Work Text:
“Yoohoo!” Allison’s repeated knocking on Neil’s front door was driving him positively insane. “Neeeeeeeeil. Neeeeeil. Let me in, pretty-boy!”
He was rolling the sleeves of his dress-shirt up as he stalked over to the front door to answer it, a scowl across his face. She was grinning when he yanked it open, her expression immediately turning inquisitive at his attire.
“You are relentless,” he grumbled, stepping aside. She sauntered past, leaving a trail of stiletto heel dents in the carpet and french perfume. Her curls bounced as she walked, immaculate as always.
She bee-lined for the bedroom, where there were no bugs hidden. When she turned around to face him, her arms were crossed with one eyebrow raised. “So you’re going to see him again?”
Neil fiddled with his sleeves, his collar. It brought heat to his skin when he thought about it. He was just - curious. He wanted to know all there was to Andrew and couldn’t figure out why. He shrugged. “I asked if he’d like to grab drinks. He said sure and recommended somewhere called Eden’s. I don’t think it’s a proper date -”
“Ha!” Allison crowed. “Nicky’s going to be ecstatic! He knew setting the two of you up would be perfect: you’re a perfect pair of tiny, brooding assholes.”
“Mmhm.”
“Is that what you’re wearing?”
Neil looked down at himself. “Yes?”
“Jesus Christ,” Allison complained, loudly, pinching his shirt between two glittery nail extensions and dragging him into his own room. “You’re a disaster, you know that, right?”
“Shut up,” he mumbled, looking with disdain at the clothes she threw onto the bed, which included a black wife-beater and a mesh top to go over it. It was January - he was going to freeze to death.
“Is he picking you up from here?” she inquired, rifling through his boxers. Neil sighed: it’d been so long since Lola’s protege had appeared at their doorstep that being embarrassed around Allison just wasn’t a thing anymore.
This is Allison, Nathaniel, his father had said, a broad hand on Allison’s shoulder. Her parents sold her to us. To you. She will be your Lola.
They’d been merely teenagers, bitter and afraid. Silently, in the confines of Neil’s childhood room, they had locked pinky fingers and vowed to take his father down, once and for all. Neil had immediately let himself be comforted by her grey eyes, tumultuous storms rather than simple irises.
“I’m not stupid,” Neil retorted. “You’re the only one who knows where I live,”
“Other than dearest Daddy,” she muttered. She could only speak like this within his room, where they were sure that his father hadn’t hidden any microphones. Nathan claimed it was to ensure that anyone who attacked Neil could be caught but Neil wasn’t stupid enough to assume that his father trusted him.
“I’m picking him up,” Neil mumbled, tugging on the jeans she’d thrown at him. “Are you sure about this outfit? It seems a bit -”
“You’re going to Eden’s on a Thursday night, you idiot,” she laughed. “It’s a gay club on Thursdays. You’ll fit in great.”
Neil did not like the way she winked.
His phone buzzed. He fished it out, almost flinging it across the room in his hastiness. Allison snorted, mumbling “Eager.” Neil wasn’t eager. He’d just - he was simply curious. About Andrew. About the cotton armbands, hidden under his dress shirt. The shadowed eyes. He seemed dangerous, but also impeccably well controlled.
pick me up from this address instead. don’t knock on the door.
The address was for somewhere in the easterly suburbs, a little closer to the club than Andrew’s apartment had been. Neil shoved his keys and wallet and phone into his pockets, letting Allison fiddle with his hair.
“Enjoy yourself!” she called out, getting into her pink porsche. “Don’t kill anyone!” He rolled his eyes and clambered into his car, careening out of the garage.
The house was small and quaint. Two cars were parked in the driveway, one under the awning and another rather haphazardly, nearly scraping the gate. The second was obviously more expensive, and Neil thought he might have recognised it from their first date.
Date. Fucking hell, Neil was on a second date. With a man. His father would kill him. His father would strip his skin from his body and hang it from a flag mast for everyone to see. A gay son couldn’t carry on the Wesninski legacy. Neil was a disgrace enough already.
He wasn’t even gay. He just found Andrew intriguing.
He waited for five minutes outside, then texted Andrew to let him know that he was here. When another five minutes had passed without an answer, he climbed out of the car, checked the address was right, and carefully walked up the pathway.
He knocked on the door twice: before his knuckles could land a third time, the door was wrenched open, revealing a lithe man with brown features and a wild-eyed smile.
“Neil!” he crowed. “Hi, it’s so nice to meet you!”
“Nicky, for fuck’s sake,” Neil heard Andrew grumble from somewhere out of sight. Neil snorted under his breath, shaking Nicky’s hand.
“Allison and I are the best match-makers,” Nicky sung, falling back into his house and pulling Neil across the premise. In the kitchen was another blonde man, considerably taller than Andrew and wearing a genuine smile. “Neil, this is Erik, my husband. Erik, this is Neil! You remember Allison, don’t you, honey? They’re good friends!”
Nicky was…a lot. Weakly, Neil asked. “How do you know Allison, again?”
“How could I not!” Nicky laughed. “We were in the same marketing classes in college. I told her that her Gucci sweatpants were trashy - because they are - and she didn’t take that too well. God knows she loves her brands.”
Neil did know that, probably better than anyone else.
“Goodness, Allison said you were a cutie, but I had no clue how right she was!” Nicky pinched his cheek, and noticed the side-long glance Neil sent to Erik. He winked. “I’d invite you to have fun with Erik and I if I wasn’t sure I’d be scalped by my cousin.”
“Yet you talk too much regardless,” Andrew said, materialising out of nowhere.
Neil was suddenly relieved for Allison’s intervention when he saw what Andrew was wearing under his coat. It was a sleeveless shirt, the holes hanging so low that Neil could see his ribs, the cords of muscle that wrapped around his midsection. It was also low at the neckline, both in the front and back. Neil looked away.
Nicky bid them farewell with a cheery wave and a wolf-whistle. Andrew practically dragged Neil out of his cousin’s house, the tips of his ears bright red.
“I was trying to avoid that,” Andrew muttered. Neil just laughed and gestured towards his car.
“Shall we?”
Admittedly, the club didn’t seem like the right place for Neil. He didn’t drink - he couldn’t afford to lose his inhibitions - didn’t dance, and it was too loud to talk properly. Whilst people watching was fun and Andrew didn’t seem to mind just hanging out by the wall with a whisky in hand, Neil wished they had somewhere quieter to talk.
“I haven’t been in somewhere like this in years,” Neil mentioned, leaning closer into Andrew’s shoulder. “I suppose nothing’s really changed.”
“I snuck in here as a kid. Got a fake ID.” Andrew shook his head. “It was not a good way to figure out my sexuality.”
“What - you came here to just - makeout with people?”
Andrew arched an eyebrow, still looking out over the swarm of writhing bodies. “You never did anything like that?”
“No,” Neil murmured, wrapping his arms around his stomach. “I didn’t realise that was the normal thing.”
Andrew looked at him for a moment before knocking back his whisky and chucking the glass onto a nearby table: a finger in Neil’s belt loop tugged him away from the wall and then they were moving. Past the bar, the dance floor, the music booth, right for the doors. Neil tried to protest - Andrew had paid for both of their admission tickets - but the man was having none of it, Neil stumbling along behind him as he walked.
When they were outside, Andrew leant Neil against the brick exterior, facing him with his ankles crossed.
“I’ve never really done anything like this before,” Neil confessed. “I don’t - I don’t know what’s expected of me.”
“Nothing is,” Andrew insisted. “Nothing you don’t want to do.”
Neil made a vague gesture with his hand. “I’ve been set up before, by Allison or my -” he cleared his throat. “I’ve never asked someone out twice. I suppose I don’t really get it.”
“Do you swing at all?” Andrew inquired.
Neil shrugged, looking away. He supposed this would be where Andrew decided Neil wasn’t worth his time anymore, if Neil wasn’t really sure about sex or anything remotely intimate -
Andrew forced Neil to look at him with two fingers under his chin. “Neil, I’m not here to do something you don’t want to do.”
“What’s the point in sticking around, then?” Neil managed.
Andrew shrugged, dropping his hand. From his pockets he drew out a carton and lighter. Neil let him light two, accepting the second and holding it to the corner of his mouth. “Maybe you’re interesting.”
Neil hummed quietly. He could understand that. Andrew was interesting too.
He realised he liked this: the quiet. Smoking together outside a club, the two of them in their own bubble. This side of the building was dark, courtesy of the wooded parklands that came right up to the club’s westerly wall.
Maybe it was a bad idea. Getting involved with someone who was outside of his circle of work was never a good idea. If Andrew figured out that Neil was the Butcher’s son, he didn’t think that the man’s curiosity would be as forgiving. No one in their right mind would date a gangster’s - a serial killer’s - son, not unless they were already involved in Neil’s world.
“Would you look at that,” came a soft voice from above. “Daddy wouldn’t be too happy if he knew where you were, Junior.” Neil had a knife in his hand before he’d even blinked, pointing it at where the shadow had dropped down into a crouch, just a few feet away. “Would he, now?”
She hadn’t even bothered to obscure her face. Leverett was so sure she was going to kill him that she wasn’t worried about her identity.
“Fucking hell,” he muttered, fingers twisting in the loose material of Andrew’s shirt. Then he realised Andrew also had a knife in his hand, perfectly balanced and hidden out of sight. Where the hell was he hiding those? Everything he wore was impeccably tight, far too tight to conceal knives. “Well? Get on with it, then.” He felt Andrew’s gaze boring into him, sharp and incredulous.
Her smile faltered, eyes twitching to the left, where someone was probably hidden around the corner. “No pleas for mercy? No last words?”
Neil shrugged. “Learn to stop revealing your plans?” With that he turned and socked the man who emerged right between his eyebrows. It gave them a window, so he dragged Andrew by the hand - if their fingers were intertwined that wasn’t Neil’s problem - and disappeared into the parklands.
He’d probably been around here before. There weren’t too many places to hide bodies in Baltimore: every time he tripped over a log he wondered if his father had ever left his dead nearby.
“I think we’ve lost them,” Andrew managed, looking around. Neil just shook his head. “You’re rather idiotic, aren’t you?”
That wasn’t the first time Neil had heard that. “We can’t stop here. We’re only safe when they’re dead.”
“Neil,” Andrew said, lowly. “If you kill them, I’ll have to bring you in.”
Nei blinked, slowly turning around. It was pitch-black, but even then, his eyes were golden. Shimmering. Dead fucking serious. “You’re kidding me.”
“What?”
“Are you a cop?”
Andrew sighed. “Maybe. Are you a criminal?”
“If I say yes are you going to lock me up?”
Andrew shrugged. “The worst I’ve seen you do is punch someone in the face. And rightly so.”
You have no idea, Neil wondered, aghast. How had he not noticed? Why hadn’t he done his proper research? This was insane. This was insane. Neil couldn’t date a cop. His father was one of the most highly sought after gang leaders in the Baltimore region! “Fuck,” he whispered, fingertips to his lips.
“Look,” Andrew said. “I’m not going to ask why there are people chasing after you, who your father is, why the hell you had a cleaver in the compartment of your door, but - we could help each other.”
“What do you mean?” Neil managed, voice strangled. When the fuck had he seen the cleaver?
“You could be my informant, and I can -” Andrew grimaced. “Owe you, I suppose.”
“I don’t want to be an informant,” Neil hissed. “I want - I don’t know. I don’t know. I want to get to know you and also really don’t want you to die right now. But I can’t date a cop. I don’t want to lie to you. I lie to everyone else in my life. I don’t want this to be the same.”
Andrew’s hand rose up to cup his cheek. “Who are you, Neil?”
A twig snapped nearby: both of them whirled around immediately, bracing themselves.
“Neil?” Leverett laughed dismissively, materialising from the shadows. Neil cursed. They should have never stopped running. “Is that who he told you he was?”
Andrew pulled a knife on her. “Leave.”
She laughed, but it was cut off with a sharp punch to her throat. Neil blinked: one moment Andrew had been beside him, and the next he had a fistful of Leverett’s hair, her throat constricted by his grip.
“If you touch him, I will make sure that you never see the light of day again.” She made a gurgling noise. “Do you understand?” When she didn’t respond, he shook her. “I asked: do you understand?”
She nodded weakly. Disgusted, he let her go. She was gone within seconds.
Slowly, hesitantly, Neil reached out to unwind Andrew’s fist where it was wrapped around the handle of his knife. Their noses brushed as Andrew stepped into Neil’s space.
“She will be dead by the end of the week,” Neil whispered. “I have no control over that. I have no control over the family I was born into. I’m -”
“Apologise and I’ll gouge your tongue out,” Andrew muttered, sliding the knife back into his armbands. They had to hold sheaths, Neil realised, vaguely impressed.
He sighed. “Maybe let’s just go see a movie, next time.”
Andrew arched an eyebrow. “The Godfather?”
Neil looked at him, dubious. The corner of Andrew’s mouth twitched upwards.
“Drive me home,” Andrew said, taking Neil’s wrist.
Neil just nodded.