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Robin Cross is interesting. And Andrew doesn’t think that often.
She is otherwise unremarkable, frumpy and cowardly and a complete pushover. Since her arrival, she had been a target - harassed and used as a scapegoat for her teammates’ rampant insecurities. She’s not good at exy, in fact, she’s terrible at it. She spends most of her time on and off the court shaking in her boots and avoiding everything with an eye. Cohabitating with others is impossible for her because despite her best intentions, she rubs everybody the wrong way. She quite clearly doesn’t fit in, and so she is a target.
And he’s drawn to her.
Andrew patiently waits for her to break. He waits for her to lose her temper or her mind or, like certain others, run away. But each day after her arrival, she just retreats further into herself and further away from reality. He'd anticipated some friction from the moment he left that little note on Wymack’s desk months ago (the one that read simply: Robin Cross ) but now he got the feeling he was going to have to take some responsibility for it.
In the beginning, even Neil had asked, ‘Why her?’
It wasn’t a coincidence that he had recruited her. Since his freshman year, he could recall hearing snippets of her unfolding story; first from Betsy and after the association had stuck, he’d noticed it of his own accord every time thereafter. Kidnapped as a child, Robin Cross had been raised in captivity by a man she had believed to be her father and after many years, in an unsuccessful attempt to lure in a younger victim, she had gotten away. It was just the evening news for most people but for Andrew it was a connection, it was something that existed in the vacuity of his mind, brought to the forefront where everything else was lost in a sea of manic distraction. So when he had heard the news - her kidnapper had been caught attempting to flee the country - and she was once again brought to his attention, he couldn’t ignore it so easily. Maybe his mind was finally clear after years of court-ordered mania, or maybe, God help him, he was a better person.
Her athletic performance certainly didn’t inspire him into action, but everything else about her did. Her scarred past, her ceaseless fear and her drive for exy born out of a desperation for freedom, they were familiar. They were him. Not someone he used to be, but someone he still was. And he had a bad habit of taking in lost causes like that. It’s probably the reason he’s still alive to make such stupid decisions - he’s the greatest calamity of them all.
*
She really is terrible at exy.
The first time she stands in the goal during practice, she misses every shot. She seems to have an understanding of the appropriate techniques and she’s certainly going through the motions, the way people go through motions when they’re drowning in mud. By the time her arm swings, the ball has flown right past or, at times, into her.
On a good day, the Foxes are out for blood. They’re raucous and aggressive, they get off on conflict and can smell timidity like rot in the air. Today, this particular batch appears to have decided as a hivemind that there’s no time better than the present to let loose their pent up aggression and circle their prey, carefully tenderized and weak as she is. When Andrew and Neil return from the court after practice, the sophomores have her cornered in the flickering light of the locker room. Neil’s had to intervene on Robin’s behalf all week and the sight in front of him has his hackles raised in an instant - he doesn’t really care about Robin’s personal wellbeing any more so than he cares that his teammates are going to such lows. But no matter the reason, he’s pissed.
‘Jesus Christ, can’t you guys just leave her alone?’ Neil snaps. He’s a hair's breadth away from blowing his top and the team hasn’t even turned to face him yet. Andrew wouldn’t mind sticking around for that; he’s getting bored after two weeks of this particular scene.
Sheena is the first to respond and, predictably, she’s physically incapable of shutting her wretched mouth and withholding her unasked for two cents. ‘I think we as team members have the right to protest deadweight players! This isn’t high school anymore, this is college sport and we shouldn’t settle for players who aren’t serious about this!’
‘I am serious…’ Robin protests, but her voice is too weak and nobody hears her over Dumb and Dumber making a racket.
Jack is backing her up in record time, his ugly face an offensive addition to her company, ‘Sheena’s right,’ (no surprise there, he’s so far up her ass he eats the shit she’s full of for breakfast), ‘There’s no way we can play a game with her - we’ll be humiliated.’
‘Today is proof enough,’ somebody else pipes in. ‘No offense, but we won’t even make it past the first game like this.’
Neil growls, ‘She was chosen to be on this team for a reason. None of you little shits are even close to being good enough to decide who gets to stay or go, so you better pull your heads out of whatever holes you stick them in and if I hear any of you questioning the recruits we’ve chosen again, I’ll make it my personal mission to make your life miserable. Now piss off and go home, read a book or something.’ Players begin to trudge off, mumbling their discontent as they go.
‘What dumbass chose her anyway…’ Sheena mumbles and Neil’s already gearing up to lose his temper completely when Andrew speaks up.
‘I did.’
He doesn’t say anything other than that. He catalogues the room, noting Jack and Sheena’s shared look of what can only be called mortal horror, Neil’s self-satisfied smirk he gets when Andrew does something particularly pot-stirrish and most importantly, the way that Robin’s gaze lands on him.
If he was someone else, he’d look away from a stare so loaded.
*
Afterwards, Robin approaches his locker.
‘Did you really recruit me?' she asks. From the corner of his eye, Andrew notices Neil perking up a little at his own locker and he’s clearly trying to eavesdrop on the conversation. Andrew doesn’t feel much like giving him the satisfaction and keeps his eyes strictly on the contents of his locker.
'You're here, aren’t you?'
She huffs out a pathetic laugh that sounds a lot more like a sigh and she’s so hunched into herself that she’s almost Andrew’s height. ‘I must be a big disappointment, huh? Being so bad at exy, letting them push me around like that.’
'I assume you'll fight back eventually.' Andrew doesn’t mention exy - he doesn’t care. He picks up his bag and shuts his locker. He really needs a cigarette.
Robin fidgets. 'I - don't know how.'
‘Hm,’ Andrew supplies. He slips a pack of cigarettes out from his back pocket and pops the bottom, plucking the highermost one out and promptly lighting it. Neil’s miraculously disappeared to somewhere or the other as he often does, so Andrew makes his way towards the parking lot to smoke alone. Well, almost alone, because Robin is trailing behind him like a lost duckling. She hangs around, the gangliest raincloud that has ever loomed over him, and watches Andrew take drag after drag until the cigarette is almost gone. He watches back, and when the cigarette has finally burnt all the way to the filter, she speaks.
‘I really want to do well, I do. Exy is all I have and it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, but I never got to practice as much as everyone else and they’re all so good, and I’m horrible at it and I don’t blame them for hating me or wanting me off the team. I let people down a lot and I don’t know how to be normal. But no one’s ever really given me a chance. Except - you.’ It comes out in a nervous rush and it’s the most Robin’s ever spoken and every word out of her mouth fills Andrew with a low simmering feeling of tension, so dangerously close to anger. It’s so close to anger because no matter how hard she’d tried to be more than her past, here she was, in a parking lot with Andrew, apologizing for existing. Just for existing. That she had reached this point meant that somebody somewhere had failed her; on the precipice of giving into every fragile thought, she was someone who believed she lived to stay crushed under a boot, and that she deserved it. It’s a tired existence that Andrew knows all too well.
To see her defenseless and unable to fight back as she’s beaten down to dirt has Andrew’s fingers itching to cut every demon of hers to pieces himself. But she’s reaching out, hesitant as it is, wanting something to grasp her hand and pull her back up. She doesn’t want revenge or anger - she wants an opportunity to be better.
Andrew had met someone like that before - and he had almost lost him. It wasn’t going to happen again.
‘Those assholes aren’t that good. They’ll all be balding accountants in unhappy heterosexual marriages by the time they’re thirty so this stupid game is completely wasted on them. Their opinions about it are worthless as far as I’m concerned.’ And in a moment of compassion he’d gut any witnesses for: ‘Need a ride?’
‘N-no. I have class.’ Her eyebrows are raised high into her forehead and she looks how whiplash feels. Andrew unlocks his car and sits himself in the driver's seat. He looks at the dashboard clock.
‘You’re going to be late,’ he says, and shuts the door.
*
Neil shows himself at their dorm hours after Andrew’s already returned. He drops himself onto the chair at the desk that Andrew’s reading on top of and he looks much too interested in what he’s doing so naturally, Andrew ignores him. Neil, in turn, ignores Andrew ignoring him and opens his mouth.
‘So I was at the library after practice.’
‘Oh, good for you. Did you finally learn how to read?’
‘Very funny. I was doing some research,’ he says with unnecessary emphasis. Usually when he says that, he means he was napping all over the keyboard. ‘About Robin.’
Andrew very pointedly doesn’t look over at him and turns the page in his book. ‘Is that so?’
‘It is. She was kidnapped as a kid, did you know? Kept locked up by some psycho for years and now she’s probably fucked up for life. Which you do know - that’s why you recruited her.’
‘No, actually, her athletic brilliance was just that inspiring.’ Neil looks at him. ‘And she’s got nothing else. She’s a fanatic just like you.’
Neil continues to look up at Andrew through his stupid thick lashes and his stare is so searching that it feels too much like he’s seeing right through Andrew and into every one of his thoughts. ‘It’s good of you to give her an opportunity like this. No one would believe me if I told them you’re so big-hearted, taking in dysfunctional wrecks and nursing them back to health.’
‘You should take a look in the mirror sometime, runaway. This team is full of dysfunctional wrecks.’
‘At least I had the entire world to run to. She had nowhere.’ At this, Neil’s eyebrows scrunch up. He’s got quite the repository of disturbing memories so Andrew can only imagine what he’s thinking of now. He wonders if it's worth asking about.
‘I wouldn’t go comparing sob stories if I were you,’ he says instead.
‘Actually, I think that’s something we’ve all got in common.’
‘What, a tale of woe?’
‘Something like that,’ Neil replies and shifts into Andrew’s space until his head rests on his crossed knee. ‘I think we’re all just looking for somewhere to belong, a place where we can be honest about ourselves and still be allowed to stay. It’s hard for people like us to have a home.’
‘That’s awfully sappy of you, Neil. Are you sure you used to be a mobster?’
Neil laughs at the dig and nuzzles Andrew’s knee with his scarred cheek. ‘Mobster’s a bit of a stretch, don’t you think? And besides, I’m Neil Josten now and Neil Josten is allowed to be sappy and care about people and feel happy that his boyfriend is thinking about the wellbeing of others.’
Andrew doesn’t comment on the boyfriend thing since it’s something he’d rather unpack on his own later. It’s new and they’re navigating it - Neil is trying his hand at permanency and Andrew’s trying his own at tenderness. He must be making progress if his interest in Robin has anything to say about it; he wouldn’t have cared enough two years ago. He didn’t care about anything at all, then. But now, maybe Andrew is allowed this too.
‘Yes or no?’
He leans over and gives Neil a firm kiss. Neil accepts it eagerly and smiles at Andrew when they break apart.
‘So what are you gonna do about her? I’m getting pretty sick of coming to the rescue all the time.’ He doesn’t really mean that, the raging martyr that he is. He’d save anyone who stubbed their toe or dropped their fucking chicken nuggets if it meant he got to give someone a piece of his mind.
Tired from thinking and caring about useless things, Andrew’s reply is uncreative at best but safe in his usual realm of apathy. ‘Threaten her, I guess.’ Neil scoffs at him. ‘Get up.’
Neil lifts his head. ‘Wait. You’re joking, right?’
‘Nope.’ Andrew pushes him the rest of the way off, swings off the desk and heads for the door.
‘Don’t break her! We don’t have another goalie!’ Neil yells after him and Andrew thanks him for his show of support with a middle finger in his direction.
*
He crowds Robin to the edge of the roof and his own heart is pounding a feverish rhythm, both for her and himself - just one wrong move, one lapse of control and they’d both go down. But the fear spurs him on and he doesn’t stop there.
‘Hit me,’ he says. ‘Or I push you off.’
‘What?! Please don’t!’ Please. He hasn’t heard that in a while. He still hates it.
After his conversation with Neil, Andrew had rapped on Robin’s door and silently brought her to the stairwell, all the way up to the roof. And without preamble, he’d led her right to the very edge, so close that the breeze threatened to tip them right off.
‘I’m giving you express permission to hit me as hard as you can. It’s either that or your brains all over the pavement. Make your choice.’
Robin screws her eyes shut and makes a pitiful noise. She’s obviously blindsided by the dangerous turn of events; the fear in her eyes was claustrophobic. Since they’d talked in the parking lot, she probably thought he would protect her and that would be that. And he will - to a degree. But there’s nothing he can do if she can’t hold her own against her teammates, not when they were just chum swimming around in a tank full of sharks.
Andrew fists his hand in her shirt and gives a rough shove. At this, she loses her footing - one of her feet slips off the edge of the roof for just a moment and she scrambles perilously for balance. The fear of falling suddenly becomes very real and very urgent and unable to flee, she fights. Her hand whips out and she aims a series of desperate punches directly to the side of Andrew’s head before gripping onto his hair and holding on painfully. Her reaction is purely animal instinct, left with no choice but to either save herself or die. So she fights.
But Andrew tugs Robin back to safety and she falls into his chest with a choked gasp. They’re fine. Her whole body is shaking like a leaf and her hands are still ripping into chunks of his hair like a lifeline. Andrew lets her do it because the pain is grounding him where the adrenaline has iced his veins to the point of aching. She finally pries her eyelids apart and when their gazes meet, something complicated sits in those wide brown eyes so stricken with terror. Her stare is at once asking him why but also already knows what he’s trying to say. She must be able to read something in his, too - fear, understanding, anger, wisdom - maybe she can tell that he’s just like her.
‘In this world, if you don’t fight back,’ he yanks her closer by the shirt, ‘you fall.’
Robin’s eyes are misty, but she nods with steely resolution. ‘I want to fight. I won’t give up - I won’t fall.’
Andrew lets go of her shirt. ‘Good. Your form is lousy.’
And he leaves her there without explanation, trembling alone on the roof.
*
Andrew brings Robin to Eden’s the next Friday.
Aaron and Nicky are visibly baffled when she rocks up to the car - it had been years now since somebody new accompanied them to Columbia. She’d come here under Andrew’s instructions, unfortunately dressed in a boring shirt and jeans. What about Andrew attracted lousy eyesores who couldn’t dress to save themselves, he doesn’t want to know. But he lets her in his car anyway.
This time around, he bypasses the cracker dust and the group settles for a generous helping of drinks. Aaron and Nicky drink more than their fair share before disappearing into the crowd, jostling themselves towards the dancefloor together. Neil cracks open a soda across from Andrew and Robin and while he’s looking particularly compelling in a new shirt that Andrew recently bought for him, he needs to make himself scarce for the night. Andrew lets him know as much with a glance and Neil gracefully takes the hint.
‘I’m gonna go catch up with Roland.’ Neil doesn’t really talk to Roland, but Robin doesn’t know that.
As Neil makes his exit, Andrew downs his first drink in one fell swoop before picking up his second.
‘I’m assuming you didn’t take me here to have fun?’ Robin asks as a precursor to their impending conversation. She doesn’t look comfortable anyway, unnerved at the strobing lights and heavy crowd. Andrew wonders if she’s ever even been to a nightclub before - she’s probably not even of age.
‘Depends on your definition of fun. We’re here to talk about you.’
‘Me?’
‘It was all over the news. You: kidnapped, locked in a room, used as bait and so on and so forth. I can only assume a past like that is why you’re incapable of fending for yourself now. So what fucked you up the most? The kidnapping, the baiting or the fact that now you have to live in the real world like everybody else?’
She must get asked this a lot because her expression barely changes. ‘To be honest with you, it’s been harder than I ever thought it would be, adjusting to my new life. Sometimes I even miss my own prison, isn’t that silly? But my family is really good to me and they let me come here to play exy, it’s like a dream come true! Things are getting better every day for me.’ She’s not entirely untruthful but her answer is so stock standard that Andrew knows she’s only just scratching at the surface of her scab; she’s completely ignoring the festering wound underneath. He knows what’s really gnawing at the recesses of her mind and he knows that the only way to tame it is to tear it out from the inside.
‘Better for you, right? But not for others.’
She startles at that. ‘I’m grateful, I - I shouldn’t dwell on it,’ she says and it's yet another placid and bland excuse that sounds like it came straight from a psychologist's mouth. It’s seriously irritating him. ‘Everybody always tells me I’m lucky...’
Andrew cuts to the quick. ‘Lucky to get away? Or lucky that you were able to sacrifice someone else's child for your freedom?’
‘What? I-’
‘You got to escape and it only cost you somebody else’s life. She lived and died in that room while you moved on, went to school, ate your wheaties, hugged your mom -’
‘No!’ she bursts, ‘That’s not true…’
‘It’s not?’
‘No! It’s not! I’ll never forgive myself for what I did to them,’ she finally admits and though she’s been beaten down and antagonised consistently since the moment he met her, Andrew has never seen her look so fiercely angry. And at herself, no less. ‘I don’t deserve to move on. Is that what you wanted to hear? I don’t deserve a new life.’
It feels like the first real truth she’s ever given him.
‘There were six after me,’ Andrew supplies as an answer. Robin doesn’t ask six what, doesn’t ask for more details than that and it’s polite of her, but Andrew doesn’t give a fuck about politeness or sensibilities or what he should or shouldn’t say. The details aren’t something he gives out lightly, they’re barely something he’s comfortable with himself, but he doesn’t often need to have these conversations. ‘Six kids. Fed to a busted Marine with a fetish for molesting the weak and defenseless.’
He sees Robin’s intake of breath and then, oddly, he sees relief too. But he gets it - it’s a powerful thing, feeling like you’re no longer alone. He continues. ‘I’d been in the foster system since I was born, passed from family to family. Most of them were bad, others worse, but I was never with any for long. I thought I’d found somewhere I could stay,” he hates this part, ‘but that didn’t work out for obvious reasons. I’d put my trust in the wrong person so where there should have been zero, there were six.’
He doesn’t think he needs to say any more. They stop and share a few sorely needed moments of silence and rather than lingering in her anger, Robin just looks exhausted. Andrew shares the sentiment.
‘Does it ever cross your mind - the people that got hurt because you couldn’t save them?’ she asks.
‘It used to. But the way I see it now is that I did what I could and there’s no point thinking about what I couldn’t. You could easily argue that we’re responsible by proxy, but if you do that you might as well write off the rest of your life as a wasted effort because you'll never move on. You’re a victim, and you don’t get the privilege of living a normal life just because you survived - it doesn’t work like that.’
‘But moving on feels impossible. I don’t know what to do. What do I do?’ Her glossy eyes throw off blue and pink under the lights and she looks at Andrew like he is her guiding star, her answer. And he’s not, he will never be, but right now in this fragile moment? He’s willing to go for broke.
‘You fight for it.’ She smiles at that.
Andrew has to sleep alone on the couch that night and he tosses and turns more than anything else, but he doesn’t regret the conversation they had. He knows just what he plans to do now that Robin is his - he’s going to make certain that she will never be anyone’s ever again.
*
That weekend, he has Robin swiftly moved into his dorm and in his direct line of sight for the foreseeable future. Her teammates don’t say much as she goes, but Andrew can see them whispering amongst themselves - their relief is clear. Neil helps her carry the few boxes she has over to their dorm and helps her get settled. Aaron and Nicky also offer their support from the living room in the form of not doing anything helpful at all; they’re quite obviously still puzzled by the development, but they knew better by now not to protest the sudden addition to their family. Moreover, Robin was the only newcomer that hadn’t actively pissed one or all of them off yet, so there were very little complaints at this point in time. He’d almost say that Neil had been the worst adjustment but Kevin’s personality was hard to outdo.
Andrew shows her to the bedroom and leans against the threshold while she puts her last box down. He watches her do the math as she takes the space in - four beds, five people - and rather than letting her strain herself to the point of combustion, he says, ‘You’ll have mine.’
She protests the offer in an instant. Her aversion to inconveniencing others is predictable but no less gratuitous. ‘But where will you sleep? You can’t stay on the floor.’
‘I won’t be,’ he replies, and because it’s going to come out soon enough, ‘I’ll be in Neil’s bed.’
‘Oh,’ she says, ‘but where will Neil sleep?’ Andrew stares at her.
‘They’re boyfriends! They’re gonna cuddle up together every night!’ Nicky butts in from the living room and Andrew has the privilege of watching Neil aim a spoon with perfect precision directly into the back of his head all the way from the kitchen. Ever the marksman, judging by Nicky’s wounded yelp.
‘Well, you heard it straight from the horse’s mouth,’ Nicky’s reaction to the horse comment falls on deaf ears and Andrew looks only at Robin. ‘You’re with us now and that means you’re not staying anywhere else. You stay in this room on that bed.’
So she accepts. And the following Monday morning, she sits beside Andrew and Neil on the third cushion of their designated couch in the locker room. They’re all here for practice but Andrew doesn’t care; there’s an elephant in the room that can no longer be ignored - a lanky and unassuming freshman who sits right by Andrew’s side and won’t spend one more day subject to the whims and fancies of others if he can help it.
Andrew also doesn’t particularly care that Wymack is standing there at the head of the room and will probably scream bloody murder after this - he’d rather say what needs to be said and deal with the fallout later.
So, with that in mind, he promptly cuts through the chatter of the room with the deafening slam and resulting crack of his knife into the centre coffee table. The room goes dead silent in a second.
With their mouths now blessedly shut, Andrew says it plainly to the team: ‘If I find out that anybody in this room has put a single hand on Robin here, I’ll use this very knife to gut you where no one will ever find your body. And that’s a promise.’
Neil is looking at Andrew like he just brought home gold, Wymack is looking at him like he just stabbed his table and where he expected to find timidity, he sees instead a bolt of fierce satisfaction in Robin’s eyes. Something inside her liked that, the power and the way a whole room could be immobilized before her. She takes a long and steadying breath in before she speaks and Andrew is expecting her to say something characteristically polite to offset the tension in the room, something stupid like it’s not a big deal or I'd really appreciate it if-
‘And if you try to push me around again, I’ll stab you in the face!’ she says instead.
Robin Cross certainly is interesting.