Chapter Text
It's the dream. He knows before he even opens his eyes. Dreams don't have smells but this one does and it's not the warm smell of baked goods that filled his apartment. It's a soft, clean scent — wholly different, but familiar somehow too.
He's supposed to remember everything. He’s supposed to remember but again, the moments leading up to him falling asleep are blank. He can't help feeling tipped off-balanced and shaken as he opens his eyes.
He expects everything to be the same as before but, really, he should have learned his lesson at this point.
The foundations are unchanged. It's the same living room he woke up in before; same light blue walls and cream-colored furniture, same rough wood coffee table and green, deep-pile rug. But there are changes, the biggest one being that he is alone. His attention snaps automatically to the corner of the room by the windows, expecting to see a figure there, restless hands twitching at the curtains... but there's no one.
He sits up from his position on the couch and notices other changes too. Smaller things; the entire room a spot-the-difference picture that he compares against his memory: a coaster shifted on the coffee table. An orange mug on a shelf that hadn't been there. A book that had been on the window sill before now on the seat of an armchair, pages splayed like the reader only got up for a moment and intended to return.
Andrew looks down at himself, even though he tells himself not to — that was where things had started to go wrong last time, after all — and he sees he's wearing different clothes. Not the clothes he was wearing before falling asleep, but not the ones from last time either.
Almost as if time has passed here.
He stands up. He's unsteady and weak in the knees — but that's to be expected when it's not his body.
He shudders, resisting the urge to reach for his knives. They won't be there.
This dream continues to differ from the first one, mostly because Andrew isn't freaking the f*ck out. This is his second time around, and like being in the deep end after having exactly one swim lesson instead of being tossed in carelessly, he's managing to keep his head above water. He tries not to think about the other time as he walks around the room and farther, but he sees flashes of it as he moves down the same hallway he'd stumbled through, panic making him blind and stupid. He avoids looking at the bathroom, and any reflections, altogether.
Coming to in an unfamiliar place with a body that was his — but also decidedly not with its lack of knives, scars that ran smooth under his fingers, and muscles and twinges not where he expected them to be — was difficult enough the first time.
And then there was Neil.
Neil but not Neil. Neil, an almost stranger in real life and a completely unknown variable in this scenario that Andrew again recalls in pieces that don't make any sense: blue eyes, scarred hands, a calm voice telling him that he's okay, he's safe.
Then there's the most confusing part: Andrew stumbled to the bathroom, not daring to turn on the light and collapsed in the doorway, a panic like he hadn't felt in years tugging him deeper and deeper, down, down. He kept reaching for his armbands, for any purchase, but they weren't there. And then Neil was there, standing a careful distance away that Andrew sneered at until Neil crouched down and slid something across the floor to him. A kitchen knife. Andrew grabbed it, metal hilt heavy in his palm. It felt real.
He wondered if the blade would be just as real too. Real enough to wake him up.
The strange dream-Neil, parody of Neil the stranger, seemed to have guessed where his mind had gone because he said, urgently, Andrew, don't and reached out.
Andrew growled, a pinned animal, and flinched hard enough that he tilted off-balance and backward, falling, falling and trying to brace himself — but never hitting the ground. Only waking up to the sight of his car roof, those telling black singe marks, and the seat belt buckles digging into his side.
Of course it had to be f*cking falling.
Now Andrew continues past the bathroom, down the hall to an open door and comes to a large bedroom. He didn't make it this far on his last visit due to obvious circ*mstances. Following in the same vein as the rest of the house, it's all muted colors and soft-looking fabric. Sprawled in a patch of sunlight on the expansive bed, a substantial ball of gray fur with eyes blinks impassively at Andrew as he stops in the doorway. He blinks back.
With an inquisitive mrrp, the cat jumps from the bed and starts looping through his legs, shamelessly rubbing itself against his calves. He toes it away with a socked foot. It ignores him so he chooses to ignore it too and, for his trouble, trips over it as he walks farther into the room.
Then, he starts snooping.
He quickly finds his subconscious lacking in imagination.
There's not much in the room besides the usual furniture and their usual contents: socks and underwear in the dresser, clothes and shoes in the closet. There are a couple of photographs propped up on the nightstands but though they contain two people he should know — one blond and one scarred — he hardly recognizes them at the same time and looking at them too long makes his chest start to squeeze, so he sets them back down. He doesn't need to see the way the two men stand next to each other to know what room he's in anyway. Whose room. There's a detail he didn't catch last time but can't overlook now that gives it away.
Unconsciously, he finds himself swirling the smooth cool band of dark silver on his left ring finger with his thumb. He stops.
This is their bedroom.
Weird.
He skips looking through the nightstands, not sure he wants to know who his psyche has designated him as a person based on the contents of his dreamed-up bedside drawers. Or worse: if he'll find a far more condemning drawer full of kinky sex toys.
With every other stone more or less turned, he leaves the room to go back down the hall to the first door he sees, across from the bathroom. The cat follows him, still chattering at him and trying to kill him by stepping directly in his way as he pushes open the door to what turns out to be an office. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves line two of the walls and there's a desk with a computer in front of a large window. Andrew goes to that first, shaking the mouse, but it's locked. For sh*ts and giggles, he tries one of his own passwords. It doesn't work, which is both surprising and expected, depending on your interpretation of dream logic. In any case, he moves on to inspect the rest of the room.
In the bedroom and living room, there had been clocks but no dates and no calendars, which isn't that strange, but one would expect an office space to have something of the kind. Andrew doesn't find one. He's not sure what it would mean if he did. It's a dream, what does it matter what point in time his consciousness decides to set it in?
Instead, he studies the shelves. He's not much of a reader anymore. When he was younger, he would spend hours at the library after school, finding a haven between the stacks in more ways than one. But that was a long time ago.
Now, he doesn't recognize a lot of the titles and he can't be sure that it's totally due to this being a dream. (Aren't you supposed to not be able to read at all in dreams?) One set of books catches his eye though, put aside on a lower shelf in a place of obvious honor. Mostly, what gets his attention is the name A. Minyard on the spine.
He reaches for one, pulling from the middle of the row. The cover tells him it's one in a series of young adult books. He flips to the first few pages with a numb sort of feeling that spreads as he reads the dedication.
For you, the kid seeking refuge in words.
He almost shoves the thing back onto the shelf, but he wants to be sure. After all, he's not the only A. Minyard in existence. There's an author's page in the back. No picture, nothing but a small paragraph — a sentence, really — that reads: Andrew Minyard lives in the countryside with his husband and their cats.
He snaps the pages shut. It sends up a puff of air, dust motes dancing in the slanted light through the window.
What the f*ck.
Book in hand, he leaves the office with purpose — and the cat — dogging his heels. He's not panicking this time. He's getting answers.
Down the hall, he comes back into the living room and spots a side door through the kitchen. He goes to it, eyes trained on the bright world just beyond the mesh of the screen door. He stops only to slide on a pair of shoes from the small pile next to the threshold, then he pushes the door open and steps through, squinting into the sunlight — and is momentarily distracted trying to keep the cat from making a break for it. Jailbreak thwarted, the screen door bangs shut behind him with a contemptuous yowl.
"You're fine," Andrew says to the gray blob through the mesh. Then he turns around.
Their house — the house — is in fact in the countryside. A pasture of rolling fields stretches out in front of Andrew, mountains plastered on the horizon, looking as translucent as tissue paper at this distance. To his left lie rows of trees disappearing around the corner of the house, branches swaying in the breeze, bright colored fruit and blossoms winking in and out of sight. Peeking out of the treeline are a pair of tin-topped buildings with their doors thrown open to the warm summer air. Everything is green and alive, alive. Buzzing and rustling and puffing gentle breaths on his skin.
A dream, he tells himself, reminder and revelation at once. A dream.
In the other direction he finds another cat, paws tippy-tapping their way across the grass in the shade of a tree that seems to have stepped out of line and planted itself a dozen feet closer to the house than the rest, huge and laden with fuzzy orange fruit that bend and bob its branches. The cat chirps a greeting to Andrew, and Andrew, resigned, walks back in the direction the small nuisance came from, managing to trip only a few times as it weaves joyfully through his legs.
Together they round the wide trunk of the tree — and there, kneeling in a sizable kitchen garden in the half-shade and the dirt, is Neil. Diffused sunlight dapples his skin, shifting over scuffed knees under ratty short hems and knobby elbows peeking out over long, worn gardening gloves.
The cat meows. Neil looks up, his gaze finding Andrew. He smiles. It's a smile that lights up his face, so much shining in his eyes — and it stops Andrew dead to be looked at like that.
Andrew jerks to a halt. Neil's expression falters, lips tipping downward, brow furrowing. Then the smile is back, but it's not the same. It's gone soft around the edges. Fond. Not... whatever that was before.
"It's you again," Neil says.
He stands up and dusts himself off, wiping sweat from his brow with the collar of his shirt. It lifts the bottom hem, thin green material peeling back to expose more skin and hints of scars and Andrew pointedly glances away, his belated sense of privacy kicking in half an hour of roaming, barging into rooms and digging through drawers later.
When he looks back, Neil's shirt is in place and Andrew doesn't think he's imagining the amusem*nt crinkling the corners of his eyes.
"It's me," Andrew echoes, not a question. "This is a dream."
Neil shrugs. "For you, maybe."
"Who am I?"
Another flicker at the edges of Neil's mouth. That's definitely amusem*nt. Andrew feels his hackles rising in response. "What?"
"Nothing. It's just usually I'm the one with the identity crises." He pauses. "Andrew."
The way he says his name makes shivers run up and down Andrew's spine. He clenches his hand around the book. Neil glances down at it, but he just says, "No knife this time?" in a light tone.
The full weight of the last time he had this dream, the last time he was here, hits Andrew again — except it comes with a strange and unwanted wave of embarrassment. Before, there were no consequences. It was a dream he was never going to have again, or so he thought, so his reaction didn't matter. But now someone remembers him; remembers him clinging to sanity and a kitchen knife and panicking so hard that he threw himself out of whatever the f*ck this is.
If there's one thing Andrew doesn't do is regret, he doesn't feel shame or guilt, but he can't help but feel some approximation of all three. This person is a stranger, a decoy, a byproduct of Andrew's f*cked up subconscious. It shouldn't matter. But this feels very real and Neil is looking at him again with something terrible, almost like understanding.
Something headbutts Andrew's shin in a bid for his attention and he looks down at the cat, hoping the heat rising to his face, crawling up his neck, will be misconstrued as anger or annoyance or a flush from the sun. "What, bastard?" he asks the cat.
Neil lets out a surprised huff of laughter. When Andrew looks at him, he has his lips rolled into his mouth like he's hiding another smile, so Andrew says again to him, "What, bastard?"
Neil shakes his head and mussed curls, sun-bleached and tinted distinctly red, fall across his forehead. Andrew has only met the real Neil a handful of times but he remembers real-Neil's hair being more a muddy brown and longer; real-Neil's face gaunt and not nearly as scarred, though dream-Neil's are faded and indistinct. This Neil is more filled out, more crinkled. Older. Happier.
Andrew can hear insects buzzing in the trees, leaves rustling, wind moving down the mountains through the grass. It smells like summertime, like freshly churned earth and sweet blossoms and the heat is calm and not unpleasant.
It feels real.
It feels like a dream because nothing in Andrew's waking life could ever be so beautiful. Not for him.
His hand on the book is slick with sweat. He grips it tighter, holding on.
Neil tilts his head, and his eyes are blue, blue — bluer than the dreamed sky above them, bluer than anything. (Andrew doesn't recall ever noticing real-Neil's eyes before but he thinks he would have noticed if they were this color.)
Neil asks, "Do you want a tour?"
Andrew expects to wake up. He expects the dream to dissolve, become fuzzy and illogical and skip around until he is snapped back into the real world but time goes on and the dream stays as clear and sharp as any memory, any real moment.
It's slow and easy. Neil walks them in a big loop around the house, starting with the garden he was tending to when Andrew showed up. He keeps up a comfortable stream of chatter about the different types of plants in contrast to Andrew's silence, mentioning offhandedly that he (the not-Andrew, the dream-Andrew) made him plant more vegetables after only planting berries and herbs the first year, much to his chagrin.
Pointedly, Neil gathers a basket of zucchini and squash and potatoes that he'd been kneeling next to earlier and he walks them to the barn, one of the two buildings Andrew saw when he first came outside. The interior is dark and the air is thick with dust and the smell of metal and oil. An older model car sits in the shadows with its hood up, innards exposed, miscellaneous tools and parts spread around the body like fallen ripened fruit from a tree.
Neil puts down his basket on a nearby toolbox in order to stoop down and pick up the cat. It goes limp with adoration in the cradle of his arms. Andrew can't blame it — can't stop watching Neil's hands, ring finger glinting with the same dark silver on Andrew's. Neil is telling him he doesn't know anything about the car or what stage of repair it's currently in, only that it's a years-long pet project, but Andrew doesn't care.
This is all starting to dig under his skin, his mind consciously sucking up every detail as if he's not almost fully incapable of forgetting anything: Slender fingers splayed in white and brown fur. The layer of dust on top of the toolbox. The dirt under Neil's nails. The sweat on the back of Andrew's own neck. The freckles on Neil's calves. The coolness of the shade.
The grass is spongy under their shoes from a recent watering as they continue on their walk past the second building — a shed housing a mower and other gardening tools, crawling with sweet-smelling honeysuckle all along the outer walls — to the edge of the larger grove of trees. Neil takes them to one heavy with fruit, cherries as dark as pinpricked blood gathered in small clusters under the leaves.
He reaches up on his toes to pluck a bundle. Andrew doesn't look away from the skin exposed by his shirt this time, that stretch of tan skin and pink ridges.
He wants to touch everything, remember every tactile detail. His knuckles skim the trunk of the tree, bumpy bark scraping harshly. He places a palm there, spreading his fingers — all while watching muscles move and shift before being covered with ratty green once more as Neil plants both feet on the ground and his shirt slides back into place. He's holding his prize: a handful of red-black fruit.
"The squirrels can be a problem here and for the apricot tree by the house," Neil says, wiping the dirt from the cherries with the cleanest part of his dirt-covered hem and diligently removing the stems. "But King helps." He nods to the cat, rolling lazily in the grass a few feet away. "They haven't gotten to them too bad yet this year, anyway."
"King?" Andrew asks.
"King Fluffkins," Neil says, and grins when Andrew levels him with a deeply unimpressed look. "The other one is Sir Fat Cat McCatterson."
"You are making that up."
"You'll love the names of our cows too."
"Cows," Andrew echoes, tucking away all the we's and our's like little shiny things to look at closely later.
"Princess Pookybear and Lady Sparkles Von Shimmershine."
Andrew stares at him. And then, dryly: "The fruitful creative labor, I'm guessing, of a seven year old child with a penchant for glitter?"
"Nope," Neil says. "Yours. Well, you use the excuse that Nicky helped with the cats, and granted he does have a thing for glitter — but the others were all you."
The mention of his family throws him, his cousin's name rolling so easily off of Neil's tongue with a sense of familiarity more real than the feel of the bark under his palm, the sting of a sunburn starting on the bridge of his nose. It aches. He doesn't want his world to press in, doesn't want to remember that this is nothing more than a dream and eventually, soon, he'll wake up.
"Sounds like I'm an idiot, then."
"Nah." Neil shrugs. "I quite like you."
Off-balance, Andrew takes a cherry from Neil's palm and pops it in his mouth, careful of the pit as he bites down. The fruit is sweet and juicy as the skin breaks and bursts across his tongue. He sucks all of the flesh off of the small seed, then pulls it out, nestling the cherry pit in his cupped hand. He remembers the story of Persephone eating the fruit of the underworld, doomed to return, and takes another.
Neil does the same, spitting his pit off to the side. They eat the entire bundle until their fingers are stained red with juice. It's dyed Neil's mouth red too. Andrew wants to lick the inside of it, taste it, as sweet on Neil's tongue as it is on his. He's shifted the book to nestle under his arm to free his hands and now he fiddles with his ring, that band of dark metal that matches Neil's.
"We're married," Andrew says, still looking at Neil's mouth. It goes fond again.
"You and I are married," Neil agrees, but it's clear the you is not Andrew, not the one that he is now. It's whoever owns this body he's driving, whoever he is when this Andrew wakes up. The tinkerer of the old cars in the barn. The writer of the book Andrew still clutches. The co-owner of this dreamscape of a farm.
Husband to the pipe dream standing in front of him.
It's ridiculous, the dissonant chord that strikes in him. None of this is real. There's no alternate version of himself to be jealous of, but he finds his mouth flooding with spit at the sour feeling in his chest, threatening to override the sweetness lingering on his tongue. He hesitated calling this place a nightmare before but it's what feels most apt now — because he can't stay here. Truly one of the more f*cked up things his mind has ever done: dangling this perfect dream in front of his face with the full intent of never letting him keep it.
With the last of the cherries gone, Neil dusts off his hands, calmly sucking a stray line of juice from the side of his palm — he has to know what he's doing, Andrew thinks resentfully— but Neil just glances over and asks, "Do you want to see them? The cows, I mean."
"Yes," Andrew says without hesitation. "Though I want to make it clear that I refuse to call them by name."
Neil laughs, the sound rich and sharp, and shakes his head once before tilting it in the direction behind him. "Come on."
Neil turns and they take one step together — then Andrew stops, his knees buckling under his weight. He stays on his feet only by catching himself on the trunk of the tree even as it feels like the very ground beneath him is starting to crumble and give way. It's a familiar sensation, one of standing at a high, high place, looking down, body teetering forward.
Falling.
"Neil." He reaches without thinking and grabs Neil's wrist. He feels just as real as he looks: warm, rough skin and a thrumming heartbeat that taps against Andrew's fingers like the flutter of wings.
Neil stops and turns back, eyes wide with surprise and confusion before that terrible understanding blooms once more on his face.
Andrew doesn't have much time. He feels it. A million things run through his head, a million questions that bubble up and get trapped behind his teeth.
He manages: "Will I come back?"
The expression on Neil's face goes even softer. "I don't think so."
Andrew tries to hold on, focus. It feels like the only thing keeping him here is his grip on Neil's wrist and even that is slipping, slipping.
"What do I do?"
What he means is: how do I get back here, how do I make this real, how do I make you look at me that way.
Neil bites his lip, the first sign of hesitancy he's shown. Then his eyes, blue, bluer than anything, meet Andrew's. He tugs his wrist out of Andrew's grip only to slide their hands together instead, palm to palm, fingers intertwined. He squeezes once, just as the rest of the dream falls away.
"Choose us."
Andrew wakes up.
He stares at the popcorn ceiling of his living room — and it is his living room, his leather couch beneath him, his beige walls and mismatched furniture. Beyond the patio doors, the sun has already risen high in the sky, throwing shadows and shapes across the room.
He slept through the night. For once, Andrew feels light upon waking, not weighed down by shadows and old memories.
He lifts his hand — his hand. No ring, no book, no cherry juice stains.
No warm palm and steady pulse.
He can still taste the dream on the back of his tongue, feel the flesh of it stuck between his teeth.
It's a quiet mid morning, the world continuing on to another normal day, but it feels like something has shifted inside him, reorienting to a new fixed point. Even with his perfect memory, Andrew thinks he can feel the dream — how it felt, how real it was, the exact color of Neil's eyes, brightening and darkening in the shivering shade of the leaves — fading back to the recesses of his mind. And that's the last thing he wants.
He rolls off the couch. Blood rushes to his head, his skin prickles and his vision goes black as he remembers what it feels like to be in his own body again. A few seconds pass, then he finds his footing, then his laptop, still in the kitchen. He brings it to the bedroom, sitting down at his desk — all the lamps are still on from last night. He doesn't bother turning them off.
He opens a blank document and begins to write.
