Chapter Text
Todd was standing behind Pitts when the car drove off.
Which meant he didn’t really see Neil after they’d initially brushed shoulders trying to push through the theater doors. The whole thing felt oddly final, like suddenly a massive wedge had been jammed between whatever friendship he’d managed to form with him, like he had gotten up on that stage and never come back.
Knox hadn’t been with them when Mr. Perry had taken Neil. He’d been behind in the crowd with Chris. He didn’t know what had happened, he hadn’t felt the jarring heat of Charlie’s reluctant confrontation.
“She kissed me!” He cried, throwing himself over Meeks and Charlie. He grinned expectantly, waiting for the cheers of approval and joined excitement, but was met with only solemnity.
“Good on you, Knoxious,” Charlie murmured absently.
The rest of the night felt mechanical. They all piled into the car and Keating drove them home in silence. No one tried to force conversation. Neil had set this silence for them, and no one dared disrespect it.
“I’m going to bed,” Cameron said decisively and dipped into the bathroom. The others stood in the hall, great hulking teenage forms of some unidentifiable grief. Eventually, Pitts sighed and followed him.
Knox offered weakly, “I’m gonna… find something to eat.”
Charlie nodded, but neither of them moved.
Todd stood in the doorway of his and Neil’s room. The paint in the door frame had started
to peel around the clasp, weathered from years of careless boys scraping the stopper across it. Todd picked at it nervously, the stiff streaks catching under his nails and digging into his skin.
“What are you gonna do?” Meeks asked him.
Truth be told, he wanted to go with Knox and Charlie, be anywhere but in that room. It felt insurmountable without Neil, dark and cold and inhabitable, and he didn’t want to be shut up in there with the empty bed. The aching altar of the Perry family sins.
“Let’s go.” Todd wasn’t even sure who said it. Maybe no one did, and they managed to think it at the same time.
The kitchens were empty. It was well past midnight at this point, and the staff had all retired for the night. Knox and Meeks scrounged up some leftover meatballs from the night before and spread the dishes along the counter. Charlie found some forks, and they all stood in silence, hunched over, eating cold meatballs in the dark.
Charlie, the way he always did when they were served anything that came in a unit larger than bite-size, jammed an entire meatball in his mouth. His jaw strained to chew it until he inhaled wrong and choked, coughing and spluttering. He grabbed Todd, and hit his chest in desperation.
Meeks pounded on his back and he hacked enough to dislodge it, before laying his head on the counter in defeat.
They didn’t eat much after that.
Todd and Meeks shared a sink to brush their teeth. The water was freezing this late at night, from the winter. Usually, the younger boys had already been through and the water had had time to warm, but it had been hours since they had gone to sleep.
Meeks’ hands were shaking- Todd had noticed how the fork had trembled against the dishes when he held it- and when he squeezed the toothpaste it globbed out uncomfortably and splattered against the front of his robe. He groaned and scraped it off, flinging it into the sink and trying to rinse it down, but the spot was left on the flannel.
Todd couldn’t stop looking at it.
“ Todd… Todd.”
He didn’t really wake up, just uncurled from the warmth of his bed enough to see Charlie. His brain was still asleep, didn’t think it through, just knew that if it was Charlie, it couldn’t matter all that much.
“Todd…”
The cold air in the room was too thin to breathe. The tears trailing down Charlie’s face, the tears dripping down Meeks’ chin. Knox’s dejected lean on the door.
“ Neil’s dead.”
It was hardly a conscious thought to make it into the snow. It flooded into his slippers, soaking through his socks against his cold feet. His hands must’ve been cold too, but his whole body was too numb to notice.
Everything he did wasn’t him- just some immediate mechanism within his body. It wasn’t until the thought really reached him, like the cold had been fighting it off all this time but it was too overpowering to completely subdue.
Neil’s dead.
Todd’s stomach lurched. He gagged involuntarily. How could Neil be dead? Neil?! Dead?! It was almost impossible to comprehend. But it felt real. He’d left that night for the play and they’d never seen him again. Puck was the ghost of a boy that had already made up his mind. And he would haunt them forever.
Todd’s stomach rolled and he keeled over, bile and undigested meatball from the night before spilling from his mouth and tarnishing the ivory snow. He fell to his knees, rocking with waves of discomfort, spitting out the taste of his grief.
The poets ran to him, grabbed him, to stop him from falling over in his own sick and rotting there. Knox buried his face in Todd’s back, grabbing him around the waist, and Charlie’s icy fingers pushed the clean snow to his mouth, purging the acid for only a moment, the way vomiting had only quelled his internal agony for barely a second. He wanted his hands there on his face, freezing against his hot lips and burning tears, to help stabilize him, but Charlie pulled away to help Meeks keep him upright, even against the weight of Knox against his spine.
It was his father, it was his father, it was his father!
He wouldn’t do this, he wouldn’t do this, it was his father.
Todd felt violently ill, worse than the time his appendix had burst, like if he didn’t throw up until he could hold his stomach, he was going to die.
He managed to scramble away from the poets, to tumble off through the snow like if he ran fast enough, he could get away from this situation, from this news, this reality.
This world without Neil.
His shoes slid on the snow, and he ruined the perfect stillness of the morning with his scream, and it still wasn’t enough. If Neil was gone, the sun shouldn’t have risen.
The wet grass turned to wood beneath his feet, and he nearly crawled to the end of the dock, reaching and reaching for the end, for something to save him. He was sure he would tumble end over and end and fall right through the frozen surface to be boiled in the subzero lake and it would hurt, but at least he would feel the same outside as he did inside. Even drowning wouldn’t hurt this badly.
But as he reached for the water, knees knocking on wood, he never met the surface of the ice.
“Neil!” Todd jolted awake, grasping at his blankets like it was the malleable snow he was expecting, and fell right out of bed and onto his back on the wood floor.
Neil startled at both his name and the clattering as he hit the ground, crying out, “Jesus, Todd!” and throwing his half-knotted tie over his shoulder. He rushed to grab Todd, who stared at him like he was some combination of a spector and a god and gasped for breath.
“Are you okay?”
Todd’s sight darted frantically across the room, looking for some flaw, some disconnect to prove this was a dream. But the room looked exactly as it always had, and Neil was watching him like he had lost his mind.
“Okay, you’re scaring me.”
“You’re okay?” Todd choked. He reached out and held the side of Neil’s face with one hand, and grabbed his arm with the other. He was afraid that he might disappear at the touch, but he didn’t. He remained solid and tangible under Todd’s grasp.
“‘Course I’m okay.” Neil smiled peculiarly. “Tonight’s the night.”
“What night?”
He laughed, staring absurdly. “The play. The play is tonight.”
“It is?”
“What’s gotten into you, Todd?” He felt along his forehead for a fever he wouldn’t find.
Todd swallowed and started to bring himself off the floor. “Just had a weird dream, I guess.”
The deja vu was insufferable. Everything Todd said, heard, did- felt like it already had been. He had sausage and oatmeal at breakfast, which they always had on Tuesdays, because it was Tuesday, although he could’ve sworn he had sausage and oatmeal yesterday (which made no sense because they had bacon, eggs, and toast on Mondays) and he listened to Charlie’s story about the first time he broke his arm. Which he was sure he had heard (but Charlie only had about eight good stories so he certainly could’ve heard it before).
Cameron burst a test tube during laboratory, which had happened yesterday, he swore, but no one seemed too put out, and Dr. Leason- as he was bandaging the huge angry welt on his hand in gauze- even said it was the first time Cameron had made that sort of mistake.
He sat through Keating’s lesson on music, with the sleep mask pulled over his eyes, but he couldn’t think about music when he was having the weirdest day of his life. He’d thought about music during the lesson yesterday. He remembered specifically thinking about Camille Saint-Saens. But no one else remembered.
Spaz tripped on the stairs on the way to dinner. Todd remembered it as it was happening, and tried to catch him as he fell, but he was just a second too late, and Spaz totally ate it, managing even to crush his own glasses. Neil and Charlie pulled him to his feet and he pushed the broken glasses up his nose.
Knox stayed behind on the way to the play because Chris had broken in.
Charlie spoke too loud and tried to stand up when Neil got on stage.
Todd shifted in his seat. Anxiety had started to burrow into the pit of his stomach and he could hardly sit still.
Keating watched him tense and shot him a questioning look, that he ignored. What was he supposed to say? I think Neil’s going to kill himself tonight. I had a dream about it.
Surely, that would go over well.
As they filed out of the theater, Neil and Todd brushed shoulders.
“You were incredible,” Todd told him earnestly, and despite the dampening presence of his angry father, Neil smiled.
Tonight, Todd got around Pitts. He watched Neil half-smile at Keating’s praise and climb in the car miserably, and he watched Charlie cry in outrage.
Todd already felt sick. It was happening again. Word for word. But it wasn’t like his dream, because he was standing in front of Pitts now, so it was different. It wasn’t a dream.
They stood there in silence as Mr. Perry’s car disappeared down the road.
“She kissed me!” Knox laughed, arms around Charlie and Meeks.
“Good on you, Knoxious,” Charlie murmured absently.
The paint hadn’t been peeled.
There was a spot, a place in the door frame where a drip of paint had hardened and Todd had peeled it off yesterday. Except he was back in the doorway, and he was peeling the same place. It came off with the same difficulty, and the piece around it stuck under his nail and hurt his skin.
“I’m going to bed.”
“I’m gonna… find something to eat.”
“What are you gonna do?” Meeks asked.
He motioned vaguely toward Charlie and Knox. His stomach was perfectly upset, but he was hoping he could fix it if he ate.
The four of them slipped through the dark into the kitchens. The meatballs made it in front of them, and Todd stabbed his fork in to pull off a piece. He managed to stomach it and went for another because he really should eat.
Charlie jammed his fork into one of the whole ones and shoved it into his mouth, distending his jaw. Todd watched him try to choke it down, until it met with his epiglottis and he gagged. He grasped Todd’s arm and hit his chest with the heel of his hand. Meeks punched his back and dislodged it.
Todd wasn’t hungry anymore.
The sink water was ice and Meeks gripped his toothbrush like he would drop it if his knuckles weren’t white. He fumbled with the toothpaste and accidentally forced out a wad that tripped down the fibers of his robe. He groaned, and scooped it into the sink.
Todd stared at the wet spot.
Todd didn’t mean to go to sleep. He laid awake for hours, just staring at the ceiling and worrying, trying very hard to not look at Neil’s empty bed at all costs. His plan was to stay up all night, because then he couldn’t dream, and he wouldn’t have a repeat of that horrid nightmare.
But he did fall asleep, because next thing he knew, he was being shaken awake. He tried to brush it off- he had barely slept at all and he hadn’t had the nightmare again, thankfully. But he realized it was Charlie and immediately sat up.
“What’s wrong?”
The poets stood in the doorway in various stages of disarray and agony.
Charlie swallowed. “Neil’s dead.”
No.
Todd had snow in his shoes before he could comprehend it. He was running, or at least trying to, before the sickness in him came tearing from his mouth. Meatball and acid in the snow.
Knox's face to his shoulder was familiar and comforting but not enough. Meeks tight hold on his arm. Charlie’s freezing fingers shoveling snow against Todd’s wet mouth.
The snow tasted good, and he wanted to hold it in his mouth, to make him feel better, but it wouldn’t last, just like any semblance of normalcy.
So he clawed himself free and rolled through the snow like a madman to get to the dock. To meet the wood and the icy water, and he screamed Neil’s name the whole while.
If he could just touch the water…