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“Neil. You’re still bleeding,” Andrew says, after everything.
It’s twelve minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve, Andrew has been home for seventy-two hours, and Neil has been in the bath for all of one minute before he notices it too. There’s blood on the insides of his boxers. The pile of clothes and bones and Neil Josten are at Andrew’s feet on the bathroom tiles, and Andrew isn’t doing anything but standing there with them, staring at the remnants, the remains. The remains of –
“It doesn’t hurt,” Neil says, from somewhere so far away it feels as if he is sinking. Andrew had undressed him, told him to stay, pulled away all the blood and dirt and awful humanness sticking to his skin, and left it behind to rot on the bathroom tiles. But all the time in the world has suddenly caught up to him, the weight of it burying into his bones underneath all the bleeding scars, and Neil grips the edge of the bathtub to make everything stop coming undone. The water is lukewarm. His body aches, but differently. Andrew had stayed, too; but so had something else.
The remains of –
“Neil,” Andrew says, low and steady, so silent in the wake of Wymack’s bathroom that it hurts. Their coach is someone beyond the door, hiding all the knives so Neil can’t try to cut his face open again, and Andrew is stuck in here with him, cleaning his wounds, watching him sit motionlessly in the bathtub. The water is turning pink. Andrew is very still.
Neil blinks.
“It doesn’t hurt. The blood’s old,” he tells Andrew again, still looking down at Neil’s bloodied underwear and finding the remnants of something else amongst it too. His chest hurts with the awful humiliation of it all, and Neil thinks that Andrew knows that too, all the same. He looks down at Neil from where he is standing in the centre of the bathroom. Everything about him is hollow.
“You need to be looked at.”
Neil stares back, eyes empty and hard and dark. “No,” he says, letting his voice infect itself with something colder, more here than the rest of his body is willing to be, and tells Andrew definitively, “I don’t need a shrink. I don’t need a hospital. I don’t need you looking at me like that.”
“You need a lot more than that, rabbit,” Andrew tells him, and –
Neil doesn’t know when it had happened, but he blinks and suddenly Andrew is in the water with him. He’s still wearing all his clothes, his shoes, his knives, because maybe taking everything off seemed redundant, inane.
The water sloshes at Andrew’s movements, the sudden abruptness creating waves around the tiles, the pink-tinged water seeping into all of the bathroom cracks of Wymack’s apartment like it won’t ever fucking leave. Neil blinks at Andrew as Andrew stares and stares and stares back at him, trying so hard to understand the man who sits in front of him. All of Andrew’s clothes are drenched, weighing him down in the same way Neil is, naked with nothing but the scars to his skin.
But this – that ugly, awful deja vu coming undone in the water for Andrew to see, to feel – shouldn’t and doesn’t matter, and so he tells him, “November didn’t mean anything at all to you, so why should this mean anything to me?”
He is beyond feeling all the things he had felt at Evermore, on that burning black sand beachfront in California, inside the basement of his childhood home in Baltimore. Sticky sheets, sticky vinyl, sticky hair dye in his eyes, someone else’s sticky semen in his boxers. It had all been so funny and awful and undyingly nonsensical, the concept of murdering all the pain all because you let someone hurt you, until it isn’t anymore.
Andrew disagrees the way Neil knew he would.
The surface breaks, water is everywhere, Andrew has his fingers gripping into Neil’s chin with one hand, and they’re staying there. “I wasn’t anything,” he says, voice low, finger’s white. “You’re different.”
Neil’s voice doesn’t waver. “Because it’s not the same.”
Somehow, he also knows that Andrew doesn’t believe him. “Liar,” Andrew bites.
Neil’s eyes don’t break away from him when he tells him – awfully, concretely, undeniably – “I let it happen.”
“Did you say yes?” Andrew says, his breath on Neil’s lips. Without taking his hand away from Neil’s jaw, Andrew uses the other to point to the underwear still bearing all of Neil’s undoings, his scars that will remain with him, but differently. Andrew isn’t understanding him.
Neil tries again, “No, but–”
“So stop it. Stop talking,” he says. Andrew’s hands are now against his cheeks, the touch so grounding, so there , like he cannot convenience himself any other way that Neil is still here, right in front of him. “Stop defending it. This will never be your fault so shut up.”
He doesn’t. Instead he pushes back with the syllables of Andrew’s own name. He needs Andrew to stop talking. Neil says again, “I didn’t say anything. It’s on me. I know that and I’m fine. I’m okay, so don’t–”
“You didn’t do anything,” Andrew whispers.
Neil blinks, staring at Andrew for a long time, finding it so impossibly difficult to make it all make sense.
Anything, anything, anything.
Neil had lied there, and Riko had –
Had lied with him. He had collided their mouths together, bite down on Neil’s lips until they bled, shove his tongue so far down his throat, Neil choked on the spit. Riko had tasted like rotting butcher’s meat and metal. His mouth burned every inch of Neil’s skin until it charred off in horrifying chunks that wept blood and pus, disintegrating like human pieces of auburn hair and acidic bleach in a different bathroom from his one.
But Riko had gotten bored quickly. Maybe Neil did too. It was a different ache but a tolerable one. There are buried, gallowed parts of his own cartography that have been moulded together over the decades to make Neil who he is, and those two awful weeks shouldn’t have mattered much in the galaxy of hurt that he’d been condemned to survive. So, Neil decided that they didn’t. It had become all the same kind of bearable; it hadn't been worth screaming. That bed had existed in an indifferent universe made of all the same smithereens that Neil had been ruined enough to be accustomed to, but it didn’t hurt because he had let it hurt. All the pain is still somewhere, laying waste amongst the gallows of the universe Neil neglects to acknowledge, hiding there like an unsolvable paradox, an equation that doesn’t have the mercy to un-exist; but here lies Neil Josten too, defying everything, compartmentalising the agonies and letting them die because he said so.
So –
“I let him,” Neil tells Andrew, easy and easy and easy. It’s nothing, it’s everything, it had been the most simplest choice he had ever had to make, so much so that it wasn’t one and all the abuse had been benign, necessary. “I didn’t fight it, I didn’t stop him. I didn’t do anything but lie there because he said if I didn’t, he’d make Proust–”
Andrew doesn’t let him finish. He isn’t one for mercy.
“He raped you,” Andrew says, pieces falling into place and shattering the ground as they do. “He raped you in place of me.”
It’s still not a question the second time he says it, but Neil answer anyway, correcting him, telling Andrew he’s wrong, that he misunderstands –
“I let him.” He lays it all out like playing cards, like algebraic formulas, like brain matter for Andrew to pull apart and hold in his hands so that it could all make sense to him the way it does for Neil. “I made a choice to keep you safe.”
Andrew doesn’t see it that way. His hold on Neil is tight, digging his nails into Neil’s skin and hurting. Neil’s stitches haven’t opened up but they are bleeding again, down down down Andrew’s bloodless fingertips.
Andrew notices, and doesn’t let go. “You didn’t. You were raped,” he says again like Neil is stupid and a child and can’t fucking understand the gravity of it all. “He gave you the illusion of choice. It doesn’t make it anything else than what it is. You didn’t let him do anything. He took it from you.”
Neil goes to say something back, but Andrew pulls his face in closer. His eyes are honey and fire embers and hate and Neil cannot bring himself to care. Andrew whispers, cold and hollow, as he says, “But you – you are still so fucking naive. Don’t you ever condemn me the cause of your martyrdom. You shouldn't have gone to Evermore for me.”
And maybe Neil hates Andrew too. He had hated Andrew’s unfeeling towards all the things that had been done to him, a festering psychosis in all the infinite intricacies of someone else’s protection, but Neil understands it now, and maybe that makes him sick too, all the same. “If I am to keep making my own choices,” he says back. “I am choosing you, Andrew. Every fucking time. I have to.”
Neil Josten hadn’t known how to live for someone else, until he did. The feeling of falling into this was an insanity he’d never had the privilege of understanding, of knowing; but in the times he hadn’t been watching, during all their in-betweens and finite truths and staring staring staring, things had changed. It had all happened so slowly that Neil hadn’t comprehended the depth of it until now, sitting opposite from the thing he’d throw his life away to protect. It’s a different kind of agony, only because it isn’t. 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 sits opposite to in the bathtub, and maybe Andrew can get up and walk away from their indifferent anomaly of space and time and place they’ve created in this fucking bathroom together, but Neil can’t.
“I am allowed to want to save you,” Neil says, needing Andrew more than Andrew has the capability to be needed, more than Andrew had ever promised he could be and –
– for that, Andrew will kill him. Neil knows it. It’s written all over his face, the awful agony in his eyes, the anger that’s red and red and red making his lungs falter, his breathing seize. All that indifference has bleed away from his bones, all of Andrew’s careful un-feelings bleeding down through the drain into the pipelines of the city somewhere, and Neil hopes they down themselves. Andrew claims his apathy like his own name; but not now, not when it comes to Neil. And so, when he speaks, something breaks in his voice, something significant, something that couldn’t stay so carefully buried. Andrew grounds out his word through a whisper, “You’re not. I never asked you to, and because you’re so fucking stupid, I have to spell it out. It’s yes or it’s no, and I am telling you, no.”
Neil mirrors him exactly, leaning in closer so that Andrew can feel Neil’s breath on his lips when he talks. He ignores the pain in his skin from Andrew’s hold, and whispers back, “What makes you think I give a shit about what you say I can choose to fight for?”
Andrew doesn’t back down either. “Your whole life you’ve survived this way and I will not let your stupidity save something that cannot be saved.”
Neil says, “It’s not stupidity if it’s you.”
“It’s beyond that, Rabbit,” Andrew tells him, a warning for Neil to leave and bury everything underneath the ruins Andrew would make of them if he could. Andrew’s desperate, Neil realises, for him to give up and let this – this whatever-it-is go and die and rot before Neil kills himself with it –
But despite everything, Neil won’t, he can’t. “Andrew, you’d die for anyone else but yourself. You’re just as much of a martyr as I am. Why can you promise to protect me, yet you won’t let me do the same?”
The question isn’t one Neil needed an answer to, but Andrew gives him one. He pulls a hand away from Neil’s cheek, only to drag it along the in-betweens of his jacket sleeves, running his fingers up and down the shape of the knives that Neil can see through the wet fabric. He pulls a blade out, and through the bathwater, Neil sees his marred, ruined skin, bloodletted a thousand times over in penance for all of those other promises who Andrew couldn't have saved.
He breaks, quietly.
He presses the point of his knife to Neil’s skin just underneath his chin, digging into the flesh, but not enough, not all the way.
“Because I’m saying no,” Andrew is quiet when he speaks, voice thick and dangerous and awful. His breathing is strained, too quick, too quick, too quick. The knife doesn’t shake. “I am not your answer. I cannot give you peace.”
Neil doesn’t falter. His eyes are steady, his voice doesn’t waver, and while Andrew looks like he could fall apart in hundreds of unfixable pieces in the same bloodied penance, Neil will not let him. Neil tells him, “I don’t want peace. I want you. It’ll never be what we deserve but it can be enough. It is enough.”
Trading one life for another isn’t how it shouldn’t have gone, but they are Foxes; they are Neil and they are Andrew; and these are the cards they were dealt. They will make impossible choices that are not choices at all, and in condemning themselves for their promises, they will hurt each other in the fallout. They’re hypocrites and they’re liars, and Neil would unravel the entirety of spacetime to give Andrew the solace he was owed from it, and Andrew would let the universe break its own neck if it meant Neil didn’t have to damn himself in such a way. They’re made for this, for each other. If Neil didn’t know a single fucking thing in this unkind, indifferent universe, he knew that.
Maybe Andrew does, too. They’ll find each other in the dirt of the earth, laying waste to themselves in a mangle of their own bodies, and, after everything, they will stay there.
Neil looks at him and doesn’t stop. “You’re not nothing now, are you? Tell me what you’re feeling.”
Andrew's grip on the knife falters, and Neil – Neil understands. Andrew is something of a convolution constructed of all these universes and all these infinities, that shouldn’t have ended up here, but did: wanting despite not wanting anything. And together, there is this need to gravitate around each other like tiny suns and satellites falling into orbit because inexplicably, impossibly it was as if they would die if they did not. Every other agony is inconsequential.
For lack of anything better, Neil knows, Andrew promises him, “I want to kill you.”
And for the same reason, Neil asks, “Am I hurting you?”
They sit there within the nothingness for too long again, willing the other to give up, go away, stand up, and for the first time, both of them seem to realise they can’t. They’re stuck here, with each other, with their bathwater turning pink, Neil’s laundry on the floor like old piles of dust and bones, and maybe they’ll rot together, maybe they’ll want to. They do not deserve this, but they deserve one another.
Neil had felt safe with Andrew making him feel the mortifying, terrifying ‘this’ because he was satisfied in knowing that Andrew wouldn’t care to feel anything at all when Neil’s past finally came for him. But Andrew, in that awfully agonising fashion, had defied the things people assumed him to be. Neil had misjudged him.
Andrew says, “You don’t seem to ever stop.”
But Andrew had misjudged Neil too. In the same way, Neil defied whatever it was that Andrew thought him to be, and too late, he had realised the one he’d condemned himself to, had condemned Andrew back. And now Andrew is stuck, bathing with all his clothes, in someone else’s blood, and the awful feeling of falling – of wanting to, of letting it – is synonymous with handing Neil a gun aimed at his own heart, Neil supposes, and –
– Neil doesn’t care.
Andrew can hate and hate and hate him for it – kill him if he has too – but Neil isn’t something of pipedreams or deja vu or of the conditional unconditional promises Andrew had held onto until his hands were bloodied and deformed and showing bone. He is the thing for Andrew to keep coming back to, and Neil knows that terrifies him. Someone Andrew had damned himself to, impossibly, infinitely wants to be, and Andrew isn’t made for that. Neil watches him come undone and apart and fall at the thought of someone needing Andrew for something other than the things he could’ve ever promised them, and that breaks Andrew. Andrew has condemned himself to be needed a thousand times over, but he hasn’t ever known what it is to be wanted, and yet, Neil cannot stop doing so.
This time, Neil moves first. He gently raises his hand to Andrew’s, wrapping his fingers around the same hilt. Andrew’s palm doesn’t stop shaking, the knife still pressing against Neil’s neck, but when Neil lowers it down, Andrew lets him.
“Stop breathing like that,” Neil tells him.
Andrew bites out, “Don’t tell me what to do.”
But Neil ignores him.
Distantly, the knife slips out of both their grips, sinking to the bottom of the bath.
“I’m not sorry for any of it,” Neil says, another truth given away for nothing but Andrew to hold in his scared palms and lay beside within the water. He meets Neil eyes, breathing with purposed, careful intent as Neil continues, “I’d go to Evermore all over again if it meant keeping you safe. I’ll believe you if you say that the things done to me were not my fault, but you have to believe me when I say they’re not yours either. So, if you want to kill me, kill me; but you’d break our promise yourself. It’d make you a liar, Andrew.”
Andrew doesn’t speak until he does. “I hate you, rabbit.”
“Yeah,” Neil agrees. “Tell me what else you’re feeling.”
An infinity has passed once again before he says simply, “I want you.”
“You want me how?” Neil has to ask.
Andrew moves his hands out of the water, placing them back against Neil’s cheeks, only this time, the touch is soft, painless. Drowned fabric rubs against his skin, weighing it down, but neither of them pay it any mind. Andrew grazes the bruises blooming watercolour scars against Neil’s jawline, his cheekbones, and doesn’t stop ever letting go when he tells Neil, “I just want you.”
It’s midnight now. The fireworks explode in the distant sky within the darkness, alighting the stars and outer space with sparks and colour and life. It’s all vibrant and loud and everywhere, leaking in through the tiny window at the top of the wall, pouring its light into the liminality of the bathroom. It catches on Andrew’s shirt, his damp hair, Neil’s wet skin. Somewhere they will break themselves apart in the name of each other’s existence, and somewhere their devils will drag themselves out from their graves to kill them all over again, and somewhere they will have to leave this bathtub and fight the arrays people unlike them would never have the misfortune of knowing.
But tonight they ignore everything. The universe is for everyone else, but this insignificant moment in spacetime is for them. They stay still, Neil’s face in Andrew’s hands, his heart beating through his fingertips on Neil’s cheek. They could kiss, but they won’t. Not now, not like this, not yet.
But there’s solace in also knowing they could.
For now, Neil whispers, “That’s not an emotion.”
Andrew, ever the liar – at least when it comes to this – whispers back, “I don’t do those.”
“You don’t want either,” Neil points out.
“I don’t,” Andrew agrees. “This won’t save us. We’ll still be all kinds of awfully fucked up. I’ll still hate you for not hating me enough to let me go; and you’ll still hate me for not wanting to be saved. We’ll still be nothing. We’ll still never have peace.”
But that could be enough.
“Okay,” Neil promises.
They are not each other’s answers, but they are there.