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He was supposed to be gone by the time Andrew returned, he was supposed to vanish like a cloud of smoke does when a breeze cuts through it, he was supposed to leave like the color and the glitter and the fog and the amusement did.

Andrew feels like he’s alive and breathing for the first time in seven weeks, like he’s falling and falling and there is noise around him, in the silence of his mind, buzzing and loud and only for a heartbeat, and a tug hard enough low in his stomach that he feels the pull of it as if he’s a magnet and his veins are on fire, and—

He takes a second to look down at his hand at that thought. At the hand that had been pressed to Neil’s skin a few minutes ago, and at the part of his skin that keeps shooting sparks alongside his body, and as the sound of the door closing reaches his ears, Andrew turns to follow Bee to her car and says goodbye to this side effect of his drugs for good

“Just so we’re clear,” Andrew says, his lips pulling into another smile because of course this has to happen. Because of course Neil is the only one to notice the pale scars on Andrew’s arms. “I’ll kill you.”

“Liar,” Andrew says. “But that’s what makes you so interesting. It’s also what makes you so dangerous.”

He had talked about this with Bee, about how much this attraction running along his skin like little sparks of electricity starts to feel less like lust, like what Andrew had thought it was, and more like claws, like poison crawling under his skin.

He’s definitely a lost cause, and that was a lie and Andrew hates liars, so he moves and puts his hand over Neil’s mouth to shut him up. The heat from his lips burns Andrew’s palm, makes him feel like someone dropped the match dangling above the gasoline poured everywhere inside of him at all times to create a fire burning bright enough to rival the sun.

Neil gets that look again, the same one he had when they were at Eden’s Twilight the last time. The one Neil had been wearing when he had tried to figure out Andrew and Renee’s relationship that shouldn’t even matter to someone like him, who doesn’t swing, as much as it seems to do.

It’s enough to make Andrew focus a little more, to make him feel like fireworks and falling, and the feeling of Neil’s pulse against his palms is almost enough to ground him. It’s ridiculous and nothing that should happen, nothing Andrew should let happen, but he ignores it and starts tapping his thumbs against Neil’s throat in time to Neil’s pulse instead.

Because this sudden interest Neil seems to be having is even more interesting to Andrew. Because Andrew knows that it’s a problem and dangerous, that when he looks at Neil and feels like he’s falling down a high building, soaring through the air toward the ground without a parachute.

“You wouldn’t care about the number unless there really was something there for me to find,” Higgins says, and he says it quiet and accusingly, as if Andrew is to blame for anything here when the pointy shards of a glass with a name like a promise surround him like corpses that crunch and hurt after every step you take.

Neil says and then his brown eyes, his brown eyes that still look oddly wrong to Andrew, look from one of them to the other before it settles on Andrew and makes Andrew feel like he’s sitting on the roof, barely holding on, with his feet dangling over the edge. Oh, Andrew doesn’t like this.

Riko takes a shot at the goal Andrew would have usually been able to defend (because he sees it coming from miles away, because it incredibly easy to read Riko’s body language), but then there’s a ten foot tall wave of nausea and pain rolling over him in the second he lifts his foot to move and it roots him in his spot

One thing this fic does really well is explain the motives and fallouts of Andrew going through withdrawal on game nights. I’m surprised it isn’t spoken about more, considering he literally comes off his meds just to play.

In a weak attempt to out-run this attraction laying itself over him like a thin blanket even when he knows it won’t work.

Andrew has never been much of a runner, after all.

It doesn’t matter, it shouldn’t matter, and Andrew knows this because no one has ever looked back at Andrew when he had looked at them, and Andrew knows better than to let this simple attraction grow into something more and let it be the thing that manages to kill him.

Andrew doesn’t have to turn around to confirm that it’s him because something deep inside of him pulls at him and it’s a small flame whose name Andrew knows like his own reflection grinning back at him when he looks into a mirror.

This will hurt

Andrew reaches out and puts one finger underneath Neil’s chin, lets the spark from the skin contact dance along his skin and lets it set him on fire from the inside out, and pushes Neil’s head up.

Interesting, Andrew remembers thinking when he had seen Neil the first time without the constant high of his medication there to cloud his judgement, and he thinks maybe he underestimated just how interesting someone like Neil Josten can be for someone like himself.

Oh, Andrew really, really can’t wait until he’s sober and all of this disappears. Until it disappears like the dream it has to be, until it disappears like the acrid smoke from his cigarette does as he takes a drag and it gets blown away, turns invisible, like it had never been there at all. Like it had been a fragment of Andrew’s imagination all along.

Not even if his body’s reaction to Neil, the warm feeling in his gut that claws up all the way to his chest and climbs to the inside of his ribcage, feels like he swallowed the sun and is getting burned from the inside out.

He describes love as if he is physically in pain. I love it

Later, when Neil isn’t directly next to him and he can’t feel the warmth of his body leaching into his own and when he can’t feel his bright gaze burning into his skull like fire.

Because it wasn’t necessary for anyone else to know, because Andrew pushed Neil to give up a secret just now to see if he would, to see if it would make him less interesting (it didn’t).