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Neil wakes up in the middle of the night.
He’s sitting up before he knows it and in the cold air he forgets for a moment where and when he is. Is it his father’s house, the night that- but no, it’s not that dark, or his eyes are just used to it, and it’s their bedroom in the Village.
Next to him Todd mumbles, clenching the hand he has on Neil’s stomach. “N-?” he says, half awake, and Neil loves him for it.
“Just a dream” he whispers, running a hand over his hair. It’s blonde still, the grey hairs only noticeable if you look. Not like the ones threading through Neil’s black, which Todd refuses to point out but Charlie does, loudly, every chance he can.
He opens one sleepy eye, but Neil shushes him.
It’s not that bad a night, not that he needs Todd to cling to, and he waits for him so settle back down before slipping out.
It’s even colder in the living room, despite being crammed as it is with books (“Fire hazard” he’d smiled at Todd and he’d smiled back). He takes the blanket that they call an afghan even though it isn’t off the back of their unevenly colored sofa and puts it on.
It’s scratchy and terrible, left behind “accidentally” by Knox and never collected. He’s pretty sure it was a gift from Knox’s overbearing mother in law, a titanic nightmare sketched broadly from Knox’s chattering and Mercedes’ tight smiles. That sentence is Todd’s, he’s pretty sure too. He can count on one hand how many times Knox’s pretty second wife has visited their small apartment and have plenty left over, which is probably why they were the dumping ground.
Knox could also be counted on one hand, along with Charlie and another couple of friends who haven’t argued that Neil and Todd could afford a better, bigger place. They could, now, Poet Laureate and Esteemed Theater Director, finally after so many years, but this is their home.
Todd’s written mountains of gold and even bigger ones of shit on their scarred kitchen table, and the light in the living room is perfect for thundering around, imagining a stage around him. As much as he’d loved acting, there was nothing quite like running the show.
Todd had smiled at him when he’d said it, shaking his head and telling him he was the last to figure out where he’d been heading all along.
A recurring theme in my life, he’d answered and Todd had snorted, now who’s the English Major? and Neil had had to kiss him, pulling him down on the same sofa before they’d both tumbled off, laughing and kissing like they were seventeen again.
Well. They’d had to be quieter at seventeen, surrounded by the presence of other boys and teachers and the ghosts of Wellton behind them. They were stubborn, those Hellton phantoms, and they’d taken years to be exorcised.
And on nights like this Neil found they’d never really left, just stepped out for a moment but glad to be back.
“Fuck you, Hellton” he mumbled, like it mattered. He’d never really hated it, not the way the others did.
They were trapped there, but Neil was free.
His father wasn’t around, wasn’t just waiting to sneer at how girly Neil’s interests were, how close to his mother he seemed, how he needed to toughen up . That he wouldn’t stand any more of this acting business.
It’s so obvious now in retrospect.
(There’s other things too, that are obvious now. The way his mother smiled a little too wide and brittle, the way his father had repeated over and over “I never hit her”, like that made some sort of difference).
But back then Neil just felt the constant weight of being wrong somehow, of being off, of needing to be better. Wellton was a world away from that, where he could be charming and fun and if his friendships seemed a little close, a little intense well. It was boarding school. Those things happened.
Funny, that, if his father hadn’t sent him to school to man him up he might never have found Todd, might never have noticed just what it was that made him different.
Sometimes he wonders about that.
The ways it might have gone.
The night after the play, staying up all night in his cold, cold bed and thinking about-. He hadn’t. He still doesn’t know why, doesn’t know what kept him from getting up. Not dead poets, or his friends, or Todd, or Shakespeare. He just...hadn’t.
Neil had lain there, feeling like his entire life was over and done nothing.
And the next day his father had been on the phone with Braden Military Academy to find that it was ridiculous to expect them to take on a student midyear, even less a senior, especially if that senior had no military school experience.
“You don’t understand!” his father had screamed into the receiver. Neil can still hear it sometimes. “My son has got to get to Harvard!”.
Whoever was on the other line, some poor clerk stuck with the Perry Family Fury, had screamed back “Then Wellton’s your best damn bet! Stick him anywhere else and Harvard will say what we said, just what the hell is wrong with a boy transferred so late so suddenly!” and hung up.
It’s a little funny now, his father’s face slack and pale at the language , which would end up seeming so quaint.
There had been a silence in the house and then more phone calls. His mother, and he hadn’t loved her then for it, hadn’t understood the courage it took, had sat with him and taken his hand while they waited.
Neil was back in Wellton by the next week, on disciplinary probation and strict orders to keep to only to parental approved extracurriculars. He’d walked back in a daze, sitting on his bed.
And then Todd, in the doorway, lighting up like Neil was every birthday and Christmas rolled into one.
He’s probably never been hugged as much as the day he came back and Todd shrieked his name loud enough to call down all the boys and their heavy bodies on Neil’s.
Finally he’d managed to gasp out: “The Society. We have to stop”.
There had been a heavy silence until Todd smiled, soft. “No”.
“What do you mean, "no"?”
“No”.
And then Neil had laughed until he cried. Or cried until he laughed maybe.
He’d still sleepwalked through the next few days until Todd climbed into his bed at night, hesitantly laying an arm over him, like maybe Neil wouldn’t let him do it anymore.
“It doesn’t matter” he’d whispered, still deep in the hole his father had tossed him into. “I still have to go to Harvard. Med School”.
Todd had nudged him until he turned over and then he just said “So take acting at Harvard. There are classes, there must be”. “You don’t understand, my father would-” “What? Stop paying for Harvard? Then you wouldn’t have to go and that’s what you want, anyway”.
Neil had felt his mouth drop open.
“The forest for the trees” Todd had whispered with a small smile and Neil had kissed him, really kissed him, not the quick dry presses of lips from before and Todd had kissed him back.
(He hadn’t worked up the courage to sign up, that first semester, especially with Todd at Columbia, what felt like millions of miles away. But he had eventually and, well. He never did get to Medical School).
Neil shakes off the memories. On worse nights, he imagines that that’s not the way it went. The cold helps, grounds him in the present.
He moves to the window carefully, mentally mapping out which floorboards to avoid. It wasn't the first place they’d lived in together, not by a long shot if you counted Wellton, but it was the one that had felt like home from the very beginning.
Todd’s brother had come around then, helped them with their furniture and eaten at their table with Knox and Charlie, who’d never needed to be told why Neil and Todd kept moving along together, even years after college and Todd being published.
He was likable, Jeff, not what Neil had pictured. He’d even smiled graciously a few years back, when they’d been to dinner and a young woman had come up shaking to ask if Todd was The Todd Anderson, to tell him that his poems had changed her, that she’d stayed up late to watch the telecast of the speech he’d given for the President.
Todd’s parents’ faces had fallen while Todd shyly thanked her and signed her notebook.
It had been the proudest day of Neil’s life, prouder than the day he and his mother both had stood up to his father and he’d helped her walk out.
She’d eaten at their table every Wednesday since then, until her death. A heart attack, earlier than it should have happened. Thanks dad .
But they’d had the good years, and in a way Todd’s parents, bad in their own right, had been the better ones, because in their absolute indifference they hadn’t particularly minded the ‘close friend’ with which he lived.
They’d even called Todd, with some prodding from Jeff, Neil’s always privately suspected, the day his first poem was published in the New Yorker .
It was framed in the living room, and they’d stared at it in quiet awe for a while until Todd had whispered feverishly in his ear “It’s about you, you know that don’t you? they’re all-” and they hadn’t even made it to the bedroom.
He’s smiling when he looks back at the window and takes in the view. Behind him the floorboards creak and he reaches out. He gets an armful of sleep warm Todd and they stare out of the glass together.
“It’s snowing” Todd whispers like it’s a secret and Neil smiles against his shoulder.
“You saved me, you know that?” he whispers back and Todd smiles half fond, half concerned.
Neil kisses him, tries to say it’s not that bad a night .
He still has those, sometimes, even years after the first time he broke down and found a psychotherapist, and then another, before he proceeded to cycle through them like lovers.
Charlie had been the one to say that and Todd had blushed, and he’d answered “Well of course. I’m never going to want another lover, so I have to go through something ”.
Charlie had gaped.
It was the first time he’d ever alluded to it that openly.
And then he’d laughed and turned to Todd: “He might not, but if you get lonely give me a call”.
For a long moment, Todd looks into his eyes, then nods, satisfied, and turns back to the window.
Neil still doesn’t have the words for it, the ways in which they seem made for each other. Miraculous , maybe, if he believed in that sort of thing.
Todd’s never tried to fix Neil by himself, never been insulted by it the way some people seem to be. He knows that’s it’s not that he’s not enough.
“I love you so much” he says instead and Todd smiles.
He turns back to the window with a look that says he’s picking through the landscape and finding words, maybe a new poem, outside.
“Like a dream” he mumbles to himself.
Then he lets himself be tugged back to bed and as they settle Neil whispers “That we have but slumbered here, as these visions did appear?”
Todd smiles against his lips: “They wouldn’t be too bad, all things considered”.
No, Neil supposes.
Not bad at all.