air and the ghost of Neil Josten doesn’t catch him. He can’t. He is air. He is phantom. He is nothing.

There

is

nothing.

Neil Josten is dying.

He is.

He’s dying.

Neil is dying, Andrew.

Andrew, listen. Andrew –

Andrew.

Something you need to know about the Hatfords is that –

they never came.

Neil’s hands are acid, marred with bleeding scars that seep cigarette ash and rosy red blood into the concrete. The foul stench of the basement rotting inside his open skin is polluting everything.

“You will never leave this basement again, Nathaniel,” his father is saying, an insatiable kind of sickness echoing all throughout the barren room. He had been the one to find him here, condemned as he was, a child of Baltimore’s gallows learning what it is to remain like all the other bodies had before him. Neil could taste their old and dried ashes as his father pushed him into the floor. Long, long ago, Nathaniel had been instructed to learn the art of dismemberment, and he had been – severing limb from fox from deer from dog when he’d been ten-years-old and sobbing – until he hadn’t.

There’s a blowtorch down at Nathan’s side, a cleaver at his other. Nathaniel wants to scream, losing himself to a kind of insanity he would never come back from, unable to stop. His eyes burn, maybe from the blood, maybe from the panic, the desperation. He’s clinging to what remains of himself, of Neil Josten, with bloody fingertips, knowing it wouldn’t do him any good but unable to make himself let go.

The awful, bloodless hands of his father’s men clamp down on his legs, binding his limbs to the cold concrete. His father picks up the cleaver, the sound of it searing like bullet casings against tiles inside his brain.

“Please,” he begs. “Please, just let me go, just let me go–”

Titanium meets flesh.

The world is red.

Nathaniel is screaming.

He has no feet. The blunt end of the axe smashes into his kneecap. The fire of the blowtorch is cauterizing open bone. He has no skin.

The entire flesh on his lower half is moulted an array of violent colour, burning a festering black ash as the embers pollute themselves deep inside his carcass of a corpse, the angry metal of his father’s cleaver bearing shrapnel of shattered titanium and tainted marrow and ungodly human meat as it leaves pieces of itself behind in Nathaniel’s body.

“Please,” the voice that echoes off the concrete is not human. There’s a ghost lying in the place where Nathaniel Wesninski lays dying, and he cannot feel his father slit the skin of his calves, digging a knife inside of him until bone gives way. “Please, he’s…”

You can live without limbs, he supposes, but perhaps not a rib cage, not a lung, not a throat, not a spine.

And then he hadn’t felt it anymore. The breaking away of more and more of whatever was left of his body, and it’s skin bleeding broken blood over raw, exposed muscle, the bone mixing with a thousand smithereens of cleaver shards and fraying mental; pieces of his chest coming undone from his corpse and onto the ground like animals before him; the heat of the blowtorch alighting the edges of nerve endings, sending chaotic signals that his body cannot recognise as pain anymore. His brain is the strands of his hair in Andrew’s fingers and this basement’s remains of human bodies. Nothing hurts.

There is not one fragment of dry concrete when the knife had fallen from his father’s hands. Blood pools around his corpse like a sad puddle of dirtied bathwater, and Nathaniel thinks, even in death, he would never be clean. They’ll hose the basement with water, scrub his brain matter from the pipes, watch pieces of his skull catch in the drains.

Nathaniel had been delusional, insane, hopeful enough to believe he could have become something other than what was to remain in this world as the rot seeping under the grate, slimy and infectious. His body would wrap around the drainpipes like weeds in overgrown wastelands, desolate of human existence and left to succumb to the world’s gallows, and God, he wants to smile.

How unfair, how undeserved, how stupid, how perfect, how fitting–

“They’re still looking for him,” Lola says. “They’ll keep looking for him as long as he’s breathing.”

”Let them try to find all of the pieces,” Nathan says.

Nathaniel – Neil – whatever the fuck he is – wants to laugh again and never stop. This must be what it is to die, he thinks as his body is dragged under. They’re here, he knows. All the people that took the pieces of Neil Josten and turned him into something real, something worth fighting for, something worth loving – are still out there looking for him. A ghost lost in outer space, a fracture of bone in the gutter, an eyelash in his bed.

Maybe Andrew will sleep there when he’s gone.

Neil thinks he’s speaking. He’s moving his lips and air is leaving his lungs, he’s choking on his throat. There’s noise.

“Aw, Junior,” Lola coos, sitting by his head, leaning in closer and closer and closer. “What is it? You can tell us.”

This isn’t for you, he thinks, and then–

“He’s waiting for me.”

There’s a steady drip drip drip of blackened icy tap water as it lands against the concrete. The edges of the broken cleaver dig into his body’s skin as he lays with it. Every sane and conscious part of his mind is telling him that he is no longer breathing, that he can no longer feel any pain, that he cannot feel the urge to run anymore, that he can go, and comes to the conclusion that this is very very bad –

–  but Neil is thinking of his home, of the Foxes, of Andrew, and finds that he doesn’t care about infinity. Nothing matters anymore to him when he remembers, bones on concrete, hand in hand, that he’d told Andrew, ‘Thank you. You were amazing.’

Neil Josten will die. Neil Josten will die as himself. Andrew is waiting for him.

Neil stops. Andrew opens his eyes, watching the universes behind his eyelids bleed into embers of themselves, and stares at the ashes of this someone in front of him.

“One of us needs to make it, Andrew. It’s going to be you.”

The words are so heavy they are painful. The entirety of everything is crumbling against their bodies he dreams nightmares of sometimes, and Andrew can’t take this anymore. It isn’t fair.

“No,” Andrew says, choking on it. There’s a smell of rotting, burning flesh becoming constellated by cigarette ash as human skin turns a blackened, festering wound, until no flesh remains at all. His mouth suddenly tastes of vomit and lead and Neil’s teeth that had been smashed in, falling from his mouth on the autopsy table when Andrew had stroked the side of his face, so carefully delicate, soft, in the way Andrew Minyard couldn’t be – and yet, it hadn’t event mattered.

Neil was –

Neil was still –

Neil was d –

“No! You lie. You lie.”

Neil’s cheeks are wet, rosy and red red red, eyelashes all sticking together, and that isn’t right. Ghost shouldn’t be able to cry. Neil shouldn’t be able to cry. Stop it, stop it. “I shouldn’t have done this to you,” he says, voice aching. “Andrew, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

He’s waiting for me. He’s waiting for me. He’s waiting for me.

“You are the worst thing that’s happened to me,” Andrew tells him, his hand dangling beside where Neil’s should be. “But you don’t get to leave.”

“I’m sorry, Andrew.” Neil makes Andrew look at him, him and his blur of stupid idyll bullshit that strangles Andrew like a sickening lifeline. Neil and his fucking audacity to stand there as if Andrew’s real Neil isn’t fucking dead because he got himself fucking killed when Andrew couldn’t – couldn’t stop it. Why didn’t you wait for me, Andrew wants to scream. “Fuck, I’m sorry.”

Instead, Andrew screams something else. “Stop fucking saying that! I’ll kill you.” In his hand is suddenly his knife, Renee’s knife. The blade is heavy and cold and aching within his grasp and it’s pointed against Neil’s skin that isn’t skin because how dare he do what he’s done to Andrew Minyard?

Everything is in chaos. Everyone is screaming with him, all the same. Neil’s silence is louder than all of it.

“What the fuck are you doing?!” Aaron cries, trying to push his way through Wymack.

“Andrew, hey,” Wymack says instead. “Put down the knife.”

Fuck you! Something like ghost pancakes twists inside his gut all over again, and he can feel the milk and honey and iron eroding away his lungs, the bones of his ribs shattering against the force of everything! Of everything! He wants to ask Neil if this is what it had felt like to die, but what the fuck would he know! He’s in pieces, he’s ashes, he’s rotting, he’s in the hospital! It’s nauseating and icy – almost like ugly medication erupting inside his glass body, beginning as little euphorias that make him feel nothing at all, until it threw him back down to Earth, and he became one of all things fallen. He wonders if Renee’s angels had felt this, too. He wonders if Neil did when he died and came back but just not enough of him.

He’s losing himself to his mind, falling and falling and falling. The glassy syrup pancake embers turn to dust inside his stomach, and Andrew is ash, flesh grey and blue like watercolour paint that he’ll throw up again.

“No!” Andrew screams, turning the knife on them all. “Don’t come near us!”

Why do you all look so fucking afraid?!  Why do you all look so fucking sad?! This is all a joke, don’t they know?!

Fucking Bee is here! What the fuck? When did that happen? How long has he been standing here? Why would they time travel without him?

“Okay, okay. We won’t. Can you breathe with me?” Betsy says and nothing within her wavers. She’s tall and steady like an anchor that’s always been there, and something for everyone else to keep coming back to, keep holding on to.

“Shut the fuck up! He left without me!” Andrew tells her, voice leaking painful, vermilion words that shatter like razors and cleavers and glass against the air. He feels himself come apart and undone. He watches, always, Neil who stands across from him, the bandages that lay across his rising and falling chest, as blood weeps artistry across his lungs, somehow condemned to flood again and again and again. “You shouldn’t be here!”

“Andrew, I know you’re upset right now,” she says and he wants to scream back that he’s not upset at all! He’s livid, he’s sorry, he’s manically hysterical and it’s amazing! “Why don’t we sit down and talk it through? Shall we go somewhere else? Would Neil like to come, too?”

“No!” He says for the both of them. He’s done this before. He doesn’t look back at Neil to see his reaction because he doesn’t fucking matter anymore. Neil may have died, but Andrew is not going to let anything happen to him. “I said get the fuck away from us! You’re going to take him away and I won’t fucking let you!”

From the edges of his mind, in some echo that shouldn’t be there but won’t ever go away, Neil tells him, “Andrew, they’re trying to help you. Let them.”

He goes to shove Neil against the wall, throwing everything he has into the liar in front of him, but he falls right through the air. His head hits the drywall, ow ow ow, and everyone’s yelling again. He looks up at Neil, fuzzy and watercolour and see-through, and screams, “Shut the fuck up, you fucking hypocrite! I hate you!”

Neil had been selfish – fucking selfish. He doesn’t know what it is to remain. To undyingly, unforgivably remain. He doesn’t know what it is to see smashed teeth falling from his corpse’s mouth or feel cold, cold, cold fingers within an arm that hadn’t even been fucking attached to his body. He doesn’t know what it is to strangle the life from someone he’d promised to protect, or loose the only thing who had kept him uncontractually, infinitely, as if he were someone worth loving.

“You and Neil are arguing,” Betsy says, and oh what a brilliant deduction Doctor Dobson! “Why don’t we come talk about it at Reddin? You’re bleeding. You need to be looked at anyway.”

Ha! Andrew knows what that means! He’s still gripping the knife, maybe from the wrong side, maybe pointing it at his stomach. It’s a joke! He needs to let the pancakes out, he needs to bloodlet, he can’t take this anymore, he can’t, he’s dying and dying and dying.

“I’m not crazy,” Andrew says, because he isn’t. He isn’t he isn’t he isn’t! It is not his fault that he stayed here. Cruelly, unjustly, he stayed when Neil didn’t. Whatever fucking deity had constructed the fragmented pieces of their souls together, they were made of the same smithereens; but only, fate had twisted so far from what it had been during the timeless time wherein Neil could’ve stayed alive. And so, Andrew decides that he had forgotten to fall with Neil when the world fell with him. “I’m not crazy!”

“Of course not,” Betsy takes a careful step forward, slow and awful. “No one’s thinking that. But you’re upset, and you’re panicking, and we’re worried, okay? I need you to put the knife down so we can talk.”

“You’re going to take him away,” Andrew says and maybe Neil says something too but Andrew doesn’t hear him. “I won’t let you. I have to protect him. I made a promise. I made a promise, you can’t.”

It isn’t fair, Andrew decides, but he’s following the ghost to the ground, to Neil.

Living is a disease all the same, everyone is sick, and Andrew is going to live for a very, very long time.

“So did I!” Aaron screams. “Put the knife down!”

“David, call an ambulance,” Betsy says.

Andrew’s not here anymore. “I made a promise,” he makes himself say. “I made a promise.”

And one last thing–

“No!” Aaron says, a distorted blur of the colour black running like an oil spill across Andrew’s eyes, and then he’s gone. Goodbye!

He’s in a hospital right now. It’s still March.

But you should know, this is Baltimore. Time and time and time ago.

He’s sitting on a row of chairs outside of the emergency room. He’d wanted a cigarette, but he hadn’t had it in him to light one, to pull the Marlboros from his jacket pocket. When he did, his hands found something else and now he cannot let go from it.

Andrew flicks his knife back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

Wymack comes walking towards him. He snaps his phone shut. He sits down, one empty chair between them.

“Don’t,” Andrew says. “Don’t say it.”

“Andrew,” Wymack says instead.

Andrew grips the knife’s handle like he could break it with his palm. He holds it in Wymack’s direction in warning. “Don’t fucking say it.”

Wymack looks at him for a long time. At last, he says, “I’m saying your name.”

“I want to see him,” Andrew decides.

“They won’t let you,” Wymack tells him.

Andrew grits out, “They don’t get to decide that.”

Wymack’s eyes never stop searching him. “They do.”

Andrew can’t look at anything. He sounds awfully, condemningly and absolutely indifferent. “They don’t get to decide he’s dead.”

“They did,” Wymack says. A hospital has never been so fucking quiet. And then, Wymack clears his throat, his hand choking the life out of his phone until it threatens to shatter. “Morgue,” he whispers. “Basement level.”

He’s not in the morgue when he wakes up.

Neil is still here, even when he shouldn’t be, and Andrew is even more surprised to see him than he was the day on the rooftop, the day in Millport. “You are not well,” Neil says.

He’s sick. Probably very sick in all the ways most people never would be. But then he’s also alive. Vividly, eternally alive, and he thinks that after knowing the taste of his own teeth, of knowing Neil’s, loving with absurdities, with timelessness, with fever, that oh, Neil’s leaving now. Again.

Andrew blinks around the sleep in the corners of his eyes, flaky dried tears that still remain, and let the cold, empty whiteness of the hospital room surround everything. He’s surprised to see Aaron too, sleeping curled up in the chair by the window. There’s a very distinctive, terrifying difference between the two people in the room here for him, and it’s so terribly unfair that Andrew still doesn’t want to believe it. His eyes shift between them, how they both look so awfully human, but where Aaron has sunk himself into the chair, creating spiderwebs of folds within the cushions, his hand bending the paper curtains, letting the light in, Neil is a superimposed image over the film of Andrew’s universe.

It had been night, he thinks, when the ambulance had taken him, but it’s day again now and it’s seeping into the room that Andrew would rather remain timeless.

Neil is sitting on the end of the bed in place where Andrew’s feet are, and Andrew doesn’t feel him at all. Neil looks down at them underneath the covers, through his lap. He looks so solid, so human, so real that even though his body is nothing but air, Andrew still wants to call him a liar. Neil smiles at the floor as if he knows what Andrew is thinking, and for the first time, Andrew realises he does.

He deserved to die gently. Andrew looks at him. “Neither are you.”

Neil meets his eyes, away from the floor, he says, “That was very stupid of you, Andrew Minyard.”

He thinks he can think again now.

“I’m not as smart as I thought I was,” Andrew says again, an echo, an afterthought and then– “Why are you still here?”

Neil waits. Andrew knows what he’s doing, what he will say. “I’m not the one choosing to stay. I need to go, and you need to let me.”

Andrew’s eyes shift to his brother sleeping in the chair, to Neil’s ghost on the end of the bed. “I was in love with you,” he realizes, and saying it is the warmth of a thousand suns upon this cold, empty earth. It is this incredible piece of condemned divinity that is so damningly human in his hands, it is agonizing. It is the weight of infinite uncounted time; it is the undying promises his soul is tainted with by those who condemned themselves to love him, and who he deludes himself into loving back.

But Neil was never like everyone else.

“I knew that,” Neil says, and Andrew swallows hard. He feels ill. Thick, jagged stones are nestling their way into his throat, his bones and condemning him to the shattered cobble of the chambers. Abstractly, he’s on a morgue shelve, an autopsy table, lying at the universe’s mercy the way Neil had been, and poison is filling the hollows of his carcass and solidifying it to char. There are flames licking at his feet. Cleavers through his bones.

“No, you didn’t,” Andrew says.

He needs to get up. He cannot stay here.

“Well,” Neil says. “I do now.”

“I dreamt you,” Andrew says, deciding that this is the frayed, undying pieces of everything he has ever wanted to love. The agonies of the things they had to become in this indifferent Earth had constructed the shattered pieces of their names together and Neil Josten and Andrew Minyard were made of the same ashes. It shouldn’t have made as much sense as it does.

This is complex and mortal, so very fragile; undeniably human.

“I was real because of you,” Neil tells him.

“Does it matter anymore?” Andrew asks.

Without ever having to think about it, Neil answers him. “Yes,” he says, a truth.  “Let me go.”

“I can’t,” Andrew says a final time, the words slipping from his mouth like a promise, a condemnation to himself that he could scream almost every night. It’s the realest thing that thinks he’s ever spoken, and yet it is as if he’d said them in a thousand different times in a thousand different ways. Neil Josten, outside of the one he’s fabricated inside his mind with blurred memories and borderline insanity, knew this. “You made it impossible.”

“You did it before,” Neil says like any of it had been easy. “Do it again.”

“I let you go and you died. You died,” Andrew tells him, the words a soft whisper leaving his lips like a secret he cannot let go from. His voice breaks when he says it all, and then he mourns. He mourns the faded ghost flickering in the doorway of the hospital as it wears whatever is left of Neil’s face, and he mourns the one in the mosaics of the mirror as it wears his own. He mourns his blood that had now seeped beneath the basin into the plumbing of Wymack’s apartment, and the touch of it on his brother’s hands, and he mourns the fact that he once was naive enough to think that he’d found a someone amongst all the nothingness again. Andrew let himself relax, be comfortable, be satisfied and fucking content. Andrew loved Neil more than he promised he could, and that should feel like an irrefutable lie, but it doesn’t.

“I need to go,” Neil tells him. “You need to let me.”

“Lie with me,” Andrew decides.

Neil says his name only once, and then he’s moving closer and closer and closer. “Andrew–”

“Lie with me now,” Andrew says, “And then you can go anywhere you like. I won’t stop you.”

“Okay.”

Neil follows Andrew to the empty side of the hospital bed where the daylight outside can touch him, and pulls Andrew together in all his empty, mosaic glass pieces and Andrew feels the ghost bid him goodnight and goodbye while he starts to fall asleep again.

“You’re dead. Yes or no?”

“Yes,” Neil says. “I’m hurting you.”

“Yes. You will always. I hate you,” Andrew then says, only because he loved Neil enough not to; and he didn’t love him enough to let Andrew go with him. He doesn’t think he’s crying, but if he were anyone other than who he was, he could be. When he looks back at Neil, Andrew forgives him without blinking.

He thinks he feels Neil’s hand against his cheek, nothing more than an echo. He opens his eyes, and everything’s empty. His own hand is the one grazing against his skin, but Andrew decides to keep it there.

He's sure that in another dimension with different stars than these ones, the two of them had it better.