Work Text:
When Andrew was younger, he spent hours hiding in libraries or laying out in the warm California sun and imagined himself as a warrior. He imagined slaying monsters with twelve eyes and big horns, monsters who roared and snarled and were as fictional as the books Andrew read late into the night. They slumped to the ground, lifeless and bloody, and Andrew arose victorious, sword held high with a triumphant grin.
These were monsters he could conquer. The ones he knew, the ones with iron grips and whispered threats and familiar, evil gazes, were too big and too real, and no matter how Andrew tried, he never seemed to be able to fight them off.
“Stop that,” one of Andrew’s many foster mothers—Susan—snapped one day at dinner, grabbing his arm. Her fingers were cold on the thin skin of his wrist. “No playing at the table.”
Andrew had been making one of his foster brother’s action figures run circles around his plate, preparing for battle against a red-clawed monster. He dropped the toy on the table and ripped his arm out of Susan’s grip, wedging his hand beneath his thigh as she clicked her tongue and lifted her fork again.
“Aren’t you a little old to be playing with toys?” Stewart, his foster father, asked, brown eyes dark in the dim light. The November chill crept in from the cracked window and curled around Andrew’s spine as the gazes of his foster siblings caught on his face. “How old are you?”
“Nine,” Andrew said, serrated anger seeping into his voice.
“Don’t take that tone with me, boy,” Stewart said, and Andrew clenched his jaw and stared down at his plate. “Thomas stopped playing with those toys when he was seven.”
Andrew pushed his mashed potatoes around his plate, rage coiling in his gut.
Stewart snapped his fingers. “Hand me that toy. You don’t need that anymore.”
Andrew stopped thinking about fighting his monsters after that. He stopped thinking about fighting any monsters at all.
With those years of his life long in his rear-view mirror, Andrew stamped down the feelings crawling up the back of his neck each time he saw something that reminded him of some distant memory. Before, he could match whatever he saw to a house and a memory with clinical detachment, give names to the faces that floated to the surface and tuck them away in the boxes stacked in the back corner of his mind. Now, whatever unnamed emotions that accompanied his past bled into the edges of his vision until he was forced to spend most of his free time on the roof. The frantic gallop of his heart drowned out any lingering feeling until apathy settled over him in a muddy, familiar haze.
Neil noticed, of course. He’d never quite kicked his habit of staring, which inevitably led to him following Andrew to the roof and letting his feet dangle off, swinging in the air.
“I like this time of day,” Neil said one night as the sun dipped below the horizon, tucking his hands beneath his legs. Andrew hummed something unintelligible, an encouragement to continue, so Neil spoke again. “No one can see you. It’s much easier to blend in.”
“Makes it easier to run,” Andrew concluded, and Neil tilted his head thoughtfully.
“Yes. But it also means I have to hide less.” Neil drew his knees toward his chest and pillowed his cheek on one. “You don’t like this time of day,” Neil deduced.
“No,” Andrew said, and Neil took that without asking for anything else. He just nodded and snagged the pack of cigarettes on the chilly cement between them, shaking the lighter loose into his palm.
Andrew hated him. Andrew hated the ease with which he accepted his short answers, hated that he knew which days to push and which days to retreat. Hated that Neil had wormed his way under Andrew’s skin. They were two sides of the same coin, irrevocably and dangerously bound, and it left Andrew feeling unspeakingly exposed. With anyone else, he would have loathed that feeling with a ferocity that turned his stomach inside out. With Neil, it made Andrew want to wipe the smile off his face—with his fist or his mouth, Andrew hadn’t decided.
“When is your favorite time of day, then?” Neil asked, sticking a cigarette between his lips, and Andrew thought about taking it out of his grasp and pulling him in.
Andrew looked away. “The afternoon.”
Neil nodded again, taking a slow drag. He waited to see if Andrew would say anything else, and when he didn’t, they sat in silence.
Throughout Andrew’s childhood, mornings inevitably brought pain. They brought tending to wounds and scalding hot showers and scrubbing at his skin until it was bright red and raw. By the time noon swung around, depending on what stage of life Andrew was in, he’d either been forced into school or playtime with his foster siblings or helping his foster father weedwack their lawn. In the afternoon, though, Andrew would get off the school bus or rush out the front door and walk to the nearest library, rain or shine. He’d sit in the dated seats and curl up with a new book and watch as people filtered in and out of the building, silent and observant in the corner.
Nighttime held memories Andrew wished he couldn’t unearth. But the afternoons were peaceful and quiet, hours spent climbing into some fantasy world long enough to be someone else.
Neil flicked his cigarette off the edge of the roof and moved to stand, presumably to allow Andrew a moment alone. Andrew grabbed his wrist, and when Neil paused, pushed another cigarette into his waiting palm.
He couldn’t say the word “stay.” It was too vulnerable, too inadequate, too bitter as it crawled up his throat and to the tip of his tongue. He couldn’t say “stay,” so he said, “Light it,” and Neil’s lips tugged into a smile as he dropped back down next to Andrew and lit the cigarette. Andrew took it from Neil’s hands and placed it between his lips, but he didn’t quite mind when Neil removed it only a few seconds later to tug him into a kiss.
Bee noticed, because of course she did. She wasn’t around to see him spending hours on the roof, his heart thumping in his chest so loudly that his thoughts petered away, but she saw the tension in his shoulders as she asked questions, as she gently prodded him closer to a conclusion he wasn’t yet ready to reach.
“You are holding back,” she noted with a tone so benign she could have been talking about the weather. “You should respect your boundaries and listen to yourself when you feel you’ve gone too far. But I know that you are well aware that some discomfort is necessary for growth.”
Andrew resisted the urge to clench his jaw against any further words and took a jagged breath through his nose. “There is nothing to say.”
“Andrew.”
Some indecipherable emotion clawed its way through Andrew’s stomach, and he stared at Bee’s glass figurines, the sunlight catching on their edges and bouncing onto the ceiling. “What do you expect me to say?”
She waited for a moment longer, eyes lingering on his face, then asked, “Would you like more cocoa?”
She was offering him an out, if he needed one. Andrew thought of pressing Neil’s hand to his chest for the first time, of the fear that ate through his ribcage and the warmth that spilled from Neil’s fingertips, and pushed forward.
“It is harder to remember,” Andrew said, hoping Bee could hear the words unspoken, and she nodded in understanding.
“It is possible that as you grow, the emotions you categorized and buried as a child will unearth themselves.” Bee tilted her head and took a sip from her yellow mug. “Is this what you believe is happening?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think about that?”
“I think that it unnecessarily makes my life more difficult,” Andrew said. “They weren’t affecting me when they were out of reach. I never wanted them in the first place.”
“Maybe you did not want these specific emotions, but we have been working on shedding perhaps some of your apathy,” Bee said, gently raising a brow. “Allowing yourself to be immune to the events of your life served you in the past, but it does not serve you now. You do not want to be immune to Neil, do you?”
“I don’t want anything,” Andrew said, and Bee smiled.
“Right. Forgive me,” Bee said. She jotted something down and glanced at the time on her watch. “There is something called your inner child. Have you heard of it?”
“No.”
“There are a few different ways people describe your inner child, but I describe it as the part of your subconscious that still behaves like and holds the emotions of your younger self.” Bee waited to make sure Andrew understood, then continued. “As you can imagine, this is a part of yourself that I believe you are out of touch with.”
“Why would I pay attention to who I was as a child,” Andrew said, not quite a question, and Bee smiled.
“Because your inner child still affects you now. The foundation of your character is created when you are a kid, and although you have changed as you have grown older, you did not lose that part of yourself, Andrew.”
“What’s your point?”
Bee was unaffected by his sharp tone. “Perhaps the feelings accompanying these memories are not things to ignore or suppress. Like I said, filing away your emotions served you as a child. It kept you safe from the nature of your life in foster care. But now, you are safe. You have been a Fox for four years and with Neil for three. These emotions are bubbling up because there is not a threat anymore. Maybe it is time to allow yourself to feel them.”
Andrew stared at her for a long moment, turning her words over in his mind. It was pointless, he decided eventually. It would only serve to slow him down and distract him.
“I know you don’t see the point in allowing these emotions to arise,” Bee said, “but at least think about it, or perhaps even try it one time. The next time you are reminded of something from your past, allow the emotions that accompany the memory to arise as well. If you hate it, we can move on.”
It was a few days before Andrew had to consider Bee’s words. He and Neil were sitting on the couch, Neil’s ankle hooked around Andrew’s as he worked on schoolwork and Andrew messed with his phone. Nicky emerged from the bedroom and flicked on the TV, browsing the channels despite Neil’s frustrated huff.
“That’s distracting,” Neil said, the end of his pencil between his teeth as he frowned down at his homework.
“Sorry,” Nicky said, and finally settled on America’s Funniest Home Videos. It was an odd choice, considering he had been religiously following Real Housewives of Orange County since last summer, and it tugged Andrew back into a brown couch in a dim living room, one of his foster mothers at his side and his foster siblings scattered throughout the room.
This was house number six. A three-bedroom, one bathroom home filled to the brim with five kids—three biological, two foster. They had dogs that were in perpetual need of a bath, and Andrew’s bedroom steadily stank more and more like mildew the eight months he stayed there.
His foster parents loved AFV. They insisted the kids watch with them every Sunday, so they all piled into the living room and split two bags of microwave popcorn between the seven of them. The kids always raced to get to the couch first, since there was only one and the adults took up half of it on their own. Andrew and his foster sister, Lily, had won this time.
Nausea hit Andrew’s stomach like a bullet, and he pushed away from the couch and toward the dorm door, ignoring Nicky’s confused protest. He tried to close the door calmly behind himself and failed.
His legs took him to the roof on autopilot, but as he stepped into the cool, night air, he remembered Bee’s words. These emotions are bubbling up because there is not a threat anymore. Maybe it is time to allow yourself to feel them.
Andrew let out a sharp breath and turned around, freezing when the door to the roof swung open to reveal Neil.
“Are you—?”
“Come on,” Andrew said, and he wrapped his hand around Neil’s wrist to tug him all the way to the parking lot.
“Where are we going?” Neil asked.
“Do you have your keys?”
Neil shook his head, and Andrew dug his car keys out of his pocket and pushed them against Neil’s chest.
“Drive,” was all Andrew said as he climbed into the passenger seat. Whatever feeling this memory brought with it turned his lungs to ice, and he took quiet, shallow breaths, ignoring the look Neil sent his way.
He poked and prodded at the memory and the coldness seeping behind his ribs. He remembered hours spent on the lawn and jumping through sprinklers in the 110 degree summer. He remembered running to the school bus and shoving one of his classmates into the mud.
He remembered roaming hands in the laundry room, remembered fear crawling across his skin and wrapping around his throat.
Andrew had spent so many years burying unpleasant emotions deep into the soles of his feet, and they had coagulated into a jumbled, indecipherable mess. He wasn’t entirely sure he would be able to pick them apart, let alone call them by name.
“Andrew,” Neil said, and Andrew wondered if he had been saying his name for a while. In the back of his mind, he felt Neil’s stare, but he shook his head. Neil turned forward and kept driving.
Dread. That was the emotion clinging to his ribcage. AFV was a tradition, a routine. So was what came afterward. Andrew didn’t like that tradition as much as the first.
Neil pulled into the parking lot of a Dollar General and killed the engine, twisting in his seat. Andrew exhaled and met his gaze.
“What happened?” Neil asked.
Andrew knew that if he wanted, he could tell Neil no and Neil would accept it without argument. They could move on and browse the store and avoid the conversation entirely. But Neil blinked at Andrew, brows furrowed slightly, and Andrew spoke before he’d even decided what to say.
“Some of my foster parents used to watch AFV,” Andrew said, hating the hoarseness coating the words, and Neil frowned.
“Do you not want Nicky to watch it?” Neil asked.
“It’s fine,” Andrew said, and if he were still on his drugs, he would have laughed at how much he sounded like Neil. He pushed open the car door with a bit more force than necessary. “You broke your fidget toy two days ago. We’re getting another.”
Neil followed Andrew inside the store without complaint, and he kept his mouth shut when they got back in the car to drive back to Fox Tower. He was silent while Andrew led them up to the roof, his boots echoing through the stairwell as he took heavy steps.
“My mother liked Jeopardy,” Neil said, legs tucked beneath him. “We didn’t watch it that often, maybe only a handful of times throughout our years on the run, but she always liked it.” His shoe was an inch from the edge of the building. Andrew idly wondered how his breathing was so steady.
“Did you?” Andrew asked.
Neil shrugged. “It was alright. I preferred Exy games, but she never let me watch.” Neil turned over his hands and regarded the scars on his knuckles, a wordless thought in his gaze. After a moment, he twisted his hand to face Andrew, palm out, and waited.
For a long moment, Andrew debated pushing his hand away. When Neil began to withdraw, Andrew laced their fingers together, thumb rubbing across the raised skin of his scars, and released a breath as Neil tipped his head to rest on Andrew’s shoulder.
“It’s late,” Andrew said.
“Yeah,” Neil said, but they sat silent for a few minutes longer, Neil’s hand warm in Andrew’s grasp. Andrew watched his cigarette tumble toward the dark ground below and allowed Neil to pull him into a short kiss, then followed him down to the dorm.
The next time an emotion dragged across Andrew’s spine like the knives in his arm bands, he allowed himself approximately two minutes to feel it before he stared over the edge of the roof, adrenaline coursing through his veins in a sickening rush. Bee never specified how long he should “allow himself to feel,” but two minutes would have to do.
“So you tried it,” Bee said at their next session, one brow raised. “What do you think about it?”
“It’s pointless,” Andrew said.
Bee nodded. “It might feel that way at first. But I think it will allow you to heal a bit more from all of the trauma you weren’t quite able to process as a child.”
Andrew stared blankly at her.
“I know that it’s easier to ignore those feelings. I know it’s convenient to be able to tuck them away. But you see where it’s gotten you now and how difficult it has become to be in touch with your emotions for any amount of time, no matter how short.” Bee took a sip from her mug, silent as though she was waiting for Andrew to respond. Her gaze flitted down to his hands, resting on his knees, and back at his face. “I am not saying that you need to reach a place where you’re constantly bombarded with emotions. You have learned how to steel yourself against the world, and that has served you thus far. But it doesn’t serve you with Neil, nor with your family. You care about them, although you may not admit it, and that is something you are allowed to feel. It will not hurt you. They will not hurt you.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Andrew said.
“None of them are like those who hurt you in the past,” Bee said. “I can say that confidently because they would not be important to you if they were. You know this as well as I do.”
“That doesn’t mean—” Andrew stopped himself short, unsure of where the words came from, unsure what to do with this truth he didn’t even know was his.
“They won’t hurt you,” Bee finished for him, and Andrew clenched his jaw until his teeth ached.
“They can’t. They mean nothing to me.”
“I believe we’ve both seen differently,” Bee said gently. Her tone said she was teetering toward an edge she did not like to approach, that she was about to say something to force Andrew to face a hard truth. She hated it as much as Andrew did, had told him years ago that she did not mean to “overstep,” and Andrew, drugged out of his mind, had waved her off. Now, Andrew had to look away from her, had to resist the urge to leave for the roof of Fox Tower.
“Aaron was out of line when he told me about your relationship with Neil. Neil disappeared without telling you where he was going and nearly died. You care for them, and although most of us do not like to admit it, caring for people gives them the ability to hurt us.”
I’m nothing. I’ll always have and be nothing, Neil had said after their first trip to Columbia, his hollowed-out gaze on Andrew. The memory was coated in the sugary, kaleidoscopic haze of Andrew’s drugs, and he pushed it aside, pushed away the pull he’d felt toward Neil even back then.
And I am nothing. And as you’ve always said, you want nothing. Andrew remembered Neil’s barely-there smirk, remembered the taste of his mouth when Andrew kissed him to shut him up.
Thinking about those days blew a hole wide in the center of his chest, gaping and vulnerable, and Andrew nearly shoved away from the couch. He could have never seen this coming. He’d never anticipated having a weakness, never planned for being so known, and now that he was, he—
“You care for Neil,” Betsy said, and her words threw Andrew back into the present.
He thought of red curls and wide grins and warm kisses on freezing cold cement. He remembered wanting to tear the stadium in Binghamton apart brick by brick, remembered kissing Neil under the covers in a cabin and breaking Riko’s arm as Neil kneeled in front of him, half-limp.
He remembered, and it wasn’t painful. It didn’t make his ribs ache or his throat burn. It didn’t make him want to pull his knives out of their sheaths or throw a punch. He remembered, and he wanted, and Andrew felt a bit unmoored.
Bee understood Andrew’s silence. She nodded. “You care for him.”
Andrew’s jaw unclenched. “Irrelevant,” he finally said, and Bee’s serious expression broke with a faint smile.
“Not all emotions are bad, and what you feel for Neil is not a weakness. If you close off all emotions, you lose the good ones as well,” Bee said. “Allow yourself to feel, Andrew. It’s safe to feel now.”
Neil was waiting for Andrew on the couch when Andrew got back, knees drawn to his chest. He dropped his legs at the sight of the dorm door opening, fiddling with the camera Andrew had gotten him a few months before.
Andrew pushed the camera out of Neil’s hands and tugged him to his feet, capturing him in a kiss that pulled all the air out of Andrew’s lungs. Neil made a surprised noise against his mouth and wrapped his arms around Andrew’s shoulders, leaning into the hands Andrew planted on his waist. Andrew tightened his grip and knew Neil heard the words he would never say, knew Neil was content with what little feelings Andrew could offer him, and Andrew hated him. He hated him with a fierceness that made him press as close as possible, made him sweep his tongue across Neil’s and pull Neil’s lower lip between his teeth.
Andrew released Neil, and he nearly had to look away from the wide-eyed, flushed stare Neil gave him. Neil pressed his fingertips to his mouth, blinking, and covered the shit-eating grin that overtook his face.
“What—?”
Andrew pushed Neil’s hair away from his face and stepped away, already starting toward the door. “Roof,” Andrew said, and Neil rushed to follow.
Neil rambled about Exy practice as the sun set, and Andrew settled back into himself, bit by bit. The apathy he knew so well bled into the edges of his thoughts, but in the center of it was a Neil-shaped hole, and for once, Andrew had no desire to ignore it.
Eventually, he pressed Neil against the ground, kissing the words off his lips. The ghost of warmth poured from Andrew, and Neil accepted it all. He never asked for more, never asked Andrew to be someone he wasn’t or give something he couldn’t, and Andrew knew Bee was right. He knew that he no longer needed to force himself to feel nothing.
This, Andrew thought, could kill me. He will be the death of me.
Neil had said he was nothing, and Andrew, idly, with Neil’s mouth on his and hands in his hair, wondered if Neil was everything. It was a stupid thought—one that didn’t feel like his, one that sounded like all the things he would never forgive Neil for saying, but it took root deep in his chest anyway.
“I hate you,” Andrew said into their kiss, and Neil huffed out a laugh, pulling back far enough to press his lips to the edge of Andrew’s jaw.
“I know,” Neil murmured against his skin, and Andrew brushed his lips against Neil’s temple, did it again when Neil leaned into it. “I know,” Neil repeated, and Andrew kissed him.