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Neil’s heart aches. It cries, it yells, and it claws the inside of his ribcage, begging to be let out, to be put out of its misery.
It hurts worse than anything Neil has ever known : breaking his arm, being alone, getting lost as a kid… He’d take all of it at once, all of that pain, to avoid the way his body is demanding to drop dead.
He considers it. He slips out of bed, he grabs his crown, he opens the window. He puts it on, hoping to feel the freedom he had felt on stage, but he does not. His brain is exhausted, his heart drained, his body harmed in ways he cannot explain.
His feet lead him out of his room, and, as he passes the living room, he can smell the vague perfume of his mother. Houses and rooms are full of perfumes - the shelves are crowded with perfumes, his brain recites.
His soul cries out at the poem. Poetry has to leave him, it has to go, or it’ll kill him.
At the top of the stairs, he wonders. Drunkenly, high on exhaustion, he wonders what to do. The answer comes naturally, without any tears. His hand finds the railing, and he goes down one step before he hears it. This time, his soul isn’t the one crying out.
“Neil,” the cry said, “Neil.”
The cry leads him to the back door. It leads him to the frozen gate, then to the climbable fence around their house. It leads him through the snow, barefoot with a long coat on, probably not enough, but he does not think about it. I will go to the bank by the wood, and become undisguised and naked, he thinks.
He listens to the cry, and the snow has already drenched his knees when he realises there is and was no cry.
No cry, no one crying his name.
No one, but him.
He’s far from home, his body temperature dangerously low, the skin on his hands and feet already breaking from the cold, but he keeps walking. Undisguised and naked, he repeats, calmly, as if slowly breaking the chains holding him back.
He walks, and he walks again, and then, he’s by the back door. He doesn’t remember the trip, doesn’t feel a thing, but he grabs a rock, and he throws it at a window.
Charlie’s face appears.
Ten minutes later, a group of familiar faces opens the door for him quietly.
Neil falls into Todd’s arms. He only realises once in his embrace that he’s been crying, tears like crystals on his pale skin. He wraps his bloody fingers around Todd’s neck, and he cries, and he stays that way even after the entire group covers him in coats, giving up their own shoes and socks for him.
When he speaks, his lips are blue, his voice a broken cry, “Oh, Todd.”
A shaky answer comes from Todd, who has wrapped his arms around him, under all the coats. “Neil, you…”
Charlie cuts them short, although his face is covered in tears, “you’ll cry later, lovebirds. You’re gonna… die, like that. We can hide you for tonight,” he says.
So they do. He’s thrown in Todd’s bed, covered with multiple blankets, and Todd lets him hug him through the night. They do not sleep, but they stay quiet. Only once in his arms does Neil keep reciting mentally, ‘My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs’. He feels all of them through Todd, not much through himself.
With nothing to lose, once the sun has set, he breathes out, “I love you, Todd”.
With much more to lose, once the night has come, Todd admits quietly, “I do, too”.
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms, Neil thinks, as they happen, and, for the first time since the beginning of the night, he wonders what comes after. How did the poem go, already ?, he wonders as his lips suck the life out of Todd’s, as his arms pull him infinitely closer.
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you, his brain adds, although the order is messed up. As tears softly and quietly run down Todd’s cheeks, and as soft sighs leave his lips, Neil sees the lines of the poem appearing in his mind, perhaps even more out of order, only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.
All consuming, with a thirst that cannot be quenched, he kisses Todd again, and, as he turns him over to lie on his chest, he moves his shirt away, pressing his lips against his bosom bone, plunging his tongue to his bare-stript heart, away from the poem. He stays there, and he listens to his heartbeat, enjoying his body in a way sex wouldn’t allow. He reaches, and reach’d till he felt his beard, and reach’d till he held his feet. Diving into his soul, hoping to find relief there.
Todd lets him, with open arms, with tears running down his face, his neck. He welcomes him into his soul, and he holds him through it, even when Neil breathes out, “For me the man that is proud, and feels how it stings to be slighted.”
Neil holds him back when Todd completes, disregarding parts the way Neil did, “You are not guilty to me, nor stale, nor discarded.”
When the day comes, Todd has fallen asleep, limbs tangled with Neil’s. It does not stop Neil. Like the wind, he moves quietly. With a pen, he scribbles behind Todd’s first poem, “what is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest is Me; Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns”.
His heart reacts properly for the first time since he’s left, painfully squeezing itself until he adds, “Your hair by the all-consuming, devouring blue; thy hands by the pines - through it all, love made by thou. Cruel beest love near the vines”.
He leaves quietly through the window, with stolen shoes and broken dreams.
Years later, Todd finds him by the ocean, behind the forest of pines and the fields of vines, with his shoes and a suitcase full of new, bright dreams.