Chapter Text
The world passes in flashes: dark room. Lucy’s face. Lucy’s blood. Screams and lights, a shocking pain that seems to go deeper than his bones. Fluorescents overhead, rushing past, too fast, too fast—
Dr. Benton saying his name, a look on his face John’s never seen before, a cracked-open sort of terror, whites showing all around his irises. Lucy’s face, through the swinging door, so pale—shouting, voices he knows, fear crumbling the professional edges. Pain, somehow sudden and endless, like he’s never felt the lack of it—like he’s been ripped in two, fingers deep inside his guts and rooting around. He knows it’s Peter—it’s the only thing that keeps him from kicking out, flailing, trying to escape the pain. Dr. Benton’s taught him to take it, to persevere, to learn in the spaces between discomfort and the rush.
Then a gush of sudden, incredible relief from pain, like a wave of cool bliss that washes from his fingertips to his toes, and after that—darkness.
The pain wakes him again, radiating out from his center, rousing him mid-whimper, and he twists, tries to get away from whatever’s hurting him, but firm hands—gentle grip, calloused skin, warm and solid—catch his wrists, slide up to his upper arms, press his humeri down into the sheets.
John gasps at the searing pain in his gut, hears a rasp of a voice cut through the thick fog in his skull as those warm, rough fingers press against his shoulder, anchoring him against drifting into the void—hey, somebody, he’s awake, he’s hurting, he needs—
And then that wash of painlessness again, pulling him down like a stone, and he sinks into darkness without a ripple.
#
After Jack left at fifteen, passing his GED and filing for emancipation and disappearing from the Cody family overnight, Andrew kept track of him when he could. Not right away, obviously—he and Julia had been seven, busy stealing wallets for Smurf, not exactly able to flip through the yellow pages—but once they’d hit old enough that she left them at the library alone while she went to take care of business a few years later, he’d found him, by chance, as he flipped through one of the library's case of far-off city newspapers.
He hadn’t gone far, all things considered: Texas, apparently, where he’d won some kind of military award. Andrew hadn’t understood what it was, but his heart had skipped a beat when he’d seen the picture. Jack Abbot, the caption said. ROTC, University of Texas, Austin.
Andrew slid the whole page out of the newspaper and slipped into the restroom, heart thudding in his chest, fingers threatening to shake. Still, he was careful: he creased the paper over and over, made precise tears to detach the photo and caption, and then methodically shredded the rest, flushing it down the toilet in long, thin, strips.
#
There’s something beeping—steady, familiar, reassuring. The patient’s heart rate is normal, no alarms, and John can’t remember what patient he’s here for? His thoughts are thick as marzipan, and he claws his way up though them, trying to find the surface.
His eyelids weigh a thousand pounds apiece, and he can’t pry them open—instead he just tips his head to the side, feeling his mouth unstick with a dry snap of skin on dehydrated skin. His throat feels wrong, scratched and dry, like it should be sore, but the pain is distant, just like the rest of it.
Voices are murmuring in the distance, far away: Luka, Deb, and a third voice. The last one—it’s steady, rumbling, firm and controlled, and there’s something about it that’s familiar, somehow, but not quite right, and John drifts off again, thoughts jumbling and breaking like a kaleidoscope as he sinks back down into nothingness.
#
That first call—November 13, 1999—Andrew dials on a payphone behind a gas station, change gripped in sweaty fingers. Julia’s at a party with some girls in their class, Craig’s at home with Deran and strict instructions not to open the door for anyone, and Smurf’s out with Billy, Andrew’s least favorite of her occasional partners-slash-marks. She won’t be back for at least a couple nights, and this is Andrew’s chance. He’s memorized the number, doesn’t have it written down anywhere, and the first few rings make his heart flutter in his chest, teeth clenching and grinding. Finally, there’s a click.
“Abbot,” comes the voice, and Andrew can’t speak for a moment, frozen, because—that’s Jack. That’s Jack. Jack Cody, the brother that got away. Jack Abbot, now.
Andrew hangs up the phone.
#
John’s aware, for the first time in a while—conscious for a moment before the pain roars in, and he gasps with it, eyes flying open. The room is dim: the SICU, IV in his arm, white-hot stabbing pain in his belly. He whimpers with it, every movement sending spasms of agony down his nerves.
“Stop moving,” says a voice, close in his ear. “Hurts less when you’re still. Relax.”
The voice is low, quiet, authoritative, and John can’t place it, because it’s not a voice that matches the hospital smell in his nose. He fights to open his eyes, blinking, forces his body to relax, and yeah, the voice is right: the pain recedes just enough that John can stand it, that the IV pumping into the crook of his elbow can keep up and push it back. He takes a deep, careful breath, and rolls his head to the side carefully, fighting nausea.
The figure beside him sits in shadow, farther away than John expected, upright and stiff in the chair. John squints, blinks away the fog. “Jack?” he asks tentatively, but no, that’s not quite right. His brother in law Jack is... somewhere secret, in the Middle East. Deployed. Not due back for months. Michael was terrified for him, though he’d never admit it to John in their infrequent phone calls.
“Not Jack.” The figure doesn’t move, and John’s exhausted suddenly, eyes slipping closed again.
#
Andrew dials again, a few minutes later—after stumbling back, catching himself on a low fence, hunching down as emotions he can’t name well up in him along with tears and maybe bile—and this time, when Jack’s voice crackles down the line, Andrew doesn’t hang up.
He doesn’t know what to say. His brain is too full or maybe completely empty, and the silence stretches, broken only by his wet and catching breaths, loud in his own ears. He makes a noise, something that's not Jack's name, but that's trying to be, and—
“Andrew?”
He can’t help the sharp gasp that chokes him.
“Holy shit,” says Jack. “Andrew?”
Andrew makes a noise, he thinks, but all he can hear is the pounding of his own heart and the harsh grating of his breath.
He’s not sure how long it takes, and he can’t remember anything they said, but he walks away from the conversation with Jack’s personal number tucked tight inside his brain.
#
John thinks he’s probably high, because there’s something wrong with his belly and his back, but he can’t feel what it is. It should hurt, he thinks. Something is missing, or maybe something’s there that shouldn’t be—but it’s hot and strange and there’s a thick layer of fuzz over every thought.
He’s cold, too, shivering, and he feels weightless, like he could drift away at any moment. There’s something warm beside his wrist, though, and he lets his fingers fall open, stretches them out until they touch skin, grounding him, body heat a lovely burn on his chilled hand.
He opens his eyes again, and the room swims, all vaseline-lensed like an old romance.
The light is different than the last time he’d woken, cutting through the window in golden sheets, catching motes of dust as they drift thru the air, and for a moment, John’s distracted, because this is a hospital, there shouldn’t be dust.
He curls his fingers around the hand on the bed, anchoring himself with the touch, and the knuckles under his palm tense, then slowly relax a fraction, quivering. John looks down at his hand, then follows the arm up, up, past thick, freckled elbow and navy-sleeve-clad upper arm, across broad shoulders to a face that’s almost familiar.
#
Andrew doesn’t tell Julia, who’s drifting away from them all, about Jack, even though she's the only one who remembers him besides Andrew. He doesn’t tell Craig, who was an infant when Jack left, or Deran, who never met their oldest brother. He certainly doesn’t tell Smurf.
(He tells Cath, who he cried about Jack with, once years ago—but only that he found him, not that they’ve talked, that they’re in touch. He’s in love with her, of course, but he’s not stupid.)
And it’s not like he’s always reaching out, either. Jack doesn’t have Andrew’s number—not the house number, bought long after Jack left their trailer, and not the series of burners he uses over the next few years, either. He calls Jack rarely, rations it out, makes himself wait: calls on Jack’s birthday from a burner or whatever payphone he can get himself to, and then gives himself one more call per year if he needs it.
He calls the first time he finds Julia passed out in a pool of her own vomit, breathes deeply as Jack talks him through rolling her on her side, checking her pulse, driving her to the hospital. He tells him what to tell the staff and doctors to keep them from asking questions or looking too deeply.
Jack stays on the phone with him through it all, hours of silence when Andrew can’t manage to make the words come out, can’t bear to hear any more information—just breathes through the phone, goes about his business with the phone tucked somewhere where he can hear Andrew but where his voice is muted.
Andrew sits, stares at Julia’s closed eyes and slack mouth, and listens to the sounds of the life his brother’s built without them, conversation and alarms and laughter in a distant place.
#
John recognizes him, all at once, the memory slipping up through his hazy mind: Michael’s wedding. He remembers Jack’s younger brother, standing in the back of the reception hall, not sitting or talking or eating or dancing or anything, just watching. Remembers the way he’d been stiff and silent at the dinner, eyes darting to meet John’s, then away—remembers one-word answers to John’s questions that slowly stretched into two, three, a full sentence. Remembers the tipsy glee of the first time his mouth had twitched into a smile at something John had said, remembers leaning close, the warmth of his shoulder.
He remembers, too, leaning into Dana’s space as they waited at the bar during the reception, asking if she’d met Andrew before this, if she knew what his deal was, and Dana had said kid, don’t ask Jack about his family. Especially not today.
John had pulled his gaze from the face that looked so much like Jack’s—younger, maybe, but holding a strange tension, still in a way Jack Abbot rarely was—over to the center of the dance floor, where Michael and Jack swayed, eyes only for each other.
When he looked back at Andrew, their eyes had met, and something in his gut had sparked hot and sudden.
Four years later, Andrew looks exactly the same. His eyes—a little browner than Jack’s, a gorgeous hazel to Jack’s vibrant gray-green—glitter when they meet John’s, and John swallows hard against his dry throat.
“You’re awake.” Andrew doesn’t move.
His hair is longer than Jack’s, and longer than it had been in 2011, too, a curly, soft-looking halo around his head. It’s the only part of him that looks soft.
“What—” John coughs, rolls his head against the pillow, the pain of his lower belly, shoulders, and back sudden, sharp, clear even through the drugs.
A straw presses to his lips, a rough palm cradling the back of his neck, not pushing, just supporting, and he sips gratefully, eyes squeezed shut against the way his guts feel wrong.
“What happened?” he says when he’s able, and Andrew pulls the cup back, setting it on the table beside the bed.
“You got stabbed.”
“Yeah.” John blinks, tries to push the image of Lucy’s face going slack from his mind, remembers the way his whole body had gone cold at the confirmation that she was gone. “Yeah, I remember. But. After that?”
“Surgery,” says Andrew, and there’s a furrow between his brows. He reaches over John—chest nearly brushing John’s, and the heat of him makes something in John relax, the pain dialing down a fraction—and holds up a chart. “Here.”
John squints, but he can’t make out the words, but the signature at the bottom is as familiar as his own. “Benton?” he asks, and Andrew nods.
“Yeah. He said something about your kidney. Had to take it out, something about bleeding. But your other one’s fine.”
“Shit.” John closes his eyes, the strange horror of a piece of his body going missing, gone forever, seeping through him.
#
Michael Robinavitch seeps into the fabric of Andrew’s every call to his brother, on the edges of every story, constant as sand, and at first, Andrew hates him. He hates him because he’s family to Jack now, somehow, bound together in the trenches of Jack’s first deployment where he’d met a doctor with some kind of volunteer job, exchanged numbers, reconnected back in the states after Jack’s wife died and immediately intertwined their lives. Robby—because he’s never Michael to Jack, apparently—is the love of Jack’s life, whether or not either of them know it.
(Andrew, however, knows it.)
He hears him in the background when he calls Jack, sometimes. Andrew looks him up, stares at his picture on the hospital website beside Jack’s. He looks kind. Gentle. Soft. Creases in the corners of his eyes from laughter, hair that looks like it stays messy, no matter what he does, and a rumpled look to him, even in the formal headshot. He doesn’t look like anyone Andrew knows, not like anyone from the world Jack left. He thinks that’s probably a good thing.
He calls Jack from outside the hospital where Cath is giving birth to Baz’s baby, because he doesn’t know what else to do, doesn’t know what he’ll do, if he lets himself go, and it isn’t Jack who answers.
It’s Robby, and Andrew freezes when his half-familiar voice apologizes, says Jack’s on shift, introduces himself for real. Andrew doesn’t have the self control to hold on through one more unexpected disappointment.
Somehow Robby can tell because his voice softens, goes quiet and gentle, lets Andrew puke out a few of the words he can’t say to Smurf, to Baz, to his little brothers or Julia. It’s not enough, and Robby’s a stranger and this is Cody family business and he shouldn’t be talking about it, but Robby asks easy questions that show he knows the history, at least a little. The compassion in his voice is nearly enough to make Andrew crumple to lean against the wall of the phone booth, to let the tears that are welling in his eyes slip past his twitching, tightly held muscles.
He lets out one quick, sharp sob, and hangs up the phone.
(Two thousand miles away, Michael Robinavich stares at the phone in his hand, heart pounding, because Andrew sounds so much like Jack, and at the same time nothing like him. This must be how Jack feels when he talks to John—but magnified by the way Robby’s never been afraid for John the way he knows Jack is for his brother and sister. And he knows he can’t hop on a plane to fly cross country and hug a man he’s never met, but—)
#
A SICU nurse John doesn’t know comes in to check on him, noting pulse and blood pressure on the monitor and taking a look at his drain. She checks his lines and briskly tucks his blankets around his hips more securely, then tells him that Dr. Benton will be in soon to check on him, and something inside him that’s spent six years learning to trust Peter untwists a little bit.
He glances at Andrew, who’s still sitting stock-still, staring straight ahead out the window past John, half in shadow, and for the first time since he woke up actually has the brainpower to wonder what in the world his brother-in-law’s brother (brother-in-law-in-law?) is doing here.
John thinks about asking, but—
The thing is.
He knows his parents won’t come. They’re in Japan, and even if they wanted to, it’s a full day of travel to get back. Barbara’s in Brussels and they haven’t spoken in years—she’s probably happier, cut off from the family.
Michael’s in Pittsburgh, but he’s busy with his own life as a brand new attending; he can’t drop everything to come visit (although John knows he will, once someone thinks to call him).
So he doesn’t ask Andrew why he’s there, because some scared little part of him thinks that if he asks, then Andrew will leave—
And then John will be alone, with just the pain and the memory of Lucy’s eyes fluttering shut across the expanse of dark-soaked floor.
So he doesn’t ask, and when Peter comes in to check his incision, he narrows his eyes at Andrew. “Who are you?” he asks, blunt like he always is, and it’s almost refreshing in its familiarity.
Andrew glances down at John, then back up at Peter. “Family.” He pauses. “Distant family.”
“My brother’s husband’s brother,” says John, helpfully. “Andrew.”
“Yeah, okay,” says Benton, obviously dismissing Andrew from his attention. “I have to look at your incision, Carter, so...” he trails off, glancing down at John’s gowned-and-blanketed abdomen.
“Staples look good,” Andrew says, and what the fuck?
“You a doctor?” Benton asks, and Andrew blinks at him, head tilting up a few degrees, and the way he tenses—there’s something about him that reminds John of the stray dog (that might have been a coyote) that used to hang out behind the ambulance bay dumpster—that wary attention, that skittish gaze, those big, deep eyes that pin you down.
“No,” Andrew finally answers. “But I’ve had my share of stitches. These look good. Healthy. Healing.”
Benton stares at him another long moment, then shakes his head. “Carter, you want privacy for this?” he asks, and John’s touched, actually, that he’d offer, but.
“No, he can stay.” He's not sure when Andrew even saw his incisions, but...
Benton’s mouth tightens in that grimace John’s intimately familiar with, the one that says stupid call, but not worth my time or energy to correct, but his hands are gentle as they pull back the blanket, tucking it just above John’s hipbones with a gentle press against his uninjured side as he lifts John’s gown. The care in the gesture makes John’s eyes sting, and he tries to sniff surreptitiously, but Peter pauses, glances up at him, glove-clad palm cupping John’s hipbone with the barest touch.
“It’s okay, Carter,” he says, quiet, and John shudders a little, wants to lean into the pressure so he doesn’t float away. “You’re alright. I got you.”
John nods, and Benton gives a sharp nod back, then slides his hands across John’s bare belly—strangely numb, hot and swollen feeling under the fog—
Pain ricochets through John’s body, and he grabs the railing of the bed with one hand, fighting the urge to flinch from the feeling of Peter pulling at the dressing.
“Stay still,” Peter orders, other hand coming up to squeeze his shoulder, and John obeys automatically. “Had to repair your renal artery. Colon took some damage, too. Plus the blood loss. Two stab wounds in your back, one incision on your front.”
John’s shivering, he realizes, as if he’s freezing, and his breath is coming fast as Benton leans in to examine the staples across his lower belly.
He peels his hand free from the rail, sticks it through the bars, because he’s going to float away without something to anchor him, and Andrew’s piercing, dark eyes are fixed on him, a steady point in the chaos.
“Can you—” he murmurs, wiggling his fingers, and a warm, rough palm lands hesitantly in his own, holding tight.
#
Andrew hears about the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell from his brother Craig, of all people—he doesn’t know where Craig learned a piece of actual news, and doesn’t particularly care, except that when he next calls Jack in November, he gets invited to a wedding.
“I want to have you there,” Jack says, voice tinny down the line. He’s been stateside for a few months, thinks he’s going to get deployed again sometime next year, and he and Robby are getting married.
Andrew’s never been to a wedding.
His family’s not big on ceremonies, or commitment—except to each other—or the kind of paperwork that tells the government anything more about their business than is absolutely necessary.
It’s only a couple days in Pittsburgh, and he’s disappeared longer than that—so he tells Deran he’s got to take care of something and buys himself his first ever plane ticket for early March.
He watches video after video of people walking through the airport, looks at floorplans and reads articles about the TSA and the probabilities of various mechanical issues, and when the day comes, he parks his car at a cash-only lot in Carlsbad and steals a bicycle for the last few miles to the airport.
It’s a sensory hell at LAX, which he expected—he knows not to bring a gun, at least, and he does not lose his shit when they confiscate his nail clippers. They don’t find the various smaller weapons he’s stashed in his carry-on (because no matter what they say, he doesn’t trust anyone to move his bag for him, especially not into the dank and probably filthy space under the plane).
But when he settles in his seat—beside a man in his fifties who immediately puts on earbuds and closes his eyes—Andrew can’t help the thrill of excitement that shudders through him, because he’s about to fly.
He spends the entire two flights—with a layover in the middle where he nearly had a breakdown in Denver at the crowds and noise—staring out the window at the country flying below. He’s never been farther than Arizona, never seen the way the snow glistens on the Rockies or the patchwork squares of the midwest. His favorite part, though, is the sliver of one of the Great Lakes they pass, two thirds of the way through the flight: it looks like the ocean, but contained, flat and sparkling, mirror-bright, ringed with buildings and beaches and densely packed roads. He cranes his neck around, face nearly touching the glass, and watches it disappear behind them.
(Julia would love flying, he thinks, and pushes the thought down deep.)
#
John doesn’t let go of Andrew’s hand, even when Benton tips the bed upright and eases him forward to check the sutures closing his back wounds. He squeezes it through the pain, and Andrew’s other hand comes up to brace the front of his shoulder. John gasps through the pain, tips his head forward and rests it on Andrew’s chest, breathing in deep. He smells clean: not hospital-antiseptic clean, but beach clean, like salt water and sunlight with a hint of deep, woodsy musk. John focuses on the scent of him, on the warmth of his solid chest through his shirt, and tries not to puke on him as Benton presses light, gloved fingers along the edges of his wounds.
Finally, Benton pulls back and catches his shoulders, easing him back down. There’s some sort of silent exchange of intense eye contact between him and Andrew, but John’s suddenly too tired and in too much pain to parse it.
(He loves Peter Benton desperately in a weird, complicated way: somewhere between mentor and idol and all-too-human, fallible man; he doesn’t think he wants to fuck him, probably, but wants to bask in his approval and press himself as close as he can, watch his nimble fingers bring life back to the dying, wouldn’t have wanted anyone else rummaging around inside his belly, is somehow glad they're forever linked by that intimacy, Peter's appendix still on his shelf—and man, they’ve got him on the good drugs, haven’t they?)
“Looking fine,” says Peter, stripping his gloves off and pulling John’s gown back down and the blanket back up. His hand lands on John’s shoulder, huge and warm through the thin fabric of the gown. He pauses, jaw working, eyes intent on John’s face, and all John can do is stare back, holding tight to Andrew’s hand still clutched in his own.
“Good on pain meds?” Peter asks, and John nods.
“Yeah, I’m okay, Dr. Benton,” he manages, and even smiles a little.
Peter’s palm slides up his shoulder to cup around the side of John’s neck, thumb against his cheek, and he pats twice, briskly, before pulling away. “Take care, Carter. I’ll be back in a couple hours.” And with that, he pulls away and walks out of the room without a backwards glance.
John lets out a long, shuddering breath and lets his eyes fall closed. He hurts.
“You lied,” says Andrew in his soft, raspy voice.
“Hm?” John tilts his head on the pillow to look at him. His brow’s furrowed, and he’s leaning forward, posture still stiff. John wonders, suddenly, if the man ever relaxes.
“You’re not good on meds,” Andrew says. “You’re in pain.”
“Ah, it’s not that bad.” John’s other hand—the one not held in Andrew’s thick, warm one—picks at the blanket.
“You heal better if you’re not hurting. You’re a doctor. You know this.”
John does. John does know this.
With a sigh that makes his abdomen pulse with a roll of sharp pain, he presses the button for a bolus. The relief is quick, and as his muscles unclench, Andrew’s hand tightens around his so it doesn’t slip away.
#
It’s fucking cold in Pittsburgh in March. Andrew’s never in his life been so cold, and when Jack picks him up at the airport, he’s got a thick, puffy coat waiting in the passenger seat.
“It’s Robby’s, but it’s clean, I promise,” he says as Andrew picks it up and holds it at arm’s length for a moment before sliding it on. “Hey, brother.”
He’s not sure where to look, or what to do, so he climbs into Jack’s truck beside him.
“Buckle up,” Jack says, and Andrew does, because it’s been more than twenty years since he heard his big brother’s voice live, but somehow, the instinct to listen is still there.
He risks a glance sideways at Jack, finds him smiling, eyes soft.
“You look good, man,” is all he says in that warm, familiar voice as he pulls away from the curb, and something in Andrew’s belly loosens.
Jack had offered his couch for Andrew to crash on for the duration, because apparently Robby has a brother visiting for the wedding, too, and he’s already in the guest room since he’s been in town a week and is staying another, so Andrew had booked himself a room in a motel nearby instead. The idea of stepping into Jack’s life—with his fiancé and his brother-in-law and his normal job and normal friends—is too much. He can’t do it.
So Jack parks the truck at the motel, then reaches into the backseat and pulls out a six pack. Andrew grabs his backpack, gets the key from the front desk, and shuts the door behind them.
Jack sets the beer down on the desk carefully, pauses with his back to Andrew for a long moment, then turns.
“Hey,” he says. “I missed you, brother.” His eyes meet Andrew’s, catch and hold, and then he’s stepping forward, telegraphing the motion before he wraps his arms around Andrew—one at the shoulder, one at the waist, their bodies lining up like mirrors, and Andrew presses into the half-forgotten familiarity of it.
Jack still smells the same, feels the same, but the last time Andrew saw his brother, he’d towered over him, already near-grown to his adult height, if a little scrawny. Now they’re the same height, near the same breadth, a matched set in a way he’s never been with any of his other siblings, and something in him unravels against Jack’s solid shoulder, tears rising in his throat. He sinks against his brother, clutching at his back, and can’t stop himself: he falls apart.
#
John wants out.
He’s been in the ICU bed, conscious and antsy, for a full day. They haven’t taken out his Foley yet, so he’s still pissing in a bag, but at least it’s not pink-tinged anymore.
Andrew is gone, disappeared while he was sleeping off his last round of meds, and the room feels huge and sterile and empty without the quiet sound of his breathing and the warmth of him radiating in the dim corner. One of the nurses had asked John, quietly, if he was safe, if he needed someone to come talk to him, and he’d been confused for a moment before realizing she meant about Andrew. His baffled face had apparently been enough to convince her, because with one last look at his silent guardian, she’d shaken her head and retreated.
John’s torso feels distant under the pain, wrong in a subtle way, and every time he closes his eyes all he can see is Lucy’s pale face through the open doors, the blood pooling under her neck, the way her lips had been grey and her skin faintly yellowed. She’d already looked dead.
He hasn’t let himself think about her, not really, because—
Because he’d failed her, hadn’t he? He’d been a shitty teacher, and she’d been finally figuring out her place—no thanks to him—in the last few months. If he’d been better, if he’d been kinder, if he’d paid more attention...
The heart monitor is beeping, he realizes, and his breath is coming faster, and something hurts, a sharp pain in his chest—
“Carter!” Benton sounds afraid, and that’s not right, Peter’s never afraid, and John tries to say he’s alright, not to worry about him, but he can’t make his voice work.
“What’s happening?” Andrew’s voice is low and dangerous, and that’s not right either, Andrew left—
Something cold spreads from the IV in his arm, and John slips under again.
#
The wedding is fucking weird. Maybe all weddings are? Andrew doesn’t know since he’s never been to one, but there are dozens of people all dressed up in a restaurant’s back room, all smiling, as his brother and Robby grin so widely they can barely manage to kiss. There are speeches and toasts talking about stuff he doesn’t know about, memories he doesn’t share, and he’s been pressing himself closer and closer to the wall. He hadn't taken a seat—they're all in rows, back to the door, exposed and crowded and he just can't make himself do it. It's strange and uncomfortable and at the same time he's vibrating with the reflected joy of it. He’d missed Jack’s first wedding—hadn’t even known he was married, only found out his wife was dead long after the fact—and he wonders how different Jack had been at that one.
Jack’s got a pair of well-dressed men beside him, and behind Robby is a blonde woman and the man who must be his half brother, because he looks just like Robby except—softer. Younger, obviously, but also sunny in a way Robby isn’t, wearing his fancy suit like a second skin, shoes polished to a perfect mirror shine. He looks impossibly young, all floppy hair and crooked teeth and sweet smile, but Andrew knows he’s in his mid-twenties, that he’s a full doctor like Jack and Robby. He’s wearing a watch that Andrew could fence for at least thirty thousand, and the pinky ring would get a couple more on top. He’s got an earring, too, a little hoop that catches Andrew’s eye when it winks in the candlelight later at dinner.
At dinner, Andrew sits at the table with Jack and Robby and the four people who'd stood with them at the ceremony. He doesn’t contribute to the conversation much, even when Jack’s groomsmen try to draw him out. It’s all too strange—a different world, one that Jack fits into effortlessly, conversations about medical procedures and conferences and honeymoons flowing like the champagne the whole table drinks too many glasses of. Robby’s brother—John Carter, he learns—is doing his best to keep up with the conversation, too, and as he drinks more his cheeks go pinker and pinker under his sparkling brown eyes. He catches Andrew’s eye a few times, directs questions his way and includes him in the conversation, and it’s... nice. Strange, but Andrew appreciates it, and it keeps him from getting up and running the first time Jack gets up from the table.
He finally slips out when the dancing starts, lingers in the doorway to watch Jack and Robby’s slow, swaying steps, and doesn’t tell anyone where he’s been when he gets back to Oceanside.
But the first night back in his apartment he closes his eyes and tucks the memories close inside his chest, pulling them out one by one to look at closely, like jewels. He’s happy for Jack—his older brother deserves the life he’s found, deserves happiness and peace and friends and lovers and family.
Three days later, he’s sixteen seconds behind Baz as they flee the bank, and then he’s surrounded by cops, hands behind his head, rushed through trial and sentencing before Smurf can get her claws in lawyers and judges. And so he gets six years.
Prison is bad. Obviously. It’s fucking prison.
Andrew doesn’t remember a lot of it—between the drugs they put him on and the shit that happens inside, it’s probably for the best. And then he gets out, and Julia is dead, and everything is different. Julia’s son is sleeping in his room, and his apartment is gone, and the motel they drop him at has thin walls and dirty bathroom counters that won’t get clean no matter how many times he wipes them down. He replaces the motel sheets with ones he buys himself, fixes the air conditioner that hums at a frequency that drills through his eardrums, gets his clothes from Smurf’s garage and washes them all twice before folding them neatly in the freshly-lysol’ed drawers.
And then—
He sits.
Because what the fuck is there to do?
Julia’s gone, his brothers have their own thing going—yeah, Baz throws him a couple bones, giving him little shitty jobs, but they don’t need him—and Smurf is Smurf, alternately loving and distant, a tapestry of strings attached to every smile.
He thinks, suddenly, of Jack. He wants to call him, but he hasn’t spoken to his eldest brother in three years, not since his wedding, and he doesn’t even know if Jack knows he went to prison. Doesn’t know what Jack would think about it, and besides, he’d ask if Andrew was all right, be all kind about it, all soft, and Andrew can’t take that, not now.
Instead, he opens up the new laptop he picked up and types Jack’s name into the search bar.
He’s still in Pittsburgh with Robby, both of them at the same hospital between Jack’s deployments, and there’s a picture from some kind of formal dinner that Andrew opens and stares at for a long time. Jack’s laughing, eyes on Robby, crinkles at the corners of his eyes where they weren’t last time he’d seen him, and he looks... happy. Content. He’s staring at his husband like he’s the only person in the world, and Robby’s staring back the same way.
Andrew pushes down the wave of emotion that rises in him—something he got real good at the last few years—and closes the computer, setting it gently on the table beside the bed. He’ll go for a walk, maybe. By the ocean. Breathe in air that hasn’t blown through chain link fences and HVAC systems that haven’t been cleaned in decades. Smell the ocean. Just exist, without anyone telling him how.
#
John floats, the pain distant—voice trickling in every once in a while. He hears Peter’s voice, harsh and loud, feels pressure around his abdomen. Hears Mark and Deb, Elizabeth, even Dr. Romano, maybe, and through it all, the low rumble of Andrew’s, and his hand in John’s. Part of John knows it’s strange that he’s here. They’ve only met once, and only briefly, and John can tell instinctively from the tenor of the voices and the alarms he can hear that the patient—himself, he’s the patient—isn’t doing great and probably shouldn’t have visitors. But Andrew doesn’t leave. His hand stays tight around John’s, and it keeps him from drifting away.
#
Andrew’s got a second main phone, aside from all the burners for jobs—it’s one that has Jack’s number, and Julia’s (still has Julia’s, and he can’t bring himself to delete it), and Robby’s, just in case. He pays extra for unlimited data, keeps it off the wi-fi at the house, has news alerts set up for all of the family and most of their associates. So he gets an alert about John Carter’s stabbing (Doctor Stabbed by Patient is Heir to Carter Family Fortune, what the fuck). He figures the guy’s got family, money, and he’ll be fine—but something about it itches in the back of his head. He bets John’s never been stabbed before. Maybe never been hurt, not really; rich boys get coddled, right? They’re not having guys break into their trailer to threaten them with guns, not getting shot by security guards and cauterizing the wounds with hot knives in the back of bars, not losing their last baby teeth to bouncers’ fists at eleven. He bets John’s belly’s never been scarred before, maybe never even had stitches.
He remembers the man’s face at the wedding, remembers him drawing Andrew gently into conversation: the way his eyes had gone soft and wet when their two brothers kissed, remembered the way his smile showed slightly crooked teeth, endearingly rabbity in a way that fit his face and arms and legs too long for his body. He’d looked so much like Robby, but just—softer.
Andrew had thought about him, that night, had imagined him—he’s always been attracted to softness, to care, to people who can show their emotions on their faces the way he’s never quite mastered. He’d imagined that smile breaking like sunshine over John’s face, imagined it pointed at him—imagined the way it would feel warm on his skin, warm him inside and out.
And yeah, he’d jerked off about it when he’d gotten home, imagined looking up at that sweet smile from his knees, imagined those soft hands replacing his own thick, rough ones on his dick.
So the thought of John Carter, hurt in the kind of way someone like him shouldn’t be (hurt in a way that should be reserved for people like Andrew, who hurt people back)—it sticks with Andrew all day. Jack’s deployed, and besides, they haven’t spoken in years, so he closes the door to his room, pulls up Robby’s number and, after a moment’s hesitation, hits call.
It doesn’t ring, goes straight to voicemail, and he hangs up without leaving a message. He frowns at the screen for a moment, then opens google instead and pulls up the hospital Robby works at, digging through the website until he finds the direct line to the ER and trying that instead. That one only rings twice before a voice picks up, brusque and businesslike.
“PTMC Emergency Department.”
“Looking for Robby. Dr. Robinavitch,” Andrew says.
There’s a pause. “Jack?” says the voice, sounding incredulous.
Andrew blinks, pulls the phone from his ear, looks down at it for a moment.
“No,” he says, a beat late.
The woman on the phone lets out a long, blown breath. “You sound just like—sorry. Who is this?”
“Andrew,” he says, still thrown. “Jack’s—”
“Oh! Jack’s brother.” The voice warms, filling with relief, and Andrew can honestly not name the last time someone felt relief at his voice. It’s strange, and he tucks it away to look at later. “This is Dana Evans, we met at the wedding. Okay. Robby just left a couple hours ago. His flight’s at two. Are you meeting them there?”
“In... Chicago?” Andrew’s trying to keep up with the conversation, emotion rising in his chest, because he’s missing something here.
There’s a long beat of silence. “In Germany,” says the voice, slowly. “For Jack?”
And that’s how Andrew finds out that his brother almost died in an explosion, thousands of miles from home.
#
John lives in a mansion. That’s the first thing Andrew realizes, when they pull up to the gate. Old money, the kind you don’t get in California; through the window he can see gilded picture frames, candlesticks a couple hundred years old, casually displayed wealth that makes his fingers itch, makes him start calculating weights and the capacity of his pockets, the staff’s eyelines, and the distances from window to ground.
John’s grandmother meets them at the door, and the appraising look she gives Andrew makes his skin tingle with the way it feels like it cuts right through him. She knows what he is, her look says. She’s not afraid of him, but she is watching him, and Andrew suddenly wishes he could introduce her to Smurf—she might be his mother’s match, in a bizarre, mirror sort of way that would offend them both.
She introduces herself as Millicent Carter, and Andrew isn’t sure how to respond, so he looks to John—who’s pale, sweating, face drawn in the wheelchair Andrew’s pushing. He expects John to say something about Robby and Jack, but instead, he just says, “Gamma, this is my friend Andrew.”
Huh.
“Thank you for helping my grandson,” says John’s grandmother, voice steady, eyes cool and intent on Andrew’s face. She turns to John and raises a hand to his face, stroking his cheek once, lightly. John leans into it, eyes closing, and when she pulls away, he sways in his wheelchair. “The suite by the garage, I think. It’s all one level and has an accessible bathroom. I’ll let you get settled and have someone bring dinner to the terrace.”
Andrew nods, glad his hands are occupied by the handles, and follows John’s instructions directing him through the garage—past a series of cars that would make his brothers start salivating, and that he is absolutely not glancing at whether the locks are engaged or not—down a corridor and through a wide set of french doors.
He had done his research when he’d first found out about John: it’s habit, at this point, for any new acquaintance of any of his brothers. So he knows the history, the net worth in the mid-nine figures, the foundations and tax havens that likely bring it up further, but it’s something else to see it—and especially to see it through the eyes of someone to whom it’s just home.
John’s breathing hard by the time they make it to an overstuffed couch beside a window, cold winter light flickering over the fabric. There’s a furrow between his brows and he’s hunching over, and Andrew parks the wheelchair beside the couch and crouches down in front of it. “Not bed?” he asks, and John shakes his head.
“If I get in bed, I’ll be in there till morning,” he says, voice strained. “Gotta eat something or I’ll just puke up the meds.”
Andrew reaches out carefully, palm up. John’s tense, obviously in pain. If he were one of Andrew’s brothers, he wouldn’t hesitate to wrap an arm around and lift quick, knowing the move to comfort would outweigh the momentary hurt, but the idea of causing John more pain, even for a moment? This isn’t Craig, or Deran, or even Jack. John’s different. Softer. Sheltered. Probably not used to pain the way the Cody boys are.
John puts his hand in Andrew’s, long fingers wrapping around Andrew’s own, and his grip is firm and steady as he squeezes and leans forward, weight on Andrew’s upraised palm, and he lets out a gasp of pain—quiet, high, muffled, shoved to the back of his throat. It’s a sound Andrew recognizes, deep down, and something in his brain reorients, the image of John’s sheltered, painless childhood shifting, just a little. It’s the sound somebody in pain makes when they know no one is coming except to make the noise stop.
He leans forward, braces John’s body in his own (warm, solid, a little sweaty) and takes most of his weight as he shifts to the couch, gasping as he bends. John hunches forward, breathing hard, sweat beading at his temples, and Andrew starts to pull away to give him space, but John’s hand clenches around his, tight.
“Just—stay,” John whispers, rough. “Just for a minute. Please. I can’t—” he trails off, head falling forward to land against Andrew’s shoulder. His hair is soft against Andrew’s cheek, damp from sweat, and Andrew stays still, hands resting against John’s shoulders. After a moment, John breathes in deeply, turning his face into Andrew’s neck. His eyes are damp, tears warm against Andrew’s skin, and Andrew stays where he is, even though his knees are starting to ache from the crouch. “Sorry,” John murmurs, and the warm breath makes goosebumps rise on Andrew’s skin. “You can—you can go. You don’t have to stay, I’ll be fine.” He lifts his face, lines of pain clear around his mouth and beside his eyes. “Thank you.” He eases himself upright, breath catching in his throat, and Andrew doesn’t let go of his shoulders until he’s propped up against the back of the couch.
I don’t want to go, Andrew thinks. But—does John want him to go? He can’t tell. John’s eyes are closed where he’s slumped against the couch.
He’s interrupted from his spiral by soft footsteps, and he stiffens, turning to stand, automatically moving in between John and the door, but it’s just the man who’d been with John’s grandmother at the door. He’s holding a tray, and he stops short at Andrew’s glare.
“Dr. Carter?” he says, careful.
“Thanks, Geoffrey,” John says, and Andrew relaxes a fraction. The man is an employee, obviously, someone John knows, but still—John’s hurt, can’t protect himself, vulnerable. Geoffrey steps forward, and John’s hand lands on Andrew’s hip, making him twitch. “Andrew,” John murmurs. “It’s fine.”
Andrew lets himself be moved to the side as the man sets the tray down on the table in front of the couch. It’s easy food—sliced bread, cheese, salami, sliced fruit and a little dish of almonds, along with two tall glasses of water and a pair of fancy-looking china plates. It's what he imagines a fantasy king might eat. The man—butler? do people still have butlers?—straightens.
“Anything else I can get you?” he asks, and John shakes his head.
“I’m probably going to eat and go right to bed. Thanks, though. Tell Gamma thank you, too.”
“I’ve put new sheets on the beds.” He unstacks the plates, setting one in front of John and the other beside it. “Your guest can stay in the blue room, if he would like—it’s been prepared.” His eyes flick to Andrew. “Sir? Will you be staying?”
“I—” Andrew looks to John.
“He’s probably got stuff to get back to,” says John.
Andrew shakes his head. “I don’t,” he says. “But I—if you want me to leave—”
“I don’t,” interrupts John. “Uh, you’ve been amazing, but you don’t have to stay if you have your life to get back to. I’ll be fine.”
Andrew gives him a slow once-over, taking in the way he’s slumped, the pallor in his cheeks, the thick bandages visible under his shirt.
John smiles, just a quick glimpse of his crooked front teeth, acknowledging the point without Andrew having to say anything. It makes something in Andrew’s chest loosen, just a little.
“If you want me to stay—” Andrew starts, the words difficult to get out. “I want to stay.”
“Yeah, okay,” John murmurs. His eyes catch Andrew’s, warm and brown and endless. “That would be—I mean, thank you. Andrew.”
He likes the way John says his name, he thinks, likes the way his voice curves sweetly around the syllables, the way it goes softer on the back half. “I can help with stuff,” he says. “Like—bandages. I’ve done plenty. I'm good at that. At taking care of people when they're hurt.”
"I can tell," says John, and his voice is low, curling through Andrew's ears and making something in his belly go warm and loose.
“So that’s a yes on the blue room,” says the butler, and Andrew turns, startled. He’d almost forgotten the man was there, dismissed him in his mind as irrelevant. He tries not to glare, but he’s pretty sure, based on the way the man’s eyes widen fractionally, that he doesn’t succeed.
“Yeah,” says John. “He’s gonna stay.”
#
It’s a slow recovery—the first week is just bed, and pain, and a new appreciation for David Attenborough, because Andrew has extremely strong opinions about television choices and John’s just glad of the company distracting him from how much everything hurts. He takes the drugs when he needs them, Andrew counting out his doses of painkillers and antibiotics carefully, setting timers and keeping track. He rests, and he sleeps like the dead once the oxy kicks in.
it’s the third night after he’s come home that he half-wakes in the night, body tense as a bowstring, pain ricocheting up and down his spine and spreading like lava across his lower back. He can still see shadows of the dream as it pulls him back under: Lucy’s white face, throat cut, blood pooling around her in an impossibly wide puddle and he’s swimming through it, trying to reach her, drowning in it as the level rises—
“John!” The voice cuts through the dream, a hand reaching out, and he can’t grab it, too far away, and he’s breathing in the blood, lungs filling with it—
“John!” The hand reaches down, down, cutting through the thick, dark liquid, catching John’s slick fingers, holding tight and pulling him up.
Lucy’s eyes fix on him, then go blank as the blood slips over her head but he can still see her face as she sinks down, down, down, out of reach. John is sputtering in his bed, reaching for her, crying out in pain, drowning in it.
“John!” The fingers around his palm squeeze tight, grounding him, and gravity reorients itself—he’s laying in the bed in the ground floor guest suite, moonlight cutting through the curtains, Andrew’s face above his own, Andrew’s hand in his.
“John?” His grandmother’s voice is wavering, tired, worried—less controlled than he’s ever heard her, more afraid, and when he squints through the darkness, he finds her standing in the doorway, robe tight around her, slippers on her feet. She looks small, and rumpled, and afraid, and old, and his mind instantly produces the image of her in Lucy’s place—
“Stay here,” Andrew murmurs, low enough for John’s ears only. “Don’t go back there. Stay with me, John.”
John swallows with a thick, dry throat.
“I heard you crying out,” Gamma says, stepping closer. She looks small and frail, pale and rumpled. “I—John, are you all right?”
No, he wants to say. I lost a student and a kidney and maybe my mind. I’m in pain all the time and I’m terrified. But what he says is, “Just a dream, Gamma. It’s okay. You can go back to bed.”
Her eyes flick from him to Andrew, where he’s sitting on the edge of the bed, shirtless, in tight boxer-briefs and bare feet, then to the hand clasped around John’s. “All right,” she says carefully. She pulls her robe closer around herself, holding it closed at the throat, giving him one more long, searching look. John knows she can see how pale he is, how the sweat is beading at his hairline, how the muscles of his jaw are bunched and tight against the pain. He wants something—anything—to make the pain stop, but he knows his next dose isn’t till after sunrise. He can see the bottle if he turns his head, can almost reach it, he knows—but the sun’s still down. Hours to go.
Gamma nods and retreats, closing the door behind herself noiselessly, and John’s body relaxes, just a little.
“Awake?” Andrew asks.
John nods, eyes closed, because he knows he needs more rest, but he’s not going to get it, not tonight. “Hurts,” he murmurs, because he can’t not. “Hurts so much. How soon can I have—?” He trails off because he hates how much he wants it, the relief from pain, the fuzz that blanks out his thoughts and nightmares.
Andrew’s silent for a moment, and John breathes through it. “Couple hours,” he says finally. “Six a.m.”
“Shit.” John shifts his hips against the mattress, trying to take the weight off his stitches, but it just makes the pain flare to radiate down his hip instead. He hears himself whimper, feels himself tense against it.
“Hey.” Andrew’s hand brushes John’s sweaty hair off his forehead, warm and strong, anchoring him with the touch. “Come on. Let’s watch something.”
John nods and lets himself be levered upright and propped against the headboard. Andrew settles beside him, stiff-backed, still in nothing but his boxer briefs, legs outstretched and crossed at the ankle. His bare shoulder is warm against John’s as he reaches for the remote and turns on the TV on the other wall, finding a documentary about primates.
John’s body relaxes slowly, the pain receding from all-encompassing to barely tolerable, and he leans against Andrew’s solid bulk, cheek against his thick shoulder, and watches bonobos negotiate their social order.
“They’re our closest relative,” Andrew says quietly, and when John tilts his head up to look at him, he’s still staring straight ahead. “Their genes are almost identical to ours. Just a couple differences.”
“Oh yeah?”
“They take care of their families, stay together, help each other. A lot more than most primates. More than a lot of humans.”
“That’s good,” John murmurs, Andrew’s voice a soothing monotone in his ear. He can tell Andrew's trying to distract him, can feel the way he's working at it, and a part of John wants to tell him to go back to his room, not to go to all this trouble—but the other part of him, the one that's hurting and exhausted and heartsick, wants to burrow into his warm shoulder.
“They’re the only other species of primate that adopts each other’s orphans, even if they’re not related. Like us.”
John hums, shifting his body, sinking into the pillows and leaning a little closer.
“My niece—” Andrew starts, then stops.
“Yeah?”
“I was taking care of her. For a while. After her mom—” he trails off again.
“She’s lucky she has you,” John says. “I think you’re pretty good at taking care of people.”
Andrew sighs. “Nah. I wasn’t good enough. Smurf tried to take her in, but that would have been—bad. She’s a normal kid. She doesn’t deserve that.”
John nods, because he’s heard from Jack and Robby exactly how fucked up the Cody childhood had been. “Nobody deserves that,” he murmurs.
“She’s with a family now. Has a new sister her same age, I guess.” He swallows, a shudder trembling through his body. “I’m making sure she stays there. Making sure Smurf doesn’t get her back. She should get to be a kid with a family. One that’s not ours. Even if that means I can’t see her anymore.”
The heartbreak in his voice is muted, but it cuts John to the core, because this kid—she doesn’t know how lucky she is, that she has someone who loves her so much he would give her up, just to see her happy.
Onscreen, the researchers are holding up skulls, showing size differences, shape differences, where the teeth are sharp and where they’re flat. They look almost human, like this.
“My sister—me and Jack’s sister. Julia. My twin.” Andrew pauses.
John waits—he’s learning Andrew’s rhythms, he realizes, learning the way he takes his time to make a point, the way he processes things deeply, thoroughly, not like the way John’s mind flits from thought to thought, skimming the surface of a subject.
“She OD’d. Heroin. Couple years ago. If she’d gotten away from the family earlier—if she’d had somebody taking care of her...”
John presses in, lets the back of his hand brush Andrew’s.
“Couldn’t do anything. I was in prison, but I should have—”
John feels the muscles shift in Andrew’s shoulder, knows he’s clenching his jaw, and feels the sudden urge to reach up and run his fingers over the bunched muscle, remind him to relax.
“I should’ve tried to do more way before that,” Andrew finishes. “Should have been better. Should have been there, been paying attention.”
John slips his hand under Andrew’s. “My cousin Chase overdosed,” he says after a moment. “He didn’t die, but the brain damage—” he stops there, because Andrew’s fingers are weaving between his, thick and strong, careful and tense.
The pain’s not so much lessened as receded, the tide moving out against the bulwark of Andrew’s warmth. John settles in, eyes on the screen, and lets himself sink into Andrew’s quiet recitation of primate facts.
#
Andrew can’t stay long, only a few weeks, in the end, the first one spent in the SICU and the rest at John's grandmother's. His brothers, his mother keep calling, and he can’t put them off forever. There’s shit to deal with back home and there’s only so long his mother will keep her promise about leaving Lena alone with her new family if Andrew’s not home under her thumb. Besides, Jack’s coming home in a few days, and he’s got enough people in Pittsburgh that Robby has promised to take some more time off to be with John now that they’re back in the states.
Andrew video calls Jack once with John, the day before he leaves Chicago. He stares at his brother’s drawn face, aged ten years since the last time they spoke. The conversation is short, to the point, but it’s enough to reassure Andrew that Jack’s alive and on his way home. Afterwards, they’re quiet—he can feel John working through something in his mind, but he can’t tell what.
John’s face falls when Andrew tells him he’s got a flight that afternoon, but he doesn’t ask him to stay—and Andrew couldn’t have stayed, anyway, so it doesn’t matter if John wants him to. So he packs his couple changes of clothes in his duffel bag, makes sure he has his wallet and phones, and calls a cab to the airport. He checks John’s stitches one last time—perfect, healing well—makes sure his pill organizer is stocked for the week, changes the sheets on the bed he’s been using even as John tells him he doesn’t have to, and then sits on the couch beside John, stiff-backed, uncertain what to do next. Because John is family, sort of, but also not—and he’s looking at Andrew with those big brown eyes, stubble on his cheeks, soft blanket over his lap, and Andrew has the sudden urge to lay down, put his head in John’s lap under his soft hands, and close his eyes to all the shit he’s supposed to be dealing with in California. He knows John would stroke his hair, if he did that, knows he’d do it just right, too, firm and slow, careful and sweet. He knows how soft John's skin is, knows how good it would feel.
He looks at John, meets his eyes, and John smiles that crooked, rabbit-toothed smile that makes Andrew’s stomach go hot. “Thanks doesn’t feel like enough,” John says, and Andrew recoils from the words. “I don’t know what I would have done without you.”
“You would have been fine,” Andrew says. He can’t look away from John’s face.
“Mr. Cody,” says Geoffrey the butler from the doorway, and Andrew startles at the sound—the man would make an excellent thief. “Your car is here.”
Andrew nods, stands, and starts to turn, but John catches his hand and pulls until he bends close.
John pulls him in for a hug, tight, and Andrew wraps his arms around him, bracing himself with a knee on the couch beside his hip. He sinks into the embrace for a long moment, allowing himself to breathe in the scent of him, all warm laundry soap and shampoo. He starts to pull back when he feels the temptation rising to burrow into the soft cotton covering John’s chest. But instead John catches him with a hand on his cheek. He holds him there with a touch, presses his lips to Andrew’s in a careful, warm kiss that makes Andrew nearly fall off the couch, muscles going weak, heart stuttering.
“Thank you, Andrew,” John says again when he pulls away. Andrew can feel the words against his lips, feel the shape of them, and he nods, speechless, heart pounding, cheeks flushing. He stares at John for a long, long moment, eyes searching his, but he doesn't find anything besides hazy, sweet warmth in their brown depths. He takes a deep breath—feels the way it catches, shudders in his chest—then follows Geoffrey out the door.
He opens his bag to pull out his phone on the plane, and his fingers brush paper. He pulls out a paperback, thick and well-loved. Planet of the Apes.
He laughs, flips it open to the first page, and lets himself sink into it.
He gets home late, nearly midnight in Oceanside, and sits on his bed in the dark, staring at the wall stenciled with Lena’s name, for a long, long time.