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Language:
English
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Published:
2025-12-26
Completed:
2025-12-26
Words:
28,226
Chapters:
5/5
Comments:
13
Kudos:
76
Bookmarks:
23
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1,080

and miles to go before we dream

Summary:

The classroom a theatre, his classmates the audience, everyone—everyone!—an actor—and he feels an irrational urge, right then and there, to stand up and speak. Something clenches in his chest, and elation hooks a chandelier over the dim, cold classroom lamps, and Neil becomes aware of a yearning, brighter and brighter, that implores him, begs on its knees to speak—and dear God—he wants, and wants, and wants so much that it clenches his hands into fists and his mouth into a line and squeezes life out of him, there to be found yet—and to be an actor, even miles away from a stage, is a prospect as heartbreaking as it’s possible, because now the stage is right in front of him and it’s almost pathetic, is pathetic, how much he wants to feel the words (drip from his tongue, like honey).

—

In which Neil’s father doesn’t let him audition for Henley Hall, but A Midsummer Night’s Dream features heavily in Welton’s literature lessons—and when a performance opportunity rolls around (disguised as Welton’s annual Open House ceremony), it prompts Todd into directing that very same play.

And Neil, of course, wants to act.

(Or: In which Todd and Neil save each other.)

Notes:

first of all thank you so much to my wonderful beta @oh-golden-boy on tumblr who was EXTREMELY helpful throughout this wild ride (she came up with a certain pivotal moment in act 1, i’ll let y’all guess which scene it was) and fuelled my incoherent ramblings about this AU.

and thank you so much to all of you who clicked into this story! please allow yourself to linger over these words for as long as you’d like (perhaps to distract from the cryfest that is, unfortunately, canon).

Chapter 1: PROLOGUE

Chapter Text

PROLOGUE


He must have been 5 years old—or maybe even younger—when his mother took him to a play for the first time, for now nothing remains from that except the stage lights and the comforting darkness around and dashes of colour that blurred and twinkled together in ways he hadn’t ever known they could. 


He remembers cheering, mostly. And the actors, bowing. And even then, he’d imagined being someone else, for an hour and a half. Silly, really; he can’t even recall the name of the play now, much less the actors.


For some reason, when the clapping started, he’d turned his head to look at his mother (as his mother was just a mother to him then, associated with bubble baths and food that smelled as good as it tasted) and she hadn’t been smiling, not like the rest of the audience surrounding them. She’d had her hand to her mouth, like the Victorian ladies on the perpetually playing black-and-white TV at home, and her eyes were glistening like the very stage lights lived and breathed within them.


She caught his eye, leaned over to say, “It’s a world in itself, isn’t it?” and he’d nodded, too mesmerised by the reflections in her eyes that spun and weaved on Cupid’s loom to say anything. He wouldn’t know what she meant until much later.