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It is like a child has scribbled in dark ink, an oval repeated again and again, the black abyss of a ‘0’ flashing. The word, written out, its letters floating around Andrew, the z and e, the r and o, until the word settles into its real form, slithering like a snake through the air and then latching onto Andrew’s skin.
Zero.
It wraps around his wrist, crawls to his chest, pierces him until he thinks he can feel it on his ribcage, through his organs, in his stomach.
Zero.
It is still there, that zero, when the world around him falters. It is flashing on the flip phone in Andrew's hand like a too-late warning: zero, zero, zero. It is flashing in the sky when everything turns red like blood and Andrew is running instead of on the bus, running from New York to Baltimore, but his feet aren’t actually working. Cars and bikes and people pass him. The Foxes’ bus passes him. His legs are useless. Everything is useless and then he’s there, suddenly, teleported, and there is nothing. There is just an endless black, and the outline of a zero which he belatedly realizes he is standing on. It is an abyss sucking him down, deeper and deeper, until one of the Foxes is calling Neil’s name and they get no response. Suddenly there are people everywhere, like a search party, all of them calling Neil’s name at once as if he is missing. Andrew sees Coach and Kevin and Dan but their faces are contorted, blurred somehow, and their voices quickly turn to sludge until it’s just Andrew again.
He reaches out blindly and tries to call Neil’s name, knowing Neil will answer if it’s him calling, but his mouth cannot form the word. He cannot conjure up a living Neil, and so he is suddenly shown a dead Neil instead. Body twisted, limbs broken, eyes void. Every inch of his skin is bleeding out onto the floor. A violent reckoning befalls Andrew, something akin to fear eating him alive—
Andrew twitches awake.
The white noise of the fan places him in his dorm room. It is dark, long past midnight, but his eyes adjust fast to the shadows and outlines around him. His back is slightly wet, stuck to his shirt, and so is the back of his neck. He is sweating, body tense and pulled taunt, but he cannot force himself to relax. He cannot yet wave aside his unconsciousness as inconsequential.
Too slowly, the thing beside him begins to take shape. Andrew felt like he’d jolted awake, but in actuality, he knows it had not been more than the faintest flinch. Not quite enough to wake his companion.
The seconds pass breathlessly. Andrew is on the cusp of something. The darkness allows him this response, this inability to grapple onto reality and get a good foothold. The fan keeps whirring. The room is suddenly too stuffy to withstand. The image of the dead body, scarred, persists. The mattress is terrifyingly still. Nearly no movement.
Andrew swallows, then all at once finds his refusal to speak idiotic and pointless. Nightmares are not the truth. They are insidious thoughts praying on your logical ones.
Andrew says, softly as he can yet still somehow hard, “Neil.”
By then, his eyes had mostly adjusted to the night. He sees Neil flicker to life before him, alive and fine, which, no-fucking-shit. Andrew had seen the rise and fall of his chest, could partially hear the breath coming in and out of Neil’s nose. But this? Seeing eyelids open, having Neil’s gaze search and land on Andrew’s own? That is significantly different.
Neil doesn’t say anything, but he removes the blanket from his body and rolls off the bed. After a contemplative pause, Andrew follows him. They slip out of the room, Andrew clicking the door closed quietly behind them. Neil makes for the kitchen and there is the clack of glass and then the sound of a running faucet. Andrew goes to their new couch and settles on the cushion closest to the window. The blinds are cracked slightly, enough that Andrew can spot a sprinkle of far-away streetlights, their orange glow coating the campus roads.
Neil comes back with two glasses of water and offers one to Andrew. Andrew takes it but places it on the floor near his feet. Unbothered, Neil settles on the middle cushion beside Andrew and pulls his knees up to his chest, bare feet pressed into the sofa. It takes Neil a minute to find the remote, but his hand eventually emerges with it from between the couch cushions. He sips his water, flips on the television, turns the volume down until its nearly muted, and channel surfs until something catches his attention.
He lands on a rerun of some 90s show neither of them have seen before and tosses the remote aside, forgotten. The colors are dull and the quality is iffy. It is lulling somehow, fitting for the morning hour. Neil sets his glass aside and settles deeper into the cushion behind him.
Andrew stares out the window for a half hour, soothing his thoughts until they are silk-pressed and flat. He can feel Neil sinking beside him, limbs loosening, knees turning slightly toward Andrew in both relaxation and exhaustion. When the show’s credits run and the opening song plays right after, Andrew sets his palm on Neil’s knee. The warmth of him is never less surprising.
“Go to sleep,” Andrew tells him.
“Hm? I’m not tired.”
Andrew studies Neil’s cheeks, rubbed red from his pillow, and his slow-blinking eyes. Everything about him screams he’s halfway to a dream. His blatant lie is so unnecessary Andrew almost rolls his eyes. Hopefully Andrew’s blank stare is enough to convey how unimpressed he is with Neil’s false bravado.
“It is too early to be difficult.”
Neil doesn’t stifle his yawn. “Too early or too late?”
“You’re not even hiding it now.”
Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, Neil asks, “Hiding what?”
Andrew pinches the skin at Neil’s knee. Neil attempts to swat Andrew’s hand, but when Andrew pulls his arm back, Neil slaps his own knee instead. The look Neil sends him is an attempt at scorn, but he’s too tired to make it work. The commercials on the TV cut out, and Andrew nods his head back to the screen.
“Since you’re not tired, pay attention.”
Neil is not fooled by this distraction, but he obediently turns back to the TV and attempts to watch the next half hour of outdated television. Ten minutes into the episode, Neil’s body starts shifting, muscles loosening in a way that suggests he’d lost the fight against drowsiness. Andrew reaches around him for the remote and presses the power button, sinking the room back into dimness. The volume had already been low, so Neil does not shift at the newfound silence.
Eyes closed and body scrunched as small as possible, Neil doesn’t look like much. There is a peace there that doesn’t exist during the day, constantly outweighed by his aggression as co-captain and the antagonism of his mouthy rants. Even his kisses are red hot, balancing between violence and desperate need. The version of Neil Andrew is staring at is one only few of the Foxes see, the version who trusts enough to loosen his bones and show off his ooey-gooey soft middle. It would be nauseating if it weren’t obnoxiously endearing. It would be maddening if Neil’s trust, so new and fragile and wilted, wasn’t entirely Andrew’s to hold.
It is that trust that makes his nightmare impossible to swallow. Neil danced on the rope of death and Andrew, though cut free from his promise, had not been capable of action. He remembers how Neil’s flip phone felt in his hand, what the small screen looked like as it illuminated that text message, the single number staring back at him. He remembers the hollow ache of his complete fucking uselessness, and the long hours between that moment outside the stadium and the FBI’s call. The memory sinks somewhere unreachable inside him. It riles him in a way he often can’t prevent. This lack of control untethers him, threatens to let him loose to the wind, but he almost always knows how to stuff it away until it is nothing but an echo of that pain.
He knows it is moronic to linger on it now, but the dream has pressed into Andrew’s edges, burrowing where he can’t quite reach. He stares at Neil, running his gaze over the lines and scars and features on Neil’s face again and again until his subconscious finally holds true to the fact that, yes, of course, Neil Josten is right here and he is, for once, just fine.
Again, Andrew wakes Neil up with just his name.
Neil’s only response is a quiet grunt, half-formed as a question.
“It’s cold,” Andrew tells him.
“Okay,” Neil grumbles, shifting.
“Go to bed.”
This wakes Neil slightly more. He lifts his head to stare at the television only to find its been shut off. He runs a hand on the couch with his eyes half-open until he finds the remote. Andrew takes it from his hand and tosses it across the carpet.
“Neil.”
Almost offhandedly, Neil says, “I’m not going without you.” It is said so flippantly that Andrew is inclined to ignore the heaviness of that statement, but he knows Neil means it. “Tell me when you’re ready and we’ll go.”
Andrew doesn’t answer because there’s nothing to say. Neil’s false heroism helps no one. If he had the breath, he would plainly tell Neil to leave, but a part of him is surprised Neil hasn’t left on his own. Neil is usually good at reading the distinction between Andrew appreciating his company and rejecting it. He wonders if his face has learned to give itself away, to say something other than what he wants to convey.
“Did I tell you about the jellyfish?” Neil asks him.
Andrew slants his gaze to Neil, mouth flat. He has no idea what Neil’s talking about. “No.”
“I keep having this dream,” Neil starts. His head is tilted, staring at the wall ahead of them, like he’s deep in thought. “Where I’m at the bottom of the ocean and the only thing I can see is this massive jellyfish. It keeps reaching for me, but I always swim away. At least, I try to swim away. I just kind of wave my arms and my body moves, but I know if I stop, the jellyfish will catch me.” He leans his head back on the couch and turns to face Andrew. “Matt looked it up and said I’m trying to ‘adapt to uncertain situations’ or ‘navigate challenges.’”
“Backliner, coffee connoisseur, dream interpreter. Matt’s a man of many talents.”
Neil grins. “Weird thing is, after he told me what it could mean, the jellyfish turned into a colony of bats.”
“Chasing you underwater?”
“Mm.”
“And what did Matt say about that?”
“Who cares?” Neil says, and despite his words, his voice is slumber-soft. “Today it’s bats, tomorrow it’s a litter of kittens. It’s just a dream. It’s not real.”
“Will you say the same when the thing chasing you underwater is your father?”
It is cold, but Neil expects it. He cannot play therapist without taking his own advice. Andrew won’t deal with that hypocrisy. They both know Neil is not untouched by nightmares, that he dreams about Baltimore too, just from another perspective.
“Maybe,” Neil says. “But if I forget, you can remind me.”
By now, Neil’s eyelids have slid shut again. He’s not sleeping, Andrew knows, but instead content. Somehow appeased by Andrew’s presence. Long minutes pass in silence. Not once does Andrew take his eyes off Neil’s face.
Andrew breaks the quiet first. “I’m not going back to bed tonight.”
Neil cracks his eyes open, considers Andrew carefully, then gets up. His feet make no noise on the dorm room’s carpeted floors. He is only gone for a moment, though, returning with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and a pillow in his hands.
“Do you mind?”
Andrew leans further back into the couch, settling in, and gestures at the couch in a motion meaning ‘go ahead.’ Neil tosses his pillow down on the opposite end and lays down with his blanket wrapped around him. He keeps his body slightly bent, feet inches from Andrew’s thighs but deliberately not touching him. Andrew taps his ankle, and Neil makes an affirming sound in response. He lets himself stretch out fully, feet in Andrew’s lap, and in seconds he’s relaxed, on the verge of dozing.
Beneath the blanket, Neil’s bare feet are cold. Andrew reaches for one, rubs the knuckle of his thumb into Neil’s sole, and is rewarded with a soft sound of content.
“Yeah?” Andrew asks, quiet, the word shifting like water in the dim space.
“Hn,” is Neil’s only reply, sleep-heavy, but Andrew knows by now how to read Neil’s yeses and nos.
This, Andrew can do. Not a begrudging shuffle back to bed, body velcroed to Neil’s back. An arm slung over his waist and his nose buried in Neil’s neck. Tempting as those things are, Andrew has limits he listens to, for both his sake and Neil’s. Instead, this—both his hands curled around Neil’s knotted foot, always sore from athleticism, never properly stretched. Andrew kneads the skin carefully, the way he knows will help best, then switches feet. The steady, rhythmic movement of his hands, which has long since pulled Neil beneath sleep’s grasp, lulls Andrew until he can’t do anymore, palms resting on Neil’s now-warm ankles.
Compared to the dark of their secluded room, the living area, even with its lights off, holds much more miscellaneous light. Here, it is easier to see Neil in all his glory, dreamland kissing his brow and tucking him in. His body rises and falls. Rises and falls. A repetitive motion that never stops.
This, more than anything else, is why Andrew cannot return to the bedroom. The bedroom holds no salvation for Andrew, who needs this exact lucid picture spread out for him during these irrational morning hours. He bats away sleep in exchange for peace-of-mind and watches Neil’s breathing body until honey pours over the horizon, and dawn begins.