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“Should’ve known this was one of yours.”
“These are always products of a shared imagination. You can’t blame it all on me.”
“Flying pigs? I’d never.”
“If that’s the part you have an issue with,” hands spread behind him, the cement unnaturally and too pleasantly warm under his palms, “I’ll take responsibility there.”
They sat atop a boring, plain grey building in the middle of a boring, plain world, the edges soft and the sound not spoken so much as known, and it was business as usual. It wasn’t every night they fell asleep to each other, but the night was fated to go one way, they always - eventually - met. The dreamscape varied, of course, sometimes influenced by television shows Andrew had watched or towns that Nathaniel had seen.
The shared dreams started when they turned twelve. A book Nathaniel’s mother found for him (because there was nothing Nathaniel didn’t tell his mom, one of many points Andrew didn’t appreciate about him), titled How To Know You’re Not Alone, informed them that this was the natural first stage of a bonded pair. It had been much more normal in the past, but it wasn’t unheard of.
In Andrew’s opinion, it meant and was worth nothing. His life in California did not end or change. Nathaniel, meanwhile, continued to be somewhere in Europe.
He refused to tell. More likely, his mother told him not to. Andrew had the gut feeling that Nathaniel wasn’t supposed to be interacting with him even in their shared dreamscape, but his mother couldn’t expect him to control his unconscious actions.
(Andrew expected himself to, to a point, but then, that was a fight that took too much energy to keep up.)
Tonight, it was grey buildings in a grey world and, as they watched from a rooftop Andrew didn’t fear falling from, grey pigs with white wings. They had little white hooves and little white tusks, and they blended in so well with the clouds it should’ve been easy to miss them.
“But not the rest?” Nathaniel prompted.
“Careful.” Andrew, now sixteen and entirely too old for Nathaniel’s gift at getting under his skin, “you almost sound pleased. You wouldn’t want me to think you’re happy, would you?”
That did the trick. Sounding unhappy, Nathaniel replied with, “I can sound pleased.”
Flying pigs or not, tonight wasn’t a good night. Andrew could feel it in the air as the grey blurred more, the roof’s edge the only clearly defined feature left. He’d known it by Aaron’s hostile silence and three months of their biological mother still breathing.
Dreamscapes listened. They’d learned how to work the space by working together, but the nights were they both felt conscious enough for that were far and few in between.
Because it wasn’t a good night and because he needed to know in the way he’d needed to know whether or not Tilda was the cause of Aaron’s bruising, Andrew asked, “How’s your mother?”
Predictably: “Fine. How’s yours?”
“I wouldn’t call Tilda my mother.”
“Not her. The other one. Cass? Yeah. Cass.” A beat. Nathaniel was blue eyes and a wild shock of hair, smudged at the elbows by grey. He looked etheral. To him, Andrew probably looked the same. “I was thinking. And I don’t think family has to be related by blood.”
Tonight was not the night for this.
(Cass hadn’t visited once after the first year in juvie. She’d called. Twice.)
“Drop it.”
Nathaniel, because he could smell it too, probably, and because he always did what Andrew said, dropped it.
The edges softened, and darkened, and dragged inky fingers across the grey. The pigs were gone. The building was gone. Black, swift and solid and thriving, blanketed everything but the sliver of ledge they perched on.
If the pigs and grey world had been his, this enclosed world was Nathaniel’s. Andrew felt certain that if they tried to move, they wouldn’t be able to.
Nathaniel, as the dreamer, dealt with it worse than Andrew.
(This was not a good night. Their dreams interwove but remained largely separate; they were older than the book had recommended them to wait to meet, the olden tales of separated soulmates going mad abruptly much more personal.)
“Do you ever think we’ll meet?” Nathaniel mused, one moment a foot away and the next pressed side-to-side with Andrew.
In the dark, a hound bayed and men called. The sound rattled the cage, and made Nathaniel’s eyes squeeze shut. He’d had this one before, then. A hunt was afoot, one they couldn’t see but had to belong to.
“If you’d tell me where you were,” Andrew replied, steady as a stone by necessity, working to conjure a flying pig or maybe give them the wings, “we already could.”
Neil was quiet.
Without speaking and without particularly wanting to, the unconscious taking from the conscious, words passed between them: I know. You can’t.
They were spoken without sound, and carried through the dark.
To follow was: but meeting, that’s what soulmates do.
A scent caught, the barking grew closer, louder.
Consciously, Andrew decided and, with the experience of someone who had been promised much and received little, told Nathaniel:
Maybe this is all our time together. Get greedy, look for more, and this is what happens.“
That predictably lit a spark in Nathaniel’s eyes. From when they’d first met to now, never once had there been a night he grown too tired to fight.
Nathaniel proved the invisible cage wrong when Andrew took his extended hand and they ran.
(If the dogs eventually got them - and they did - and if they woke up sweat-drenched and terrified on opposite sides of the world, well. It wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been.)
(After all, they could have been alone.)
“This is the fifth time in two weeks. It’s getting old.”
“Fuck off, Andrew.”
“You’re not bored?”
“Fuck off.”
“I’m bored. Change it.”
Flames crackled. Sparks spat. Fire burned, burned, burned, an inferno in stripped-down metal. Beyond the wreckage was a burning sea, the water set alight from a cold and distant sunset.
Hands coated in gasoline, a trail stretching slow and languid from his fingers to the car, it would be mere moments before the fire made real on its threat to consume Neil. All he had to do, he knew, was turn away. Step back. Shake off the gasoline. Look away. Leave. Or, best of all: do as Andrew said, and will the scene away.
(How much could he leave behind? Was it a matter of pick and choosing? Would he lose her, too?)
The air shivered, stretched, drew taut as a band – and, ever elastic, snapped back into place. It made Nathaniel stumble without ever moving, and Andrew, immobile and solid, scowl harder. They’d long become adept at influencing their shared dreamspace and making sure it remained shared. But without the passion to see the scene gone and if a nightmare wished to persist, it would.
Burning curiousity sabotagued Andrew’s efforts right out the gate. The irony wasn’t lost on him.
“Who is that?” He asked, for the third time. Twice was a lot for him, even here – three was close to unthinkable.
He stepped around the blaze, the heat unnaturally strong even from three full arm’s lengths away. He almost didn’t hear the reply - he hadn’t expected one.
The reply was an answer, and it was: “My mom. I did this.”
All at once, what had been hot was cold; what had been up was down; what had burned, burned brighter, the charred remains in the seat blacker than death and Nathaniel’s hands, at last, catching fire.
The dream cracked and spat Andrew out to a sweat-drenched bed in Columbia, his heart racing and ears ringing.
He took a few gulps of air, caught the time (too early for the birds), and stumbled to the bedroom for sleeping pills. He needed to catch the dream. He needed to –
(It wasn’t his thoughts in his head, but he didn’t put effort into fighting it.)
He needed to meet Nathaniel.
The bottle was far beyond half-empty. Nicky, though he tried to hide it (he couldn’t hide for shit), counted the amount every other day. He didn’t know about Nathaniel; he only knew his cousin kept a strict bed time and would go to lengths to ensure he followed it.
There was a chance the blast hadn’t woken Nathaniel. That he was trapped in a night terror, burning for an age and a half; they weren’t dead yet, he wouldn’t leave him trapped in hell just yet–
“What are you doing?”
He froze, fist curled and ready to strike any who touched him.
Aaron didn’t reach for him. He wavered at the doorway, blurry-eyed but awake.
Slowly, Andrew uncurled his hand to show the pill to his brother.
Nicky didn’t know about Nathaniel. Aaron had an inkling – after juvie had been the firs time Andrew had the chance to search for books and articles on the phenonem without needing to watch over his shoulder, and though he’d never looked into it around Aaron, there was the possibility of a mistake. Andrew was working on making less mistakes; at eighteen, it was about time. But still, it was possible.
Taking in the pill and whatever else he found in Andrew’s face, Aaron said, “I’m going to eat breakfast,” and, though it was too early for birds or breakfast, went to the kitchen.
The pill, its capsul warmed and growing stickier in his palm, would have him waking with nauseau if he took it without something in his stomach.
There was a chance Aaron knew and there was a chance that somewhere, Nathaniel continued to sleep.
There was a reality that Nathaniel’s mother was dead, and that Andrew wouldn’t be leaving Columbia for some time (until Aaron or Nicky found schools they wanted, if it went as he planned).
In the end, he went to the kitchen. The next night – wouldn’t be the same. He’d find Nathaniel, alone but alive, ruined but brave, and, finally, it wouldn’t simply be a chance that they would meet.
Nathaniel did not fit in Columbia.
He was too bright, too bold. Crowded and cityish, Columbia didn’t stand a chance. Whenever he walked into a room, the walls paled and the lights dimmed; watching a movie with him meant the screen lost all appeal; food, sleep, the very air in his lungs, all of it was worth nothing with Nathaniel in view.
This, for Andrew Minyard, was simple fact.
It remained so for a month after Nathaniel joined them, wandering about their house in what appeared to be a daze. He was silent, but in the way the world was after a nuclear strike: full of potential, thrumming with energy, an unavoidable disaster in the making.
Then Nathaniel - who had introduced himself to his cousin and brother as Neil Josten - took off for one of his many spontaneous runs, and Nicky, a touch nervous, asked Andrew what was wrong with him.
Andrew’s eyes snapped to him for clarification.
“I meant, what’s wrong with Neil?” Nicky tittered, hands up and palms out at the look directed his way. “You look at him like he’s a ticking time bomb.”
It was only then that it occurred to him that how he saw Nathaniel didn’t match up with how the others saw Nathaniel.
Proxitimy to one’s soulmate after years apart, apparenty, came with more than a few conditions.
(The books had told them as much, but they’d thought the dramas and movies greatly exagerrated it.)
(They had, in some ways. In others, they matched up not at all.)
For one: differentiating true exhaustion and the tired, stretched out feeling that arrived after too long apart. Nathaniel liked to leave, which was fine, because he always came back– but sometimes he left for two to three days, and by the end of the third, Andrew found it close to impossible to even crave a cigarette, let alone get out of bed.
It was awful. It took two weeks for him to figure out what it was attached to. It was why he’d taken Nathaniel by the collar and told him that, no, he wasn’t allowed to run off for full weekends any more.
(Tellingly, Nathaniel didn’t overtly protest. Coming back to the house, apparently, had been all he’d had the energy to do on the third day.)
For two: distraction.
From every twitch of the hand to rise of the chest to blink, Andrew’s attention narrowed in. Nathaniel didn’t fare much better, if how skittish he would become the moment he clued in to how long he’d been staring at Andrew meant anything.
For three: dreams.
Proxitimy clarified and sharpened. That was all.
For four: equilibrium.
It took two months.
Technically, it took six years and eight months.
It took fingers brushing while passing utensils. It took bumping shoulders when one of them arrived home. It took Andrew backing Roland into a wall and finding him, for once, entirely lacking. It took a few looks across a living room and a few more over a car roof and in the rearview mirror and Aaron and Nicky going out on the town without them, Andrew turning the offer down and Nathaniel never consenting if it wasn’t Andrew.
It took –
An unusual amount of recklessness on Andrew’s end, which was frustrating below the relief. An unusual amount of staying in one place for Nathaniel, which was terrifying below the gratitude.
Peace came with an Exy re-run playing on a forgotten screen. Reality returned, the colors Nathaniel had stolen from the world equalizing. He remained the center, because he was by fate’s design greedy with Andrew’s attention, but the rest – fell, bit by bit, into place, the latent power evening between them.
It felt like finding himself.
And all it took was fingers wrapping around a thin wrist, pushing up against a sleeve to smooth skin. Acknowledgement. Confusion smoothed by a quick question - no, I haven’t, and yes, I’d like to - and, deafened to all else, a kiss. Acceptance.
In retrospect, it was a little cheesy.
Neither cared.
For days, that was all it took. Skin on skin - platonic or not, a lead-in or not, it didn’t matter, of course it didn’t matter, the books said they were two parts of a whole and they’d fit no matter who they were - and the rest of the world, for a time, returned.
(It was a terrifying and awful thing to comprehend, but while he feared vulnerability and he feared containment, it wasn’t as if they hadn’t already seen anything their dreams had to share.)
Hands brushed here, legs thrown over legs there. A kiss or five. A, “I wouldn’t mind–” and, “– what, a blowjob?” and wide eyes and. And.
And, at night: edges crisp and sky vibrant, no grey, no black, no cage and no fire, sinew strung from expectation and skin bursting with desire, they found they needed for nothing. They were masters of their shared realm. No matter how far they parted, no matter what happened from here out, this was theirs.
They were teenagers. What they dreamed of was:
A bed, and there one was. Pillows, and there they were.
An idle desire for Nathaniel not to be dressed like a washed-out druggie, and, “Hey!”
Andrew had no complaints. “Leather suits you.”
“Give some warning,” he huffed, but if he really minded, it wouldn’t have happened. That was how this worked. They agreed, moved, lived, breathed, existed, together.
When Andrew made use of the bed, Nathaniel went with him. When Nathaniel toppled into him, mouth hungry and hands hot, Andrew went with him. They helped each other out of their clothes as if they couldn’t just will them away, enjoying each small reveal and each new inch of exposed skin. Andrew’s fingers traced Nathaniel’s scars; Nathaniel’s fingers tightened in his hair. Give and take, give and take.
Heat built. Knees dug into Andrew’s sides, Andrew curled forward into a knife-marred chest. One hand tangled itself in blond hair; the other curled with Andrew’s around the both of them.
In this dream world, irrevocably theirs, when Nathaniel hissed, “I want to–,” Andrew could immediately say, “Yes.”
It meant pausing and unwrapping their fingers, which sucked. It meant Nathaniel lifted himself up and sank down, breath kicked from their lungs, the expectation filling the spaces between them of how it should feel if it was good, because it was good, it was beyond good, it was wishful thinking given form.
Except.
The waking world wouldn’t take Nathaniel flexing around him away from him. The rest of the world wouldn’t mar the noises it drew from Andrew’s throat, a shuddering breath he hadn’t experienced before. When they moved, they moved together; beginning to end, they were together. That would remain true, awake or asleep.
Heat built, Nathaniel hissed, hips shifted back, Andrew’s hands helped him keep the angle, a whine and pleading murmurs, hand curled tight here and Andrew’s teeth lodged there, and. And.
(If they both woke up to damp boxer shorts, their housemates were none the wiser.)