badacts:

Andrew doesn’t have nightmares like Neil does. He doesn’t jerk awake panting, doesn’t take minutes to shake his way down from the sick adrenaline that his own subconscious triggers. He doesn’t scream, doesn’t thrash, doesn’t bolt afterwards like the runner he swears he isn’t. 

When a therapist pre-Bee asked him about nightmares, Andrew told him that there was nothing he could dream about that was worse than what he’d lived through. He said it to shock, with the sharpest edge of his drugged humour, and refused to say anything else afterwards. There was another shrink across the desk not long afterwards.  

He was lying anyway. There’s always something worse. But nightmares have never a problem for Andrew.

Neil has survived the yakuza. He’s survived his own father’s dedicated attempts at killing him, and come out of it scarred and with an even shittier attitude than before. He survived whatever came before that on the run, the marks clear as day on his skin.

He’s a cat with nine lives who must have used up eight of them. It hasn’t made him more careful. He’s a reckless asshole who balances on the edge of buildings, who drives a hair over the speed limit with one hand easy on the wheel, who can’t open his mouth without daring someone to break him. Who doesn’t even seem to realise he does any of that.

A fall, a crash, a single hit could wipe away everything that is Neil Josten. Neil can’t seem to stop flirting with them, less self-destructive than he is purely ignorant of the fact of his own mortality.  

Self-destruction isn’t the only kind of destruction, of course. There are plenty of regular, everyday ways to die.

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