Chapter Text
The first time Andrew sees Neil, it is seconds after he’s been thrown into some smelly juvie cell. He remembers cursing out the guards, then the dark, then the figure sitting on a bed that nearly made him jump out of his skin. He remembers grumbling and threatening and anything to scare his new roommate away, to absolutely no avail. That is the first spark of interest he feels about this boy.
It takes some digging (and far too much staring), but he eventually gets a name out of him—Abram— and a half-assed reasoning for his presence in the slammer. Andrew doesn’t believe a word out of his mouth, but Abram doesn’t seem willing to give him more than this name and a too-long sentence for identity theft, amongst other things.
On the other hand, Abram seems very happy to listen to Andrew’s spun tales of raging fires and terrible homes. There’s something about those ice-blue eyes that makes Andrew feel like he can talk about these things. He tries to stop the words from tumbling out, but he’s fourteen, Abram is gorgeous, and he just can’t resist offering truths in exchange for Abram’s.
By the second month, they’re inseparable. Where Andrew goes, Abram follows. Where Abram wanders, Andrew makes sure nobody tries anything. Not that the boy needs protection—his glare is downright chilling—but Andrew likes to feel useful.
Their secrets become bigger. Andrew confesses that he burned down that house in hopes to get away from the people who’d taken them in. Abram tells him that his mother died not long before he was caught for using fraudulent credit cards, that he’s an orphan who just stopped running. It explains his paranoia, though Andrew still doesn’t know where it originates. He doesn’t push.
It isn’t until halfway through their stay together that Andrew understands why his stomach flips every time Abram trains those blue eyes on him, why he doesn’t like seeing the boy flash that crooked smile to anyone who isn’t him.
It sends him into a spiral at first—how could he like men after what he’s been through? What kind of cruel joke is the universe trying to play? Why does the runaway with fire for hair and ocean in his eyes have to be the first person Andrew truly cares about since Cass? He stops talking to Abram for some time, too angry and disgusted with himself to take the time to dissect these new feelings the boy gives him.
Granted, it doesn’t last long. Abram corners him after a week of Andrew successfully ignoring him and unsuccessfully ignoring his own feelings, and looks at him like a kicked puppy. Andrew would love to say it took more than that, but it really didn’t. He shoved Abram away after giving him the most vague of explanations and they went right back to the way they were before.
Andrew eventually builds up to telling Abram about Aaron. He tells him about Tilda and how she put them both up for adoption, but came back only for Aaron. He tells him about how he’s never met her, but he blames her for everything that’s happened to him in the foster system. Abram listens with rapt attention, offering Andrew no pity and no comfort.
Somehow, that is more comforting than not.
Abram doesn’t give him anything in return that day. But he wakes up early to see the redheaded boy leaning over the top bunk, mouth already open like he’s been waiting to tell Andrew something since the second his eyes opened. He probably has.
So Andrew listens as Abram tells him about his mother’s escape from his father’s chains, how he was caught in the crossfire of both their anger, how they didn’t survive each other but he did. Andrew feels a dark pit of rage boil up inside him, a visceral need to rid Abram of everyone who hurt him. Abram seems to notice, because he laughs and says they’re all dead already.
Andrew’s birthday comes and goes without much celebration. Abram makes him a card that he immediately stuffs under his bed for safe-keeping and slides his dessert over with a grin. It only dawns on him as he stares at the bed above him that a year has almost passed since he was first thrown in here.
It feels like a few months.
—
He wakes up in the middle of the night to Abram shifting on the crinkly mattress that separates them. He tries to go to back to sleep when the boy does not climb down the wobbly ladder like he usually does, but he’s snapped back to consciousness when he hears quiet whimpering. Maybe even a choked “Dad”.
Ah. So a nightmare then.
Andrew barely gives himself time to think before he’s climbing up to the top bunk, pointedly ignoring the creaking and swaying of the metal. Abram seems distressed, face scrunched up in fear Andrew has never seen on him. He flinches when Andrew gets closer, like he can sense him even in sleep.
His eyes snap open when Andrew places two gentle hands on his jaw, and it’s clear he doesn’t see where they are or who’s there with him. He is frozen in terror. Andrew doesn’t want to restrain him, but he will, if the need for it rises. Abram stays perfectly still, though. Like the danger won’t see him if he’s pretending to be dead.
The cloud over his eyes dissipates after a few minutes of Andrew keeping a firm but gentle grip on his face and whispered commands to breathe and look at him. Abram comes back to himself with a heaving chest and a sheepish smile.
He tries to tell Andrew about his nightmare, but Andrew knows it’ll cost him too big a truth so he claps a hand over Abram’s mouth and climbs back down.
He doesn’t sleep for the rest of the night, too busy making sure Abram does.
—
Abram shows Andrew his scars. It’s been a few months since the nightmare and it seems to come out of nowhere, but Andrew could tell Abram has been waiting for someone to talk to about them. It happens on a Tuesday, after a clinical check-up that has both of them wanting to crawl out of their skins.
They’re both fifteen now and Andrew is starting to struggle with putting his attraction on the back-burner. Not that Abram seems to mind in the slightest. If anything, Andrew swears he preens under all the staring. He suspects that also encourages Abram to half-strip in front of him. Andrew hates him. Andrew really wants to kiss him.
Then Abram gingerly pulls his shirt off and Andrew wants to find every single person who put their filthy hands on this beautiful boy so he can rip their throats out with his teeth. Their cuts and slashes litter skin trying to keep the colour the sun left a year ago. Andrew sees cigarette burns, road rash, a stretch of skin garbled where the bone under never healed properly. There’s a gruesome burn on his shoulder, in a shape Andrew barely recognises as an iron. The scars stop at his neck, like some sort of ploy to tell his entourage that no, nothing bad is happening at home. Andrew feels that pit of rage in his stomach threaten to boil over.
There’s silence as Abram lets Andrew process the sight. Andrew can see that he doesn’t know what to expect, but it definitely isn’t Andrew asking if he can touch the raised marks. Abram flushes but nods, and suddenly Andrew is closer than he’s ever been.
To be completely honest, the blond boy has no idea what to do with all that trust. His hands float over Abram’s naked chest with a reverence to them he didn’t know he possessed. He tries very hard not to look up at Abram, tries not to think of those blue eyes watching him so intently. He especially tries not to think about his parted lips and reddening cheeks.
But Andrew is a teenager and very much in love with his juvie roomie, so he looks up and freezes.
Abram isn’t looking at Andrew’s hands on his chest. Abram is looking straight at Andrew with dark eyes and bitten lips, and Andrew just is not that strong.
—
It’s in his bed that night, lying side by side, that Andrew tells Abram about Drake. He avoids details, but still he sees his own rage mirrored in glacier blue eyes. He tells him about Cass and Richard, and how he almost had his perfect mother before her son ruined the whole thing. Abram doesn’t flinch, doesn’t get uncomfortable with what Andrew is throwing in his face.
Andrew pushes a little further, telling him exactly why he wants nothing to do with his brother, what Drake threatened to do. Abram’s eyes stay hard with fury, not a single drop of pity in their depths.
Andrew decides then that this boy with fire for hair and too much paranoia is not real. He can’t be.
—
The rest of the year passes without much excitement, except for Luther Hemmick coming in to try and get Andrew to sit in a room with Aaron. It goes about as well as expected, which is to say not well at all, but Abram seems to find his description of the event absolutely hysterical. He falls asleep that night to the sound of Abram’s laughter still ringing in his ears.
Andrew’s birthday passes again before he realises he doesn’t know when Abram’s is. He tries asking one day and is met with a familiar vague smile followed by a dismissive wave. It’s only slightly annoying. He does get another card to shove under his mattress and extra dessert.
Abram starts to get restless after. Andrew is used to taking a walk to the indoor field so he can watch the boy run laps until his legs give out, but lately, Abram has been spending more time on the track than in their room. It obviously has to do something with his paranoia and escaping habits he yet has to kick. Andrew lets himself worry about his rabbit for about five minutes before he walks down to the track and trips up Abram with a barely concealed snort.
He gets a glare and a huff in response, which is more than he’s had in a week. Andrew takes it as a win.
Abram eventually tells him that it’s January, to which Andrew frowns—he had not pegged the other boy as a winter hater—but the look in those blue eyes suggests a despair that could simply not arise from falling snow. He doesn’t ask, but he doesn’t pretend he isn’t curious.
It takes another week of Abram trying to run his legs off before he breaks and answers Andrew’s questions without much fight. He tells him that January is his real birthday and the month when his mother first took him away from the slaughterhouse that was his house. Tells him that January was the first time Lola Malcolm put a knife in his hands and told him to cut. Tells him that, even if his mother and father killed each other in their last meeting, Lola is still out there where Abram cannot see her and he’s terrified she’ll find him to end what his father set her out to do.
It isn’t the first time Andrew has had to bring Abram down from a panic attack, but this is the first time he’s had to dig his fingernails into the boy’s forearms to shock him back to the present. Andrew hates how scared, how small, Abram looks. Hates the idea of being away from him when their respective sentences end. So he offers him a deal.
Andrew will do anything he can to keep Abram safe as long as they stay together. There’s hesitation at first, like he was expecting, but Abram seems to understand that he’ll have no one and nowhere to go to once he gets out. And Andrew is offering him shelter with protection at no extra cost. All he has to do is stay.
—
Andrew meets Aaron a few more times, each one worse than the last (much to Abram’s amusement). He continues to dislike Luther, continues to resent Cass, tries not to think too much about when he’ll have to leave. He memorises the feeling of Abram’s lips on his, gets more comfortable with scared hands touching his shoulders, finds a little bit of peace in the embrace of another.
Then an officer visits their cell and informs Andrew that he is being released on early parole, that Aaron and his mother are waiting for him outside, that he is all set to check out. He can barely manage to look at Abram and watch the panic in his eyes, but he does and almost refuses to leave if only to stay with his runaway.
He does not want to break their deal. Abram insists he go to his family, but he doesn’t seem to realise that he is the only family Andrew has truly known. The officer gets impatient and Andrew nearly has to bite his head off to get some time with Abram. Alone.
He tells him that he’ll be back the second he gets a phone to give Abram the number so that when the boy gets out, he can call Andrew and he’ll come pick him up. He doesn’t give him the chance to argue.
Abram does not cry. Andrew definitely does not cry. If he is more curt towards his brother and Luther when he walks out of the detention centre, they do not have to know it is because of the little boy he’s leaving behind.
—
Tilda takes in Andrew and Aaron at Luther’s request, and Andrew locks down his relationship with Aaron through a similar deal to the one he made with Abram.
It takes him no time at all to go back to the centre—as a visitor—and slide his phone number under the small gap between the table and the plexiglass. Abram still looks at him like he hung the moon and the stars. Andrew still hates him (god, he misses him).
He starts high school with Aaron and learns just what kind of woman Tilda really is. Because deals seem to be his thing now, he makes one with her; he won’t kill her if she never touches his brother again. It is a warning disguised as a threat, and she does not take it to heart, which results with Andrew in the hospital and Tilda in a coffin.
Nicky Hemmick flies in just days later, fresh from Germany with kind eyes and too much love to give. Andrew barely has time to blink before he’s being whisked away to another home, one step further from Abram and the peace he could almost hold in his hands.
Abram calls him twice in the next few weeks. The first call comes as a surprise that has Andrew’s heartbreak acting up all over again—it’s been so long since he’s heard that voice. Again, he absolutely does not cry. Not even when Abram tells him that he’s supposed to be released within the month. They stay on the phone for much longer than necessary (which is not that long, considering juvie phone rules). Andrew manages to tell him about Aaron and Nicky, and Abram counters with a two minute rant about his new roommate.
The second call comes in days after Andrew traps Aaron in their bathroom and forces him to get off his drugs. The house is a hub of crackling tension that none of them particularly want to be in. So when Andrew’s phone rings and Abram tells him that he’ll be out tomorrow, the relief that blooms in his chest is almost painful.
Nicky gets a very short version of Abram’s story and excitedly agrees to take the boy in for as long as he needs to get back on his feet. Nevermind the knife quietly pointed at his ribs.
—
The first flash of auburn in the sea of concrete crashes into Andrew like a breath of fresh air. Finally, finally, he can have his runaway back. Abram greets him with the brightest of smiles and Andrew can’t help but bask in its glow. He deliberately ignores the look Nicky sends his way.
But Abram comes out Neil, with an FBI pig flanked on both sides, and Andrew has to remind himself that it won’t be so easy to just be with him again. On the phone, Abram had warned him of all the questions they’d have to go through (Nicky and Aaron included) to make sure they were a safe enough landing spot for him. Andrew wants to grab his hand and book it out of there.
The sun is starting to set when they finally make it back home, a newfound stray in tow. Nicky is much too excited about it, which is both getting on Andrew’s nerves and confusing Abram, but he figures it’s one of the better things that have happened to them lately, so he lets his cousin be. Aaron is not so gracious.
—
They do fine for a while. All of them start to work at Eden’s Twilight; Andrew as a bouncer, Aaron and Nicky as bartenders, and Abram (he should really start calling him Neil) as a barback. They’d originally put him with Nicky, but he proved to have a much bigger mouth than Andrew anticipated, so he got pushed to the restocking and cleaning jobs where it was much less likely for him to scare away customers.
Having Abram—Neil—so close all the time means Andrew can compensate for those months apart. There’s rarely a time where their hands are not somewhere on each other. Nicky had tried to tease them about it once, only to receive matching bone-chilling glares. He hasn’t brought it up since.
Andrew finds himself feeling almost content. It’s his last year of high school, he’s surrounded by the people he knows he has to keep if he wants to make it through the next few years, and for once, he’s not waiting for the other shoe to drop.
He really should have stayed vigilant, looking back.
It’s the end of Nicky’s shift when it happens. Neil and Aaron are inside, halfway through their own shifts, and Andrew has just arrived to take over for James, the other bouncer. Four men, big ugly guys, come sniffing around Eden’s, for reasons Andrew first ignores. He doesn’t find out until he hears Nicky’s scream and suddenly his brain shuts off.
When everything comes back into focus, the four guys are on the ground, beaten half to death, and Andrew is vaguely aware of the arms wrapped around him. There are police lights coming from all over the place, Nicky’s crying into his fist, Aaron is pushing past some officers. He can’t see Neil until the red hair comes barrelling through the crowd, yelling what Andrew can only assume are some vicious things to anyone who tries to stop him.
If Andrew was a poet, he’d comment about the contrast between them—both held back by police, Neil with both hands free, reaching for Andrew; Andrew with his arms pinned, dragged away from the scene. He focuses instead on the desperation in Neil’s eyes, the need to get to him before they’re separated again.
The trip to the station is horrible. Too many people touch him without his permission, the officers are looking at him like he’s a monster, the handcuffs are digging into his skin. They tell him a bunch of things he doesn’t listen to, and then the metal bars slam in his face.
He waits in the damn thing for a couple hours, sneering every time one of the pigs comes to check in on him (he tries to hide in the shake in his hands as best he can). Then there’s a big commotion and Andrew does not smile when Neil’s voice rises above the rest, demanding to know where Andrew is. Nicky agrees enthusiastically seconds later, followed by Aaron’s reluctant grunt.
He’s decidely not happy to see his band of misfits show up in front of his cell, surrounded by disgruntled pigs. Nicky wastes no time fussing over him, for once undeterred by the famous Minyard glare.
They eventually tell him about the charges he’s supposedly facing, to which he scoffs but does not argue. He does still have to finish his high school year—and, well, what the hell is the point of getting arrested for aggravated assault if you still have to deal with high school afterwards?
—
The rest of the year proves to be miserable in every possible way: school, the looming threat of a trial, and Neil’s increasing paranoia whenever any of them try to approach the subject of college. Andrew knows the prickle of anticipation he must be feeling, but if they stay in that Columbia house all together for much longer without breaks, somebody will get murdered for real.
They finish their exams without a big ceremony, and Andrew barely gets a second to savour his freedom before he’s shoved into a courthouse and tried for the crime of saving his cousin from bigots. In his opinion, Nicky and the lawyer do a good job of keeping him out of jail (he internally sighs with great relief when Neil is not called to the stand).
When the judge finally comes to a decision, Andrew is no longer sure he’s so against jail. Sure, he gets a choice, which is probably more than others in his position could hope for, but it kinda sucks: get thrown in the slammer for however many years or have drugs shoved down his throat for three years.
He watches Neil’s face contort with a rage that seems so out of place in the clean, composed court hall. Nicky and Aaron look positively exhausted, though they seem okay with the options given to Andrew.
Andrew doesn’t understand why Neil is so angry. If anything, shouldn’t he be just as glad as the other two that he doesn’t have to watch Andrew walk away again—because when it comes down to it, as much as he’ll hate having his emotions controlled by the government, Andrew can’t fathom turning his back on the redheaded boy for a second time.
—
In his bed that night, with his hands threaded through that auburn hair, Andrew asks about it. He asks why Neil is so upset about the idea of Andrew having to take mood-stabilisers, why he looked about ready to vault over the judge’s bench and bash her head in with the gavel.
Neil’s hand stills where it was tracing patterns on Andrew’s shoulder, and that same fury flashes across his blue eyes. He tells him that no matter the drug, the user is always less themselves after taking it. He tells him that he doesn’t want his Andrew Minyard to be replaced by whoever drugged Andrew Minyard will be. He tells him, with the slightest hint of pink on his cheeks, that he doesn’t want to stop being whatever it is they are.
And suddenly Andrew understands. He’d chosen the drugs and the therapy to not have to walk away from his family. But by taking away his sobriety, he shuts down Neil without even saying a word. For three years. No matter the choice, he turns his back on him.
He tries not to let it get to him (he does not succeed).
They spend their last night wrapped together, taking advantage of every second like it’s the last.