The King's Men - Epilogue
Day: Saturday, April 27th / 28th*
Time: 3:10 AM EST
Neil waits off to one side while the others file out, knowing Andrew will be the last to leave. Wymack knows better than to stick around and follows his Foxes down the hall. Andrew brings Neil's duffel to him. Neil takes it but drops it off to one side. Andrew studies it for a moment, then shrugs out of his own bag and puts a hand to the wall near Neil's head.
"Your close calls are getting old," Andrew says. "I thought you knew how to run."
Neil affects confusion. "I thought you told me to stop running."
"Survival tip: no one likes a smart mouth."
"Except you," Neil reminds him.
A year ago Neil had been a scared nobody, hating himself for signing the Foxes' contract and counting down days until he moved in with Wymack. Tonight he is the starting striker for the first-ranked team in the NCAA. In two years he'll be captain, and in four he'll graduate from Palmetto State. Neil will find a professional team first and then fight tooth and nail to make the cut for Court. Neil can already imagine the weight of an Olympics medal around his neck. He doesn't even care what color it is so long as it is his.
Better than that bright future is what he already has: a court that will always be home, a family who'll never give up on him, and Andrew, who for once hasn't wasted their time denying that this thing between them might actually mean something to both of them. Neil didn't even notice the silence at first, too distracted by his dizzying thoughts. Now he can't help but smile and pull Andrew in.
This is everything he wanted, everything he needed, and Neil is
never letting go.
END OF ALL FOR THE GAME SERIES.
Art commissioned and used with permission by the incredible @hamrikaa!
*Due to the Leap Year, I have opted to highlight the day rather than the date to keep the events in occurrence to the 2007 year. I will continue to mark both days accordingly.
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"I'm fine"
I'm literally obsessed with these fucked up motherfuckers
I'm currently reading the third book, but this is a snippet from the time before Christmas at the Ravens :)
...
Wait
Here, gained a bit more trauma :))
I'll do more illustrations of the post-xmas-at-Riko's bit,
I guess I'll just draw more of them in general
I'll draw some Andreil >:)
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Whenever any of the foxes are slightly inconvenienced by someone enough to complain about them, Neil always asks, “Do you want me to take care of it?” And everyone usually just laughs it off as a joke, but it is very much not a joke. Neil Does Not Like when people mess with his people. At all. Even slightly. Only Andrew, Kevin, Renee, and Aaron know that Neil is not joking.
It comes to light just how much Neil is not joking when some guy Allison was messing around with in her last year hurts her. Not horribly, he hurt her feelings more than anything, but when she tried to leave his dorm, he’d grabbed her arm hard enough to leave it bright red, minor cuts where his nails had dug in, and her elbow hit the doorframe when she jerked away so it was swollen and hurt to extend fully. Neil asks, “Do you want me to take care of it.” Allison tried to laugh it off, make it sound like a joke when she told him, “Yeah, actually. That’d be great.” But it’s all Neil needs as permission.
So Neil digs. He listens to the rumors, talks to a few girls, and watches him from afar. And then, one day, he’s gone. Nobody can find him. There’s an investigation, and the campus is swarmed with all kinds of law enforcement, and nobody can figure out what’s happened to this man.
Andrew asks Neil if there’s even anything left to find, and Neil tells him plausible deniability is a thing for a reason—Andrew’s grumpy with the lack of details, so as revenge, he tattles. The teams talking about the guys disappearance in the locker room before practice, and Andrew nonchalantly says. “You gave him permission.”
Neil just glares but, when questioned further, just shrugs them off. Tells them not to worry about it. He tells them what he told Andrew. Plausible deniability. Not that it’s necessary, really. The police won’t find anything, and Neil knows what he’s doing. There is nothing to lead them back to him.
After that, they learn to take Neil much more seriously when he asks if they want him to “take care of it.”
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when neil stopped referring to himself as ‘neil’ and switched to ‘nathaniel’ i genuinely fell to my knees like it’s actually so poignant how a simple switch in name shows how hopeless neil felt during that time, how he really believed that he was going to die after finally having a chance to truly live
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