remember everyone’s favourite headcanon about neil coming back to life once upon a time and telling his unsuspecting friends about it on movie night?? I wrote that bitch!!!
The light from the TV seizes every time a scene leaps off a building or the action crashes into the protagonist. It’s exhausting to be in the same room as the flicker of it; the pulsing gunfire and longwinded monologues intercut with showy violence that’s all soft in the middle.
The combat is slow — it’s obvious the director wants you to follow the stunt double’s prowess with your eyes, to take the moment that someone goes sprawling and package it, understand it, delight in your own understanding. The urgency of the fight whimpers and dies. It’s a half-time waltz set to galloping music, stilted dialogue fed into it all like splinters.
It’s almost a comedy, this palatable brutality playing out in a room full of fighters.
A woman hooks her leg in the window of a moving car and slides inside, and Neil makes a tsk-ing noise. She grapples with a driver and wins impossibly. The scene shifts and becomes a greyscale basement; the villain orders his cronies about in German that can’t figure itself out. Neil nudges Andrew’s foot with his and Andrew nods without looking.
The screen hiccups, abruptly paused. “What is it Lassie?” Matt jokes, mouth twitching. “Something wrong?”
“No,” Neil says, sour. “Just wondering if his German coach spoke any German.”
“I thought it was cute,” Nicky says.
“You think he’s cute,” Allison corrects, reaching over Renee to steal a twizzler from the knot of opened snacks on the coffee table. She bites into it viciously when she says, “you’re into boys who can’t speak the same language as you. They’re easier to trick.”
“Wow,” Nicky says, bewildered. “The bitch is out today.”
Allison swipes primly at her lipstick. “Always is.”
“You got another horrifying factoid to share with the class, Josten?” Dan asks. “Something about the proper technique for jumping between cars maybe?”
“Yeah. Don’t lead with your legs. That’s a good way to get yourself ripped in half.”
“Un-pause,” Renee prods, and Matt laughs when he hits play. The movie skids around and tries to find its own plot again. Light flickers over Neil’s frown.
The protagonist shoots at a tank until it blows up, and Neil snorts, jostling Andrew’s side when he stands up. He watches Matt and Neil have a conversation in gestures, and Matt relents after a moment, letting Neil slip away without pausing anything.
He’s gone for a while. Doubtless somewhere in their bedroom or breathing secondhand smoke from his own hand or killing time cross-legged in the brightness of the kitchen.
It’s less bearable, trying to swallow the movie without Neil shaking with laughter against him every time someone lies or shoots the wrong way. Andrew feels uncomfortably like the only other person in his lifeboat had just been rescued without him.
Another explosion rocks their sound system, and Andrew flicks bored eyes back to the villain circling the lead in a helicopter. He’s still waiting for the plot twist to get over itself and make an appearance, or for Neil to do the same. It’s starting to chafe, being in the dark with the whole team, shifting and breathing and rustling plastic packages around him.
The protagonist gets suddenly skewered by the debris from the helicopter he just shot down, and the heroine tumbles down over the rubble, scrambling to hold his face in both hands. Dialogue devolves into blood-bubbling I love you’s and come back’s from there, and Andrew concentrates on zoning out.
“He’s not actually dead,” Nicky says incredulously, mouth full of popcorn. Dan shushes him. “He’s too pretty to be impaled to death.”
“I bet you want him to impale you to death,” Matt says slyly, pleased with himself, and Renee frowns at him.
“Ay, he’s back!” Nicky says, popping another handful as the protagonist gasps back to life, face wet with tears or sweat or rain. “What’d I tell you?”
“You’re ruining this movie,” Aaron says flatly.
“Do you think he went to heaven for those five minutes?” Nicky continues, ignoring his cousin. “Like I get that he’s a mass murderer, but it was all ‘greater good’ stuff. Like charity work.”
“I don’t think God had time to decide,” Renee says softly.
“Like he was hanging out in limbo?” Dan asks, playing along. Renee shrugs generously.
“I’d love to die for like ten minutes, make a scene, have Erik weep over my broken body. Then high five God on my way back to life.”
“Nothing happens when you die, Nicky,” Neil says matter-of-factly from the doorway. He smells like Andrew’s cigarettes when he climbs back onto the couch, legs tucked underneath him. He reaches for a handful of popcorn.
“You can’t know that for sure,” Renee says, frowning a little. Her beliefs never show on her face so much as when she’s trying to fight back without fighting.
Andrew can feel his heart wind up and get ready to throw something, though he’s not completely sure why until Neil says, “I died once.” He shrugs. “God looked a whole lot like an endless abyss.”
