#sorry if this is kinda poorly edited I've been at this for hours and gd hours

[ravenvsfox]

hello meghan my love my darling when are you going to post the next chapter of the rockband au???? you should do it on or before the 2nd for absolutely no personal reason at all. but anyway ilysm???? i hope you’re doing great now that it’s starting to warm up (seasonal depression whomst?) 💖💖

(hello ily honeyy happy happy happy birthday I’m sorry this is late)

Neil wakes up, as usual, to the pinging of a text message. He doesn’t bother to look at it. He knows what it will say; the unassuming number, the conspicuous silence whenever he writes back. 

He rolls over so that the thinning comforter pulls and sticks beneath him, and he slits his eyes against the pre-dawn light.

Yesterday he’d deleted the number ’36’ from his messages and jammed his bare feet into his boots. He’d walked all the way out back to the dumpster with the cellphone cracking in his fist before his fear won out, and he’d pocketed it again.

He knows what day the zero should fall on. He’s learned to dread countdowns because he’s lived to see what comes on the other side of them, surfed the sand in an hourglass as it ebbed out from underneath him.

The monsters keep him busy, and so do the Foxes, now. They pull him in different directions, divide his attention, pique his curiosity. He’s acutely aware of how devastating it will be for him when he has to leave them, what a terrible thing he’s done by letting them close enough that they’ll notice when he’s dead.

But no one endures like the lonely people who end up at Palmetto, and he knows no one will stumble for long.

He reaches into the swath of blankets and holds the phone in his hand. It buzzes again, the nudge of the same message insisting upon being read. He feels frustration crest and fall in his chest, and then he wonders if anyone else is awake. Sometimes Andrew will get up early and make eggos, or Kevin will go for a run before the sun is up, but they’ve been inconsistent while they sloshed through the songwriting process.

He’s heard Aaron making endless pots of coffee and Nicky in the basement, practicing licks without an amp in the middle of the night. Once, Neil wandered down and knelt the wrong way on the couch to watch him play. He wasn’t quite awake, and the music twanged against Nicky’s goofy grin and made Neil smile back at him.

Now that Ausreißer’s album is edited into submission, sent off for packaging, all of their tireless work crystallizing somewhere, he’s promised Foxes that he’ll record a vocal for them. It’s strange to think of them wanting his serious voice worked through their bright sound, incongruous as salt in coffee. It’s even stranger to think of the way his voice will be broadcast after he’s dead, perpetually echoing after his disappearance.

Their album is set to be released in a week, and then the next leg of their tour will roll up to meet them, and sometime in those delicate, dwindling months, Neil will be found. He fantasizes about leaving a ripple when he’s taken, and then he thinks better of it. When his mother died, he watched the fire take her skin, and her hair, and her eyes, and he thought, death would be easier if we didn’t let ourselves matter to one another.

He lets the phone sink back into the sheets, and sits up, swinging his legs over the side of the mattress. Someone knocks twice on the door, just the edge of a knuckle. Andrew.

“It’s open,” he says. 

Ever since Andrew had burst in, answering questions that Neil hadn’t even thought to ask, he’s taken to leaving his door unlocked.

Andrew opens the door and promptly crosses the room towards Neil’s dresser, not even sparing him a glance. His hair is unkempt, a riot of blond that won’t part correctly, fluffed up from sleeping on it wet.

Unlike the rest of the monsters, who’ve buckled back down into their routines, Andrew’s been acting increasingly erratic. He’s been self-medicating more often, and holding himself back from something so effectively that Neil can’t quite see what it is. Sometimes he seems to glitch out, cutting himself off mid-sentence, cagey and self-contained.

The drugs should make his tongue looser, but mostly it seems to make him say more of everything. It’s harder to find whole kernels of truth in a bowl full of bravado that’s puffed out like popcorn.

Andrew puts both hands on the knobs of Neil’s drawer and waits there. Neil nods, amused. He’s long since found a lock for the bottom drawer and secreted away his money and information. Andrew pulls the top drawer out, sawing it back and forth when the dufflebag catches. He digs briefly through Neil’s small selection of shirts, and picks out something in faded green. He throws it and some light-wash jeans in Neil’s direction.

“Up, get up. Renee’s already at the studio.”

“You have today off,” Neil says.

“Well deduced,” Andrew says. “I’m driving you.”

Neil hesitates. “I’m fine with walking.”

“Do what you want,” Andrew says flippantly. “I have an errand to run near the studio, and you can come with me or you can waste Renee’s time and mine.”

“That’s not manipulative,” Neil says sarcastically.

“I’m giving you a choice,” Andrew says. His gaze finds the burner phone nestled in Neil’s bedding, then trails up to catch his eye.

“Yes, okay. Just let me change.” He’s secretly glad to be ferried to the studio, to have earned Andrew’s passenger seat, and to not have to think about who could be tracking him on foot. Andrew crosses wordlessly to the threshold of his bedroom and closes the door behind him. He can hear him shifting his weight outside, guarding Neil’s privacy.

He dresses quickly and quietly in the clothes that Andrew picked out for him, feeling strangely flushed about the whole thing. He doesn’t want Andrew to know that he’s doing exactly what he suggested, or that it’s become a habit for him to do so.

They leave not ten minutes later, after he’s stopped in to use the bathroom and splash water on his face, teasing fingers through his hair and swigging Nicky’s mouthwash.

Andrew waits at the door, turning keys over in his hand, hair still wild, belt buckled kind of askew with the tail of it sticking out.

“Are you ready?” Neil asks tentatively. Andrew cranks open the screen door in response, and steps out into the sweet spring morning. Neil follows, watching his even gait, the full, yolky yellow of his hair.

They climb up into the cold barrel of the van. When Neil reaches for the dial to turn up the heat, Andrew catches his wrist.

“I can’t get any warmer.”

It’s around this point that Neil suspects that Andrew might already be high.

Maybe balancing the creative chaos of their album with the newness of Neil has taken more of a toll on Andrew than it has on the others. Something about working constantly, writing feelings into rhymes that you can chew and rinse and spit with has made him itchy and distracted.

“Did you take something?” Neil asks.

“Not yet,” Andrew says, reversing violently onto the street, much too broad a maneuver for such a large vehicle. He clips the opposite curb before he cracks into drive and takes off.

Neil watches his inscrutable face, the tightness around his mouth and the brightness of his eyes. He can’t tell.

“No one drives like this when they’re sober.”

“You know I do,” Andrew tells him. Neil does. He’s seen Andrew stoned, laughing like he doesn’t want to be doing it, the way people do when they’re being tickled. He’s also seen him drunk, soaked through with sweat, sticking to the seats, and he’s seen him storm-cloud sober. He always manages to make it feel like the van is on ice skates.

“Did Wymack ask you to hold my hand?”

Andrew considers this for a moment too long. “Depends on what you mean by that.”

“Babysit me,” Neil clarifies. “Drop me off and pick me up so I don’t cause another incident.”

“No,” Andrew says simply, turning left so sloppily that he almost clips a crossing pedestrian.

“Then why would you—why are you doing this?”

“Million dollar question.”

“Is there a million dollar answer?” Neil asks.

“There are no million dollar answers,” Andrew says. “There are disappointments.”

“So no one asked you to do this for me.”

Andrew looks at him. “You may have noticed that I do not do what people ask me to unless it’s in my best interest.”

“You’re not as selfish as you want people to think,” Neil says, looking away, out the window. The studio is creeping up on them, three intersections way, then two. He’s come to know the route well, imagining the bends in the road when he’s trying to fall asleep. “Defending Kevin could bring the yakuza down on you, and you’ve always known it. Just like you had no guarantee that killing Tilda for Aaron wouldn’t kill you too.”

“Most people wouldn’t give murder as an example of selflessness,” Andrew says. “Does it make you feel better, to make us into good people?”

“No, actually,” Neil says honestly. “It makes it harder to pretend I’m one of you.”

Andrew pulls up into the shaded side of the studio, and Neil breathes out heavily. The honesty comes so much easier now; after those first botched pricks to his veins the blood has just flowed and flowed.

“Here,” Andrew says, pulling his keys from the ignition and prying the ring open. He slips a little bronze key from the loop and hands it to Neil. “To our front door. Allison’s going to drive you home, and none of us are going to be there to let you in.”

Neil’s hands go cold with surprise, and he opens them both for Andrew. “Just for today?”

Andrew shrugs and drops it into his palm. “It’s yours.”

“Why?” Neil asks quietly, pressing two fingers to the ragged edges. The metal is still warm from Andrew’s hand. He thinks of his name looped into a contract, thinks of sharing a microphone with Kevin and bumping fists with Matt. He pictures himself unlocking the door to a home on a residential street and hearing their record playing somewhere inside.

“You live there,” Andrew says, bored. “It’s convenient.”

“It’s more than that,” Neil says fiercely. “You know it is.” He wishes suddenly that he could give Andrew a key to something, an access code to a vault of secrets or a missing piece that would topple Riko’s threat. Before he’d found a stolen twin and a frantic cousin, he had even less of a home than Neil did. The teeth of the key eat into his palm.

“Do not lose it,” Andrew says. “I’m not cutting you another one.”

He knows that he would never misplace this proof of the flimsiness of Andrew’s apathy, this symbol of belonging, this ticket to normalcy. He also knows that Andrew would make him another if he really needed it, and that it means something distinct to both of them.

Andrew watches him mildly. “Go inside. Find your Foxes. If they try and wash your voice out with shitty effects, walk away.”

Neil smiles a little. “You told me yesterday that you don’t care about musical integrity.”

“I don’t want to hear you complain when the track flops,” Andrew says.

“Right.” Neil pops the door open. “I’ll see you at home,” he says tentatively, and when Andrew waves him off, he closes the door between them.

He lets himself uncurl his hand to look at the key, slowly, like it’s a living thing, something he unearthed. He studies the pattern of it, the tangy metallic smell clinging to his fingers.

When he looks up again, Andrew has pulled away. He forces himself to ease the key into his pocket and lower his eyes before the van disappears around the corner.

______

He finds Renee alone in the biggest upstairs studio, sipping demurely from something that smells natural and fruity. She smiles warmly at him when he comes in, and he feels caught in the suspended moment between springing the trap and suffering the consequences.

“You’re early,” she says.

“Interesting. Someone told me I was late.” He shrugs off his jacket and drops it over a music stand.

“Interesting,” she echoes.

Neil crosses his arms. “Where are the others?”

She pauses with the rim of her travel mug at her lips, then lowers it again. “Struggling to get out the door, probably. Allison likes to take her time primping.”

“Okay,” Neil says, uncomfortable to find himself alone with the only person at Palmetto that he can’t really read. “Warm up?”

“If you want,” Renee says easily. Infuriatingly. “Or we could talk, like Andrew so obviously wants us to. I recognize his machinations when I see them.”

Neil considers the slender silver cross at her neck winking in the overhead light. She has the nimble, capable hands of a musician, and the inexplicable ability to garner the respect of someone like Andrew. It’s more than enough to warrant his curiosity.

“What could he possibly want us to talk about?” Neil asks, sitting gingerly in a stray chair across from her.

Renee shrugs. “He’s not usually forthright with details.”

Neil tilts his head and decides all at once to play along. “What is it that he likes so much about you?” he asks.

Renee takes his rudeness in stride, her mouth pursing a little with amusement. “He discovered that we have a lot in common. Rich histories of bad situations and terrible exit strategies. The only difference is that I have my faith and he has his nihilism.”

“And what exactly constitutes a bad situation, for you?”

He’s seen Andrew’s sleeves of scars, he’s seen him wake violently from dreams that never seem to be anything but nightmares, and he’s seen that shallow look in his eyes that says that he’s been hurt as badly as he can be, and everything else is just smoke after fire.

He can’t see any of that on Renee. Her faith is gentle as candlelight, her mannerisms easy as warm water, and he doesn’t like the waxy, tepid feeling of being around her.

Her smile cinches, as if yanked closed by pursestrings. “How much time do you have?”

Neil shrugs. “As much as you do.”

She pulls a hand awkwardly through the hair at her neck — as if, for a moment, she was expecting it to be longer.

Neil waits. Renee sighs. The overhead clock ticks.

She tells him methodically about her mother’s whirlwind of abusive boyfriends, the years that compounded into a deadly pressure that would only give when she took knives to it. She doesn’t hesitate when she tells him about causing her parents’ death, running with gangs until it landed her in juvie, and then into foster homes. For a moment, Neil can see something of Andrew in her face like a familial resemblance.

Renee worries a fingernail in her mouth for half a second, distracted, before she explains what Stephanie Walker did for her. The way music and faith entered her life at once, twin forks on a lightning bolt. Church choir first, and then violin lessons.

Cruelly, he resents her for having someone who desperately fought for her, for letting her mother die so quietly in jail. He also understands, for the first time, why he’s been so unsettled by Renee; she walked out of her tragedy and shut the door. Neil can never latch his while Nathan’s foot is wedged in the gap. He has the most unsettling feeling that Andrew’s door has been wrenched off of its hinges.

“So why aren’t you with Andrew?” he wonders aloud. It’s not the right thing to say, but it’s the only complete thought he’s had since she started talking. Her story reads like a high quality forgery of Andrew’s. Renee complements him just as well in friendship as she does in music.

She smiles like she was expecting this question. “Why would that matter?”

“It doesn’t,” Neil says quickly. “Matter. I don’t care. It just seemed like an obvious fit.”

“We’re kindred spirits in some ways, and I have a hunch that we’ll always be friends. But I’m not his type.”

“I can’t imagine who would be, if not you,” Neil says. He doesn’t mean for it to come out as an accusation, or a compliment, so it sits uncomfortably between the two.

“That’s a puzzle,” she says, smiling impishly.

“You know the rest of your band is placing bets on you?” he asks.

She laughs. “Sure. Gotta pass the time between sets somehow.”

“And it doesn’t bother you?”

“Not at all. Allison’s in on the joke, and that’s half the fun — bluffing together. Finding your allies.”

“In on— in on which joke?” he asks, vaguely frustrated.

Her eyes drift sideways, away from him and towards the door. She pushes up her sleeves carefully. “Andrew and I aren’t just unlikely. We’re impossible.”

“Why impossible?”

She shrugs. “I don’t date men, if I can help it.” Neil barely has time to process this before she adds, “and Andrew doesn’t date women.”

“Oh,” Neil says dumbly.

“I wouldn’t spread that around, though,” she says. “It’s not common knowledge just yet.”

“So why would you tell me?” he asks.

She smiles again. “If he suspected that you were curious about my relationship with him, and still engineered this conversation, I don’t think he would be surprised to know that I’ve told you this particular truth.”

Neil turns this thought over in his head. Andrew puts his secrets at such a remove that he completely avoids being confronted about them. Their impact disperses and melts away before he even makes an appearance.

He thinks about Andrew’s complete disinterest in the fans who throw bras at the stage and shake posters with his name on them. He doesn’t think their gender has anything to do with his apathy, but those instances still tint and change in his memory.

Renee sits good-naturedly through his bout of silence, and then she says, “I hope I helped uh— fill in the blanks a little more for you. I know I don’t really know anything about you, even though we’re all really trying to. Your bandmates though—you breathe the same air and play the same songs day after day, so they can’t help but know you a little. And I know them. So maybe we can be friends someday too.”

Neil feels a distant pang of regret that he won’t be around long enough to prove her right or wrong. He’il be pried from this life with the abruptness of a needle lifting from the middle of a record, and the truth will die, unspoken, on his wasted tongue.

He doesn’t reply, and lukewarm silence stretches between them until Allison comes teetering into the room on platform heels a minute later. She puts her iced coffee on the table and tugs affectionately on the ends of Renee’s hair, and Neil thinks, of course.

A memory surfaces—Andrew twisting dye into his hair and his eyes slipping involuntarily closed—but Dan and Matt parade into the room, arms full of store-bought water and gatorade, and whatever the thought was going to be slips away.

_____

It takes them hours to nail the recording. Neil is dissatisfied with every take, Dan keeps thinking up ideas to beef up their harmonies, and Matt messes with the controls, stripping back the distortion to ‘show off Neil’s pipes’.

They break for lunch at 1pm, and Neil finds himself drifting away from the others, wandering all the way downstairs and through the door, out to the shade where Andrew had left him that morning. He takes out a cigarette that he’d stolen from the console in the van, and the backup lighter from the bowl of keys in the foyer.

He lights up, flame chewing its way towards his fingers. He turns his back against the brunt of the cold and keeps his shoulder to the wall, hair washed forward over his eyes by the wind.

A car rolls up somewhere behind him, and then there’s a snap like a briefcase being closed.

Someone says, “Nathaniel.”

Neil whips around. His fingers tense so that the cigarette nearly snaps in half, but he clings to it and the lighter, the only weapons on his person.

There’s a sleek black SUV parked several spots away, and Riko Moriyama is leaning out of the open side door.

“It is time for us to talk,” he says.

Neil takes a step back. He can see at least two other people in the vehicle, and when he looks up, the shades are drawn over every visible window in the building.

“If you run it will only drag this process out for all of us,” Riko sighs. “We don’t offer civil discussions often. I would take this rare opportunity.”

“You have a knack for making threats sounds like kindnesses,” Neil says. “But then, most bullies do.”

“Get in the car,” Riko says. “Or your real name goes violently public.”

Neil’s teeth clench hard enough to crack. He drops the cigarette on the pavement, and walks forward two steps. “Can I say goodbye?”

“Don’t be melodramatic,” Riko says, and his upper body disappears into the car. Neil follows him in, trying to conceal the way his legs have gone stiff with terror.

In the cab of the car it is just Riko across the expanse of cool leather in the back, and two older men whom Neil doesn’t recognize in the driver’s and passenger’s seats. They peel smoothly out of the parking lot and onto the street.

“They’re expecting me back,” Neil says. One of the men in the front passes Riko an ornate black cane, and he levels it in Neil’s direction.

“I don’t want to hear anything from you until I have finished speaking. In fact, do not talk unless you have been prompted to. I already know everything about you that I care to.”

“I’m at a disadvantage then, since all I know about you is that you are a sadomasochist with the bravado of a much more interesting person.”

Riko raps the cane into the side of Neil’s head with such force that his teeth clatter together and his ears ring.

“I guess pleasantries are over, then,” Neil says.

Riko regards him with distaste. “In another life, perhaps, you could have been an asset. Your father’s reputation precedes him. We might have recruited him if he were as easy to pin down as his son seems to be.”

“What would the yakuza need with another butcher?”

Riko raps him on the hands this time, a warning. “Don’t. Speak.” He watches the redness bloom immediately on Neil’s knuckles with flushed pleasure.

“It would be easy enough to send word to his colleagues and have them at Mr. Hemmick’s front door in a day or two, but I’m not sure that you wouldn’t stir up a mess in the meantime. The publicity from your death could bolster Ausreißer’s success. The disappointment from hearing that you’ve left voluntarily is a boycott and a think-piece away from cutting them off at the knees.”

“You want me to leave the band,” Neil says incredulously.

“Of course,” Riko says.

“I’m aware that you have sway in many circles, but not here,” Neil says. “The people in this studio are inside each other’s pockets more than they’ll ever be in yours. They won’t accept this. They won’t.”

“Your interpersonal connections mean nothing to me. Kevin belongs on my team. Andrew and his monsters have been a nuisance, but you are an insufferable offence.”

“So you’re removing your biggest threat?”

Riko’s lip curls. “I found vermin in my house, and I will return it to the sewers where it was born unless it gets out of my way.”

“Even if you did scare me with your posturing, my hands are tied,” Neil says. “I have a contract. He—they won’t let me go.”

Riko’s expression shifts, sand dunes moving in the blowing wind. “You think the drummer will protect you?”

Neil doesn’t reply. He doesn’t want to betray Andrew’s position. He’s like a pipe bomb in a mailbox or a chess piece in check.

“Oh, Neil. He couldn’t even protect himself.”

“What,” Neil says flatly.

Riko waves the cane in a relaxed circle, like he’s deciding where it should land. “I would have thought that someone with your trust issues would have done better research on the people around you.”

Neil stays silent.

“Andrew was a foster kid, yes? It’s chaotic for kids in those crowded houses. So many mouths to feed. Or fuck, in Andrew’s case. I’m sure it was traumatic for little Andrew to be passed around like that, from bed to bed. No wonder he’s so hot and bothered over our intervention. He knows what it looks like when someone’s overpowering him.“

“You’re lying,” Neil says, thunderstruck.

“Mention Drake Spears to your little bodyguard and see how quickly he loses it. Or better yet, just look up the Minyard trial. Andrew can drink the past away, but he can’t erase it from the news. Drake was a fascinating man. Not that rapists in uniform aren’t common, but to break someone like Andrew in I’m sure takes a little extra finesse.”

Neil lunges for him, and Riko counters a beat too late with the cane. Neil clips his eye, and the cane makes contact with his throat a second later. He splutters and reaches, trying to get a hand around Riko’s throat.

“That’s not true,” Neil’s saying, over and over. He twists the flesh on Riko’s neck, scrabbling at his clavicles, physically pressing him to be honest.

Riko looks annoyed, but not deterred as he holds Neil’s hands at bay. “How did you think he got to be a monster, exactly?”

It knocks the breath out of him. His grip sags. He’s aware suddenly that the car has stopped moving, and that anyone in it could kill and dispose of him without so much as interrupting their day.

“You’re not a monster because of what other people do to you,” Neil says, seething.

“Nonetheless. Leave the band, or one of the other members goes missing,” Riko offers. “I don’t care which, but Andrew is so nicely broken in already.”

Neil’s hand darts for him again, and Riko catches it, bored, cracking it back at the wrist. The door pops open at Neil’s back, and he’s hooked halfway out of the car by one of the other men, forearm screaming with pressure where Riko has him clamped in his fist.

Cool sweat breaks out on his brow from the pain as Riko leans down to face level, nails piercing his skin.

Before he can speak, Neil chokes, “you can’t set Andrew up. I won’t let you.”

Riko looks suddenly fatigued, and he lets Neil go so that he rocks back onto the sidewalk. “The more you underestimate my family’s clout. the more people suffer by our hands. You must understand that I am the only thing keeping any of you alive right now.”

“You’re wrong,” Neil says.

“You’re likely to be dead by summer, Nathaniel,” he says evenly. His eyes are black in the shadow of the open car door.

“That’s not my name.”

“If you want to lose allies and make new enemies in the meantime, it is your choice. But I don’t want to see you on stage again.” He shuts the door quietly between them, and Neil stumbles back several steps, momentum almost overbalancing him.

He watches the SUV depart and thinks of all of the leverage they have over him, how laser focused their will is to scrape Ausreißer off the charts and clip Neil’s loose end. His defiance had almost no affect on them at all. He had rubbed up against Riko’s temper, sure, but it was no harder than squeezing the trigger on a gun that’s already in your hand.

He squints distractedly at the studio several metres behind him, the bustle of midday spilling through the streets. The pleasant murmur of a city heralding in the end of Neil’s life.

He keeps thinking, if Riko knew about Neil’s past, he had no reason to lie about Andrew’s.

He keeps thinking, how could he be stupid enough to imagine that he had the biggest secret in the band — like Andrew wasn’t writing him a roadmap with songs, like his past wasn’t melted down and repurposed into lyrics.

He thinks, the target on his back just swallowed everything and everyone around him.

He thinks, I have to talk to Andrew.

______

He can’t bring himself to go back inside and excuse himself from rehearsal. There’s no explanation that they would accept without also understanding that he’s dragged them all down into danger with him.

He let them believe that his problems weren’t active case files and bleeding wounds. He pretended that he could broadcast his voice and maybe the music would be so sacred that no one would come looking for him.

Neil takes the bus home, scraping together spare change from his pocket. He finds his key while he searches, and his heart sinks. When he’s slouched in an aisle seat, he looks down at the shape of his hands, the grit under his nails, the old slice across his pinky, and the key nested in the intersecting lines of his palm.

Rain starts to patter against the window, blurring the colourful shapes of people outside who were hopeful enough to dress for much warmer weather.

He whirs with anxiety, searching for an out so desperately that it becomes a physical act, a shaking and a sweating. He should leave the city while he can still bear to. He owes it to everyone at Palmetto studio to take such a volatile element out of their equation.

It used to be his favourite solution when things turned ugly, dumping his life and name and letting a car carry him to a new one. The ritual of dying his hair and popping in lenses always felt charged with possibility.

Now he can’t let himself consider it. The idea of never seeing Dan or Wymack or Nicky or any of them again, of abandoning his deal with Andrew and dropping his new key into the nearest storm drain — it’s different now.

They were the first people to squint past his face-paint and recognize him as a lost kid. They gave him a key and a home with a locking door and passed him a microphone with the name he chose taped onto the handle. They gave him all sorts of contracts, but most important was the unspoken one that, for a minute, looked like friendship.

He gets back to the house two hours ahead of schedule, but it still feels too late. He thinks about letting himself in but suddenly can’t stand the thought of walking into the home that he’s about to ruin.

He knocks and steps down onto the second stair to give himself some distance. After a minute, someone stirs inside, and then there’s a thumping of footsteps, and the whine of the screen door.

Andrew stares down at him through the mist of rainwater.

“You have a key, don’t you?” he says. Neil looks up into his wan face, studying the way he’s holding himself up with the door, washed out in the bleak light from outside. Neil climbs warily to the top step, feeling a lived-in sadness settle into him.

“You’ve been drinking.”

“Got it in one,” Andrew says, smiling with one half of his face. “So very very perceptive all the time.”

It’s such bad timing that Neil laughs, then holds a trembling hand over his mouth. “I can’t have this conversation when you’re like this,” he says.

“Which conversation is that?” Andrew asks sharply. “Do be precise.”

“I need you sober,” Neil insists.

“You don’t need me anything,” he sneers.

“I’m making you coffee. And then we have to talk about the Moriyamas.”

Andrew looks immediately more alert. His hand slips from the door, and Neil just barely catches it before it closes on him.

“Why are you back early?” Andrew asks slowly. Neil closes his eyes.

“I don’t know. I don’t know why I came.” He should be hitchhiking over state lines. He should be in someone’s truck bed with the rain in his hair. He should be using the cold to forget what warmth feels like.

“Not a good enough answer,” Andrew says. He steps backwards into the entryway and turns, calling “keep trying” over his shoulder. Neil follows him solemnly, nudging the doors closed at his back. He steps out of his shoes while Andrew disappears silently into the kitchen.

When he rounds the corner, Andrew’s sitting on top of the dinky round table by the window, legs crossed beneath him. His cigarettes and lighter are at his side, and a bottle of Smirnoff is open on the chair behind him.

Neil moves towards the coffee maker, but Andrew snaps his fingers at him.

“Tell me why you left recording, no non-answers s’il vous plait,” he says. Neil hesitates, then climbs quietly up onto the table across from him, boosting himself with one socked foot on the cushion of a chair. Andrew looks surprised and red-eyed as Neil settles in, knee to knee.

He swallows thickly. “I have to leave.”

“You just got here,” Andrew points out.

“I have to leave the band,” Neil explains.

He waves this off. “Oh, no, I’m pretty sure we have our contractual claws in you, Neil Josten.”

“There are people, more now than ever, who have… more deadly claws in me.”

Andrew taps his lower lip thoughtfully. “Is it claws though, or is it talons? I know how the Moriyamas enjoy their raven motifs.”

“Riko’s threatening the band.”

“What’s new?” Andrew says.

Everything, he wants to say. Everything’s reaching a new and chilling level of dangerous.

“He stopped me on the street,” Neil says quietly. There’s a hand on his jaw immediately, turning his face towards the overhead light fixture. Neil lets his eyes unfocus in the harsh light. Andrew puts a finger to the bruise from the cane Riko was borrowing. “It’s fine.”

“You will be fine up until the moment that you’re dead,” Andrew spits, one hand moving to inspect Neil’s tender wrist.

“I’m fine if I can walk away,” Neil argues. “I’m okay if I stand up and move on, and that’s what I need to do here.”

“You took some heat from Riko and now you want to run away,” Andrew extrapolates. “Which is great, except you told me you weren’t ready to give up our deal.”

“I kind of assumed all deals were null and void in the event of a deadly threat.”

Andrew uses his leverage on Neil’s chin to tilt their faces close together. “I,” he says, “am a deadly threat. Riko is a little boy playing with his father’s knives.”

Neil flinches at his phrasing, shaking his head. “He has connections I can’t begin to understand. He told me things about my past, about yours—“

“Did he?” Andrew interrupts. His voice is the kind of inescapable cold that turns all of your exposed skin red, then blue, then black.

Neil tries to turn his face out of Andrew’s grip, and the pressure on him is immediately lifted. “Who’s Drake Spears?” he asks.

“Oh,” Andrew breathes, and then he laughs. “A dead man. Aaron’s gift to me.”

Neil’s face goes lax with surprise. “He killed him?”

“We like to keep our violence in the family,” Andrew says, smiling again, joyless. “Or rather, they did. We ended the cycle.”

“So Riko wasn’t lying about what happened to you,” Neil says slowly.

Andrew takes his cigarettes in one hand and shuffles them against the tabletop for a long moment. “Unlike you, Riko doesn’t always think that lying is in his best interest. It’s not one of his favourite sins.”

Neil stews in this revelation for a moment, trying to outlast the directionless rage streaking through him.

“I wish I’d known, before.”

“Why? So we could waste our time excusing ourselves in miserable circles for things that other people did to us? So I could explain to you what all of my scars mean and make you feel better about yours?”

“So I could have killed him myself,” Neil says fiercely. Andrew eyes him steadily. The rain picks up outside, and Neil can see it coming in through the window cracked over the sink.

“Is that supposed to impress me?”

“It’s not supposed to mean anything to you. It’s just the truth,” Neil says. “If I can’t kill my own demons, I—would’ve liked to kill yours.”

“Much too late for that,” Andrew shrugs. “Not too late to stay here with us. If Riko threatens you out of the band on his first try, then you’re not as tenacious as I thought you were.”

“I’m afraid,” Neil says, “that someone else will suffer for my pride.”

“It’s not pride, it’s trust,” Andrew says, and then his face clouds over like he’s sobering up, remembering himself. “In case you’ve forgotten since I reminded you two minutes ago, we have a deal. Protection for participation.”

He shouldn’t believe that this volatile, five foot nothing stage performer could rebuff the yakuza, but he does. He can’t look at Andrew’s eery, wavering certainty without wanting badly to trust him.

“Right,” Neil agrees, feeling hours-old tension ebb out of his shoulders. He came here, he realizes, knowing that Andrew would give him a reason to stay. “I’ll wait it out. But you have to promise me that you’ll watch your back.”

Andrew shakes his head and pulls a cigarette from the pack. “He can’t touch me,” he says, flicking his lighter open. His eyes are hazy as he props one hand up and smokes on autopilot. Neil’s not certain that he knows for sure who Andrew’s talking about anymore.

The tour isn’t for another couple of weeks. He can keep his face out of the news and slog his way through all of this new information, maybe turn over a solution somewhere in the muck. At the very least, he can spend these final weeks pretending that he’s not afraid of the dark at the end of the tunnel where the rest of his life should be.

______

It’s the bark, not the bite

the prelude to a fight

the gleam of bared teeth

when they catch the low light

the revving beneath

the thought that you might

with the last of your breath

get our ending right

Neil turns the demo down on the car radio, embarrassed, and Dan grins at him from the driver’s seat.

“That’s a sexy little lyric.”

“Shut up,” he says, rolling his eyes.

“I like the weird synth in the background, that’s baller,” Matt pipes up from behind them.

Nicky groans. “Don’t tell Kevin that, he thought he was a fucking genius for stringing together six notes by ear.”

Dan laughs brightly, easing onto the freeway that’ll carry them out of the city.

Their album was released at midnight, and they’ve spent the morning watching the charts and listening to Nicky read out reviews as they were published, waiting to see if they’d be rejected or absorbed into the musical bloodstream.

It was exhilarating to see the finished product saturating their little corner of music culture, to watch people forming opinions, and to pop up in playlists and news feeds. Someone had already posted a guitar cover of one of their tracks before noon. 

Neil watched the locked door of their house and hoped furiously that Riko wouldn’t take this new music as defiance and show up to drag him away. Foxes had shown up instead, with congratulatory champagne and a novelty card for Neil that read “baby’s first album”.

Both Ausreißer and Foxes were scheduled to take the weekend off before they’re all launched into promotions and tours on opposite coasts. Dan had suggested a Palmetto-wide retreat to lake Jocassee, and Neil had jumped at the opportunity to dodge the pressure from the Moriyamas and corral everyone out of harms way.

“This is going to be such a rowdy time,” Nicky says, chin tucked onto the shoulder of Neil’s chair. “I can’t believe you convinced Andrew to come.”

“Yeah, what the hell,” Matt says. “How did you manage that?”

Neil shrugs. “I asked.”

“Oh, you asked,” Dan says, nose scrunching under her sunglasses. “Do you know how long we were playing nice with the monsters before you showed up?”

“Neil’s got that magic touch,” Nicky says.

“Just how magic a touch are we talking?” Matt asks slyly.

“Don’t,” Neil warns.

“He won’t let us bet on them,” Nicky complains. “He’s just like, not fun.”

“It’s bewildering to me that you clowns are wasting your time when we all know who Andrew’s into,” Dan says. She keeps talking, and Neil hears Renee’s name, but he’s uninterested in the direction the conversation is taking. He looks distractedly out at the sun-split highway.

He thinks of how quiet the other car must be, stacked with supplies, caught in that constant vortex of tension between the twins, plus Kevin with his headphones on as always. Or what Renee and Allison talk about, tucked into Allison’s baby-pink convertible, the wind catching their bleached hair.

“Damn, are they passing us already?” Nicky asks, and Neil looks back in time to notice the massive shape of the van swerving past on their left. He catches the tail end of Aaron flipping them off, and Nicky laughs, craning into the front to return the gesture.

“They left like half an hour later than us, what the hell,” Dan says, revving a little, reluctant to fall behind.

“Andrew’s driving,” Neil says. The van jolts awkwardly into the lane in front of them, and Neil smiles as it streaks ahead. “They’ll beat us by a mile.”

“If they don’t crash first,” Dan grumbles.

“Look at it this way — if it’s not that, it’ll just be some other disaster,” Matt says. “That’s what you sign up for with the monsters.”

“You say disaster, I say a great time. Am I right, Neil?” Nicky asks, flicking at his shoulder to get his attention.

“I’m staying impartial.”

“You literally can not fool me,” Nicky says, affronted. “You love having an opinion.”

“He doesn’t want to incur your wrath by agreeing with us,” Dan teases, winking sideways at him.

“My wrath? This is the guy who taunted Riko Moriyama on sight, and you think he’s afraid of me?”

“We all are,” Matt says solemnly, and Nicky socks him in the arm.

They keep bickering, but Neil mostly tunes them out. A song that he helped write is still playing at half volume from the sound system, rounded out by Kevin’s deft bass solo. The car is warm enough to lull him to sleep, and he can see the rest of the Ausreißer crew fading into the scorched horizon ahead.

______

They arrive in staggered bursts to a spacious cabin, swallowed in overhanging trees on all sides. It’s two stories high, with a broad, wrap-around porch — courtesy of Allison’s string-pulling. 

The twins are sharing a bench when they pull up, talking seriously, and Neil has to squint to make sure he’s seeing them correctly. Three hours in a car together and against all odds they’re still sharing space.

No one bothered to unpack the van, so Neil keeps himself busy by hopping into the back and pulling out duffel bags. Allison and Renee arrive soon after with coolers full of booze and perishables, and by the time everything has been lugged inside, there are three guitars propped up and abandoned in the foyer.

It’s surprisingly easy, once all of them are talking at once. Kevin drinks enough to stay loose, which always seems to relax Aaron in turn. The girls sit on the floor of the dining room while Matt unpacks groceries. Nicky chatters about getting everyone hammered so they can play “sweet, genre-fucked music” together. Someone lights a joint, and it makes the rounds.

Neil hops up on the kitchen counter, and Andrew leans against the fridge beside him.

Neil relaxes at the sight of him. “Aren’t you glad you came?” he asks, a little louder than he intended. He can sense the others pretending not to eavesdrop, their conversation dropping and then starting back up again, overly bright.

“Remains to be seen,” he replies.

“You were talking to Aaron,” he says. Andrew stares passively back at him. “I’ve never seen you speak one on one like that.”

“It was a long drive.”

Neil hesitates. “Did you tell him—“

“Andrew,” Nicky calls. “I’m comin’ through with groceries, can you free up the fridge?”

Andrew moves wordlessly aside, and then all the way out of the room. Neil watches him go with a dull sort of disappointment. For someone who is so frequently difficult to parse, Andrew is such an obvious font of honesty and clarity that speaking to him sometimes feels like an antidote to his own lies.

“Come on, Neil,” Renee trills. “We’re talking about the collab.”

“I want to hear the track,” Kevin says.

“You want to critique it,” Neil counters, wandering closer.

Dan throws a hand out towards him. “Exactly!”

“I think I have a right to know how you’re utilizing my lead singer.”

“Oh jesus, Kevin’s going to start talking about music theory, isn’t he?” Allison says. “I’m gonna need to drink so much more.” Dan cracks up, passing her a mickey of spiced rum.

“We all do,” she agrees, raising a full bottle in toast. “It’s a Palmetto tradition. Work hard, play hard.”

“Thanks coach,” Matt snorts.

“C’mon, bring it in.” They all tilt bottles together, some of them unopened, eyes rolling. Neil can see Andrew watching from the next room, and when they drink, he takes a drag from his cigarette.

______

Neil drinks too much. 

He’d half planned on it, but his stomach is empty and his anxiety is just barely held down by sobriety, and it all gets to him so fast. His elbows keep chafing against other people’s, and his fear keeps blinking back at him from between branches outside and through passing headlights and in his own reflection.

They’re all seven or eight drinks deep when someone brings out a guitar, and then it’s a chaos of bad singing that coasts into real singing, someone upstairs laughing hysterically with someone else, someone on the porch with a bong.

He likes how it feels, the old safety of staying numb, like the back of the bars where nobody knows you, so you don’t have to bother to know yourself, and there’s nothing to be afraid of except the throb of a hangover at the end of the night.

But it’s different, now. Dan gets in close and thumbs both his cheeks, and Allison puts little, almost undetectable braids in his hair. Matt tells him how happy he is that they’re all together over and over again. The longer Neil looks over at Andrew the more he’s aware that he’s looking for something that isn’t there.

Nicky looks solemnly into his eyes in the bathroom mirror and asks to see his tongue piercing. There’s a strange moment, when he opens his mouth, where he thinks Nicky might grab him by the tongue.

“Come here, come here, come here,” someone says, and Neil looks at Allison’s reflection where she’s hanging in through the doorway. “Convince Andrew to play us something.”

“I can’t,” Neil’s mouth says. He tries again. “He won’t.”

“He does whatever you want,” Nicky says, looking much too serious.

“You—no,” Neil says. “You guys ask for whatever you want. I ask what he wants.“

“Whatever,” Allison says. “Semantics. Come out here.”

Nicky puts his hands briefly on Neil’s hips to sidle by into the hallway, and he and Allison chatter all the way back to the sitting room. Neil looks blearily at his reflection. His hair is so long now, it softens the angles of his father’s features. Makes his eyes look less painfully blue. He blinks, and breathes, and tries to think about nothing.

His feet carry him out to the rest of them. Dan cheers when he enters the room. She’s so flushed, and even though she’s sitting, Matt’s holding her steady.

Andrew’s sitting in an armchair by the fireplace, his posture relaxed, lips wet, drink in hand. Neil walks as steadily as he can to his side. The room goes nearly silent.

“Will you play something?”

Andrew looks up at him flatly. “Why would I?”

“I want to hear you sing,” Neil admits.

“And?” He takes a sip of his drink.

Neil shrugs. “I’ll trade you something for it,” he offers.

After a long moment, Andrew says “I’m not interested.”

“I know you’ve been writing new lyrics,” he says softly.

Andrew watches him for a minute, then nods towards the place where his notebook is sitting unassumingly on the coffee table. “Then sing them yourself.”

Neil considers this. He retrieves the book and holds it in both hands, giving Andrew time to back out. He doesn’t, and someone breathes out behind him.

“Okay,” Neil says. “Fine.”

He flips to the centre and finds blank pages, then beyond that, two that are flush with words and annotations. There are chords written out for four more pages after that, and then just scores and scores of melodies and poems and the lucky places where they meet.

He thumbs through songs he recognizes and new, title-less ones, still standing, everyone watching his search with interest.

He comes to a page near the back with the title burn this, and it reads:

Hands off never used to be a bad thing

It would be better if I never heard you sing

I know it’s winter, you can’t tell me that it’s spring

I want you without wanting anything.

Then a few lines are scratched out before the next fragmented stanza. Neil looks up into Andrew’s face, and he’s already staring back, eyebrows hitched so, so slightly together.

Neil crosses the room, and wrestles a little portable synth out of his bag, carrying it over to the couch. Some of the members of Foxes ‘ooh’ dramatically.

He nudges it on, cracks his knuckles, and toggles a couple of switches. He holds the book open on his knee, and starts to arpeggiate the suggested chords that Andrew’s written above each line.

He sings, improvising the melody, those first four lines and then —

It was too easy not to feel

when the drugs still told me you weren’t real

I always knew you were here to steal

We started this, me back on my heels

and you—beneath me.

There’s more, but Neil can’t bring himself to keep singing. His throat sticks and his vision goes spotty.

“Kind of a bummer,” Matt says.

“I think it’s pretty,” Dan says softly.

“Hard to believe the monster wrote it,” Allison says.

“You must know by now that we can write good lyrics,” Kevin says, irritated.

Aaron says something, but Neil’s still stuck staring down at the words on the page. Something is angrily crossed out in the second stanza, just completely struck through, unreadable. He feels remarkably sober all of the sudden, and he trudges to the precipice of an understanding so large that he has to step away from it, or he’s sure it’ll call him down to his death.

Andrew stands, somewhere in the field of Neil’s vision, and lets himself out onto the porch.

“Whoops,” Matt says, when the door closes behind him. “Do you think we took it too far?”

“He offered the book up,” Allison points out.

“To me,” Neil says.

“Well, yeah, but I think ‘sing them yourself’ was pretty self explanatory,” Dan says, missing the point. “So are we supposed to know who that was about?”

Neil stands, and the synth slides off his lap and into the crease between couch cushions. He walks to the kitchen and pours himself a cup of water, downing it all. Then another. He tries to remember exactly what the lyrics said and finds himself less and less certain.

For the second time that week, he thinks, knees knocking with terrible anticipation, I have to talk to Andrew.

______

He finds him curled on the bench outside, drenched in the yellow light from an exposed bulb, still nursing the same whiskey from before. He looks up with what Neil now recognizes as carefully tailored interest.

“Why does Nicky think that you’ll do whatever I ask?” he asks, voice wavering.

Andrew taps his fingers erratically on the rim of his glass. “Presumably because your track record has been good so far.”

“That doesn’t really answer my question.”

Andrew’s lips purse. “Then ask a new question.”

“Fine. I’ll play,” Neil says. “What was that song about?”

“It was about wanting something that I can’t have.”

“I didn’t think you wanted anything.”

“No,” Andrew agrees. “Except maybe to see if you sound as good in bed as you do on stage.”

Neil sits down, hard. He’s half-surprised when gravity still works, and the wicker footstool catches his weight.

“You like me,” he says weakly.

“Not really,” Andrew replies, expressionless. “Want and dislike are not mutually exclusive.”

Neil dry swallows a couple of times. He thinks of their eyes connecting darkly in a bathroom mirror, Andrew’s fingertips gliding over his scars, the passenger seat left open for him, his mouth and then Andrew’s on the same flask. He thinks of lyrics on their own album about running and lying and wanting without taking, and he remembers the deal that has kept him upright and safe and sane for so long.

Andrew’s amused interest when he’s high, the cryptic things that Nicky said to him on the night they met, the conversations where he gives away his secrets but doesn’t feel like he’s losing anything, it all completely restructures in his head.

He’s dizzy, still drunk, one foot in the reality where he was little more than a hindrance to Andrew, and the other in one where he writes songs about how much he wants him.

“You didn’t tell me,” Neil says dumbly. “You never said.”

Andrew shrugs. “There’s no point,” he says. “I’ve thought about it. Written about it. But I know better.”

“Okay,” Neil says, even though it’s not. Andrew shifts in his seat, and Neil watches his broad hands, his shiny lower lip, his squared shoulders. The night chirps and smokes with faraway firewood, pitch dark beyond the line separating the porch from the wilderness. Andrew might be the brightest thing for a thousand miles. “Okay,” he says again, but this time it splits in his mouth, and he reaches for Andrew’s face.