andreil - my peace has always been dependent, on all the ashes in my wake
(I had juuuuust started this one during the last batch of hozier lyric prompts, so I thought I’d give you the very beginning of what I wrote, my luv 💖)
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When he’s eighteen, he pulls a bandana up over his mouth and sets his mother on fire.
The car ride over is a long strip of gasoline, and he shakes the whole winding way down the cliff to the abandoned alcoves of the beach. Mary Wesninski, Mary Hatford, his last line of defence, puts a matchbook in his hand, seizes, and dies.
He remembers every second of it, the damp sand sticking to his face when he rubbed the sweat from his brow. The blood in the crevices of his fingerprints. The electric pounding in his head, the lights of the traffic far above shimmering over the wine-dark surface of the water.
Surely, he thinks, staring at the blackened shell of their latest vehicle, they will find me now.
The tragedy is finished, the pyre is out, and he’s still here, thrown over the mound of sand that his mother’s bones will be a part of, always.
He kneels, eventually, and looks at his dirty hands. He’s never been to the beach to swim, before. He’s never seen a person stop being a person before either. He couldn’t watch, but he couldn’t leave, and he’d seen flickers of her metamorphosis though the flames.
He heaves over, and throws up in the shallow water of the cave he’s in.
He forces himself to walk straight, all the way up the cliff that they had driven down together. He tastes ash, for days after.
A week later, he’s Neil.
Two years later, and he pulls a bandana up into his hair, and catches sight of Andrew behind him in their bathroom mirror, sleeping with his hand pressed under Neil’s pillow like a love note.
He slips quietly out of their apartment, and zips his windbreaker up to his chin. It’s drizzling, the pavement is brown with rainwater, and it isn’t fully light out yet. No one’s on the street but him. He breathes out, relieved out of habit.
He runs. No pressure on the small of his back, or breath on his neck.
He thinks of the groceries they need to get. Pineapple, because it’s sweet enough for Andrew. Chocolate milk. Mixed greens. Lean chicken thighs. Paper towel. A couple of new Bic lighters.
He cracks his neck, and focuses on the way the sweat at his hairline is cancelled out by the chill in the air. His sneakers pound into the same trail that he runs every day, and his head turns over and over with easy white noise.
When he circles back towards home, he spots Andrew sitting on the front steps of their complex.
He slows to a jog, and Andrew watches him approach. He’s not smoking, or pretending to do anything but watch Neil pull closer. He’s wearing this flimsy white t-shirt, and his feet are jammed into a pair of Neil’s shoes so that the backs are folded down beneath his heels.
“You’re up early,” he says, hopping up so he can lean teasingly over the steps, like he might fall down into him.
“There was a phone call,” Andrew says mildly.
“Hmm?”
Neil smiles. He’s not really thinking about it. Whatever gets him out of bed before noon.
“The police,” Andrew continues.
Neil lowers himself back down to ground level. He’d almost forgotten, what early morning phone calls mean.
“Who is it?” Who’s hurt, lost, arrested, gone. He runs through the people that matter to him, and the people who might relapse into trouble, and he finds that it’s almost exactly the same list. He grits his teeth.
Andrew shrugs, and leans back on his hands. He’s being blasé to calm Neil down. “Your mother.”
“My mother,” he repeats. The words mean nothing. Her name wasn’t on either list. Or any list at all, other than tragedies he had to live through to get to a good ending that stuck.
“They found her bones.”
He’s already shaking his head. “No, they can’t have. I burnt them, and buried them.”
“Are you telling me you did a perfect job?”
“She—she taught me how to get rid of a body.”
“And your work wasn’t affected at all by it being her?” Andrew asks steadily.
Neil swallows. He thinks of retching violently into the water, trembling so hard that the first 3 matches broke. He can see his own body crumpled a few feet over his mother’s, exhausted.
“But no one was looking for her,” he whispers.
“Someone found her,” Andrew says. He stands and fists his hands in Neil’s jacket. “Is this going to be okay for you?” he asks, uncharacteristically gentle.
“I don’t know. I think so. Do you think the FBI will—will do something to keep me out of it? To cover for themselves?”
Andrew shrugs. “Local police want to talk to you. See where that goes.”
“I think—I was all over that cover-up, Andrew, they could pin me with this.”
“They won’t. You’ll go and talk your way out of it, as always, and we’ll go home.”
Neil breathes out. Across from them, someone steps out of the apartment block across the street with their dog. “You’re right,” he says, distracted. Andrew reaches up and unzips Neil’s jacket to get his focus back.
“I’m right,” he repeats. “Call them back.”
