Work Text:
Neil wakes at about 5:30am with a weight on his chest.
He can’t see anything in the pitch black and moves his hand to find fur.
She purrs, yawning and stretching out her arms so that her claws dig into his arm on their way back down.
He buries a hand under her belly and scoops her up, turning ever so gently to his left to deposit her on the ground.
They usually shut the bedroom door at night, but they got back late last night and must’ve forgotten.
He rolls back over to see Todd, his face smushed into a pillow and his hair a messy ball of fluff not dissimilar to the cat’s, sticking up in all directions. He’d run his hand through it to smoothen out the strands if he knew it wouldn’t wake his boyfriend up.
Instead, he closes his eyes and lets his fatigue wash over him once again, gradually pulling him back under.
Until he feels paws on his arm.
The next time he wakes, the space next to him is empty.
Todd is standing on the other side of the bedroom, in his boxers, cradling the cat.
“She,” Neil points at the beast, “is a menace.”
“I know,” he coos, holding her face up to his. “Woke up to her chewing my hair.”
Someone couldn’t resist the urge to touch it, then.
“But how can you be mad at her?” Todd pouts, holding the cat out to him.
“I swear you love her more than me,” Neil comments, throwing off the duvet and taking the cat.
Todd makes no effort to object to this.
“My father invited me over for Thanksgiving,” Neil says quietly, before shoveling a mouthful of cereal in his face and pretending he doesn’t see Todd’s frown.
“You can’t be serious. Neil, a year ago-”
“A ye-” he begins, but can’t speak through all the cereal and holds up his index finger to signal ‘Wait a second’. They sit in awkward silence as Neil chews and swallows. “A year ago, he wouldn’t even speak to me. This is progress, Todd.”
“I know, I know,” he sighs, reaching out for Neil’s hand from across the table. “It’s just… do you actually want to be there or do you just feel obligated to be?”
Neil threads their fingers together, thinking.
“Both. I wanna be there. And I want you there, too.”
Todd laughs. “How’re you gonna explain that?”
Neil shrugs, then flashes one of his disarming smiles and kisses the back of Todd’s hand. “I just really like my roommate.”
Tybalt the cat, her namesake the result of an unfortunate mistake with her gender by the shelter they bought her from, brushes against Todd’s legs underneath the table.
“I think you’ve got competition.”
“Knox called yesterday,” Neil says, looking into the mirror as he loops a tie around his neck.
“What did he want?” Todd buttons up his shirt.
“What do you think he wanted?” Neil sighs, his question rhetorical. “We talked about Chris for about an hour before I had to go.”
“I don’t blame him. If you left me, I probably wouldn’t shut up about you for at least a year.”
"Just a year?"
"Maybe two."
The strange thing is Neil knows it's true. If he and Todd split up, their entire worlds would be off-kilter.
The very fabric of his life has come to morph around Todd these past 10 years. If even a thread comes loose, he’ll fall apart for certain.
“Is he gonna be alright for Thursday’s meeting?” Todd asks.
At their last Society gathering, he’d practically sobbed his way through every line of poetry he chose to read. He was worse than Todd on a particularly bad anxiety day. They couldn’t, and wouldn’t, kick him from the meetings, so they’re resigned to watery-eyed poetry.
Neil pulls on his socks.
“Probably not.”
“8 o’clock, right?” Todd asks, fixing the collar of Neil’s coat.
“Yep.”
“Break a leg,” he says, and Neil pecks his lips before opening the door.
He looks back at Todd one more time, his hair still in need of a comb and his mouth curved into a smile, and he can’t leave without kissing that look off his face.
He slides onto a train packed with businessmen with briefcases and families with rowdy children.
He waits a few stops and gets off near the theater.
At 7pm, they start flooding the lobby and begin taking their seats.
At 8pm, Neil is standing in the wings, Act 1 Scene 1 playing out already. He’s on next.
He wears a suit and tie- a modern reimagining of the play.
Ophelia gives him a smile. Claudius slaps him on the shoulder and mutters encouragement.
Their first showing.
The other actors file offstage, and it’s Hamlet’s turn.
He looks out over the sea of people, obscured by the blinding stage lights. Each of them is here to see him. Their claps are for him. A decade of performing and the goosebumps he gets when the theater becomes a vacuum of whistling and screaming and cheering.
Nearly ten times the number of people who saw his first stint on stage in 1959 now stand before him, celebrating the career he’s chosen.
The one his father objected to, told him he’d never make enough to live a comfortable life with.
But what is a comfortable life without passion?
He has the only job he’d ever want to do.
He has a partner he’ll love to the grave. That alone is enough.
When he steps behind the curtain for the last time, his cast mates close in, ruffling his hair and patting him on the back and chanting his name.
He parts through the crowd. He sees Todd, hands in his pockets and a grin on his face, waiting by the stage door.
They sneak out of the theater unnoticed, Neil’s bones ache with exhaustion but he feels giddy off the post-performance high.
Walking home, the snowy weather freezes their fingers, and, when they turn the corner onto a deserted street, Todd dares to grab his hand. Neil’s are always warm, you see. Todd’s are always icicles.
They throw open the front door and they’re kissing before he can even shed his coat. Todd’s hands are in his hair, messing up its perfect sculpting for the show, and he couldn’t care less.
He thinks Todd probably has a thing for his hair. He likes it.
“I don’t think a single person in that audience even breathed when you started The Speech,” Todd’s words dissolve into a laugh. “I mean, you walk out on that stage and something changes. You were made for it.”
“You think so?”
“I do.”
Neil grins. Todd has seen his raison d’etre this evening. Now, it’s his turn.
“And how was your day?” Neil asks, fingers tracing a heart on his soft, pale palm.
Todd sighs.
“Okay, I guess. I got another chapter done… I didn’t like much of it.”
“Read it to me,” he half-requests, half-instructs.
Todd knows better than to deny him, and reluctantly gets out of bed, disappearing into his study for a moment and returning with a small wad of paper.
“Are you sure? It’s really not-”
“I’m sure.”
Todd climbs back in next to him, and Neil rests his head on his chest. He likes to feel when Todd reads his work, not just hear it.
He closes his eyes. Todd’s chest moves up and down as he speaks and breathes. Down below, traffic sounds from the roads, and light from skyscrapers threatens to creep past their curtains.
A meow interrupts Todd’s first paragraph. He feels a gentle weight on his leg as she settles into a loaf, tail occasionally tickling his skin.
Todd speaks and Tybalt purrs.
His wearied bones can rest.
~~~~
Neil sits behind the desk, letting the daydream wash over him in bitter waves.
‘Yeah,' he thinks, the cold metal of the barrel against his temple. ‘That would’ve been nice.’