Chapter Text
Texas goes poorly. They last a month holed up in a rental apartment with walls so thin that Neil can hear every detail of the lives of the people who live next to them, above them, and below them. Plus, it’s infested with rats. His mom catches one on their last day there.
“Look away.” His mom says, and Neil does, even if it’s nothing he hasn’t seen before. “I'll ask you again: who tipped you off?”
A groan, then a brisk smack. His mom isn’t like his dad; she’s not interested in gloating in screams of pain or pleas for mercy. She has limited time.
“Tell me now, or I pull another nail. Five, four, three, too slow.” A scream. Neil presses his hands to his ears. It doesn’t help much.
Turns out it was the car, his father's people were tracking their car, and the reason the guy held out so long was he’d already called for backup.
Mary finds another ride, and Neil is running to it with their duffel when someone shoves him. He hits the ground hard, rolls with the impact, gets back up, and makes it to the car, only to stumble again. His shoulder burns. Mary has to drag him into the vehicle. When her hands come away bright red, he realizes he’s been shot.
There's nothing to do but wait until his mom can drive far enough away to deal with it.
“Chris. Chris, come on, answer me. Nathaniel.” That isn’t his name now, he knows it’s one of her tricks. The first few weeks, she’d say it sometimes, just to make sure he wouldn’t react to it. Neil keeps his eyes scrunched tight. “Abram. Wake up. You’re not dying.”
One of Mary’s hands presses into his chest, keeping him still while her other hand stitches him up, and his shoulder is fire, fire, fire.
Then Neil’s in a motel room, bandaged up and swaddled in the bulletproof vest he didn’t have time to put on when it mattered. He doesn’t know how long it’s been. He might've lost a day. He might've lost a week. His mom tells him Chris is dead and gives him Alex.
She flicks a pointed look at the motel bathroom. Neil ignores her. He sits on the bed, pulls his knees to his chest, and wraps his arms around his knees to make himself a smaller target.
Alex will be better than Chris, quieter, more prepared. It’s like when Neil did conditioning with the other little league kids, and it hurt, of course, but now he can run farther and faster, even faster than his mom.
Alex has dirty blonde hair and green contacts. Mary has been using semi-permanent conditioner-based dyes, so Neil can keep his roots intact without his hair falling out. The overall effect is a little weird, a little too brassy. Neil feels like a bad photocopy of a surfer boy, but he doesn’t look in the mirror enough for it to matter.
The next few weeks are motel, road, offroading, motel, sleeping in the car, changing cars until their pursuers lose track of them.
Their car breaks down once. Mary fixes it. Neil stumbles over his words when he tries to read to her from the manual, the technical language harder to sound out. He hasn’t had much practice since they ran. Mary’s jaw goes tight, and she tells him to read to himself until it makes sense.
They settle in San Francisco, stock up on food outside the city limits, and sleep in the car until Mary finds a place that lets them pay the rent in cash.
The apartment is better than the one in Texas. It’s on the top floor, and small, with a bedroom, a bathroom, and a pathetic excuse for a kitchen/living room that may have begun life as a large closet.
Neil sits on his knees by the bedroom window. He ducks his head under the curtain, which his mom says he must always keep closed, and angles himself so he can see out the bottom sliver of the window, but he’s not (hopefully) visible to anyone looking up from the street. He needn’t have bothered. From this angle, all he can see is the roofscape of San Francisco receding into the distance, a patchwork of gray, black, and red brick, and a small rectangle of orange sunset sky.
Without opening the window and looking down, Neil can’t see the alley. It’s less ideal for snipers, he supposes, but his father’s people are more likely to just go in through the front entrance anyway. Neil had wanted to watch the garbage trucks. There might have even been a stray cat.
Neil sighs. He blows on the glass until it fogs up, draws stars, frowny faces, and his new name. Alex. He watches until it fades away again. It’s replaced by the roofscape and a figure, perched on top of the building across the alley.
Neil ducks down so fast he bangs the side of his head on the windowsill. He taps at his chest, feeling for the comforting weight of his Kevlar vest.
“Mom,” he says. It comes out in a wheeze. He hadn't meant it to. Again, louder, “Mom.”
Mary crosses the room in three quick strides, hand already drifting to her waistband as she scans his face.
“What?”
“Someone–there's someone on the roof,” Neil says.
“Stay down.” Mary snaps. She spins to put her back to the wall and inches over to the window. She draws her pistol, though it won’t do much good at this angle, before peering through the sideways gap between the curtain and the glass. Her face goes tight.
“Alex,” Mary blows out a long breath, the way she did at first when Neil asked questions, before she started getting angry instead. “That's a kid.”
Neil stares at her blankly.
“Good eye,” Mary says finally. “But he’s unarmed and definitely unaffiliated. Go shower.”
She waves a hand vaguely at him and goes to bed, tucking her gun under the pillow.
He’s not about to remove his vest after that. A damp washcloth is close enough to what Mary is asking. When he’s done, the last traces of light are vanishing from the sky. Neil’s tired, the dull kind of tired that comes from sitting still all day, but he doesn’t think he can sleep until he checks again, just to be sure.
His mom was right. It’s a boy, around his age, slouched by the edge of the roof. He’s perfectly still, but for his feet, which dangle over the alleyway and swing lazily. He’s still sitting there when Neil goes to bed.
In the daylight, Neil can see him better. His clothes are almost as gray as the roof below him: blue-gray tattered jeans and a black-gray shirt with a logo too faded for Neil to read from this distance. Blonde hair, buzzed short, catches the light when he turns.
And his eyes–his eyes–they’re staring but unseeing. They’re so dull that for a second, Neil is sure he’s looking at a corpse. But the boy moved, but he’s looking at Neil, and Neil freezes, not quite shocked (he’s seen dead bodies before, mutilated bodies), not quite scared (not yet, at least, not if there's no connection to his father here, and his mom said there wasn’t), but a chilling flavor of curious Mary hasn’t yet trained out of him.
Neil looks away first.
After that, he watches for the boy every day.
The first few weeks of a new name are the hardest. Mary conducts a thorough check of the building and ensures that Neil has memorized all possible entry and exit routes. They wait to see if anyone will catch up to them, if they’ll have to leave again.
Usually, the worst part of it is staying inside. When they’re traveling, his mom will let him run around sometimes, in fields where she can see him, or even once in a forest to see how far he can get before she catches him (not far). After they’ve settled into a place, they typically go out a few times a week to keep up appearances. In Atlanta, he even went to school.
But now Mary is tense, and after Texas, Neil is in no mood to be out in the open. His shoulder still aches, the skin red and ugly under the bandages, even though the wound has knit itself back together by now. Neil wonders if it’ll always look like that. He wonders if it’ll always hurt.
This time it’s not so bad, always being in the apartment. Neil paces until his mom tells him to quit; it’ll bother the downstairs neighbors. He sits under the window and goes through his math workbook, trying not to be too quick, so he won’t run out of problems.
He looks up, every few minutes, to see if the boy will come back.
He’s there most evenings, some afternoons. One morning, Neil spots him hunched up, back to the edge of the roof, so small and still that Neil almost skims over him as some strange outcropping of the architecture.
Almost.
Because the boy hasn’t looked at Neil all week—is purposely ignoring him, in fact, because Neil knows he knows Neil’s there—but today he turns nearly as soon as Neil’s eyes land on him. He glares.
The look is so fierce that Neil can’t imagine how he ever saw the boy as anything less than alive.
Some stupid, self-destructive instinct takes over Neil, and before he can question it, he mists up the glass.
Hello, he writes, then again, the letters mirrored and larger this time, more readable, iH.
Neil considers adding a smiley face, but that feels dumb, so he tries to add a hand waving instead. He messes it up; it looks more like a paw print. He hears his mom approaching and jumps, looks behind him. Any minute now, her hand will clamp onto his shoulder through the curtain, and then she’ll draw the fabric back and see what he’s been doing. She’ll be furious. Neil wipes the message away as quickly as he can.
When he ducks out from behind the curtain, he sees his mom is only rustling around to make breakfast—microwaved scrambled eggs, better than their usual fare—and feels stupid all over again, firstly for doing it and secondly for fearing he’d be caught.
The next time he sees him, the boy gestures at him sharply, a come-hither motion–except Neil must be misinterpreting that, because if he’s not, he needs to stay away from the window, needs to be more careful about drawing attention. Neil glances behind him. His mom is in the other room. He pulls the curtains tighter around himself anyway.
Safely cocooned, he shakes his head, traces t’nac on the glass. The next gesture is less ambiguous. The boy gives him the finger. Neil shrugs, and then his mom calls for him. He has to go.
When he gets the chance to go to the window again, the boy is gone.
Neil’s mom is gone too, a few days later. Not for long, she says. Just for the night and some of tomorrow, to get some paperwork they’ll need.
Neil asks if it’ll be dangerous, and she tugs at his hair, hard. Of course it’s dangerous, since she’s not bringing him. She leaves Neil the duffel and makes him recite the rendezvous point he’s to go to if she doesn’t come back, and the number he’s to call if she doesn’t meet him there.
After she leaves, Neil checks the locks again and again. He’s making sure the gun is loaded when he’s startled by a loud tap on the window.
Neil yanks back the curtains to see the face of the boy across the way. The boy's eyes widen when he sees the gun, and he disappears entirely from view.
He fell, Neil thinks, new terror flaring, He’s dead. I killed him. We’re going to have to run again.
Neil scrambles for the window latch, yanks it open with a shaking hand. He’s not ready to look down and see the body curled small against the pavement. He glances down anyway, sees no one, nothing but the bricks of the apartment building receding down to the alley.
“Don’t shoot, Rapunzel.”
He’s alive, and then, He saw the gun. That means police, and police means running again, but his mom isn’t here this time, but–
“That’s not my name,” Neil says, “Are you–where–”
He looks up too late, sees a flash of blonde as the boy retreats to the cover of the building’s roof.
“You are the one stalking me, you know.” The boy’s voice is flat, angry, but not particularly afraid, and Neil is offended enough at the accusation that he lets it bypass his confusion and fear.
“I’m not stalking, I don’t even leave–”
“Staring.” The boy says, “You were staring. And messaging. Could you not shoot me from over here, when I’m sleeping? Did you want to try out a moving target?”
“I wasn’t gonna shoot you,” Neil argues, because if they’re talking and not shooting or stabbing, they’re alive. “You came looking in my window, you could’ve been anyone.”
“So you’d shoot anyone?”
“Well, I wouldn’t shoot you,” Neil says, feeling like that would be his main concern if he were in the boy's situation, rather than dumb word games. “Here, listen.” His fingers have gone numb around the gun, and he takes a moment to pry them off, trying to calm his breathing. Neil sends the gun skittering away across the floor, still close enough for him to dive and grab it if he needs to. He twitches a little at the thought of what his mom would do if she could see him. “I put the gun down.”
The boy doesn’t answer. But the thud of the gun hitting the ground must reassure him, because a pair of skinny legs lower into the window frame a moment later, finding purchase on the sill. Then those too disappear, and are replaced by the boy's torso. His arms neatly fold over the sill as though he’s no further off the ground than he’d be to slump over a kitchen counter.
The boy’s fingers are in Neil’s house. If Neil slammed down the window, they’d be trapped, maybe even break, if he did it hard enough. The thought doesn’t reassure him.
“Do you really sleep up there?” Neil asks.
He hasn’t seen the boy sleeping. He’s gone most days when Neil wakes up. But that means nothing; it’s usually too dark to make out the contours of the building across the way when Neil goes to bed.
“Do you really never go outside?” The boy asks, rudely.
Close up, Neil can see the boy’s teeth are kind of crooked. His eyes are big in his face, dark and spiteful, but his mom was right, the boy doesn’t look like the type to be secretly working for Neil’s father. He looks like he could use a hot meal and a bath, Neil thinks, not that he’s one to talk. He still won’t take off the Kevlar vest long enough for one.
Still, his mom has drilled into him that everyone is dangerous, even if they don’t mean to be. All it takes is one good citizen's phone call, and they’ll show up on the wrong radar.
“I asked you first,” Neil says.
Stalemate, he thinks. The boy stares at him. After a minute of silence (Neil counts the seconds in his head), he worries the boy is just going to leave. That would be good, Neil should want that, but then again, if the boy leaves, there’s someone out there who knows they’re armed. Better to keep the danger where he can see it.
“I go out when you’re not there,” Neil lies, but it sounds weak even to him. The boy has shown up at all times of day; Neil is always at the window within minutes. Neil knows enough about probability to know what that suggests.
“That woman went out today,” the boy says, “First time since you moved in.”
“Yeah,” Neil says, unsure of the connection. Is it some kind of threat? Who threatens people when they’re clinging to the side of an apartment building? Well, his mom did, once, but she’d had a gun. “So?”
“My name is Andrew.”
“...Alex,” Neil says, and instantly knows he’s mucked it up. Whenever they get new identities, Mary will periodically demand his name, birthday, or hometown. This hesitation, then the answer tripping its way off his tongue, would earn him a slap.
Neil changes the subject before Andrew can do anything about it.
“How’d you get over here?”
“Climbed,” Andrew says, like he’s stupid.
“Right,” Neil says, annoyed and a little impressed, “But how? There’s no fire escape.”
After Atlanta, his mom always checks for one, even if it’s just a walkway that goes to the other apartments on the floor, not a ladder leading down to the street.
Andrew shrugs.
Neil imagines his father’s men separating him from his mom, cornering him in some dead-end street. He pictures himself disappearing over the wall, there and then gone like a spider on a thread of silk.
“Will you show me?” Neil asks.
“Why should I?” Andrew says.
Somehow, Neil doesn’t think Andrew would be interested in the Kevin Day collectors’ edition trading card tucked away in his duffel, hidden between the inner and outer lining so his mom won’t find it and throw it out.
“I have protein bars,” Neil offers.
Andrew’s eyes narrow, but Neil is right–he looks a little hungry. Neil amends that to a lot hungry when Andrew looks away like he’s been caught out. He looks a lot hungry, pretending to be a little hungry.
“What kind?” Andrew asks.
Neil moves away from the window and returns with a fistful of Clif Bars. “These.”
“Chocolate chip?”
“Uh–” Neil checks to be sure. He doesn’t think Andrew will take well to being deceived, which doesn’t bode well for their future interactions. Pretty much everything Neil says to anyone who isn’t his mom is a lie. “Yeah, some.”
“Fine. Just follow what I do, it’s not hard.” Andrew says, and makes as if to start climbing again.
“I can’t follow you outside. I’m not allowed,” Neil says, remembering himself. Andrew gives him a long stare, and he explains, “My mom is away for a bit, but she wouldn’t want me to.” But she’d said Andrew wasn't affiliated. She’d only looked at him a second, and she’d known, and Mary isn’t one to be reckless. “She says the city’s dangerous.” He’s more trying to convince himself than Andrew now.
“If you quit wavering and come on, I will make sure you get back fine,” Andrew says, “Deal?”
Like a bodyguard, Neil thinks. His father has one of those. But Neil has some doubts about whether this kid can protect him from what might be coming after him.
“That's not an easy job,” Neil warns him.
“Look, are you from the suburbs or some shit?” Andrew doesn't bother to wait for an answer. “Stay here if you want but I’m going.” With that, he climbs back past the window and up towards the roof.
“Fine,” Neil says hurriedly, “Wait up.”
Neil clambers out the window and stands on the windowsill. He clings to the top of the frame. He’s careful not to look down.
Some of the bricks protrude further than others, creating rudimentary handholds and footholds. Andrew directs him to ignore them for now and just climb to the top of the window frame. From there, the distance to the roof is relatively short, and he can pull himself the rest of the way up.
The air is crisp and warm, but not too humid. Neil tilts his head up to stare at the sky. It’s a muted gray blue, calm enough that it doesn’t strain his eyes. It feels like it’s wrapping around him and only him. Like he’s the only person in the world. Well, he and Andrew, who has already torn off the wrappers of three of the protein bars. Andrew stacks them on top of each other, presses them into a pancake-like shape, then rips the disk into shreds and devours it before the chocolate can start to melt.
Neil watches, fascinated, until Andrew looks up, scowling at Neil like he expects a scolding for his table manners. Neil takes a quick step back.
“If you try to push me off I’m dragging you down with me,” Neil says. “Just saying.”
It strikes him that maybe he shouldn’t be on a roof with someone he feels the need to say that to, but a corner of Andrew’s mouth twitches, the closest thing to a smile Neil has seen from him yet.
“Don’t break our deal, and I won’t have to,” Andrew says.
“What do I owe you for watching my back, by the way?”
“These are all the Clif Bars you have?” Andrew asks. Neil nods (a lie, but if he spares more, his mom will notice). “Then I will tell you when I think of something.”
Neil paces around, stretching his legs, until he remembers what his mom said about the downstairs neighbors and stops. The last thing he needs is someone coming up to investigate the noise. He takes note of the hatch adorned with the signage “Roof Access: Maintenance Only.”
Andrew eats the rest of the protein bars.
Neil lies on his back and stares at the sky. He tells Andrew he thinks the sign is pretty dumb, actually, because they’re either maintenance or not maintenance, and anyone already on the roof who’s not maintenance isn’t going to change their minds because of a sign. It’s locked, too, but not a particularly secure lock; if Neil had the right kit, he could get it open in under a minute.
Being with Mary all the time, who is so close to him that they’re basically the same person (except his mom would never do what he’s doing now, and he yanks that thought out of his head before it can take root), Neil got pretty used to thinking to himself. He does so out loud now. It’s the most words he’s said at once since he and Mary ran away.
He glances over to see Andrew studying him, his eyes catching on the front of Neil’s shirt, how the fabric lies over the Kevlar vest.
“You are not from here,” Andrew says finally. He says here with weight, like it encompasses the whole world, like Neil might say he’s from Neverland or Hell, just as easily as he says,
“Yeah, we moved from Texas.” Neil is trying to avoid outright lying.
Andrew scrunches up his nose. “You don’t sound like you’re from Texas.”
“Have you been?” Neil asks.
“I’ve never left Cali,” Andrew says, like Neil’s dumb. “I’ve seen movies, though.”
Neil slips into the accent he’d been working with his mom to develop, pushes the twang a little farther than she’d accept. “I wanted to make a good impression on y'all, but I can go back to it, unless,” he switches again, mimics some of what he’d heard in the drive up north, “you’d rather I like? Go hella LA?”
“Fuck off,” Andrew says, “No one sounds like that.”
“I do,” Neil says.
“You’re a liar,” Andrew says, a little wonderingly, as he scans Neil’s face. Neil edges away from him, in case he gets angry, or demands an answer to a question that will send Neil tumbling from his tower of half-truths as surely as if Andrew just shoves him off the roof. “And weird. Really weird. Do you like slurpees?”
“I dunno,” Neil says. He’s pretty sure he’s supposed to know what that is, and he’s not about to blow his cover by admitting he doesn’t.
“I like slurpees.”
“Okay,” Neil says. Without any more preamble, Andrew demonstrates how to shimmy down the drainpipe into the alley. He even goes along with Neil’s aversion to the more public sidewalks. Andrew clearly knows the city well, knows how to avoid its crowded areas and prying eyes.
Andrew tells him to go into the 7-11 and ask for the time, or directions, or something similarly boring; Neil can figure it out. Against his better judgment, Neil does. He's rewarded when he exits the store to see that Andrew must have slipped in and out without him noticing, because Andrew’s brandishing two enormous cups in his hands. Each one is about as big as his head.
“I have my own money,” Neil says. He could pilfer a few dollars, anyway. His mom usually has him manage their funds as practice, she says. Neil suspects it’s just something to keep him busy and silent.
“I don’t,” Andrew says. “Take it or leave it.” He shoves one into Neil’s hands and starts walking.
Neil tries to calculate the odds that the teenager running the 7-11 will call the police, that the police will catch up to them, and that one of his dad’s moles will recognize him. He decides it’s relatively unlikely and jogs to catch up to Andrew. Once he’s running, even a little, he realizes how much he missed it, and the feeling takes him all the way to the end of the block, then back to Andrew, then down the block and back again. Only a little of his Slurpee spills.
Andrew levels him with the flat stare Neil is learning to read as his what the hell are you doing look.
“I get jumpy,” Neil shrugs, “Not much room to run around inside.”
They walk until they reach Neil’s apartment building. Andrew has Neil hold both Slurpees and climbs partway up a tree by the entrance. Neil passes both cups back and climbs up to join him, and they relay the drinks back and forth between them until they’re comfortably perched up high in the branches. The fresh smell of the leaves and the feel of them fluttering against his arms and legs at the slightest breeze make Neil feel miles from the ground.
“School’s starting soon,” Andrew says. He tends to go silent and pick up the thread of the conversation later, or start a new one if he finds the old topic boring. Neil isn’t sure which of the two he’s doing right now.
“Yeah?”
“It’s someplace to be,” Andrew says. It’s difficult to tell from his face, but Neil guesses Andrew is looking forward to it. “We might end up at the same one. Depends on the lottery.”
Neil doesn’t know how to say that he might be gone by then, so he just says, “Sometimes I’m homeschooled.”
It’s not true, not really. Since they ran, his mom usually tries to get him enrolled somewhere, once she realized how bad Neil’s spelling is getting.
“Shit,” Andrew has a venom in his tone that startles Neil. “I would run away.”
“Don’t you?” Neil asks.
“Run away,” Andrew's voice is so flat that for a second, Neil thinks Andrew is describing him as one. “Nah, I always go back eventually.”
Neil sips at his Slurpee, nods. He offers the rest to Andrew, who’s already finished his and chucked his empty cup down to the sidewalk. Andrew waves him off and keeps talking.
“I tried last year, only lasted nine days. Found out pretty quick there was nowhere I could go. All it got me was a new placement. With a cop.” Andrew adds, “Foster brat,” though Neil wasn’t planning on asking. He’s mostly relieved Andrew isn’t likely to report him to some responsible adult, if he hates whoever is in charge of him enough to run away.
“Yeah, unless you can pay someone to pose as your guardian, it’s pretty hard to get away.” Neil agrees. His mom has gone over this, and the contingency plans, dozens of times, “Especially if someone is looking for you.”
A pause.
“I know what I want,” Andrew says, “In exchange for taking you out on the town.”
When Neil hums assent, Andrew adds,
“The gun. I want you to show me how to use the gun.”
“Deal,” Neil says.