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Andrew is not unfamiliar with blood.
He is not even, per se, unfamiliar with blood on Neil. They both have mopped up puddles of red from the floor under the bathroom sink a few too many times.
This is different. This blood sticks, covers everything, tracks across every inch of skin. The backs of his hands are red, streaked over where it flowed from his palms down his arms. It crusts under his fingernails and dries in flakes on his sleeves.
And there is so fucking much of it.
And it dries so fucking fast, despite the steady supply flowing from between Neil’s hands.
Andrew feels like he can’t breathe.
He grips the wheel tight, keeps his eyes on the road instead of the cracking blood across his knuckles, and ignores the pained gasps Neil tries to suppress in the passenger seat.
At least he’s conscious, he tries to tell himself. At least there’s that.
When Kevin first brought the kid home, he wasn’t conscious. He wasn’t bleeding, but his head was lolling back against Kevin’s shoulder and his body was limp where Kevin held him up against his chest. When Kevin tilted him over, let him drop backwards onto Andrew’s couch, the other side of his face was covered in bruise purple splotches.
“Who’s that?” Andrew did not get up, his empty coffee mug still dangling from his hand. It was not the first time Kevin brought home a broken thing. Kevin had himself once been a broken thing brought home.
The desperation on Kevin’s face, when he turned around, startled him only moderately. Kevin was prone to dramatics, had once spent an afternoon drunkenly wailing on Andrew’s couch about a sport Andrew had not previously known existed, but this was still — different. More intense than even Kevin usually was.
“Andrew,” he said, voice scraped raw like he’d been screaming for hours. “We have to help him.”
Andrew remembers raising a brow. He did not think he was particularly known for his helpfulness. “I don’t even know who he is.” Not that a name would make him more inclined.
“This is N— Neil. I think.” Kevin ran both hands through his hair in frustration when Andrew blinked at him in reply. “He used to go by a different name. It doesn’t matter. He’s one of Riko’s.”
Andrew hummed. That was no good. “Think I’m already housing enough strays.”
It was not an outright no, though, and Kevin pounced on the fact. “We have to. I cannot leave him again.”
That raised the hairs on Andrew’s nape. He had always known there were other people involved, other strays like Kevin left behind in the struggle, but he had never come face to face with any of them. Right there in his living room, in this dingy apartment he rented only because Kevin insisted it was safe, he looked at the broken boy Kevin had dropped onto his worn-out couch.
A single, limp hand dangled off of the edge of the couch, fingers brushing the carpet. More bruises ringed that wrist like a cuff, like an ornate bracelet handcrafted for him.
Andrew set down his mug and crossed the room towards the couch. The boy lay flat on his back, head tilted to one side to show off the dark bruises that littered across his cheekbone, darkest in the hollow beneath his eye but spreading down as far as the corner of his mouth. On his neck, a silvery necklace glinted like the one Kevin had still been wearing years and months ago.
Andrew reached out a single hand, touched the tips of his fingers to his chin, just enough to tilt his head over the other way. His skin was warm, alive, but damp with sweat. High on his other cheek sat a pristine 4.
A hand wrapped around his wrist, and Andrew was on the floor between one blink and the next. Silver flashed, and the edge of a knife pressed to his throat just barely too light to draw blood. Above him, Neil was much more awake than he’d seemed, eyes wide and wild and blue even among the mess of purple that almost swelled one of them shut.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“Nate,” Kevin said, all pretense of the name out of the window. “It’s okay. He’s with me.”
Neil-Nate looked up at Kevin wildly, teeth bared and the knife still hard at Andrew’s throat. Slowly, methodically, Andrew slipped his own knife out of his sleeve.
“Kevin? What the fuck?”
Their intruder seemed surprised enough by the apparition of Kevin Day before him that his death grip on Andrew relaxed for just a moment. It was just long enough for Andrew to grip the hilt of his own knife tight and buck his full body weight up against him, throw up an arm against his wrist to disarm him, and flip them around.
Nate-Neil snapped out of his stupor and struggled with all his might, but he no longer had the element of surprise, and in pure physical strength, he had nothing on Andrew.
Andrew wrangled him back against his chest, holding both of his arms flush to his torso and pressing the blade of his knife against his throat from behind.
He felt, rather than heard, as Neil-Nate-Nate-Neil took a heaving breath against him.
“Well then,” Andrew said. “Let’s see where this ends.”
“Andrew,” Neil gasps from the passenger seat.
Andrew doesn’t allow himself to wince. Street signs flash by faster than he can read any of them, a constant blur as he winds expertly through traffic. Not many cars are out this time of night, but he speeds past them all the same.
They are getting closer to the city, and he knows he is going way too fast, and he is bound to be pulled over, but he does not ease his foot off the gas for even a second. They have outrun worse than tired highway cops.
Neil gasps again when Andrew hits a bump in the road. In the periphery of Andrew’s vision, his hands clasp tighter around his side, fresh red still seeping from between his knuckles. But Andrew cannot focus on that. He needs to focus on the road, the lazy late-night drivers he has to circumvent, the lack of flashing lights in the rearview.
He has to focus on the sound of Neil’s labored breathing. Pained, but alive, alive.
“Andrew,” Neil whispers again. He seems barely aware of what he’s saying. “Andrew, Andrew …”
They bought the car together.
Neil picked it out, wandering through the rows of displayed vehicles in the hall, in his ratty old gym shorts and with the hood of his zip-up pulled over his frizzy curls. Andrew caught the salesmen directing multiple wrinkled noses at him, but they had brought the money, so.
Eventually, Neil knocked his fist twice on the hood of a sleek black car. It had caught Andrew’s eye as soon as they’d walked in, and he was almost certain Neil had noticed. When he narrowed his eyes at him, however, Neil only shrugged. “Black is good. Inconspicuous. And it’s fast.”
They paid over a hundred thousand dollars in pristine cash bills Neil procured from a clear plastic bag he carried around in his duffel bag, much to the wide-eyed shock of the salesman, but Andrew knew no background check would flag anything about this money, or either of them. Neil was too good at his job to be caught out by a regular car dealership in Georgia.
They signed on the many lines with names Neil had picked out in advance, and Neil all but snatched the keys up off the desk, taking off towards their new ride without so much as a goodbye.
On the drive home, he rolled down the passenger side window, filling the car with booming air blasts as they sped down the highway, and grinned over at Andrew with his hair in his eyes.
“Andrew,” Neil whispers, even quieter. Andrew can’t tell, from here, how conscious he still is. “Andrew, it’s okay …”
It wasn’t supposed to go like this.
It was supposed to be easy. In and out. Kevin and Neil knew the place better than anyone else, knew every niche and every corner. They made the plan, they did the math. In and out, no more than twenty minutes, grab Jean and go. No lingering. No disturbances. No alerting anyone to their presence.
Andrew thought it was a bad idea from the start.
“He’s not dying,” he said, when Neil spread the plan out over the kitchen table.
“Yet.” Neil looked at him with fire in his eyes, hot enough to burn blue. He rarely got like this anymore, the way he’d been that first night. Angry. Scared. “You don’t know what Riko has been doing to him.”
“Neither do you,” Andrew said, just to be petty. He almost wanted Neil to get angry. He was itching for a fight, verbal or physical, anything to stop Neil from planning — this. This suicide mission.
And Neil was angry, he could read it in the flash of his eyes and the tense line of his shoulders, but he was a better man than Andrew was. In many ways. He glared, but he did not fall for the fight. “I do know, because I’ve lived it. We cannot leave him there, Andrew. He’s not dead yet, and I’d rather it doesn’t ever come to that.”
Andrew made himself look away from Neil’s face, the expression that stuck there. He knew, deep down, that there was no convincing Neil, but he’d had to try.
“I am going to do it,” Neil said. “You can come with me, or you can let me go.”
And that was really no choice at all. Andrew pulled his gun from its holster and placed it next to Neil’s on the table. They were almost identical in shape and size, except that Neil’s had obviously seen more wear, the hilt scraped and worn in places. They lay there, innocently, on the kitchen table.
“Alright, cowboy,” he said. “Tell me the plan again.”
Neil grinned, wide and glorious. They both knew Andrew remembered the plan word for word. Instead, he leaned across the table to frame Andrew’s face in his hands and kiss him.
City lights start flashing in the distance, right along with the burgeoning sunrise. If Andrew could press the gas any harder, he would.
His phone won’t connect to the speaker, and he cannot afford to pull over to figure it out.
“Fuck!” He slams a palm against the wheel, almost sending them careening before he gets a grip. Neil only gives an incoherent groan in response.
Andrew fumbles with the phone for two more seconds before he gives up and tosses it over into Neil’s lap. He does not take his eyes off the road again, but he does tear one hand from the wheel to grip Neil’s shoulder instead. Digs his fingers in as hard as he can, like he could wrench him back to full consciousness.
“Neil,” he says. Begs, maybe. “Neil, I need you to call Aaron. Can you do that?”
Neil makes a garbled sound, but it’s at least proof that he heard him.
“You just need to dial. I’ll talk. My phone is in your lap. Can you do that? Just pick it up and search for Aaron. He’s an emergency contact. It’s not hard. Neil.”
Neil makes another sound but unsticks his hand from his side to reach for the phone.
He was skittish those first few weeks. He lived on Andrew’s couch, or variably on Kevin’s depending on where the night left them all, and he did not really talk to either of them.
When they were both home, they mostly skipped around each other. Andrew ate in the kitchen, while Neil ate on the couch. Andrew worked in the tiny corner of his bedroom he called an office, and Neil would pace around the length of the living room or stand out on the tiny balcony.
Often enough, Kevin would come to pick him up, and they’d leave for the day. Andrew had no idea where they went, and he didn’t ask. Group therapy for mafia rejects, maybe. The mall. Whatever it was, it didn’t help Neil’s mood, or his atrocious fashion choices.
With the bruises healing and the swelling on his face going down, Andrew could at least tell that, apart from his choice of clothes, he was, for lack of a better word, cute. Not that it mattered.
Sometimes Kevin brought him back at night. Sometimes he didn’t. Andrew slept all the same for it.
Andrew was content to ignore the metaphorical booger Kevin had smeared off on him, as long as he stayed nice and alive as per Kevin’s request, until the guy one day slipped out onto the balcony while Andrew was smoking.
It was the closest they’d been since their impromptu wrestling match on the living room floor. Andrew blew smoke out of the side of his mouth and raised an eyebrow at Neil.
“Can I have one of those?” Neil hopped up onto the balcony rail like it was the most natural thing in the world and gestured for Andrew’s pack of cigarettes.
It was such a shift in attitude that Andrew shook a cigarette out of the pack and handed it over before his brain had time to catch up. Only when Neil placed it between his lips and leaned over for Andrew to light it did he have the wherewithal to gesture to the four-story drop at Neil’s back and say, “Try not to kill yourself.”
He did flick his lighter, though, and Neil leaned back with smoke curling around his head and a self-satisfied smile. He said, “So. Andrew Minyard.”
And really, it was over for Andrew from that point onwards.
The line rings once, twice, three times before it clicks. He barely waits for Aaron to mumble out a sleep-drunk, “Minyard?” before he snatches the phone out of Neil’s slack hand.
“Aaron. How fast can you get to the hospital?”
“What?” Fabric rustles on Aaron’s side of the line. “Andrew? Did something happen?”
“Yes.” He doesn’t have time for this. “How fast can you get to the hospital?”
“Fast.” Immediately, Aaron sounds more awake. “What happened?”
Andrew grits his teeth. Now is no time for dramatics, but he also knows that Aaron is unaware of most of what goes on in his life, at this point. “It’s Neil. He was — he was shot.”
“What?” He can hear Aaron pause in getting up. “How on earth was he shot?”
“Does that matter?” Andrew cannot help himself. He takes a breath. “It’s nowhere vital. But he’s bleeding a lot. He needs a doctor as soon as possible and I can’t take him to anyone else.”
Aaron takes a second, audibly composing himself, before the doctor's voice slips back on. “Alright. Just get him here. How far are you?”
Andrew slows down just enough that he can read the next street sign. “Maybe ten minutes.”
“I’ll be there. Is he conscious?” Keys jangle on the other side.
“So far.”
“That’s good. Try to keep him that way.” A door opens. “Drive safe.”
Andrew wrecked his first car three months after Neil moved in. If he believed in omens, he would consider Neil Josten the biggest one. Especially because it was, technically, his fault.
Neil would argue with that, but Neil argues with everything.
They were on the way home from a job, which Andrew was not even supposed to do. He had a deal. If there was one thing he made Kevin promise him, it was that he would never have to be a driver for these things again; he’d bought that car with mommy dearest’s life insurance money and had no intention of getting the license plate number onto some mafia hit list.
Which didn’t matter now anyway, because the car was a wreck.
Neil stood in the high grass on the shoulder, shivering in the cold night and refusing to look at Andrew. As if it was his fucking fault, and not Neil’s for getting them here in the first place.
They were both fine, physically. The car was not.
Andrew handled the police and the tow truck, and called a car for both of them. Taking an Uber when Neil was carrying multiple guns, and Andrew himself was strapped to the teeth with knives was perhaps unwise but also unavoidable unless they planned to walk several miles along the highway home.
He did not want to hear that Neil had done the very same before.
Neil walked with him to the nearby rest stop but did not say anything on the way or when they got into the car. He didn’t say anything at all until they got home, which Andrew had to admit was rather unusual for him.
They took three steps into the living room before Neil rounded on him, teeth bared. “If you can’t fucking drive then don’t come on my jobs.”
Andrew raised a brow. “I did not offer.”
White hot anger flashed in Neil’s eyes, and Andrew felt a strange thrill he could not quite decipher. It wasn’t until Neil stepped closer that he figured it out. Neil had been so docile, so borderline boring those past few weeks, that this sudden reversion to the feral creature Kevin had first dumped in Andrew’s living room was the most exciting thing to happen all month. Teeth sharp and claws out and eyes zeroed in on Andrew.
Andrew had always enjoyed a wild animal more than a tame one.
“Kevin made it seem like you were a bit more use than this,” Neil spat.
It was all made worse by the fact that Neil was dressed like this, for once in his life. No ratty sweatpants or a t-shirt that could be Kevin’s, but a sharp cut suit that fit him like a glove.
Andrew had to make himself look away. “Kevin is full of shit.”
“I figured that out myself.” Neil seemed no less angry than before. “But at least he’s good for something.”
Andrew scoffed. “What are you so mad about?”
“You almost killed us!”
“But I didn’t.” Andrew barely knew what was happening anymore, just that he itched to keep those feral eyes on his. “Takes a little more than that to get rid of a parasite.”
He did not have to specify. It worked either way, Neil’s eyes flashing sharper. “If you hate me that badly, you might as well just kill me right away. I know you have a gun.”
“And what?” Andrew deliberately ignored the implication that Neil had snooped around his bedroom. He locked the door whenever he left, but he’d never been under the illusion that that would really stop Neil. “I get arrested for murder and Kevin wouldn’t even bail me out ‘cause I killed his toy. No one wins.”
“Do not call me that.”
“What? His toy? What else are you?”
Those teeth again, sharp, glinting. Feral. Andrew itched.
It was more of a grin this time, radioactive blue eyes creasing with it. “Something that will kill you. Bastard.”
Andrew was sure of that. He could no longer remember having stepped so close, but Neil had not backed away an inch, and now there was not much more separating them. A few inches of breath, and the razor-sharp tip of Neil’s nose. “I’d like to see you try.”
“Oh, I will.”
Hands wound tight into his hair, sending tingles down his spine, but their mouths crashed together hard enough to blot it all out. Thoughts spun away in endless circles as he gripped Neil tight, dug his fingers into his back like he could pull him apart on the spot. Shred him to ribbons, melt him into himself.
It was all more bite than kiss, more teeth than tongue, and Andrew couldn’t get enough.
He’d known he was ruined before, but the seal was on it now. Letter signed and sent. Neil Josten buried the tips of his fingers into Andrew’s scalp and himself into his chest, and neither would ever leave again.
They tore away from each other minutes, hours later. Red and bruised and out of breath, Neil’s eyes wide and bright in a way that was no longer quite so wild. Andrew almost itched for another insult, anything to bring that creature back, but for perhaps the first time in his life, he came up blank.
Instead, he drew a knife from his sleeve and watched as Neil’s eyes zeroed in on it. “Catch.”
It sailed through the air for barely a second before Neil caught it, with an ease that threatened to make Andrew dizzy with arousal.
“Come on,” he said, instead of acknowledging that. He spread his arms, another knife shaken from his sleeve into his palm within the blink of an eye. “Try.”
Neil dove for him immediately.
Neil’s reverted back to babbling. Andrew grips the steering wheel in both hands, thumbs the appropriate distance apart, and tries to block it out.
“Andrew …” He sees, from the corner of his eye, as Neil’s head tilts back against the window. “Andrew …”
“Andrew,” Neil gasped against his mouth, fingers tightening on the back of Andrew’s neck. He’s holding on for dear life, like lowering any further into the leather of the backseat might kill him.
Andrew held on, too, hands fisting tight into the skin at Neil’s sides, feeling the tender arch of his ribs there, the texture of the scars that run up and down his abdomen. He felt almost crazed about it, the weight of Neil in his palm, the shape of his body he’d become so acquainted with. He didn’t think he could ever let go again.
Neil’s legs tightened around his hips, a single other point of contact Andrew allowed, for the sheer depravity of it, of allowing Neil to pull him further into himself. Both of their breaths stuttered, in unison, when Andrew slid in deeper.
“Andrew,” Neil said again, still half muffled into Andrew’s mouth, almost a prayer more than it is an address. He expected nothing in return, never had, except for Andrew to keep him like this, right there, their bodies entwined in the backseat of this expensive car. Their expensive car.
A heel dug, gently, into Andrew’s lower back. It was enough to urge him forward, to cant his hips into Neil, causing Neil’s breath to catch again and coaxing out another, “‘ndrew—”
“Yeah.” He kissed Neil, once on the lips, twice on the corner of his mouth, once more on the temple. He held him impossibly closer, pressed into him harder. “Yeah.”
It was not fast, messy, hard, or anything like it usually was. But it was good, and it was Neil, and it was theirs. Better, perhaps, for how close they were and how hot Neil gasped into him; worse for how little they actually moved, for how long it took, for how sweaty they got as the windows fogged up.
He stroked Neil off with his hand more than he fucked him into orgasm, and he pulled out right after and finished himself off onto Neil’s stomach. All very unromantic, from the look of it.
Afterwards, though, Neil carded his hands through Andrew’s hair, and he smiled, and Andrew kissed him once more.
Neil loses consciousness when they hit city limits.
It’s not ideal. Aaron said to keep him awake, and at least when he was Andrew was sure that he was—
But he’s breathing, steady and shallow. Andrew tries to focus on the sound. His hand slips from where it was perched on Neil’s shoulder, down his arm and to his cold, clammy hand.
The sweat between their palms mixes with the blood. Andrew holds onto him all the same.
All went according to plan, for about ninety-five percent of the plan.
They got in. Just the two of them, to raise the least amount of suspicion possible. Kevin and Renee were stationed outside, and the rest of the crew further out. Cars and guns at the ready, and a nice room made up at Abby’s house for their rescue.
Neil led the way, ducked around corners and slid along walls. Andrew stayed at his back, gun ready. He had the map of the place memorized, just in case, but he was not nearly as familiar with these halls as Neil was.
It was easy. Way, way too easy.
Jean was asleep in the very first room Neil insisted they check, curled in on himself on a cramped cot. He looked bad, though Andrew had never seen him look any better. Neil shook him awake, shushed his surprise, patted him down — for weapons or injuries, Andrew wasn’t sure — then led them all back out.
Andrew had just begun to allow himself to wonder why Jean had never left by himself, when it all went to shit.
Voices swelled to shouts behind them, and Neil cursed under his breath. When footsteps joined the voices, he stopped short and drew his own gun, pushing Jean and Andrew ahead of him.
“Go, go,” he hissed. “I’ll stay behind you.”
“Absolutely not.” Andrew fisted a hand into the front of Neil’s shirt and tugged him along. Jean did not stop for a second, just hurried up the stairs in front of them. “Come on.”
They hurried upwards, back towards the light. Behind them, a gunshot rang, and Neil braced his hands on Andrew’s shoulders as if to propel him forward. A second gun went off as a pair of steps hit the stairs behind them, and there was no more hiding now, anyway. They broke into a run without needing to coordinate.
Neil looked back, once, and cursed again.
“I was hoping he wouldn’t be here,” Neil panted. His face was pale and serious when Andrew chanced a glance at him, his brows furrowed. They had caught up with Jean, who was not as fast as they were. He was injured, clearly, hobbling and dragging his left foot, one of his arms cradled to his chest. Neil urged him forward without mercy.
More gunshots went off. Andrew listened to them hit the walls, and focused on how many turns there were left.
They reached the ground floor, and Neil slammed the fire door shut behind them. From there, it was only one more hallway until they reached the exit.
Jean groaned, holding onto his arm for dear life, but when he threatened to stumble and fall behind, Neil grabbed him hard and dragged him onward.
Fresh air hit Andrew’s face when he pushed open the door to the dingy parking lot. Neil pushed Jean off onto him, and Andrew half-dragged him into the night, both of his heavy arms slung over his shoulders. It was awkward, Jean being so much taller, but only a few yards across the concrete a car door popped open, and Renee hurried towards them.
The halo of her hair was illuminated strangely in the fluorescent light of the single streetlamp under which they’d parked the cars. She stashed her gun, and reached out to take Jean’s weight off of him.
“Andrew,” she said, but he could barely hear her through the ringing in his ears.
It was fine. They had made it out. They only needed to get the French motherfucker into the car and get out of here, as far away as possible. They were all fine, Renee propping Jean up against her as she led him towards her car, Kevin sticking his head out of the passenger side with his brow creased in concern, and Neil —
Was still at the door behind them. Andrew turned around just in time to watch him crumple to his knees.
Even sleeping, the breaths Neil takes sound ragged. He twitches every few seconds, as if fighting for consciousness still, and his hand grows clammier in Andrew’s.
Hypovolemic shock, Andrew thinks, at the same time that Neil says, “Mom —”
His voice sounds different, far away. Younger. Andrew has to keep his hand fisted around the wheel and try not to squeeze the other one too hard around Neil’s.
He has to focus. They’re no longer on the highway now, but weaving carefully through the city streets, around the first stragglers waking up for their early shifts. The hospital is close enough, but Andrew can feel Neil’s damp hand sliding from his, and has to keep his mind occupied.
“Mom,” Neil whispers again, pleading, awake but not conscious. “Mom, we’re almost in California.”
"My mother died here,” Neil said when they passed an exit on the interstate. Half Moon Bay.
It was a thing he had been doing, ever since that damned kiss. Revealing things, little bits and pieces of himself, his past, without Andrew asking. Like he simply wanted him to know.
It was infuriating. Andrew itched, almost anxious in his seat, aching to tear him apart, to pull over and drag him into the backseat and figure out what other sounds that mouth could make. The urge was borderline insane and definitely not healthy. They hadn’t kissed a single time since, though he sometimes caught Neil looking at him like he was waiting for it, still. Andrew needed to get a fucking grip.
So instead, he flicked his cigarette butt out of the window, and raised a single eyebrow at Neil.
He was lounging in the passenger seat, always at risk of propping his feet up against the dashboard despite the number of times Andrew had swatted at his knee for it. Another suit, in preparation for the meeting in San Francisco, though he had thrown the jacket into the back without care, and the first few buttons of his crisp shirt were undone. Andrew had to keep looking away from that throat, the slender slope of it, the tan skin, the pale scar tissue that ran right beneath his Adam's apple like a rash.
Neil caught his gaze, and the corner of his mouth quirked up though his eyes were still far away.
“She was shot,” he continued without prompting. “My father got her a few hours north of here. She didn’t tell me until it was too late.”
Andrew tapped his fingers on the wheel. He knew as well as Neil did that it was as much permission to keep speaking as Andrew would give him.
Neil smiled fully, then. “It was alright. I managed without her.” His head dropped back against the seat behind him, curls bunching up around his face. In the slowly warming evening light that fell in through his side of the car, he looked more like a hallucination than ever. “You should watch the road, Andrew,” he whispered.
Andrew gulped a deep breath, cutting him a look, and turned back towards the road.
He was used to driving with Neil, by then. Kevin’s promises and the fight that had preluded their kiss be damned, Neil would not stop asking him, and now Andrew had an incentive to be here.
California wasn’t easy for either of them, Andrew haunted by the prickling of his skin and Neil’s gaze drifting out the window every so often, growing distant and quiet for a few moments before he picked up the thread of their conversation again. But he was also Neil, and he threatened to put his socked feet on Andrew’s dashboard, and he argued that it was also his dashboard because he had paid for it, and he flipped through Andrew’s music collections and picked out only the most infuriatingly bland songs for them to listen to.
When they stopped to get gas, he popped into the store and returned with a sports drink for himself and a bag of candy for Andrew, which he dropped into Andrew’s outstretched hand with a grin.
They drove and listened to the music Neil picked out includingthe few songs Andrew did not allow him to turn off. Andrew watched the street signs pass them by, allowed his eyes to drift a few times to watch as their shadows caressed Neil’s face in a way that he wished he could, and tried to keep himself contained.
He did not know where this was going. This particular drive was leading them to a hotel in San Francisco where Neil — polished and beautiful and deadly in a suit he wears only for these kinds of events — would meet with people who were part of a past he did not reveal even to Andrew. Part of whatever his father had been involved in, part of why his mother had to bleed out on a beach in California. Part of the gun in his belt.
But this — Neil in his passenger seat, Neil stretching like a cat in the golden light, Neil catching his gaze every time Andrew allows himself to look and smiling, just a bit — he has no idea where it’s going.
The roads run by them and the music keeps playing and Andrew’s eyes keep flicking between the road and the boy by his side, and it’s only when they pull into the hotel parking lot that Neil finally presses the release on his seatbelt and leans over to kiss him again.
He was a tiny pinprick of light, red and blue and bright, and his hands were warm where they framed Andrew’s face to pull them together, but his mouth was even warmer. They could not pull away, neither of them, Andrew’s hands tangling in Neil’s expensive dress shirt, Neil’s fingers sliding through his hair, until Neil ended up in his lap and Andrew did not know how much time had passed since they’d parked.
Neil grinned at him when they pulled apart, his mouth red and shiny, his pupils blown, his shirt wrinkled. He was perfect.
So, perhaps Andrew had been waiting for it as well.
The hospital parking lot is nearly empty when they arrive, the sun still not quite in the sky. Andrew pulls up as close to the entrance as possible, and his feet hit the asphalt before the engine has quieted.
The only person in sight is an elderly lady having a smoke by herself near the front door, but Andrew has no time to waste on her. By the time he’s rounded the car and hefted Neil into his arms, slippery with blood and the flailing of his limp body hard to support, Aaron has run out the front door.
He looks almost like Renee in the pale morning light, blonde hair half illuminated, his face pinched.
“Fuck,” is all he says, but he’s there immediately, hands wrapping around Neil to help adjust him into Andrew’s arms, the sleeves of his white coat speckled with red within moments. “You got him?”
Neil is heavier like this than any of the other times Andrew’s picked him up before, and his head droops over Andrew’s shoulder, his cold forehead pressing against the side of his neck. His twitching had stopped somewhere between the road and now, and he’s simply still where Andrew holds him. “Yes,” he hears himself say, through his wadded up ears, though he doesn’t know how the word got out past his closed throat. “I’ve got him.”
The woman by the door has dropped her cigarette, her eyes wide, when they pass. Inside, a few nurses are waiting, and Neil is lifted out of Andrew’s grip before he can protest. He’s placed on a gurney, his blood already soaking through the sheets before they’ve rolled him away.
Aaron lingers for only a moment, a more serious mirror of Andrew’s own face. The years have washed out most of their eerie similarity, and Andrew is startlingly grateful for it. He does not know if his stomach could handle it now.
Aaron grips his arm, squeezes it. Years ago, that would have sent Andrew spiraling, but now he only leans into it. “It’s okay,” Aaron says. Full doctor voice, more professional than Andrew has ever heard him. “We’ve got him.”
He disappears, then, following the direction Neil was rolled away in.
And Andrew is alone.
Andrew Minyard remembers everything.
Gifted, his middle school teacher called him. Wasted potential, he heard his high school teacher say behind the closed door of a parent-teacher conference that he didn’t have a parent to attend. My little genius, Cass said, wiggling him by the shoulders in an imitation of a hug every time he brought home another aced test.
And it was always true. He was no genius, but he’s never had trouble remembering anything, his mind crystal clear, his memories never fading.
It’s a blessing until it’s not.
He remembers — everything. Time will never relieve him of the wounds that greedy hands inflicted, seared forever into his cursed brain, forced to replay the images over and over again when he lies awake at night. Every beloved touch threatens to revive a memory he can never hope to suppress.
For a long, long time, it was not a life he could live. For a long time, he would have done anything to quiet his brain. Drugs, alcohol, cars, sex. Anything for a moment of quiet.
Then there was Kevin. A broken birdie on his doorstep, and a purpose, at last.
He kept Kevin around mostly as a favor for his boss, who, unlike most people, respected Andrew enough to gain his respect in turn, and who was also Kevin’s dad. Kevin needed something, someone, to keep him grounded while he went through rehab, while he recovered from whatever cult Wymack had rescued him from. Andrew did not see how he was the best choice for babysitting a recent mafia reject, though he was loath to admit it and would never say so out loud, he supposed it was worth it in the end.
Because Kevin gave him something to do, at least. Something to keep his focus other than the drugs and the dingy bathroom blowjobs. Those still happened, but much less frequently than before Kevin.
And then there was Neil. Nate. Nathaniel Wesninski. Neil Abram Josten. Another broken thing, delivered straight to his doorstep by Kevin himself, with more fake passports and more knives on his person than Andrew could count on both hands. And Andrew remembers everything.
He remembers greedy hands and endless nights of pain and freshly washed sheets drying on a line in the yard.
But he also remembers Neil, prone on his couch. In a sharp suit on the shoulder of the highway. Perched on his kitchen counter with his legs swinging. Joining him on the balcony for a smoke.
He remembers the taste of every kiss, every sound Neil would make against him, every hidden little spot that makes him purr. Neil on his couch, in his kitchen, in his car, in his bed. Neil on his lap, hands carding through Andrew’s hair with an unexpected care, a secret smile he tucked away against Andrew’s neck.
Two, three years ago he would have scoffed at anyone who told him he would ever feel like this. He was best on his own, had learned the art of never relying on anyone else before he’d hit puberty. Sex was nothing more than a slightly more satisfying way to get off than the simple comfort of his right hand, and he would certainly never be entranced into something like a relationship.
And yet, here he is. Remembering.
A memory he has detested all his life, a brain that works against him day and night, becomes a blessing so easily. Neil curled up in the passenger seat as they drove, Neil wrangling the keys from him after a night out and driving them home, his hand placed on the backrest of Andrew’s seat as he looked back to reverse.
The orange golden tones of Neil’s hair illuminated in the sun, the exact shade of blue of his eyes, the freckles that spread from his face down his shoulders in the summer. Andrew tried to count them, tried to press his lips to each one in the shower while he rinsed the ocean salt out of Neil’s hair, but there were too many, and he was too easily distracted by Neil’s lips on his, by the fit of his waist between Andrew’s hands.
They drove across the country, left behind Andrew’s simple apartment for weeks at a time. Neil showed him all the places he’d been, and Andrew drove them to all the places they’d ever wanted to see.
There was still work to do, and people to take care of, and pasts to run from. But Neil got better, less jumpy, and gained his weight back. He smiled, and he was warm in the sun and under the sheets of Andrew’s bed, and he grew his hair out long enough to tie it back and then chopped it all off and then grew it out again.
Time flew past them like road signs on a highway, as they drove and worked and traveled and fucked, as Andrew fell irreversibly into something he would never call love, and knew without a doubt that Neil felt the same.
And he remembers it all. That’s the most important part.
The minutes after Neil collapsed, however, are blurry even to him.
Kevin was the first to cry out, jumping out of the car, and Renee almost dropped Jean in her shock. Andrew had not seen the blood until then, but suddenly it was everywhere, leaking past the hand Neil had pressed to his side.
He was next to him in seconds, and Renee was shouting at Kevin to get back in the car, and he could not even hear anything, see anything, except the enormity of Neil’s eyes and the pallor of his face, and the single word that dropped out those lips, “Andrew …”
He’d been fucking shot. Maybe he’d said that out loud, judging by the garbled sound of Renee’s voice that echoed back, no words discernible through the static in Andrew’s head. When had he been shot?
Maybe he asked that out loud, too, because Neil said, voice strained, “We needed to get out.”
“Shut the fuck up.” This, Andrew was sure he did say.
And then Neil was in his arms, a small, pained sound pressed out of him by the movement of Andrew’s steps, and he half-watched as Renee stowed Kevin and Jean in her car. He had no time to focus on where she was taking them, if she was keeping to the plan. He placed Neil into the passenger seat, watched as he flopped into it with a groan, and rushed behind the wheel.
He’d peeled out of the lot before Renee had shut the door behind Kevin.
The clock, high on the white wall of the waiting room, clicks towards 6:00 am in steady motions. Andrew watches, his knee bouncing, as the hand jumps forward to the twelve just as the door opens to let the light from the hallway spill in.
It’s not Aaron, but Katelyn. Not his favorite person to see in a moment like this, and she looks even more tired than Aaron did, but she’s holding a carrier with a blanket over it and she makes herself smile at him.
His niece was born almost three months ago, now, and he hasn’t been able to make it out to see her. Something in him twists at the thought that it should be only now that he gets to, in this dingy waiting room while he waits for the baby’s father to sew his boyfriend back together.
“Hey,” Katelyn says, the bags beneath her eyes enormous. She drops heavily into the chair next to him, and sets the baby carrier down in front of them.
Andrew almost doesn’t dare look, but beneath the pile of soft blankets he sees a tiny face, asleep.
“How are you?” Katelyn asks, though he doesn’t think she seriously expects him to indulge her small talk. She gives him a few seconds of grace, in case he does decide to respond he supposes, before she continues, “Aaron was worried. You haven’t called in a while.”
Andrew knows. Still, Aaron picked up. Still, Aaron drove to the hospital in the middle of the night.
Andrew taps his fingers, freshly scrubbed clean of Neil’s blood in the bathroom, on the armrest of his uncomfortable chair and stares at the clock. It’s past six now. He’s been here for over an hour.
“How bad was it?” Katelyn asks. She has never been known to let a conversation drop, though the years have softened her. Fine lines run alongside her eyes, creasing every time she smiles. “Aaron didn’t tell me much.”
She’s also a doctor, though not a surgeon like Aaron. He doubts she knows much about bullet wounds. He doesn’t know, actually, if Aaron knows much about bullet wounds.
“Bad,” he says, which he is sure would be a delight to Katelyn under any other circumstance. As it is, she has it in herself to remain stoically calm beside him, rocking the carrier with her foot. “The drive was too long.”
It was. Neil should have gone to the nearest hospital, not one so far away. It was Andrew’s own selfishness, his greedy belief that he knows what’s best for him and can trust no other doctor to make the world right again, that chased him down the highway with a bleeding Neil in his passenger seat.
The clock ticks another minute forward.
Katelyn says, “I’m sure you did the best you could.”
Andrew does not reply again. Cannot, for fear of either agreeing with or contradicting her.
She is silent for a few minutes, the carrier rocking back and forth under her foot, the baby sleeping peacefully within. “Aaron has been wanting to meet him,” she says, then.
Andrew cannot stop himself from answering. “Neil?”
“Yes.” She smiles, just a bit. “I think he was jealous.”
Andrew blinks at the clock. Watches as it passes another minute. He does not have words in response, but she does not seem to mind. After all, he rarely does.
“I don’t know. I never asked him. But he would talk about him sometimes, and the fact that you’ve never brought him around. The fact that you haven’t really visited since you met him.” She’s right. He hasn’t seen them for more than a few hours since the wedding. “I think he was jealous of someone stealing his brother away like that.”
“Someone stole my brother away, too.” He doesn’t know why he says it. It’s the most honest he’s ever been with her, but his chest feels raw enough already. Neil is bleeding out only a few rooms over. Neil might never get up again. He might never see him again, see those eyes again, hear that voice again. The realization is so damning that he might as well talk to Katelyn while he’s at it.
“I’m sorry you feel that way.” She sounds like she means it.
Andrew doesn’t have the will to say anything more. His throat aches like he’s been screaming for hours, though he has, in actuality, said very little. Perhaps even less than usual.
Katelyn doesn’t have the chance to say anything else, either.
The door opens to reveal Aaron covered in blood.
Andrew burned a CD for Neil.
After about the fourth time of driving him to the middle of nowhere and listening to the horrible choices he made out of Andrew’s wide selection of music kept in the glove box seemingly at random, he sat down in the little nook he called an office and spent most of the night working.
He had very little to go off of to figure out what kind of music Neil might like. Andrew had caught him bopping his head to a few of the songs, but he didn’t seem to mind anything terribly much as long as there was some kind of noise going on — “Mom would make us drive in silence,” he’d said, when pressed on it, “I’d like to not repeat that,” — so he had to get other sources he could rely on.
Kevin. The handful of friends Neil had apparently made at the city library. Which Andrew only found out through Kevin, as he hadn’t known Neil had ever even been to the library.
It was a stroke of good luck, though, because the library people, specifically a tall guy named Matt, whom Andrew had had half a mind to be mildly jealous of when his entire face had lit up at the mention of Neil, had had an actual idea of what Neil liked. Like, he actually talked to them about it.
It was also around this point in time that Neil had started sleeping in Andrew’s bed, instead of the couch, sprawled across the mattress and only half covered by the two separate blankets he insisted he needed. Andrew had done his best to wear him out early in the night and had pretended to fall asleep next to him, waiting for his breath to even out before he slipped out of bed and towards his desk.
He wasn’t entirely sure it had worked, as Neil was a light sleeper despite all, but he did not say anything and did not rise to look at what Andrew was doing.
He stowed the CD in the glovebox before they left in the morning, right in front of all the other ones, and it fell straight into Neil’s lap when he opened it for his daily pick.
“Oh?” He picked it up, turned it around. On the case, in thick sharpie, it read only: For idiots. And Neil was an idiot, but he grinned sharply at Andrew and peeled the CD out of its case immediately. “What’s this?”
Andrew only pulled into traffic in response, but it was enough for Neil. He pressed play, and the first song started, heavy on the bass. Noise. Neil liked that.
It was a good playlist. Neil liked it. Andrew could tell — if some fucking tall guy named Matt who works at the town library can figure out what Neil likes, then so can Andrew. And he did. Neil bopped along to the music on occasion, no more expressive than he usually was, but he did not skip a single song, and when Andrew chanced a look over at him, he looked up from the map in his lap and smiled.
It was good. They were good.
They were driving into the middle of nowhere, some remote location for Neil to do the shady work that he did, and Andrew was sick to his core of playing getaway driver, but it was Neil.
Neil who liked the CD he burned for him. Neil who slept in his bed. Neil who liked loud music and Neil who liked him.
That was the most important part. They were in the middle of nowhere, empty roads and empty land, street signs leading to nowhere. But it was with Neil, and he was looking at Andrew with those godforsaken eyes, and the sun hit the side of his face just right.
And he smiled, and said, “Watch the road, Andrew.”
“He’ll be alright,” Aaron says in the gray hallway outside the recovery room. He’s still wearing the coat he helped carry Neil in, the bloodstains on the sleeves now washed out brown in the white light.
Andrew looks no better, covered head to toe in blood that has been drying, flaking off for hours.
“He’d lost a lot of blood, but he’s tough. We got the bullet out and the wound closed. Luckily it didn’t hit anything vital. It was really mostly the blood loss that did him in so much.” Aaron's hands knead together between them. It’s a tell Andrew is familiar with — he wants to say something. He does not, in the end, and simply nods. “I have to go report … all of this. You can go in. I can’t say when he’ll wake up, but call a nurse when he does.”
He disappears then, coat flapping behind him. Andrew is alone once more in the cold hospital hallway, barring the nurse he sees slinking around a corner at the opposite end of the hall. He closes his eyes for a moment. Breathes.
Neil will be alright. Aaron is the only doctor in the world Andrew would trust those words from.
He pushes the door open.
It’s a small room, clearly meant for special patients. Neil is the only one here now, pale and small in the bed they placed him in. An IV is still hooked up to his wrist, dripping clear liquid.
He looks so different, so subdued. Even bleeding out on the passenger seat, even unconscious, he still had fight left in him. Like this, he looks much closer to death than he did two, three hours ago.
But he is alive. A monitor beeps steadily next to the bed, and Andrew, stepping closer, can see the regular rise and fall of his chest. He is alive, alive. A white bandaid attaches the IV to his arm, and few other, smaller ones cover what must be scrapes along his arms and cheeks.
They must have removed his bloody clothes during surgery, though Andrew does not know what they did with them, as he’s only wearing a light green hospital shift under the thick covers, covering up what must be the extensive bandaging across his side.
Andrew steps up to the bed, only to sink down on the chair beside.
He has never liked hospitals. He does not quite understand how Aaron could have chosen to be in one every day for the rest of his life, after the sheer amount of times they had to be in one as teenagers. Andrew remembers, with as much clarity as he does everything else, waking up to Aaron’s pale, wide-eyed face hovering over the side of his hospital bed. Both of his arms had been in casts, but the thing he recalls as the most uncomfortable was still the scrape in Aaron’s voice when he said, “Andrew. Mom is dead.”
He has avoided hospitals to the best of his ability since. They rarely harbor the good kind of memories.
Neil remains unmoving, proving his point, and Andrew finds himself waiting once more, this time without a clock to watch. He has his phone in his pocket, technically, which has a clock, but he’s too tired to reach for it.
It occurs to him only then how long it’s been since he’s slept. More than twenty-four hours. Neil took a nap before they left, huddled up in the bean bag they’d bought the week before, the first real purchase Neil added to the apartment, but Andrew was too anxious then. He wishes he did, now, instead of pacing in circles around the kitchen.
His eyes drift closed, all adrenaline drained out of him at last now that he’s here, now that Neil is here, calm and asleep and pale, but alive.
He used to never sleep in front of Andrew. If he fell asleep on the couch before Andrew had gone to bed himself, he would jerk awake at the mere suggestion of footsteps in the same room. No matter how silent Andrew tried to be, he could not sneak past him, and Neil would glare at him hard if he tried.
It took a while, weeks, months, until the first time Andrew saw him asleep. He looked younger, the frown that usually pulled at his mouth eased away, his body fully relaxed. It was less than a week before that job Andrew drove him to, before they crashed the car. Before the kiss. Perhaps Andrew should have known then already that his life was about to take a turn no one could have predicted.
The first time they slept together was not much later — Neil collapsed on the couch, his suit only half chucked off, and Andrew on the armchair beside him. It hadn’t been planned, but it was late, and he was tired.
He woke up the next morning to find Neil already awake, blinking at him from the couch like a lazy cat.
It became a thing of its own all too soon. Neil migrated from the couch to Andrew’s bed without any real conversation happening about it, just one night after Andrew sucked him off in the shower, he wandered out of the bathroom in just a towel, fell backward onto the mattress, and never quite left again.
They learned how to sleep around each other then, Neil always deathly still like he expected to be found at any moment, Andrew pressed backwards against the wall to keep as much space between them as possible.
Until they loosened, until months bled into a year, then two, and things became easier to handle. Until the shape of Neil beside him in bed was second nature, and to wake up to the sight of him became expectation rather than surprise. Neil began to wiggle around more the more comfortable he got, but by that point Andrew no longer minded. They twisted around each other, rarely ever quite touching, but still close.
And in the mornings, Neil would wake him with no more than a quiet, “Andrew.”
He opens his eyes to sunlight streaming in through the hospital window, much brighter than he remembers only moments ago, and Neil is awake.
He’s pale still, and he blinks slowly, but his lips open on another word, “Hey.”
Andrew’s mouth tastes fuzzy, a clear sign that he did fall asleep, but he sits up immediately. He’s supposed to call a nurse, he knows, but when has he ever listened to Aaron? Perhaps he will start, but not now.
Now, he only sees Neil, gray and small in this hospital bed, but alive, and awake. The corners of Neil’s lips tug up into a tiny smile, and a whirlpool of memories forces itself through Andrew’s brain.
He wishes with an ache that he could categorize every single time he’s seen that smile more clearly. The first time Neil smiled at him, not just around him: from the passenger seat of the car, on a sunny day in Colorado. Andrew said something that Neil thought was funny, or perhaps stupid, and he smiled at him like this. The first time Neil smiled at him at home, stretched out along the length of what was still only Andrew’s bed then, naked from the waist down and one of his legs propped up like Andrew hadn’t just been between them. He looked up at Andrew with content eyes, still flushed red down to the collarbones that peeked out the collar of his shirt, and he smiled.
He smiles at him now, too, eyes crinkling at the corners, and something that tastes distinctly like relief washes through Andrew’s chest. It’s so foreign a feeling it threatens to make him lightheaded.
Neil’s hand, attached to the IV, rests between them, and Andrew reaches out for it as if to steady himself. Their palms fit together, now clean of blood, warm and dry, and Neil curls his fingers around Andrew’s.
“We are never doing this again,” Andrew’s mouth says, almost entirely without input from his brain. Neil, who has always been able to read him better than anyone else, smiles a little wider in reply. “You are so fucking stupid.”
“Yeah.” Neil squeezes his palm. “Thank god I have no other friends left in there.” He wiggles a bit, then, looks up at the IV. “When can I get out of here?”
Andrew snorts. “Take that up with the doc.”
A realization visibly dawns in Neil’s eyes. He looks around the room for only a moment before he asks, “Aaron?”
Andrew makes himself hum. He has long given up on trying to detest how well Neil knows him. “He might be preoccupied, though. Katelyn brought the baby.”
Neil’s eyes light up. “You saw her?”
Andrew hums again, and ignores the way Neil squeezes his hand again.
“I’m glad.”
Andrew glares at him, but Neil continues before he can think of anything to say to that,
“When do I get to meet them?”
“They’re outside,” Andrew says simply. He squeezes Neil’s hand back, then, feels the shift of his bones and sinews beneath his palm. So fragile. So alive, when Neil squeezes back once more.
A shudder wracks through Andrew involuntarily. He needs a proper night of sleep desperately.
“Just —” he says, not quite knowing where that sentence is going. “Just this. For a moment.”
Neil’s gaze softens. “Okay.” He shifts his hand to tangle their fingers together properly, and holds on tight.
Andrew allows himself to drop forward just a bit, zero in on their hands together. Breathes. Two years of memories leading up to this single moment. He wishes it never happened. He wishes nothing else ever happened. He remembers everything that’s ever happened. He’s never letting the memories go.
Neil is alive. Neil is alright. Neil is here with him.
He breathes out, lifts Neil’s hand to kiss the back of it, and says, “Okay.”