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i.
Neil's heart hammered, a dreaded unstoppable ache that settled deep into his bone marrow like some kind of chronic, festering disease that couldn't be cured with wet cloths and cough medicine. It was that same unrelenting panic he experienced every time he dreamed a little too deeply and Andrew’s breath slipped too far away from his own. It had been cold and December and snowing the way it shouldn’t.
It’s always night time when everything starts to crumble apart. The past seeps in through the window, through the opening wounds in Neil’s skin and condemns him here: lying awake, paralysed. It’s that funny, undying feeling that smothers him with insomnia until he cannot remember how to sleep, but still dreams in spite of it all. His mind is a paradox of all the things that shouldn’t exist, and it begs to unwrite itself in the wake of midnight where time isn’t real, and every aspect of it exists all at once. It possesses him like fire embers, seeping underneath his fingernails like blood until the bones inside are rotting through his carcass all over again and again and again.
The arcane, irredeemable history of who he used to be catches up, infects his bone marrow until the frostbite claims him, and Neil cannot remember how to count to three, to thirty.
Dvattsat syem. Dvattsat vohsyem. Dvattsat' dyevyt?
These are the nightmares he doesn't let himself think about during the daylight, and so they seem to slip through the fragmented scars of his fraying mind. Andrew would call it burying away, hiding, running – Neil would call it survival. The feeling is harder to ignore than in the daytime, where it’s easier to keep the fragments of colliding brain matter away from infecting his own. It hurts him, an isolating cold that makes a home in every one of his organs, at having to have the need to keep everyone away – but the embers are incinerating.
In the darkness, they catch.
In the darkness, the familiar dread leaks through the decaying cracks of his skin and takes hold of him from the inside out like a curse, an affliction, like knives in Baltimore.
In the darkness, he chokes on the starlight –
“Stay with me,” Andrew says, his voice an impossible anchor that shouldn’t exist here. He’s knelt down beside Neil’s bed, that is where Neil finds him, face gentle and impossibly calm as if he doesn’t have anywhere else to be.
“I want to. I'm trying,” Neil whispers, breath unsteady. Falling asleep shouldn't have to be difficult, and yet here they were.
“Try better.”
Neil cannot feel his body, but he knows his hands are shaking. Wet. There are angry, marred indentations from his broken, bloodied fists. They’ve torn against the concrete in his father’s basement seemingly a hundred times over, or burned until his flesh has disintegrated into charcoal inside Lola’s car and sand in the ocean. His skin that Andrew had once held has become something of a sickening masterpiece of a hundred watercolour-red constellations, smeared with unforgivable streaks of the past that will never let him go.
Dvattsat' dyevyt. Dvattsat' dyevyt. What is it? What is it? Whatisitwhatisitwhatisit? Dvattsat' dyevyt and then –
“I can't breathe.”
“You can breathe, you’re just an idiot.” They’re in their dorm room. Kevin sleeps in the bed over from him. They’re at Palmetto State University. In South Carolina, planet Earth. “Now, come back. Stay.”
Andrew is still beside him.
He knows of the sins Andrew’s hands are tainted with because sometimes, they are Neil’s, too; he is them. That faulted, infinite wrongness constricting around his bones when Andrew reaches out, touching his paper skin, staining the flesh, condemning it. Neil tastes it when he awakes from broken sleep. Cigarette ash and South Carolina snow and whiskey that Neil won’t drink runs down his lips in the same breath as Andrew’s name. It should be terrifying, how condemningly broken the sins of their histories have made them, and it is, but when the blood mixes and dries, it matters less.
“Can I hold your hand? I need – something to–”
“Yes.” Andrew reaches his hand out, human and warm and all-consuming. He takes Neil’s hand as if it were as familiar as his own. As if they fit, if it had always been there, and Neil doesn’t know how to let him go.
The way his fingers intertwine around Neil’s own feel like they’ve found something inseparably impossible to forget, engraving into his flesh the same way all of Andrew’s keys had before, and somewhere in between the metallic teeth and the scarred skin, Neil’s heart aches something awfully tolerable.
Neil stares at Andrew’s palm for a long while, unbreathing and counting as he does. He counts Andrew’s bloodlessly pale knuckles, the faint freckles constellating up his wrist, and then the old scars lining his forearm. “You’re not bleeding,” Neil says distantly, and Andrew lets him turn their intertwined palms over, just so Neil can be sure. He cannot look at his own hand so instead he asks Andrew, “Are my hands? My fingernails, they’re–”
“No,” Andrew says. He isn’t looking, as if he knows, without even having to see what he will find there. He’s watching Neil’s eyes, the same ones that are dizzy with sickening, overdue panic and rosy crimson with all the blood he hasn’t lost. Neil can’t look at him and Andrew can’t look at anything but. Everything is upside down. “There’s no blood,” he says without turning their hands over. “It's twelve past three. You're here with me, and you’re staying. The past is dead. Let it be.”
Neil scoffs, the sound coming out as a hollow rasp, sounding awful against the silent air. “You know it’s not that easy.”
Dvattsat' dyevyt. Dvattsat' fucking dyevyt.
“I never said so,” Andrew tells him, warm and warm and warm. He’s killed with these hands and he’s drawn his fingers through cigarette ash and he’s bloodied his knuckles if it meant keeping Neil safe and he’s held him together if it meant keeping Neil forever. He holds them as if it will always be ‘always’. “I said you should breathe. If that is difficult, then there’s no hope for you.”
“I'll remember that when you choke on your froot loops tomorrow.”
“Remember it three nights from now when you dream the same dreams again.”
Neil finds his lungs in Andrew’s hands, and says, “You'll still be here to tell me yourself.” It’s not a question, but Andrew answers as if it is.
“Yes,” he says without ever having to think about it. They both know they’ll be here all week, all year, together for the rest of forever without ever having to say it. Neither Andrew nor Neil would ever admit to something as terrifyingly infinite as that, but there’s an unspoken unconditional promise that they’ll never need to. Maybe one day they’d get there, and maybe one day they’d say it aloud and maybe one day they’d realise that it didn’t matter to them as much as it seemed to matter to the rest of the world and maybe one day they would give up.
For now, this is everything.
But Neil cannot help himself from asking, “What's thirty in Russian?”
Andrew gives him an irritated look before nestling his head into his arm against Neil’s mattress and mumbling, “Do your own homework.” Neil wonders if he’ll sleep like this, knelt on the scratchy cream carpet, chest draped over the side of the bed, face hidden in the crook of his elbow, right next to Neil’s shoulder like some sort of marble creature Neil had once seen in a museum in Venice.
Neil takes his other hand and threads his fingers through Andrew’s hair. “Andrew, I need to know.”
Across the room, Kevin shoves his head underneath his pillow in a rather exaggerated display, and mutters, “Thirty in French is ‘ta gueule’, dickweeds.”
ii.
“No, uh uh,” Neil says, kneeling onto the tiled bathroom floor into little less than a ball. He moves his face close to where Andrew is laying in front of him, his cheek resting on the back of his other hand. “You can’t stay on the floor.”
Andrew narrows his eyes defiantly, a cloudy meteor storm of supernovas and blackholes within the amber outer space.
“It's cold,” Andrew pouts - actually fucking pouts - and the look he gives Neil has Neil’s head spinning despite himself being completely sober.
Of course they’d celebrated with the rest of the team before, whether it was after a win or an excuse to reveal bets through truth and dares or just to commemorate surviving a typical tuesday. Though, it had become an unspoken thing between them that they’d watch for the other who would let go enough to allow themselves to be vulnerable. Only, it had always been Neil who would end up sprawled across Andrew’s lap, giving away unfaltering sweet truths as if they were flower petals upon a love-me-not in his hand, tasting ungodly amounts of vodka on his own lips when Andrew shoved his hand to Neil mouth to stop him giggling.
But -
Like an asteroid striking the earth, Neil realises suddenly all at once, that this is the first time he’s seen Andrew drunk.
“And it’s also never been cleaned,” Neil says, despite the fact he is also on the floor. “You’ll catch all kinds of shit if you stay here any longer.”
“No. You sleep here, too,” Andrew tells him, pointing his hand to the tiles in front of them, and then reaching out to graze Neil’s cheek, brushing Neil’s hair out of his face rather exasperatedly, as if Andrew isn’t the pathetic wasted thing sprawled across the bathroom floor that Neil wants to collect like a mosaic masterpiece. His eyes are all the more clouded over in delirious half-asleep nonsense as Andrew pushes Neil’s curls back into something that doesn’t resemble a halfhearted mop. Neil doesn’t want him to stop.
He rolls his eyes, instead. “Yeah, fuck that.”
Their eyes meet again, something softer, something realer glossing over the haze of the sticky bathroom air. He holds one hand out loosely, just above Andrew and Andrew watches it for a moment. “Let me take you to your bed,” Neil says.
“Do I get a lullaby?” Andrew deadpans.
Neil smirks, and before he even realises he’s doing it, childish words are clinging to the walls of the bathroom like sharpie hearts and mediocre poetry on bathroom stalls. “Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques. Dormez-vous- ”
“Shut up,” Andrew snatches his hand away from Neil’s head only to hold it to his mouth. Andrew’s lips press against the back of his own hand, and Neil knows that he can feel Neil’s mouth smiling against his palm. His words are soft when he lets the kiss that isn't a kiss go. “I don't want you to touch me.”
“Okay,” Neil agrees easily, “but I will catch you if you so much as give any indication that you will pass out on the journey from here to your bed.”
Andrew looks offended. “I don't faint.”
Neil scoffs. “Then start moving.”
Andrew suddenly looks at him a little too closely, a little too deeply than Andrew should want Neil tonight. “I want a bath.”
“Tomorrow,” Neil sighs. “I’m not supervising you right now.”
Andrew flips him off and turns on his back to stare at the cobweb cracks in the ceiling as if they were starlights. “Fuck you. I’ll drown myself just to spite you.”
“And you can do that tomorrow.”
Andrew slides his eyes back over to Neil’s face. “Do you know CPR?”
Neil pauses. “You’re flirting,” he realises, his cheeks hurt from fighting against the smile wanting to escape his face. “You’re flirting with me? I don’t think I like this side of you.”
“Nevermind, if I drown, leave me there.”
Neil turns his head curiously, feigning sickeningly sweet innocence that someone like him shouldn’t have the right to possess. “Are we boyfriends or something?” He asks, and the words taste like honey, like the skittles Andrew had mixed into his vodka soda and the strawberry sunscreen he’d tasted on his skin before that.
Andrew pouts that fucking pout again and it feels as if this man is unraveling Neil’s mind, making him lose himself better. “We’re associates. We associate,” Andrew says, and then, “But you don’t want to have a bath with me? I don’t want a bath without you.”
Pressed up close against his face, Neil breathes in the smell of sugary sophomore-made cocktails and cigarettes that seems to construct the aura that is Andrew tonight, and simultaneously has a hard time coming back to himself enough to say something back.
Neil doesn’t know exactly when it started. Maybe ever since January or June or July or a different month that doesn’t start with the letter ‘J’. It had become a routine, as familiar as breathing was to sit in the water with Andrew or underneath the warmth of the shower’s rain, and study each other like the masterpieces they were, each scar and freckle and bruise and mole constellating each other’s cartography until everything that they were all interwove together.
They know each other like the moon knows her stars, and Neil thinks about that as he had drawn the constellations of cepheus and octans and cancer against Andrew’s chest.
“Andrew,” Neil had said to the other body of flesh against him. He didn’t want to be anywhere else but here – with the citrus shampoo, feverish skin and the body that inexplicably, undeniably, always fit against his. It didn’t make sense, yet here they were.
“Tell me what you want,” Andrew had whispered, letting Neil press against him, both of their connected bodies feeling the flow of the water pour across their skin as they drowned in the ever-so-carefully-constructed familial warmth of this.
“Kiss me,” Neil had mumbled back. “Yes or no?”
Andrew grazed his lips down the sweet flesh of Neil’s neck, pulling at the skin between his teeth and leaving a trail of watercolour bruises – suddenly condemning Neil a muse of this celestial masterpiece that they’d become since last Summer.
"Where?" Andrew had murmured over the sound of Neil’s breath hitching, over the water streaming against the tiles.
"Everywhere,” Neil had told him. Unbelievable longing rose like fire within his chest, and suddenly, pressed as they were – with Andrew’s lips and teeth and touch across his neck, the taste of Neil in his mouth, the construction of a world in which they were the sole centrefolds – Neil had everything. “Forever."
And Neil still had everything when the water shut off, and the room was cold again, and when Andrew wasn’t aware enough to tell him ‘no’. Neil would say it for him.
“Ask me again tomorrow,” tonight’s Neil tells Andrew. It’s still winter-spring cold in the bathroom, though warmth from other suns anywhere else but here are shining upon them. Impossible pieces of spacetime and Andrew are so damningly human in his hands, it is agonisingly bearable. “We have all of them.”
Andrew nods easily. “Okay.”
Andrew sleeps in Neil’s bed that night, and Neil sleeps in Andrew’s.
iii.
“Shit,” Neil whispers, hands twisting within his sheets as he lets the cold water from the sink wash over them. He doesn’t even remember the nightmare, the memory of it clawing and clawing and clawing inside his brain within the kind of sleep that people who aren’t him fall into –
But as soon as he’d awoken, it hadn't even mattered.
His skin had been warm and for a moment Neil had been convinced it was blood. His broken scars had suddenly torn open over his raw, exposed muscle and bone mixing with a thousand smithereens of his remaining flesh and the rose-white bed sheets. Pieces of his hands had been coming undone from his body and onto the mattress like fraying ash cigarettes between his teeth; the heat of the dashboard lighter alighting the edges of nerve ending, sending chaotic signals of excruciation across his fevered brain that was collapsing apart like burning embers and black sand and the flaying remains of a human body.
It was everywhere. Blood had drowned away whatever was left of Neil’s corpse, and condemned his sheets, his bed, his skin a bloodied mess of all the things he’d become.
He had to stop the bleeding.
Distantly, his hands grazed over the familiar hundreds of astrography scars constellating across his chest, his arms, his abdomen, until they worked down to the molten disfigurement of broken skin along the side of his cheek, his neck, the insides of his mouth. Nauseating, thick panic had threatened to scream from his lungs as Neil still couldn’t find the source of the warm, sticky blood spilling across this body until –
He turned his shaking palms along the length of his body, going down down down from his mouth to the acidic warmth weeping liquid against his thighs. As soon as it had solidified within him that it wasn’t actually blood, Neil had pushed the back of his hand to his mouth as the nausea, now rich with feverish anger and suffocating humiliation, clawed its way up his throat until he was condemned to choke on it.
He finds himself in the dorm’s bathroom at three in the morning, hands bundled so tightly in his soiled sheets that they hurt. The frostbitten February cold is seeping in through the open window, leaking into the tiles, and the water is so cold, it aches. Everything aches. Neil’s stomach twists with something vile as he scrubs furiously at the sheets, almost wishing to himself that it was blood, that he had woken up bleeding out and out and out, because at least then he’d know how to clean it, at least then he wouldn’t feel the humiliation that comes with wetting the fucking bed at twenty.
“Shit.” Neil shoves the stained sheets into the basin, slamming his hands down onto the edges, and gripping the sink so tightly that his knuckles hurt. They’re bone-white, bloodless and splitting, and Neil can feel Andrew watching his hands in the mirror before he even steps into the room. They’re shaking, they’re scarred, and they’re covered in urine, and Neil still wants Andrew to hold them.
Andrew is watching from the doorway, the door slightly open since Neil hadn’t even remembered to lock it, close it. For an awful, agonizingly long moment where Neil’s body refuses to move, Andrew lingers like a benign shadow, seeking permission to cross over the threshold into the space of the bathroom where Neil stood at the basin. He can hear the steady breaths of Andrew’s lungs and the soft footfalls of his feet against the tiles, all the while the warm sourness of stained sheets and bitter urine clung to his body like smoke in California.
It had spilled against the white ceramic, seeping from Neil's clothes like an open wound weeping red, like the bloodied artistry of awful, agonising pain that Neil wishes it had been. That, at least, would have been easier, kinder.
“Don’t,” Neil tells him, turning away from Andrew’s reflection in the glass mirror, refusing to look at the other man, at the mirror, at himself. He cannot move, frozen like the winter air freezing the tiles of the bathroom and the stained water-soaked sheets of his bed. His body is no longer his own, and Neil feels the humiliated nausea claim him, burning his cheeks a rosy human red, the same colour of all his organs that don’t seem to fucking work the way they should when he’s asleep. “Just go back to bed.”
He wants to break the mirror. He wants it to shatter into a million pieces, let it fracture into a disgusting mosaic of broken glass and blood because maybe then there will be no reflection and the acidic urine against his hands, his thighs, his ankles will drown itself away.
“I'm waiting for you,” Andrew says simply, his voice steady and indifferent as if Neil isn’t standing drenched in his soaked boxers, hands twisted in bed-wetted sheets at three o'clock in the morning.
Neil takes a sharp, shaking breath, clenching his hands deeper into the fabric and says, “It’s not – it won’t come out.”
Andrew rolls his eyes. “Yeah, that’s not going to wash out piss, idiot.”
Neil falters. Hearing Andrew say it makes it worse, makes the fucking mortification of pissing himself as an adult make him want to cry. Neil forces himself to take another ragged breathe because if that happens, he will undoubtedly and irrefutably die from the humiliation.
“I fucking wet the bed.” Neil’s voice is a broken whisper when it leaves his lips, his hands trembling within the basin, and he doesn’t notice the warmth of Andrew’s body beside him until he’s standing next to him.
He turns off the frigid rush of the tap water, uncurling Neil’s aching hands from the sheets, uncaring of the stains or the smell clinging to Neil’s skin. Neil forces his eyes back to the mirror, and Andrew meets him there. “You had a nightmare. You were asleep. Your body reacted,” he tells Neil, voice almost bored and verging on annoyance. “Get over it. Take a shower.”
Neil grabs at the sheets again, meets Andrew’s warm hands in between the wet fabric, and tells him, “I have to clean the sheets.”
“You’re going to take a shower,” Andrew says again, easing Neil’s shaking hands away from the bedding, and Neil lets the drenched fabric slip through his fingers into Andrew’s, their palms grazing. “I've got the sheets.”
The moment Neil lets go, his hands ache to hold onto something again. He managed to find the edge of the sink, and with it, he hold himself up while listening to his jagged breaths collide against the bathroom's walls, amplifying against the porcelain tiles like cascading bullets, and embedding themselves there along with all the graffitied poetry and blood that isn’t actually there.
“Andrew–”
He forces himself to look at Andrew within the mirror, tearing his eyes away from the wall, and seeing the solidifying, infinite presence that is the man beside him. He’s in Neil’s shirt, just as Neil’s in his, hair a mess in every which way, and he’s holding Neil’s soiled sheets in his arms as if he doesn’t even care – as if he’d do this again and again every three AM because Neil was something Andrew would put back together a thousand times over. He’d find him in the bathroom, in his bed, in the cold February winter, and pick up all his little glass shards upon the tiles, only to build them back together, back into something just as beautiful.
Andrew meets his eyes and says, “I want to get to sleep tonight, and I want you next to me. Will you let me do your laundry, or are you going to continue to behave like the world is ending because you pissed yourself?”
Neil swallows, surrenders his hold on the basin. The nauseating shame of waking Andrew in the middle of the night because of this seems to collapse under the exhaustion of it all, and Neil finds himself nodding, whispering, “Okay.”
The feverish warmth of the shower washes away the night as Neil sits under the spray. He finds himself leaning against the tiles. Andrew had left minutes ago to go down to the laundry room, and though Neil hadn’t wanted anyone to bear witness to him in this moment, he suddenly found himself longing for Andrew to come back the more he sat alone under the spray.
He stays in the shower until the water is cold again, though when he redresses himself in clothes that Andrew had left behind for him, he counts until ten before leaving to go back into his bedroom. There’s a towel placed over his bare mattress underneath Andrew’s bunk, and Neil takes a step towards it, not really caring at all that it smells rancid and doesn’t have any bedding on it. He’s slept on a lot worse.
Before he can get there though, Andrew, who had returned while Neil had been in the shower, is peering over at him from the top bunk. “Your mattress is fucked, you can deal with it later,” he tells Neil, and then, with a voice that wouldn’t seem any different to anyone else, he says, “Sleep with me, yes or no?”
Neil shifts his feet, standing in the middle of the room. “I’ll sleep on Matt's couch if you don’t actually want me in your bed.” He could come up with a good enough lie to the others in the morning to explain why he was sleeping there. A problem he was glad he wouldn’t have to deal with was Kevin, though. Thank fuck Kevin had stayed at Wymack’s tonight because Neil wouldn’t think he could look him in the eyes ever again if he knew what had happened tonight.
Andrew rolls his eyes again. “I hate you so much,” he says only because he doesn't. “I wouldn't be asking you if I didn't want you with me.”
Neil bites the insides of his cheek, feeling the warm, rosy blush fighting against his flesh again. He buries his face in the hood of his sweater, breathing in the gravitating smell of coffee and spearmint and Marlboro reds, distantly realising that it’s Andrew’s. “What if it happens again?”
Andrew scoffs, throwing his back against the pillows and already turning over to face the wall. He looks back at Neil with sharp, knowing eyes, and mutters, “Then I’ll wash my fucking sheets as well and we can shower together. Are you coming?”
“Yes,” the soft murmur leaves Neil’s thawed lips in an instant, and he curls himself around the warmth of Andrew like the type of body who is made for this kind of love, leaving only the clean sheet between their skin. Andrew had picked his smithereens and soiled sheets from the floor, and taken Neil back with him as if he was made for this. He’d had the remnants of Neil’s nightmare soiled against his room, his midnight, his hands, and he had washed it all away, as if somehow, despite everything, it hadn’t mattered – because of course it hadn’t. “Thank you.”
“I’m asleep.” Andrew shoves a pillow at him. “Shut up.”
iv.
Tonight it is Andrew’s turn. Dead asleep, he murmurs vermillion words that Neil cannot make out in the wake of September’s three in the morning, and Neil looks at him. They are lying together, and Andrew looks like the child he isn't, the one he never could have been, but then he sounds like the child that he was - the one that had forgotten to scream, and beg, and say the word ‘please’ after one too many times - and Neil cannot lie there and do nothing.
He’d only said Andrew’s name, but that was all it had taken. Andrew had come awake in an awful, agonising breath, and he hadn’t looked at Neil when he’d lunged at him. His voice hadn’t matched the way Neil remembers him sounding every other time, too open and raw like bloodied fragments of a seeping wound that had stopped bleeding but won’t ever close over. Screams don't exist here, but it doesn’t matter. Neil hears the same voice in his nightmares, that voice of their corpses having been burned from the inside out, eaten away by moths and California embers into things they couldn’t help but become, and finally consumed by the shadows they were until they were nothing.
So Neil breathes, he waits, keeps Andrew’s side of the bed warm until Andrew will come back and do it himself.
It’s now two hours later, the shallow scrap of Andrew’s fingernails and the crescent moon-shaped indentations in Andrew’s palms are scabbing over. No one is bleeding. Andrew had left him alone, but he is back now, smelling of cigarette ash and cold autumn and antiseptic.
And now -
Now, it is time to sleep again.
Andrew shoves his knives away on the dresser, and stares at them for too long. He’d searched for them as soon as he’d awakened, looking for them beside his pillow, next to the bedside, under Neil’s skin. Since this routine had become a little less finite, Andrew left his knives in places Neil wouldn’t have to think about them, and it’s not fair to either of them.
They don't speak until Andrew climbs back into the covers as if somehow, he’d never left, and everything is undone, as it always is, as it has to be.
“You can sleep with them, if you want,” Neil says. The words fall from his mouth like something akin to ‘you can’t hurt me’. Beyond Andrew’s body, Neil feels the stars fall, and he doesn’t think he minds all that much. The phantom feeling of clean, cold metallic twisting and slicing apart his flesh remains like a bad dream inside his head. The thought of having knives anywhere around him while he sleeps is suffocating. Smithereens of space and supernovas are colliding into his paper-doll body and burning him into pieces he cannot connect one-too-many times again, but if Andrew needs safety in hurt, Neil will give him that.
Andrew, with hazy glazed-over eyes and more hair falling in front of his face than not, brushes his fingers over the small graze of fleshy broken skin from Andrew’s nails cutting against Neil’s skin. Neil watches his eyes as he does. It’s wont even scar, much too shallow for something real, and Neil cannot even feel it. Andrew, though, feels Neil’s new wound like a sickness, a tragedy. “I just scratched the shit out of you in my sleep, and now you want to arm me?”
Neil will not say he is fine, or that it doesn’t hurt, or that it is okay if Andrew hurts him again and again and again when Andrew doesn’t know that Neil is Neil, but he will tell Andrew -
“I want you to feel safe,” he says softly, almost running the backs of his fingers delicately against Andrew’s arms where his knives will lay in the morning. Tonight, they’re bare, unburdened with dark fabric and metallic sheaths, and the skin is damp and feverish with warmth against Neil’s, but neither seem to mind. The almost-touch is that of gravity and suddenly Neil wants to hold him and never let go. Andrew can have a hand in Neil’s and the other with his fingers twisting around his blade, and maybe it won’t even matter.
“I do,” Andrew says.
Neil can love Andrew with his hands full.
“You don’t have to lie,”
“I’m not lying,” as if to prove it, Andrew brings his hands to Neil’s face from where they lay beside them both. He takes his palm and places it against Neil’s cheek, the flesh underneath a mangled scar of lighter burns and knife carvings and fingernail markings, but Andrew keeps his fingers there. The scabbing flesh and crescent-shaped indentations broken within Andrew’s palms run like watercolour paint and ash honey against Neil’s skin. Blood had felt awful against his own skin every time before his one, but this September, this night, this three AM, it’s awful as it is comforting. There are worse ways to bleed and Andrew knows this too. Pieces of Andrew and Neil are shattering off into their own hands, only to fray apart like the ash and flowers in the ugly South Carolina snow; but the hurt was their own. They would catch the fragments all the same. The cut on Neil’s cheek didn’t hurt.
“Andrew,” Neil started to say without knowing what the rest of the sentence would be. The singular name was falling desperately from his lips as the hand against his cheek was this overwhelming he needed for as long as they both existed. Until the end was reached, and they'd finally rest together if only for a little longer. They deserved this.
Andrew brushes his fingers against the new thin line against Neil’s cheekbone, and Neil starts to understand. Andrew will keep his hand there all night if he has to, and Neil will let him.
“Neil. I don’t need to sleep with my knives. I sleep with you.”
v.
There’s a sheet of math equations somewhere that Neil needs to have solved for a class that he has in ten minutes, but Andrew is here, a finite warmth that has fallen asleep in Neil’s bed, and Neil can’t leave. For someone so small, he’s taken up more than half the bed, a tangled mess of feverish sickness and gross snot that had refused to drag himself to class after morning practice. Neil’s been crushed into the wall, willing himself as still and flat as possible to avoid touching Andrew on the single mattress that doesn’t even quite fit one body.
They're not spooning. They’re not. If anything, they’re both knives in this relationship that fucked up when categorising themselves as silverware. Yeah, that makes sense.
Whatever.
Neil should’ve left twenty minutes ago, climbed over Andrew, woken him up, and dealt with the consequences, all while having the time to finish his worksheet – but he hadn’t. Neil had stayed.
He knows Andrew is awake now. He’s been pretending to be asleep for the last ten minutes, chest rising and falling a beat quicker than it had a moment before, eyes flickering dizzyingly as he’d first oriented himself, and Neil had been pretending not to notice, keeping himself as far pressed into the wall as if to disintegrate into it, and pulling at a loose thread on his shirt because that’s easier than admitting he wants to leave when he doesn’t.
He should let Andrew go back to bed. He should be concerned about getting whatever cold Andrew’s managed to get infected with. He should go to class and finished his fucking homework. But instead, Neil asks Andrew, “Do you know you talk in your sleep?”
Andrew doesn't open his eyes when he answers, “No.”
Neil snaps the thread loose from his clothing, and weaves the red string in between his fingers. Andrew shifts ever so slightly, pressing deeper into the mattress, into Neil’s side and it speaks all the words he doesn’t say. Come closer, touch me, stay.
“You do,” Neil tells him, and then without even thinking about it, he ties one end of the thread to the little finger of his right hand, a lopsided, childish bow of bright crimson string that suddenly looks universally out of place. He holds his hand out above them both, reaches out to Andrew’s bed above him where Andrew will sleep tonight instead of where he does now, and feels parts of himself ache.
Neil turns his face to Andrew’s. “Do you want to know what you said?” he asks.
Andrew isn’t looking at him. He’s watching the thread tied to Neil’s finger dangle in front of their faces like some sort of fucked-up noose they both let lie between them. The dust embers catching within the day-broken sun that’s leaking through the window. “No.”
There’s a length of string between them, and Andrew picks up the other end. Neil watches with glazed over, dazed eyes as Andrew ties the thread to his left little finger the way Neil had, a perfect bow of connected twine that is suddenly tying them to each other.
“You told me you loved me,” Neil says pointlessly and simply. “You and all your undying lovesickness. It was disgusting.”
Andrew scoffs, voice rasp and lungs heavy.
They fit together, they do. They fit together like identically scarred upturned hands that they hold for each other, or broken pieces of shattered glass that had fused together after existing apart for so very, very long. Together, they have the same flesh, the same mouth, the same sickness of belonging to the other for two souls who had never known what it is to have.
“Undying is not a word I'd ever associate with such an insignificant concept.”
“What would you know? You were asleep. I also didn’t know you wanted to marry me.”
“I don't,” Andrew says simply, voice plain and uninterested and if they’re talking about what they’ll have for lunch and not how they will spend the rest of their forevers. “You’re not something I want chained to me for the rest of my life, and you certainly don’t want me.” Despite Andrew’s words, Neil doesn’t seem to mind.
Andrew pulls at the line of thread connecting their fingers together and it threatens to snap but either he’s not pulling hard enough or he’s refusing to let go. Neil lets his hand fall against Andrew’s as he motions for it, and Andrew intertwines their bound pinkies.
He finally turns onto his side, and looks at Neil as he says, “Our ties of fate would be that of nooses, and we’d kill each other if we pronounced ourselves legally bound.”
Neil shrugs. “There’s tax benefits.”
“I don't do taxes.”
“I'd do them for you.”
“You don’t do taxes.”
“I'd do them for you,” Neil says again, and Andrew’s eyes are soft - haunted - as if Neil had just uncovered the most unnerving, arcane type of secret buried deep within himself. After everything, Neil shouldn’t be surprised that there are still revelations within him to tell Andrew, but he is, there are. Somehow, this is the one that feels dangerous. Maybe being in love with someone is dangerous, Neil supposes. It’s a different kind of danger that he’s never felt before – sickeningly sweet syrup coating his tongue, rich oxygen filling his lungs, an entity that Neil doesn’t know how to forget. Andrew has become the gritty earth embedded underneath his fingernails, nestled in between his flesh like the hundreds of scars that condemn it broken. He’s become the jagged, suffocating warmth Neil lies next to, and maybe Andrew can get up and walk away from the bed, but Neil can’t.
Neil untangles their pinkies, brings his hand up in front of both their faces, pulling at the string tying their little fingers’ together and nudging his away from Andrew’s, testing if it will break, if Andrew will let the string go. He twists his end of the twine around his finger, bringing it closer to Andrew’s, and Andrew lets Neil guide their intertwined hands, but doesn’t make an effort to shorten his end of the line. “If we didn’t hang each other with our own strings of fate, apparently.”
“Weddings are disgusting. Marriage is abhorrent. Something as insignificant as words on paper is not going to save us, and you know this.” With heavy, slow-blinking eyes and an easy, indifferent voice he tells Neil, “I want to sleep next to you tonight, and I want to sleep next to you tomorrow. I want your burnt shitty sugarless coffee and I want to hear you breathe. Nothing is going to tell me I can't. Leave the betrothed to the betrothed. It’s not about them. It’s about us – you. You’re something I want to keep coming back to.”
Here in this small space of an exhausting, ungodly world, in their dorm’s suite that feels much too warm than it has the right to ever be, Neil realises that he wants to exist for this person for the rest of his life. He wants to smoke cigarettes within the dawn's sunlight as it spills across the concrete rooftop like oil paint, and breathe in the smell of smoke and rosewood shampoo as Andrew breathes against him. He wants to send him nonsensical pointless phone messages that he doesn’t know how to write, and make him cups of coffee he has no intention of ever drinking himself, and then he wants to kiss Andrew’s mouth, always, after all this time, because sometimes it is three AM and his mouth tastes like a sandy graveyard and fire embers that catch on the gasoline rainbows, and he’s never known a thing like Andrew that can so seamlessly make it seem as if he’d ever known what it is to hurt.
Neil wants to tell him this. He wants to write it all down within the margins of his mathematics worksheet, slip it into Andrew’s bag so that he will see it in his next class. Andrew would burn it right at his desk with his lighter and then trace over Neil’s constellation scars with the ashes. The words would become permanente infinities within Andrew’s mind like carvings within a tree trunk, scars in flesh and exist only, always, for them. Forevermore until they both become the paper earth embers to which the rosewood and the rye and tobacco within their cigarettes grows from.
But Neil isn’t good at saying these things, and he cannot remember where he left his homework, so instead, he says, “I want a divorce.”
Andrew drops his hand in between the almost non-existence space between their bodies, dragging Neil’s hand along with his all the same, and together, they fall. Andrew closes his eyes and smooshes half his face into the one pillow lying on Neil’s bed. “We’re never getting married,” he mutters as if he needs to. “We can get a cat though.”
Andrew’s decided he’s going back to sleep, so Neil realises he should take this as his opportunity to leave, to go to class relatively on time, to figure out whatever the fuck topology is, but instead he finds himself saying, “I lied.” His voice is quiet, weary of Andrew pretending to fall asleep beside him, but Andrew hums indifferently because Neil knows he’s known the whole time. He knows when Neil just wants a reason to talk. “You don’t talk in your sleep.”
+ i
It's April or September or May, and it doesn’t matter.
“I don't think I'll ever want to sleep with you,” Neil says, the words slipping from his mouth like a secret, a condemnation to himself that he finds himself coming back to sometimes when they lie like this, and maybe it is. He doesn’t know. It could be the realest thing he’s ever said to Andrew or it could be the most casually insignificant whispering that he’s had the breath to mutter.
He also doesn’t care. Neither does Andrew.
The glow-in-the-dark constellations Nicky had left before them are peeling from the ceiling without ever actually having the courage to fall, and Neil almost wishes they would. He could tear them from the ceiling, a metre from his head upon Andrew’s top bunk, and then throw them out the open window, but he also wants to see how long they will last.
Andrew pretends they don’t exist, while also pretending to fall asleep again and again and again because Andrew does that.
The back of his knuckles graze against Neil’s cheek, while the other hangs from the open window against his top bunk. He half-heartedly shrugs against Neil’s body that has collapsed against his own, and says, “Sleep on the floor then.”
“Sex,” Neil clarifies without needing to. “I'll never want sex.”
In another world, a different city, or some other tonight there would be a touch on his shoulder; a blazing pyretic graze down his arm; a gentleness that erupts into his mouth with the familiarity of something of supernovas and home and tobacco and everything . He would feel the feeling of falling as a familiar lost light from the inside of his bones with every touch of Andrew’s hand, and Neil would weep. His being was made for it in every spacetime and every dimension. And in some of them they’d be the people they cannot be in this one and do the things people who are not them do to love each other.
But, tonight, this world is enough for them. They’ll be okay.
“Okay,” Andrew says easily. He has the side of his face pressed into Neil’s neck, his hand against Neil’s molten scarred cheek, and he doesn’t want anything else.
Neil asks anyway, “What do you want?”
“I just want you,” Andrew tells him, and maybe he’s pretending to fall asleep again. Maybe that is easier than falling in a different, more indefinite cosmic kind of way. He’s still awake however, and he moves into Neil’s space and presses his body close. His cheek is lying against Neil’s chest, right next to his heart, and Andrew can feel the way Neil stops breathing, Neil’s sure. “That's enough. That’s everything.”
This isn’t ‘I love you’, but maybe it could be. Maybe it is.
“Oh. You’ve got it bad,” Neil says, and Andrew blinks at him because he does. Neil meets Andrew’s hand at his cheek, and takes it in his own. He runs his fingers over bruised, angry knuckles and Andrew runs his over fraying, old cigarette scars. “I want to sleep with you, though,” he says.
Andrew scoffs. “You want to steal all the blankets and claim the mattress like a starfish.”
“Are you going to tell me to stop?” Neil asks lightly, gently touching just the outside of his hand in case Andrew needs an anchor to come back to. Underneath the edges of his fingertips, Andrew’s touch is warm and familiar, his pulse comfortingly steady, and Neil held onto it, selfishly, a little longer than he should have. He wonders if Andrew finds Neil’s own pulse against his ruined scars, and then he wonders if that is the reason Andrew keeps coming back to feel them.
“Why would I do that?” Andrew asks as if all of this had always been that easy. Neil distantly realises him moving from the bed. His warm touch is gone from Neil’s cheek, and suddenly digging through his pockets.
“I also want to change my major,” Neil says. “What do you think about astronomy?”
“Boring. Pretentious. Why can’t Earth be enough for you? Are you running away amongst the stars?”
“No. But if I was, you could come, too.” Neil blinks hazy eyes, fighting to bear witness to the universe in front of him, slowly being pulled into the sunken bliss of heavy, smothering nothingness and everything.
Andrew has other plans, though.
“What are you doing?”
Andrew pulls one cigarette from a pack of Marlboro reds and lights it in his other hand. Tendrils of smoke escape into the open October or January or November air, until they mix in a dizzying cloud against the glowing plastic stars fraying from the ceiling. Andrew puts it between his teeth. “People in the movies smoke cigarettes after they fuck. We’re doing that.”
Andrew takes a drag, and Neil tastes ash on his lips when he kisses him. He asks first, everytime, unknowingly counting the days like stars until they don’t have to ask anymore. One day, they will not need to. But for now, everything is enough. Andrew is every part of him, in every way, in every sense. He has his lips to Neil’s, and it’s gentle. It’s beautiful. It’s that of Aries. It’s the soft love song they deserved, the one Neil hadn’t known he’d been waiting for. It rewrites over everything else, all the agonising scripture that had come before, all the condemnations that had happened in their histories – and their grief burns itself into stardust.
“I think real people just have more sex afterwards,” Neil tells him, a whisper against Andrew’s lips. Neil’s eyes are hazy, intoxicated with that tolerable kind of lovesick, and maybe he realises, not for the first time or for the last, that Andrew Minyard would be his undoing until the end. He wants it that way.
Andrew shrugs again, the cigarette burning as his fingers hang from the window. “We'll never be real people.”
Together, they have the same mouth, each belonging to the other as if they share the same astronomies, and they do. They do, Neils thinks. Neil thinks he will carry Andrew’s mouth around with him until they fall again and again and again.
Stardust tastes like this. It must.