veilless:

🚬🔑small observations andreil make on each other & keep to themselves:

• andrew has a ticklish spot behind his ear that makes him shiver and grab at neil’s shoulders/hair every time neil so much as breathes around it. neil’s lips are helplessly attracted to that spot, he lives for kissing and biting down on it because he loves how breathless and weak andrew’s already half-assed threats get. also, that one time he got andrew speechless and panting when he dared to nuzzle into it? so worth it.
• neil – unconsciously or otherwise – tends to draw fox paws onto random surfaces when he’s in thought. andrew used to notice them doodled onto notebook pages but thought they were just bored doodles, exclusive to study time only. but after baltimore, neil takes a liking to tracing fox paws into andrew’s skin when they are close. nowadays andrew likes to think that it might have never been a habit of boredom but neil feeling safe and calm. (sometimes andrew traces them back into neil’s skin too.)
• andrew can name constellations on a night sky. neil discovered this while they were up on the roof, talking late into the night. he can’t stop being enthralled by it ever since, by how andrew’s mind works like a clockwork, wondering about when and why he learned them to start with. whenever neil points at the sky and looks at andrew with prompting, curious eyes, andrew answers him like someone who can’t fathom just what’s so interesting about a bunch of stars. he hasn’t yet figured it out that the stars aren’t at all what neil is fascinated by or has his eyes on. not yet.
• neil is fond of long baths. it’s something he’s eased into gradually and only after his dad’s death, after he got used to the fact that now he has all the time in the world to just enjoy a lot of things he couldn’t before. things he had to give up on, or couldn’t do because there was simply no time. like a long, hot bath without any kind of hurry, till the water loses warmth and his fingers get pruny and andrew stands in the doorway with a towel acting like he wouldn’t care if neil gets a cold even though he’s frowning. 
• andrew has lazy and careless

  handwriting; his school notes the kind of mess only he himself sees through, his signature (and later on, his autograph) full of simple flat lines and the rare curve. usually he writes like it’s too much work to hold a pen but whenever it’s something for neil (a message/a note on the fridge/that one time neil got a serious fever and andrew went to his class to take notes for him) it gets noticeably more readable. neil might be imagining things but he likes to think he’s not.

• neil likes to kiss andrew after andrew ate something sweet. andrew eats a lot of sweet things so it took him a while till he noticed the pattern, but after he did it wasn’t that hard to see that neil is always going out of his way to kiss him while the sugar still clings to his lips. andrew liked sweets before, now he has a reason to never lose his sweet-tooth. ever.
• andrew’s the only person who knows the exact history for every single scar neil has. on the other hand, neil’s the only person who knows the exact number of scars on andrew’s arms.