Chapter Text
The hardest part about going back to Welton was knowing that he couldn’t leave.
Snow pressed against the windows in pale sheets, the kind of cold that pierced veins. Neil sat at the edge of Todd’s bed, tracing the ridges of his new forehead scar as if it would change what had already been done. The skin still stung when he furrowed his brows, a quiet reminder carved in flesh of everything broken, everything that kept on living.
Their room smelled faintly of old wood and radiator dust, the heater rattling like a dying moth against the wall. Somewhere between its hum and the crisp ticking of Todd’s clock, silence became a tongue of its own. Todd didn’t speak first. He rarely ever did, especially when Neil was like this. Instead, he folded his clothes with careful precision—shirts aligned, socks paired like a promise—and Neil watched him, watched the shape of someone shifted and new.
Todd had found a kind of strength Neil had never possessed. It showed without Todd ever meaning to, without him even realizing. It was so clear it almost hurt. Neil wanted nothing more than to witness it, to stay close enough not to miss a single moment.
Outside, the snow fell harder than before, thin weightless flakes drifting past the glass like transient spirits. Inside, Neil breathed in the stillness, trying and failing to pretend like nothing had changed when, in reality, his entire existence had intrinsically changed.
“…You’re really not going home over break?” Todd asked at last, breaking the long silence that had settled between them. He snapped his luggage shut, a sound too loud for the quiet room.
Neil fell back against Todd’s pillows, feeling the mattress strain underneath his weight, “No,” he said softly. “I don’t think they’d be able to handle it.”
Todd hesitated. “Oh. Because of-“
“Because of everything,” Neil interrupted, although his tone wasn’t sharp, but simply tired. His fingers danced upon the spot just above his brow, where his scar caught the light in a faint silver line. “Every time my father looks at me, it’s as if he’s looking through me. Like I’m still gone.”
Todd opened his mouth, then closed it again. His thoughts surged and fell like the tide; too large, too slight, too fragile to put into words.
“And my mother-“ Neil started, but stopped himself with a shaky breath. He stared at his hands, fingers twisted together. “She means well, but she cries when I so much as breathe wrong! She talks about the future as if it’s a miracle that I survived at all, and it’s-“ He broke off, shaking his head with a hollow laugh. “It would be a horrendous idea, is all I’m saying.”
Todd carefully sat next to Neil, looking down at him gently. The silence stretched again, tender but heavy. Then, quietly, “Stay here, Neil. You won’t be alone.”
Neil looked up at him the same way he always did—longing, heartfelt, and unquenchable. For the first time in weeks, something softened.
“Yeah,” he said, voice low, “I was counting on that.”
Neil had always despised silence. It left too much room for the thoughts he had tried so hard to outrun; memories of gunmetal, a flood of shame, the echo of a trigger that should have ended him. He could still feel the cold of the barrel kissing his forehead, a touch far more intimate than he had ever received from home.
But here, now, with only their slow, shared breathing and the soft patter of snow against the window, he found he didn’t quite hate it as much.
Todd moved with an unreal tenderness, easing closer until their bodies were side by side on the too-small bed. He curled onto his side slowly, as though approaching a startled deer, knees drawn in and shoulder brushing Neil’s. His breath brushed the nape of his neck in small, devout bursts and Neil could sense the way Todd’s eyes traced the lines of his face in the low lamplight.
For all their time together—how could four months feel like an eternity?—Todd remained a mystery Neil could never entirely crack open. He caught glimpses in fleeting moments, like on Todd’s birthday or after Neil was released from the hospital, but the core of him remained tucked away, guarded, unreachable. Neil wanted more than anything to understand him, to take Todd’s mind apart the way he did plays and characters to find the truth within.
But, Todd wasn’t a role to analyze. He was a person—quiet, complicated, and beautifully mystifying. And, lying here, with the winter world hushed around them, Neil found that the unattainability of grasping all that was Todd didn’t frustrate him. If anything, it made the moment feel sacred.
“I’m scared, Todd,” Neil’s voice cracked when he said his name, quiet like a confession.
Todd swallowed, “…Yeah. I know.” His voice was small, but steady enough to lean on.
Neil pulled at a loose thread on the cuffs of his sweater as he let his hands fall onto his lap. They wouldn’t stop shaking. They hadn’t quivered this much since that night, “What if I’m the only one holding over?”
”You won’t be,” Todd murmured, tone gentle as he turned his head toward the ceiling. He only ever spoke like this with Neil, but the weight of that thought made both of their chests feel tight. “Cameron stays every winter, doesn’t he?
”Cameron doesn’t count,” Neil whined, “I think he just shuts himself in his room to study the whole time. And he leaves on Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve. I’ll be alone on Christmas, Todd. Completely alone. What if I-“ He stopped, voice thinning, “What if I do something stupid?”
Todd’s breath hitched, “Don’t,” he said, wetting his lips, searching for the right words, “Don’t say it. You don’t have to say it out loud.”
Neil shut his eyes, shame flickering through every fiber of his being. “It’s too much. It’s always-“
”I know,” Todd said, with more tenderness than he had ever used before. He reached out, hesitant, then rested his hand near—not quite on—Neil’s. A silent offering. “You’re not doing anything. Because you won’t be alone.”
“Do you really have to go?” Neil’s voice was gentle, not quite a plea, but close enough that Todd felt it in his chest.
Todd let out a slow exhale, eyes fixed on the faint cracks in the plaster above them, “My parents, they-“ He stopped, swallowing hard. The familiar ache crept up in his throat, that vague dread he’d been avoiding for months. “Jeffrey’s back for the holidays,” he finally managed, “And he… he wants to see me.”
Neil turned his head toward him, concern knitting his brow.
“If it weren’t for him,” Todd continued quietly, “they wouldn’t want me back at all.” He said it without any bitterness at all. Rather, it was a tired, matter-of-fact truth, like reading a line from a book he didn’t like but had to know anyway.
Neil took Todd’s hand in his own, closing the distance. “That’s not true,” he whispered, though they both knew that Todd didn’t believe it, and probably never would.
He huffed a hushed, humourless laugh, “It is, Neil. Jeff’s the one they brag about at supper. I’m the quiet one they forget is even around,” he hesitated, then pulled his head toward the window, where snow fell thick and alone, “I know you’re worried about being alone here. I get that, trust me. But, Cameron will still be here. I heard Pitts might, too. They won’t let you wander the halls or disappear in the lake.”
Neil let out a tiny breath that could have been a laugh, “That’s not the kind of stupid thing I’m talking about.”
”I know, Neil,” Todd said for the millionth time, softly smiling and shifting so their foreheads nearly touched, “But you won’t be the only one. And even if you were… I swear you wouldn’t disappear. Not here.”
In the quiet that followed, the ticking clock and rattling heater felt just a little less lonely.
Pitts couldn’t believe it.
All that work. Months of plugging away to keep his grades hovering near the top, gleaming reviews from every teacher—McAllister had even scribbled “shows promising work” despite the regular, soft snores from the back row during Latin. He’d collected academic praise like stamps, avoiding demerits with careful focus. For what?
To be left behind.
He lay sprawled on his narrow dorm bed, his gangly limbs dangling over the edges like fallen branches. A low groan muffled itself in his pillow. The trip had been a polished daydream in his parents’ conversation since the spring. The spring. He’d listened all summer to the litany of tropical promises; cerulean water, white sand, endless sun. A brochure for the resort had lived on the fridge for months, replacing his youngest sister’s latest artistic endeavour with a glistening seascape.
Not once, in all that time, had they included “for us, of course, not for you” to their plans.
The dorm was quickly becoming a tomb, hollowed out by the absence of nearly all the other boys. The silence was heavy, broken only by the tired hum of the radiator and the occasional moan of the old building settling into the deep Vermont cold.
”I’m sure it won’t be that bad,” Meeks said. He was settled awkwardly on the edge of his desk chair, already packed and due to leave for the airport within the hour. The words, meant to be soothing, fell flat in the vast, empty room. They both knew it was a lie. Out of the two of them, Pitts was the one who was good at comfort, who remembered birthdays, who offered a steadying hand during exam panic, who just knew when to sit in quiet solidarity. Now, the roles were painfully reversed.
Steven Meeks had been his roommate for as long as Pitts could properly remember. Their partnership felt less like an assignment and more like a strange form of fate, a layer of bedrock. The first thing Pitts had ever truly noticed about him was that mess of copper-bright hair, a shock against the drab greys and browns of their ninth grade dorm. Then, the too-big glasses that slid perpetually down his nose, magnifying eyes that missed nothing. And finally, the crooked grin that appeared whenever a complex problem in their physics text yielded to his systematic mind.
That was his daily view: Meeks, surrounded by a constellation of radio parts, textbooks, and tangled wires, his brow furrowed in concentration before breaking into that triumphant, lopsided smile. Pitts hoped, with an unsaid, fervent certainty, that this would be his view for every day to come. Meeks was the precise schematic to Pitts’s messy, emotional blueprint, the steady, grounding hum of a tuning fork to Pitts’s more variable frequency. They were a matched set, two halves of a single, better-working whole.
Rarely were they ever seen apart. Their time was measured in collaborative rhythms. Late nights hunched over a hi-fi radio, the smell of solder and ambition hanging in the air. Silent, focused study sessions where a mere grunt or pointed sigh was full conversation. The easy, wordless trade of a textbook or a rusting screwdriver. Meeks’ world was one of logic and orderly circuits, but Pitts had learned that his friend’s heart operated on a parallel, just as reliable, wavelength.
He was the only one who could translate Pitts’ simmering frustrations into actionable data, and the only one Pitts trusted to see the disappointment that now lay on him like a lead blanket.
He turned his head, cheek flush against the rough cotton of the old pillowcase. “Not that bad?” His voice cracked, scraped raw from swallowed fury, “Meeks, they’re in Barbados. Barbados! And I’m here. In Vermont. It’s negative ten degrees out there. I don’t even get to go stay at my cousin's house like my sisters. And the heater in the hall is making that clanking sound again, which means it’ll cut out by midnight! ‘Not that bad’ is the worst understatement of all time. This… this is deliberate exile.”
Meeks adjusted his glasses, a nervous habit, and bit back a grin, “You’ve got Cameron. And Neil, apparently. Though, God knows how his father even allowed it. And Keating’s in charge! It won’t be like a regular term. It might be different.”
”Different,” Pitts echoed, the word dripping with sarcasm. He pushed himself up, running a hand through his hair. “Different means three of us rattling around this crypt with a teacher who’s probably just as trapped as we are. What’s Keating supposed to do with three left-behinds for two and a half weeks? Lead us in jaunts to the frozen lake? Have us read sonnets about summer fruit?”
The image was so bleak it was almost funny. A bitter laugh escaped him, “They booked a suite, Meeks. Two bedrooms, a balcony overlooking the Atlantic. My father joked about sending me a postcard of a palm tree over the phone. ‘To remind you of what hard work earns you,’ he said.” Pitts looked at his best friend, eyes wide with fresh betrayal, “What did my hard work get me? An extended prison sentence in this hellhole.”
Meeks didn’t have an answer, for once. Instead, he stood up, walked to the window, and scraped his fingernail across the frost on the inside of the pane. “It isn’t fair. You’re right,” he said finally, the euphemism vast enough to hold all of Pitts’ rage, “I’ll write you, okay? Every other day, though it’ll probably be exceedingly uneventful. And I’ll call from Nassau if I can. My uncle has a telephone.”
It was a lifeline, thin but sincere. Pitts nodded, the temper escaping from him, replaced by a dense, reluctant acceptance. “Thanks. Just… describe the sun, ‘kay? In excruciating detail. I want to know about every photon I’m missing out on.”
Meeks gave a toothy grin, the one he knew Pitts liked to see. “Deal.”
A distant, solitary bell tolled the hour, the sound lonely in the empty quad. A door to their right slammed—probably Knox, running late for his train to New York and his goodbye kiss from Chris. Mr. Keating was likely surveying his own unexpected kingdom of the stranded, wondering how things could have ever turned out this way. Pitts swung his legs over the side of the bed, his feet hitting the cold floor. The holiday stretched out before him: a boundless, blank expanse of frozen time.
It was not an adventure. It was not a reprieve. It was, simply, what he had been given.
And as the cavernous Vermont winter pressed against the window, he wondered, with a tremor of something that wasn’t quite curiosity, what a man like John Keating—a man who preached seizing the day from the jaws of society’s conformity—would make of days that nobody else wanted.
The silence in the room was a physical presence, and Cameron, ever the observer, catalogued its dimensions.
Charlie didn’t look at him. Not once. He moved around their shared space with a stiff, mechanical efficiency, yanking sweaters from their hangers and stuffing them into his leather suitcase as if they had personally offended him.
This unusual ritual of pre-departure tension was an annual event. Every December since the sixth grade, a storm cloud would settle over Charles Dalton in the days before he left for what he called “the inferno” of his home. The usual barrage of jabs and jokes would dwindle, the rebellious spark in his eyes guttering into something sullen. Cameron had learned to navigate it overtime, getting on Charlie’s good side and offering quiet, practical help—folding what Charlie had balled up, locating a lost box of Marlboro’s from under his bed—which was either tersely accepted or simply ignored.
But this year was not normal in every sense of the word. This year was a different calculus entirely.
Neil’s return to Welton after that night has caused a fundamental shift in the atmosphere. It wasn’t something triumphant; it was a seismic event that had left the landscape of their school permanently altered. The boy who came back was quieter, his famous smile that Cameron had known for years and years becoming a fragile, occasional thing. And Charlie, who had stood in the epicenter of that crisis, had been hollowed out by it. The typical dread of going home was now compounded by a grief he couldn’t express and a fear he wouldn’t name. The incident had shaken something loose within Charlie, and all the bravado in the world couldn’t glue him back together. The poets definitely couldn’t.
All Cameron could do was be a monument to the wreckage. He sat rigidly at his impeccably ordered desk, pretending to review a piece of Latin text, eyes tracking Charlie’s erratic movements in his periphery. He kept track of the white-knuckled grip on the suitcase handle, the way Charlie’s jaw tensed soundlessly, the profound avoidance of his gaze. Cameron’s mind, so adept at memorizing formulas and equations, scrabbled for the correct procedure. Quickly, he realized that there was none. He wanted to say something, offer a lifeline despite their ill-disposed relationship, but every phrase was could possibly think of—“It’ll be okay,” “He’s back, that’s what matters,”—sounded insultingly trifling in the face of the raw, hushed affliction rolling off his roommate.
So, he said nothing. He simply sat, a silent sentinel in the tense quiet, absorbing the chill of a goodwill that felt, in that moment, like it was being packed away with the sweaters and socks, leaving behind only the faint, aching echo of a brief period of cordiality.
Charlie’s voice cut through the quiet after a long pause, a low, rough sound. “Stop watching me.”
He didn’t turn as he said it, standing at the doors of his closet, back stiff and hands gripping the door handle.
Cameron froze, exposed. He had been watching more than behaviour as his mind wandered, eyes tracing the line of Charlie’s shoulders, the restless energy that seemed to vibrate beneath his skin even in stillness. He’d been studying the shadows under his eyes, darker, now evidence of the sleepless night Cameron had borne witness to through the thin barrier between their twin beds—the constant, frantic turning, the punched-out sighs, the occasional, muffled curse into the inert dormitory air.
“It’s creepy,” Charlie added, the word meant to wound. It landed, but not as intended. It sounded fragile, a deflection.
”I wasn’t-“ Cameron began, the innate need to defend himself dying on his lips. He had been watching. He set his pen down with deliberate care, tired of pretending that his Latin was anywhere close to being done. “Sorry.”
His response was meek, inadequate. It wasn’t just an apology for staring. It was an apology for the chasm that had reopened between them, a gulf that seemed to have swallowed all the tentative progress they had made since September. Everything had softened, just a little, in the wake of the Dead Poet’s Society. A shared, unspoken terror had forced a kind of truce. Their barbed comments had lost some of their venom, mutating into something almost playful, a familiar, even comforting, rhythm of minor irritations.
But Neil’s absence and subsequent return had changed the air itself. Now, the old defensive trenches were being re-dug, and the digs were no longer lighthearted.
”Sorry,” Cameron repeated, words hanging lamely in the air, growing cold. It was almost as if he was trying to convince himself more than Charlie that everything was alright. He cleared his throat, grasping for something more. He was never good with words, feeding into his insecurity around the poets. Neil had always said he was born with his foot in his mouth after all.
Charlie finally turned around, but his eyes didn’t meet Cameron’s. They raced everywhere except his roommate, trying and failing to find a new distraction. “Stop saying that,” he muttered, voice hardly louder than a whisper, drained of its initial poison, “You haven’t stopped saying that since Neil came back. I don’t want an apology, I just want you to stop it.”
”It’s just…” Cameron started, then faltered. ‘It’s just that I don’t know how to talk to you.’”Will you be, uh, fine? At home, I mean. I know it’s sort of-“
”What do you care, Cameron?” Charlie did look at him then, and the directness of his gaze caused a physical shock. Looking at them now, his eyes were red-rimmed, stark against his pale face. “Are you my damn therapist? You think you can help?”
”No, Charlie. That’s not...”
”Isn’t it?” Charlie took a step closer, the space between them crackling with a voltage untouched for months. “Ever since I met you, you just watch and judge. But you don’t do anything about it. You never do.”
The accusation hung in the air. His mind raced to a million different places, a desperate need to find a solution to this mess. What did he want him to do? To grab him? To shake him? To…? He stopped his thoughts before they got too far, before he couldn’t reign them back in.
”I’m giving you space.”
”For fucks sake, Cam, I don’t want space!” The outburst was sudden, raw. Charlie ran a hand through his tousled hair. “I don’t know what the hell I want anymore. After Neil, I have no damn idea! But this weird distance you’re giving me? It’s so much worse than when you would nag me about demerits.”
The words left them both breathless. Cameron searched Charlie’s face, trying to find something more than this anger and only finding terror beneath it.
”Then tell me,” Cameron said, the plea leaving his lips before he could stop it, “Just tell me what you want, like you always do.”
For a long moment, Charlie just looked at him, his defiant expression crumbling into something lost and young. He looked 10 years old all over again, and Cameron felt just as juvenile. The air was thick with years of words unsaid—shared rooms and secret smiles underneath cold words and a line they’d both been too afraid to cross.
”I can’t,” Charlie laughed, but it was dry and heartless, the fight drained from him. “Not with you. Not anymore,” he turned back to force his suitcase shut, grabbing it with shaky hands, “Just forget it, Cam. Happy holidays or whatever.”
But Cameron knew he wouldn’t. He’d remember the crack in Charlie’s voice, the charged silence, and the terrifying possibility that had flickered in the small space between them before vanishing again into the cold winter dark.
God, this Christmas would be hell.