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It starts with a nightmare, as it always does, because Neil dreams about blood and grins sharper than knives and hands around his throat and his hands bound behind his back. He dreams about dark nights, bullets, the smell of burning flesh, and the wracking desperation inside of his broken soul to just lock himself in the bathroom and cry. He dreams about the lack thereof because he’s not Neil Josten and the ability to cry was long ago lost.
In these dreams, he’s Alex. He’s Chris. He’s Stefan. He’s — Nathaniel. It starts with a fracture in the making and then it shatters like he’s broken a mirror with his bare fists, knuckles cut and bleeding.
He’s the son of the Butcher; the son of a runaway wife with heavy hands and a tongue quicker than a whip, and he can feel the beginnings of his father inside of him, stirring around and picking at him with teeth and prying nails. His nature and his nurture. He’s made of cruel smiles and harsh sadism. He’s well versed in the art of knives and he bathes in blood. He’s not Neil Josten because he’s Nathaniel Wesninski.
And in this particular nightmare, he smells rust and ash. His hands are burning and he wants to shed his own skin, crawl away and hide. He wants to run and run and run until there’s nothing left behind him. When he turns around, it’s his father with his rough hands around Neil’s throat. When he reels, it’s his mother and his jaw aches with a phantom pain. When he opens the door, it’s Andrew and his world disintegrates. When he looks back, he’s in the basement again, but it’s not Nathan or his cruel companions dead on the floor — it’s all the Foxes and he’s holding a gun in one hand and a knife in the other. When he opens his mouth, nothing comes out and he’s watching it all burn.
He’s not Neil Josten. He’s Nathaniel Wesninski and it hurts.
It hurts so much, it wakes him up with the shuddering sensation of being pulled through the icy depths of the ocean.
It takes Neil five slow, long minutes in the disorienting dark of the dorm room to be able to sort out his surroundings enough to bite back the initial panic. Still, he’s too afraid to turn on a light because the lack of a gun underneath his pillow and the sound of someone breathing to his left has sunken a fear so deep in him, he doesn’t trust himself to not get up and run if he moves an inch. His eyes burn like he hasn’t blinked and there’s something lodged in his throat so thick and so painful, he can’t swallow it down. He’s an anchor drudging across the bottom in slow motion.
When Neil finally breathes out, it’s deliberately slow but uneven.
And if Neil were a different being, he’d give himself this. He would lock himself in the bathroom when he jerks awake into the 3 AM darkness, Andrew to his left up against the wall and sleeping in the only peaceful kind of form Neil’s ever seen Andrew. If he were a different being, a more solid and stable being, he would give himself this. But the substantial weight of his mother’s hands and the severing edge of his father’s knife had broken him long before he had even been old enough to understand and in its place, he learned to cope with the pain in his chest and compartmentalize in blank silence.
If Neil were a different being, he would know how.
As he is—barely a functional person—he stares at the bottom of the bunk above him in the outlining darkness and he stays exactly how he is: numb and still, and he counts as high as he can in every language he knows until the sun starts to rise because this is a truth.
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In the morning, Neil is so detached from himself, he’s delayed in everything that he does.
With Kevin around, he falls into the easy lie that he’s not all the way awake because he didn’t sleep well (“you better be awake before the game tonight”), but Andrew watches Neil knowingly as he makes his cup of coffee. The solidity of Andrew’s gaze sinks Neil because he knows that Andrew is picking him apart, piece by piece, until he finds whatever it is that he’s looking for in Neil. He doesn’t want Andrew to find it.
It takes him ten seconds too long to stop staring at his coffee because all he can see is the punishing darkness Andrew stood in and he could swear that he smells blood and fire before he turns around.
Andrew’s standing in the doorway, expression arranged into his familiar apathy, but something is giving.
Every scar on Neil’s body feels raw and exposed, bruised and bloody. It makes him nauseous and unsteady, as if the world is tilting just enough to unbalance him and disorient him but not so much that he’s falling over. Yet.
He thinks he might actually be pitching into a free fall when Andrew looks at him, a question but not, and Neil shakes his head once, barely a twitch of muscles in his neck, but it’s enough.
This is how Andrew knows.
They spend the rest of the day leading up to the game orbiting each other but never touching.
Andrew stays nearby when he can; always within reach but not close enough to even accidentally brush against Neil and Neil, in his desperation to keep himself from running (from the game, from the Foxes, from Andrew), doubles that distance intermittently throughout the day. It only lasts until Andrew can inch his way back into the vicinity.
Neil has the creeping sensation that if he moves a certain way too quickly, Andrew might haul him back by his shirt. He’s not sure if it would be for his own good or an act born out of annoyance on Andrew’s end.
There had been a time that Neil was sure Andrew would cut his losses and let him go if Neil hit the ground running on pure instinct and bad memories, but then Baltimore happened and the championships happened two years ago. And now a part of Neil thinks some of Andrew’s reluctance to let him out of his sight might be rooted in something uncomfortably close to a selfishness only people with something to lose know.
Neither one of them talk about it. Neil’s not too sure they’ll ever as it is.
He refuses to call it fear, but it might not be too off the mark for Neil especially.
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Neil plays the game with a fire reminiscent of when the Foxes go up against the Ravens—like he’s fighting with all teeth and knuckles because he has a point to make and someone to tear apart. He plays as if everything and everyone have wronged him personally and he wants to revenge for every single one of them.
Andrew watches him and Neil knows it.
After Neil gets a yellow card for a body check escalated into a near full brawl on the court over a comment that Neil could usually (on better days) brush off, he wheels around with his hands clenched around his racquet as if he’s either going to swing it into anyone that steps in his way or he’s going to snap it in half, and he looks up and he mindlessly lands on Andrew because that’s what he does. That’s what they do.
They find each other, tethered and grounded.
Except this time, Andrew’s solemn scrutiny doesn’t put Neil back on the ground before the second half is done.
The Foxes lose their favor, seven to six, because in one sharp swing in the last five minutes, Neil gets benched with a red card. Andrew keeps them from falling too far after the penalty shot, but it doesn’t ease the anger or the disappointment and Neil knows that Andrew didn’t close the goal down to spare anyone’s feelings, especially not Neil’s. He’s on a self-destructive route and Andrew has always been keen on collateral damage, medicated or not.
When Kevin corners Neil in the locker room after the tense showering and changing out, Neil shuts down.
“What the fuck was that?” Kevin demands. When Neil doesn’t bother to humor him with a response (because Neil’s not sure that he’s not going to take a swing at Kevin now), Kevin raises his hands like he’s going to do something, if not just push Neil as a means of taking his frustrations out on the source of their biggest problems tonight, but then—
“Enough!” Wymack’s voice breaks the air and seemingly echoes in the locker room. Neil flinches and recoils, all instinct and no logic, and it’s harsh enough that even Kevin seems to crack. “I’m not in the mood for your shit tonight, Kevin.” Neil has rearranged his expression back into something too close to coldness when Wymack looks at him and says, “I don’t know what the hell is going on with you, Neil, but you need to go home and sleep it off and come back to me when your head is back in the game and you’re not trying to get yourself benched for the rest of the season. You got me? I don’t want to see this shit on my court again.”
“Yes, Coach,” Neil grounds out, fisting his tension into his duffel bag as Kevin retreats.
When Neil steps outside, there’s a white noise in his head and something humming through him. It’s a restless buzz and he wants to run and run and run. He wants to run and feel like he’s getting somewhere rather than between two goals on a court. His body hurts and everything in him says to go. He’s standing behind Aaron, Nicky, and Kevin on the way to Andrew’s car and he stops walking. He stares down the dark street and he could be three states away by tomorrow afternoon if he just—
It’s like crashing into a wall full speed when the court door slams open loudly, pointedly, and bounces off the wall, shattering the lethargic silence that had fallen on the parking lot and the group.
Aaron and Nicky turn around to look because curiosity killed the cat. Kevin makes it a point to continue looking at the car, like he’s waiting for someone to just unlock it so they can go home and sleep off their defeat. There seems to be a silent understanding when Aaron and Nicky turn around, away from Neil and Andrew.
Neil looks at Andrew vacantly—almost robotically from the noise and not because it’s Andrew and Andrew’s all but demanding Neil’s undivided attention—and he looks back at Neil with the same unconcern as always, but underneath it and in a way only Neil can find, there’s almost a challenge because he sees through Neil.
Run, I dare you.
There’s something softer, too. Something that almost tells Neil the opposite.
It’s the same impression that he’s been feeling all day when Andrew placed himself back steadily within reach every time Neil distanced them. Like if he does take up Andrew’s goading, he won’t make it very far because Andrew will drag him back with his own hands and lock him in the dorm if he has to.
Neil doesn’t know if this is considered protection or insight because Andrew has always been the quicker of the two to know that these moments are transient and Neil will wake up half a country away and want to come back home when this fear and ache to flee settles back down; either before or after he gets himself hurt.
It might be one in the same if Neil thinks about it.
It reminds Neil of that thing Renee had said once: This, too, shall pass.
So when Neil tilts his head downwards slightly, it almost feels like he’s putting himself in Andrew’s hands and asking him to take him apart now. It tastes a little like trepidation and rout, too, and in the moments between his gesture and Andrew walking around him to the car, Neil vividly remembers the feeling of his mother’s wrath because this is what built him. These bruises and these scars and this pain became callouses to Neil’s entire being and tonight, it’s raw and unrefined like he’s seven years back in a dingy motel room and he’s lost the fight.
Neil spends the entire car ride carefully avoiding even the faded reflection of himself in the passenger window.
Andrew doesn’t watch him this time.
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It’s another nightmare. This one pitches Neil into his free-fall so far upside down, he doesn’t know right side up.
He’s standing in the middle of a hotel room and his mother is on one side and his father is on the other. It’s all a matter of which one is going to reach him first when they both move, but then the whole room shifts itself from the ground up. Neil watches his mother shift from Mary to Nathan to Lola to Jackson and before the knife sinks into Neil’s ribcage, it’s Riko. Somewhere in between blinks as the blade scrapes against bone and Neil looks up, mouth open in a breath he can’t hear, he sees his father’s face above him. He reaches up, recoils, and then he’s falling face first.
He never meets the floor. He smells blood and he hears the sadistic laugh of a man unhinged. When he rolls over on the ceiling, it’s coming from his own mouth and it sounds like Nathaniel, splitting down the middle.
Neil hauls himself up and Andrew is standing there. The room is empty and black.
“Nathaniel.”
Neil closes his eyes and clenches his fists. His arms burn and now he can smell burning flesh. When he opens his eyes to a whispered ‘Abram’ because even in his dreams, Neil responds to Andrew’s voice like a magnet, everything shatters outwards, bloody and sharp and loud.
Neil thinks that he’s screaming.
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It’s 3:30 AM when Neil finally manages to sort the room out in the same hazy darkness as the night before. He can hear Kevin snoring softly and he can hear Andrew breathing beside him, but he doesn’t risk a look. He knows that it’s Andrew, he knows this with every fiber of his heart, but he’s afraid that he’ll see his mother if he looks.
This time, Neil drags himself to the bathroom. He sits on the edge of the bathtub for a long time, leaning himself on his knees and trying to remember how to breathe. None of his breaths reach his lungs.
And if he were a different person, if he weren’t made of scars and broken and upside down, he wonders if this is the moment where he would cry. Where he would let go and sit there, in the bathroom at half three in the morning, and cry until breathing was all that his body could do because he had nothing left and like always, the human body would self-preserve even when you don’t want it to.
If he were a different person, maybe he would.
He’s only just this though.
It takes him another five minutes before he can stand up to face the mirror. He braces himself, white-knuckled and teeth gritted, on the sink before he actually looks at his own reflection.
And in that moment, he knows undoubtedly who he is and will always be in the center of his heart. He has always been nature and nurture presented, and there will always be this darkness inside of him—both inherited and learned. He will always be Nathaniel Wesninski in the core of his being because he can’t fight fate.
The soft movement of black in the corner of his eye shifts his stare from his scarred face to the doorway where Andrew is standing. The both of them stare at each other for a long, steady moment and they’re both an orbit and a mirror themselves in how Neil holds Andrew’s indifferent observation with his own even though his hands are gripping onto the sink so hard that his fingers hurt.
It’s Neil that breaks it first, as it always is.
He feels Andrew move around him, careful not to actually touch him, and it’s when the shower cuts on that Neil moves, albeit sluggishly. He moves like he’s wading through in slow motion, sticky and syrupy almost, using all his strength to move from point A to B. He wants to leave because Andrew isn’t a man of words and Neil doesn’t have the energy to wonder what he’s doing or why he’s taking a shower at almost four in the morning. He wants to crawl out of his own skin and into his bed—not Andrew’s for once—and sleep the rest of the week away because he wants to be able to breathe again. And if running away isn’t going to accomplish that, then maybe sleeping will.
Except Andrew’s standing between him and the door when he turns around.
Neil’s brows furrow and he opens his mouth as if he’s going to say something, but then Andrew shoves him backwards.
The bathroom is small, if not a bit cramped on the best of days, so Neil’s three steps back from surprise rather than force puts him near the shower doors. He definitely starts to make a sound in the back of his throat, the beginnings of a protest or Andrew’s name, but then Andrew pushes him again.
It happens so quickly, Neil almost falls on his ass in the shower, tripping backwards on the ledge because he has nowhere else to go in the inertia of Andrew’s shove.
The ice cold water hits Neil in needle pricks and he almost inhales the waterfall coming off the top of his head in the sharp inhale at the same time he snaps his hands outwards to catch himself, the shower taller than it is wide. His feet find enough of a grip so he more or less falls gracelessly against the wall with a muted thud.
It takes him a minute to gather his bearings now, his gray t-shirt clinging to him like a second skin and his sweatpants weighing uncomfortably. He can feel the beginnings of shivering starting to creep in as the iciness seeps through and down to the bone. He has half the mind to come back at Andrew, his temper flared and barely subdued under the cold water, but when he levels a glare on Andrew through his hair matted on his forehead, he doesn’t move.
Before Neil can say anything, Andrew reaches in and turns the hot water up so high, it unbalances to a point that he might as well turn off the cold water and drown Neil like this.
Through the beginnings of steam, Andrew returns the stare, unwavering and blasé, his clenched jaw being the only thing to give him away. His voice grates out of his throat and drops between them, heavy as a stone, “Wake up, Neil Josten.”
Like this, Neil has nothing left.
His arms fall to his sides heavily and he opens his mouth, but the both of them know there’s nothing there. So he hits his head back against the wall as he looks at Andrew. His body is unstable and ruined, every scar alive with every memory, and it clings to him like a shadow. He’s tired. He’s so damn tired. Andrew says it again and his tone lilts around the edges underneath the clipped blankness, rough and grinding, “Wake up.”
It’s angry, but it sounds fraught in its crudest form.
But Neil’s jagged ends cut through it before he can bother deciphering it to be something more. “I can’t,” Neil whispers. It breaks between them, left like that—split like fiberglass. It hurts them both.
The sound of water falling stays there.
Neil closes his eyes, and he accepts defeat and exhaustion. He’s setting himself up to sleep in the shower if he has to because there’s no way he’s getting out now. Even if he had any attachment to his sluggish body beforehand, the weight of his soaked clothes does him in anyway. He’s too tired for this.
He can’t wake up.
When the shower door closes, Neil doesn’t open his eyes for a long moment.
Then he does and Andrew’s there, his clothes soaked and hanging off his body, and he’s never wavered. He reaches out silently between them, a question muted on his tongue but in the way his fingertips stay slightly curled as if he’s braced himself for a ‘no’ and he’s reaching out to give Neil the choice anyway. Looking at Andrew’s hand like that, Neil realizes that Andrew’s waiting for him to fall into him because this, too, shall pass.
In that moment, in that excruciating moment where Neil wishes he were a different person so he could do something to let out all of this pain and anguish and he wants to cry, it’s all that he does want. He wants to fall into Andrew because Andrew is the one person that has bared the weight of Neil’s demons with him and never once has buckled underneath it or flinched away. He’s the one person that can’t be cut on Neil’s edges.
So he does.
He leans forward in his silence, chin almost touching his chest, and he knows that if he tilts himself further, he’ll literally fall into Andrew so he stops there. Andrew takes that for what it is though because he reaches up to cup the back of Neil’s neck and Neil’s forehead almost meets Andrew’s shoulder in the motion.
The water is warm between them, although it doesn’t help Neil’s clothes, but now Neil’s not sure if it’s because Andrew stopped trying to burn him or because he’s gotten used to it. Distantly, for Andrew’s sake, he hopes it’s the former seeing as Andrew’s the one standing mostly under the stream now.
Andrew tugs enough that Neil’s forehead finally does press against Andrew’s shoulder, near his arm rather than his neck, and Neil tries to find his feet. His foundation is still cracking when Andrew repeats himself one more time, close to Neil’s ear, “Neil.” He says it like a reminder; a matter-of-fact. A truth. Sunrise. Abram. Death. “They’re dead and buried and burned and you’re not. You’re here. You’re alive. And you’re not him. Wake up, Abram.”
It’s a mantra.
Andrew says it again. Neil mouths it back against the wet material of Andrew’s shirt.
They stay there, standing underneath the water, Neil’s arms heavy at his sides and his head leaned barely against Andrew and Andrew’s hand a grounded weight on the back of Neil’s neck, and they’re hardly holding onto each other but they’re clutching on where it matters the most. It feels like plummeting.
Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.
Neil Josten, wake up.
You’re here. You’re alive. You’re not him.
Wake up, Abram.
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In the morning, Neil doesn’t get out of the bed. Neither does Andrew for a few spare moments.
When Andrew disappears into the kitchen, Neil can hear the muffled but indecipherable mumblings of two people talking. It ends with a solid thump and then a door closing. He guesses that it’s Kevin, or lack thereof, but Neil still doesn’t quite have the energy to care one way or the other. He just hopes to any God listening that Kevin leaves him alone for the day because there’s still a slow burning desire to either destroy himself or everything around him.
Andrew comes back with two cups of coffee, places one on the floor within Neil’s reach but out of the way so it doesn’t get knocked over, then goes to the window to push it open and prop himself on the edge to smoke a cigarette. Neil watches all of these movements in silence.
After his first cigarette and a flicking look, Andrew finally says, “Staring.”
“I know,” Neil murmurs, but his voice is hoarse like he’s been screaming and it cracks. Andrew lingers on him for another quiet moment before he turns back to the window. Neil doesn’t miss the way he angles himself so none of the smoke drifts to Neil, but he doesn’t comment on it or even allude to it. It takes a few more minutes before he says, “Hey.” Andrew looks at him without turning to him. “Thanks for the shower last night. It was really refreshing.”
There’s a slight flicker in Andrew, but as quick as it comes, it leaves and he turns back to finish his cigarette.
Neil drinks half of his cup of coffee before he can’t stomach it anymore. It’s started to taste like dirt when he puts it back on the floor where Andrew had left it. At first, he debates going for a run but when he looks back at Andrew, he realizes that neither of them trusts Neil to stop there. So he’s debating just going back to sleep when Andrew comes back into his line of sight. He instinctively looks up and draws in a deep breath, not for any reason other than to remind his lungs that he’s alive and he’s real and so is Andrew. He ignores how it feels like being cut.
“Are you awake?”
Neil blinks slowly. “Yeah.”
Andrew reaches out like he did the night before and Neil tilts forward in answer the same way. His hand is solid and warm against Neil’s neck, but instead of dropping his head low enough to touch his chest, he looks at Andrew. It’s something warm when Andrew leans forward to bump his forehead against Neil’s. It doesn’t hurt, but the feeling it ignites is so sudden and so sharp inside of Neil’s chest, he has to breathe in slowly, deliberately.
It’s not new, but it always feels it.
Neil closes his eyes and what Andrew breathes out, he breathes in.
“You’re here,” Andrew murmurs between them, so quiet that he almost mouths it instead. Neil almost wonders if he said it at all when he continues, “You’re not going anywhere.”
“Andrew,” Neil exhales because it’s all he knows. It’s all that makes sense.
He angles his head before Andrew can finish asking, “Yes or no?”
Neil inhales and for the first time in days, it feels like it reaches his lungs. “Yes.”
Wake up, Neil Josten. You’re here, you’re real, you’re a truth.
Stay, Abram.