Chapter Text
Andrew is on his third bottle of the night when his chest begins to ache.
He’s on the roof of Fox Tower, drunk out of his mind. Cigarettes litter the ground around him in piles that show his restless movements around the area, feverish steps that can be retraced through the trail of breadcrumb-like cigarettes.
At first, he thinks the ache means an oncoming heart attack, or a stroke, or some other result of his redeveloping alcoholism or cigarette problem. That whatever higher being up there is finally listening and has graciously decided to strike him down and rid him of his suffering.
Someone is finally stepping up to end his life, once and for all, after years and years of pleading with the skies. Maybe he’ll start seizing soon, with no one left to find him on the roof in time. Maybe he can make it as quick and painless as possible — stepping off the roof and forcing back the nausea at the height as he plummets and prays the fall will be what finally kills him.
He even entertains the idea of being struck by lightning. He can see clouds gathering on the horizon, a pale congregation against the night sky. Maybe they’ll bring a storm with them, and he will become one of the twenty-something lucky people yearly to get struck and die.
To his disappointment, nothing happens.
The roof stays empty. Andrew stays standing.
Any clouds that move over him are slow and positively un-stormy, so Andrew takes another swig, hoping the burn of whiskey will kill him before anything else does.
The liquid numbs the ache on its way down, fills the holes with moonshine and white lightning that feel like bruises, only just barely sore until he thinks of them. He doesn’t like the pain. That doesn’t stop him from pressing down hard on the bruises in his chest anyway.
Another violent swallow.
He forces the drink down.
He is free to sit and stare off the top of the roof. No one has come to find him since his exit from the dorms. Last he heard, Nicky had been telling the others to ‘give him space', everyone going eerily quiet when he had gone down to get a new batch of beer.
Their judgment. It is always their judgment. They weigh his behaviour against their own and decide he is lesser for his rotten core. Like the rot growing in his flesh has been tastefully kept there as… What, interior decoration?
The way they look at him is almost demeaning.
Wilds looks at him with something close to pity as he wrenches two bottles of beer from the bottom of the fridge and cradles them in his arms, close to his chest. The look brings a searing disgust to Andrew's chest, and he thinks the only way to quell it may be to rip it out with his hands and kill it like a parasite.
Nicky's eyes are red-rimmed, disconsolate and swollen from tears. He opens his mouth as if to say something, but he shuts it just as quickly when Andrew sends a stare his way, sniffling slightly.
“Andrew—” Nicky tries again anyway, a weak smile on his face. He looks vaguely queasy at the blank stare Andrew sends him. He doesn’t move a muscle as he stands in front of the fridge and looks back at Nicky until he drops his gaze.
Andrew pays them no mind. He grabs another bottle for good measure, knowing he’ll need a lot more than just two bottles to numb it all. His alcohol tolerance is nothing but a pain now.
Kevin watches silently from the table, hand-shaped bruises around his neck like a dark collar. Andrew left them there, he recalls distantly, the feeling of his hands around Kevin’s neck and the pure, unfiltered rage he had felt because Kevin wouldn’t say a word about Neil’s whereabouts. He had been blinded by the buzz in his mind when he realised Neil was missing, that he never made it out of the mob and back onto the bus.
And now Neil is gone.
There’s a wave of brief rage that rises when he looks back at Kevin, who’s trying his best to look back steadily at Andrew, before he drops it abruptly, no longer able to withstand the withering look Andrew sends in his direction, an answer enough for his feelings.
Andrew wonders if Kevin sees himself in him, in the way his hands grip the bottle. In how they swallow in sync, eyes wide and desperate and gasping.
Aaron looks concerned.
It's a look of worry that's reflected on a face akin to his, and it makes Andrew want to throw up — everyone has as of late, really — so he shoves past them and strides back up to the roof.
Kevin doesn't step in to stop him. Andrew doesn't ask him to. He carries the bottles in his arms as he steps back onto the roof, back into buffeting wind and empty space.
There’s a Neil-shaped space next to him.
Now, on the roof, it’s a visceral reaction that tears through. Andrew thinks that if he presses his hand to his heart, he could feel the pain bleeding through his skin. The feverish delirium that he has settled himself in sinks over him like a shroud, billowing fabric encasing his body within. Choking, suffocating — it presses down on his face and feeds itself into his lungs, dark fabric all hazardous smoke and bitter nicotine.
For a split second, it feels more like a veil than a shroud.
Drug-like euphoria clouds his vision, adrenaline for the soul. A celebration, rather than grief. It masks the ache he feels in his bones, the blend of whiskey spreading out on his tongue and bringing a rapid rush. Liquid euphoria finds its way into his bloodstream, and for a split second, everything — the aches and darkness — dissolves into cigarette smoke.
He’s barely slept. His eyes ache with the effort of keeping them open, but he can’t find it in him to sleep. His dreams are flooded with auburn hair and eyes drifting away in wisps of smoke, cigarette daydreams and broken promises.
People don’t want to feel pain.
Andrew knows it better than anyone else — the intemperance of violence, fingers that grip and burn against skin to leave marks that taste acrid and bitter on his tongue. Pain has never been actively wanted or asked for, and it never will.
Pain is heat and rage and a scalding fire that his hands can't put out, pressing against red-hot wounds, Neil’s fiery hair in his hands and Neil’s head between his own knees, breaths that come far too quickly and lungs that don’t constrict the way they should.
He's lost far too much to pain and pain alone.
It mottles his skin, and he’s black and blue and bruised on his back, a sickly little canvas of nothing but skin and bone. Andrew thinks he’s seen every shade of bruises on skin.
Sometimes they’re yellow. Andrew had thought them akin to a sickly sunshine, sunflowers mushed into waste beneath heavy shoes. Lost potential, little suns wilting with no sustenance. He can see through their eyes, feel the destruction of flowering buds as they are crushed beneath uncaring soles.
Pain is one thing when you’ve only ever seen the colours of bruises on your neck and knees, and it’s another when you’ve felt sweet, golden sunlight on your hands, holding tight to the feeling and not letting go.
Logically, it’s the same amount of pain. The same force, the same hands, the same bed that he lay in every night, but the sweetener — it makes the pain all the more bitter.
He's grown afraid of hope, knowing that the sunlight always fades after dark.
Sun-chaser, little child — following the sun, all knobbly knees and skittish affection, stumbling over himself in his desperation to get closer to its warmth — a doe-eyed child, plagued by the same things that Andrew still is to this day.
It scalds when he finally touches the sun. The movement is Icarian — he can see his skin sizzling, boils born and bursting under the heat. Flesh warping in front of his eyes, melting off his bones, clay pushed off of its structure by corpse-cold hands.
The smell of burning flesh is nauseating. Neil makes him nauseous. Neil feels like sunlight, warm and reckless and burning, hot hands on skin that make Andrew lose his mind.
Make, because Neil is coming onto the roof any second now. Andrew can be as angry about his nausea as he wants when his junkie comes, and he actually has someone to blame for Neil.
Neil knows when he can’t handle his own body. Neil can see the deformities under his skin, the parts of his body that he wants to rip and tear at until they’re a mangled mess. Neil will sew his bloody, broken body back together — kissing the patchwork marks and loving him despite the obvious stitches across his skin.
Neil knows when he feels empty, when he needs space. He knows when Andrew needs him nearby, if only for the comfort of a bearable human presence.
He can tell. Neil would know what to do with the hole in his chest.
Andrew drinks until dawn. Neil doesn’t show.
Neil smells like his cigarettes.
The thought is enough to send a rush through Andrew's blood. His mind conjures up an image of his cigarettes in Neil’s mouth, Neil inhaling the smoke and breathing out.
It’s sharp. It wakes him up.
He’s asleep in Neil’s bed, curled up tightly with Neil’s pillow shoved into his gut. His neck hurts slightly without having anything to rest on, bringing a surge of annoyance that he shoves back down.
The sheets still smell like Neil and his shitty three-in-one shampoo, and Andrew brings a corner up to his nose, staring at the gray fabric.
There’s a single strand of auburn hair next to the pillow that curls up slightly near the end. Andrew shifts and can feel the lumpiness of the mattress beneath his feet, because Neil had never bothered to fix it, and Andrew couldn't care less when they were sleeping together, too absorbed in Neil himself to mind.
He feels hungover. There’s a cup of water on the side table, aspirin next to it in a little jar. No note, but he can guess that it’s from Renee — this seems like something she would do.
It hurts to think. It hurts to think of Neil, here, in his bed, in their dorm, under his sheets. Andrew has lain in this bed too many times, but never without Neil.
A wave of anger and repulsion comes quickly.
He wants to throw something: Kevin’s thermos, a chair. Neil’s shitty flip phone that he never replaced sits innocuously on the table like another offering to Andrew, a silent plea for him to get a grip. No one else had touched it since the FBI returned it after the investigations.
They had been too late. They couldn’t even look Andrew in the eye when they pronounced Neil’s death, just repeatedly assuring them that Neil’s father was dead and gone.
Just like Neil. Neil, whose body was found charred beyond recognition, was killed the same way his mother had gone; likely intentional on Nathan's part. Nathan died a death far more graceful than the one Neil got, one far more painless and simple than the torture Neil underwent at his hands – a fate that Andrew wished he could change with the deep loathing that floods his chest.
“Wesninski is dead.” Andrew can’t find it in him to remark that Neil had been a Wesninski too.
Andrew had asked to see Neil in the morgue. His eyes had been closed. His last look into Neil’s eyes had been in Baltimore, amidst the crowd, brief panic settling before he disappeared from Andrew’s line of sight. That had been the last time Andrew had ever seen Neil, the last time Neil had ever looked at him.
The morgue is cold, where Neil was all passion and burning spirit, eyes bright as he harped away to Andrew. Neil burned red-hot, embers igniting whenever they came together.
“You’re flying awfully close to the sun.” They’re talking after another win, Neil having done the post-game interview and shit-talked the other team live, having to be forcibly dragged off by Wymack before he got sued for defamation.
Neil had grinned back at him, a smile sharp and toothy. He’s all smug, and it makes Andrew want to grab him by the jaw and kiss his lips until they’re swollen. “You’d catch me if I fell, Drew, I know you would.”
“93%. See that you don't.”
“Worried that you'll lose your favourite chew toy?” Neil's eyes spark slightly as he speaks. There is a brief flash of teeth, sharp canines that flaunt their appearance.
“Haha, very funny,” Andrew deadpans, looking Neil straight in the eye expressionlessly. “It's your neck fetish. You're the one chewing on people's necks, not me.” A small rosy mark peeks out of Neil's collar, just barely showing from beneath the fabric. Willfully, Andrew voids his gaze.
“You practically eating my neck made it into the tabloids once. Everyone thought I got mauled.” Neil responds with a shrug. Andrew's eyes fixate on Neil entirely – it's all he seems to be able to do nowadays. His thoughts bounce around in an echo chamber of Neil, Neil, Neil.
If they just had more time, he would take the colour in Neil’s eyes and bury them deep within himself, where no one could ever get to them. He would preserve Neil down to every last detail, memorise the furrow of his brows or where each hair lay.
The image of Neil, auburn hair almost glowing in the setting sun, is enough to make Andrew pause in his tracks and lick at his suddenly dry lips.
Andrew doesn’t have enough time. He didn’t have enough time with Neil, he thinks, as he watches Neil’s body closely. Now untethered, lost in motion – time ticks by without Neil to control the hands of the clock, everything rushing past feels like it has returned him to his drugged stupor.
The clock says that it’s two in the afternoon. Everything feels shitty and disconnected — aftereffects of his hangover, he supposes. He fumbles as he sits up, picking the aspirin up and downing it dry, ignoring how crackly his throat feels around the pellets.
Andrew pointedly avoids looking at the flip phone on the table.
Kevin hasn’t entered their room since Andrew stumbled in in the morning, drunk out of his mind. His bed is undisturbed, blanket still folded and tucked military-style. Andrew’s been given a wide berth despite their deal – Andrew can't find it in himself to chase him down and tell him that the deal’s still on.
Someone has to be blamed for Neil’s death. Andrew silently cycles through everyone they know – Kevin, Wymack, and everyone he and Neil know. He needs to have someone to blame, or he thinks he’ll go insane, needs a clear shot at an obvious reason – but Nathan is dead, and the FBI won’t tell him the names of those who worked with him, so he comes up with nothing.
He doesn't want to get out of Neil's bed. If he closes his eyes just tightly enough, Neil is asleep opposite him. They’re on separate sides of the bed. His eyes are closed, he's snoring lightly, a hand tucked under the pillow. An unruly lock of hair sticks up. If Andrew just found it in himself to imagine, Neil is right there.
Except he can't. His memory knows the feeling of Neil against his skin in a bed too small for two. There hasn’t been a night in this bed that hasn’t had them forced together by proximity.
It’s why they have two beds. They sleep in their own beds when they feel like they can’t handle touch, within reach but never skin-to-skin. It’s the best arrangement for them.
He’s in Neil’s bed, but Neil isn’t there. He should be here — Andrew wants him, needs him now.
He can't feel Neil. His brain won't forget the warm feeling of Neil’s skin on his as they lie in bed and miss their alarms just to piss Kevin off. There’s no Neil-like shape next to him, bundled under blankets with just his head peeking out.
He can't forget.
Skin on skin. Next to Neil, year after year. That’s the ending Andrew had foolishly thought that they would get. Neil was the sweetest thing he’s ever had; Andrew had tasted the best version of himself in Neil's mouth, the taste of cigarettes somehow anything but morose — he had thought that they would get a happy ending, a happy something at the very least.
He wants to forget. Drown his sorrows in alcohol and cigarettes until he can't think straight, until his lungs cave in on him and he dies, here where Neil’s scent still lingers, smoky and wild.
He'll die with Neil's scent on his skin.
Andrew goes back to sleep, not bothering to get up. All he wants is to numb the feeling, so he sleeps.
He can hear Kevin in the room at some point, being as silent as possible as he sneaks through the room. Andrew isn’t asleep yet – he hasn’t moved from where he lies on Neil’s bed, staring at the wall the bed rests against and shutting his eyes when Kevin walks in.
All that floods his vision is Neil, and his eyes almost snap open before he forces them shut, wrenching the blanket more tightly over himself. Kevin’s steps pause before he retreats. Andrew grips the blanket tightly as he keeps his eyes shut against the warm light flooding through. There’s a faint redness that shines through his eyelids, shrouding his vision with flickers of colour.
The next time he opens his eyes, he’s on the roof.
He remembers this moment, can recognise it by how Neil is sitting beside him, knees up to his chest, staring back at Andrew.
They're on the roof a week before Baltimore happens. The place has become some sort of limbo for him, a place he keeps getting brought back to after Neil's death.
It’s nothing new — they’re on the roof more often than not nowadays, just smoking and talking. Neil is called to heel behind Andrew with a simple glance and a hand on his back pocket as they make their way up.
Andrew knows it's a dream. Neil's eyes are too blue, too soft and blurry around the edges, more cyan than turquoise. He’s just so slightly off enough that Andrew can recognise it, but everything else is Neil, down to the finest details.
His scars are a perfect replica. Andrew has run his hands over them enough to memorise the feeling and shape of each mark and the place it takes on Neil's body.
This Neil is built on what Andrew remembers of his Neil.
The eyes alone are enough to tell Andrew that he's fading. He warps before Andrew’s own eyes, the edges of his skin prickling faintly against the fluorescent light on the roof behind them.
Neil still smells like cigarettes. He never smokes them, doesn’t enjoy the indulgence — he lights them for Andrew instead, moving forward to place them between his fingers. He grins when Andrew huffs smoke towards him.
Neil’s answer had been abrupt when Andrew asked him wryly about his tendency to stick his face into secondhand smoke despite his own lack of motivation to smoke cigarettes himself.
“They smell like the brand my mother used to smoke. Before she died.”
Andrew hums in response before offering Neil a cigarette. “They all say second-hand smoke is bad for your lungs, you know.”
As always, Neil takes the offering and lights it, breathing in the smoke. “Not second-hand now, is it?” His eyes glint with the reflection of firelight as he inhales, eyes taunting. Andrew hates him. He hates the idea of Neil — a pipe dream, a castle in the sky he cannot help but chase. The smoke billows around Neil’s face beautifully – Andrew smokes furiously to drown the surge of emotion that shows as a slight flush on his face, trying to pass off his silence as nonchalance.
The edges of Neil’s lips crease and raise, and Andrew stares at the way the skin rises, eyes fixated on the movements of Neil’s mouth. It’s tempting just to lean in – so he does, not bothering to hide his inhibitions.
Sunshine. Neil tastes like sunshine. He savours the feeling of Neil’s mouth on his, his junkie insatiable as he chases the taste hungrily, nipping at Andrew’s lips.
He tastes like Andrew — it’s unnerving tasting yourself on someone else’s lips, but the taste has grown to placate Andrew in its own way. He never thought any part of him could be this good, good enough to get someone to stay.
All of Andrew's bad habits feel like starbursts of ecstasy with Neil kissing him.
“Hate you.” Andrew mouths against the column of Neil’s neck. Neil makes a soft sound, a grin fixing itself across his face before he tugs Andrew in for another kiss.
Neil pulls away slightly, eyes fixated on the minuscule lift of his lips before he kisses him again. Andrew kisses back with full force, arms wrapping tightly around Neil’s waist and gently tugging him knees-first into his lap. Neil thumps him on the back playfully before he leans in again. He feels alive, kissing Neil on the roof – his legs hang off the edge, the height exhilarating.
Andrew had always thought he would be better off dead. He had wished for it at some point.
The records wouldn’t be difficult to conceal — a Doe, orphaned, a druggie and an alcoholic. No one would look for him after he died. He’d get a gravestone with ‘Andrew Doe’ etched into it like a representation of his soul – on the chance that people actually found his body, no name to go into the ground with him.
Doe. Something innocent, frightened, lost — wide-eyed amber, pelt soft. No scent of copper or bloodied knuckles follows it as it moves, weaving delicately through the woods.
Andrew isn't sure if he still has any part in innocence. He's not a lost foal. All that's left is a bloody, broken-horned stag that watches from the space between trees, eyes wide with bloodlust.
He finds himself afraid when he reaches out for Neil. Not afraid of Neil or what he may do — he worries that hands which have never known love cannot be trusted to impart it gently enough to be understood as so.
So he lets Neil manoeuvre him.
It's a March evening, and everything is sweet and slow, Neil's hands wanting as they steer his shoulders the way he wants, pulling and skirting around him in the way he knows Andrew likes. Fleeting sensations that tickle, verging on intimate.
Andrew knows this is a dream. A week from now, there will be nothing left of Neil Josten or the Andrew he knew.
He catalogues Neil's breathing. One, two, one. A steady rhythm as he leans against Neil's chest slowly, a metronome made of his heart. Neil's hands against his chest, Neil's heart against his own.
His cigarette burns down to the filter. He doesn't light another one; his hands are too busy with the hem of Neil's shirt as he fists it, pulling Neil closer, wandering and tracing shapes upon Neil's back.
Neil is burning in his next dream.
Burning, burning, burning. He's screaming and flailing as the flames lick up the same scars that Andrew had kissed. Neil is red and burning, the blue of his eyes burning with him. Burning. It’s all he can think about as he watches Neil, wanting to rush forward and pull Neil out of the flames and the gasoline coating his skin, extinguish the flames with his own body and hold Neil tight until he’s sure the junkie won’t run again.
But this isn’t real. Neil Josten is dead, and there’s nothing Andrew can do about it. The ground has swallowed him and his sky-blue eyes whole.
Neil's face warps beyond recognition, flesh peeling off. His skin is red and raw, cracking and tearing in certain areas. His injuries, both old and new, burn away with the rest of him.
The sound is a horrible wail, flames crackling in the background as they consume. Andrew can see with his own eyes the doing away with Neil's flesh.
Andrew's kisses don't do anything to preserve flesh. Neil is an unrecognisable lump by the end of it. Nathan had wanted to do away with him the same way he did his mother – through fire.
Neil is burned flesh on the photo, dark and fleshy and raw, and Andrew thinks he wants to throw up.
Andrew doesn't know if Neil was alive, as he was burned. Wymack won't tell him. He'd pulled the papers out of Andrew's hands before Andrew could read on, just as quickly as Andrew had snatched them from him, ignoring Andrew's spitting and swearing as he fought to get them back.
There's an autopsy report inside; he can see the very edge of the paper sticking out from the file of documents. He needs to know if Neil had burned alive, how much pain he had felt during the process — if death had been torture or catharsis.
Pain is not a foreign concept to either of them, but Andrew finds himself wishing that Neil had gone painlessly – that at least the end had been peaceful.
He wants to rip Nathan limb from limb.
Had they not known that Nathan had taken Neil, Neil would have been labelled another John Doe. His body is unrecognisable in the picture that has etched itself into Andrew's mind, all peeling flesh and soulless skin.
Neil’s screams echo in his head as he watches him flail, and Andrew wants to shut him up — he can’t take the reality of Neil’s voice anymore.
Nathan had burned him alive. Andrew remembers the impersonal words of the FBI when they'd passed the photos to Wymack. Andrew had snatched the photos from him, hands shaking, and he would've swung at the officers if he hadn't been cuffed to Wymack.
“Nathaniel Wesninski was found dead. His father has since been neutralised. We are sorry for your loss.” The words taste like ash in his mouth, insincere and fake. Andrew hisses a sharp ‘Neil’ when they mention Nathaniel, but they pay him no mind.
Both Nathaniel and Neil are dead. Only one name is getting carved onto Neil's gravestone. Andrew will be damned if he lets it be Nathaniel. He won't let Neil be buried under what he's been running from for years, won't let him be forever named as someone he isn't.
Nathaniel isn't Neil, and he never will be. There lies a shallow distinction between the two, a barely discernible difference that Andrew finds himself acquainted with.
Seeing Neil after coming out of rehab had only solidified the sense of feeling Andrew felt towards him. Neil was watercolour, where the rest of Andrew's world lay in charcoal and graphite.
Life chased after his heels, and Neil would let it bowl him over head-on, hair and eyes and everything else about him a pipe dream. Fantastical, illusory – Andrew tears away his latest disguise and is met with another.
Neil lies. Lied.
“Thank you, you were amazing.” While he knows he's about to be taken and die trying to get away. Promises to Andrew that he would keep their deal before running off to martyr himself again – and yet Andrew still reacts to him with Pavlovian behaviour, moving forward when Neil does, offering keys when Neil steps towards the Mas–
He's like a guard dog called to heel by Neil and only Neil, bowing his head and baring his teeth.
Andrew thinks he's dreamt Neil up, would hope for it to be the case – finding out that Neil wasn't real would hurt a lot less than him dying, because Neil should've come home. Nathaniel should've stayed dead in Baltimore and never come back. Neil should have stayed with Andrew, should've stayed with him in his arms in their bed in their house.
Neil should've stayed his. He shouldn't have died because he stayed once after running for years. He doesn't get to leave Andrew in the dust like this.
It's unfortunate for Andrew that Neil does what he shouldn't do.
Nathan doesn't get to take him. His knives trace out patchwork patterns on Neil's skin, and he shouldn't get to do that because Andrew had a deal with Neil, promised his protection and safety. Pincushion skin and darkened marks, the Neil in his head watches Andrew as he burns.
Blue eyes burn into his skin as the flames consume Neil. Silence has crept over them now, because Neil’s mouth has burnt and he’s falling, falling, felled. Andrew can see Nathan looming behind Neil; a near-similar image of Neil reflected behind his corpse, arms outstretched and warping into Drake’s own as he steps towards Andrew.
Neil doesn’t get up.
“Come on, Andy. Give your big brother a hug.” Drake’s voice is sickening and saccharine sweet; his hands gored away — Andrew wants to drive a knife into the junction of his neck and shoulder and watch as the blood spills out. His skin is melting off his face, his eye crushed in its socket.
He wants to kill Drake and Nathan, and everyone who has ever wronged him and Neil. They don’t get to rest easy in the ground when Neil may have died burning, died with his voice caught in his throat, died afraid.
Death is no attractive deal.
He wants to die with Neil, together in their bed as they grow old, die in each other’s arms, and now he can’t carry on with his plans because Neil is dead, and all Andrew can think of is following in his footsteps.
“Don’t go where I can’t follow.” He had told Neil that once on the roof, the two of them sharing a cigarette, red-faced from kissing. “I mean it, junkie. Don’t disappear.”
“I’ve told you once,” Neil murmurs, face buried in the junction of Andrew’s neck, where he is most vulnerable — he could dig his teeth in and tear Andrew’s veins out, and Andrew doesn’t think he would mind. “I’ll tell you again. I am not a pipe dream. This is real, Andrew. No one's disappearing.”
When he wakes again, the room around him is dark. Kevin is snoring faintly in the background and has seemingly overcome his worries of being choked out for the night. Andrew watches him sleep quietly. Kevin’s chest rises and falls unsteadily, breaths cut short by anxiety that haunts him even in his dreams.
Gaze unreadable, Andrew stares at him from the other end of the room, knees up to his chest. He watches each breath Kevin takes in, the inflation of his lungs.
Autopsy. Yes, right. The report. It's on Andrew's table now, some shitty decision probably made by Wymack or Kevin, spewing shit about how he deserved to ‘know the truth’. He flips it open slowly, eyeing the official records. Every page feels like an insult, digging into open wounds and reminding him of Neil's death.
The victim's corpse was burned to be physically unrecognisable.
Autopsy and further investigation show the victim to be nineteen-year-old Nathaniel Wesninski, son of his murderer, otherwise known as the Baltimore Butcher, or Nathan Wesninski.
Nathaniel Wesninski has been going under the alias Neil Josten and is a member of the Palmetto State Foxes Exy team. Our investigations do not show a prior connection between Nathan Wesninski and the Palmetto State Foxes.