Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of it’s own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.

— OCEAN VUONG

☀︎

The second time, it takes Andrew a couple of minutes to figure out what’s going on. 

A locker clangs somewhere behind him, sharp and metallic, in the Binghamton away team locker room. The lights are too sharp. Andrew’s temple throbs once, twice, but doesn’t ache when he presses down where a bruise should be. 

When he turns around from where his gaze has stilled, hazily, on the locker, Neil is disappearing into the shower stalls. 

Where have you been, he thinks, and anger overrides the confusion blurring the corners of his vision. The betrayal of Neil’s disappearance is enough to ignore the sharp pangs of bewilderment, casting a shadow of frenetic desperation over his memory.  When Andrew takes a step forward though, logic breaks through the emotion that had crested in a single breath. Anger and confusion and panic, all held on a door-hinge of fluorescent light, in the echo of the locker clanging, disappear. Somewhere out in the hallway, Wymack calls for Allison to hurry up with her primping, and Andrew—Andrew already knows the words. He shouldn't. 

Andrew shouldn’t remember this.

The locker room is quieter, now — Neil has disappeared to the showers, and most of the others have filtered out. Matt is across from him, locs wet and dripping onto the wooden benches. Aaron and Nicky left a few minutes ago. Andrew shouldn’t know that, but he does. He watched them leave — just not now. There’s something caught between his memory of them leaving and them being gone, an animal in a trap, a strike of light through an image, cutting it in half. Something in the back of his mind, a small, frantic voice, says that Neil should not be here. Andrew should not be here, either. He believes it. 

“Andrew.” 

He wonders, briefly, looking at the way Matt packs his damp towel into his duffel bag, if this is all a side effect of the comedown. No matter that it’s been two months. Andrew has known nightmares that have lasted longer than that, and have felt more real than this does. Maybe he’s still there. Maybe he never got off of them. Maybe he really is going insane. Maybe he needs to call Bee. There’s a brief relief in the panic, something sharp and painful. Andrew can feel panic, now. It’s welcome, almost, until he remembers where it’s coming from. 

“Andrew.” 

When he looks at Kevin, pulled away from thought by the irritated tone Kevin uses on his name, Andrew almost chokes on something terrible and guilty, deja-vu soaked like oil into the porous bone of his ribcage. 

Kevin’s bag is slung over his shoulder in a mockery of casualty, the way he mimics the others on the team, idiotic examples of personhood that they are. Andrew laughs at Kevin for it more often than not, the obviousness of a childhood lost and now faked, but there’s no humor now — something vile and nauseous and snarling crawls up his throat when he looks at Kevin’s muted expression. 

He looks too pale for a victory. 

They had won the game. Andrew remembers that, at least: winning the game. The cheers from the Foxes, the screaming from the stands, Kevin’s sharp, pleased grin pointed towards him in the goal. Waiting in the foyer for the others for Neil— Neil. Neil’s ‘thank you’, the tone not right, the steadfast set to his expression as if he was saying something else instead of gratitude. The set of his mouth, crooked and smiling about something private. The riot. The bottle, and the darkness, and the solid hit of glass to skin and bone.

Andrew presses too-heavy fingers to his cheek to feel for a bruise that’s decidedly not there. Kevin’s eyes narrow, quietly, confusedly. Andrew ignores him, a habit well learned, and shoves his own uniform into his bag as the memories flicker in the back of his head like a badly angled home video. Not that Andrew has experience of them, but still. The habit of badly remembered memories. 

Andrew remembers hauling Kevin and Aaron through the crowd, beer-bottle-green glass blinking on both of their shoulders. Slipping back into the crowd to snag a disorientated Nicky from it, pulled away from the team in the way a riptide steals life. The way Wymack had crowded them onto the bus, all of them beaten and bloody with torn clothes, and had yelled spitfire words at Andrew when he’d ducked back into the crowd — the moving masses of bodies and glass and the flashing changes of pitch blackness and the sharp, blinding light of cop’s torches and vehicle headlights. Neil’s bag was folded in on itself where Andrew found it beside the fence, straps frayed and zipper pulling from the canvas and Neil’s uniform poking out of the half open zipper. He had found his racquet two steps back toward the door they had left out of. He had handed it to Kevin when he made it back to the bus. Andrew has no care for abandoned Exy gear, but Kevin is always taking in strays.

Andrew remembers too perfectly the moment in which he realized that Neil was not going to return to the bus to reunite with his duffel bag. He had dug through the netted pocket and come up with Neil’s phone. A ring of keys. 

Kevin was already sitting across from him, fingers tangled in the torn-loose netting of Neil’s racquet. Tugging at the strings, pulling them free from the foundation runners — something done to prepare for restringing. 

The slow crawl of time when Wymack started to call the hospitals — the even slower crawl of time when he called the first morgue. Nicky’s strangled sob, Matt's argument against the calls, and then his shocked silence, the way the lights in the bus were too dim to pick out Renee's expressions where she sat at the front of the bus with Abby shrouded in musty darkness. 

There is more feeling to the memories than Andrew’s able to comprehend, right now, but the facts and happenings are easy to run through. They are easier to make sense of without the dizzying whirl of emotion, something Andrew is relearning. Andrew deals in facts and knives and truth, so that is what he focuses on through the haze of what should be deja-vu. 

Andrew rifling through the netted pockets of Neil’s bag and coming up with his phone and the call log. The area code for Baltimore.

Kevin’s still silence—Kevin. 

Kevin underneath him with wide, panicked eyes, his lips turning blue. Nicky's hands at Andrew's shoulders, trying to pull him off of Kevin. Nicky and Matt and Wymack, all tugging him away from the asphyxiated betrayal on Kevin’s face.

Andrew blinks, disrupting the constant recall of memory. It’s a strange feeling — betrayal from his own hands. He doesn’t feel guilty, though. The nausea from that thought isn’t as deep reaching, but it is still there, a small niggling feeling at the edges of his consciousness. 

He had gotten his answers, though. Andrew rolls them over his tongue as he drags his foot across the locker room linoleum to confirm it’s solidity, it’s realism. It squeaks quietly under his shoe, his foot catching on the sticky, rubber like texture, a grating sound. 

Neil’s birth name is Nathaniel Wesninski. That’s what Kevin had managed to choke out around the bruising, once Andrew had been restrained like an animal. We called him the Butcher’s son.

And then Kevin had told them about watching a screaming man get cut into pieces and Andrew had seen red yet again.

His memory cuts, almost — Aaron in the other bed in the room they were sharing at the motel. Renee, sitting in the single ratty chair in the corner of the room, murmuring quietly under her breath. Praying. Like that was going to do anything. The slow creep of dawn, not quite making it to sunrise before Andrew had heard the locker clang moments ago, throwing him back into something that should be left in the past. 

It had only been a blink of time. 

Had. Andrew knows it well enough to use past tenses for it, a slow slide of recalled memory. It had happened. He can be sure of that much, at least. Andrew trusts his mind enough that if it replayed his biggest nightmare over and over it would get all the details right. 

Andrew should not have these memories but he does. 

“What’s wrong with you? Andrew.”

Kevin is still standing there, snapping his fingers in front of Andrew’s vision, and the snarling kind of anger that comes with knowing secrets taints his voice when he finally replies to Kevin’s attempts to gain his attention. 

“What, can’t even leave without me? You can do that much, right?”

Kevin can. He’s said nothing — no one else has said anything — but he flinches minutely when Andrew speaks to him, then looks confused. As if not quite sure why he did. He recovers from his faltered step in a split second, though, turning to leave the locker room, the fluorescent light sticking to him even as he rounds the corner into the dimming corridor. There’s the echo of chatter from the other Foxes, already gathered in the hallway, that pulls Kevin away from the sudden silence of the locker room. 

He hasn’t said anything. Andrew sighs, the sound coming out choked. Frustratingly confused. Something is happening again. There are no changes to this but for Kevin’s flinch and the way Andrew can remember it too vividly, like a light that’s been turned on too bright.

He knows the feeling too well. It crawls under his skin. There is too much happening and yet not enough. The silence grows large enough to swallow him whole, left adrift with his memories that don’t seem to fit anywhere. Andrew was in the motel and now he is here, with a pocketful of harsh streetlights and desperation, and words being spoken out in the corridor that he’s heard before. 

Last time, though — last time, his brain clings onto — Andrew was out there, in the hallway too. Now he’s here. Now Neil is out of the showers and instead of finding an empty locker room like he would have, Andrew is standing here. 

Nathaniel Wesninski sits too twisted at the roof of his mouth, compared to the glossy, pebble-like syllables of Neil. It’s a truth, though, that Andrew remembers too clearly to be dream, too sharply to be false. Another truth: Nathaniel Wesninski disappeared last night into the darkness of the riot. One more: Neil Josten looks surprised to see Andrew still there in the locker room.

“Andrew?”

His voice is too wavery for a win. His hair’s damp from the showers, but his eyes are, too, red rimmed around the bottom. For a moment he looks lost — as if he’s back to being the same boy he was when Andrew and Kevin intercepted him in that back-end public school out in Millport. As if he was a dead man walking towards yet another death. Andrew had known the expression too well. He’d seen it on Kevin. He’d seen it in the mirror.

Andrew has no space for reminiscing, right now. No matter this sudden repeat of memory. 

“Where were you?”

Neil tilts his head, questioning. Wet, his hair plasters itself to the side of his face, obscuring the jet black, numerical mark of ownership that Riko had inked there. Andrew swallows down the disgust at the sight of it. He has spent the last year and a half trying to tear that same symbol off of Kevin’s cheek — to see Neil with it, too, is a failure on his part. Stupid, the two of them. Too willing to give up themselves for others. 

“In the showers,” Neil says, reaching for his bag. He keeps his eyes fixed on the strap, hands too loose around it — like it’ll hurt if he grip too hard. Andrew takes a quiet step forward, tension held in every muscle as he watches Neil fiddle with the zip. 

“Before that.”

“.. Press with Dan?”

Andrew can’t tell if Neil’s being deliberately obtuse or if Andrew really is alone in this. Both of those options are too uncomfortable to think about. Neil has been lying to him a lot longer than Andrew had believed. It would be easy, then, for him to continue the untruths. 

The Butcher’s son, Andrew thinks. He’d known that Neil had a relationship to violence the rest of them will never quite know, but the picture Kevin had painted, choked out around the bruises on his throat, was something Andrew would have never guessed. Neil knows lying like survival. Andrew had thought the running was bad enough. 

“Playing dumb is not going to work with me, Josten,” Andrew says. “Save the lying for people stupider than me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Neil says, frustrated. His eyebrows pinch together as if he’s confused by the anger, but his eyes are still bright. There’s a beat of silence, and Andrew thinks, again, what there is to lose with Neil. All of it, sure, but he already has. Whatever they already went through had stolen Neil away into the dark — there’s nothing to lose by admitting he knows something at least. 

“You just going to disappear again?”

Neil doesn’t miss the way Andrew words it — he starts to mouth again with an expression of slight, unguarded confusion, before the sharp ringing of his phone disrupts the two of them. It’s the default text tone — it sounds too cheery for the dim moment under the locker room lights, and Neil flinches. 

Andrew’s eyes narrow. 

“Who’s calling?”

Neil smoothes out his expression from the jolt of panic Andrew has just watched him battle with, giving the phone a cursory look before dropping it down to his side. 

“It’s probably just a wrong number. You should go and find the others.”

“Neil—”

“Andrew.”

“Abram.”

Neil shuts off. “Go find Kevin, Andrew. It’s fine.” As he watches, Neil starts walking away from him toward the bathroom stalls. An escape, of kinds. 

“For a man who has already had a breakdown over a phone, you are not selling this well.” 

“It’s fine, Andrew.”

Andrew knows that voice. He knows a no when he hears it. The door to the toilet stall slams shut, and there’s the grating sound of the lock when Neil locks it behind him. The phone beeps: he’s picked up the call. 

Andrew knows there is no point in lingering when Neil will not give him the answers he needs. If he doesn’t even have the answers he needs. Andrew knows enough for now — Neil’s father is called the Butcher of Baltimore, Kevin had said. He was supposed to be like me. A gift to the master. 

A sacrifice, more like it. Andrew knows what would have happened if Neil had been sent to the same place Kevin was created. There would have been no escape from the darkness, for him. 

Andrew scoffs, loud enough that Neil will be able to hear it from where he’s locked himself in the stall, and leaves the locker room. The rest of the team is loitering in the lounge  with their gear bags, half of them talking, the other half tapping away at their phones. It’s still a celebration for them, the win, and Matt offers him a rare grin when Andrew joins them. Beside him, Dan is talking to Wymack, and the others are crowded near the two security officers by the doors. 

“Where’s Neil?” asks Nicky, sidling up beside Andrew. He’s relaxed in that way he is after a win, happy in a way that’s honest; his phone is glowing white in his hand, open to a messaging app. Andrew catches a glimpse of German, before he snaps his answer. 

“Do I look like his keeper?”

“You’re saying you aren’t?” Allison scoffs, not unkindly. “You’re as bad with him as you are with Kevin, you’d be the one person to know where he is.”

Across from him, Kevin keeps his eyes fixed to the linoleum of the floor, the sticky surface reflecting the fluorescents. It makes him look paler, despite his dark skin, and Andrew takes an aborted step forward toward him, the deja-vu of whatever has just happened pushing him forward. Andrew knows the feeling of Kevin’s pulse beneath his thumbs, the way it had beat fast and strong, fighting against the pressure, before it had stuttered, chokingly. He would do it again, for the answers he wants. He’s not sure if Kevin has the ones he needs now, though.

Neil had disappeared and Kevin is the one person tied up enough in his past to know why he’s gone. Andrew just doesn’t know if he remembers Neil disappearing, though. He wagers a look around the lounge, to the other Foxes — no one else looks like they recognise this place more than they should. None of them look like they are caught in something that they have already been a part of.

None of them know the curse of insanity, though — to be disbelieved at every turn. If any of them — Nicky, Matt, Allison, Dan, Renee, Aaron — thought this was a repeat of the past, they would tell the rest of the team.

They would probably be believed. 

“Hey Neil! We were starting to think you’d drowned in there,” Nicky says, and Andrew turns to see Neil walking out of the locker room toward the rest of the team. 

“Sorry,” he says, coming to a stop beside Andrew. His hair’s still damp, and his phone has disappeared somewhere into one of the pockets in his ridiculously baggy pants, but his expression is more—closed off. Like he’s flattened it out into a clay mask, like the hair and the eyes and the tattoo aren’t enough of a giveaway of who he is.

Nicky waves a hand in dismissal. “It’s fine, we were just wondering if you’d decided to live in there,” and oh. Nicky hadn’t spoken again, last time. Neil grins weakly at the joke as the others start to grab their bags and gear for the walk to the bus.

His eyes pass over Andrew to the two guards behind the group, before they pull back to Andrew. 

“Thank you,” Neil says, and Andrew stiffens. 

Thank you, you were amazing. Neil’s expression, like he was giving something away, like he was confessing something more than gratitude. Allison’s snicker, the riot, the flashing of police lights, the bus—Neil. Kevin. Nathaniel. Abram. Neil.

“I don’t need your thanks,” he says, before Neil can continue. Somewhere behind him, Dan lets out a half-aborted laugh, but Andrew’s focused on the way Neil stills and something settles behind his eyes. He can’t tell what it is. Andrew hates it — the way Neil looks like he’s already decided on something Andrew never got the choice of.

He can’t ask Neil the questions he wants in front of the others, so Andrew settles for just looking at him. His hair’s darker from the showers, but the fluorescent lights bounce off the bleach damaged auburn, the color still a slight shock to Andrew whenever he looks at it. It glows gold, almost, at the crown, before Andrew yanks his gaze away and down to Neil’s hands, tucked into his pockets. One is deeper than the other, as if he’s holding onto whatever's inside the pocket. 

“Neil,” Andrew says, as Wymack starts to usher them through the doorway out where the mounting sound of the crowd crests louder, and louder, and louder, and louder with every step that they take toward the exit. It’s frustrating — the things he wants to know but still cannot be sure of — the way that the only thing he can pull out from behind his teeth is the sound of Neil’s name.

Neil looks back to him from where he’s at the front of their little pack, eyes flickering over Andrew, as if cataloging him. He looks nervous. Beneath that, he looks terrified. Andrew hisses a curse beneath his breath when Neil turns away with a short, wane smile. When they step out of the door into the frenetic darkness of the parking lot, Andrew tries to grab at Neil’s arm. 

“You are a fool if you think—”

“Andrew!”

Here is a truth: Andrew still has a deal with Kevin. When the bottle flies through the crowd toward their little group, Nicky’s voice raising over the din of people, Andrew turns to tug Kevin out of the way. He earns an elbow to his face for his efforts, something heavy and sharp that sends a dull spike of pain through his temple and blurs red over his vision. Kevin looks down at him with sharp surprise, but Andrew isn’t concerned with that. 

When he turns back around for Neil, there is only the crushing pressure of the riot and the half-darkness of the night, interrupted by flashing lights. 

It’s muscle memory, really, from here on. Wymack pulls them onto the bus and Andrew ducks under his arm and back out into the riot. Neil’s bag is closer to the parking lot than it had been, last time — his racquet, too, isn’t abandoned far down the chain link fence . 

He has to swallow down the useless, choking sense of despair. Andrew is often angry, which is the more productive cousin of fear. Desperation does not breed clear thinking.  

He presses on through the crowd back to the bus, the bright white of it half-glowing in the darkness, the headlights cutting a sharp path through the crowd as Andrew pushes past Bearcats and Fox fans alike. Riots like these have no sides, once the lights go out. Wars like these ones are fought en-masse in the darkness. 

When he surges onto the bus, Kevin looks up from where he’s sitting and immediately down to where Andrew’s hands where Neil’s racquet and duffel bag are loose in his grip. Even from the other end of the bus Andrew sees the way Kevin’s pupils dilate, two pinpricks of lightlessness in a pool of dark brown. 

He drops Neil’s gear on the floor with little concern for the way it slumps against the carpet — Neil is not here, and so there is no reason for him to be concerned about it. The bus creaks under his boots, the light dimming as he strides toward the back of the bus where Kevin is, and Nicky and Aaron in the seats behind him. The Palmetto Monsters — three cowards and a beast. 

Matt stares at him in passing, confused, the barest hint of concern on his face, separate from the contortion of pain from his injuries. Fear always follows Andrew like this. 

Fuck propriety, fuck sanity. Andrew will get his answers or he will die trying. It’s muscle memory, really. Kevin’s eyes flit up to Andrew as he approaches, dark and terrified like a man staring into his past, and Andrew’s hands flicker toward his throat. 

“Andrew, what the fuck?” asks Nicky, but Andrew can barely hear him over the thick, overwhelming sound of his pulse in his ears as he steps in front of where Kevin’s sitting.

When Kevin had first arrived in Palmetto, all six feet of broken bones and squinting at the sunlight like he’d never seen it before, they had made a deal. There is no point explaining it again — the two of them know it too well. Even knowing is too weak a word for it, Andrew thinks. Everything they have ever had to do with each other is born out of protectionism and Kevin’s infuriating push and pull of Andrew toward Exy. 

But even unsaid, the deal is a constant. Andrew’s terrible, traitorous mind offers up the memory of crushing Kevin’s pulse under his thumbs and the asphyxiation-blue hurt on his face. Andrew’s knives are the basis of what he and Kevin have built, something terrible and unerringly plural. His hands, then, are the ruin.

He flexes them briefly, feeling the way the tendons ache from his racquet, from a game he has played both twice and once. Neil’s absence is a dark void in the bus’ seating plan — Andrew knows loss like something bitter and guilt-filled, and now anger joins the mix, sharp and stagnant in one. That something dark flares inside of him, and he leans closer to Kevin. 

When he goes to pull on it though, that reserve of emotion he’s more familiar with than the sight of his own face, he can’t. It takes more effort than it should, to lift his hands from where they’re held at his side to where Kevin’s sitting in front of him. 

“Andrew?” 

Kevin sounds uneasy. His eyes are blown wide like they do when he wakes in the middle of the night, choking around the vestiges of a dream. Andrew’s seen it so much that even without his perfect memory he would know it in the darkness. He knows what it is to see Kevin scared — it’s a new thing to see him terrified of Andrew, though. 

Andrew’s hands shake. He snatches them away like they’re about to be burned. He speaks, instead. 

“What do you know.”

“I don’t know what you're talking about,” Kevin says hesitantly, voice shaky. “Where’s Neil?”

Andrew sees red. 

His hands stay by his side, though. 

Kevin makes a concerned noise when Andrew spins on the heel of his boot to stall back down to the front of the bus. It’s an echo of Kevin’s words there, too — Dan and Matt and Abby and Renee all clambering over each other's voice to ask where Neil is. 

“Andrew—“ Wymack starts, but Andrew is saved from his likely furious expression, bathed pale in the weak bus lights, when he snatches Neil’s bag from the man's hands. He knows what he’ll find in the side pocket, fingers searching for it in the plasticky netting. Neil’s phone is quiescent and dull when he pulls it open, but it lights up when he flips it open to the call log. 

The screen brightness has been bumped up to as high as the phone can handle and the numbers sear themselves into Andrew’s memory with little effort. Stark black on white, the tinge of blue the screen has — area code 443.  

“Baltimore, right? Who was calling?”

It’s not a question. These things have never been questions, between them. It’s only a give and take, a black and white push and pull. Andrew commands and Kevin obeys and Andrew pretends that it’s for his protection. 

“I—”

“Kevin, if you know something..” Dan says, carefully. Beside her, Abby has paused in bandaging up Matt’s hands, her eyes fixed on the two of them where they’re settled near the back of the bus. 

Kevin releases a thin breath, still staring at Andrew’s hands even from the other end of the bus. He shuts his eyes, briefly, and turns away to stare out the window into the grainy,  tattoo-black darkness instead of Andrew. Kevin lets out the suggestion of a shaky sigh, still staring at Andrew’s hands. Andrew watches as he shuts his eyes briefly and turns away slightly to stare down at the seats of the bus. 

“Neil’s real name is Nathaniel Wesninski,” Kevin says, turned away from Andrew, voice small. “We called him the Butcher’s son.” 

Andrew has spent the last two years cataloging each and every one of Kevin’s expressions. It would have been a difficult task without his memory, something too accurate and too strong for Andrew to ever be rid of, but Andrew thinks, hatefully, that he still would have learned the different ways that Kevin’s lips quirk when he makes a new expression. He looks confused, right now. As if he’s not sure why he’s saying this. As if the others around them should know. As if Andrew should know. 

That was not there the last time Andrew watched him spill Neil’s secrets. Granted, neither was his blemish free throat, but time plays its tricks.

“Where’s his father now?”

Andrew has seen Kevin in every iteration of tragedy. The hanged man, the dead man walking, the shell of a god made mortal and broken. He looks devastated, now. The abandoned lover. Achilles receiving news. Something pulls at the edge of his mouth, asking for release: less words and more emotion. 

“Out on bail.”

“And you knew?” Nicky sounds hysterical. The pitch of his voice breaking the dull, tense, headachy silence of the bus is enough to let the rest of the Foxes loose at Kevin. Andrew lets them — presses into the seat right at the back of the bus with Neil’s phone still in his hand. 

When he digs through the bag, he comes up with keys. 

☀︎

Wymack books them a motel, again. Again is a word Andrew will always know for pain — once experienced, there is no escaping it, whether in dreams or reality. 

Now, it’s just a simple fact. They arrive at the motel, again. Wymack sends them off to different rooms, again, the ones who were injured piling into a room with Abby again. Andrew flicks on the switch again and the bulb flickers weakly before blinking into full strength. There’s a moth caught in the bulb, fluttering helplessly against the glass. 

This time, again doesn’t refer to the room allocations. Renee is down the hallway with Abby, helping her bandage up the others. Aaron is with Nicky. Andrew; Kevin. 

“You remember, don’t you,” Andrew says, words clear and unfettered. Across from him, Kevin shifts in surprise, maybe. Caution. When they’d been piled into the same room, this time Andrew the only bruised one, Kevin had still settled himself as far away from Andrew as possible. 

“Yes,” he says. The answer doesn’t surprise Andrew, but it is relieving. Andrew has never been a paranoid man, but there is a solace that comes with someone else assuring that this is real. 

Kevin shuffles his feet on the carpet, and Andrew pulls his gaze away from him toward the window. Andrew should be surprised that, of all people, Kevin is the only other one to remember — but he’s not. Of course something so strange would pull both of them into it. They’ve never been lucky people. They haven’t been separated in the last year and a half — it’s a stupid thought to believe that even time repeating would tear Kevin away from him. Across the room, Kevin takes in a short breath, as if about to say something, and Andrew looks up to where the lamplight bounces off the oil-spill blackness of his hair. 

“Why didn’t you do it, this time?” 

They both know what he’s talking about — Kevin’s hands twitch in phantom pain, as if wanting to check that his throat is still intact. The memory hangs between them like an ugly curtain. Outside, through the window of the motel room, the skies start to lighten, signs of a coming sunrise.

“Would you rather I had?” Andrew levels a cool look at Kevin, who flinches minutely, then shakes his head, eyes fixed on the floor. Andrew has always hated the way Kevin refuses to make eye-contact, some strange carry over from Evermore. Subservience in the face of violence is something that takes years to unlearn, something Andrew knows intimately. For all he hates the connection between his own past and Kevin’s, it’s the truth, no matter how strained and opposite their childhoods were. 

Andrew hums at the silent answer, and looks away to where the dawn starts to rise over the windowpane. When he blinks, he’s staring at the steel of a locker and Allison is talking somewhere out in the hallway. There is the sound of a locker clanging shut — the echo of metal, like some kind of awful dawn chorus. 

☀︎

Andrew remembers everything in technicolor detail. It’s always been the case — curse and blessing in one. He notices when things are the same. He notices when things are different. This time, Kevin leaves the locker room when Matt does. This time, when Neil gets out of the showers, he’s limping slightly. His hands are held away from the rest of the body as if it would hurt to touch his own skin. When he sees Andrew in the changing room once everyone has left, he doesn’t look surprised. 

“Where are you going?”

Neil flinches. “I’m n—”

“No. No bullshit. Where the fuck do you keep going.”

“Where do I keep—” Neils expression sharpens and darkens in turn. “You know.”

“I didn’t ask you to repeat my words back to me. Where do you keep going?” Anger makes Andrew’s words sound stilted, like he’s talking to a child. A holdover from the drugs, some kind of amusement found in infantilising the people around him. Kevin always winces slightly at the tone — Neil, on the other hand, shows no reaction to it. 

“Andrew. Leave it.”

There’s another word sitting behind his teeth, perched on Neil’s tongue. Andrew can almost hear it. He has never known it to work. He clenches his jaw in response, instead, reaching toward Neil’s face with a savage kind of movement. “Yes or no?”

Neil looks down at the hand, eyes still hazy from whatever is happening. The fluorescents in the locker room turn his eyes an impossible shade of blue, the kind of color Andrew has only ever seen in pictures of oceans far away. Californian waters aren’t something Andrew tries to recall, despite never being able to forget them, but no matter. Neil’s look like they’re something foreign. Out of place everywhere but for when he’s settled. 

They look too sharp, right now. Neil still says yes. 

Tugging at the loose fabric of Neil’s shirt, Andrew drags him into something bruising. Neil hums, pressing back as harshly as Andrew does: he gives in too easily to things like this, as if Andrew is a place to settle. 

Andrew is the farthest thing from. Andrew is the solution like a pickaxe is the solution. He’s a sharp tool to clear a path and warn off wolves and cut whoever is clumsy enough to mishandle him. Andrew is a blunt force tool that Neil treats like a scalpel. 

Andrew has a habit of pushing away thoughts that are too heavy. This one makes him uncomfortable, so under the rug it goes. He focuses instead, on the way Neil’s teeth clack against his before he pulls away, eyes fixed on the floor somewhere beside them. He won’t meet Andrew’s gaze, even when Andrew reaches for his chin, trying to force it up. “Abram.”

“Andrew, bitt—”

“You know I hate that word.”

Neil scoffs. “Then why does it feel like it’s the only thing I can say to you to make you leave this alone?”

Andrew stares at Neil; the way his hair is damp again, a different strand plastered over his forehead n a curl, leaving the 4 on his cheekbone visible; the way he alternates between keeping eye contact with Andrew and trying to tear it away; the way he raises his hands as if to push Andrew’s away, but keeps them hovering over Andrew’s covered wrists. He has not been given a yes, Andrew notes, so he keeps himself carefully separate from Andrew. 

“Considering you’ve caught the three of us in this, there’s nothing you can say.”

“Three?”

“God forbid Kevin be out of the loop,” Andrew says, heavy with sarcasm. It sounds too casual for the way Kevin’s presence in this makes him feel, and Neil’s eyes widen. He looks—hopeful. Guilty, too, but there’s that spark of sanguinity that Neil always has when it comes to Kevin, something terrible and joyful in one. 

“Then the both of you—”

“Yes.” Andrew says. He means it in more ways than one — stretches his arms out far enough that the black fabric of his sleeves bumps against Neil’s palms. Neil’s gaze follows the movement, his hands relaxing minutely where he’d been clenching them. 

“Andr—“

Neil’s phone rings. 

Andrew’s eyes flicker towards Neil’s pocket, the sound of the default chime singing from the fabric. When he looks up, Neil is watching him. His eyes stay pinned on Andrew as he reaches for the phone — opens it with hesitance, weighing up Andrew’s presence, before he heaves a sigh and presses it to his ear without checking the caller. Andrew knows the area code, but he doesn’t know who’s on the other side of the phone until Neil says it out loud. 

“I didn’t give you this number, Lola.”

Andrew stills, watches the way Neil listens to ‘Lola’, the way his breathing stops and starts in intervals, his face paling even more. Neil in sunlight looks like he’s burning, but here, under the artificial lights, he looks strung out. Broken. Hollow, in more ways than one, the breakage in his hair from bleach obvious, the acne scars over his cheekbones. 

“That,” Neil says, “Is not my place. Don’t tell me it’s my right.”

Andrew hears the sound of a high pitched laugh through the phone — even though he’s pressed as close to Neil as he can at this moment, whatever’s being said on the line escapes him. He reaches a hand up to grab at the phone but Neil bats it away with a tortured look, half-plea-half-terror, before turning back to Lola’s voice. 

“What do you want.”

A hum of words through the phone, inaudible. Outside the locker room, there’s a burst of noise, something cheerful. Probably Nicky, maybe Matt. A stern voice: Wymack. None of them know what’s going on in here except for Kevin, who had escaped before any of this. None of them have any idea what Neil’s been hiding from them. Not even Andrew, who’s standing beside him. 

“He is in Seattle.” Neil sounds like he's reciting lies. Andrew hates it — all he can do though is glare at  the phone, the way the backlight of the screen throws sharp shadows over Neil’s face, illuminating the hollows and ridges of his cheekbones, the old, silvery scars over his temple. He, Andrew weighs up, briefly. A short reference to the man who’s very existence had Kevin convinced of Neil’s death. Not even convinced, really. Hoping. As if death was kinder than what Neil’s father signified. 

“They won’t leave without me, you know,” Neil says, stumbling over the words despite the way they sound rehearsed. Andrew knows the feeling — they’re all just following the same lines with minor variations. A badly cast play with two rehearsals. “They’ll know I’m missing.”

Andrew wants to rip the phone out of Neil’s hands, snarl down the line at whoever’s taking him away, whoever’s planned this. He wants to know where Neil is going, and why he looks like he’s gone through something Andrew has never wanted to relive, and what’s going on. He wants to know their weak points and soft spots and the places he can most easily slide a knife into. 

“Lola—” Neil says, but there’s the dull sound of the call hanging up. Neil lowers the phone, movements half-robotic, and keeps his eyes decidedly turned away from Andrew. Andrew may not have heard the words said but the intent of them was obvious. Andrew knows what the sound of a threat is. 

“Neil,” Andrew says. “What is this.”

“I don’t know, Andrew,” he gets in return. “A fever dream? A hallucination? A time loop? I don’t exactly believe in magic.”

“Not—this,” Andrew says, waving a hand around them as if to refer to whatever the fuck they’re caught in, before snatching Neil’s phone from his hand and brandishing it between them. “This.”

“I can’t tell you,” Neil says. Andrew bristles. 

“Can’t, or won’t?”

“Both.”

“Why not.”

“Because.”

“Abram. Stop with the martyr bullshit. Didn’t you figure that out already? In case you don’t remember, you’re letting me protect you,” Andrew says, and Neil tugs his hand away like it’s been burned. 

“We broke that off,” Neil says, and Andrew stills in surprise at the reminder of the conversation. If I’m hiding behind you I’m still running, Neil had begged. I don’t want to end the year like this. Neil had already asked him to let him go, but Andrew hadn’t thought that he’d taken Andrew’s silence as agreement. It doesn’t matter. Andrew doesn’t have the words to tell Neil that even if he had agreed, it may as well be defunct if the world is crumpling in on itself, the center of it a few hours in the darkness of Binghamton.

“I asked you to let me stand on my own two feet, Andrew,” Neil says. He sounds tired. He sounds like the loop is something far worse for him than it is Andrew, for Kevin. “Pl—Let me do that. None of this means anything if I don’t. None of this means anything if any of you get caught in this.” 

This time, Andrew watches furiously, resisting the crowd as the two security officers drag Neil away. His eyes, bright and startling and terribly blue in the chaos of the parking lot, stay fixed on Andrew.

The locker clangs. 

☀︎

“What’s even happening?”

They’re the only two at the back of the bus — the other Foxes have crowded around Abby at the front of the bus, where the overhead lights are brighter. If Andrew squints, he can see the way the light reflects off of the sweating ice packs strapped to Matt’s hands. Andrew stops squinting. 

“Why are you asking me?” Andrew drawls, a mockery of boredom. His brain is too alert to attempt proper sarcasm. He’s still looking for exit strategies. 

“Aren’t you supposed to be the one with all the answers about this?” Kevin snaps, voice hushed. He shuts down as Andrew leans in, expression flattening carefully, eyes wide and fixed on the flex of Andrew’s hands. The flash of frustration Andrew feels seeing the expression has become so common that it’s easier, now, to ignore. 

“He won't tell me anything,” Andrew snaps, the words scratching at his throat with how harshly he speaks them. “Maybe you should try asking him yourself, instead of running away to hide from him with the others. Are you scared of him? Poor little Day, spooked by the big bad Butcher’s son.”

“I’m not scared of him,” Kevin snaps, “and I’m not hiding.”

“Then why do you keep leaving? You disappear so quickly from the locker room, Kevin. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”

Kevin scoffs. “Do you even want me there, Andrew? I’m not blind either.”

For a split second, Andrew — viciously, truthfully — thinks no. He’s mine and mine only. You have no claim to him. Neil-and-Andrew is something that Andrew will never consider as a ‘this’, but there is still a level of possessiveness to it that Andrew wants to keep separate from Kevin. Andrew has had to fight and claw and bite and scratch for every scrap of everything he’s ever gotten. Kevin Day was given everything before it was ripped away, but Andrew never had anything to begin with. 

Andrew remembers, though, the flash of guilty hope on Neil’s face upon knowing Kevin was stuck in this with them. The soft disappointment he’s started wearing when Kevin leaves the locker room instead of staying. 

“Do what you want,” Andrew says, eventually. Outside the window, the streetlights are dim as the bus rattles its way up the road toward the motel. “You’re stuck in this the same as us, I don’t care what you do.”

Kevin doesn’t reply, and Andrew doesn’t waste energy looking at him to see what kind of expression he’s wearing. There’s only a single memory of his hands over a pulse point and the sharp realization that there are no witnesses but for the three of them in that locker room. 

The locker clangs, again. Kevin disappears again. Neil is there. Andrew stays. 

☀︎

Andrew is growing tired of this anticlimactic departure from the locker rooms. Neil had thrown up as soon as Matt and Kevin had left the locker rooms, thin bile disappearing down the shower drain and his entire body shaking. His only words for Andrew had been a ‘no’, and a shaky attempt at carrying through on the phone call, pushing Andrew’s hand away when he tried to snatch the phone from Neil. 

Now, in the lounge, Neil shuffles on his feet as Wymack talks, and Andrew watches the shape of the two security officers dressed in blue. Tall; imposing. Andrew knows the types of men they are. 

Some things are worth spilling blood for. His twin is one. Kevin is another. Neil has slowly edged his way into the list with his lies and quick words. 

Andrew raises a flat palm to his forearm, fingers playing with the split edge where the sheath is. The two security officers that keep taking Neil from him are standing at the door, eyes dark and pinned on Neil. Andrew tried standing in front of Neil to block them from seeing him, no matter that he’s shorter; tried having Neil be the last to leave the locker lounge; tried having him be the first. It never changes anything. The two men look hungry — not in the way that a stray dog does, but in the way a hawk does. Searching for fresh blood. Their eyes never stray. 

Neil’s gaze catches on the splay of Andrew’s fingers and his gaze hardens. 

“Andrew, no.”

It’s not the first time he’s told Andrew that, and Andrew guesses it won’t be the last, the way Neil is so defiant in the face of anyone taking action to stop him doing something stupid, over and over and over and over. 

“If you want me to keep trusting your word, you’d be better off letting me at them,” Andrew says coolly in German. Across from him, Kevin tilts his head a little — he may not understand the words, but he recognises the way Andrew says it. 

“You can’t fight everyone’s battles for them,” Neil says, almost spitting the words out in his frustration. Andrew has watched him snap like this through the veil of French, but in German it takes on a harsher tone, the way that Neil is aiming for a chink in Andrew’s armour. “Just because Kevin and Aaron let you, doesn’t mean that I will.”

Nicky and Aaron are on the other side of the room, too far out of earshot to understand what they’re saying, but Allison leans in at the way Neil snaps with a sharp look for Andrew.

“What the hell are you telling him, monster?”

“Mind your business,” Andrew snaps, and Allison turns away with a haughty sniff. When he turns back to Neil, he starts to lecture again, now free of eavesdroppers. 

“They are so much worse than you. If you think you’re dangerous then these two are absolute monsters,” Neil stresses, his words catching on the frantic way he says it. “They would kill you and anyone else out there they think is in their way.”

Andrew thinks briefly of his twin, of Nicky, Renee’s thin neck. The imposing bulk of the men in the security uniforms. It wouldn’t take much, he thinks. A knife or two to the throat. 

But Neil’s words are enough to still the immediate thoughts of sharp action. Neil was never afraid of Riko Moriyama, or Andrews knives, or even Andrew himself. He is afraid of these men, though.

“Don’t engage,” Neil hisses. 

Andrew’s hand drops away from his knives, but not without tugging one out of it’s sheath. The metal blade, warm from his skin, slides out of the armbands unnoticed before he presses it into the back of Neil’s hand. 

Neil looks down at it, and Andrew watches as he suppresses a full body flinch, eyes widening at the sight of the curved blade, the serrated edge at the hilt. He looks terrified. Andrew had known his quiet words, the way he had murmured I’ve never understood why he likes knives, but this is pure fear. Andrew knows the sight well, but to see it for a single knife is strange on Neil’s face. Neil has never been afraid of Andrews knives. He is now, though. 

“Andrew, no. ”

“Just because you refused our knives doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take them,” Andrew says, lowly, watching as Neil’s hand flinches away from it. 

“It’s not— I can’t.” Neil shoves his hands in the pockets of his shorts, eyes still fixed on the knife, and Andrew scoffs as the group starts to move. 

“Fine,” he snaps, shoving it back into his armbands as they pass through the doorway into the noise of the riot, the sheathed edge of the blade scraping uselessly against his skin. Lights flash around them and the carpark is full of night and spring-heat and Andrew tries to keep his eyes fixed on Neil and beside him Kevin watches Neil, too, until the darkness swallows them all and there’s nothing to be seen of him. 

☀︎

“Neil’s real name is Nathaniel Wesninski. We called him the Butcher’s son.”

☀︎

“Neil’s birth name is Nathaniel. His father is the butcher of Baltimore.”

☀︎

“Nathaniel. That’s—Neil’s real name. Nathaniel Wesninski. The Butcher’s son.”

☀︎

“Nathaniel.”

☀︎

“Nathaniel.”

☀︎

“Nathani—”

☀︎

These last loops, Neil has stumbled into the locker room with the echo of a locker and expressions Andrew has never known him to make. They’re too open, as if he’s given up on hiding all of his stupid little secrets. He looks around half-frantic and stares at Andrew like he’s seeing a stranger. He hasn’t been—Neil. Something’s off. 

“Who are you?”

Neil strains against the hand Andrew has pressed against the back of his neck, fingers digging into the curve of spine. His short curls tangle around the ragged edges of Andrew’s nails. His expression is hazy. Distant. Andrew knows the look of a man lost in his own mind, has seen it in the mirror since he was seventeen. Andrew shakes Neil a little, tilting his head up so that he can force Neil’s face up, needing eye contact as reassurance.

“Who are you.” It’s less of a question, now. A demand, almost. Andrew wants an answer, but he also wants confirmation. Of what, he’s not sure. That Neil is alive. That he’s listening. That he’s even fully here, in this moment. Neil makes a choked sound, before heaving in a sigh. 

“Nath -Neil.”

“You sure about that?”

Out in the corridor, Wymack yells for Allison, the words half memory, half deja-vu. Neil is still struggling against the grip, and Andrew lets go a brief second before adjusting the grip. Neil has not said ‘no’ — Andrew has no intention of letting him run off. He thought Neil had learned, but the boy in front of him might not even be Neil, right now. Andrew squeezes the back of Neil’s neck again, and he slumps forwards slightly. The haziness clears. Neil blinks open clear blue eyes, and his voice is stronger when he says: “Neil. I’m Neil.”

Andrew hates the way it sounds like Neil is trying to convince himself of it. The locker room echoes the words back to them — the fluorescents burn above them, the words bouncing off the thin plastic covers. 

“You’d better be,” he says, after the silence stretches on a beat too long and Neil is still staring at him. “I have no intention of getting stuck in something as ridiculous as this for someone who cannot even remember their own name.”

Neil makes a noise that sounds like a choked laugh, and Andrew crushes down the feelings that come with it. 

☀︎

Someone breaks away from the security officers and rushes the Foxes — Andrew pulls Kevin out of the way and loses his grip on Neil’s wrist—

☀︎

Another bottle — clear glass, this time, arcing through the striped disruption of headlights. Andrew raises a hand, instinctively, to block it—

☀︎

Andrew asks Neil “yes or no?” and it’s a yes, it’s always a yes, and his hand is wrapped around Neil’s wrist like some kind of desperate shackle, and the crowd is loud and rioting and there’s the flash of blue from the security officer in front of them and Kevin yelps behind him and Andrew turns and—

☀︎

Andrew refuses to let go of Neil but he still gets ripped away and Andrew has a broken arm and sticky blood on his temples. He can shake off the pain but not the weight of Kevin’s gaze. For a moment he thinks that’s it, and he laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs and laughs.

At some point Abby gives him something to make him calm down. The curse of insanity — no expression of unwanted emotion warrants anything other than sedation.

☀︎

Andrew knows the general outline of despair. The court mandated drugs they had placed him on at seventeen, which the Foxes call antipsychotics and Bee calls experimental antidepressants, had taught him the feeling, or lack of it. They’d made it impossible for him to feel anything other than a kind of crazed, artificial joy, and complete apathy. He is still relearning the shape and innards of emotions. Contentment is out of reach but pain, concern, guilt — Andrew is beginning to remember them more and more. Something softer, too, in those minutes in the locker room. He can’t quite recall the name, for all his memory. 

Right now, Neil looks like how Andrew had felt all those years under the blue haze of the drugs. Like the shape of him is there, but the rest has been hollowed out to make space for some immense exhaustion. Forming him into a regular little tragic hero. Andrew has never quite known what to do with hopeless cases. Kevin was one matter. Neil is another. 

Andrew asks. Neil says yes. 

He snarls, grabs the back of Neil’s hair to drag his mouth down. The kiss says I hate you for doing this alone. It says why won’t you let me help you? Neil responds the only way he can. He pulls back. It tastes like him saying there’s nothing you can do. It tastes like I want you to stop trying.

Neil is a martyr in more ways than one. Even if he were dying, he would not ask for comfort. 

He’s stopped disappearing to the showers now, at least. Neil just sits down on the bench until Matt has left and Kevin has followed with a lingering glance at the way Neil favors his weight to one side. Andrew is beside him, too, now. Just turns from the locker right toward him, like some kind of homing signal. At least he’s there. At least he can offer touch when his brain is capable of it, so that he can continue trying for information. It never works, but Neil looks less—desperate, by the time they leave the locker room together. Even when the phone call ends and Neil’s eyes flit up to Andrews, that impossible blue, he looks more settled, before he rises to leave and face whatever this is again and again and again. 

Out in the lounge, the moment of brief celebration before the riot floods over them again, Andrew watches as Kevin sticks as close to Neil’s side as he can. Barely an inch between them, Kevin’s eyes pinned carefully on Neil, the tuft of hair at the crown of his head, the sharp slash of twin ink on Neil’s cheek. 

Ravens don’t know how to be alone. Andrew knows. He’d witnessed it firsthand. Kevin knew not to touch, but it was a barely done thing. He would press himself so close to Andrew someone couldn’t have cut the space between them with a knife without damaging one of them. Now there’s Neil. Kevin has found another stray to add to his nest — he’s better at distance now, but his eyes still follow Neil as they leave the lounge room and into the hallway. 

“Andrew,” Neil says, quietly, even as Kevin tucks closer to the two of them as the noise crests and swells outside. “I’m sorry.”

It’s the last thing Andrew hears before the car park erupts with screams and Neil is wrenched from his grasp. He can still taste the bitterness of Neil’s shampoo on his lips when he bites them hard enough to draw blood. It drips down his chin, coats his teeth. Kevin yelps and a bottle flies and Andrew’s torturous mind starts to deliberate. 

☀︎

“Can you even protect yourself?” Andrew jeers across the room. This loop they ended back up in the motel, with Andrew’s face purpling from a stray elbow of the crowd and Kevin’s hands hovering carefully above the bruise. Closeness, but not contact. 

“I never needed to,” Kevin says, quietly. There’s frustration in the tone — Andrew wants to prod at it, to see what would come of it. Where’s the juncture in his skin that will make him straighten his spine? Where’s the point that Kevin will break enough to finally stop hiding? “I have you.”

“You will not always,” Andrew says, the words a lie in his mouth, dripping down to form clay at his feet. “You are aware of our deal, Kevin. Once you repay your half, I no longer need to protect you.”

“You say that like our deal is still on.”

“Is it not?”

Andrew is aware of what he has done, but to hear Kevin say out loud that he believes their deal is off — there’s something there that aches. Andrew doesn’t believe in pity or regret, but the way that Kevin flinches away from him impacts Andrew in a way that even he has no words for. For Kevin, pain is something formal. Andrew has demanded propriety between them with his hands and the crushing pressure of his thumbs to Kevin’s windpipe.

He doesn't know how to word that even if Kevin could have never given him something to live for, he still would have protected him until his last breath. He doesn’t know how to word that Kevin has already fulfilled his half of their deal. He will never word it in a way that Kevin will understand, but maybe upholding his half of this is enough. 

“I thought of all people, you would be the last one to break your promises,” Kevin says, finally raising his gaze from his hands. The blue light of the bedside table lamp spills pale and violent over his face, twisting his features into something far more intense than they would have appeared in daylight. “You have no right to lecture me about protecting myself when you couldn’t even keep a promise to do the same.”

“Says the man convinced that Exy will solve all of my problems,” Andrew laughs shallowly, an attempt to steer Kevin away from this line of attack. His eyes are narrow, slitted in the dim light of the hotel room, but his fingers betray his anxiety, fiddling with the foundation runners of Neil’s racquet. He hasn’t let go of it for a single loop. The sole connection he has to Neil when he’s gone.

“If the roles were reversed, would you have done the same to Neil?’ Kevin asks, and Andrew barely refrains from flinching. 

For all his memory, Andrew forgets sometimes, that Kevin was raised by ravens. Carrion birds. He is almost brutal in his elegance. Kevin is all long lines and sharp edges, tall and imposing to those who do not know what endless darkness does to a man. 

“Are you sure you want the answer to that, Kevin?” Andrew asks, coolly, and regrets it in the same breath. 

Across from him, Kevin’s eyes widen, hurt and shock in one, and Andrew has to shut his own a moment so he doesn’t see it. 

Andrew wonders if he’s been protecting Kevin wrong, at times. Ignore the hands reaching for his throat that first loop, the way Kevin flinches away from him, but— the way Kevin is too quiet sometimes and all Andrew can do is tease. The way that Kevin talks about the Nest in sharp words but with a hollow tone and Andrew still calls him coward. It’s a fact, of course — Kevin is too scared of the things that haunt him to do anything about it. He has been hiding behind other people his whole life. 

But still. Kevin curls away from Andrew minutely, tucking his legs up in front of him on the bed like a shield and lowers his eyes, the light pouring away from his face and into his lap. Andrew sometimes wonders, too, if Kevin would have been better off with Renee taking him on—no. Renee is kinder than Andrew, sure, but she is too gentle. Kevin would have stayed adrift. Comfortable, but he would never have learned to be Kevin Day again. He would have stayed adrift in a lifeboat, first class with people who do not negate your ship sinking, but do not try and push you to swim to shore. 

Andrew watches the shape of Kevin disappear into itself, tucked up on the embroidered bed runner. What did it take Kevin to denounce their deal? To attack, almost, Andrew. Andrew can guess what talking back entails in the Nest. Ungratefulness like this is something Kevin probably expects a knife to accompany. Even so. Evermore is somewhere Andrew will not let Kevin back to, if his life depended on it. He can reward his show of spine without violence. 

“Kevin,” Andrew says, and watches as Kevin’s eyes flick up, impossibly green in the lamplight. “Just because you always assume the worst doesn’t mean it’s the truth.”

☀︎

At times, Neil squints out at the rest of the locker room, as if hiding from the fluorescents. He flinches, then starts blinking through slitted eyes, his eyelashes dark and caught together. It looks ridiculous, the way he’s trying to dull the sight of the artificial lights — the white glow they cast over everything, over Neil, turning his already pale skin into a reflective strip. He flinches this time too, when Andrew turns and Kevin leaves and Matt leaves — flinches, and then shakes himself out of it, but he’s already shaking enough that it’s too obvious. Andrew takes a step toward him, enough for Neil to look up and meet his eyes, before Andrew turns away towards the doorway of the locker rooms. 

“Andrew?” Neil’s voice sounds breakable — hollow in the way a lightbulb is, the filament dying quicker the further away Andrew walks from him. It’s still strange to hear Neil’s voice like that — Andrew knows him for his silvertongue, quick witted words that still his hands long enough to forget about his knives. Not the desperate plea for Andrew’s return.

The light switch in the locker rooms is hidden between two rows of lockers, a double switch for both the fluorescents overhead and the bulbs along the walls. Andrew swipes a hand over them to turn them off, plunging the locker room into a dull, velvety darkness. 

“Andrew, what—”

Andrew picks his way around the benches toward Neil in the dark, taking careful steps back to him. When he reaches where Neil’s dim shape is sitting in the blackness of the room, he settles back down next to him on the floor. Neil’s barely visible, lit only by the light from the hallway on the other side of the locker room, but there is no mistaking the way he holds himself, the shape of his jawline in the half-darkness. His eyes narrow in searching confusion, pupils blown wide in the darkness, black swallowing the arctic blue of them.

Andrew pulls out his lighter and flicks a thumb over the wheel to ignite it. 

Neil’s pupils dilate in the sudden thwoom of gas flame, his face illuminated by the flickering light of it. The heat of it rolls over Andrew’s fingers, his habitual holding of it near the wheel, but it’s a known kind of pain now. Something barely worth thinking about when the two of them are sitting together on the floor of the locker room in the darkness, lit only by the small flame. Neil’s eyes are impossibly blue in the firelight — confusion flickers over his face once, twice, before settling, and he relaxes minutely against the bench behind him.

Andrew has never expected to be allowed this with another person, no matter who they were to him — to sit, quietly, in darkness, and watch the way their face changes in the light. It figures that it’s Neil who’s the one to break the cycle, as much as it terrifies Andrew and he abhors it in one same breath. Neil, who will spit words in the face of Riko Moriyama and yet will not let Andrew help him in whatever this is. This being what Andrew has decided is a time loop: this being whatever they have between them, no matter that Andrew will never say that out loud: this being the fractured ground between the two of them and Kevin. For the time being he can just look, though, at Neil — his pale flush, his shaking hands, the copper-gold-red of his hair. Neil came to Palmetto all brunette and bad contacts and too raw at the edges to be anything but a Fox. Here he is now — vibrant in coloring like a warning of toxins, a lure and poison in one. Too close to death for comfort. For all they’re trapped in the locker room, Neil is a ticking clock, an hourglass made boy. Neil is gone, and then he is back, and then he is gone again.

Andrew has no idea what he’s doing here. All he can do is keep the lighter switched on in place of the artificial lighting that has Neil twitchy and terrified, the circle of gas flame a safe place for now.

“Why are you doing this?” Neil asks, voice small and breaking the silence. They have a few minutes before his phone destroys the safe haven of the locker room, but for now his voice is enough to shatter it. Andrew hates how confused Neil sounds about it — as if he has never been afforded any kind of gentleness that wasn’t just an absence of violence. He probably hasn’t. Andrew knows the look. Even so, it’s infuriating. 

“Why don’t you just let this be? Just let me go, Andrew,” Neil stresses, and Andrew suppresses a growl. 

“I don’t trust you to come back to me—to us, in one piece,” Andrew says, lowly, and Neil shudders, body taught as a wound spring, eyes closed as tight as he can, the thin skin of his eyelids pale in the firelight.

“I thought I asked you to let me stand on my own feet, Andrew.”

“I hate martyrs,” Andrew snaps, frustrated. Neil refuses help at every turn, unable to see the way that Andrew is trying to untangle himself from anger long enough to say don’t you see? I want you to stay. Stop taking what I’ve given you of my insides with you when you leave. 

“Hypocrite,” Neil throws back, and then: “so you hate me? If you hated me you would let me go.”

“You will not be a martyr,” Andrew says, harshly, “as long as I have anything to do with this.”

“I don’t want you to have anything to do with this.”

“You have no choice,” Andrew says, and he tries to make it sound like a finality. Neil has never been good at accepting those, though. Even here, the end is not the end. “Yes or no?” Neil looks away from Andrew’s eyes when he says it, gaze shifting to fix on where Andrew’s thumb is still pressed to the lever of the cigarette lighter. Swallows once.

“Yes.” 

Andrew grips Neil’s chin with one hand, the other bracing himself on the bench. The lacquered wood is sticky under his hands but he pays more attention to the way Neil barely reacts to the touch. He is too trusting of Andrew — it should scare him, to be held like this, but it doesn’t. 

“You are a Fox,” Andrew says, pushing as much conviction into his voice as possible. “You are a problem, and a menace, and you are infuriating. But,” Andrew says, tilting Neil’s face up, “you aren’t going anywhere.”

Neil sighs quietly instead of answering, looking to where his phone is lighting up for an incoming call. The screen of the phone is bright, the blue light harsh in the soft darkness of the room, competing against the lighter. 

Across the room, Kevin walks through the door.

He’s almost tentative about it, footsteps so small and hesitant that they’re almost drowned out by the ringing of Neil’s phone. Neil hasn’t picked it up yet — too stricken by the appearance of Kevin to press answer. 

Kevin steps into the lighter glow, a circle of warm light around the three of them. 

He seems out of place, almost. The locker room has been Andrew and Neil’s this whole time — Kevin has met them afterwards in the lounge and watched from beside Andrew as Neil gets taken away. It feels unbalanced, but in the small glow of firelight Kevin settles slightly. Something swells in Andrew’s throat, half-anger-half-hesitancy, but he told Kevin to be here. He cannot fault him for that. 

Neil—Neil looks relieved. His head is tilted up to look at where Kevin’s still standing above the two of them, expression wide and open and relaxed. Andrew will never understand what the two of them are, and it scares him, almost. This is mine, he thinks, watching Neil reach for Kevin, but for a moment he’s not sure who he’s talking about.

Andrew nudges Neil’s hand, knocking the hollow plastic of the phone against his knuckles, and Neil stirs like he’d forgotten where they were. He answers, like always, but his eyes stay fixed on Kevin — Andrew stays looking at Neil’s looking. 

The call goes like it always does — Neil runs through it now like a script. Andrew wonders if ‘Lola’ is confused by the lack of fear or urgency. There’s no panic to Neil’s voice now, but it’s taken up a home in Kevin’s eyes. He’s crouched down — almost shoulder to shoulder with Neil, watching him and the phone in equal measure, like the fruit sticker stuck to the base of the phone will answer everything for him. His eyes roam over Neil in that way he does before every practice. Scanning him for injury, for weakness, for pain. Seeing where the chinks in his armour are, where Kevin needs to help him protect those areas better, learn how to take a bruise. Kevin, Andrew knows, lives his life around the outline of pain. He watches the people around him for it, too. There is nothing that can be done for a torn ligament, but the strain can be iced before the injury occurs. There is no end to this until Neil tells them what they need to know, but they can be there, waiting. 

Neil ends the call with a snap of the phone, expression dull and exhausted. He looks shattered, like a bulb broken on the ground and left there to be ground into sand. He leans towards Kevin, though, humming quietly when Kevin raises a hand to press into the back of Neil’s hand, scar tissue overlapping with Neil’s blemish free skin. Andrew watches it happen, keeps his hands pressed under his thighs, bites down on the snapping words he wants to give to Kevin for not being here before, but he is. Kevin is here, and Andrew is here, and Neil is here when he is not Nathaniel. It’s what Andrew asked for. It’s what he has to accept, now. 

“We can’t just stay in here?” Kevin asks, throwing a glance at the door. 

“No,” Neil says quietly, phone quiescent and small in his cupped hands. “It’ll just be worse if I hide.”

Kevin looks confused, almost. As if surprised that hiding isn’t an option for Neil — as if surprised he isn’t able to run from this. “Are you sure?”

“Positive,” Neil sighs, and starts to get to his feet, even as Kevin frowns at the movement, the proof that Neil is going to leave again and accept his fate of this. Whatever the hell this is. Andrew watches as Kevin almost opens his mouth to speak again, but thinks better of it, shutting it again and turning to Andrew with some kind of plea in his eyes. 

Andrew calls him coward and Neil follows his lead, but at times like these, Andrew thinks that maybe Kevin is just used to surviving differently. 

“Let’s go, Day,” Andrew says, and Kevin looks away to where Neil is already leaving the locker room. The two of them watch him weave through the darkness of the locker room towards the door  — Andrew’s lighter is still lit, but Neil travels further from it as he moves away from them, reaching the pale fluorescent light of the hallway. His hair glows redder when he reaches the doorway, sharper in a way that seems less of him. Too bright. Danger, Andrew has always learned, comes in blue and red lights. Neil, when he turns, looks like a police siren in the fluorescents.

“What do we do?” Kevin asks, helplessly, and Andrew just lets the lighter flick off, leaving them in a sudden, and necessary, darkness. 

☀︎

“Of course you know how to hotwire a car,” Kevin sighs over the clamor of the riot, before climbing carefully into the passenger seat. 

☀︎

The next loop resets the second the stolen car rattles to life. The locker clangs and Kevin stumbles toward Neil, whose eyes are unfocused. His hands are hovering over his temple. 

Andrew, not for the first time and not for the last, wonders what’s happening to Neil. He has his suspicions, but they make him too nauseous to follow the thread of thought any further than its intrusion. Across from him, Neil heaves in a breath and Kevin hovers his hands over Neil’s shoulders, before he looks over to Andrew and removes them altogether. He tucks them under his knees instead, and leans in close to Neil, who’s breath is quickening. Andrew strides over — forces Neil’s chin up with a hand, gets a ‘yes’ hissed through clenched teeth and places a thumb to his pulse point. 

“Breathe, Josten,” Andrew says, tapping along with the elevated heart rate at Neil’s throat. When he ignores Andrew in favor of trying to panic hard enough to make himself sick, Andrew yanks at the hair at the nape of his neck, and Neil’s brief gasp of pain is enough to break the repetition of the shallow hyperventilations. Kevin, too, lets out a shallow sigh beside him.

Matt wasn’t here, when the loop reset this time, already gone. Andrew isn’t sure if Kevin and Neil realize, or notice, but Andrew does. He has been realizing for every loop. 

No two loops are the same. Some things remain, of course — Neil’s disappearance is a constant, as is the riot, and the sound of Nicky calling his name, and the reset, just before dawn. The locker, and the chatter, and Neil, and Kevin. But certain things shift, either gradually or sudden. Some loops are short. Some almost make it to morning. Some, Nicky keeps talking and makes a bad joke, in other’s he’s silent. Andrew has never been a believer in fate, but the way the loops change is half-baffling, half-infuriating. 

Andrew watches Neil breathe slower, steadier, now — watches Kevin rub circles into the juncture of Neil’s wrist and palm, head dipped so that he can see Neil’s eyes where they’re hidden under his dry fringe.

He wonders if everything they do is enough to shift it — if simply lingering a second longer in the locker room is enough to tilt their understanding of the loop on its axis. Something small: a breath held, a step taken too far to the left, a sentence worded differently or left unsaid. 

Something big: holding his hands back from Kevin’s neck. 

☀︎

The loop never quite makes it to sunrise. Either it is still dark when it resets, or it is just before the sky starts to burn orange. 

☀︎

Neil sees them following after him into the riot eventually. Even hauled over the shoulders of the security officers, he manages to meet Andrew’s eyes as Kevin piles into the passenger seat, a split second of absolute chance contact. That impossible blue, fixed on the spark in Andrew’s hands as the engine rattles to life. Andrew watches the dark swallow him. He climbs into the driver seat anyway and speeds out of the parking lot. It doesn’t make a difference. It doesn—

☀︎

Neil stumbles back into the locker room with spitting anger and the shock of someone terrified of what’s happened, despite it having already passed. Matt’s gone, by the time Neil regains his sense of self — of Neil — enough to storm toward Andrew and Kevin, eyes blazing and furious. 

“Andrew, what did I ask? ” he half pleads, before turning on Kevin. “And you too?”

“You can’t really expect us to just stay here, can you? I knew you were foolish, but I didn’t think you were stupid,” Andrew says, dryly, watching as Neil’s expression stays furious even as his body shakes. 

“I can, because I asked,” Neil half-shouts, desperation bleeding into the sound of his voice like ink in water. “Do I need to make some kind of deal so you won’t follow? Do I have to beg? What , Andrew? What do you want, for me to be able to do this by myself?”

“Nothing,” Andrew says, leaning forward. Neil’s eyes flash when they flicker to him. “Telling us what’s going on would be appreciated, but you got us in this mess. If you can’t fix it yourself, then of course Day and I are going to have to do something.”

“I don’t want you involved in this,” and Neil’s voice is rising, petulant and furious and loud enough that Andrew wonders if the rest of the Foxes can hear the clipped shout, if one of them is going to come through the doorway in a moment to see what’s happening. “I’ve asked—”

“You’ve asked, but you haven’t told us anything,” Kevin says, cutting in finally, that tone of voice he used all the time in training last year. His eyes are still unfocused, but he fixes his gaze on Neil as well as he can. “We can’t let you do this if we know your father has someth—”

“Because I’m dying,” Neil half-shouts, before his mouth snaps audibly shut, teeth clacking, the grating noise of bone-on-bone. Kevin gags, horrified, but he still looks like he had known. Andrew thinks back to the way Kevin had spoken of Neil’s father on the bus, the emphasis afforded to the word ‘butcher’. The way he had told Andrew quietly, one loop, that the first time this had all happened, he’d hoped the morgue had said yes. That death would be kinder to Neil than his family. 

He still looks shocked. Green around the edges, like he’s about to be sick, but Andrew watches out the corner of his eye as Kevin swallows and leans back toward Neil. Neil, who looks resigned, now, at the spilling of his truth. He leans back against one of the lockers, the metal clanking dully where he presses his back into it, posture looking less like a murder victim and more like the teenage boy he should be. 

“They’re here to kill me,” Neil says eventually, frustrated. “That’s all they’ve ever been here for. I don’t have the time right now to tell you the whole truth, but believe me when I tell you that I don’t want them to know you.”

Andrew isn’t quite sure how he got here, trying to talk Neil out of his martyr bullshit, how he got so goddamn tied up in all of this. He’d told Renee about—Neil, all his lies and facades, just after he’d returned from Easthaven, skin still crawling from the weeks spent there. 

“It’s like getting tangled up in a damn knot.”

“Untie yourself, then,” she’d said, before kicking him in the ribs. Andrew had swallowed down a wheeze, and stepped back on the mats for a moment of breath. “You made the deal, didn’t you? Just let it go. I told you I’d take him.”

“It’s not that easy,” Andrew had snarled, twisting away as she’d advanced on him, her brow sheened with moisture. At this time of evening, the daylight outside the windows isn’t enough, so the fluorescents of the gym glisten off the sweat, a halo for a girl like Renee. I told you I’d take him. Just like Renee had offered to take Kevin when he’d stumbled onto their bus two years ago, bleeding and broken and shedding dark feathers everywhere. Joan of Exy, patron saint of the Palmetto Foxes. Andrew has never been comfortable when confronted with religion. Renee makes him squirm, but he is here with her because of Natalie. He’d run his tongue over his bottom lip and tasted the blood from when he’d forgotten about the punch she’d landed. “It—It’s the kind that just gets tighter. The more you fucking pull at it.”

“Andrew,” Renee had said, very carefully. “If you’re just getting more stuck, try pulling a different way.”

“They don’t need to know us,” Andrew says, now, back in the repeating locker room. “You just need to let us watch your back.”

“I can’t,” Neil says, bitter, desperate. “I can’t let you do this to yourselves for me.”

“Fine,” Andrew spits, anger spiraling from the brick wall Neil’s made himself into, the way Kevin’s still trying to reach out to him, his stupid, searching hands. Andrew’s ball up into fists at his side, before he turns on a heel with Neil's anger burned into the shape of him at the center of Andrew’s chest. 

“If you understand that” he hears Kevin say, quietly, as they leave the locker room to a call from Nicky. “you should know why we can’t, either.”

☀︎

“Where are you going?”

Kevin freezes like an animal caught in headlights in the doors to the motel carpark, even when Andrew keeps trying to push him out of them. The automatic sensor blinks green above them, and the doors flicker between opening and closing, unsure if Kevin is staying inside or leaving. They hadn’t made it out of Wymacks' sight this time — leaving from the motel is their best bet. 

“You think this is any of your business?” 

Aaron fixes Andrew with a look, lips tilted in petulance. Aaron isn’t sulky, exactly, he’s too tense for that, cut his milk teeth on annoyance and just kept on biting.

“Whatever. It’s your funeral if Wymack gets mad,” he eventually says. He pauses, for a moment, a mirror image of Andrew caught in stark, flashing lights. There’s no blood on his temple now, but Andrew still isn’t sure how to reconcile the image of his twin with what the two of them are . Leaving him here with the others, like this, technically violates their deal. Most of what they are, now, does anyway. Andrew could care less in this moment.

“Don’t get killed out there,” Aaron says, finally. “No one plans memorials for people like us.”

“Speak for yourself. Day over here’ll have a wake for the ages,” Andrew says, dryly, before he turns away and ducks into the early morning of spring. Kevin follows. Aaron stays. 

☀︎

Andrew pulls out of the stadium car park with a squeal, eyes fixed on the third exit where he’s watched Neil leave, over and over. Kevin pulls his legs up to his chest in the passenger seat of the car, heels digging into the fraying, dusty upholstery and Andrew spares a glance for him through the flashing lights of cars and police and the stadium lights. He’s chewing on the skin of his bottom lip, a nasty habit Andrew thankfully never adopted — his left hand is held close to his chest, the scars silvery in the bright lights. 

“Andrew?”

“What.”

Kevin hums. “Speed up.”

The speed limit through Binghamton is 45. Andrew brings them up to 80. 

☀︎

Andrew pulls out of the stadium car park with a squeal, eyes fixed on the third exit. His cheek throbs with a bruise that he can’t see but has Kevin’s gaze fixed anxiously on it, his eyes flickering between the injury and Andrew’s eyes — searching, uselessly, for anything on Andrew’s face that would give him something to say. Andrew ignores him, ignores the honking as he cuts across two lanes of traffic, and ignores the chanting in the back of his head of Abram. Neil. Abram. Andrew focuses on the anger, instead. That, of all the things, is at least productive. 

☀︎

Andrew pulls out of the stadium car park with a squeal and Kevin’s heaving breaths in the seat next to him. 

“If you keep breathing like that you’re going to pass out, Kevin.”

“Not trying to,” Kevin says through gritted teeth, heaving in shallow breaths as if he’s only been allowed a single layer of oxygen to feed from. As if what everyone else is granted has never been within his own reach. 

“Then breathe,” Andrew says, and flicks on his hazards. 

☀︎

Andrew pulls out of the stadium car park with a squeal—

☀︎

The highway from Binghamton to Baltimore cuts through urban areas, but there’s stretches, too, of absolute nothingness. Just the road and the car and lines of pine trees bordering the road. In the late hours of the night, there’s no one else on the road, so it’s them and the car and the pines and darkness the whole way there. Sometimes Kevin tries to talk — mindless stretches of what they’re stuck in, an attempt with the map in the side pocket of the door to find a quicker way to Baltimore. Andrew’s learned to tune out most of what Kevin says — Exy is not something Andrew cares to remember details of. The sound of his voice in the damp spring-darkness of the car is a welcome distraction, though. 

☀︎

“Andrew?”

“What, Kevin.”

“Do you think Neil—”

“Don’t.”

“...Okay. Sorry.”

☀︎

Kevin starts sitting in silence. Staring, quietly, out the window, at the passing landscape of evergreens. 

☀︎

They don’t see Neil on the road. Andrew wonders if maybe the loop is aligned just enough for a brief moment of contact in the locker room and nothing more. Now it’s just him and Kevin on a late-night highway, and Neil every time the locker clangs.

☀︎

The thing is that making it to Baltimore is the easy part. 

“What now?” Andrew says, swerving around a flatbed truck that’s going the speed limit into the city. Baltimore is a suburban plain, covered in green and more green, stretches of brick and spring foliage. In the darkness, it takes on an eerie stillness, the kind of quiet that comes before a storm, before the flash of a knife, before the sound of footsteps outside your childhood bedroom. Andrew’s hands grip the wheel tighter, no matter that they’re already as tensed as he can make them, and pulls off the highway into the strip of town where the streetlights illuminate the new growth, so bright in color that it’s jarring.

“I don’t know,” Kevin says, gesturing wildly in the direction of destruction. “All I know is that his father is from Baltimore — that’s where Neil grew up. I don’t know the fucking address.” His eyes are darting between the road and the buildings, as if expecting to see Neil running down the street like he does when he’s training along Perimeter road. 

“Fucking hell, Kevin,” Andrew snarls, fingers glowing white in the darkness of the car with how tight he’s gripping the steering wheel. Under his palms, the rubber is dry and cracked presumably from summers past, and he feels it flake off, black, onto his skin. 

“I don’t know,” Kevin repeats helplessly, and Andrew presses his foot down on the gas as hard as possible.

Baltimore is a big place—a whole city. Neil could be anywhere. The locker clangs. 

☀︎

Andrew cups the back of Neil’s head in his hand, his palm cradled against the base of his skull, the unfamiliar weight of it. The head is the heaviest part of the human body — once the head falls back, the rest of the body follows. It’s just gravity. It’s just that he’s holding Neil up in more ways than one.

Neil sighs shakily, the whine of half swallowed tears audible in the exhale, and lets Andrew press their foreheads together. He keeps his hands to his side until Andrew gives him a yes, and then they grip each other tight enough to form bruises that won’t stay. Under Andrew’s hands, Neil shakes quietly, the kind of trembling that comes from a comedown, comes from violence, comes from pain. Something that exhausts every ounce of hope and energy from the body. Andrew tugs at Neil’s hands — hopes its enough, for all he knows it isn’t. Andrew cannot give more than this — it’s just the way he is. Andrew has never been a kind person and he never will be. Bee is always asking him to be kinder to himself, but Andrew doesn’t like the way it disarms his teeth. If he can’t feel pain, he won’t know when he’s hurt. And all that blood has to go somewhere. 

Kevin is carefully distant, these moments in the locker room, perched on the edge of a bench across from them — he averts his eyes when he sees Andrew watching him, but then his gaze is pinned back on the both of them, watching every movement as if expecting them to disappear at any moment. Andrew knows the feeling — he knows it for Neil. He has known it, too, for Kevin. There is only one thing keeping Kevin from running back to the Ravens, and Andrew stares at it in the mirror every morning. There might be two things, now, though. Andrew’s traitorous mind offers up reasoning and abandons it all in one, even as Neil reaches out carefully to Kevin from where he’s sat beside Andrew. It’s not the first time. It will never be the last. 

He’s one of us, Neil murmurs, one loop, and so Andrew watches Kevin relax into the reaching hand. 

Kevin, at least, isn’t afraid to touch. He’s known violence as well as they have, but Kevin Day also had a mother who knew what it was to offer affection. She may have given him over to a monster, but Kevin knows what it is to touch gently, to use your hands in a way removed from the violence of Exy. His habits still spill over — every movement is designed to foster a goal. One, reach out to Neil’s hand. Two, step closer. Three, let Neil burrow into him in a way Andrew can never allow. Andrew watches Kevin press fingers gently into the crown of Nei’s head, even as his hand is still caught in the front of Andrew’s shirt. 

He’s a part of this too, Andrew, Neil had said. He’s always been a part of this in one way or another.

☀︎

Neil takes the offered knife. That loop ends the moment they hit the highway. 

☀︎

The next loop, Neil turns away from the blade in Andrew’s upright palm without even addressing it. 

☀︎

Andrew and Kevin hit a fox somewhere on the highway. 

When Andrew finally climbs out of the car with a muffled swear and a sharp, frustrated hit to the clock, Kevin is crouched in the middle of the empty road in the headlights of the car they’ve stolen. The lights act like a spotlight, illuminating the red smeared on Kevin’s fingertips where he’d reached out to touch the animal. It’s already too late for the thing — it’s mewling in pain, fur matted with red, rust orange marred by the tar-blackness of split organs. Andrew knows what half-dead things look like, and one of them pulls his hand away from the animal to tuck it close to his chest. 

“Andrew—”

“Don’t,” Andrew says. He doesn’t even really know what Kevin was going to say, but it doesn’t matter, not when they’re standing on an empty highway with a stolen car and too far away from Neil to reach him in this loop. It was a mistake, this one — a split second of bad timing that had Kevin hauling Andrew out of a group of angry supporters. It surprises him, at times, that Kevin can stand his own when it’s not against the people he was born fearing. Andrew wonders, sometimes, what Kayleigh Day would think of her son and where he chooses to use his strength. 

Kevin swallows, rocking back on his heels to stare at the fox. Andrew follows his gaze, revels in the floodlit horror. It’s better than drug-induced apathy, even if the blood-matted fur brings a strange kind of grief to his throat. Its eyes are glazed over, the darkness of it’s eyes glossy with blood and tears and the reflecting light of the headlights. There’s bits of tar-coated gravel stuck to its fur where it would have been caught on the worn, ragged road when Andrew hit it. It whines quietly, pants a few times, and Kevin sniffs, his expression caught too clearly in the headlights. 

Andrew settles back against the bonnet, feet kicked out to where Kevin is still crouched, and watches the fox die. Pushes away what his mind offers of Neil and attempts for careful blankness while he stares at the blood on Kevin’s hands.

Later, Kevin ends up in pained, exhausted sleep in the passenger seat while Andrew leans against the driver's side of the bonnet, a cigarette lit in his hands and pluming smoke spiralling above him. Behind the trees, the sun is rising thin and pale, the dark stain in the middle of the road becoming duller as the sky lightens. 

Kevin’s tucked into Andrew’s jumper — his own is buried in the trees on the side of the road, the fox wrapped inside the jersey fleece of his Palmetto hoodie. It’s two sizes too small and short around Kevin’s wrists, revealing the trail of freckles on brown skin that he gains in summer and then spends all winter drawing between with a pen. On the other wrist, the one held close to his chest as he sleeps, the too-short cuff tugs up to reveal pale scars over the wrist. 

Kevin looks younger, when he’s sleeping. Andrew blows a smooth stream of smoke into the dim light of early morning, eyes lazily fixed on where Kevin is slumped, listlessly, in the passenger seat. He looks younger than his age in general — sharp face and soft eyes and a slanted brow peg him still as a teenager, for all that he’s twenty-one. He holds himself as smaller than he is, too. Folded into the seat, long legs bent up to his chest where it rises and falls, Andrew remembers why people call him pretty. In sleep, with his furrowed brow and sleep-slack mouth, eyelashes soot stained and dark against his cheek, Andrew can almost forget the snapped rope between them, the harsh touch of others. 

Andrew is not blind. Kevin had shown up on the Foxes bus at midnight with a shattered hand and a face too distinctive to be ignored. Tall, strong build, the kind of athleticism that the Nest demands and then demands even further. Royal looking — hollow, though. None of the haughtiness that Kevin has now. He was empty, back then — a cast over his wrist like a shackle, or a weight, or a death warrant. Kevin wasn’t very alive, then. 

They took him to Edens, at one point, once he was able to venture out of his room without looking like he was expecting to be jumped at any moment. Andrew had promised protection but not babysitting, and Kevin had drowned himself in the fruity drinks that Nicky had bought, and then shot after shot of vodka. There had been a moment, then, in the golden lights of the bar when Kevin had been laughing with his head tipped back and the neon pouring down his throat. Andrew had shaken it off, blamed it on the crackers and his medication, only for it to dig its way inside of him when Kevin had leaned forward in the depths of a breakdown in the bathrooms, muffled bass through the sticky, graffitied walls. Andrew had made a mistake that night that he has spent the last year trying to swallow back beneath a haze of apathy. There has never been anything more humiliating to Andrew than his own desires.

It should be easier to swallow down, now that Kevin flinches away from him. Now that he has Neil. 

These things have never been easy for people like Andrew. It is too hard to forget. 

They’re just pulled over on the side of the highway, now. Just waiting for that moment before sunrise when the silence and the careful call of the birds in the forest gives way to the metallic chime of the locker. Like some kind of awful clock alarm. Here you go: eyes wide open at 6:18am, and then waking up at ten at night, ready for someone to take what is yours straight from your hands.  

Andrew leans down slightly to check inside the car again, where Kevin is folded into the seat, hair mussed, before straightening up to lean back against the hood of the car. He takes another drag of his cigarette and blows a thin stream of smoke into the hazy morning air that comes with spring. Grey, and dim, and the light rising over the treetops, and Kevin breathing quietly inside of the car. Birdsong. Andrew’s heartbeat. The clang of the locker. Neil.

☀︎

The next loop, they hit a deer. Andrew keeps driving.

☀︎

They never see the dusk, the night having already taken over by the time they leave the locker rooms, but Andrew feels it all the same, the blue pressure of spring sunset, the way it starts to pull Neil away from him even before the loop has begun. A knotted string at his spine, something insistent and aching every time Neil takes another step away from him. Oh , he thinks, briefly, one loop. This is how it’s going to feel every time he goes away, huh. It is a sentiment he will never say out loud, because Andrew Minyard has an image to protect and a body too shattered to withstand any more weakness, but he can at least yank at Neil’s sleeve insistently. 

It doesn’t make any kind of difference, though. The moment the sun is gone, Neil is too. He is never theirs, fully, when the light isn't there. 

Andrew knows that Kevin’s aware of it too. He stays close to Neil, tucks the other boy close to him, under his chin, a hand tangled in his shirt whatever chance he gets. This reset, Neil is breathing shallowly through his mouth — not panicking, but reminding himself of the absence of pain. Andrew knows the feeling, of having to force yourself into forgetting. Forgetting is a way of remembering, at times. 

“Breathe,” says Kevin. “Breathe,” says Andrew, at the same time. The tone of voice is different but the sentiment is the same. Neil heaves in a breath—one, two, three, four—and lets it out slowly, a measured comedown. His eyes flicker up to Andrews, the blue turned duller, rounder, in the lighter glow. The fluorescents have not been on for a long time. Andrew manages to keep an even gaze, looking through the little wavery flame, and slowly, Neil relaxes. Bone by bone, muscle by muscle. 

“Andrew,” he says.

“If you’re going to play the martyr card, the least you could do is make it look like you aren’t being forced to drink Nicky’s coffee,” Andrew says dryly, and despite the situation, Kevin chokes on a half-aborted laugh. Neil looks at Andrew, measured, before he lets a small, cracked smile escape from whatever has him in a chokehold. 

“Not a martyr,” he says. “Just something I should have had to do a long time ago.”

“You should have never had to,” Kevin says, quietly. He sounds like he’s reading an elegy, but his eyes are still fixed on Neil, his deafening existence in the silence of the locker room. Kevin sounds like he’s always preparing for Neil’s funeral but Andrew still watches him, stomach twisting, as he stays alive in the locker room. 

“For once, Day is right,” Andrew concurs, and Neil huffs out the suggestion of a laugh, just the aftermath of a cooling breath before he stills. 

“I’m so— mad,” Neil says, the smile turned bitter, his mouth twisted into a frown. The firelight spills dull shapes of shadow over the hollows of his face, his hair half falling over his eyes where he’s tucked into Kevin still. Andrew revels in the way the anger turns his voice sharp, but the context sours it, making it flake into a pile of ash at the bottom of his lungs. “I got to be Neil, for real, for a while. You made me real. You made me want to stay. ”

“Then stay,” Kevin says, measured, self-assured in a way he has in practice, as if it’s that easy. “You keep ending back up here. That means something, surely.”

“Neil’s still here,” Andrew says, watching the way Neil picks at his nails, resists the urge to reach for the hand and pull it away towards him. It’s another truth, what he’s saying: Neil never left. There, the habit he has of picking at the cuticle: there, the way he bites at his bottom lip when he doesn’t know what to say. There, the splay of freckles over his left cheekbone that he built up over summer, driving back and forth from the court with Andrew and Kevin. There, overlaid: the shape of a 4, dark ink. Proof of Neil Josten’s relentless, stubborn, stupid martyrdom for the people he pledges a life to. “Leave Nathaniel behind.”

Neil looks up from where his gaze has dropped to his hands, his face covered by that quiet look of devastated amazement that Andrew despises. Neil looks like he’s seeing the sky for the first time when he passes his gaze from Andrew to Kevin, and back to his hands, laid over with firelight, the skin clean and smooth.

“Not yet,” he says, quietly. “I still need to be him. But—”

Neil never finishes the sentence, leaving the end of it hanging in the dark air of the locker room until it’s extinguished with the disappearance of Andrew’s thumb from the lighter. But when he stands to leave, he keeps a hand reaching for the two of them, his still-shaking form offering to pull them up from the ground. 

"Wait for me,” Neil says in German, in the hallway. Kevin, on the other side of him, tilts his head, questioning, but too tired to say anything about it. About the language; about the way Andrew stills in the middle of their walk to where the two security officers are waiting to escort Neil to his death. Andrew nods, jaw clenched. With that last damning command, Neil disappears into the soft, spring darkness.

☀︎

 The locker clangs.

☀︎

The locker clangs.

☀︎

The locker cla—

☀︎

"I kissed him," Andrew says, eyes fixed on the road where it stretches out ahead of him, the tarseal striped by the dim streetlamps. 

"So?" Kevin says, half-petulant, half-panicked. The last loop had a bottle broken over Andrew’s face and Kevin desperately wiping away the blood so that they could follow to where Neil was struggling in the guards hold. He’s staring down the highway now as if Neil's going to appear any second, unbroken and free of injury, as if the shadows of the trees are hiding Neil from him. "You've kissed me too." 

"You were drunk and hyperventilating in Eden's, that doesn't count." 

"Fuck you," Kevin says, but there's no weight to the words, just something to fill the empty, sprawling space between them and the gearstick. Kevin has never been good with silence, as much as Andrew would prefer it. He's the kind of person to read their notes out loud to memorize them, mutter over his laptop at the game he's watching, try to initiate conversations that Andrew will never join him in. Neil is willing to listen, and talk back, but Andrew has learned to tune Kevin out when he doesn't need to listen. The loops make it more difficult, though. Everything here is needed, and Andrew is uncomfortably aware of Kevin's next words. 

"Did you ever want me?" Kevin asks, quietly. "I know you said I wouldn't have known how to say no. But that wasn't really an answer, was it?" 

Andrew fixes his gaze on the median strip, thinking about that night in Edens, in Columbia, Kevin too unaware of Andrew’s boundaries, the guilty, desperate look on his face the next morning. Andrew had laughed in his face when Kevin had asked about the moment in the bathroom, meds coursing through his blood, a crazed grin on his face. He didn’t trust himself with Kevin. He didn’t trust Kevin with himself. He handed him his bottle of pills, though, and told him to hold onto them, more of an admission than anything else Andrew was able to break through the haze of the drugs enough to say. 

"There is no point in me answering a question you already have an expected answer for," Andrew says instead. He does not tell Kevin that the answer he is expecting to receive is wrong — there's a line he drew last year between them, the space big enough for another person, and Andrew is a person who rarely goes back on the boundaries he's built. Beside him, Kevin shifts in his seat, his legs pulled up to his chest in an attempt at self-comfort, a way of making himself smaller. For all Kevin is imposing on the court, he restrains himself outside of it, as if he is convinced every move he makes is an inconvenience to the people around him, even though his words are rarely restrained around the people he's claimed. It's infuriating — Andrew's hand's grip tighter onto the steering wheel with a single-minded, ridiculous idea to tug his hands away and let his legs splay out into the footwell. Take up more space , Andrew has been wanting to tell him for the last two years, the words biting. Stop acting like a coward .

"Do you want him?" 

Andrew stays quiet, almost stubbornly so. There is no relief in answering a question that Kevin already mostly knows the truth of. There is no point answering a question both of them have the same answer for. 

"People won't know what you want unless you say it, Andrew," Kevin says, and Andrew pushes away the memory of Neil's instincts for boundaries, the way he understands Andrew without words. Neil is not there — he is somewhere ahead of them in the darkness of the highway, and Kevin is the only one there with him. Kevin, who knows how to take a no but still whines about it, who snatches his hands back when he's given rejection and then is convinced he'll never get a yes again in his life. Kevin doesn’t know how to reach out, and Andrew can’t invite him in. Their relationship is born from a raging incompatibility between the two of them.

Kevin turns back to the window so all Andrew can see is the stark black lines of a 2 on his cheekbone, and then they don't speak again until Neil's beside them in the locker room again.

☀︎

Andrew is no fool. He sees the way Kevin looks at Neil when he’s not looking his way. Andrew knows the look too well. Has seen it directed at himself, too, when Kevin thinks he’s not looking either. Kevin has always been bad at hiding what he wants. It's why Wymack’s only criticism of him on the court is that he telegraphs too much when he goes to score. He makes his desires too obvious. 

☀︎

Here’s a truth: anger is a secondary emotion.

☀︎

Kevin leaves a beat before the two of them, attempting to explain it as a separation of himself from Neil’s past in the eyes of the two security officers. “If we all leave together, they’ll suspect you’re spilling something,” he’d said, even though Neil’s reply had been along the lines of ‘I’ve given up on everything right now, I could care less.’ He leaves anyway, with a short, conflicted look for Andrew, before disappearing into the white glow of the hallway. 

Once he’s gone, Neil turns ever so slightly from where he was standing to Andrew. “He’s scared of you.”

Andrew hums, fiddling with his lighter in his pocket as they start to approach the doorway. He knows what Neil is asking. He isn’t quite sure how to say it. 

“He knew, the first time,” is what he settles on, and Neil’s expression shutters. 

“Oh, Andrew,” Neil sighs. “What did you do to him.”

“Nothing that wasn’t warranted,” Andrew says, like it’s that easy.

“Did you hurt him?”

Andrew stays silent. 

“Andrew.”

“Yes.” The word hurts, coming out. It tears at his throat, his vocal cords, carotid and jugular and all that. No one ever told him admitting failure of his own deals would hurt so much. No one told him Neil’s shuttered expression would hurt the same amount. Here: Kevin. Here: Neil. Here, two deals broken, whether by choice or force. Here, what Andrew has used to anchor himself to people, set adrift by his inability to express the things he feels as anything other than anger. 

“He would have told you, if you asked.”

“If I asked.” Andrew’s lips curl and a low sound spills out between them, like a ruined chuckle. “Yes, or no, Kevin: is Neil going to still be alive by the end of today?”

“It doesn’t matter if I was dead or not,” Neil says, like it doesn't matter more than Andrew’s own life. His eyes are stern and bright even in the darkness of the locker room — he looks angry . His voice belies his rage when it shakes as he says: “He would’ve told you everything.”

“You sound sure of that.”

“I am.”

“What happened to not trusting anyone, rabbit? I thought you didn’t want to know us."

“It’s Kevin.” Neil says that like it should be all the explanation Andrew needs. “I know him. You do too — even better than me.”

Andrew scoffs weakly. It’s a poor cover — Neil can tell, by the way he leans in toward Andrew, hands hovering between them. “Andrew. Why?”

Andrew doesn't have words for Neil — it has always been easier, with him, to ask and then act. He can't do that, now — not with only a minute or so until one of Neil's hunters comes knocking. 

What can he say? That he's been living inside a loop of his own for the past however fucking long, reliving over and over and over and over and over again every fucking moment of his hands wrapped around Kevin’s throat. That Andrew was terrified that Neil and every ounce of humanity he’d dragged out of Andrew was gone for good. Andrew has never admitted a mistake. He doesn’t know how to.

"Well?"

“I’m still figuring that out myself,” Andrew says dryly, instead, before he leaves Neil in the locker room and wanders down the hallway with a hand in his pocket and Neil’s huffed breath behind him. 

In the lounge, Kevin is leant back against the wall, caught in a conversation with Nicky, eyes flicking between him and the two guards at the door. 

When he sees Andrew enter the lounge, there’s a glint in his eyes, that impossible green that Andrew’s incapable of forgetting. Thrown-beer-bottle-green, spring-growth-green, traffic-lights-at-night-green. He settles his gaze against Andrew as he approaches, Nicky still chattering enough to cover the space of silence between the two of them. He still freezes like a deer in the headlights when Andrew comes too close, but he relaxes when Andrew stops with a body’s length between them. 

What can he say to Neil to explain himself? That anger comes second. That anger is a resultant. That his hands around Kevin’s throat were an admission of something he doesn’t have words for — it came out as rage because he’s never known the proper words for any of this. 

Andrew’s anger is rarely a mistake. This one is a regret. Kevin, flinching away from Andrew's hands like they were never anything that offered protection. He still looks at Andrew like he doesn’t know what to do without him in front of him, though. 

“Neil! We thought you were drowning in there,” Nicky exclaims, breaking Andrew’s train of thought, and both Andrew and Kevin turn to where he’s emerging from the locker room. 

Neil slides neatly into the space between Andrew and Kevin, sending a tired grin to Nicky.

“Not drowning,” he says. “Just stalling. Don’t worry about me.”

This time, the loop resets just as Kevin turns to say something to Andrew, the stark black of his 2 lit up by the graying dawn.

☀︎

Kevin is the kind of person to see potential in people that the world has already given up on. Andrew, holding onto nothing but a prescription bottle — Neil, already half accepting death.  He is stupid, and foolish, and cowardly, and believes so strongly in the people around him that he bets his own protection on giving people reasons to live. 

It's one thing having a person you'd live for. It's another thing — but not so different — to have a person who cares enough about you to try to give you something to live for. Andrew can’t stand it. He’s surrounded by martyrs left right and center, and Kevin, coward that Andrew calls him, is at the center of it all. 

Kevin had so much faith in Andrew’s ability to live a fulfilled life that he dealt his own on it. I will give you something to live for in exchange for my protection. Kevin at nineteen was broken and terrified and Andrew had thought that the offer of something to build his life around once he was off his drugs was all Kevin could offer him in return. He was imagining Kevin needed someone else whose life was so intrinsically tied to Exy that they could understand who Kevin was. He was imagining Kevin wouldn’t find anything and that Andrew would be left trying to settle a debt. 

But Andrew’s been wrong this whole time. It’s not the only thing Kevin could offer him, but it is the one Kevin felt most strongly about. It’s the one he knew he could give Andrew. It’s the one he thought he would be able to give Neil Josten too, Andrew thinks, the Neil Josten with brown hair and taped up shoelaces in a locker room somewhere in Millport. It’s the one he still tried to keep with Nathaniel-Wesninski-Neil-Josten even though they both knew death was coming for him. Andrew realizes that even though Neil was dead in the eyes of Kevin he still didn’t give up on him. Kevin has been teaching a ghost Raven drills for the last six months. He has been grieving Neil longer than Andrew has. 

The promise of Exy makes more sense with Neil, rather than Andrew, but he still understands it. It’s the only way they know how to signify survival, those two. To live is to play Exy. It’s the only way they know how to offer a life to him. 

And even so. Kevin still fulfilled his deal, in one way or another. Andrew hates that Exy is the reason it occurred, even if it’s not the sport itself. Kevin, somehow, curled into the seat beside Andrew in the car all these loops, manages still to drag boys out of burning cars and high school locker rooms and from the bottom of pill bottles and say: here. I will give you something to build your life around. I will succeed. I believe in your ability to live. 

Andrew just hopes that belief is enough for Neil, now. 

☀︎

Andrew shoves Kevin away from the crowd—

☀︎

Andrew shoves Kevin away—

☀︎

Andrew is back in the locker room and the fluorescents are so bright there’s barely a shadow for the shape of Kevin and Neil crouched together on the floor, the patterned linoleum beneath their knees pale and gray. Andrew drops down to their level where he can see Kevin’s lips moving in some sort of reassurance, the lights washing out his complexion to something sickly, the brown skin turned almost gray from exhaustion. Neil is fever-white, clammy and panting and his eyes flicker desperately to Andrew once he realizes he’s there. There’s an uncomfortable amount of relief on his face when he sees Andrew looking at him, and he reaches out a hand — his gloves are still on, thick black cotton wrapped around his wrists and fingers. In a motion practiced, not with Neil, Andrew reaches out to peel them off Neil’s shaking hands as Kevin watches. He’s still talking, a litany of lies. 

“You’re okay,” he murmurs as the right glove comes off, “you can breathe,” as the left one joins it on the floor. 

“Nothing can hurt you right now,” Kevin says, as Neil’s phone starts to ring. 

Out in the hallway Wymack raises a hand and Nicky says something lewd about how shaky Neil is and Andrew keeps his gaze fixed on the guards at the door and in his periphery Kevin has taken a small step so that Neil is almost behind him. 

“Don’t—” Neil says and the crowd roars as the security guards snatch Neil out of his grip and the locker is clanging—

☀︎

The road disappears beneath them and Kevin is beside him with his legs folded into the seat, the streetlights running over him — every time he makes a movement, they look jerky, like he’s in some stop motion where Andrew is only allowed to see him every other second when the light comes on. His skin is dark in the dim density of the car but his eyes gleam in the light, too green for any of this and Andrew wants—

☀︎

The road disappears beneath them and Kevin is beside him and Andrew’s hands are white knuckled around the dry rubber of the steering wheel and Kevin is looking at him, that infernal number 2 on his cheek stark against his skin in the darkness of the car and—

☀︎

The road disappears beneath them and Kevin is crying this time, eyes wet and everything under Andrew’s skin feels wrong, why can he never forget—

☀︎

It’s night. It’s noon. He’s driving. It’s happening all over again. 

☀︎

Andrew’s eyes stretch to the pale light of the horizon, past the long stretch of highway - anything past it is just darkness, or the cool gray of coming dawn. There is just the road, and Kevin beside him, and then more road, the roar of the freeway. 

He barely has to look, now, at it all — the offending stretch of tarseal and street lamps. It’s too ingrained into his memory for it to ever be gone, but he still keeps his eyes fixed on the road. If he lets his eyes stray they drift to Kevin. If he lets his eyes drift, who knows the things that leap out of the darkness. No loop is entirely the same, after all. Andrew wouldn’t be surprised if a crash was the next thing to derail their attempts to get to Neil. He’s not sure if it would faze him, honestly. Andrew knows the feeling of a car crash. Kevin, though he’s admitted he doesn’t remember the accident, does too. Mothers and sons and cars, after all, are a lethal mix. They know to brace for it, then.

Keeping his eyes fixed on the highway doesn’t change how innately he knows the journey to Baltimore in spring darkness, though. Memory like that of Andrew’s has never been kind. 

Andrew tends not to focus on the mundane details of life, tries to keep them vague enough that he won’t be stuck with them. Nicky calls him spacey, Aaron calls him disconnected. He’s just trying to not have to remember everything around him for the rest of his life. There’s some things he hasn’t quite managed to avoid - the number of piercings in Matt’s ears, the display order of Bee’s figurines,  the floorboard in the Foxhole court lobby that always creaks, the thickness of the gold chain Seth used to wear all the time and was supposedly cremated with. He can never be rid of them. 

Even so, through the endless exhaustion of these fucking loops, Andrew’s been focusing on committing every bit of Neil to memory, no matter how terrifying the feeling of memorizing someone who you can feel slipping through your fingers with every second on the dashboard clock. He doesn’t need to look over to his right, because he already knows Kevin. There is no need to memorize someone you already know every inch of.

There had been a time, that first year with Kevin, months after that night under the lights at Eden’s, where Kevin had slipped backward and Andrew had started preparing a eulogy. The beginning of it was something to the effect of don’t you dare make me memorize all of you and then disappear. Don’t you dare fucking die and make me be unable to forget every detail of you. Andrew is not in the business of committing to memory people who are so short-lived. Even so, in those couple of months where it looked like maybe Kevin hadn’t made it out of the Nest in the end, Andrew was dedicated to remembering all he could. The shape of Kevin’s fingers, where they were warped and bandaged on the left hand, the name of the shampoo brand he used. The slope of his nose, the three tones of voice he switches between when he’s coaching. The way he doesn’t know his own allergies, too used to meal plans, how if left alone he’ll disappear into the pages of a book three times the age of either of them. The freckle high on his cheek, opposite to his number 2. The sound of his footsteps. The feeling of his breath on Andrew’s cheek, pressed close on the bus. 

Andrew knows Kevin, now, in a way so familiar to him that he could find him with his eyes closed. He would know him in darkness and silence. It’s a truth for everyone he keeps close — paying attention enough that he’ll remember. Andrew’s willing to offer up permanent residence in his memory for the rest of his life to the people he harbors. 

I know you enough to never forget you, no matter how hard I could try. My memory is a curse. My memory is a blessing. My memory is the only thing the sound of your footsteps will live on in. 

This is what he has of the people he protects — the mole on the side of Aaron’s neck that Andrew doesn’t have, the way he pretends he takes his coffee black but pours half a bottle of creamer into it when he thinks no one is looking. The sound of Nicky’s voice, the way it changes depending on who he is talking to, the way his German sounds when he has his headphones on and Skype open. Renee’s hair, the way she doesn’t trust herself to bleach it but takes an afternoon every other week to smear hair dye onto the ends in a kaleidoscopic smudge. 

Neil—Neil’s fingers clenched around a set of keys, the look in his eyes every time he stares at the court, the way he blurs from one self to another, the sharp snap of his voice when he switches from English to German. The way it goes quieter, but not softer when he speaks French. Letting cigarettes burn to the filter without taking a drag. The ruined skin under his shirt, knotted ropes of scar tissue curled around his ribcage. Twisting Andrew’s words in a way that he manages to dig into what Andrew’s been trying to say to people since he was thirteen. The way he had snapped across a talk show stage, a hand flung out to keep Kevin from his ex partner — the way he and Kevin bicker on the court but shift from argument to a smoothy oiled machine in a split second. Kevin’s voice lying to Neil in soft tones when he comes out of a loop shaking, Neil’s hand reaching out to Kevin even when he tries to separate himself from Andrew and Neil. Kevin running practices after midnight for a dead boy. Neil risking death for Kevin’s safety. The two of them pinning their lives on Andrew’s existence. 

Kevin and Neil are two sides of the same coin — fundamentally the same. Unable to exist without the other. Two halves of the same whole. To hate one is to hate the other — the inverse, too, is the same. There is nothing of one of them that is not intrinsically tied to the other.

☀︎

"Death would be fine," Neil says quietly, legs tucked up onto the bench, "if it only happened once." His smile is strained when he looks up to Andrew. He wants to smack that stupid fucking expression off of his face, but the feeling drops away as the smile does, Neil looking down to the ground through the slats of the bench. 

"I don't want to die anymore. I'm sick of running, I want to stay." The way he says it is so strained that even Kevin is speechless. Andrew watches as he reaches a hand up to tangle it in the hem of Neil's shirt, resisting the urge to smack it away. Neil is as much Kevin's as he is Andrew's. He is as much theirs as he is his own person. Outside, Wymack calls for Allison to hurry up with her primping, and Kevin and Neil both mouth along to the words as they echo into the men's bathroom, a matching pair with their tattoos and hollow eyes and searching hands for tenderness.

“Haverford Street,” Neil says, quietly. “Number 290.” There’s an intake of breath from Kevin — sharp, startled. Neil lifts a hand to wrap around Kevin’s, still caught in his shirt, and raises his gaze to Andrew. His body is not yet tired enough to have dark shadows under his eyes, but the exhaustion is evident in the way he is barely holding himself up. Kevin is doing the job for him. Andrew trusts him to keep Neil upright. He trusts him, as uncomfortable as the realization is, to protect Neil. 

“Don’t get yourselves killed,” he hums, tilting into Kevin with half-open eyes, hands open to Andrew as if he’s handing over his most hated secret. Andrew knows the sentiment — childhood home as haunted house and nightmare at once. Both dead and alive. 

“Not planning on it,” Andrew says, still watching the way Neil and Kevin are tucked close to each other in the glow of the light leaking horribly through the doorway. Andrew goes to heights to feel something — anything. Watching Kevin and Neil interact in the locker room is like standing with his toes hanging over the edge of a skyscraper. They make him feel. They make him afraid. 

When Neil’s phone rings, Andrew tugs it out of his hands and presses the speaker option, leaves the phone between the three of them on the floor. The saccharine mockery of a woman’s voice spills out of it — Neil greets her as Lola, and Kevin stills, and Andrew listens to his voice as Neil offers a half-conversation to her, something more out of habit from these loops than anything else. 

“—you remember who you are and what your place is.”

“I have a place,” Neil says, simply, and hangs up. When he looks up from where he’s snapped the phone shut, he looks almost—unsure. As if needing confirmation of his statement from Andrew, from Kevin. Andrew wants to scoff. None of them but Neil belongs here the most. It’s the truest thing he’s said all these loops — Neil clawed himself a space on this team out of what looked like desperation and was really just desire. He succeeded. 

Kevin hums a confirmation. “You do,” he says. “Now stop leaving.” Neil relaxes at the words, but there’s a wry smile on his face, something resigned to the knowledge that there is no stopping this, yet. 

“I can’t,” he says, looking up to Andrew, a hand reaching out to him, stilled a hand-length away from Andrew. “You know that. But—”

“What, Abram.”

"Trust me to come back to you," Neil whispers.  Trust me enough that you won’t do anything reckless, Andrew hears. Trust me that I know what I’m doing. Trust died a long time ago, for Andrew, but the way Neil offers it up is a choice. A yes or no, as simple as anything they’ve been doing for the past month, which is to say it’s the most complicated choice of them all. Andrew doesn’t have words to answer him, he doesn’t have words for Kevin’s cautious gaze still fixed to Andrew’s hands. He watches Neil’s reaching fingers waver, though, and inches close enough that Neil can grasp onto the fabric of his armbands, the black of them stark against the pale fingertips. 

“Don’t make me regret this,” Andrew warns, and Neil grins tiredly, leans back into Kevin, clutches tighter onto Andrew. In the hallway, the Foxes call for them. Neil’s phone sits quiescent in front of the three of them and Andrew lets the image burn itself into his memory. There is no forgetting this even if he tried.