Chapter Text
It was sterile and too bright in the centre of the room, the kind that made the far corners unnaturally dark, too far away and far too close. Three men accompanied him, all armed. A silver tray sat high under the light, its reflective surface filled with tools and sharp edges and prying ends.
Neil knew the van trailing him that morning on his run was unmarked, unspecial in its mein, and likeness as close to its other makes. But he’d seen it too often, too many glances had caught the vehicle in their berth.
And when it had pulled in closer than it ever had, parking up alongside the curb, just like the black van had that day in Baltimore, Neil went without protest when the door slid open and he was beckoned in. He smothered the urge to fight as he was wrangled in, blinded with scratchy material tied too tight before the engine even kicked back up, and was thrown against the backseat as his hands were restrained. He tried to keep about himself, to note the turns and stops and unevenness beneath him, but Neil’s mind kept flashing back to Lola, to a different path in a different car in a different state.
He didn’t know how much time passed before he was shoved out on stumbling feet, and dragged down, down, the echoing steps loud and hollow. Too many stairs later, his blindfold was ripped from him, the rope digging into his wrists burning in its retreat. Something heavy, wooden, was placed in his hand.
There was a door just beyond the surgical table.
Neil glanced down.
A cleaver. Pressed to his palm.
The same he’d been on the receiving end of, the raw blunt edge of steel. His fingers fit into the same grooves his father’s had. The curved line, the hooked end. Neil still closed his eyes and saw the ravaged blade inches from his skin, could still feel the catch against his lip, the blood it drew.
He looked up to find Louis already watching him.
Neil barely managed a shake of his head, fingers flexing around the handle.
Louis’ face was blank, hard as stone.
Neil was no stranger to how this would go. Lola had liked to invite him down to the basement with gleeful venom dripping from her canines, where a man —ranging in size, stature, and fear— was on the verge of disrepair in the middle of the room, generally unbound (Nathan liked the chase of a predator playing with its prey) and always unkempt— clothes already ragged and hair as if they’d been down there long enough for the sun to be a far away memory.
Lola and Nathan would take turns, questions asked just for them to be met with steel and blunt force no matter the answer. A torture unavoidable even with the givings of their livelihoods. Unmade. Crumbling under the weight that was stripped humanity.
Neil knew what he would have to do once he passed through that door, the same things he’d copied of Lola’s nails, the same things Ichirou had beckoned from his hands. The things those tools were used for.
Tremors shook his insides, nausea the only feeling he could manage to let in, the only thing that fit inside his body.
His arms trembled. Louis clenched his jaw.
Survival, that's all there was, that's all Neil needed.
The concrete room was small, rancid enough that Neil resisted the urge to plug his nose against the crimson stains and mold growing in the damp seams of the ceiling. The two cameras installed were the only part of the room untouched by age.
“Who’s there?” The body at the centre begged with the creak of the metal door slamming behind Neil.
A cloth bag covered the face he was sure he already knew, had been forced to study alongside his maths equations. The man’s hands were tied to the chair he sat in, his ankles roped to the metal legs.
“You sick fucks,” his pleads turned to ravage words, intensity muffled by the fabric against his mouth, “let me out of here, I did everything you asked—”
He was cut off by the door opening again, Louis carefully swinging it open, turning back to guide it closed.
Louis tugged at the cuffs of his pristine suit before striding past Neil and removing the pillowcase from the man's head. He struggled against it, against Louis and the caught polyester, eyes squinting despite the dimness of the concrete room. His stare was less afraid than Neil had expected as he took in the space, trying to cut down Louis where he stood, before finally landing on Neil, the cleaver lax in his hand, the ground supporting most of its weight.
Whites widened, face bleaching, jaw falling slack.
“You’re dead,” his mortified voice filled the room.
A stab cut through his chest, so sharp, so violent that he only managed to pass off the curving of his shoulders as arrogance. Neil forced a sickening smile plaster itself to his face, and swung the cleaver along the floor, the scraping awful.
“Wrong Nate,” Neil purred with an exaggerated downturn of his lips, as if he were only pretending to be upset with the mistake. His torso shook.
Recognition flooded the man’s face. “You’re just a kid,” he mourned.
Neil’s grin was encompassing, stretching a burn into his scars, the flash of teeth a warning not a kindness as he tilted his head to one side.
“Yet he’s the one that’s dead,” he pondered, voice morbidly delighted, “I wonder who killed him?” The flinch of his hands toyed with the cleaver again as he warped the truth so far it broke.
Horror. That's all there was to the man before him, his lips leaking of their colour, eyes stuck wide, glancing between the axe and Neil’s replica of a smile, body visibly shaking, enough that the metal of the chair rattled insistently against the concrete floor.
“Please, I have a brother, he’ll be waiting for me, please, kid,” his voice was lost to the flood of begging
But Neil knew, he knew the family that would have to bury an empty coffin, knew the state school he graduated from, knew the way he drank his coffee.
Louis stepped in front of the man, fingers tugging at his cuffs again.
“There are a few things we’d like to discuss, Mr. Hansley.”
When the door shut—blocking the slumped body and the red that had leaked the man dry with each ministration made by Neil’s cut—Neil shoved against Louis, hands coming away more his own, a clean lined suit smudged.
“Are you fucking stupid?” Neil hissed, still gripping the blade dripping with too much blood.
“Are you?” Louis scowled before his hand wrapped around Neil’s arm in a grip that was bruising. It was a struggle, Louis’ fingers curling over Neil’s, prying hard until Neil’s trembling vice finally relented from the handle, before Louis chucked it to the concrete away from them, letting it clatter unceremoniously as he tugged Neil into the dark hallway.
“There are fucking cameras,” Louis scorned, still holding him too tightly. The white of his collar was no longer white, the sharp corner dented awkwardly.
“Why?” Neil bled, why risk yourself, why give Ichirou another reason.
Louis’ eyes flashed, and his scowl deepened, “Worry about yourself. You’re being too fucking dangerous, Neil, do you hear me? You’re not doing what he wants, you’re being reckless,” he spat in a desperate whisper, “I thought you were just— that it was just a way to get in, to get to Kevin, but I know you, Neil,” he reprimanded viciously, “he already has Kevin, do not give him someone else.”
It took Neil a flash of a second, a filtering of blond hair for Neil to realise what Louis meant. Who Louis was referring to.
The last of Neil’s energy surged forward to grip Louis' arm hard enough to leave an indent, “He’s not going to know,” Neil demanded in French, wavering tone laced with venom, “because you're not going to tell him.”
Louis shoved Neil away from him just as unnamed body guards came through the door, and Louis barely spared him a glance as Neil was dragged back into the concrete room, his retreating figure falling to shadows in the endless hallway.
The voice in his head was small. The words sounding weak, pathetic, and not at all convincing. And they were warped with sobs. The voice in his head was sobbing, dreadfully feeble and broken, a repetitive thing that grew and grew and grew until the words merged together and it was all just screams. Wet and cracked and heaving.
Neil's cheeks were dry, and his mouth was sealed.
And still, they kept on, like if they were said enough, they would gain any sort of credibility.
You are not your father
He didn’t know when he’d have to stop convincing himself of the words, when they’d mean something.
Neil slid slow and boneless from the wall to the floor, letting the entirety of himself press to the cool tiles, palms flat, cheek smushed, body curled. The cold of the bathroom tiles leaked through his clothes and caressed his scorching skin.
He was sick of blood. He was sick of bleach and dirtied fingernails. Neil was sick. He was sick.
He’d scrubbed and scrubbed until the nerves in his hands no longer protested, until the blood colouring his palms was replaced with his own.
“Abram, wash the blood off,” she scorned, his mother’s hands bruising his wrists.
When he flexed his fingers, she flinched back, as if she didn’t want to be dirtied by him.
He had, though, he’d cleaned his palms raw, biting his nails away to rid of what stuck beneath them too.
“Wash your hands, Abram,” her mouth peeled back from her teeth in disgust.
There was no blood left, not even in the overgrown cuticles.
Anger flashed when he just stood there, the force of it breaking up lines into her face as she replaced her grip on his arms, tugging them both into the small petrol station washroom, shoving his hands under the running tap. Her nails dug into the skin covering his knuckles, scratching new lines so deep blood swelled before washing down the drain.
“Mum,” his voice trembled.
“Filthy, they’re fucking filthy,” she spat, forcing his hands impossibly further under the faucet, gathering soap to rub into the newly open wounds.
They would never be clean, he could still see the stains, could still see the dried maroon outlining his nails. There had been too much, he’d nearly forgotten how much one body could hold. Lola had taught him just exactly where to get the most from their veins, where to carve to avoid a quick death. He knew the arteries, knew the tendons that hurt the most, the hard parts of the body that resisted enough to ravage their voice.
His screams still tore at his ears, a steady thudding in time with his heartbeat.
“Why are you here?” Andrew murmured.
This didn’t feel much like living. But he supposed that was promised. He wasn’t disillusioned, living was never demanded of him once his mother died.
It took him four hours and thirty-seven minutes to get up off the bathroom floor. He counted. Beginning in English, and then French, German, Italian, Swedish—cycling through all the languages he’d picked up on the run with his mother— before his toes got their feeling back. Before he was seeing dirtied grout instead of flayed skin. Before the rumbling of neighbouring dorms filled his ears instead of a torn throat.
His muscles were stiff, skin prickling with bumps. There was a sway in his stomach he couldn’t ever imagine getting rid of. Neil managed to pull off the replacement clothing those men in suits had given him. His had been ruined. Soaked through with crimson.
Then corralled uncooperative limbs into the tub. The water was warm, one tick from cold. Any hotter and it’d feel too close to what he’d drained from that man.
He refused to call him by his name.
He wondered if his brother had noticed he was missing yet.
Neil tugged a towel through his hair, down his front, patting his legs dry. He was sure blood still sat in the grooves of his palms. Still dripped from the spills that had splattered onto his cheeks.
He’d been forced into a stinging spray wherever those men had taken him, scrubbing down with the same soap he would always find at motels. Neil closed his eyes so he couldn’t see the water turning from clear to red as it washed from his skin down the drain. They’d barged in when he took too long. Blindfolded and tied, then dumped on some abandoned street a few blocks from Palmetto. Neil had no recollection of the walk, of the elevator ride or slotting his keys into their slot.
The drawer creaked when he pulled his clothes at random. A hoodie, some sweatpants on their last leg. Boxers, socks. He dragged them on slow, fingers a far cry from smooth.
And then he was just stood there, in the middle of his shared bedroom. The sunset beyond the window bright against his dull clothing.
His palm found his eyes, heel digging, resistance against soft.
Neil had not been given this time before. The after. It was more knives in his hands, more gruelling lessons to attend. He never had to pretend to be anymore than what he knew he was.
It was a carousel he was never allowed to get off of.
His feet stumbled when they hit solid ground.
Neil’s phone was somewhere discarded on his bed, tangled in the sheets, screen blank. His hand fumbled with the cotton, feeling the cool plastic curve into the sunken part of his palm. It flipped open without much noise.
Matt was waiting in his inbox with a simple, call me when you’re able
The pounding hadn’t been all in his head then.
Neil dumped the phone back in the sprawl without bothering to close it. His fingers found his hair, but he didn’t have the energy to pull. They twitched within the strands, violent and involuntary as every muscle around his chest tightened, like a fist gripped at his pounding heart, testing how much it could hold up against. A noise, something tortured and dragged through gravel squeezed out of his throat, then something louder, caught and torn.
Neil stretched his hoodie collar wide, dug a flat palm hard over the expanse of his clavicle.
The door to his bedroom lay wide open.
The hallway was faint, the lights were off.
At the end, blurred and dark, Andrew sat on the rug sprawled before the couch, knees pulled, elbows against them.
Another sound, fought and foul in the deep curved edge of his molar— the kind that irritated his neck— traveled the length between them.
A head rose from where it was bowed, blond hair mussed.
His features were all muddy, the light from outside settling from orange to brown, finding the dim room and the boy at the centre. The lay of his shoulders told Neil he’d been there before the sun had made its descent, that his back probably twinged and his jaw probably ached.
Andrew’s chin tilted just so, the tense line of one of his hands releasing boneless.
Neil’s throat was groggy, croaked and slurred, but he still managed, “how did you get in?”
Andrew pressed himself back against the floor, legs stretched long, the carpet peaking through the strands splayed out around his ears.
“Your roommate thought it imperative that I come over,” his voice was smooth, low, “here I am.”
Neil watched the way he melted into the grey, muscles relaxed, body still.
Calves that had stopped working beneath him managed the length of the runner to find the couch to catch him.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Neil murmured. The skin around his eyes dragged, tight and heavy, his stomach cramping.
Andrew remained quiet.
Neil’s throat constricted, “you should leave,” he struggled past an unsteady breath.
Andrew tilted his chin down closer to his chest, just enough that they were able to make eye contact from where Neil was sat on the cushions. An arm raised, open and holding in the air, curved and inviting.
Like a tug, a finger pulling at a belt loop, Neil rocked forward, knees hitting the carpet as he lowered from the couch, moving closer to the boy sprawled out. He leant over him, hand planted by his waist for only a moment, eyes flitting from freckle to freckle, dancing along the smooth space between Andrew’s eyebrows, travelling down to meet his eyes again before Andrew shifted, the arm still raised bending further to curl around the back of Neil’s neck, pulling him down. Neil went willingly, practically sagging into Andrew as Neil rolled onto him, pressing his cheek between Andrew’s collarbones.
He released an exhale that shuddered as the warmth of the boy below engulfed him. Stomach against stomach, legs tangled with legs. A heart, beating, thrumming, against his ear, his own body following the rise and fall of slow, steady breaths.
“You locked the bathroom.”
Neil could feel Andrew’s words more than he heard them, a rumble against his chest.
He couldn’t manage any more from his throat. The grating pressure behind his brows didn’t relent as he squeezed his lids shut.
“Matt was sure you’d killed yourself,” Andrew went on.
A hand, warm to touch and rough from strumming strings, buried beneath Neil’s hoodie, finding purchase against his lower back, thumb rubbing back and forth over a scar he often sought out. Neil pressed in closer, something hot swelling dull and wayward behind his eyes.
There was always an astute awareness of his skin. The length of it covering his muscles, his inner organs, his bones. The way it stretched, the way it broke, the way it couldn’t sew itself back into what it had been before. The way clothes fell on it, the way it burned, grazed, flared. The eyes that pricked it, the sickening exposure that was as threatening as a knife to his back.
The way nothing had ever touched it with the intent that simmered beneath Andrew’s fingertips.
To be touched like he hadn’t just tore a body apart.
He could pretend this was all he was, could pretend that his hands weren’t still stained red.
“Don’t lock the bathroom door,” Andrew said.
Neil’s arms tightened around him because he couldn’t say the word stay.
His sleep that night was fitful, and entirely reliant on Andrew’s hand finding his chest, neck, sinking into his hair whenever he was pulled from it, harsh enough to jostle the boy toeing the line between beside him. A weighted palm, a few fingers digging in, and the coil of Neil’s body unfurled enough to try for rest again.
The bruises that sat beneath amber in the morning had Neil wishing he’d protested, that he’d promised sleep and soundness more readily than he had. Andrew refused to meet Neil’s pleading eyes, pink tipped fingers latched around a mug of coffee he’d stolen milk from Matt to make.
“You’re so loud,” he said in the closest thing to a grumble Andrew would get.
“You didn’t sleep,” Neil murmured, pressing into the counter beside him, hip against warm hip, whole body curved, arched, towards the boy.
“Neither did you,” Andrew pointed out blandly.
“Enough,” he responded quietly. Andrew’s hair was all mussed up at the crown, looking longer and darker than its usual uniform.
Neil brought fingers to rest between the strands and pushed his nose into the waiting heat of Andrew’s bed rumpled neck.
“You’re a wreck,” Andrew spoke and Neil felt it against his lips.
In the days after, Neil didn’t do much more than attend class, and even that forced too much from him.
Matt was a steady presence at his side whenever he could be, and Neil didn’t know how to touch that, didn’t know how to even begin what he knew he needed to say without Neil wanting to scream, but his body had nothing for him to hold.
His nights were better. As soon as Andrew’s classes ended, he showed up outside his dorm door, car keys in hand, eyes filtering to Matt just beyond, before beckoning Neil out. Their drives spanned hours, stopping only when the wind from the interstate bit enough to leave a burn on Neil’s cheeks, pulling off somewhere dark and untouched before Andrew was kissing him until his lips were numb and his mind blank. Empty of everything but Andrew on top of him, his hands and the plush of his lower lip. The pleasant build between his legs.
It never went anywhere, Andrew tilting away before the heat took hold, kissing back into Neil slowly, tongue lavishing every inch of his mouth without urgency. Leaving Neil sated and skin warm enough to sleep when Andrew dropped him back to his dorm.
“Neil,” Matt greeted late one night after Neil had been gone before Matt had returned, perched too close to the edge of the couch.
“Hey,” he murmured in response, toeing off his shoes, flush still high on his neck.
“Have a good time?” His roommate asked earnestly.
Neil’s lips pulled over his teeth, “fine.”
Matt’s eyebrows curled above the bridge of his nose, and he was silent for a while, a war waging within his features, before he broke with a breath, “look, man, you gotta give me something here,” he all but begged.
They hadn’t spoken since that morning after, when Andrew had left and Matt had slipped in after him. Even then, Neil had only been able to conjure up a soft sorry that Matt waved off as soon as it had left his mouth. “Glad you’re okay,” was all he replied.
“We don’t have to talk right now,” Matt spoke, “but I wanna be able to be there for you,” he continued, “if you want me to be.”
Neil had no response, teeth tight and chest stuck.
“Is it Kevin?” Matt urged. When Neil offered him nothing but an exhale, he tried again, “is it Jean?”
Neil shook his head, reverent and refusing, “Don’t—I can’t— you can’t do that, man,” he reprimanded.
“Neil,” Matt pleaded, “I thought—” the shake of Matt’s head felt beseeching.
The heels of Neil’s palms found the soft skin under his eyes, “I know.”
When had Neil gotten so bad at cutting it off at the source? At stamping down and dragging up something foreign, something easy.
“I’m trying,” Neil promised and Matt’s features broke, “I had a bad day, that’s all.”
Matt’s eyes held, picking apart his limbs to see where he hurt the most. Neil stayed still beneath it, offered up the crease between his brow.
“Thank you,” Neil said, “for getting Andrew.”
Matt shook his head again, so full of something Neil had never been on the receiving end of, “Of course, man.”
Neil only saw the email Professor Wymack had left him because he couldn’t stand the space Matt was giving him, and didn’t know where else to go but the library. The professor had linked his last assignment—the only assignment he’d submitted to Wymack’s class—and wrote, Kevin was right.
His phone buzzed when he was making his way back to his dorms.
Unknown Number: studio 1 @ 6
Then again in quick succession.
Unknown Number: its nicky btw
Neil didn’t like sharing something that had only been Andrew’s. He didn’t reply, but when he got home, he dumped his bag, shoved the leftovers Matt had left him from the night before into the microwave and ate quick enough to be outside studio one’s door by five fifty seven.
Nicky opened the door already talking, a long around way of explaining what ‘Coach’ had told him, rambling about the album barely written and the songs he deemed still in the ‘trial phase’. The three others already in the room didn’t greet him, though Andrew met his eye from where he was sprawled on the floor. Aaron ignored him completely, and Kevin followed Nicky’s long-winded words. Neil hadn’t made it to the spare chair by the recording desk before Nicky was shoving rumpled papers into his hands. Three songs, all closest to completion. The lyrics, the backing cords.
“You can’t seriously think this is good.” Was what Neil said when he’d finished the first, cutting into whatever Nicky was still saying. A wet sort of choke replaced Nicky’s words as Neil skimmed the second waited for some sort of reply.
When no one offered a retort past Aaron’s angry scowl, Neil continued, “I don’t know who told you it was, but you’ve been lied to. Severely. Because this is awful.”
“And how, Neil, would you improve it?” Kevin spoke through strained teeth.
“Throw it out,” he said.
“Scratch the whole thing?” Aaron astonished.
“All three of them.”
“I’m not sure this is what Wymack meant when he told us to ‘show you the ropes’,” Nicky chuckled awkwardly.
Neil turned to Kevin, “You’re, like, actually okay with releasing this shit?”
“Don’t be so fucking petulant,” Kevin demanded, his back standing tall against the couch.
Neil made a noise that sounded of mocking sympathy, “Learnt from the best didn’t I, Kev? How is King these days?” Neil’s tone didn’t sound regretful at all.
He took delight from Kevin’s flinch. It was the first thing he’d felt in days.
“Don’t fucking start,” Kevin fought.
Neil shrugged, “Genuine question.”
“You hate Kevin, you hate our songs— dude, why are you even here?” Aaron wasn’t as sharp as Kevin. He was more tired than anything, slouched on the opposite end of the couch.
“Someone’s gotta save him from imploding,” Neil felt the tilt of his lips and stamped down.
“Don’t waste your time,” Aaron replied.
Neil’s eyes shot to Kevin, “Des ennuis au paradis?”
“You forget your place,” Kevin scolded, the twist of anger on his face a thing the blue in Neil’s eyes recognised as well as darkening clouds flooding the sky.
“Good thing we’re not in the Nest then,” Neil replied, dumping the music sheets on the recording bench, standing from where he’d sunk into the chair.
“Okay, hold on—” Nicky interjected.
“Will you stop,” Kevin snapped, standing with the sound, but didn’t come any closer as Neil crossed the room to the exit.
“You clearly don’t need my help,” he said, splaying his hands wide in surrender.
“Nathaniel,” Kevin scorned, and every limb, every cell in Neil’s body seized. Bile and betrayal clogged his throat, his stomach swooping so quickly, so suddenly that he swayed on his feet. There it was. There it was.
“What the fuck?” Neil spat.
Kevin looked at him without remorse, as if he hadn’t just ripped into Neil’s chest, and switched to French, “Don’t walk out on me.”
“Fuck you!” Neil enunciated with vitriol, “I am not some fucking puppet for you to control,” he rasped, a match in his stomach.
“You’re not allowed to walk out on me again.” It was said with authority. The kind that was never refuted, was never retaliated against.
Because it was already simmering under his skin, had been since the day he’d seen that lightning scar in that empty classroom, since he’d become what he swore he’d never be, Neil said, in a language they all understood, “Did you forget that you fucked him? Or was it so lacklustre that you can’t remember?”
Kevin physically recoiled, his sense of fight blanching with his skin, a shattering breath escaping his lungs.
“Oh,” Neil put his hand to his mouth, widening his eyes, “was that a secret? Was I not meant to tell them?”
He caught Aaron’s eye, “but this one knew, didn’t he? Did you try to crawl from one bed to the other?”
It was cruel, he knew it, he could feel his heart clench at the words, at the way his throat wished to draw the sentence back into his mouth.
“Neil.” And Kevin said his name so painfully, so full of pent up sorrow that Neil turned back to him, his vicious tongue retreating, eyes rounding at the edges.
But Neil was crumbling, his ribs, his joints, his throat. He had not soldered himself back together yet. Had torn a man so severely it had started to rip at him instead. So before his resolve could disintegrate, before all of him tumbled to grains of sand in the name of holding Kevin together, he tightened his fists, feeling the cracking skin pull at his knuckles, and kicked at the anger festering in the pit of his stomach.
Bodies and bodies, and bodies. Fingers grasping, mouths yawning wide. Crimson and metal and skin.
“You had a choice,” Neil mourned, “you got to choose! I didn’t!”
“I had a choice?” Kevin yelled. There was a certain quality to it, to the tone and depth, that drove through Neil, right into his chest and out through the space between his shoulder blades.
“You think I had a choice?” he continued, throat straining with his shout, “my life was planned down to the minute, down to the food stuck in my teeth! You of all people— you knew that.”
“Did he make you wear handcuffs too? Or did you ask for that?” Neil sneered before he could stop himself, uncaring of their audience.
Neil might as well have hit him with how quickly Kevin's face turned ashen, how fast his posture locked up, “What?” He asked in a quiet disbelieving tone, something like horror painting the word.
“Did he lock your wrists against your headboard so you couldn’t fight back? Or did you get to choose when he stopped?” Neil continued, though this time in French, a last abort effort to keep his insides inside. “Where do you think he went at night?”
Kevin remained frozen before him, eyebrows sloped, mouth downturned, almost like he was ready to start shaking his head, as if he wanted to deny it all.
“Where do you think he went?” Neil pushed out bitterly.
He was still, his eyes too wide as they stared at Neil, face on the verge of crumbling, hands with their palms up. Though Neil could see what worked overtime behind his brows, the missing pieces, the quiet nights.
Neil pulled the sleeve of his shirt up, revealing ravaged and uneven skin at his wrists, discoloured and scarred over, “Yet you still let him fuck you,” he accused, and Neil couldn’t claim the voice that sounded from his mouth, it belonged to someone else, someone who was supposed to have died along with his father in that basement.
“Do not tell me who got to choose when you chose him,” he spat as if the words pricked his tongue. Neil searched for any remorse, any sign of pain that he wanted to elicit from him.
“It was a mistake,” Kevin said reasonably, composed and stoic like when they were kids and Kevin refused to acknowledge what he couldn’t bear to hear. Neil had missed the shift.
A wave, a high curve of tidal blue—the kind that drowned decks and sunk masts—crashed into him, his head being dragged under before he could shut his mouth, the desolation rushing into his lungs and poisoning him.
His resolve fell apart in his hands.
“A mistake?”
Because that was not fair. That’s not fair.
Nothing Neil had ever done had been a choice he got to make. Kevin had that choice, Kevin got to decide that he wanted Riko, he got to make that mistake, he got to decide to leave, had a choice of where to go, had somewhere to go. Kevin was afforded a luxury Neil never had, a luxury he could never begin to afford.
When Kevin had nothing else to say, Neil nodded, once, twice, then turned to Nicky. The boy’s eyes widened– caught, shocked– somewhere close to being ashamed of the intrigue so blatant on his face. Neil paid no mind to the emotion on Nicky’s lips, “You’re either gonna have to give me something better to work with or scrap, because I was under the impression you guys were at least half decent.”
Neil didn’t wait for a reply, or glance back at whatever Kevin’s face did at his words before he was out the door.