#Andrew off screen: in the bedroom with Neil mostly | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

paradoxolotl · 3 years

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Are there any quotes or moments from any of your fics that you've had to leave out of the final product? Like, deleted scenes. If so, do you feel like sharing?...(Particularly Inked Truths because I'm obsessed with it. I fell in love with BoM, read it multiple times. When I found out you were doing a prequel I was very excited and have not been disappointed since.) (I also love TftR but it makes sad.)...Absolutely no pressure. If you don't want to answer please just ignore this, I'll understand.

Truths for the Roof didn’t lose anything but Inked lost a bit. Really, it was just redone to flow better and fit the characterization better, or moved somewhere later on in the series. I’m more likely to add then take away. It’s pretty rare I scrap something completely, and usually find somewhere else to put it, even if it’s a different fic. But originally BOM was very different. Andrew was medicated and Aaron knew Neil Josten from class.

Here’s a scene that was reworked in Ink Blotted Memories ~

Aaron did his best to avoid Andrew after that. He made himself busy at work, hauling dishes back and forth and hanging out with the bouncers on his breaks. When they were home Andrew was usually shut up in his room or outside smoking which made avoiding him all the easier, giving Aaron space to dick around on the TV or be in his room. Nicky still tried to involve both of them in stupid bonding activities like family dinners and movie nights. When they did happen, it was tense and uncomfortable, mostly filled with Nicky’s inane chatter. Aaron purposely did not look at his brother on these nights. He was torn between wanting Andrew’s acknowledgment and wishing he had never found out about him.

He marked his days with video games and his nights with alcohol and cracker dust, counting the days until he could once again use school as a distraction.

And the entire original Brother of Mine, which I rewrote most of when I got partway through ~

Aaron could still remember lying in his bed in his mother’s house, body bruised and hurting, wishing to have someone who could help him. Someone to make things better. To stand with him and hold him up when he was so close to crumbling. Learning about a long-lost twin felt like something out of a movie. An answered prayer. Finally, Aaron would have someone, a brother, who he could talk to. He imagined late night talks and secrets shared between them. They would have a bond so strong that nothing could come between them.

Andrew’s response of ‘fuck off’ had felt like a back-hand across his face.

Still, he held out hope. He was told to try again in the Spring, and that was what he planned on doing. Even when Andrew was sent to juvie, Aaron held onto his hope of a brother who would care about him. They were twins after all, how hard could it be?

The first time he had met Andrew face to face, Uncle Luther beside him and a metal table separating them, Aaron’s idea of what their relationship would be went up in smoke. His face was looking back at him, but there was no expression, no emotion at all. A blankness that revealed nothing of what he was thinking. It was hard to make eye contact with Andrew, his eyes sharp enough to be cut on. Andrew didn’t speak to Aaron at all that first visit; he just stared at him with a flat glare the entire time.

And yet he still came to South Carolina to live with Aaron. Aaron desperately wanted for Andrew to open up to him when they lived together. He thought he had to, now that they shared a room. He also hoped that home would get better, now that Andrew was home. Maybe mom would get better, would stop being so stressed. So angry.

It only took one incident for Aaron to believe Andrew was untouchable. They were in the backyard so Andrew could smoke, both sipping from a bottle of vodka Andrew had acquired. He had only moved in a week ago, and so far, things had been quiet. Aaron had no new bruises, but Andrew’s blank stare made him warry. The slam of the front door had made Aaron flinch, Andrew’s cold eyes tracking the movement. Aaron could hear their mother calling for him, her words tight with anger. Remembering the pills he had swiped earlier in the day, he swallowed back the lump in his throat and went inside.

He remembers her screaming. He remembers the pain of a hand across his cheek. Then there was Andrew, her wrist gripped in his hand, twisted far enough to make her bend at an awkward angle. It was then that Aaron saw the first expression on his twin’s face, and it terrified him. His lips had curled back in a snarl, his eyes bright with an anger Aaron had never seen before.

It was that night that Andrew had offered Aaron a deal. They would stick together, just the two of them, and Andrew would protect him. Aaron believed this was the answer to what he had been asking for. Finally, he wouldn’t be alone. He made his promise to Andrew.

Months passed, and Aaron was still collecting bruises. It was almost worse now, to have a witness to his suffering. Someone who had promised him protection but couldn’t stop everything.

Then, the accident where Aaron was left with only Andrew. Just the two of them.

The funeral where Andrew’s arm was in a sling, a cigarette hanging from his mouth, and a strange gleam in his eye as the dirt was poured on their mother’s grave.

Nicky coming back from Germany, taking them in.

Moving into a new house and Andrew installing a lock on his door.

The agony of being locked in that bathroom, withdrawal clawing his body to shreds.

The slow isolation at school, Andrew refusing to let anyone close.

Nicky’s assault and the mandated therapy.

That awful laughter and empty smile.

And Aaron had to wonder if instead of his prayers being answered, he had been cursed.

~~~

Things began changing the spring of their freshman year of college.

When they first joined the Foxes, there was a clear divide between Aaron’s family and the others immediately. Any interactions ended in spitting insults at best and violence more than not. The others feared Andrew and his knives, circling their group like alley cats. Not that the three of them were much better. Nicky constantly antagonized the others, and the twins’ general lack of effort to get along definitely rubbed a few people the wrong way. The Columbia trips solidified their isolation from the others. Honestly, Aaron couldn’t care less about getting along with his teammates. He would leave them alone as long as they did the same. He was here for a degree, not friends.

Now, they had officially been knocked out of the championships. Not that Aaron could bring himself to care, but games days usually also meant Columbia, and Aaron desperately wanted to get off campus. Between the upperclassmen, Day’s bitching over the season and Nicky’s whining, Aaron was looking forward to drinks, crackers, and music loud enough to lose yourself in.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t go without Andrew. His twin was currently perched on his desk by the window, smoking and staring out at the campus, fingers rapidly tapping. Normally they would already be packed up and gone by now, but they hadn’t gone once in over a month. At first Aaron thought it was because of exy, but then Andrew would disappear from the dorms for hours at a time, much to Day’s frustration. The only reason Aaron even noticed this as odd was because his brother rarely left Day alone. He never told them why they stopped going, or where he disappeared to, and any complaints fell on deaf ears.

“Come on Andrew!” Nicky whined, “We never go to Columbia anymore!”

Andrew’s laughter made Aaron’s jaw tick. “Oh, poor Nicky, don’t you know that no means no?”

“But why not?” Nicky was still going.

Aaron didn’t know why Nicky thought he could reason with Andrew. Unless you were Renee the best result from interacting with him would be victim to a cutting insult or dismissal. Worst case you’d need stitches.

His phone buzzing in his hand distracted him from the conversation happening. Looking at the screen, he felt a wave of relief wash over him, soothing the tension in his shoulders.

Katelyn

You played great today! It’s too bad the season is over

Katelyn was an instant balm to Aaron’s anger. It was still new, this thing between them. They had met in their intro biology class and had spent many late hours at the library studying. She had been the first person at Palmetto who had bothered to get to know Aaron for him, not just as ‘Andrew’s twin’. At first, he was a sullen asshole, but her endless patience and positivity snuck past his defenses and made a place for her in Aaron’s very bones. The only issue was they had to sneak around; Aaron couldn’t risk Andrew finding out about her.

Glancing up to make sure Andrew was still distracted with Nicky, Aaron settled further into his beanbag.

Aaron

Whatever it’s just stickball

Katelyn

Still, I’ll miss watching you ;)

Aaron had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep the smile off his face.

Katelyn

How’s Columbia?

Aaron

Wouldn’t know we’re still in the Tower

Katelyn

Think you could sneak out for a bit?

We’re in that bar with the turtle

Nicky’s yelp brought Aaron’s attention back to the room in front of him. Andrew was still on the desk, but Aaron caught the glint of metal as a knife was put back in one of his armbands. His eyes followed Nicky as he retreated to the bedroom, face split in his usual grin. When the door closed behind Nicky, Andrew’s eyes snapped to Aaron, pinning him to his spot. Aaron glared back, daring Andrew to say something to him. To say anything.

Instead, Andrew flicked his cigarette out the window, slammed in shut, and left the dorm completely. Aaron wasn’t sure if he was disappointed or not.

He sat there for a moment, fingers tapping on his phone. If this was going to be following his typical pattern over the past few weeks, Andrew would be gone for hours, and wouldn’t notice if Aaron left. He would just need to be back before Andrew. Really, it wasn’t that hard of a decision.

Aaron

Be there in twenty.

Katelyn

Grabbing his jacket, Aaron hurried out of the dorm, eager to get away. Even if it wasn’t Columbia, even if it was with the Vixens, any time with Katelyn was worth it.

Aaron didn’t look up as he left the Tower. If he did, he might have seen a heavy stare and two lit cigarettes.

~~~

Summer came, and somehow Betsy had convinced the courts to change Andrew’s medication. Something about an incorrect diagnosis or dosage. Aaron wasn’t sure how they thought an Andrew off the pills would be any better, but no one asked him for his opinion.

The upside was that Aaron had weeks free of his oppressive twin, and he could spend as much time with Katelyn as he wanted. It was the first time in years Aaron felt like there was no weight pulling him down, like he could finally breathe.

It was in those few perfect weeks that Aaron came to a decision.

He couldn’t lose this.

~~~

Andrew had come back from Easthaven reverted back to the emptiness of when Aaron had first met him. He had barely said a word to anyone since he came back, simply leveling that bored glare at them whenever someone tried to speak to him. Whenever Aaron saw him, he was fiddling on that damn flip phone, barely acknowledging his surroundings. Even the upperclassmen had noticed his attachment to the device.

It was during a meeting before the first game of the new season that someone finally snapped.

“Damn it, Andrew, what are you doing?” When Kevin got really angry, his face flushed. Right now, he was approaching tomato.

Andrew snapped his phone shut, “Nothing.”

“Bullshit, you need to focus. Our first game is tomorrow, and we are nowhere near ready.”

“Maybe,” Andrew drawled, “instead of worrying about me, you should focus on what you’ll do when you see Riko again.”

It was a low blow, but effective. Kevin immediately fell silent, his skin changing from red to white so quickly Aaron was surprised he didn’t faint. Edgar Allen had joined their district after Kevin announced that he would be joining the Fox line-up. Last year Kevin had showed up, hand bloody and broken, looking for sanctuary. Apparently, Riko had broken his hand in a fit of rage. Kevin had tried to sue, but with the connections and money behind the Moriyama name, it was ruled as an accident. The public backlash of that along with Kevin’s transfer to the Foxes had caused several headaches last year.

“Jesus, Andrew,” Nicky whispered.

Andrew opened his phone again. No one else tried to speak to him for the rest of the meeting.

~~~

It was a new bet among the Foxes: what Andrew was doing on his phone. Everyone agreed that it was pretty clear he was texting someone, but the question was who. Some believed it was a secret girlfriend, while others were still convinced Renee and Andrew were together. Others thought it had to be something illegal.

Aaron knew what he thought, and he silently watched and cataloged information away.

~~~

The season was going terribly. They were winning games by the skin of their teeth and they were more divided than ever. Seth and Kevin couldn’t stop fighting, their newest striker was a nervous wreck, and Andrew didn’t give a shit.

Their last game was against the Ravens, and they had been destroyed. Now, Wymack and Dan were looking for a win.

They were in the locker room getting ready for the game when Andrew’s phone began to ring. Aaron didn’t recognize the song Andrew used, but he knew he normally used the default setting for his ringtone. Andrew picked up before Aaron could think too much on it.

“What?”

At this point everyone was staring at him, not even trying to act like they weren’t eavesdropping.

Andrew scoffed, “Junkie,” he said before snapping his phone shut, tossing it into his locker, and slamming it door closed. A moment later he was stalking out of the locker room.

Silence was left behind in his wake until Nicky broke it, “So it isn’t a girlfriend?”

When the team was gathered again (...missing...)

~~~

(...missing...)Today though, Aaron needed to talk to him.

The chances of Andrew brushing off any attempt Aaron made to speak to him were high, so Aaron waited until Andrew would have to acknowledge him. On Wednesday, when Andrew walked into Reddin, Aaron was waiting for him.

~~~

“Fuck off,” Aaron growled.

Josten had that stupid smirk on his face, his finger tapping on his test score. It wasn’t even that Aaron did bad. It was that Josten did better. He always did better in this stupid class. Aaron hated statistics, but apparently Josten was a math major and took every opportunity to show him up.

From day one Aaron had disliked him. He had plopped down beside Aaron, ratty clothes and shaggy hair, and called him ‘the second Minyard��. Not only was he a complete ass, but he was completely unnerving. His eyes were a blue so pale they were almost glacial, and his face and arms were covered in slashes and burn scars.

Once, Aaron had overheard someone call him ‘Scarface’, and Josten had just asked, with a terrifying grin, if they were looking for some to match.

And Aaron was stuck in a room with him twice a week.

Josten tsked at him, still tapping at his score. “What? Still second?”

“Fuck off,” Aaron really wasn’t in the mood.

He just hummed, pulling his phone out, a god damn flip phone, and spent the next few minutes ignoring the review happening. Aaron could barely focus as Josten texted away; each click grating on Aaron’s already frayed nerves.

Aaron wasn’t even sure how Josten did so well; he spent most of the class doodling in his notebook.

#aftg #all for the game #the foxhole court #the raven king #the kings men #aftg fanfiction #para's fics #ask para

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jemej3m · 4 years

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gamer au please 🥺👉🏻👈🏻

if anyone anons me those three emojis again i will have a conniption

So what if Andrew was no longer in the top-three on the scoreboard? He didn’t care. He so didn’t care. He couldn’t give less of a shit, really.

Riko had always been in the first-place slot, and Kevin had found himself quite comfortable in second.

But now, a little shit by the username neiljosten, had snatched Andrew’s place in third.

He didn’t give a shit. Who would? Definitely not him. He couldn’t care less about the game. EXY was a shit game, anyway. He barely played it.

“Oi!” Nicky yelled, rapping his fist on Andrew’s bedroom door and making a general racket. “It’s almost time to stream, Andrew!”

Andrew glared balefully at the screen before throwing aside his controller and storming out of his room.

“Someone’s still pissy he’s not in the top three anymore,” Aaron taunted, already on the couch with a bowl of chips. His girlfriend, Katelyn, had the salsa between her knees as she tugged on her headset. Erik, Nicky’s husband, was already figuring out tech stuff and testing audio.

They were called the Fantastic Five, mostly because they were all kick-ass and had made themselves careers through e-sports. Erik and Aaron both coded but had a small online following. Katelyn’s main passion was animation, but every Sunday she settled down with her boyfriend and her boyfriend’s family, posting stream highlights to her second channel the next day.

Nicky had a day job as a marketing manager at Aaron and Erik’s game developing company, F0X Games. That was the same company that’d released EXY, the newest hot-shot game out there.

With a public scoreboard. That Andrew was no longer third-place on.

“Definitely salty,” Nicky agreed, settling between Aaron and Erik. Andrew took the chair in the corner, tugging his hoodie up over his mouth and nose and sinking into the cushions.

“I didn’t think you cared about any of this shit,” Aaron muttered, knocking his controller to wake it up. Andrew just flipped him off and looked to the screen.

“Okay, we’re live in three,” Erik said, settling back into the couch and leaning on his husband with a grin.

“I’m going to tank all your asses in Mariokart,” Nicky said, cheerful. “Get ready.”

Andrew just rolled his eyes.

Fourth game in, Andrew was steadily coming 12th place. The others were all ignoring his tantrum, battling it out for the top three. Meanwhile, he was hellbent on driving backwards and tried completing the whole track in reverse. He didn’t give a fuck if everyone on the stream saw him sitting there, wallowing. He had his hood up and his cat socks on. He was definitely looking a little worse-for-wear.

“Ten dollar donation!” Katelyn cheered, squinting at the screen. “Uh, neiljosten says: didn’t realise minyard was such a sore loser”

Andrew sat upright, glaring at the little laptop on the coffee table. Nicky was grinning, losing his first-place position to Erik, who whooped.

“Looks like your new rival is watching our stream, Andrew,” Aaron said, biting his lip as he fought for 3rd place with his girlfriend.

“Neil Josten just donated another $10 and said: ‘rival? we’d only be rivals if andrew could beat my score’.” Nicky howled. “He’s antagonistic, too! Oh, Andrew. You definitely have some competition.”

Andrew grit his teeth, sitting up. He had nothing to say except: “Fuck you.” Erik whistled lowly, blue-shelling Nicky off the side of the cliff. Yelling ensued but Andrew ignored them, waiting for a response.

neiljosten, in his cryptid-like manner, didn’t appear for the rest of the stream.

His channel was relatively small. He hadn’t even showed his face yet, in neither his streams nor videos. Andrew wasn’t scouring him for information that might give him a clue as to who the hell he thought he was. He definitely didn’t care about ‘neiljosten’, whoever that may be.

“You know what I think is a fucking scam?” Neil said, in one of his stream-highlights. “The Moriyamas monopolise this whole streaming platform and still think we won’t notice if they just give hundreds of thousands of free subscribers and followers to loud-mouthed Riko Moriyama. No one even watches his shit. He’s boringly thick-skulled and can’t play to save his life. What a jackass. Get a fucking life: one that doesn’t include taunting 12-year-olds that you beat them.”

Without even thinking about it, Andrew snorted. In horror, he shut all the tabs that he had open on Neil Josten. So far, all he knew about him was that he was about 23, so only a year younger than Andrew was. And that he had a wickedly scathing tone when he confronted people. He’d alluded once to knowing Kevin, but Kevin Day was a famous name. Of course he would hedge he knew Kevin.

It felt one-sided, not knowing what he looked like, where he was from. He sounded like he was from the east coast, but sometimes his tongue had a British lilt. He sometimes swore in German. Sometimes in French. Sometimes, even, in Spanish. Andrew didn’t have a clue what to think.

At four in the morning he gave up his search. Instead, he opened up his F0X file and clicked on EXY.

The game uploaded itself and opened the launcher.

Low and behold, the ‘people you might know’ section of the Online listings heralded the one and only: neiljosten.

Neil-fucking-Josten.

Andrew had never logged so fast in his life. He trotted over to Neil’s server and location, and plopped himself into the unknown landmass.

It was time to figure out who this little fucker was, once and for all.

ignore this travesty

#gamer au #andreil #aftg #shitposting is my current state #because apparently i cant write anymore #neil josten #andrew minyard #my bb is killing me #shh dont tell the mods #iill figure it out eventually #internet au #streamer au #youtuber au #?#i guess so lol #all for the game #jem writes

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nekojitachan · 4 years

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My kitty and I agree that we'd love to see more not in the stars. She wants to see that kitty representation.

Well, this isn’t Not in the Stars (not yet), but it’s kitty representation? Sorta? It’s what hit me when I sat down to write yesterday, and hopefully now that it’s out of the way, I can get into Not in the Stars.

It’s not Death!Neil, but it’s Cat!Neil! This is the set-up for the sequel to No Ordinary Cats, basically (Cat and Mouse, unless I think of a better title).

Uhmm, think it’s pretty safe - the violence is all off-screen/in the past, mention of NIcky’s past, Aaron’s past, Andrew’s past and Neil’s past (all very vague), of someone being homophobic (potentially), and potential drug use. All vague.

*******

Andrew pulled off on the side of the road on 76 near Lake Murray, before it merged into 26 outside of Columbia and when the traffic was non-existent; he got out to stand by the passenger side while he lit a cigarette. It only took a couple minutes before the door opened and Neil emerged, fully clothed. It was the first time his boyfriend was in his human form since that morning; he preferred to spend the time in the car curled up on Andrew’s lap unless he was driving (which was rare considering his utter disregard for traffic laws and confusion every now and then on what side of the road to drive on).

“Almost there?” Neil asked as he hesitated a moment before he leaned against Andrew’s left side, a warm, welcome presence; he wore one of Andrew’s old hoodies and black skinny jeans with tears at the knees.

“About two more hours,” Andrew informed his furball of a boyfriend as he rubbed the back of Neil’s nape, which prompted a faint purr. “Hungry?”

Neil raised his right hand and tilted it back and forth through the air in a ‘so-so’ sign, which meant that he could hold out a while longer and left getting food up to Andrew. “Just want to get this over with, to be honest.”

“We’ll hit a drive-thru,” Andrew settled on before he took one more long drag on the cigarette then tossed it aside, not eager to meet his ‘dear’ family but wanting to get it ‘over with’, too. He gave Neil’s nape a gentle squeeze before he let go and returned to the driver’s side of the new Maserati, the one indulgence he’d allowed himself after the whole Malcolms debacle (that Neil had practically insisted upon after the Nissan had been totaled).

There was something to be said for Neil in cat form curled up on Andrew’s lap while he drove, a silky-furred, purring creature he could pet in a soothing, mindless manner while he sped down the highway… yet having a gorgeous redhead in the passenger seat who smiled and chatted away about various landmarks or mocked idiots who drove below the speed limit was also nice. It wasn’t that Neil didn’t like to spend time with Andrew in his human form (oh did he enjoy his time with Andrew when they were alone and he wasn’t a cat), it was just after dealing with the last of his father’s people hunting him down but finding out that his mother’s family were looking for him, Neil was being extra-careful while they relocated across the country.

Across the country to Andrew’s long-lost family.

Andrew’s long-lost family, which he’d been more than ‘happy’ to ignore the last few months, except that they now gave him and Neil a logical excuse to leave California (to leave the scene of the crime, so to speak) and set up a new life far away from everything – Andrew reconnecting with the bastards who’d abandoned him.

He didn’t give a fuck about some identical twin his druggie (and now dead) mother had kept instead of him and an unknown cousin who’d stepped in to help said twin, but it gave him an excuse to get Neil the fuck out of Oakland before these mysterious Hatfords tracked him down.

Tracked them down.

Andrew wondered if he’d given something away in his posture or scent because Neil slowly, cautiously, reached over to place his left hand over Andrew’s right one on the gear shift. “If this doesn’t work out, we can always go somewhere else,” he offered in a quiet voice.

Andrew clicked his tongue as he entwined their fingers together. “I’m not going to Toronto or wherever north you have in mind so you can frolic in the snow.”

Neil scowled even as he tightened his fingers around Andrew’s. “Canada’s a civilized country that doesn’t believe in declawing cats in some parts, why wouldn’t I want to go there?” he asked with a sarcastic tone of voice. “You’ll just love Nova Scotia once you give it a chance.”

“That sounds rather cold to me.”

“As cold as your heart, apparently.”

They spent much of the drive to Nicky Hemmick’s house bickering, which Andrew privately enjoyed (not that he’d admit it); when he did stop for food, he made sure to pick a place that had fish sandwiches, just to tease his boyfriend. Neil gave him one of his haughty ‘cat looks’ but ate the thing, never one to turn down food that was still good (or mostly good – the furry bastard had an iron stomach). By the time they’d reached Hemmick’s house, the conversation had switched to Neil needing to wear a licensed tag while in his cat form and what type of collar Andrew was going to buy him (Andrew was leaning toward spiked black leather).

“If you even think of putting a bell on me, your precious leather seats will be shredded beyond repair,” Neil threatened as they pulled into the driveway of a small house with faded yellow paint but with recently cut grass. “Uhm, is this it?”

“So the GPS says,” Andrew drawled as he put the Maserati in park. “What did you expect for two guys barely of legal age?”

“Uhm….” Neil’s fine brows drew together as he seemed to think about that. “But you were doing all right on your own.”

Andrew snorted at that as he turned off the car; he noticed that someone had flipped on the porch light and figured they’d have company soon. “All right in a one-bedroom apartment.”

Neil turned to smile at him even as he undid his seatbelt. “But I liked our apartment.”

So had Andrew; the place had grown beyond a place to crash into something more the last several months, someplace that had belonged to him and Neil.

Now they had to start over again, with two strangers.

“Follow my lead,” Andrew reminded his boyfriend in the French he’d learned from the furball as the front door opened to reveal a young man with black curly hair and a dark complexion wearing brightly colored clothes – Nicky Hemmick. “And let me do the talking.”

“What talking?” Neil murmured, yet he gave a slight nod in acknowledgement.

Nicky waved in excitement as he rushed down the porch steps toward the car, which made Andrew sigh as he reluctantly left the vehicle; Neil did the same, though he paused slightly when another figure, almost identical to Andrew, slipped out onto the porch. Aaron Minyard was dressed in baggy jeans and an oversized blue t-shirt, his blond hair cut short on the sides and left spiky on the top. Andrew only spared him a moment’s thought before he stood in front of the Maserati with Neil behind him as Nicky barely came to a stop a couple of feet away.

“Hi! You made it! We were getting worried because of the time but you made it! And wow, what style! Nice ride, cuz! Nice ride and nice cutie!” He gave a too-appreciative look at Neil while Andrew caught Aaron grimacing at the comment. “You are the boyfriend, right? You’re-“

“He’s Neil, and he’s off-limits,” Andrew warned while Neil shuffled even more behind him as if to hide, spooked as always by strangers like the half-feral creature he was. “We were slowed down by an accident outside of Asheville this morning.”

“Uhm, okay.” Nicky gave a nervous laugh as he finally got the hint and took a step back. “You still made good time, but I guess it helps to have such a nice ride.” He cast an envious look at the Maserati before he shook his head. “Where are my manners? Come on in, do you need any help with your stuff? We’ve a room ready for you and there’s food!”

“We got it,” Andrew informed the- his cousin, he reminded himself, aware of Aaron’s silent, sullen attention from the porch as he and an anxious Neil fetched their few belongings which had survived the run-in with the Malcolms from the back of the Maserati.

Neil had always traveled light and was a creature of few possessions, and had only been upset about losing his blanket from their apartment being trashed; once it was clear that he was staying with Andrew, he’d converted the contents of his binder to digital accounts. Andrew was annoyed over the loss of a pair of Doc Martens he’d broken in just right (and had taken that out on Romero Malcolm, along with the asshole daring to think he could treat Neil as a belonging), but otherwise had also learned to not grow attached to things. Once they’d decided to leave California, they’d stocked up on a few necessities and figured they’d get whatever else they needed once they hit Columbia.

Nicky clucked his tongue when he noticed the one duffel bag slung over Neil’s left shoulder and the two bags in Andrew’s hands. “That’s it? That’s all you have?”

“And an expensive as hell car,” Aaron muttered as he shuffled toward the door, his attention still focused on Andrew.

Andrew’s eyes narrowed slightly at the snide comment. “Life in the foster system taught me to keep things to a minimum,” he drawled, and felt a slight twinge of satisfaction when Aaron’s shoulders tensed at the jab and Nicky’s breath hitched.

“What about the boyfriend,” Aaron asked, his tone bitter as he glanced over his shoulder while he opened the squeaky storm door. “He a foster kid, too?”

“Vagabond, you could say,” Neil called out as he followed Andrew close enough to be his shadow, his steps just as quiet. “My mom didn’t like to stay in one place very long.”

“What about your dad?” Nicky asked, and judging from young man’s stunned expression, Neil had graced him with that smile. “Uhm, yeah, the house, let’s show you the house,” he sputtered in a rush to change the topic. “It’s not much, but it’s something!”

Perhaps, perhaps not, but it was better than a trashed apartment, a bunch of uncomfortable questions which Andrew (and Neil, especially Neil) didn’t want to answer, and a too obvious starting point for some freaky cat-shifting British mobsters with unknown intentions on the hunt for Neil. The only person who knew about Andrew’s suddenly unearthed family (other than a certain furball who was checking out their surroundings with an intensity that Andrew could feel from behind him) was Pig Higgens, who the doctors gave a twenty percent chance of regaining consciousness one day after his run-in with the ‘lovely’ Lola.

Unless these Hatfords could manage to wake the not-quite dead somehow.

They entered the house to step into a kitchen at least twenty years past due for a renovation; the floor was covered with clean but worn linoleum, the cupboards were small, metal ones painted the same pale green as the walls, and the white countertop bore a few chips in spots. Yet it was clean (except for a couple dishes in the sink) and showed signs of personality (the novelty mugs and dish towels, the curtains with smiley faces, the magnets featuring male pin-up models on the fridge), was better than most of the kitchens in the foster homes where Andrew had grown up.

“You can, uhm, just set the bags down for now,” Nicky told them with a nervous smile as he gestured to an open spot off to the side, near the doorway which led to what looked to be the living room. “I’ll give you the grand tour after something to eat? I made chicken enchiladas, I figured if you’re from California you must like Mexican food.”

They hadn’t eaten much that day, the stop for fast food aside, so Andrew nodded, which made Nicky grin with satisfaction. “Just sit down, I’ll make up your plates.”

Neil waited for Andrew to sit first and grabbed a chair at the table next to him, even scooted it closer, his pale blue eyes quick to take in everything and lean body tense as if ready to spring into motion at any moment; Andrew knew that he wanted to shift into his cat form and poke his whiskered nose into every crevice of the house until no spot was left uncovered, to ensure that the place was safe and find a hidey hole or two. Since that wasn’t possible right then, Andrew reached out to rest his right hand on his boyfriend’s nape and gave a blank look at his brother when Aaron gaped at him.

“Ah, so you like guys, too,” Aaron eventually spit out with a small moue of disgust which nearly made Nicky drop a plate over by the sink; a drop of sweat ran down the side of his face and his hazel eyes slightly glazed.

Andrew continued to gaze at his brother while he rubbed his thumb along the side of Neil’s neck. “You hiding something from me, FB?”

Neil made a faint spitting sound as he gently nudged Andrew in the side with his bony elbow. “Considering how often you threaten to neuter me? Not funny.”

“Well, there you have it,” Andrew told Aaron with a slight nod. “I seem to ‘like’ guys.”

“You like tormenting people,” Neil murmured in French as he glanced around the room through his overlong bangs, only to repeat the faint spitting noise when Andrew ran his fingers through his boyfriend’s thick hair – the wrong way. “See!”

Aaron stared at them in disbelief while a smiling Nicky returned to the table with two plates. “This is all such a surprise – I mean, first finding out about you after Aunt Tilda died, and then when you’re finally willing to talk to us, that you have a boyfriend and want to come here!” Nicky’s expression grew wistful while Aaron glanced aside as if he found the stove to be of paramount interest. “I mean… we’re so happy you’re here, but it’s… well, I’m happy to have something in common already,” he admitted as he twisted his fingers around a silver chain he wore. Then his expression turned almost lecherous. “We both have excellent taste, cuz!”

“How are we even related?” Aaron mumbled as he got up from the table to fetch a can of soda from the fridge with trembling hands, then left the room without another word. Nicky stared after him with a worried expression, while Neil gave their meals a few careful sniffs before he picked up a fork and began to eat.

Judging that to mean it was fine to do the same, Andrew started breaking up the three cheese-covered enchiladas on his plate while Nicky jumped up to fetch them something to drink as well. “Uhm, I’m sorry about that,” the young man babbled after he set the soda down in front of them. “Aaron’s been through a lot in the last few months, between Tilda’s death, finding out about you, me appearing and deciding to stick around to help him out and now you guys showing up.” He gave a nervous laugh as he toyed with the chain once more. “He’s not so much homophobic as… well, my parents and aunt are ‘old school’, I guess you could say about it.” Nicky’s dark eyes dulled with an old pain and his smile faltered when he talked about his family. “He’s got a lot to unlearn.”

Andrew frowned while he swallowed a bit of dinner (it was pretty good). “He better learn quickly.” He wasn’t going to put up with Aaron sniping at Neil, brother or not.

Nicky appeared ready to argue at that, then glanced at Neil, who had finished two of the enchiladas and pushed the remaining one around on his plate (a sure sign that he was full); when Andrew scooped it on his plate, Nicky smiled. “I’m sure he will.”

The rest of the meal was spent with Nicky babbling about the house and where everything was, his job as a waiter at a local diner, and the neighborhood. Once they were done eating, he did indeed give them a tour of the house (Aaron ignored them from his spot on the couch), culminating with the bedroom on the second floor which was ‘theirs’. “It’s not much, but the bed’s new and something tells me you two won’t mind sharing.” Nicky gave an exaggerated wink while Andrew reminded himself of all the reasons (not many) why killing his cousin right then would be bad.

Mostly they had to do with the Hatfords.

As soon as the pest left and closed the door behind him, Neil was busy examining almost every inch of the room, checking the windows and beneath the furniture (behind as well), crawling into the closet and standing on the tips of his toes to look up the walls as much as possible; Andrew sat down on the bed to watch the show. “You gonna pull up the rug, too?”

Neil gave him another haughty look. “I want to make sure it’s okay.” His hands twitched and crept toward the hem of his shirt.

“No,” Andrew said in a rush as he straightened up. “No changing, not tonight, not until I put on the new lock,” he insisted as he gave the door a potent look. “And then not outside the room until they’re both out of the house.” They’d talked about it on the drive to Columbia, the rules for Neil’s shifting in a household of strangers.

Neil made a low growl of frustration as he stalked toward the bed then curled up next to Andrew, only to relax against him once Andrew threaded his fingers through Neil’s auburn curls. “It’s… it’s so difficult. I want to make sure it’s all right, to know we’ll be all right here.”

“We will,” Andrew assured his lover as he held out his left forearm; even with the armband covered by the sleeve of his black t-shirt, Neil understood the meaning behind the gesture, as when Andrew motioned to the bag which contained the gun he’d pocketed from Romero Malcolm. “We’re prepared this time.”

“Hmm.” A slight purr escaped Neil as he rested his head against Andrew’s right shoulder. “Still, I’ll be happy when I can check everything in both forms.” He was quiet (save for the faint rumbling which was softer in his human form) for about a minute before he slowly pulled away. “About Aaron.”

Andrew frowned as his hand dropped from Neil’s hair. “Yeah? He’s a bit of an asshole.” When Neil’s upper lip twitched as if to form a smile, he gently flicked his boyfriend on the nose. “Collar with a bell,” he taunted.

“Shredded leather,” Neil shot back as he swiped his right hand over his face, then became serious once more. “He smells… odd.” At Andrew’s unspoken question, Neil’s brows drew together. “Something chemical.”

Andrew had caught the slight shake to his twin’s hands earlier, and the sweat on his forehead even as they sat in the air-conditioned kitchen. “Hmm.” Something to consider. However, right then he was tired from driving for a few days and just wanted to enjoy being on a comfortable bed with Neil stretched out next to him.

*******

#aftg #nekojitachanfics #andreil #cat!neil #neil josten #andrew minyard #nicky hemmick #aaron minyard #the band's getting back together #sorta #the monsters are getting back together #established relationship #andrew adores his furball #he also adores tormenting his furball with bad cat jokes #we're just skipping over a lot of plot here to get andrew and neil to columbia

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ravenvsfox · 5 years

Note

hello meghan my love my darling when are you going to post the next chapter of the rockband au???? you should do it on or before the 2nd for absolutely no personal reason at all. but anyway ilysm???? i hope you’re doing great now that it’s starting to warm up (seasonal depression whomst?) 💖💖

(hello ily honeyy happy happy happy birthday I’m sorry this is late)

Neil wakes up, as usual, to the pinging of a text message. He doesn’t bother to look at it. He knows what it will say; the unassuming number, the conspicuous silence whenever he writes back.

He rolls over so that the thinning comforter pulls and sticks beneath him, and he slits his eyes against the pre-dawn light.

Yesterday he’d deleted the number ’36’ from his messages and jammed his bare feet into his boots. He’d walked all the way out back to the dumpster with the cellphone cracking in his fist before his fear won out, and he’d pocketed it again.

He knows what day the zero should fall on. He’s learned to dread countdowns because he’s lived to see what comes on the other side of them, surfed the sand in an hourglass as it ebbed out from underneath him.

The monsters keep him busy, and so do the Foxes, now. They pull him in different directions, divide his attention, pique his curiosity. He’s acutely aware of how devastating it will be for him when he has to leave them, what a terrible thing he’s done by letting them close enough that they’ll notice when he’s dead.

But no one endures like the lonely people who end up at Palmetto, and he knows no one will stumble for long.

He reaches into the swath of blankets and holds the phone in his hand. It buzzes again, the nudge of the same message insisting upon being read. He feels frustration crest and fall in his chest, and then he wonders if anyone else is awake. Sometimes Andrew will get up early and make eggos, or Kevin will go for a run before the sun is up, but they’ve been inconsistent while they sloshed through the songwriting process.

He’s heard Aaron making endless pots of coffee and Nicky in the basement, practicing licks without an amp in the middle of the night. Once, Neil wandered down and knelt the wrong way on the couch to watch him play. He wasn’t quite awake, and the music twanged against Nicky’s goofy grin and made Neil smile back at him.

Now that Ausreißer’s album is edited into submission, sent off for packaging, all of their tireless work crystallizing somewhere, he’s promised Foxes that he’ll record a vocal for them. It’s strange to think of them wanting his serious voice worked through their bright sound, incongruous as salt in coffee. It’s even stranger to think of the way his voice will be broadcast after he’s dead, perpetually echoing after his disappearance.

Their album is set to be released in a week, and then the next leg of their tour will roll up to meet them, and sometime in those delicate, dwindling months, Neil will be found. He fantasizes about leaving a ripple when he’s taken, and then he thinks better of it. When his mother died, he watched the fire take her skin, and her hair, and her eyes, and he thought, death would be easier if we didn’t let ourselves matter to one another.

He lets the phone sink back into the sheets, and sits up, swinging his legs over the side of the mattress. Someone knocks twice on the door, just the edge of a knuckle. Andrew.

“It’s open,” he says.

Ever since Andrew had burst in, answering questions that Neil hadn’t even thought to ask, he’s taken to leaving his door unlocked.

Andrew opens the door and promptly crosses the room towards Neil’s dresser, not even sparing him a glance. His hair is unkempt, a riot of blond that won’t part correctly, fluffed up from sleeping on it wet.

Unlike the rest of the monsters, who’ve buckled back down into their routines, Andrew’s been acting increasingly erratic. He’s been self-medicating more often, and holding himself back from something so effectively that Neil can’t quite see what it is. Sometimes he seems to glitch out, cutting himself off mid-sentence, cagey and self-contained.

The drugs should make his tongue looser, but mostly it seems to make him say more of everything. It’s harder to find whole kernels of truth in a bowl full of bravado that’s puffed out like popcorn.

Andrew puts both hands on the knobs of Neil’s drawer and waits there. Neil nods, amused. He’s long since found a lock for the bottom drawer and secreted away his money and information. Andrew pulls the top drawer out, sawing it back and forth when the dufflebag catches. He digs briefly through Neil’s small selection of shirts, and picks out something in faded green. He throws it and some light-wash jeans in Neil’s direction.

“Up, get up. Renee’s already at the studio.”

“You have today off,” Neil says.

“Well deduced,” Andrew says. “I’m driving you.”

Neil hesitates. “I’m fine with walking.”

“Do what you want,” Andrew says flippantly. “I have an errand to run near the studio, and you can come with me or you can waste Renee’s time and mine.”

“That’s not manipulative,” Neil says sarcastically.

“I’m giving you a choice,” Andrew says. His gaze finds the burner phone nestled in Neil’s bedding, then trails up to catch his eye.

“Yes, okay. Just let me change.” He’s secretly glad to be ferried to the studio, to have earned Andrew’s passenger seat, and to not have to think about who could be tracking him on foot. Andrew crosses wordlessly to the threshold of his bedroom and closes the door behind him. He can hear him shifting his weight outside, guarding Neil’s privacy.

He dresses quickly and quietly in the clothes that Andrew picked out for him, feeling strangely flushed about the whole thing. He doesn’t want Andrew to know that he’s doing exactly what he suggested, or that it’s become a habit for him to do so.

They leave not ten minutes later, after he’s stopped in to use the bathroom and splash water on his face, teasing fingers through his hair and swigging Nicky’s mouthwash.

Andrew waits at the door, turning keys over in his hand, hair still wild, belt buckled kind of askew with the tail of it sticking out.

“Are you ready?” Neil asks tentatively. Andrew cranks open the screen door in response, and steps out into the sweet spring morning. Neil follows, watching his even gait, the full, yolky yellow of his hair.

They climb up into the cold barrel of the van. When Neil reaches for the dial to turn up the heat, Andrew catches his wrist.

“I can’t get any warmer.”

It’s around this point that Neil suspects that Andrew might already be high.

Maybe balancing the creative chaos of their album with the newness of Neil has taken more of a toll on Andrew than it has on the others. Something about working constantly, writing feelings into rhymes that you can chew and rinse and spit with has made him itchy and distracted.

“Did you take something?” Neil asks.

“Not yet,” Andrew says, reversing violently onto the street, much too broad a maneuver for such a large vehicle. He clips the opposite curb before he cracks into drive and takes off.

Neil watches his inscrutable face, the tightness around his mouth and the brightness of his eyes. He can’t tell.

“No one drives like this when they’re sober.”

“You know I do,” Andrew tells him. Neil does. He’s seen Andrew stoned, laughing like he doesn’t want to be doing it, the way people do when they’re being tickled. He’s also seen him drunk, soaked through with sweat, sticking to the seats, and he’s seen him storm-cloud sober. He always manages to make it feel like the van is on ice skates.

“Did Wymack ask you to hold my hand?”

Andrew considers this for a moment too long. “Depends on what you mean by that.”

“Babysit me,” Neil clarifies. “Drop me off and pick me up so I don’t cause another incident.”

“No,” Andrew says simply, turning left so sloppily that he almost clips a crossing pedestrian.

“Then why would you—why are you doing this?”

“Million dollar question.”

“Is there a million dollar answer?” Neil asks.

“There are no million dollar answers,” Andrew says. “There are disappointments.”

“So no one asked you to do this for me.”

Andrew looks at him. “You may have noticed that I do not do what people ask me to unless it’s in my best interest.”

“You’re not as selfish as you want people to think,” Neil says, looking away, out the window. The studio is creeping up on them, three intersections way, then two. He’s come to know the route well, imagining the bends in the road when he’s trying to fall asleep. “Defending Kevin could bring the yakuza down on you, and you’ve always known it. Just like you had no guarantee that killing Tilda for Aaron wouldn’t kill you too.”

“Most people wouldn’t give murder as an example of selflessness,” Andrew says. “Does it make you feel better, to make us into good people?”

“No, actually,” Neil says honestly. “It makes it harder to pretend I’m one of you.”

Andrew pulls up into the shaded side of the studio, and Neil breathes out heavily. The honesty comes so much easier now; after those first botched pricks to his veins the blood has just flowed and flowed.

“Here,” Andrew says, pulling his keys from the ignition and prying the ring open. He slips a little bronze key from the loop and hands it to Neil. “To our front door. Allison’s going to drive you home, and none of us are going to be there to let you in.”

Neil’s hands go cold with surprise, and he opens them both for Andrew. “Just for today?”

Andrew shrugs and drops it into his palm. “It’s yours.”

“Why?” Neil asks quietly, pressing two fingers to the ragged edges. The metal is still warm from Andrew’s hand. He thinks of his name looped into a contract, thinks of sharing a microphone with Kevin and bumping fists with Matt. He pictures himself unlocking the door to a home on a residential street and hearing their record playing somewhere inside.

“You live there,” Andrew says, bored. “It’s convenient.”

“It’s more than that,” Neil says fiercely. “You know it is.” He wishes suddenly that he could give Andrew a key to something, an access code to a vault of secrets or a missing piece that would topple Riko’s threat. Before he’d found a stolen twin and a frantic cousin, he had even less of a home than Neil did. The teeth of the key eat into his palm.

“Do not lose it,” Andrew says. “I’m not cutting you another one.”

He knows that he would never misplace this proof of the flimsiness of Andrew’s apathy, this symbol of belonging, this ticket to normalcy. He also knows that Andrew would make him another if he really needed it, and that it means something distinct to both of them.

Andrew watches him mildly. “Go inside. Find your Foxes. If they try and wash your voice out with shitty effects, walk away.”

Neil smiles a little. “You told me yesterday that you don’t care about musical integrity.”

“I don’t want to hear you complain when the track flops,” Andrew says.

“Right.” Neil pops the door open. “I’ll see you at home,” he says tentatively, and when Andrew waves him off, he closes the door between them.

He lets himself uncurl his hand to look at the key, slowly, like it’s a living thing, something he unearthed. He studies the pattern of it, the tangy metallic smell clinging to his fingers.

When he looks up again, Andrew has pulled away. He forces himself to ease the key into his pocket and lower his eyes before the van disappears around the corner.

______

He finds Renee alone in the biggest upstairs studio, sipping demurely from something that smells natural and fruity. She smiles warmly at him when he comes in, and he feels caught in the suspended moment between springing the trap and suffering the consequences.

“You’re early,” she says.

“Interesting. Someone told me I was late.” He shrugs off his jacket and drops it over a music stand.

“Interesting,” she echoes.

Neil crosses his arms. “Where are the others?”

She pauses with the rim of her travel mug at her lips, then lowers it again. “Struggling to get out the door, probably. Allison likes to take her time primping.”

“Okay,” Neil says, uncomfortable to find himself alone with the only person at Palmetto that he can’t really read. “Warm up?”

“If you want,” Renee says easily. Infuriatingly. “Or we could talk, like Andrew so obviously wants us to. I recognize his machinations when I see them.”

Neil considers the slender silver cross at her neck winking in the overhead light. She has the nimble, capable hands of a musician, and the inexplicable ability to garner the respect of someone like Andrew. It’s more than enough to warrant his curiosity.

“What could he possibly want us to talk about?” Neil asks, sitting gingerly in a stray chair across from her.

Renee shrugs. “He’s not usually forthright with details.”

Neil tilts his head and decides all at once to play along. “What is it that he likes so much about you?” he asks.

Renee takes his rudeness in stride, her mouth pursing a little with amusement. “He discovered that we have a lot in common. Rich histories of bad situations and terrible exit strategies. The only difference is that I have my faith and he has his nihilism.”

“And what exactly constitutes a bad situation, for you?”

He’s seen Andrew’s sleeves of scars, he’s seen him wake violently from dreams that never seem to be anything but nightmares, and he’s seen that shallow look in his eyes that says that he’s been hurt as badly as he can be, and everything else is just smoke after fire.

He can’t see any of that on Renee. Her faith is gentle as candlelight, her mannerisms easy as warm water, and he doesn’t like the waxy, tepid feeling of being around her.

Her smile cinches, as if yanked closed by pursestrings. “How much time do you have?”

Neil shrugs. “As much as you do.”

She pulls a hand awkwardly through the hair at her neck — as if, for a moment, she was expecting it to be longer.

Neil waits. Renee sighs. The overhead clock ticks.

She tells him methodically about her mother’s whirlwind of abusive boyfriends, the years that compounded into a deadly pressure that would only give when she took knives to it. She doesn’t hesitate when she tells him about causing her parents’ death, running with gangs until it landed her in juvie, and then into foster homes. For a moment, Neil can see something of Andrew in her face like a familial resemblance.

Renee worries a fingernail in her mouth for half a second, distracted, before she explains what Stephanie Walker did for her. The way music and faith entered her life at once, twin forks on a lightning bolt. Church choir first, and then violin lessons.

Cruelly, he resents her for having someone who desperately fought for her, for letting her mother die so quietly in jail. He also understands, for the first time, why he’s been so unsettled by Renee; she walked out of her tragedy and shut the door. Neil can never latch his while Nathan’s foot is wedged in the gap. He has the most unsettling feeling that Andrew’s door has been wrenched off of its hinges.

“So why aren’t you with Andrew?” he wonders aloud. It’s not the right thing to say, but it’s the only complete thought he’s had since she started talking. Her story reads like a high quality forgery of Andrew’s. Renee complements him just as well in friendship as she does in music.

She smiles like she was expecting this question. “Why would that matter?”

“It doesn’t,” Neil says quickly. “Matter. I don’t care. It just seemed like an obvious fit.”

“We’re kindred spirits in some ways, and I have a hunch that we’ll always be friends. But I’m not his type.”

“I can’t imagine who would be, if not you,” Neil says. He doesn’t mean for it to come out as an accusation, or a compliment, so it sits uncomfortably between the two.

“That’s a puzzle,” she says, smiling impishly.

“You know the rest of your band is placing bets on you?” he asks.

She laughs. “Sure. Gotta pass the time between sets somehow.”

“And it doesn’t bother you?”

“Not at all. Allison’s in on the joke, and that’s half the fun — bluffing together. Finding your allies.”

“In on— in on which joke?” he asks, vaguely frustrated.

Her eyes drift sideways, away from him and towards the door. She pushes up her sleeves carefully. “Andrew and I aren’t just unlikely. We’re impossible.”

“Why impossible?”

She shrugs. “I don’t date men, if I can help it.” Neil barely has time to process this before she adds, “and Andrew doesn’t date women.”

“Oh,” Neil says dumbly.

“I wouldn’t spread that around, though,” she says. “It’s not common knowledge just yet.”

“So why would you tell me?” he asks.

She smiles again. “If he suspected that you were curious about my relationship with him, and still engineered this conversation, I don’t think he would be surprised to know that I’ve told you this particular truth.”

Neil turns this thought over in his head. Andrew puts his secrets at such a remove that he completely avoids being confronted about them. Their impact disperses and melts away before he even makes an appearance.

He thinks about Andrew’s complete disinterest in the fans who throw bras at the stage and shake posters with his name on them. He doesn’t think their gender has anything to do with his apathy, but those instances still tint and change in his memory.

Renee sits good-naturedly through his bout of silence, and then she says, “I hope I helped uh— fill in the blanks a little more for you. I know I don’t really know anything about you, even though we’re all really trying to. Your bandmates though—you breathe the same air and play the same songs day after day, so they can’t help but know you a little. And I know them. So maybe we can be friends someday too.”

Neil feels a distant pang of regret that he won’t be around long enough to prove her right or wrong. He’il be pried from this life with the abruptness of a needle lifting from the middle of a record, and the truth will die, unspoken, on his wasted tongue.

He doesn’t reply, and lukewarm silence stretches between them until Allison comes teetering into the room on platform heels a minute later. She puts her iced coffee on the table and tugs affectionately on the ends of Renee’s hair, and Neil thinks, of course.

A memory surfaces—Andrew twisting dye into his hair and his eyes slipping involuntarily closed—but Dan and Matt parade into the room, arms full of store-bought water and gatorade, and whatever the thought was going to be slips away.

_____

It takes them hours to nail the recording. Neil is dissatisfied with every take, Dan keeps thinking up ideas to beef up their harmonies, and Matt messes with the controls, stripping back the distortion to ‘show off Neil’s pipes’.

They break for lunch at 1pm, and Neil finds himself drifting away from the others, wandering all the way downstairs and through the door, out to the shade where Andrew had left him that morning. He takes out a cigarette that he’d stolen from the console in the van, and the backup lighter from the bowl of keys in the foyer.

He lights up, flame chewing its way towards his fingers. He turns his back against the brunt of the cold and keeps his shoulder to the wall, hair washed forward over his eyes by the wind.

A car rolls up somewhere behind him, and then there’s a snap like a briefcase being closed.

Someone says, “Nathaniel.”

Neil whips around. His fingers tense so that the cigarette nearly snaps in half, but he clings to it and the lighter, the only weapons on his person.

There’s a sleek black SUV parked several spots away, and Riko Moriyama is leaning out of the open side door.

“It is time for us to talk,” he says.

Neil takes a step back. He can see at least two other people in the vehicle, and when he looks up, the shades are drawn over every visible window in the building.

“If you run it will only drag this process out for all of us,” Riko sighs. “We don’t offer civil discussions often. I would take this rare opportunity.”

“You have a knack for making threats sounds like kindnesses,” Neil says. “But then, most bullies do.”

“Get in the car,” Riko says. “Or your real name goes violently public.”

Neil’s teeth clench hard enough to crack. He drops the cigarette on the pavement, and walks forward two steps. “Can I say goodbye?”

“Don’t be melodramatic,” Riko says, and his upper body disappears into the car. Neil follows him in, trying to conceal the way his legs have gone stiff with terror.

In the cab of the car it is just Riko across the expanse of cool leather in the back, and two older men whom Neil doesn’t recognize in the driver’s and passenger’s seats. They peel smoothly out of the parking lot and onto the street.

“They’re expecting me back,” Neil says. One of the men in the front passes Riko an ornate black cane, and he levels it in Neil’s direction.

“I don’t want to hear anything from you until I have finished speaking. In fact, do not talk unless you have been prompted to. I already know everything about you that I care to.”

“I’m at a disadvantage then, since all I know about you is that you are a sadomasochist with the bravado of a much more interesting person.”

Riko raps the cane into the side of Neil’s head with such force that his teeth clatter together and his ears ring.

“I guess pleasantries are over, then,” Neil says.

Riko regards him with distaste. “In another life, perhaps, you could have been an asset. Your father’s reputation precedes him. We might have recruited him if he were as easy to pin down as his son seems to be.”

“What would the yakuza need with another butcher?”

Riko raps him on the hands this time, a warning. “Don’t. Speak.” He watches the redness bloom immediately on Neil’s knuckles with flushed pleasure.

“It would be easy enough to send word to his colleagues and have them at Mr. Hemmick’s front door in a day or two, but I’m not sure that you wouldn’t stir up a mess in the meantime. The publicity from your death could bolster Ausreißer’s success. The disappointment from hearing that you’ve left voluntarily is a boycott and a think-piece away from cutting them off at the knees.”

“You want me to leave the band,” Neil says incredulously.

“Of course,” Riko says.

“I’m aware that you have sway in many circles, but not here,” Neil says. “The people in this studio are inside each other’s pockets more than they’ll ever be in yours. They won’t accept this. They won’t.”

“Your interpersonal connections mean nothing to me. Kevin belongs on my team. Andrew and his monsters have been a nuisance, but you are an insufferable offence.”

“So you’re removing your biggest threat?”

Riko’s lip curls. “I found vermin in my house, and I will return it to the sewers where it was born unless it gets out of my way.”

“Even if you did scare me with your posturing, my hands are tied,” Neil says. “I have a contract. He—they won’t let me go.”

Riko’s expression shifts, sand dunes moving in the blowing wind. “You think the drummer will protect you?”

Neil doesn’t reply. He doesn’t want to betray Andrew’s position. He’s like a pipe bomb in a mailbox or a chess piece in check.

“Oh, Neil. He couldn’t even protect himself.”

“What,” Neil says flatly.

Riko waves the cane in a relaxed circle, like he’s deciding where it should land. “I would have thought that someone with your trust issues would have done better research on the people around you.”

Neil stays silent.

“Andrew was a foster kid, yes? It’s chaotic for kids in those crowded houses. So many mouths to feed. Or fuck, in Andrew’s case. I’m sure it was traumatic for little Andrew to be passed around like that, from bed to bed. No wonder he’s so hot and bothered over our intervention. He knows what it looks like when someone’s overpowering him.“

“You’re lying,” Neil says, thunderstruck.

“Mention Drake Spears to your little bodyguard and see how quickly he loses it. Or better yet, just look up the Minyard trial. Andrew can drink the past away, but he can’t erase it from the news. Drake was a fascinating man. Not that rapists in uniform aren’t common, but to break someone like Andrew in I’m sure takes a little extra finesse.”

Neil lunges for him, and Riko counters a beat too late with the cane. Neil clips his eye, and the cane makes contact with his throat a second later. He splutters and reaches, trying to get a hand around Riko’s throat.

“That’s not true,” Neil’s saying, over and over. He twists the flesh on Riko’s neck, scrabbling at his clavicles, physically pressing him to be honest.

Riko looks annoyed, but not deterred as he holds Neil’s hands at bay. “How did you think he got to be a monster, exactly?”

It knocks the breath out of him. His grip sags. He’s aware suddenly that the car has stopped moving, and that anyone in it could kill and dispose of him without so much as interrupting their day.

“You’re not a monster because of what other people do to you,” Neil says, seething.

“Nonetheless. Leave the band, or one of the other members goes missing,” Riko offers. “I don’t care which, but Andrew is so nicely broken in already.”

Neil’s hand darts for him again, and Riko catches it, bored, cracking it back at the wrist. The door pops open at Neil’s back, and he’s hooked halfway out of the car by one of the other men, forearm screaming with pressure where Riko has him clamped in his fist.

Cool sweat breaks out on his brow from the pain as Riko leans down to face level, nails piercing his skin.

Before he can speak, Neil chokes, “you can’t set Andrew up. I won’t let you.”

Riko looks suddenly fatigued, and he lets Neil go so that he rocks back onto the sidewalk. “The more you underestimate my family’s clout. the more people suffer by our hands. You must understand that I am the only thing keeping any of you alive right now.”

“You’re wrong,” Neil says.

“You’re likely to be dead by summer, Nathaniel,” he says evenly. His eyes are black in the shadow of the open car door.

“That’s not my name.”

“If you want to lose allies and make new enemies in the meantime, it is your choice. But I don’t want to see you on stage again.” He shuts the door quietly between them, and Neil stumbles back several steps, momentum almost overbalancing him.

He watches the SUV depart and thinks of all of the leverage they have over him, how laser focused their will is to scrape Ausreißer off the charts and clip Neil’s loose end. His defiance had almost no affect on them at all. He had rubbed up against Riko’s temper, sure, but it was no harder than squeezing the trigger on a gun that’s already in your hand.

He squints distractedly at the studio several metres behind him, the bustle of midday spilling through the streets. The pleasant murmur of a city heralding in the end of Neil’s life.

He keeps thinking, if Riko knew about Neil’s past, he had no reason to lie about Andrew’s.

He keeps thinking, how could he be stupid enough to imagine that he had the biggest secret in the band — like Andrew wasn’t writing him a roadmap with songs, like his past wasn’t melted down and repurposed into lyrics.

He thinks, the target on his back just swallowed everything and everyone around him.

He thinks, I have to talk to Andrew.

______

He can’t bring himself to go back inside and excuse himself from rehearsal. There’s no explanation that they would accept without also understanding that he’s dragged them all down into danger with him.

He let them believe that his problems weren’t active case files and bleeding wounds. He pretended that he could broadcast his voice and maybe the music would be so sacred that no one would come looking for him.

Neil takes the bus home, scraping together spare change from his pocket. He finds his key while he searches, and his heart sinks. When he’s slouched in an aisle seat, he looks down at the shape of his hands, the grit under his nails, the old slice across his pinky, and the key nested in the intersecting lines of his palm.

Rain starts to patter against the window, blurring the colourful shapes of people outside who were hopeful enough to dress for much warmer weather.

He whirs with anxiety, searching for an out so desperately that it becomes a physical act, a shaking and a sweating. He should leave the city while he can still bear to. He owes it to everyone at Palmetto studio to take such a volatile element out of their equation.

It used to be his favourite solution when things turned ugly, dumping his life and name and letting a car carry him to a new one. The ritual of dying his hair and popping in lenses always felt charged with possibility.

Now he can’t let himself consider it. The idea of never seeing Dan or Wymack or Nicky or any of them again, of abandoning his deal with Andrew and dropping his new key into the nearest storm drain — it’s different now.

They were the first people to squint past his face-paint and recognize him as a lost kid. They gave him a key and a home with a locking door and passed him a microphone with the name he chose taped onto the handle. They gave him all sorts of contracts, but most important was the unspoken one that, for a minute, looked like friendship.

He gets back to the house two hours ahead of schedule, but it still feels too late. He thinks about letting himself in but suddenly can’t stand the thought of walking into the home that he’s about to ruin.

He knocks and steps down onto the second stair to give himself some distance. After a minute, someone stirs inside, and then there’s a thumping of footsteps, and the whine of the screen door.

Andrew stares down at him through the mist of rainwater.

“You have a key, don’t you?” he says. Neil looks up into his wan face, studying the way he’s holding himself up with the door, washed out in the bleak light from outside. Neil climbs warily to the top step, feeling a lived-in sadness settle into him.

“You’ve been drinking.”

“Got it in one,” Andrew says, smiling with one half of his face. “So very very perceptive all the time.”

It’s such bad timing that Neil laughs, then holds a trembling hand over his mouth. “I can’t have this conversation when you’re like this,” he says.

“Which conversation is that?” Andrew asks sharply. “Do be precise.”

“I need you sober,” Neil insists.

“You don’t need me anything,” he sneers.

“I’m making you coffee. And then we have to talk about the Moriyamas.”

Andrew looks immediately more alert. His hand slips from the door, and Neil just barely catches it before it closes on him.

“Why are you back early?” Andrew asks slowly. Neil closes his eyes.

“I don’t know. I don’t know why I came.” He should be hitchhiking over state lines. He should be in someone’s truck bed with the rain in his hair. He should be using the cold to forget what warmth feels like.

“Not a good enough answer,” Andrew says. He steps backwards into the entryway and turns, calling “keep trying” over his shoulder. Neil follows him solemnly, nudging the doors closed at his back. He steps out of his shoes while Andrew disappears silently into the kitchen.

When he rounds the corner, Andrew’s sitting on top of the dinky round table by the window, legs crossed beneath him. His cigarettes and lighter are at his side, and a bottle of Smirnoff is open on the chair behind him.

Neil moves towards the coffee maker, but Andrew snaps his fingers at him.

“Tell me why you left recording, no non-answers s’il vous plait,” he says. Neil hesitates, then climbs quietly up onto the table across from him, boosting himself with one socked foot on the cushion of a chair. Andrew looks surprised and red-eyed as Neil settles in, knee to knee.

He swallows thickly. “I have to leave.”

“You just got here,” Andrew points out.

“I have to leave the band,” Neil explains.

He waves this off. “Oh, no, I’m pretty sure we have our contractual claws in you, Neil Josten.”

“There are people, more now than ever, who have… more deadly claws in me.”

Andrew taps his lower lip thoughtfully. “Is it claws though, or is it talons? I know how the Moriyamas enjoy their raven motifs.”

“Riko’s threatening the band.”

“What’s new?” Andrew says.

Everything, he wants to say. Everything’s reaching a new and chilling level of dangerous.

“He stopped me on the street,” Neil says quietly. There’s a hand on his jaw immediately, turning his face towards the overhead light fixture. Neil lets his eyes unfocus in the harsh light. Andrew puts a finger to the bruise from the cane Riko was borrowing. “It’s fine.”

“You will be fine up until the moment that you’re dead,” Andrew spits, one hand moving to inspect Neil’s tender wrist.

“I’m fine if I can walk away,” Neil argues. “I’m okay if I stand up and move on, and that’s what I need to do here.”

“You took some heat from Riko and now you want to run away,” Andrew extrapolates. “Which is great, except you told me you weren’t ready to give up our deal.”

“I kind of assumed all deals were null and void in the event of a deadly threat.”

Andrew uses his leverage on Neil’s chin to tilt their faces close together. “I,” he says, “am a deadly threat. Riko is a little boy playing with his father’s knives.”

Neil flinches at his phrasing, shaking his head. “He has connections I can’t begin to understand. He told me things about my past, about yours—“

“Did he?” Andrew interrupts. His voice is the kind of inescapable cold that turns all of your exposed skin red, then blue, then black.

Neil tries to turn his face out of Andrew’s grip, and the pressure on him is immediately lifted. “Who’s Drake Spears?” he asks.

“Oh,” Andrew breathes, and then he laughs. “A dead man. Aaron’s gift to me.”

Neil’s face goes lax with surprise. “He killed him?”

“We like to keep our violence in the family,” Andrew says, smiling again, joyless. “Or rather, they did. We ended the cycle.”

“So Riko wasn’t lying about what happened to you,” Neil says slowly.

Andrew takes his cigarettes in one hand and shuffles them against the tabletop for a long moment. “Unlike you, Riko doesn’t always think that lying is in his best interest. It’s not one of his favourite sins.”

Neil stews in this revelation for a moment, trying to outlast the directionless rage streaking through him.

“I wish I’d known, before.”

“Why? So we could waste our time excusing ourselves in miserable circles for things that other people did to us? So I could explain to you what all of my scars mean and make you feel better about yours?”

“So I could have killed him myself,” Neil says fiercely. Andrew eyes him steadily. The rain picks up outside, and Neil can see it coming in through the window cracked over the sink.

“Is that supposed to impress me?”

“It’s not supposed to mean anything to you. It’s just the truth,” Neil says. “If I can’t kill my own demons, I—would’ve liked to kill yours.”

“Much too late for that,” Andrew shrugs. “Not too late to stay here with us. If Riko threatens you out of the band on his first try, then you’re not as tenacious as I thought you were.”

“I’m afraid,” Neil says, “that someone else will suffer for my pride.”

“It’s not pride, it’s trust,” Andrew says, and then his face clouds over like he’s sobering up, remembering himself. “In case you’ve forgotten since I reminded you two minutes ago, we have a deal. Protection for participation.”

He shouldn’t believe that this volatile, five foot nothing stage performer could rebuff the yakuza, but he does. He can’t look at Andrew’s eery, wavering certainty without wanting badly to trust him.

“Right,” Neil agrees, feeling hours-old tension ebb out of his shoulders. He came here, he realizes, knowing that Andrew would give him a reason to stay. “I’ll wait it out. But you have to promise me that you’ll watch your back.”

Andrew shakes his head and pulls a cigarette from the pack. “He can’t touch me,” he says, flicking his lighter open. His eyes are hazy as he props one hand up and smokes on autopilot. Neil’s not certain that he knows for sure who Andrew’s talking about anymore.

The tour isn’t for another couple of weeks. He can keep his face out of the news and slog his way through all of this new information, maybe turn over a solution somewhere in the muck. At the very least, he can spend these final weeks pretending that he’s not afraid of the dark at the end of the tunnel where the rest of his life should be.

______

It’s the bark, not the bite

the prelude to a fight

the gleam of bared teeth

when they catch the low light

the revving beneath

the thought that you might

with the last of your breath

get our ending right

Neil turns the demo down on the car radio, embarrassed, and Dan grins at him from the driver’s seat.

“That’s a sexy little lyric.”

“Shut up,” he says, rolling his eyes.

“I like the weird synth in the background, that’s baller,” Matt pipes up from behind them.

Nicky groans. “Don’t tell Kevin that, he thought he was a fucking genius for stringing together six notes by ear.”

Dan laughs brightly, easing onto the freeway that’ll carry them out of the city.

Their album was released at midnight, and they’ve spent the morning watching the charts and listening to Nicky read out reviews as they were published, waiting to see if they’d be rejected or absorbed into the musical bloodstream.

It was exhilarating to see the finished product saturating their little corner of music culture, to watch people forming opinions, and to pop up in playlists and news feeds. Someone had already posted a guitar cover of one of their tracks before noon.

Neil watched the locked door of their house and hoped furiously that Riko wouldn’t take this new music as defiance and show up to drag him away. Foxes had shown up instead, with congratulatory champagne and a novelty card for Neil that read “baby’s first album”.

Both Ausreißer and Foxes were scheduled to take the weekend off before they’re all launched into promotions and tours on opposite coasts. Dan had suggested a Palmetto-wide retreat to lake Jocassee, and Neil had jumped at the opportunity to dodge the pressure from the Moriyamas and corral everyone out of harms way.

“This is going to be such a rowdy time,” Nicky says, chin tucked onto the shoulder of Neil’s chair. “I can’t believe you convinced Andrew to come.”

“Yeah, what the hell,” Matt says. “How did you manage that?”

Neil shrugs. “I asked.”

“Oh, you asked,” Dan says, nose scrunching under her sunglasses. “Do you know how long we were playing nice with the monsters before you showed up?”

“Neil’s got that magic touch,” Nicky says.

“Just how magic a touch are we talking?” Matt asks slyly.

“Don’t,” Neil warns.

“He won’t let us bet on them,” Nicky complains. “He’s just like, not fun.”

“It’s bewildering to me that you clowns are wasting your time when we all know who Andrew’s into,” Dan says. She keeps talking, and Neil hears Renee’s name, but he’s uninterested in the direction the conversation is taking. He looks distractedly out at the sun-split highway.

He thinks of how quiet the other car must be, stacked with supplies, caught in that constant vortex of tension between the twins, plus Kevin with his headphones on as always. Or what Renee and Allison talk about, tucked into Allison’s baby-pink convertible, the wind catching their bleached hair.

“Damn, are they passing us already?” Nicky asks, and Neil looks back in time to notice the massive shape of the van swerving past on their left. He catches the tail end of Aaron flipping them off, and Nicky laughs, craning into the front to return the gesture.

“They left like half an hour later than us, what the hell,” Dan says, revving a little, reluctant to fall behind.

“Andrew’s driving,” Neil says. The van jolts awkwardly into the lane in front of them, and Neil smiles as it streaks ahead. “They’ll beat us by a mile.”

“If they don’t crash first,” Dan grumbles.

“Look at it this way — if it’s not that, it’ll just be some other disaster,” Matt says. “That’s what you sign up for with the monsters.”

“You say disaster, I say a great time. Am I right, Neil?” Nicky asks, flicking at his shoulder to get his attention.

“I’m staying impartial.”

“You literally can not fool me,” Nicky says, affronted. “You love having an opinion.”

“He doesn’t want to incur your wrath by agreeing with us,” Dan teases, winking sideways at him.

“My wrath? This is the guy who taunted Riko Moriyama on sight, and you think he’s afraid of me?”

“We all are,” Matt says solemnly, and Nicky socks him in the arm.

They keep bickering, but Neil mostly tunes them out. A song that he helped write is still playing at half volume from the sound system, rounded out by Kevin’s deft bass solo. The car is warm enough to lull him to sleep, and he can see the rest of the Ausreißer crew fading into the scorched horizon ahead.

______

They arrive in staggered bursts to a spacious cabin, swallowed in overhanging trees on all sides. It’s two stories high, with a broad, wrap-around porch — courtesy of Allison’s string-pulling.

The twins are sharing a bench when they pull up, talking seriously, and Neil has to squint to make sure he’s seeing them correctly. Three hours in a car together and against all odds they’re still sharing space.

No one bothered to unpack the van, so Neil keeps himself busy by hopping into the back and pulling out duffel bags. Allison and Renee arrive soon after with coolers full of booze and perishables, and by the time everything has been lugged inside, there are three guitars propped up and abandoned in the foyer.

It’s surprisingly easy, once all of them are talking at once. Kevin drinks enough to stay loose, which always seems to relax Aaron in turn. The girls sit on the floor of the dining room while Matt unpacks groceries. Nicky chatters about getting everyone hammered so they can play “sweet, genre-fucked music” together. Someone lights a joint, and it makes the rounds.

Neil hops up on the kitchen counter, and Andrew leans against the fridge beside him.

Neil relaxes at the sight of him. “Aren’t you glad you came?” he asks, a little louder than he intended. He can sense the others pretending not to eavesdrop, their conversation dropping and then starting back up again, overly bright.

“Remains to be seen,” he replies.

“You were talking to Aaron,” he says. Andrew stares passively back at him. “I’ve never seen you speak one on one like that.”

“It was a long drive.”

Neil hesitates. “Did you tell him—“

“Andrew,” Nicky calls. “I’m comin’ through with groceries, can you free up the fridge?”

Andrew moves wordlessly aside, and then all the way out of the room. Neil watches him go with a dull sort of disappointment. For someone who is so frequently difficult to parse, Andrew is such an obvious font of honesty and clarity that speaking to him sometimes feels like an antidote to his own lies.

“Come on, Neil,” Renee trills. “We’re talking about the collab.”

“I want to hear the track,” Kevin says.

“You want to critique it,” Neil counters, wandering closer.

Dan throws a hand out towards him. “Exactly!”

“I think I have a right to know how you’re utilizing my lead singer.”

“Oh jesus, Kevin’s going to start talking about music theory, isn’t he?” Allison says. “I’m gonna need to drink so much more.” Dan cracks up, passing her a mickey of spiced rum.

“We all do,” she agrees, raising a full bottle in toast. “It’s a Palmetto tradition. Work hard, play hard.”

“Thanks coach,” Matt snorts.

“C’mon, bring it in.” They all tilt bottles together, some of them unopened, eyes rolling. Neil can see Andrew watching from the next room, and when they drink, he takes a drag from his cigarette.

______

Neil drinks too much.

He’d half planned on it, but his stomach is empty and his anxiety is just barely held down by sobriety, and it all gets to him so fast. His elbows keep chafing against other people’s, and his fear keeps blinking back at him from between branches outside and through passing headlights and in his own reflection.

They’re all seven or eight drinks deep when someone brings out a guitar, and then it’s a chaos of bad singing that coasts into real singing, someone upstairs laughing hysterically with someone else, someone on the porch with a bong.

He likes how it feels, the old safety of staying numb, like the back of the bars where nobody knows you, so you don’t have to bother to know yourself, and there’s nothing to be afraid of except the throb of a hangover at the end of the night.

But it’s different, now. Dan gets in close and thumbs both his cheeks, and Allison puts little, almost undetectable braids in his hair. Matt tells him how happy he is that they’re all together over and over again. The longer Neil looks over at Andrew the more he’s aware that he’s looking for something that isn’t there.

Nicky looks solemnly into his eyes in the bathroom mirror and asks to see his tongue piercing. There’s a strange moment, when he opens his mouth, where he thinks Nicky might grab him by the tongue.

“Come here, come here, come here,” someone says, and Neil looks at Allison’s reflection where she’s hanging in through the doorway. “Convince Andrew to play us something.”

“I can’t,” Neil’s mouth says. He tries again. “He won’t.”

“He does whatever you want,” Nicky says, looking much too serious.

“You—no,” Neil says. “You guys ask for whatever you want. I ask what he wants.“

“Whatever,” Allison says. “Semantics. Come out here.”

Nicky puts his hands briefly on Neil’s hips to sidle by into the hallway, and he and Allison chatter all the way back to the sitting room. Neil looks blearily at his reflection. His hair is so long now, it softens the angles of his father’s features. Makes his eyes look less painfully blue. He blinks, and breathes, and tries to think about nothing.

His feet carry him out to the rest of them. Dan cheers when he enters the room. She’s so flushed, and even though she’s sitting, Matt’s holding her steady.

Andrew’s sitting in an armchair by the fireplace, his posture relaxed, lips wet, drink in hand. Neil walks as steadily as he can to his side. The room goes nearly silent.

“Will you play something?”

Andrew looks up at him flatly. “Why would I?”

“I want to hear you sing,” Neil admits.

“And?” He takes a sip of his drink.

Neil shrugs. “I’ll trade you something for it,” he offers.

After a long moment, Andrew says “I’m not interested.”

“I know you’ve been writing new lyrics,” he says softly.

Andrew watches him for a minute, then nods towards the place where his notebook is sitting unassumingly on the coffee table. “Then sing them yourself.”

Neil considers this. He retrieves the book and holds it in both hands, giving Andrew time to back out. He doesn’t, and someone breathes out behind him.

“Okay,” Neil says. “Fine.”

He flips to the centre and finds blank pages, then beyond that, two that are flush with words and annotations. There are chords written out for four more pages after that, and then just scores and scores of melodies and poems and the lucky places where they meet.

He thumbs through songs he recognizes and new, title-less ones, still standing, everyone watching his search with interest.

He comes to a page near the back with the title burn this, and it reads:

Hands off never used to be a bad thing

It would be better if I never heard you sing

I know it’s winter, you can’t tell me that it’s spring

I want you without wanting anything.

Then a few lines are scratched out before the next fragmented stanza. Neil looks up into Andrew’s face, and he’s already staring back, eyebrows hitched so, so slightly together.

Neil crosses the room, and wrestles a little portable synth out of his bag, carrying it over to the couch. Some of the members of Foxes ‘ooh’ dramatically.

He nudges it on, cracks his knuckles, and toggles a couple of switches. He holds the book open on his knee, and starts to arpeggiate the suggested chords that Andrew’s written above each line.

He sings, improvising the melody, those first four lines and then —

It was too easy not to feel

when the drugs still told me you weren’t real

I always knew you were here to steal

We started this, me back on my heels

and you—beneath me.

There’s more, but Neil can’t bring himself to keep singing. His throat sticks and his vision goes spotty.

“Kind of a bummer,” Matt says.

“I think it’s pretty,” Dan says softly.

“Hard to believe the monster wrote it,” Allison says.

“You must know by now that we can write good lyrics,” Kevin says, irritated.

Aaron says something, but Neil’s still stuck staring down at the words on the page. Something is angrily crossed out in the second stanza, just completely struck through, unreadable. He feels remarkably sober all of the sudden, and he trudges to the precipice of an understanding so large that he has to step away from it, or he’s sure it’ll call him down to his death.

Andrew stands, somewhere in the field of Neil’s vision, and lets himself out onto the porch.

“Whoops,” Matt says, when the door closes behind him. “Do you think we took it too far?”

“He offered the book up,” Allison points out.

“To me,” Neil says.

“Well, yeah, but I think ‘sing them yourself’ was pretty self explanatory,” Dan says, missing the point. “So are we supposed to know who that was about?”

Neil stands, and the synth slides off his lap and into the crease between couch cushions. He walks to the kitchen and pours himself a cup of water, downing it all. Then another. He tries to remember exactly what the lyrics said and finds himself less and less certain.

For the second time that week, he thinks, knees knocking with terrible anticipation, I have to talk to Andrew.

______

He finds him curled on the bench outside, drenched in the yellow light from an exposed bulb, still nursing the same whiskey from before. He looks up with what Neil now recognizes as carefully tailored interest.

“Why does Nicky think that you’ll do whatever I ask?” he asks, voice wavering.

Andrew taps his fingers erratically on the rim of his glass. “Presumably because your track record has been good so far.”

“That doesn’t really answer my question.”

Andrew’s lips purse. “Then ask a new question.”

“Fine. I’ll play,” Neil says. “What was that song about?”

“It was about wanting something that I can’t have.”

“I didn’t think you wanted anything.”

“No,” Andrew agrees. “Except maybe to see if you sound as good in bed as you do on stage.”

Neil sits down, hard. He’s half-surprised when gravity still works, and the wicker footstool catches his weight.

“You like me,” he says weakly.

“Not really,” Andrew replies, expressionless. “Want and dislike are not mutually exclusive.”

Neil dry swallows a couple of times. He thinks of their eyes connecting darkly in a bathroom mirror, Andrew’s fingertips gliding over his scars, the passenger seat left open for him, his mouth and then Andrew’s on the same flask. He thinks of lyrics on their own album about running and lying and wanting without taking, and he remembers the deal that has kept him upright and safe and sane for so long.

Andrew’s amused interest when he’s high, the cryptic things that Nicky said to him on the night they met, the conversations where he gives away his secrets but doesn’t feel like he’s losing anything, it all completely restructures in his head.

He’s dizzy, still drunk, one foot in the reality where he was little more than a hindrance to Andrew, and the other in one where he writes songs about how much he wants him.

“You didn’t tell me,” Neil says dumbly. “You never said.”

Andrew shrugs. “There’s no point,” he says. “I’ve thought about it. Written about it. But I know better.”

“Okay,” Neil says, even though it’s not. Andrew shifts in his seat, and Neil watches his broad hands, his shiny lower lip, his squared shoulders. The night chirps and smokes with faraway firewood, pitch dark beyond the line separating the porch from the wilderness. Andrew might be the brightest thing for a thousand miles. “Okay,” he says again, but this time it splits in his mouth, and he reaches for Andrew’s face.

#the boys are back in town and emotionally? they're doin bad #aftg #the foxhole court #andreil #tfc fanfic #rockband au #abuse tw #violence tw #drugs tw #this one is a bit of a rollercoaster tbh #sorry if this is kinda poorly edited I've been at this for hours and gd hours #mine #philosophium #ask #long post

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jsteneil · 6 years

Text

for no reason, part 2 of the model au

Neil picks up Andrew’s camera once.

The weight of it is surprising. Andrew spends his days carrying it around and brandishing it in all sorts of positions; no wonder he’s so muscled.

Neil himself works out, but he’s pretty sure Andrew can carry him around without breaking a sweat. The thought is thrilling; it makes Neil want to check the theory, rather than stand out of arms reach.

He’s curious about the camera, though, wanting to know the lens through which Andrew sees the world. It’s muggy and little dirty, a fingerprint right on the glass plane. It’s his, probably, or a mistake Andrew didn’t take time to correct.

He aims the camera at King, laying about on the window sill, and hovers a finger over the button. He knows the gesture intimately by now, both from a professional setting—Andrew is naturally his go-to photographer, these days—and their personal lives.

Still, he doesn’t press down. Being this side of the camera gives him a strangely voyeuristic feeling.

“You can take the shot,” Andrew says from behind him.

Neil swirls around, camera still raised. Andrew looks strangely flattened and dark; he must not have set the right settings.

“It’s a digital camera,” Andrew continues. “I can always erase the picture if it’s too horrible.”

“Thank you for your faith in me,” Neil says, but he lowers the camera when Andrew approaches.

He welcomes him with a kiss, then another. Andrew’s hands join Neil’s on the camera, and he slides the strap around Neil’s neck.

“Not trusting me to keep your equipment safe?” Neil says.

“I’m going to put my hands on your hips,” Andrew warns.

As if Neil is known for his lack of self-control as soon as Andrew touches him. Well, he might be right.

His hands are two warm pressure points against Neil’s hips as he swivels him right back toward King.

“There,” he says, “lifting the camera to Neil’s face from behind. “Frame it so King’s the focal point.”

“In the middle?”

“Not necessarily.”

Neil moves around, playing with the zoom until he’s feeling sure enough of himself. He has no experience in photography, but he’s been the subject of enough pictures that he can be relatively certain it’s a good shot by the time he snaps the picture.

“Let me see?” Andrew asks when Neil doesn’t lower the camera.

“Mmmm,” Neil pretends to think. “What’s the incentive?”

Andrew pivots him again. Face to face like that, Neil has to let go of the device not to hit Andrew in the head with it; they’re standing close enough that Neil can put his socked toes on top of Andrew’s heavy boots.

“I think it came out well,” Neil says, displaying the picture on the camera’s screen.

That part he knows: he’s seen Andrew do it more than enough times. The roles are usually reversed, though, and the thought of getting Andrew to appear in a picture instead stirs something like want in Neil.

Andrew hums his approval, zooming in with a side button. “Now you can stop your modeling career and embrace the invisibility of the photographer.”

“I don’t think they’re invisible,” Neil says. “You aren’t. There’s you all over these pictures, even if you say you don’t care.”

Andrew’s hand tenses around the camera, then he lets go. The heavy object bumps against Neil’s chest, but he barely registers it. Andrew’s eyes have darkened; a deep intensity Neil has only seen a few times. Andrew raises his hand to Neil’s hair, hovering for a second, waiting for approval, then he brings him down.

Their next kiss is as passionate as their first were sweet. Neil reaches for Andrew, directing his hands to his hair without guidance. He lowers them to his neck when Andrew allows him with an impatient tug, splaying his fingers over Andrew’s pulse point. The rhythm under his fingertips beats too fast; Neil breaks the kiss, breathing heavily, and starts again down Andrew’s neck.

It goes faster again.

He hides a smile against Andrew’s face and gets a tug at his hair in return.

The camera bumps into Neil’s arm for the third time when Andrew guides them to the wall, until Neil’s back hits the wall.

“The cam—” he starts, taking one hand off Andrew’s hair.

Andrew makes an impatient noise and slips the strap over Neil’s head.

“Careful,” Neil gasps when Andrew puts it down, hard, on the kitchen counter.

“I’ll buy a new one.”

“But my picture,” Neil says.

Andrew bites at his jaw, which shuts him up. He draws Neil closer, one arm sliding around his waist, and kisses him hard. With the other, he softens the blow when Neil lets his head back, hitting the wall.

“Bedroom?” Neil asks when they’re finding their breath again.

“There is a perfectly good portion of wall here.”

“Not in front of the cats.”

The glare Andrew sends King and Sir is withering, but he lets himself be led down the corridor easily enough.

Andrew likes to sit up in bed afterward. He doesn’t really lie down for sleep, except very rarely, in the dark hours of the morning, when sex is a sleepy thing and neither of them is ready to confront the new tenderness they bring into it. Most of the time, he sits up in bed, leaning against the window they pushed the bed under.

Sometimes he even smokes, which Neil has been informed is a cliché thing to do.

This time he’s just looking outside the window. The sun set a few minutes ago: Neil can still picture the halo of gold around Andrew’s head as he moved above him, the bleeding rays of light setting on the sheets, across Andrew’s back.

Andrew in the sunlight is a beautiful thing, golden and precious with the price of the ephemeral. Neil curls up in bed, separated from him by a few inches, like they both prefer in the aftermath. Sometimes they touch, but mostly they leave each other time and room to breathe down from the high. More and more often, though, Andrew allows touch easily after a short moment. That, too, is constantly evolving.

Neil drops his hand on the sheets halfway through his chest and Andrew’s thigh, and watches Andrew become aware of it.

It’s a choice, a silent question neither of them tires of asking.

One day it might become optional, but Neil doesn’t think they’ll ever stop asking: there is too much beauty in the straight deliverance of the answer, the certainty and the trust.

The sky is pale and blue around Andrew’s head, crowning him with soft pink clouds stretching across the opening.

He looks like a painting, Neil thinks, and he feels almost drunk on the sight.

Moving is almost physically painful. Shattering the moment would be worse than disappointment; luckily Andrew remains silent. He follows Neil’s reach for his phone on the nightstand with his eyes, but he doesn’t move aside from that.

Neil rolls on his back, both hands occupied on the phone. He doesn’t warn Andrew that he’s taking the picture, but the sound of the shutter resounds bright and clear in the silent bedroom.

Andrew is a dark silhouette against the light, the blond of his hair fading into the light. He’s supple and built like an athlete: Neil can’t get enough of the definition of his muscles against his arms, barely visible with the trick of the light.

It’s okay: he knows they’re here, knows their strength and the sensitive points that make Andrew clench his jaw when Neil finds them with his lips.

He drops the phone on the other side of the bed. By the time he rolls over in his previous position, loose-limbed and satisfied, he finds Andrew’s hand, extended across the sheets right where Neil’s was a few minutes ago.

Neil takes it and closes his eyes, silently grateful.

#aftg #all for the game #tfc #the foxhole court #andreil #i guess you could read this as canon except for like #two sentences #my writing #i'm writing so much these days!!!#what the actual fuck!!!#model au

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stillbeautifulstilldean · 6 years

Text

Here’s my @aftgexchange gift for @eerielake ! Thanks to @palmettofoxden and @henriettafoxes for helping me out <3

You asked for Andrew and Neil’s first Christmas in their own apartment so this is pure fluff!

also on ao3

The Christmas cookies Renee had baked and sent over a few days ago sat on the counter, spreading a sweet scent through their apartment. How Andrew had managed not to eat them at one go, he had no idea.

Snow was falling, causing chaos on the streets outside, but a cozy atmosphere inside. Neil was sitting at the table, staring outside. It was a mystery for Andrew what was going inside of that crazy mind of his, he’d stopped trying to understand a long time ago. Partly because he liked not knowing, Neil was an enigma wrapped in auburn hair and faded jeans.

It was a quiet, soft day. It was still early but winter weather draped a gray, cloudy atmosphere over the city. They sat in companionable silence and Andrew wasn’t interested in what was happening outside, so he focused all his attention on Neil. Not like he did anything else these days. Neil had pulled the collar of his sweater up over his nose and kept it there with his hands so that only his piercing blue eyes were peeking out. The sweater wasn’t really a Christmas sweater but the dark red certainly gave off festive vibes. Neil’s elbows were resting on the table, he looked relaxed and content as he watched the snow falling outside their window and Andrew got a tight feeling in his chest. A feeling he associated only with Neil and he hated him for it. He hated him so much for it that he wanted to kiss him. He softly tugged on the wool between Neil’s fingers until Neil let it go so Andrew could pull it down to free his lips. Andrew placed a soft kiss on them and felt Neil smile against him. It was short and nonchalant and when he leaned back Andrew met Neil’s soft, lingering gaze with his own. Andrew wasn’t good with words but Neil always seemed to know exactly what he was trying to say anyway.

The Christmas lights Neil had strung all over their apartment were reflected in his eyes. They were glowing, the icy blue softened and warmed and when they looked at him, Andrew suspected the lights weren’t the only reason.

The tree had been Neil’s idea. Of course it had because Andrew’s disinterest in everything didn’t make an exception for the holidays. Neil had shared that opinion for a while, growing up the way he did he never really had a real Christmas. But being with the foxes had made Neil soft, Andrew noted. Neil smiled more and his laughter tended to light up entire rooms these days. Spending the past Christmases with the foxes, they had managed to turn this meaningless, unimportant holiday into something special. And slowly but surely Neil had started to associate Christmas with happiness, calmness, and family. Andrew still wasn’t really used to having a family to celebrate the holidays with but he still found himself anticipating it every year, even he had to admit he didn’t mind it as much as he used to. But he’d never get caught saying that out loud.

They had only moved into their own apartment a few months ago, finally together, finally forever. Andrew had accepted that he would never grow bored of Neil; he was defeated, hopeless, found. Neil finally had a home and Andrew would make damn sure it would feel like it.

That’s why he hadn’t hesitated to buy Neil the prettiest tree they could find. It was a small one but a real one. They had decorated it with tinsel and lights and ornaments from the store, plus a few personal ones that the foxes had sent to them.

They didn’t have a fireplace so their stockings were hanging on the wall by the window on the other side of their tree. One with an A and one with an N. Neil had filled them with candy and fun little knick-knacks he’d found at the store.

The foxes had sent them presents, all wrapped and ready to surprise and Neil had put them all under the tree right next to the ones he and Andrew had gotten for each other. Neil wasn’t materialistic at all but he was excited to see what Andrew got him every year.

Andrew’s train of thought was interrupted when Neil’s laptop on the table in front of them lit up with an incoming conference call. Finally. Andrew had started to get bored. They would meet up with the foxes at Abby’s house in about a week to celebrate a belated but proper Christmas but they still wanted to skype with each other on Christmas Eve.

It took them a while to tell everything they wanted to tell, the foxes were loud and cheerful and annoying as always. But Andrew was getting better at enduring it. Slowly but surely.

Aaron, soon to be a real doctor, was tired but happy with Katelyn. He was working too much, Andrew could see it even through the computer screen. His protective instinct wanted to comment on it but he stopped himself. He would have to trust Katelyn to take care of Aaron.

Dan, 7 months pregnant could not shut up about how incredibly scared she was of having to squeeze Matt’s huge baby out of her. Andrew didn’t blame her but it was obvious how happy she was.

Wymack, Abby, Kevin, and Thea were all together at Abby’s house already. Nicky and Erik called all the way from Germany but would be flying over soon.

Renee and Allison were at Stephanie’s place. Allison just broke up with her boyfriend so Renee dragged her along so she wouldn’t have to spend Christmas alone.

It’s a wonder that Andrew managed not to threaten anyone for the entire two hours the foxes had been talking about their day, their presents and their lives.

When Neil finally hung up he gave Andrew a kiss and murmured against his lips, “You did well. That wasn’t so hard was it?”

Andrew looked at Neil like he’d grown another head and asked, “Were we talking to different sets of foxes?” before kissing Neil’s smile away.

They spent the evening alone with a nice, self-made dinner. Andrew did most of the cooking since Neil’s abilities in the kitchen didn’t surpass the basics. Andrew found him rather useless, more distracting than helpful when Neil was leaning against the kitchen counter with an apron around his hips, strong hands working on the task, bottom lip caught between his teeth, eyes only seeing what was right in front of them. Concentrated and calm.

Arms, warm and save when they wrapped around Andrew from behind, lips soft and wet pressing against his neck. His breath hot against Andrews skin and his teeth tugging on it lightly. And then there was Andrew, bare, raw, and unprotected because Neil had made him shed all his armor, had made him vulnerable, weak and there was no escape from him. Andrew would never be able to finish dinner like this. So he kicked him out of the kitchen.

By the time they curled up on the couch together it had gotten dark outside and with the Christmas lights being the only light in the room it was cozy and relaxing. Neil insisted on watching a cheesy Hallmark Christmas movie they found on tv and because Andrew couldn’t care less he didn’t argue. He held a mug with hot cocoa between his palms, enjoying the warmth that filled him on the outside and the inside. Now and again Neil softly took the mug out of Andrew’s lose grip and took a sip. He still wasn’t overly fond of sweets but he had gotten used to the sweet taste of nearly everything Andrew consumed. It was a part of him and Neil loved every part of him.

It was still snowing outside. The trees and streets and roofs were covered with a blanket of white and Andrew felt a wave of gratefulness for his warm apartment and his warm Neil curling up to him. The time to go back to playing Exy, leaving their home and having to deal with their teammates and the press would come too soon. Andrew tried not to think about it when he had Neil warm and solid pressed against his side.

It was getting late and Andrew felt exhaustion overcome his body. He wanted to get into comfortable clothes and curl up with Neil in their bed. Neil was too invested in the movie though, so Andrew waited patiently until it was over. Then he stood up and gently tugged Neil up by the hand and led him to the bedroom, heavy feet, and tired limbs, fingers intertwined like they belonged nowhere else.

They curled up in bed, facing each other. The temperature had dropped immensely in the last few days and Andrew shivered. Of course Neil noticed, so he pulled the blanket all the way up to Andrew’s chin and asked, “Are you cold?”

He looked too worried for Andrew’s liking so he made sure to reassure, “I’ll be fine in a minute. With you, as an oven next to me, I’ll be warm in no time”

Neil took Andrew’s hand again and pressed it to his chest, “You like it.”

Andrew didn’t argue and they didn’t let go of each other until they fell asleep.

On Christmas Day Andrew was startled awake late in the morning when the cats jumped on the bed. He let them curl up between him and Neil, too lazy to kick them off the bed and secretly grateful for the extra heat. Their purrs lulled him back to sleep for another hour until Neil got up to make breakfast. Andrew followed him to the kitchen to make sure Neil wouldn’t burn his pancakes because Andrew needed pancakes and he needed them edible.

It had snowed even more overnight and when Andrew looked outside everything was white.

Neil followed his gaze and smiled, “Picture perfect Christmas weather.” Andrew leaned in and kissed Neil on the cheek.

After breakfast, they sat on the floor in front of the tree to open their presents and Andrew wasn’t surprised about the abundance of creativity the foxes had put into their gifts. It was mostly dumb stuff so Neil laughed and smiled every time he unwrapped a present. Allison’s was one of the few useful ones, a new jacket that fit Neil perfectly. It would be warm enough to keep out the winter chill but that was most likely not the reason she’d bought it for Neil. They all knew she still didn’t appreciate his fashion sense and would never give up to improve his wardrobe.

When they were done opening the foxes’ gifts, Neil wordlessly handed Andrew a present, the wrapping paper was green with little foxes on it. Of course, there were foxes on it. And Andrew’s name was on it.

Neil got impatient when Andrew didn’t move for a few moments. “Open it.”

Andrew was reluctant but ripped the paper open to reveal his gift. It was stupid. It was so stupid that Andrews lips quirked up which only widened Neil’s smile. “You got me sweaters for the cats?”

“It’s December. It’s cold. They’ll need it.” Andrew’s disbelieving expression made Neil laugh but he was distracted again when Andrew moved to get a present out of the pile and slammed it in front of Neil.

Neil eyed the present, looked up at Andrew and eyed the present again. Andrew watched him in silence, expressionless, patiently and waited until Neil stopped enjoying the moment enough to be able to pick it up and unwrap it. Neil’s face lit up when he saw what it was. Two tiny jerseys, one with ‘Minyard’, one with ‘Josten’ written on the back. It was the cheesiest present Andrew had ever gotten anyone and he planned to stone cold deny it if Neil ever told anyone. It would be hell to put the cats in them but Neil was dead set on getting at least one picture of it. They moved on to the rest of their gifts, they had bought each other a few more things, mostly dumb stuff for the cats Andrew couldn’t wait to annoy them with.

He meant to clean up the wrapping paper once the presents were opened but before he could, the cats jumped on the pile and started to shred it. Neil started to play with them and their new toys for way too long for it to be normal but Andrew had gotten used to that by now. He was content with watching and couldn’t believe that this was his life.

When Andrew got bored he sat on the couch and, just as he expected, it wasn’t long until Neil joined him. Andrew knew Neil was unable to resist the opportunity to cuddle close to him. They spent the rest of the afternoon lazing around the apartment and reading the books the foxes had gotten them. Sitting on the couch with Neil’s legs in Andrews lap, Neil reached for his hand every now and then to absently place kisses on Andrew’s knuckles.

After quite some time, Neil broke the silence and looked at the tree in the back of the living room. “Do you think they’ll break it?” As if on cue there was a loud bang. Andrew answered, “Yes.” without looking up from his book.

Neil laughed and Andrew followed his eyes to the tree, where the cats were half climbing, half destroying it. King had managed to climb up almost to the top but didn’t know how to get back down again, his struggle was obvious. He was still little but heavy enough to make the branches give in under his weight which caused some of the decoration to fall down. This stupid cat would never learn. Sir was smarter and had stayed on the ground, he had managed not to get hit by the falling ornaments and was now interestedly sniffing the broken pieces lying in front of him.

Neil and Andrew watched the chaos unfold. They both didn’t really care about the cats making a mess and destroying their tree, so they let it happen without intervening. The only thing Andrew cared about was the smile it put on Neil’s face.

Night came quicker than Andrew would’ve liked. And because there was nothing better to do they got dressed to take walk outside. Neil wrapped himself in his warmest coat and the new beanie and gloves he’d gotten from Dan. Andrew was wearing the scarf Renee had knitted him and his long, black coat. His hair was messy from lying around all day and his eyes shone golden in the Christmas lights. He looked so handsome it made Neil’s heart beat so fast it was worrisome. He pulled Andrew in by the collar of his coat and kissed him softly. Andrew’s lips were warm and gentle against Neil’s and just as he was about to suggest to stay inside after all Andrew pulled back, “Let’s go, you junkie.”

It was dark and cold outside but the snow was sparkling under the streetlights, turning the street outside their apartment into a winter wonderland. Andrew wordlessly took Neil’s hand in his and they walked together until they reached the park nearby.

The snow crunched under their boots, they were bundled up in the cold and their breaths were soft clouds in the air. The park was small and beautiful, with snow all around them. Andrew faced Neil and took both hands in his. Neil studied his face for a second before leaning in and kissing him again. It caused a feeling that ran down Andrew’s spine and shuddered through his whole body. Just lips on lips, that’s all Neil had to do to shake Andrew to the core. His grip on Neil’s hands tightened and he moved his lips to Neil’s cold nose, his flushed cheeks, his forehead, everything he could reach and whispered, “Merry Christmas.”

Neil let go of Andrew with one hand to put his arm around his neck and nuzzled his face in the space between his shoulder and his neck. Andrew wrapped his free hand around Neil’s middle to press him even closer and he thought to himself, I’ll love him until the day I die. His throat tightened to the point where he couldn’t breathe for a moment.

Neil’s face was pressed into the soft wool of Andrew’s scarf, so his voice was muffled when he replied, “Merry Christmas to you too.”

#eerielake #aftgexchange #aftg #andreil #tfc #**

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philosophiums · 7 years

Note

Hi! For the prompts, can you do one where they go to eden’s twilight and Neil gets roofied? Thanks!

this is… such a good prompt. not sure i took it where you were thinking, but…. here’s this 2k mess

i’m going to regret not proofreading this, but i’m tired and i don’t care

Andrew answers his phone in the bathroom of his New Mexico apartment. “Robin,” is his greeting to the base pumping in through the speaker. The Friday night call is unexpected and routine-interrupting. He’s getting ready for bed, not about to miss out on taking advantage of his weekend of sleep; Robin should be too busy celebrating the Foxes’ latest win to even think about calling him.

“I can’t find Neil,” she says, her panic audible over the intoxicated laughter of someone too close to the phone, rolling into Andrew and upending him.

“What the fuck do you mean, you can’t find Neil?” Four fucking words, and Andrew feels just as empty as he had when he’d been standing in the aftermath of a riot, holding a duffel bag in one hand and a scuffed-up racquet in the other.

Robin’s breath comes in thick and sticky against Andrew’s ear. He can smell the alcohol in the club, though he knows that none of it is on her breath – she’s like Neil; she doesn’t drink.

“I mean that he went to go get the next round for the table and now he’s gone.” There’s a push of noise and then the music is gone and it’s just a memory of laughter and shouting, catcalls and the infrequent patter of late-night traffic.

“He didn’t run,” Andrew says, because Robin would have only gone outside if she had been thinking that; she is intimately familiar with Neil’s story, the crossing of frequencies into her own. Andrew pushes the bathroom light switch down very precisely and paces out of the room. “Get back in the club. Talk to one of the bouncers and tell them what’s going on. If they give you shit, give them the phone and let me talk to them.”

The bedroom is dark, orange light leering only from a small lamp by the bed, and Andrew leaves it that way. He shifts the phone to speaker and sets it on the dresser, shoving his legs into jeans, swapping out his balding night shirt for armbands and something fresher. He’s not planning on leaving, but he wants to be ready. Neil probably just went to the bathroom and Robin is overreacting.

Or Andrew isn’t reacting enough.

He puts the phone to his ear again and listens more clearly to the ass end of a muted conversation between Robin and an unidentifiable male. A breath close to the phone pushes out a heavy exhale before Robin starts speaking. “He says he’ll help me look. Should I check the alley? Maybe he went for a cigarette.”

Andrew doesn’t tell Robin what to do or not to do. If he was there, he’d have a firmer grasp on his bearings, something solid to jerk around and choke an answer out of. If he was there, Neil never would have gone missing in the first place.

There’s a pitch in sound again as Robin works her way past the line of club-goers waiting to gain entrance. Andrew paces. Neil’s probably fine, but if anyone can manage to attract danger in a club he both frequents and feels relatively safe in, it’s Neil. Fuck, he attracts danger every time he breathes.

“What the fuck?” Robin’s voice is dropped to a crouch, her breathing domineering, pressing into Andrew from all sides and digging bared teeth into his ear. There’s a shout that isn’t hers, angry and growing farther away, and then it’s just Robin’s breathing, the accidental kick of a beer can and the muttered curse of someone who is looking at the finish line instead of keeping an eye on their feet.

“What?” The emotion in Andrew’s voice is a whetting stone, whittling away at any remaining distance he has between himself and others.

“I-I found him,” Robin says, something like regret making her words too heavy to come out easy.

Andrew is out the door. “Tell me,” he says after Robin breathes out Neil’s name.

“He’s… in the alley,” she says, and there’s a shuffle and a flap of fabric like she’s taking off her jacket and keeps getting caught on the sleeve. Her voice moves in and out of Andrew’s ear like a frequency wave. “Shh, Neil, it’s okay. It’s me, it’s Robin. It’s okay.”

“Tell me,” Andrew repeats, staring his car without a clear memory of the steps he took to get here, the two flights of stairs and the long walk across the dark parking lot.

Robin starts and stops, her breath hitching and catching like a body being dragged over loose pavement. After fighting with what might have been tears, she finally says, “He’s drugged out of his fucking mind,” and it’s a lost fight and a worst nightmare for Andrew.

“Is he dressed?” Andrew asks, with a feeling of scraping his fingernails across his tongue. Robin doesn’t answer, so Andrew growls out the question again as he swerves around a line of three cars going way too fucking slow for his liking.

“M-mostly.”

Andrew’s fear lashes out in a palm slammed against the steering wheel. “I’m catching a plane. Stay with him. Keep me updated.” Ending the call feels like pulling life support, but it’s necessary in the same way. He calls the airport next, and having money comes with its perks, because he’s got a ticket for the next flight to Columbia ready and waiting for him when he arrives. But being rich only gets him so many concessions, and the flight doesn’t leave for an hour and a half.

He picks a seat at his gate and forces himself to sit there while he checks his phone.

Nothing.

He calls Robin.

“Hi, Andrew, sorry,” is how she opens, sounding harrowed. Andrew says nothing, waiting, not wanting the concern and desperation to be as evident to her as it is to him. “We’re at the hospital. They wouldn’t let me back there with him, but they said they’re pumping his stomach, that he was roofied. They think it was probably GHB, but they’re not sure.”

Andrew has a difficult time reconciling the world-weary Neil Josten he left at Palmetto with a man oblivious enough to allow an opening for letting a liquid date-rape drug to be slipped into his drink. He takes a deep breath in and lets it out slowly. It’s not Neil’s fault. The only person to blame here is the asshole raised to think it’s okay to take whatever he wants without asking.

“Was he raped?” The people sitting within earshot of him all turn startled and offended looks his way, but Andrew doesn’t have the mind to give them the time of day. He needs to know.

A shuffle of sound comes over the speaker, like it’s been muffled against a shoulder of scratched against a palm. Then the air clears and Robin is back. “I don’t know. I don’t think so, but they’re doing a rape kit anyway, I think. But I don’t know.”

That’s not good enough. Andrew clenches his fist against his thigh and forces himself to stay seated. Pacing isn’t going to help anything, isn’t going to help Neil. “If they let you see him, call me.” Andrew hangs up and stares at the screen of his phone for a too-long moment before clicking it to black. He checks his ticket to see what time he’s expected to be landing and is annoyed to find that dawn will be rushing at him by the time he gets there. Neil isn’t going to want to stay in the hospital once he’s lucid, and Andrew isn’t going to be there to make sure he gets home safe.

He texts Robin to make sure she takes Neil to the house in Columbia when the idiot inevitably decides he wants to run.

There’s no response until Andrew is already on the plane, and then it’s just – ‘he’s more or less lucid. i told him you’re coming.’

Andrew takes that at face value and puts his phone on airplane mode for the flight.

As soon as the wheels are on the ground, Andrew gets another text from Robin – ‘left the hospital. he insisted on going home – shocker.’

Frowning, Andrew calls Neil only to immediately go to voicemail. He calls Robin. “Where are you?”

“The house in Columbia.”

“Where’s Neil?”

“Upstairs.”

“Good. Stay there. My plane just landed.”

“Yes, sir,” Robin says, reverting to stony sarcasm now that fear isn’t interrupting her brain-to-mouth function. Andrew should take the cue from her and calm the fuck down, but he won’t be able to breathe until he sees Neil for himself.

It’s long past the witching hour when Andrew pools onto the sidewalk with the other passengers. Without a car, he’s forced to take a cab, sliding into the first one he sees and glaring aside any possible comments about his lack of luggage. Andrew gives the address, and the cabby drives in silence, the way Andrew prefers it.

All of the lights are on in the house when he gets there, and Andrew is reminded of being a child with a nightlight, of the house across the street who left their porch light on for a missing daughter who would never come home. He knows exactly how many steps he takes to the front door, the specific way the key needs to be twisted in the lock to get it to open, but he doesn’t remember any of it.

Robin is sitting on the kitchen counter, mug of coffee in her hands, a cup of steaming tea and a milkier cup of coffee sitting next to her. Andrew doesn’t say thank you, but he takes the cups and walks upstairs.

Neil is a shivering ghost under two layers of blankets, window flung open to let in the shattering cold. Andrew wants to demand that Neil take off the blankets, that he let Andrew see him, all of him, but he doesn’t say anything, can’t, won’t.

“No lecture?” Neil asks. He’s lucid, drug out of his system, weary from the game and probably stressing over the time he lost while drugged.

“If you’re asking for it, then you already know what I would say.” Andrew approaches the bed and hands over Neil’s tea before tucking a leg under himself and sitting on the edge.

It takes a while before Neil sips from his cup, and then his shoulders start relaxing and his shivering becomes more prominent. “I’m so stupid,” he hisses, pinching his eyes closed, hands shaking dangerously.

Andrew takes the mug away and stands up. “Yes,” he agrees, setting the cups very carefully on the bedside table. “That’s old news.” He walks around to the window and slides it closed, then kicks off his shoes and gets into bed, this time leaning back against the headboard. Neil watches him the whole time, and Andrew doesn’t tell him to stop. “C’mere,” he says instead, and Neil manages to crawl over and keep both blankets draped over his shoulders.

It’s not until Neil is settled against Andrew’s chest that Andrew finally feels even slightly better. They’re touching despite the padding between them, Neil shivering from the cold but warming up against Andrew’s side.

“I wasn’t raped.” Neil’s voice is a muffled ball of cotton, but the room is so quiet that it’s a pounding bass that rattles Andrew’s bones and jars him awake. “I would know.”

“If it was penetrative,” Andrew amends.

Neil is silent for a while, shivering slowing. Maybe he’s thinking, taking the time to wrap his head around the fact that he was found with his pants down, and fondling counts as rape. “I don’t remember it,” Neil finally says. “What if I want to live in denial?”

Andrew snorts, the most laughter that’s been pulled from him since the last time he saw Neil several months ago. “You?”

Neil laughs, shocked like a livewire but honest and full. He laughs until it’s soundless, until Andrew feels hot tears soak into his shirt, until it peters off into a gentler rock of shoulders, ocean waves eking out through the cracks in Neil’s composure. “I missed you,” Neil breaks, and Andrew believes him.

#the foxhole court #andreil #mentions of rape //#rape //#abuse //#drugs //#not sure if i should tag it as anything else #mine #tfc #fn #Anonymous #my fics

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wesawbears · 7 years

Note

☆ for andreil?

Who is more likely to raise their voice?: Probably Neil, but he tries not to do so at Andrew. He’s more likely to get loud just ranting about Exy things.

Who threatens to leave but never actually does?: Neither of them are the type to make empty threats. They both actually do leave a couple times, but they always come back.

Who actually keeps their word and leaves?: See above.

Who trashes the house?: Neither of them necessarily trash the house, but Neil is more likely to neglect chores, so on weeks where he’s home and Andrew’s not, Andrew gets pissed when he comes home to a mess.

Do either of them get physical?: No. They both know they’re the one person in the world they won’t hurt.

How often do they argue/disagree?: Not super often, but often enough. They’re both incredibly stubborn, and Neil will never stop pushing Andrew to reach his full potential in Exy, which pisses him off.

Who is the first to apologise?: You’re hilarious.

The rest under the cut

FAMILY:

Do your muses plan on having children/or have children?: They didn’t plan to for a long time, but they end up doing a youth outreach Exy program with some foster kids as a promotion for their team and they both fall in love with this little girl, McKenna, and Neil convinces Andrew that while it’s just a drop in the bucket, it’s one more kid who won’t have to have the experience Andrew did.

If so, how many children do your muses want/have? 1

Who is the favorite parent?: I wouldn’t say she has a favorite, but her and Andrew are a little closer.

Who is the authoritative parent?: Andrew is more protective and keeps a tighter leash.

Who is more likely to allow the children to have a day off school?: Andrew

Who lets the children indulge in sweets and junk food when the other isn’t around?: Andrew

Who turns up to extra curricular activities to support their children?: Both. Neil coaches her youth exy team.

Who goes to parent teacher interviews?: Both

Who changes the diapers?: Both

Who gets up in the middle of the night to feed the baby?: They alternate, because they’re both pretty light sleepers.

Who spends the most time with the children?: It’s pretty equal tbh

Who packs their lunch boxes?: Neil because Andrew would feed her crap

Who gives their children ‘the talk’?: Andrew, which is uncomfortable for both of them, but would be infinitely more uncomfortable with Neil

Who cleans up after the kids?: Both, and she helps.

Who worries the most?: They’re both paranoid, let’s be real.

Who are the children more likely to learn their first swear word from?: Andrew lmao

AFFECTION:

Who likes to cuddle?: Neil, but he’ll never push Andrew to on bad days.

Who is the little spoon?: Neil mostly, but they usually sleep facing each other honestly

Who gets naughty in the most inappropriate of places?: Andrew likes riling Neil up in public

Who struggles to keep their hands to themself?: Neil

How long can they cuddle until one becomes uncomfortable?: Not super long tbh... they usually only cuddle till one of them falls asleep and its not “traditional” cuddling

Who gives the most kisses?: Neil

What is their favourite non-sexual activity? They honestly just like sitting on the couch next to each other, Andrew reading and Neil watching a game on tv or his laptop

Where is their favourite place to cuddle?: The couch cause it doesn’t have the same pressure as the bed

Who is more likely to playfully grope the other?: Neither

How often do they get time to themselves?: Once they’re on the same team, pretty often

SLEEPING:

Who snores?: Neither

If both do, who snores the loudest?: See above

Do they share a bed or sleep separately?: Normally they share a bed, but one of them will go sleep on the couch if the other is having a bad night

If they sleep together, do they cozy up together or lay far apart?: They sleep facing each other with a little distance but holding hands

Who talks in their sleep?: Neil lolololol

What do they wear to bed?: Neil sleeps wearing a hoodie and godawful fox pajama pants Matt got him for Christmas. Andrew wears a tank top and sweatpants

Are either of your muses insomniacs?: They both have their days.

Can sleeping pills be found by the bedside?: No

Do they wrap their limbs around each other or just lay side by side?: Just their hands and feet touch

Who wakes up with bed hair?: Both, but Neil’s is a bird’s nest and Andrew’s is just fluffy and cute

Who wakes up first?: Neil for his run

Who prepares breakfast in bed for the other?: lmao no. But Neil will set the coffee machine before he leaves for his run and that usually gets Andrew up

What is their favourite sleeping position?: Mentioned above

Who hogs the sheets?: Andrew

Do they set an alarm each night?: Neil does

Can a television be found in their bedroom?: No

Who has nightmares?: :/Who has ridiculous dreams?: Neil

Who sprawls out and takes up most of the bed?: Neil

Who makes the bed?: Nope

What time is bed time?: It’s either 8 pm or 2 am, there’s no in between

Any routines/rituals before bed?: Andrew making Neil put his phone away from where he’s browsing Exy websites so he can go the fuck to sleep

Who’s the grumpiest when they wake up?: Andrew

WORK:

Who is the busiest?: Neil does more promotions and stuff

Who rakes in the highest income?: Both?

Are any of your muses unemployed?: No

Who takes the most sick days?: Andrew cause he won’t actually die if he takes a day off and Neil won’t even admit it if he’s literally dying

Who is more likely to turn up late to work?: Andrew

Who sucks up to their boss?: Nope

What are their jobs?: Professional Exy players

Who stresses the most?: Neil because Ichirou

Do your muses enjoy or despise their careers/occupations?: Neil loves it. Andrew likes it

Are your muses financially stable?: They’re millionaires, they’re fine

HOME:

Who does the washing?: Andrew

Who takes out the trash?: Neil

Who does the ironing?: Neither of them have ironed a goddamn thing in their lives

Who does the cooking?: Andrew, Neil could burn water

Who is more likely to burn the house down just trying?: Neil

Who is messier?: Neil

Who leaves the toilet roll empty?: Andrew cause he’s an asshole

Who leaves their dirty clothes on the floor?: Neil

Who forgets to flush the toilet?: Neither

Who is the prankster around the house?: Neither. They’re both petty about house stuff if they’re angry

Who loses the car keys when it comes time to go somewhere?: Neil

Who mows the lawn?: Neither, they have a person who does it

Who answers the telephone?: They screen their calls

Who does the vacuuming?: Neil begrudgingly

Who does the groceries?: Neil

Who takes the longest to shower?: Andrew is high maintenance

Who spends the most time in the bathroom?: Andrew

MISCELLANEOUS:

Is money a problem?: lmao no

How many cars do they own?: 2

Do they own their home or do they rent? Rent while they’re playing, house when they retire and only after McKenna

Do they live near the coast or deep in the countryside?: They live in bum fuck nowhere Illinois. (I know which house is theirs in the area surrounding where I live)

Do they live in the city or in the country? Country

Do they enjoy their surroundings?: Yeah it’s pretty isolated which they like

What’s their song?: They don’t have one officially, but my song for them is “Perfect for You” from Next to Normal

What do they do when they’re away from each other?: They’re usually distracted with playing or practicing

Where did they first meet?: y’all know

How did they first meet?: Same

Who spends the most money when out shopping?: Andrew

Who’s more likely to flash their assets?: Andrew

Who finds it amusing when the other trips over?: Andrew

Any mental issues?: ...listen

Who’s terrified of bugs?: Not really

Who kills the spiders around the house?: Whoever’s closer

Their favourite place: Andrew’s car

Who pays the bills?: It’s a joint effort

Do they have any fears for their future?: Andrew will always be a little worried that Neil will leave one day and Neil is always worried about Ichirou coming after Andrew to get to him

Who’s more likely to surprise the other with a fancy dinner?: Neither really

Who uses up all of the hot water?: Andrew

Who’s the tallest?: Neil

Who’s more likely to just randomly hop into the shower with the other?: Neither. That’s a line.

Who wanders around in their underwear?: Neither

Who sings the loudest when singing along to the radio?: Neither

What do they tease each other about?: They’re not really a teasing couple

Who is more likely to cringe at the other’s fashion sense at times?: Andrew HATES Neil’s clothes

Do they have mutual friends?: The Foxes and their team

Who crushed first?: Andrew lmao

Any alcohol or substance related problems?: ...

Who is more likely to stumble home, drunk, at 3am?: Neither

Who swears the most?: It’s about equal

Thanks, this was a lot of fun!

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ssundaye · 7 years

Text

These Hands, This Home - Andreil Short

Hello, all! I just made this Tumblr for aftg/tfc and to kick it off I wrote this short piece for Andrew and Neil and murder. As some of you know, I also have an account on ao3 with my two longer stories Find Your Way Back to One (or the zombie one), and Hope Is a Disquieting Thing (or the Star Wars one). I’m pretty new to writing fic, but if you’re interested, you can find them here: http://archiveofourown.org/users/Sundaye/works Just some warnings: blood, death, hearing voices, & knives (nothing too graphic; mostly what you’d find in canon) Hope you enjoy! _____________________

“Neil,” someone said. The name sounded distorted, like someone trying to speak to him through a closed door. Lola was whispering in his ear, instructions. Her lessons did this to him, made him cold all over, made the edges of his vision turn black with fear. He wanted to shiver but knew it would be a mistake, he could already feel the stinging of the knife if he let his weakness show.

Nathaniel listened. Break the bone first. His hands were shaking. They were covered in so much blood. This was worse than anything they’d done before. This wasn’t a pig, or a dog. An adult man’s dead stare swam in all that blood. Nathaniel willed himself to move. He didn’t want to be like that man. Lola’s breath slithered in his head.

Nathaniel inhaled through his nose. Slowly. He’d seen death, smelled death, touched it, enough times by now. This wasn’t something to stumble over. He pushed his discomfort away. Lola was silent. He needed to get this done quickly.

Nathaniel adjusted the knife in his hand and leaned down over the corpse. A hand closed over his.

“Neil,” he heard. Neil came back to himself like two cars colliding head on.

“Andrew,” Neil could barely breath. The knife dropped, thunking on the body below him and sliding to the floor.

Andrews heavy stare was assessing, blood was still smeared across his face in a violent red blossom that made Neil’s heart stammer.

“You’re hurt,” Neil observed unhelpfully. He reached a hand out to the side of Andrew’s face and stopped, waiting like he always did for Andrew to approve the touch. Andrew tilted his head so his cheek pressed against Neil’s palm. His skin was warm.

“It’s nothing,” Andrew replied. He didn’t try to stem the flow of blood still trickling from his nose. Instead his eyes dropped to the dead man on their apartment floor with the coldness of snow falling.

“We need to make some calls,” Andrew pointed out. He pulled Neil’s hand away from his face, but didn’t let it go. Instead he took it gently and led Neil into their bedroom. Neil’s knees hit the edge of the bed numbly and Andrew guided him down to sit on it.

Neil’s phone was dead on the nightstand, like it usually was. Andrew spared Neil a reprimand in his glance before plugging it in and flipping it open with a clack. The screen lit up white as it powered on.

Neil caught the red of his hands from his periphery but he couldn’t look at them directly. They were shaking. He could still feel the wet tug of the knife in their grip pulling out of that man’s neck. Lola whispered something he couldn’t translate distantly in his mind.

Andrew’s hand settled onto Neil’s neck and his thumb started rubbing circles in the baby hairs at its nape. Andrew’s hands were a warmth, a tide that always led Neil home. Andrew was speaking to someone on the phone in a low, calm voice. The words blurred as Neil heard them, but he leaned into the sound nonetheless.

The phone closing with a clack woke Neil from his trance. Andrew’s thumb had stopped its soothing motion and instead pressed lightly against Neil’s skin. Andrew knelt in front of Neil on the bed with the same impassive face he’d worn when Neil had shown him his scars. This man in front of him was an unshakable force holding Neil up.

“It’s done,” Andrew informed him, “They’ll take care of it.”

Neil could guess who 'They’ were. He wondered if the Moriyamas would pick apart the body on their apartment floor to see that the dead hitman’s trail led straight back to Neil’s father’s men. The deaths those men would suffer would be much less merciful than the one Nathaniel had given the corpse in the other room. Neil squeezed his hands between his knees, ignoring the squelch of blood between them. Andrew’s eyes tracked the movement and Neil noted the fan of his fair lashes. The bleeding had stopped but its path had dried all over his upper lip and chin like a map of a river. It had smeared onto his cheeks as well.

“It’s over,” Andrew reassured him. His eyes found Neil’s again. His voice was the sun, its gravity pulling Neil in.

Andrew squeezed Neil’s neck again lightly in question, and when Neil nodded, pulled him down into his shoulder. Neil breathed in a shuddering breath and turned his face until it pressed into the soft collar of Andrew’s shirt. He heard the steady beating of Andrew’s heart and thought his own pulse might synchronize with it. As Neil inhaled the familiar smell of Andrew, of home, Lola fell silent in his mind. Nathaniel leeched from his bones, and left him be.

#aftg #aftg fic #aftg fanfic #andreil #andreil fic #andrew minyard #neil josten #tfc #blood #violence #death #hearing voices #gore #mine #my writing

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jsteneil · 6 years

Text

Dan is the closest of the Foxes to Palmetto, working in DC where the others have migrated North or East, with Kevin down in Texas as one sweaty exception. She visits more than the others, hopping in and out of her car on occasions, and always comes in the Foxhole court holding a large to-go cup from the campus’ coffee, looking radiant and focused.

Neil smiles more easily, these days, and he never fights the natural inclination of his mouth when he sees Dan and lets himself be hugged, maybe a bit tighter than someone who doesn’t answer to the name of Dan Wilds would.

“Rookie,” she calls, lobbing her paper cup in the garbage one day. Half of the freshmen turn their tired faces to her, dragging their feet after today’s hard practice.

Neil smiles. “Dan,” he greets, and waves his team away. Robin steals his car keys on her way out, clearly not eager to repeat the time she had to wait half an hour in the cold for Neil and Dan to finish talking.

Dan lifts an eyebrow. She knows Robin from last year, when Andrew, Aaron, and Nicky were still there to share a bedroom that now feels to big for two people, but she’s emboldened over the summer. Neil is quietly proud of her, like warming his hands to the residual heat of a slow-burning fire.

“I’ll run,” Neil says with a shrug. “I haven’t been jogging as I should lately.”

“Yeah,” Dan says, “maybe because there’s actual frost on the ground. Don’t be crazy, I’ll drive you back.”

“Okay,” Neil accepts, because he’s gotten better at acknowledging the casualness of the Foxes’ kindness. “Wanna get out of here?”

Dan’s hand flies to her chest.

“Who are you and what have you done with Neil Josten, local exy court vermin?”

“I don’t actually live here.”

“Then you can explain to me why I’ve found you sleeping on those damn couches more times than I can count,” a gruff voice says from behind them. “Get out of here.”

Wymack emerges from his office with his usual stack of papers and grumpy expression. Neil knows how much Dan means to him and how long they talked on the outer ring during the last half of practice, so he understands the way Dan laughs with her teeth and turns around to hold the door open.

“We’re having dinner at Abby’s tonight,” Dan says as they make their way to Dan’s rental car. “Wanna come?”

Tonight is the Foxes’ movie night. Neil quickly calculates pros and cons: Indian take-out in a room crowded with people he already spends too much time with everyday, or in Abby’s kitchen with some of the people who count the most in his life.

“Sure.”

He sends a message to Robin to tell her not to wait for him to start the movie, then closes the door of the car on the uncharacteristically cold winter.

“So how’s the team?” Neil asks at the same time Dan does, backing out of her parking space. They share a grin: Dan’s enthusiasm for the sport will never be on the same level as Kevin’s or Neil’s, but he likes more detached outlook she brings to the conversation nonetheless. Probably because exy means less to her than to him—although Neil’s had some difficulties wrapping his mind around this truth in the beginning—Dan is particularly soothing to talk to. Andrew suggested once that it may be because she refuses to make herself insane for something as inconsequential as exy, but Neil would rather bet that it was a thinly-veiled insult thrown to Kevin’s obsession.

“We’re getting into the season on a strong foot,” Dan says finally after Neil gestures for her to speak first. “The changes we’ve brought to the starting line are already showing results.”

“Drafting Perez was a risky move,” Neil says, because his interest in pro teams has considerably grown now that it’s a certainty of his future and not a dream sitting just out of his reach.

Dan’s smile grows sharper. To Neil, she’s still the young woman who led them all the way to finals in his freshman year.

“It was,” she agrees, “but it’s going to pay big time—we have a game with the Hawks next week, and I know where the odds are leaning.”

“I don’t bet,” Neil reminds her as they park in front of the Fox’s Paw, the campus coffee.

“Still? Neil, you have no respect for traditions.”

It’s true; mostly because he didn’t get to experience them before he met the Foxes. Dan keeps talking about the Eagles in the line to the counter, prompting questions in Neil’s mind that he never took into consideration before—it’s been three years, but it still feels weird that his captain ended on the other side of the plexiglass wall. Not wrong: Dan was made to mentor, but still.

Dan almost gets another coffee, then reconsiders and orders some kind of chocolate concoction that Andrew likes, provided they add cream and sugar in large quantity, because that’s Andrew’s favorite way to eat anything. A small stitch drills into his chest like he’s gulped too much air while running, like always when the realization comes that Andrew is miles away in a large city, and not smoking, up on the rooftop of their small world.

“So how’re you doing?” Dan asks, twirling the cream in her cup.

Neil hums in response. “I’m fine.”

“Uh huh. And without the bullshit?” She’s not fooled by his confused look. “Neil, I know how it is—”

He knows she does. In hindsight, he’s grateful for the reprieve she accorded him by talking so extensively about her team first.

“The first weeks are the worst,” Dan says, which Neil doesn’t believe because it’s already mid-November and Neil’s been feeling down since August, when Andrew moved to Boston for good.

Andrew flew down to Columbia two weekends ago, which means that Neil will fly north in ten days for Thanksgiving and spend the beginning of the week holed up in Andrew’s apartment with only each other, ice cream, alcohol, and cigarettes for company. The perspective brightens Neil’s immediate future, but it doesn’t relieve the constant ache of not having Andrew right next to him to exchange truths and stories with.

“Andrew came to our game against the Ravens two weeks ago,” Neil says instead of dwelling on the feeling.

“I saw on TV. The journalists had a field day.”

Neil nods slowly. He feels miserable, and he’s sure that Dan read it on every inch of his face. He longs briefly for the days when lying to the Foxes was as easy as breathing, when the reality of his feelings concerned him only.

“I find it easier to bear long distance if you talk about it,” Dan says finally, done with being subtle. “Nicky would agree.”

“You just want the gossip. How many bets?”

“There’s a consequential one on where you’ll spend Thanksgiving break. Renee says you’ll have a quiet week in Columbia, visit Bee. Nicky has quite a few bucks on you meeting in Boston and boning the entire time.” She winces. “Sorry, his words.”

Neil waves if it off. “I gathered.”

Dan huffs a laugh and drumrolls on the table, phone in hand. “Do I get to settle anything, or are you just going to send us a pic from Vietnam or something?”

“We wouldn’t fly anywhere this far,” Neil says, then relents: “Robin invited us to her parents’ for the day. I’m not sure Andrew will take her up on that offer, but we’ll see. We’ll spend the rest of the week in Boston, so I guess Nicky wins, for one.”

“Nicky only wins if you spend the whole time in bed,” Dan says delightfully as her fingers fly over her screen. “I don’t think I have to ask you how likely it is to happen.”

Neil snorts. “You’d think he’d have learned by now.”

“Renee’s happy you won’t be alone for the holidays,” Dan reads after her phone beeps a few times. “Allison is mad—she would’ve made three hundred bucks. Don’t look so pleased.”

“Don’t bet on my life.”

“Never gonna happen.”

They sip their drinks in silence for a while, basking in the warmth of the crowded coffee shop. Having Dan by his side in Palmetto is familiar, like the feeling of watching his shots land true. If Robin is his best friend, the quiet extension of himself, then Dan is his sister, warm, teasing, and proud.

“I miss him,” he admits, because he suddenly wants to. Andrew has always been a point of friction between them, but he can acknowledge the olive branch Dan has been offering him. He doesn’t mind taking it; the riverbanks are slippery enough as it is. “We talk a lot, but it’s not the same.”

They’re good at communication, because they can’t afford not to be, but most of their conversations are silent, exchanged through looks and actions. Neil knows Andrew enough by now to read his tone, what he leaves unsaid, but he misses the touches, the certainty of Andrew, there besides him.

Dan’s hand curls around her cup like she wants to grab for him but is restraining herself.

“Have you discussed the situation?”

“Of course. I thought long-distance was all about communication?”

“And Skype sex,” Dan adds with a grin curling her mouth.

Neil frowns. In a rare bout of sharing, he says: “Not likely.”

“Really.”

“I’m not discussing sex with you.” That’s a conversation for another day, possibly imaginary, definitely involving alcohol. Neil has managed to escape it so far by sticking close to Nicky, who, despite his own interest in the situation, is always prompt to deroute on his own sexual adventures and attract Aaron’s ire.

“Fine. Keep your gossip to yourself, ungrateful child.”

“I will.” He waits a beat then says: “He’s not happy there. He never says anything but I don’t think the team is right for him.”

“Problems with his teammates?”

Dan’s frown his sympathetic. Twice captain of her exy teams and now assistant coach, she knows exactly how much inside tensions can affect a player’s game—and their lives beyond.

“Whitney is outwardly homophobic and an asshole,” Neil says. Five years ago, he would never have thought he’d ever get so worked up about something not directly linked to his survival; five years ago, he also didn’t have Andrew Minyard in his life, to love and protect fiercely where Andrew himself doesn’t necessarily. “Andrew won’t stand for it forever.”

“You’re worried it’ll fall back on Andrew?”

Neil raises his hands in front of him, palms up. “Exy golden boy from an Ivy league college and three years of seniority. Andrew.” He tips his hands like scales. “You know what people are going to see, and you know that it won’t be the truth.”

“It might if someone can attest of Whitney’s slurs,” Dan says. “He doesn’t have a good reputation in the division. People talk. And I think Andrew knows better than pulling a knife under another coach than Wymack.”

“He doesn’t carry knives anymore. And that’s not the problem, is it?”

“No it’s not,” Dan sighs. “I’m sorry.”

She asks about the team to distract him after that, and it works—Neil will never miss a chance to talk exy, especially not when it’s his team, a responsibility he never thought he’d have. He remembers the sick feeling of fear and want when Wymack first told him about his future captaincy; some days, Neil can still feel it, curled tight in his stomach to make room for pride and affection, and all those other feelings that he’s learned along the way. He doesn’t need to ask Dan if it ever goes away. He’s not sure he wants it to.

They clear out their table a while later, when night has already fallen around the bright yellow streetlights, and head back to Dan’s car, jogging slightly to fight the cold. Neil leans his head on the window and staring outside past the fog of his breath on the glass, and only straightens when he sees the shape of Abby’s house, shadow pierced by large rectangles of light. Dan winds her arm over his shoulders when they get out the car and drags him to the door.

“We’re here!” she announces, opening the door left unlocked, as usual.

Neil sheds his coat and removes his shoes, padding in the kitchen to find Wymack and Abby prepping chicken around the table. A small pot is already simmering on the stove and filling the entire room with the smell of tomato and thyme. Abby gives them each a knife and different vegetables to peel; the celeri makes a cheerful crunching sound every time Neil lowers the blade.

“You’re a terrible cook,” Dan observes good-naturedly after Abby corrects him three times on how to best mince garlic. Neil doesn’t mind: he’s usually the first to admit that he doesn’t care all that much about cooking.

“I know,” he says, and thinks, Andrew prefers to do it anyway.

#aftg #all for the game #tfc #the foxhole court #neil josten #dan wilds #my writing #idk guys

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