I'm so sorry for this awfully angsty ask but I'm incredibly curious - how do you think Neil, Aaron and the rest of the foxes would react if Andrew were diagnosed with lung cancer from all his smoking?
Ooh, but I LOVE angst. I literally survive on your guy’s tears.
The results come in, that detatched murmured affirmative; Adenocarcinoma.
Andrew accepts the news with a blank face, a shrug. He lights a cigarette right outside the hospital, the familiar burn of the smoke in his lungs, the shallow zing of the nicotine. He shoves the papers into the glove compartment of his car. Hell think about it later. Or never.
Neil finds the papers a week later. He holds them in his hands like a broken bird, careful, assessing, heart-breaking. He’s quiet when he hands them to Andrew. The whole world seems to have gone quiet. Eerily silent, like the echoing of an empty cavern.
“We’ll go back in tomorrow,” he says, his voice too loud in that deafening silent. “Together.”
Andrew stares at him a long time. “I hate you.”
Neil kisses his mouth, lightly. There’s no heat, just that depthless love that is immortal, even if the human body cripples. Even if it breaks. Immortal.
Radiation. Chemotherapy. The poisons they call treatment are worse than the goddamn cancer. And every time Neil takes a cigarette out of Andrew’s hands, he thinks he might break his arm.
“You’re going to kill you.”
Neil seems to think that if they stop smoking together it will help. Andrew assures him it will just make for two cranky bastards instead of one. Neil quits anyway.
Neil tells Nicky first. A hushed conversation outside the gym. Saying it out loud, even over the phone, is like a new blow.
Nicky’s voice is tight with the effort to withhold his tears. Neil is grateful for the effort. If he hears Nicky so, he’s not sure he’ll be able to hold himself together.
Aaron, on the other hand, is silent on the other line. Neil can hear his teenage daughters laughing in the background, the bark of the dog, the murmur of the TV. Normal life on the precipice of breaking.
“Tell him to stay away from crap food,” Aaron says finally.
“YOU tell him,” Neil challenges, no real anger behind the words. It’s been years since he and Aaron fought to bitterly, years of hostility melting into tolerance, melting into a calm, if sometimes mocking, coexistence.
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