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Todd can feel that something is wrong.
He jerks upwards from his sleep, eyes wide, heart pounding, only to find the bed beside him empty, as he knew it would be. Neil didn't come back from the play, he's at his home with his father and his mother. Todd tries to calm his rapidly beating pulse, and it slowly trickles to a more steady pace. But he knows that something is wrong.
He can feel it.
He can't explain it, but something has happened.
He wishes Neil were with him, so that he might tell him of his worries and they might sit together on the window, legs tucked beneath them, Neil's green blanket draped over both their shoulders. So close that Todd might feel his breath on his arms, and see the flecks of green and gold in his brown eyes.
Taste the cinnamon and honey on his lips.
Neil Perry had only been dead a minute, and yet, Todd knew that something had happened.
It's later, when Charlie wakes him, but earlier in the sense of the morning.
He rises, heavy with fractured drowsiness , and sees Charlie's face, marred with tears.
That strikes him as odd.
Charlie never cries.
It's only then that he notices the other poets standing rigid in the doorway. Their faces are drawn in a way that feels unnatural, jaws clenched and eyes shining glassily.
He doesn't know what has happened, but that awful feeling from before is hitting him again and suddenly he can't quite breathe right.
"Todd." Charlie says and his voice is so cracked that it doesn't sound like him.
Todd finds his head shaking of its own accord; he doesn't want to hear what Charlie has to say. Deep down, he thinks he knows what has been done. But to say it would be too much, too stifling and scary and unreal.
"Neil's dead."
Neil Perry had shot himself with his father's gun at 1.37 am, and Todd had felt it in his very bones.
The snow is icy cold, sinking into his skin and twisting its way into his heart.
Neil is dead and the snow is falling and time itself feels frozen in place.
He stumbles drunkenly through the drifts, hands shoved resolutely into Neil's robe pockets. He hadn't picked up his own when he had tore out of bed, too stunned to do anything but leave. And here he is with his dead-weight robe and his too cold hands. His sunken eyes and his heart that is still stubbornly beating even though Neil's isn't.
How selfish of it.
He can hear the others' footsteps behind him. The crunch of the snow beneath their feet is unbearably loud and it's making him so annoyed he feels like he's about to explode.
The snow is so beautiful at this time of year. Neil loves the snow, he would have to tell him about it when he came back from-
Neil Perry was silent in his grave, unaware of the boy falling to pieces in the sparkling snow that he so adored.
Snow, ice, cold, Neil, dead, not dead, can't be dead, Charlie's kidding, Neil wouldn't, he wouldn't, his father, his-
"His father did it!" he screams.
The air is thick and suffocating and he wants to claw his way out of his skin and fly up, up into the swirling snowflakes that are falling like broken promises and shattered dreams.
The other poets crowd around him, hands upon shoulders, breath mixing with everyone's, eyes finally releasing the tears that had gathered.
They sit in the snow and stare blankly. There is a gap that they subconsciously leave, a gaping, horrid hole that makes Todd's eyes blur with tears.
A gap where Neil should be.
He shrugs them off and runs down the hill, slipping on the stupid snow and heading for the docks. His heart is pounding so hard, he can no longer hear his breaths coming in short bursts of fear.
Down, down he races, faster and faster until his heart almost leaps from his chest and sits dejectedly in the bleak whiteness that blankets the grounds.
"Neil." is the only word he manages to form, the only word his mangled brain can manage to remember, beneath the snow and the ice and the all consuming dread.
Neil Perry was six feet underground, buried with the gun that he used to take his life and the flowers that only Todd knew were his very favourite in the whole entire world.
The lilies are the only colour that Todd sees.
Pink against black, red against darkness and the bright green of the stems burning their way into his eyes.
He sits on the pew next to Meeks, who is trembling in his finely pressed suit, and Charlie, whose cheeks are smeared with salty tears that wreck his face and stain his image. But he doesn't seem to care.
Todd's own suit is too small, tight in the wrong places and loose in others.
Black is a fitting colour for mourning, he thinks.
It's an absence of colour, of life and happiness and that is what has occurred. Without Neil, there is no colour in Todd's world any more.
There is just monochrome, a simple, aching mixture of greys and blacks and smears of blinding white.
The lilies are bright, too bright, burning Todd with their presence. He wants to rip them off, to stand and scream and cry and tell the world that Neil's favourite flowers weren't fucking lilies.
He wants to tell the world that Neil Perry's favourite flowers were forget-me-nots, that he had told Todd himself, and that if anything, this beautiful boy deserved to be buried with the flowers that he had once whispered in Todd's ear were "the happiest sight in the world."
When the funeral was over, whilst Todd was leaning over the open casket and thinking about the now silent boy lying somber within, he slipped a forget-me-not into the velvet beside Neil Perry and pressed a sweet kiss to his clenched fist.
Mr Keating is leaving and Todd's chest feels heavier than it has ever felt.
It takes him an enormous amount of effort for him to place his feet on the floor in the morning.
He wants to lie down and not move and die, like those people Captain whispered about in their very first lesson.
"Food for worms."
That's what Todd wants to become. That's what Neil is doing now.
Todd goes to visit his grave when he can. He hates it a little bit more every time he goes.
Someone keeps placing lilies on the tombstone that speaks of Neil as if he were the perfect son and Todd rips them down every time he sees them.
They always return, fresh and polished and not rugged and wild, like flowers should be.
Like Neil was.
Meeks told him that he and Pitts had planted forget-me-not seeds around his grave, and that in the warmer months, they would grow again.
But Neil would not.
The snow has given way to icy rain and bitter sleet.
Neil hated the rain.
Todd just wants it all to stop, stop carrying on as if nothing has happened.
The world needs to stop, to cease in its relentless moving and changing because a wonderful human has died, and the only people who care are five seventeen year olds in Vermont.
Todd thinks that he will never stop caring.
No, he knows that he will never stop caring. He cared for Neil the moment he introduced himself, and he would be damned if he let such a trivial thing as death keep them apart.
Neil Perry never managed to say the words he had been meaning to tell Todd, and Todd instead says them every day in a whispered promise.
"I love you."
Todd goes back to Welton in the year that follows.
He sits in the same room that Neil once sat in with him, he eats at the same table, but the person sized gap in the poets feels too much for him, so he goes to the dock and he stands alone.
He stands on the dock, with his hands in his pockets and his voice shut off by a lump in his throat.
He cannot speak, because the man who convinced him that his voice was worth listening to is far away in London.
And the only one who listened is in a grave in a cemetery surrounded by lilies and breathing no more.
Todd doesn't feel like he can breathe any more.
He hasn't been able to breathe since he awoke that night, at 1.37am, his heart in his mouth, because somehow he knew that something had happened.
Neil Perry's eyes are closed. Todd's eyes are open. Neil's heart is full of flowers whilst Todd's is still fucking beating. And sometimes, he wishes it wasn't.