Chapter Text
That night, Andrew can’t fall asleep.
The dorm, despite being familiar, doesn’t quite feel right. During Andrew’s freshman year, his family did not get a suite since there were only three of them. Andrew had laid a claim to the single bed early on and had managed to survive the year sharing the same room with two other men only because of his familiarity with Aaron and Nicky. It should have been easier after all these years. Both of them had proven trustworthy. Andrew should have been able to fall asleep.
Instead, he lays with his eyes wide open, unused to the absence of Neil’s quiet breathing. Even the fact that Kevin is not only a room away unsettles him; they’d shared a dorm since the moment Kevin joined the team up until his graduation and moved in together when Andrew signed up for Kevin’s professional team. Andrew has spent the last four years with either Neil or Kevin in easy reach, and their absence is startlingly noticeable.
The withdrawal doesn’t help matters. His mind is clear of the pills’ influence, but his body feels like it’s tearing itself apart. The muscle spasms, the headache, and nausea — the symptoms are getting worse and worse as time passes and his body craves its latest fix.
In the end, knowing that sleep will not be coming any time soon, Andrew rises from his bed and shuffles to the kitchen. He stops a couple of feet away from the counter and the bottle of pills standing on top. Kevin had pointedly placed it there before leaving with Wymack to his apartment. He hadn’t said anything, and Andrew hadn’t commented, but the presence of those fucking pills speaks enough for the both of them.
Andrew stands in silence for a minute, staring.
Eventually, gritting his teeth through the nausea, Andrew snatches the pills and stuffs them into his pocket next to his pack of cigarettes. The couple of steps it takes to reach the front door are agonizing; his stomach cramps with every movement, and it takes a tremendous amount of effort to force his shaking knees to cooperate with the rest of his body. The climb up the roof is possible only by leaning heavily against the railing of the staircase.
As soon as he reaches the roof, he allows himself to collapse beside the door, leaning against the rough brick and taking deep breaths. The roof is a familiar sight, even though he had rarely gone up there the first time he was on his meds; high out of his mind, the thought of swan-diving off the ledge had been hilarious.
Even now, as sober as he can be with his body still hooked on the drugs, he doesn’t want to risk it. With the way his body is on the verge of giving out, just a moment of inattention would have him splattering across the cement. So he stays leaning on the brick besides the entrance and observes the way the streetlights scatter against the chill spring air.
Eventually, Andrew fishes out his pack of cigarettes and brings one of them to his lips. His hands shake as he clicks the lighter on. It takes him three tries to light it.
His shoulders relax the moment nicotine hits his bloodstream. Puffing at the cigarette, he watches the silvery smoke climb up into the dark sky. There are no stars visible; it’s a cloudless night, but the lights all across the campus are turned on, and the light pollution hides them from sight.
Andrew works at that one cigarette until it burns down to the filter. As soon as the cigarette is done, he drops it down on the concrete and grinds it with his heel. He stares straight up for a couple of moments before flipping his phone open and dialing a number.
He still hasn’t saved it in the phone’s memory, but Andrew’s brain has stored it anyway.
This time, it takes longer for the call to be picked up. The phone rings several times before Andrew hears a click and Neil’s hoarse voice from the other end of the call. “Andrew?”
Andrew stays silent, fingers clenching around the phone in a white-knuckled grip.
“Andrew, did something happen?”
“No.”
Neil hums. Andrew can hear him shifting over the call, shuffling this way and that. Probably trying to find a comfortable position in his sorry excuse of a bed.
“Can’t sleep?” Neil asks.
“Nicky snores,” Andrew says instead of answering the question. It’s all the answer Neil needs.
The first time around, it had taken Andrew weeks to sleep through the night. Even though he knew Aaron and Nicky. Even though he was pretty sure neither would hurt him while he slept or come to his bed unannounced. Both of them had known better once Renee had given him her knives. But logic had nothing to do with the creeping sense of unease that attacked him every time one of them shifted in his sleep and the sound jolted Andrew awake.
He’d gotten over it. He’d learned to tune out the sounds. The pills knocked him out as much as the exhaustion did, and he managed to sleep through the night eventually.
And look at him now. No Neil, no Kevin, and he’s immediately back to square one.
Pathetic.
“I can’t sleep either,” Neil says. “I got used to sleeping on an actual bed.”
Andrew scoffs. “It’s almost like you’re a real boy.”
“Yeah,” Neil breathes out. “Yeah, I’m a real person now.” He doesn’t sound convinced.
But he wouldn’t be, would he? Not after being thrust right back into his time on the run, back in time when his father is still alive. Not in the time when his bitch of a mother’s words were the only thing that kept him going. Neil has only ever known how to be a person once the looming shadow of his father’s presence had disappeared.
“You know,” Neil says. “I used to hate how I look. I took after him in everything. Every time I looked into a mirror, I would see him staring back.”
“You’re not your father.”
“I know.” Neil pauses, taking a deep breath. “I saw my reflection earlier. It didn’t look like me.”
Wrong hair. Wrong eyes. No scars, even though they have marked him for four years of his life, the longest he’d had the same look since he was ten years old. Neil’s scars made it impossible to hide, yes, made it so that every eye followed him whenever he went. But they also meant that his father was dead and he was safe. Andrew knows Neil did not mind the stares if the exchange was to have Nathan Wesninski sent down to hell.
All of it is gone now. He is, once again, a Neil Josten who has spent the last several months pretending to be quiet and meek and who always has one foot out of the door, ready to run.
Andrew does not attempt to reassure him. “Are you staying?”
He’s been trying to ignore it. Trying to ignore the nagging voice in his head, the same one that used to say Neil would one day find someone better, someone less fucked up in the head, someone who could allow Neil to touch them every day, to tell him that they loved him, to treat him like he deserves to be treated. The voice had appeared from time to time during his schooling, but last year was the worst. With Andrew in Atlanta and Neil in Palmetto, Andrew’s subconscious would recite statistics about long-distance relationships, and he could not bring himself to believe that he and Neil would beat the odds.
It’s not that he distrusts Neil. Neil promised to stay, and he’d stopped lying to Andrew after Baltimore. Andrew knows, on his good days, that what they have is solid, that they have gone through too much for the distance to beat them. But those doubts are not logical. They come from the same part of his brain that used to look at razors and wonder how they would make him feel. His self-destructive tendencies did not stop just because he added no new scars to his skin.
And so he can’t stop thinking about Neil running away. It would be so easy. Unless some of their enemies came back in time, nobody except the Foxes knows that there is something special about the quiet, mousy Neil Josten. Neil could disappear tomorrow, could make his trail grow cold, and hunker down until everything blows over. He could easily avoid facing Riko, Lola, and Nathan. He wouldn’t even need to wait that long. Only until Kengo gets sick and the FBI and his uncle take that chance to kill Nathan Wesninski. He would be safe after that. Ichirou would not waste the limited resources of his newly inherited empire on tracking down someone as insignificant as a probably dead son of his father’s enforcer.
It would be better for Neil to disappear. Safer.
But Neil has never chosen a safe option in his life.
“Of course,” Neil says immediately. Andrew’s shoulders drop in relief. “You asked me to stay. I’m not leaving until you tell me you don’t want me around anymore."
“You’re not leaving me to deal with Kevin alone.”
Neil chuckles, but it’s a faint, stuttering sound. “You know, I don’t think we’ve ever had that conversation about coparenting. Maybe we should, considering that we have a grown-up child to take care of.”
Despite himself, Andrew huffs in amusement. “Careful. If he heard you say that, he’d throw a tantrum.” Which is not beating big child allegations.
“Yeah, I think we’re already used to that.” Neil sighs. He’s silent for a moment, before speaking again. He sounds tired. “I hate this.”
Andrew hums his agreement.
“Things were good. We were good. You had a job, I was graduating and already getting scouted, and everyone else on the team was alive. My freshman year was shit, but we survived and we actually made something out of our lives.”
“And now we’re back.”
“And now we’re back,” Neil agrees. Andrew hears him shifting, getting up, and then his rapid footsteps come over the line. He’s pacing again. Sitting and waiting for a possible attack from his father must be torturous. “What do we even get out of this? Survive this whole shitty year again and do our best to kill all the same people, for what? Just to have Seth maybe survive? How is that worth it?”
Andrew agrees that Seth Gordon is not worth enough to have them go through this year again. Just because they know what’s coming doesn’t mean that the danger is not there. Last time, they survived by the seat of their pants, and there’s no guarantee that they will get lucky twice. Not when they start changing things. The butterfly effect exists, and if they foil all Riko’s plans that they know of, he’ll simply come up with something new to throw at them. Neil and Kevin know him well enough that they could maybe predict some of his moves, and the team is tough enough to survive most things Riko would think of — up to and including murder attempts — but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t get hurt or fucked up in the head. More fucked up in the head. It’s not like the Foxes have much sanity to lose.
The only surefire way to avoid new dangers from appearing is to follow the exact same timeline as before. And they’re not doing that. Andrew can’t go through Thanksgiving again. Neil shouldn’t go through Evermore and Baltimore this time around. The team will not stand for letting Seth die in a club bathroom. They will inevitably change things. There’s no way around it.
So this whole time travel business gets them nothing. Perhaps Seth gets to live and Allison can stop grieving, but everyone else had good lives. Even if they change the fucked up things that happened this year, it’s not like their memories of them would be gone. It’s not like they would not be traumatized anyway. It still happened to them, even if no one else would ever remember.
The payoff is not worth the risk.
“We don’t know how to go back to our time,” Andrew concludes, because that’s what this whole thing is hinging on. If they did, Andrew would have returned in a heartbeat. He doesn’t care about keeping Seth alive. He only cares about living in a world where Riko, Drake, and Neil’s father are dead and can no longer hurt anyone under his protection.
“You’re right,” Neil agrees. “It’s not fair, but we’re used to life not being fair. We just have to survive.”
They stay silent for a couple of minutes. Andrew listens to Neil’s breathing from the other end of the call and slowly reaches into his pocket. The bottle of pills is still there.
“Neil?”
“Hmmm.”
“Stay on the line,” Andrew says, even though Neil showed no signs of hanging up. He doesn’t wait for Neil’s agreement before opening the bottle and shaking out a pill. He stares at it, face as blank as he can manage, before he tosses it into his mouth and swallows it dry.
It takes more than half an hour for the pill to start to work. Neil, who hasn’t asked a single question, stays on the line the whole time.
…
The next day, Andrew takes his morning dose as usual. He has to see Bee, after all, and she’s legally obligated to report him if she notices him going against his parole. He somehow doubts a report like that on his record would make it easier to get off the fucking pills.
The morning practice is a shitshow. Neil’s absence is obvious to everyone except Seth and Wymack. The whole team has gotten so used to him running the show that Dan has to pull double duty just to keep them all on track. The fact that Seth continues to act like his shitty self is not helping, especially in a team that has learned to play like a well-oiled machine without him in the picture. Andrew catches even Allison automatically excluding him from the drills before she realizes what she is doing. The sight of her guilty expression beneath the visor is hilarious to his medicated mind.
The only good news is that Kevin draws everyone’s attention after practice and says, “I talked to Jean last night. He says there’s nothing strange about Riko. He’s acting as usual.”
There is a general sigh of relief from the whole room.
“So he’s not back,” Matt voices the obvious. “Let’s hope Neil’s father also doesn’t remember.”
With a general murmur of agreement, the team goes off to the showers in twos and threes. Wymack stops Andrew for a second to inform him about the exact time for his appointment with Bee and then waves him off. He looks exhausted; Andrew’s pretty sure this is another person who had little to no sleep last night.
When it’s finally time to go to the health center, Andrew tosses the car keys in Aaron’s direction and ignores Nicky’s whining as he strides out of the door. Aaron, to his credit, only pauses for a second before he picks up his wallet and follows him.
“Why me?” Aaron asks.
“You don’t talk as much.”
Aaron snorts. “Nobody talks as much as Nicky,” he says, but stops probing there.
Aaron has never driven the GS, but he’s gotten enough practice with Maserati while Andrew and Neil were injured during the twins’ junior year that it takes him only a couple of moments to get into the gear. As always, he’s a careful driver. Probably some unresolved trauma there. Andrew is trying not to be self-destructive despite what the drugs tell him to do, so he does not mention it out loud.
When they park, Andrew gets out of the car and takes a moment to light up a cigarette before he goes in. Aaron frowns at the smoke as Andrew inhales but says nothing, only leaning against the GS besides Andrew and crossing his arms.
“Will you be okay?” he asks when Andrew crushes the cigarette butt beneath his heel.
“That’s a stupid question,” Andrew answers, and starts walking off without waiting for an answer.
Bee is waiting for him when he enters. She doesn’t look any different than the last time he saw her, excepting the lack of greying hair and fewer wrinkles. Her smile is, as usual, small and polite. Generally, she doesn’t try to be too friendly with Andrew when she knows he isn’t able to take it.
He accepts the hot chocolate and settles into his seat as they go through the regular push and pull of their sessions. Bee asks all the usual questions, as if this were a normal appointment, and he knows it’s intentional, because the routine settles him down enough to stop tap-tap-tapping at the floor with his foot.
Once the hot chocolate is almost gone and Andrew has stopped fidgeting, Bee gets to the point.
“I had an interesting conversation with David,” she says. She does not seem surprised when Andrew stays silent. “We have never talked about it before, but I was sure he’d never liked your medication. I can’t blame him; the dose is far too strong. However, I was surprised that he decided to bring it up after months of silence.”
Andrew resumes tapping his foot. Bee being Bee, she doesn’t even glance down at it, eyes trained carefully on Andrew’s face.
“Andrew,” she says. “I am glad that you’re requesting to get off your medication. It is not good for you, and I’d be happy to help push the request through as much as I can. I only need to know if your reasons would make it easier for it to be approved.”
Andrew spins his mug in his hands. “I can’t protect anyone like this, Bee.”
Bee fixes her glasses. She doesn’t know about Andrew’s deals, but she’s aware of enough of what’s happening with Kevin and the Ravens to get the general gist of the situation. She’s tried to talk to him about it before. That session hadn’t gone well.
She doesn’t mention it this time, though Andrew suspects that has little to do with her lack of concern about Andrew’s reasons, and more to do with her decision to come back to it during another appointment. “That seems like a legitimate reason from your side, but I’m afraid that legally I can’t use it to push the appeal through. The court was very clear about the particulars of your parole, and unless the medication proves a danger to yourself or others, there is very little I can do.”
Bee is a good shrink. She knows that he was misdiagnosed and that the fucking pills are not helping him. Andrew is aware that she filed a complaint about his medication once, but the courts had thrown it away, claiming insufficient reason to stop the drugs.
The first time around, he hadn’t cared. What did it matter to him if he was free of the damn pills several months earlier than his sentence demanded? He hated them, but he couldn’t bring himself to care enough to rail against them. So what if they fucked him up enough that he could barely tell what was real and what wasn’t? So what if he spent months high out of his mind and barely able to function? So what if this was just another way that his autonomy was taken from him, that he was denied choices about his own body and what happens to it? Nobody had ever cared about listening to what Andrew wants, and he had long stopped hoping for otherwise.
Thanksgiving had taken care of the pills at least, but that had also come at the price of what Andrew wanted. He would have hooked himself on those drugs for ten more years if it would have stopped people from learning what they did about him.
He can’t tell Bee about any of that. Firstly, while she’s a good shrink, she’s not as easy to convince as Wymack, and he doesn’t have Neil and Kevin to back up his words. Secondly, even if he tells her, it’s not like she could put ‘my time-traveler patient thinks the pills are bad for him’ on a report and expect anything other than allegations of insanity.
So he does one thing he knows for certain will work.
He takes off his armbands.
…
The appeal does not go through as fast as the last time around, but with Matt and Allison throwing money at the problem, Andrew is standing in front of Easthaven less than two weeks after his conversation with Bee.
Wymack and Bee drive him there, but when they finally arrive, Wymack stops them from going in immediately.
“You won’t be able to smoke for weeks after this, so you better take your last cigarette before lockup, kid,” he says, and takes Bee to wander some distance away from the car to give him a semblance of privacy.
Andrew doesn’t reach for a cigarette. The withdrawals are going to happen sooner or later, so it doesn’t matter whether he has one last smoke before he goes in. Instead, he fishes out his phone and dials Neil’s new number. He’d saved it under number ten, and when he opens his contacts, it’s first on the list.
“I won’t be able to call for the next six weeks,” he says as soon as the call is picked up. “Don’t get killed.”
“...I won’t,” Neil says. “I’m going to Palmetto soon anyway, and if everything goes well, you’ll be back before we move in the dorms.”
Neil’s father hasn’t sent anyone to kill him, so the team has tentatively concluded that nobody else has come back in time. This is, of course, good for their plans, but it also means that Neil did not run away from Millport to Palmetto ahead of schedule, and they could only talk through phone calls. It’s uncomfortably close to Neil’s last year at college, where they wouldn’t see each other for weeks.
But Neil will be graduating high school soon and then immediately flying to Columbia and his place in Abby’s house. Kevin is still occupying Wymack’s couch and will continue to do so — Andrew has deputized Wymack for babysitting duty while he’s away getting fucked up in rehab, and the older man promised to keep a close eye on Kevin. Neil will be fine at Abby’s, but Kevin might not be with Andrew out of the picture. He’s Riko’s main target. This way, Wymack will be able to keep an eye on him while he’s at home and Neil while he’s at court. He will be protected.
The rest of the team will also be there. The last time, all of them had left home for summer holidays before Neil arrived. This time, they’d collectively decided to wait until Neil flies in. Allison had paid for everyone’s hotel rooms once dorms were closed. Even Seth stayed, though he seemed very petulant about it.
“Keep an eye on the rest of them.” Aaron and Nicky are not as important targets as Kevin is, but it’s better for Neil to stay close to them, just in case.
“Of course,” Neil agrees easily. “I’m not even going to let them touch Aaron, no matter how tempted I might be.”
Andrew snorts.
“Are you okay? With going back in?”
Andrew eyes the Easthaven clinic with as neutral a face as he can manage. It’s a nice facility, despite everything. Up-to-date on all specifications, and even the staff — aside from one notable exception — had been professional if distant during Andrew’s treatment. It would have been a good place to go through withdrawal if not for Andrew’s prodigious memory.
He knows exactly what happens there. He can’t ever forget.
“The court says I have to go in,” is all that Andrew can say to that question. Like with most things in his life, he doesn’t have a choice.
It’s almost audible how hard Neil is gritting his teeth. “He won’t touch you.”
He sounds very certain about that. Far more certain than if it were purely guesswork.
“Don’t do anything stupid.”
“I know,” Neil spits. “I have to lay low. But Andrew, he won’t touch you. Riko doesn’t care about making your life difficult at this point. I’m pretty sure he only connected you with Drake after Higgins came to Palmetto. Despite what he likes to think, he doesn’t have connections to know about local investigations in California.”
It’s logical. It makes sense. It doesn’t stop Andrew’s stomach from churning every time he glances at the building from the corner of his eye.
“I’ll call you when I get out,” he says instead of addressing anything he might be feeling.
“I’ll come pick you up,” Neil answers. “Nicky has your car keys, right?”
“No. I gave them to Aaron.”
Neil swears, even as Andrew’s lips twitch into something that resembles an actual smile instead of a grimace. Neil can’t bully Aaron into doing what he wants as easily as he can Nicky. He usually gets what he wants in the end — he always does, because Neil Josten does not understand the concept of quitting — but Aaron is more resistant to his manipulations than most. It mostly comes down to Aaron actually being one of the rare few people who knows exactly the sort of person Neil is. Even the rest of the team tends to think he’s saner than he actually is, but Aaron knows what’s up, and both of them hate it.
Andrew finds the whole thing funny. If he has to put up with both of them for the rest of his life, he should at least get some amusement out of it.
“Fine,” Neil says, clipped. “I guess we’re picking you up together. Fuck.”
Andrew snorts. From the corner of his eye, he sees Wymack approaching, tapping his bare wrist as if he were wearing a watch on it. Andrew nods in his direction.
“I have to go.”
“Okay,” Neil says, still sounding unhappy. “I hate that you have to do this again.”
It’s not like Andrew is a happy camper either. “I’ll survive.”
“I know. You always do.” With that ominous statement, Neil hangs up without saying goodbye, and Andrew huffs in amusement.
He clutches the phone tightly only once before he stuffs it back into his pocket. It will have to be given to the orderlies with all of his other possessions later, but for now, he keeps his hand on it.
“You done?” Wymack asks, coming closer with Bee at his heels.
In lieu of answering, Andrew turns on his heel and strides off towards the entrance of the clinic. Wymack huffs but follows after. “Did Josten have anything interesting to say?”
“Oh, Coach,” Andrew sighs, not even wondering how Wymack knows who he called. That man sees far too much. “He never has anything interesting to say.”
Wymack’s lips curve into a smirk as Bee looks on curiously. Andrew hasn’t mentioned Neil to her. “If you say so. That was a pretty long conversation, if you’re talking to someone who does not interest you at all.”
“Keep your thoughts to yourself, Coach. This is above your paygrade.”
Wymack, as always, knows exactly when to stop, so he doesn’t say anything else as they reach the door to the clinic. Andrew forces himself not to hesitate visibly, but he can’t help the way his shoulders tense as they enter the lobby, warm in that soulless, magazine way, and familiar.
“Once more unto the breach,” he murmurs before he can stop himself and aims his unnerving grin to the first nurse that meets his eyes. She looks away first.