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i. had a bitterness when i looked back
Kevin starts collecting stones on Christmas. Heavier than flowers they still serve the same purpose, only he knows they're for a funeral that's yet to happen.
It’s not something he means to start doing, it sneaks up on him in New York. It’s odd to be there without Andrew, without that gravitational force that Andrew so often exudes. Kevin doesn’t realise how caught in the other man’s orbit he's been until he’s weightless and without it.
Most of the time they spend wandering the city, following Matt around while he shows off his side of the town. He points out the places where he used to play, the gym where Randy took him to learn boxing after he left his father’s home.
Randy is a pleasant woman in the most brutal of ways, an honesty that would seem mean if she didn’t do it with a smile and Kevin can see where her rough edges match up with Matt.
Aaron and Kevin bunk together while Nicky takes the lone room, explaining that he can call Erik more easily like that and Kevin honestly doesn’t really want to know. He doesn’t know how to act in this house of cream walls and fluffy carpeted floor. He doesn’t even bother to unpack, doesn’t see the need for it when they’re only going to be there for a short time and his bag is neatly packed so he can easily slip out the clothing he needs for the day.
They have dinners together where Kevin keeps fiddling with his phone, he sticks close to the others and he doesn’t spend time by himself except when going to the downstairs gym that Randy has set up in her basement. Matt agrees to take him to the court close by twice, Aaron joins with a scowl and it’s an interesting set up. Two backliners against a striker, but they make it work.
He looks at his phone, he eats, he sleeps and he tries not to think about that cloying red and black so close by. He listens to Aaron’s breathing when the room is dark during the night. He wishes Jean would answer his messages but he doesn’t know if it’s anger or callousness that has him silent. Kevin doesn’t know how to tell Jean that Neil doesn’t deserve his anger, not the one that’s bred from his anger at Kevin. But the world has never been nice to Jean, so perhaps everyone deserves his anger as destructive as it is.
Perhaps his phone is being monitored. It wouldn’t be out of the blue, it wouldn’t be anything new.
They’re out shopping when Kevin gets the call, he knows the number by heart even if it’s no longer programmed on his phone. He doesn’t have it blocked. This is not a time when he can ignore it. He doesn’t really deserve to anyway;, the ticket had been in his hands before it was passed onto Neil, he had been the one who gave it in the end and he thinks that perhaps if he was someone else he would have torn it into two. Would have said no instead of once again passing along Riko’s messages and taking part in his sick games.
“Merry Christmas, Kevin,” Riko says, voice bright on the other end, “I finally thought of a Christmas gift for you.”
“I don’t want one,” his voice is brittle, tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth and he’s missing a buzz in his blood.
“Don’t be like that. He could have been someone you know, if you hadn’t dragged him into this, but at least you can have him back for however long that lasts. It’s lovely to have Nathaniel back, isn’t it? So much like his father.”
The shadow of Nathan isn’t someone that Kevin cares to be reminded of, isn’t someone he wants to think about. “Has he signed?”
There’s a harshness in Riko’s voice when he starts speaking again. “He was always supposed to be mine—I should have carved the number into him but he matches you now. And isn’t that what you wanted? Your own little striker to rule over.”
Kevin sucks in his next breath and then hangs up. It’s not what he wanted. It’s truly not, but he doesn’t know if Neil will see it as that. There’s a reason the night training matches the Raven’s hours, some of the Nest’s teachings still holding on. At least Neil hasn’t signed yet, or Riko would have gloated about that, but there’s still days left and the tattoo. Riko couldn't have possibly given it to someone he meant to let go, the Master couldn’t possibly have let Riko brand someone that they weren’t allowed to keep.
Nicky comes out of the store with a large paper bag, face bright. His cheeks are flushed from the heat inside and it’s such a jarring difference to the cold in Kevin’s lungs, to the puffs of breath coming out a little bit quicker. Maybe it’s the fact that he raised the twins that has his smile slipping for a second when he sees Kevin.
“You okay there, Kevin?”
“Yeah,” he slips his phone back into his pocket, and Nicky’s eyes follow it.
“An important call?”
Kevin nods, but he’s not ready to talk about it. What is there to say other than Kevin’s own gravitational force seems to drag everyone down around him as well, tearing them up much like a black hole. The opposite of the force Andrew has that keeps everyone tightly anchored to him.
“Oh, Kevin,” Nicky says, smile brittle and he reaches out for a moment until he lets his hand fall.
They walk back in silence and it’s on the doorstep to Randy’s house he notices the stone. It’s smooth and grey, really dull but made oval by human ingenuity. Looks like one of those that comes with pots as decoration and Kevin places it in his palm, weighing it carefully. The weather is cold enough that even the sun hasn’t been able to heat it up.
There was a time when Kevin had been afraid he wouldn’t retain his grip, when he had been thinking that his hand wouldn’t stop hurting, way after the doctors said it should have stopped. Ghost pains.
There doesn't seem to be an end to the ghosts that Kevin carries.
There’s Neil and there’s Nathaniel and he thinks he has to carry those because nobody else will after the year is over.
But there’s also Abram. A name that had been spoken so softly and gently from a boy that smiled like cut glass. It had meant more than Kevin thought it could at the time, a little bit of kindness that Abram got to keep and a little bit of the Hartfords and their traditions. Judaism is a matrilineal practice, and they name the babies after a deceased relative. Kevin wonders which Hartford died, if Abram even knows that.
You don’t leave roses on a Jewish grave, Kevin remembers reading, you leave stones.
So he puts it in his pocket together with his phone. Once they’re back at Fox Tower he empties out a drawer beside his bed and puts it there, still warm from his pocket.
ii. “no, you’re not that strong”
Kevin takes a punch for Neil when they return, tastes blood in his mouth and maybe it’s with a little bit of satisfaction he thinks that it’ll leave a mark. That Andrew will see it because he doesn’t think he could throw that punch himself. And now he can’t return it after Matt stopped talking to him once Kevin told them the truth. Nicky had tried to keep the mood up, a smile flexing on his face and eyebrows scrunched, not sure how to go about it. Not sure of the damage yet. Still not sure about the violence to expect from Evermore.
It’s not the thing that makes him flinch the hardest though.
Last time he saw those blue eyes with those red curls he watched a man be cut apart and burned back together. Over and over. Done for Riko’s safety, and hadn’t that told Kevin something. Even the second son stood above them when it came to this—second place, and he would be a coveted possession for the main branch’s protection. Kevin had been terrified for months after that, more than the Master had ever frightened him with his cane. He hadn’t seen violence like that before then. He hadn’t seen that kind of smile on Riko’s face watching it happen either, happy to have his father’s attention on him for once, even in the most convoluted of ways.
There’s nights and conversations that exist between them that Kevin doesn’t know how to approach. There was love at one point. Riko had been his brother. But love was meant to be soft, the way his mother had been gentle, and he didn’t know how to put it together with blood and bones. He had hoped that Riko would turn and look at him, that he could pull him back from whatever darkness was pushing him down that path. Who does he even tell about how much that failure hurt?
Neil looks at him with pity when he flinches back from those eyes and the red red red of his hair. A grimace on his face that reminds Kevin of the fact that only humans smile to show kindness. It doesn’t help.
He finds him later in their suite’s bathroom. Sprawled on the floor, the rug is pushed to the side and for a moment he thinks “Oh god he’s dead!” until Neil opens his eyes and peers up at him.
“What are you doing?” Kevin asks.
Neil shrugs, grimaces when it jostles whatever is hiding behind his long sleeved shirt. It’s too big on him, and it might be Matt’s or even Kevin’s. He’s not really sure and there’s a spark of anger about having his things touched. But if he left it out there for Neil to take then he can’t really be angry, property will be taken from him if he doesn’t keep it to his own space.
He doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to move, so Kevin steps over him so he can reach for the nail clippers on the sink. He knows he’s being watched as he neatly trims down his nails, makes sure to get the edges so they don’t snag on fabric. Hates the sensory of it even more after his hand was broken.
“Would you clip my nails?” It has Kevin startle enough that he almost slips with the sharp blade, not that the clippers would be able to really cut him when they don’t open more than a couple of millimeters.
When he looks down Neil wiggles his fingers at him. They’re still swollen, purpling and red. It looks like it hurts to move them.
“If you get up, I’m not getting on my knees for you.”
Neil snorts. Levels himself up painstakingly slow and slouches over the sink in an ugly sprawl to watch Kevin finish his last nails. He wiggles his fingers again when Kevin carefully takes a hold of his palm and drags his left hand over the sink. It keeps Neil in the corner of his eyes, the harsh light of the bathroom casting few shadows on his face and cuts the blue of his eyes into ice.
Oh.
The light. Kevin should have figured that out. Between the ceiling light and the ones mounted above the mirror, the bathrooms are the most well lit places in Fox Tower. With the white tiles and the sensible brown wooden fixtures it’s a far cry from the red and black of the Nest.
Neil’s hands are dry and warm underneath his. Fingers a bit crooked from previous breaks. They’re more narrow than his own, smaller and Kevin doesn’t know why it’s suddenly so important that it doesn’t hurt. Or he does but it’s not something he wants to think about as he softens his touch. There’s two nails missing on Neil’s left hand that he doesn’t ask about.
“You should take care of your hands better,” he says instead, poking at the angry red skin around his nails.
“Is that so,” Neil hums.
His eyes are half lidden, not really looking at Kevin either, the hand not caught in Kevin’s grip scratching behind his ear. His freshly dyed hair looks puffier. A far cry from the curls Kevin remembered from when they were children.
“I could give you something for it,” Kevin suggests, still carefully moving Neil’s fingers as he tries to not have him flinch, “I use lotions for my own hands.”
“Is that why they always smell like lavender?”
“It’s a pleasant smell, but yes.”
It finally brings Neil’s attention to him, wary eyes scrutinizing him. His skin is split through one brow and he still hasn’t taken off the plaster above his cheekbone. Still hasn’t let Kevin know if it’s real, if it’s just another trick from Riko. It makes him nauseous. The traces left by Riko—a gift as Riko called it—and it hurts knowing it’s Kevin’s fault.
Whatever Neil sees on his face makes him sneer, lips pulling up and showing his gum again in something raw. “That’s not an apology.”
Kevin harshly breathes in, looks down back at Neil’s nails, “I—it’s not meant to be one”
“If you say so.” He’s quiet for a few moments. “I won’t accept an apology because I do not need one from you.”
They go back to silence, fractured and heavy. It’s not that Kevin thinks that Neil is lying to him, for all the lies he does speak, but there’s a misjudgement there he thinks on how the blame is divided. There’s facts and one of them is that Neil would not have been hurt if Kevin stayed at Evermore to begin with. If Kevin had stayed he could still diffuse that anger inside of Riko, could meddle when it turned outwards and hope it wouldn’t explode.
“So who is it that you see?”
It drags Kevin out of his mind, has him looking at Neil again whose tilted his head so his hair flops into his face. There’s a name Neil is prodding for, and is afraid to hear, but they’re both very good at poking against the soft tissue of their own bruises. Gently, Kevin returns his hand only to take the other one as he thinks. There’s a name on his tongue that belongs to grief now and he doesn’t know if Neil would like to hear it. “Neil.”
“Hm. So what name is true, Kevin Day or Kevin Wymack?”
The next cut has Neil hissing, hand flinching back and even if that leaves a lump in Kevin’s throat he’s still affronted enough to not let go. He hisses between his teeth, “I am still my mother’s son, that won’t change.”
“Are you going to tell him?”
“Not yet.”
“Why?”
“I already told you.”
Even without being part of the main branch the Master has always been someone to pay attention to, words so easily wrecking things around him. It’s not any damage Kevin cares to see happen to Wymack.
“And what’s the other reason?” Neil prods, pokes at Kevin’s ribs with his newly cut nails. They snag on Kevin’s t-shirt, the sensation as always something that makes him shudder.
“I asked for help,” Kevin starts, “and he could have said no.”
He hesitates, then continues: “it was easier to be rejected as a striker than his son.”
“Ah,” Neil says with a bitter twist of his lips, not caring much for familial bonds. He doesn’t get it, Kevin guesses, but he won’t prod those wounds, doesn’t think he has any right to do even when Neil needles.
He’s quiet after that, lets Kevin finish with his nails and even lets him place a tub of hand lotion in his hand. Sniffs at the open cap and wrinkles his nose at the lavender.
“Thank you for this,” he still says.
He wiggles out from the half closed door like he can’t open it. Kevin hears him by the door and then the indignant shout from Nicky followed by some clattering. He finishes up cleaning up the sink, washing away the clippings and washing his hands together with scrubbing the newly exposed skin underneath his nails with a brush.
When he returns to the common room Nicky is kicking out pebbles by the door. “He just emptied out his shoe right in the hall, I thought I raised him better.”
“You didn’t raise him at all,” Kevin reminds him no matter how many times Nicky has put food in front of them.
Nicky doesn’t see when Kevin opens the door later, looks at the corridor outside and plucks the biggest of the pebbles with a rosy colour to it offshoot with spots of grey.
iii. live and learn and never forget
He doesn’t know when Neil starts napping in their dorm room, but it happens enough times that when he opens the fridge to peer into it and Neil walks into the kitchen, he isn’t surprised even if the clock says 23:04. He hadn’t bothered to turn the lights on, the fridge light cutting a harsh line throughout the kitchen that has Neil squinting at him from the table that separates the kitchen from the common area.
Kevin looks back at him but there is no chance to hide that he had been looking in the fridge. There’s no reason either for him to hide it, no one to tell him that he can’t have a late night snack. Especially not Neil who eats when food is presented to him and Kevin has seen scarf down days old yoghurt without making a face. Still, there’s a sense of embarrassment running through him as Neil looks at him, tilts his head like he’s waiting for Kevin to do something.
He’s spending far too much time with Andrew with the way his face goes blank, Kevin wants to say. But Neil has always been able to shut down like that, clamp down on his feelings far tighter than the others could imagine. It drives Kevin up the wall when Neil decides to turn it on him—he has, after all, earned some honesty from Neil.
“Nothing in the fridge?” Neil asks, coming up behind him silent on his feet.
“There’s a lot of things in here,” Kevin says, because it’s the truth, there’s just nothing that looks appetizing right now.
Neil looks into the fridge from underneath his arm, leaning his body against Kevin. With the way he’s angling his face if Kevin were to look down he would see the tattoo, harsh black on bronze skin.
“There’s no fruit,” he remarks.
“So?”
“I want fruit.”
Without any explanation he turns around, disappears back into the suite and around the corner for the bedroom. It’s not until he returns swinging the car keys on his finger that Kevin realises that he presumingly went to tell Andrew. Last Kevin saw Andrew he was reading on the bed but he doesn’t appear as Neil jiggles the keys invitingly at Kevin.
“It isn’t really necessary,” Kevin hesitates.
“Too bad, I want fruit,” he turns before Kevin can continue and heads to the door.
There’s no jacket there for him and when he seems to not care enough to head back to his own dorm room Kevin offers one of his own. It’s an older one that he doesn’t really use anymore and it hangs to Neil’s knees when it only goes to mid thigh on Kevin. He pushes up the sleeves, and then placidly watches Kevin fold them up for him instead.
“It holds longer if you fold it instead of scrunching it up like that,” Kevin complains because Neil doesn’t seem to care. Flops the other sleeve around until Kevin gets to that one as well.
Kevin sends a last lingering look to the bedroom door, but Andrew doesn’t appear and Neil is walking away from him.
In the elevator he feels that humiliation bubble up again.
“I just didn’t want anything in the fridge,” he explains, not looking at Neil but still catching him in the reflection of the silver doors.
“Okay.”
“Sometimes,” Kevin says haltingly, “It just doesn’t sit right.”
He doesn’t know how to explain food to Neil, doesn’t know how to tear at that thread because he doesn’t know how to explain it to himself. How he’s never gone wanting for food, has had the best at the Nest and he’s not left wanting here either. It just feels heavy sometimes for him, food is a fuel and means that he can keep going. He never cared about the taste if he knew it was healthy. The first time he ate a pizza with the cousins he hadn’t tasted anything else but guilt and fat. He knew the count in his head, knew that this wasn’t a food that would feature on any of his food plans and yet he had had it again.
“Kevin,” Neil steps out of the elevator and if Kevin didn’t know better he sounds almost condescending, “I ate ramen for two months and canned soup for another two, I do not care about what you eat.”
Kevin pulls a revolted face, “How do you not have any vitamin deficiency.”
“I probably do,” Neil shrugs, looking mildly interested.
The parking lot is silent at this time, there are new cameras put up in the parking space since the incident. Kevin can’t help but be a bit uncomfortable with them, uneasily watching the blank lenses look back. There were multiple ones in the Nest and he wonders how Neil feels about them, but moving around the Maserati and slipping into the driver's seat he doesn’t look affected.
Kevin has to move the seat back while Neil barely moves anything more than the back mirror. It’s odd to be in the car just the two of them, even when Andrew had been at Easthaven most often Nicky and Aaron would also be there, and it leaves an awkward air between them as Neil smoothly backs out of the parking spot.
“I told Andrew where we were going,” Neil directs the car South, throwing a furtive glance at where Kevin is massaging his hand a gesture he would deny to be from nerves.
“And where are we going?”
“There’s a 24/7 grocery store a bit away.”
Opposite of Andrew he never puts on the radio even though Kevin has seen him fiddle between channels and knows he can operate it. Instead, he pulls down the window and lets the night air fill the car with a mix of rain and warm asphalt. The street lamps light up the cars in sporadic bursts, keeping Neil’s face in the shadow while his red hair shines like embers. His hands aren’t as swollen anymore, not as reddish around the tips and Kevin almost asks if he’s using the lotions but doesn’t. He doesn’t know how brittle that kindness is.
Kevin doesn’t often think about Mary. A wisp of a woman with a narrow face and a bitter twist of her lips. She had been pleasant towards Kevin but her eyes hadn’t left Neil for a moment in the Nest, surrounded by dark and red as they were. It had been her Neil had turned to when he had made a goal, face lit up and waiting for a tiny twist of her lips. Even then Kevin had known it wasn’t where Neil should be looking, had to swallow the shout in his throat because can’t you see, can’t you see that that’s not the one who rules here. He had swallowed it down though, because Nathaniel had not been part of them, had not been part of Riko and Kevin or RikoKevin or the them against the Master’s harsh hand.
It must have been similar though, those years Neil ran. Caught in a world so narrow it could only contain two bodies, two lives. There are so many things that Neil will never speak of, that will cling to his consciousness like it does Kevin. There are so many lives lived that will stay hidden and a grief they both understand so deeply it fills the space between them. Lost to them when they were boys and perhaps lingering for a while when throwing themselves out on the court.
There’s a question on Kevin’s tongue, one he won’t let escape because it will lead to nothing and there’s no one to answer him. It weighs heavier each day. How do you grieve for someone who’s still alive, who might not be buried? Kevin doesn’t know how to tell Neil he’s already built him a funeral bouquet, that it’s heavy enough that the drawer won’t pry open as easily anymore. That it’s made from steel grey and rosy pink.
Their days are running out and yet here Neil is, buying fruit because Kevin doesn’t dare to ask for a midnight snack.
The grocery store is a tiny one that also acts as a gas station and Neil parks the car in one of the empty staff slots. The inside is badly lit with narrow aisles. Kevin takes a basket by the door and almost immediately Neil puts a pair of Granny Smiths inside with a package of strawberries.
It takes longer for Kevin to decide what he wants, as there isn’t anything he’s particularly interested in. There's more the concept of a taste in his mind than anything tangible and he wanders around, leaving Neil to skim the sports papers. Olives are sensible Kevin reasons after taking another lap around the shelves, putting them into the basket alongside some granola bars.
“ Do you want some as well? ” Kevin calls out only to have it quickly followed by a crash.
“Jesus christ, Neil,” his voice comes out harder than he means as he rounds the corners and sees that the magazines Neil had been browsing have toppled onto the ground.
Neil’s shoulder draws up, defensive and harsh as the cashier looks up from whatever she was doing with a tired expression on her face.
“Can you be a bit more careful?” Neil gives him a dark look, crouching down and grabbing the magazines in a haphazard pile to shove them back onto their shelves, not caring about what pages get damaged in the process.
Then he turns and slips out of the store, leaving Kevin to the awkward mess, the cashier watching him from behind the till.
“I can pay for it.”
“It’s fine, it happens,” she says in the resigned voice of someone who just wants to go home. Kevin might strangle Neil once he’s outside again as he fights the red of his cheek while she scans the content of his basket.
“So, French?” the cashier asks, and he wonders if it’s her trying to smooth things over or genuine curiosity but it has Kevin blinking down at her. “The uh, language you were speaking earlier? French, right?”
Kevin processes that, goes back to the non-conversation and probably, he didn’t really think about it but he raised his voice to call out for Neil and he probably slipped into French for a moment there. “It was.”
He can’t see Neil at first when he hurries out, not until he comes closer to the car and can see the small huddled form against the front grill, staring out at the road. He has his fingers curled against the asphalt and he’s breathing slowly through clenched teeth. His phone is beside him, like he was attempting to call someone, but with the way his hands are shaking he probably dropped it.
Kevin approaches slowly, carefully angling himself so that Neil can see him coming. He doesn’t think it’s a good idea to sneak up on him, currently.
“Neil, where are you right now?” There’s a far off look on his face and his sleeves are riding up and Kevin can see those awful marks around his wrist. He’s not stupid enough to not be able to guess, where Neil would have been for him to react to French like that. For him to look around for a body that isn’t there.
“I’m here.”
“I don’t think so.”
Finally he looks up at Kevin, eyes hazy and with a smile that nobody could take as friendly. He looks smaller like this, curled up and washed out in the poor light of the parking lot and so horrendously young. Kevin doesn’t know how to take care of someone who knows how to ruin themselves in the quietest way possible, has never been a person to soothe and rarely has he been called kind.
Neil knows his brand of kindness more than most though, the way Kevin refuses to let go of something he’s already lost. Biting into flesh to not have it pulled from him like a lousy dog fighting for scraps. Knows the awful breed of kindness that has Kevin keeping his mouth shut as the days slip closer to the end they’re both waiting for.
“Let me drive.”
“You hate driving.”
“Doesn’t matter, I can still bring us home and that’s more than you can do right now.” Kevin reaches for him, pulls against his jacket until he can stand. “Don’t tell Andrew though.”
He crouches down and picks up Neil’s phone, he isn’t surprised to see the screen has cracked. Neil finally uncurls his hands and a stone slips from it, one he apparently held onto, probably to not dig his nail into the asphalt. He watches when Kevin picks it up but doesn’t say anything even when Kevin puts it in his pocket.
“I learned to drive before Riko,” Kevin says as he slips into the driver’s seat that he has to push back before he can even get into the car. “I couldn’t accept not knowing how to drive, but it gave him a reason to have me drive him around.”
It hadn’t been acceptable for Kevin to not learn how to drive, to himself at least, not when a car accident had placed him in the Nest, on the continent. But he hated it either way, and he’s never told anyone he’s scared of cars—because he’s not—he just hates driving.
“I still look for him sometimes,” Neil offers in return, voice shaky. “I don’t mean to, but he was the end all be all during my time there. I like his accent, it was pleasant and he would talk while stitching me back together and I don’t think he knows he can be gentle.”
Kevin let a lot of people be hurt for him and he was rarely given the chance to put them together. He doesn’t think this fixes anything but Neil puts his feet up on the seat and rests his chin against his knees watching Kevin. Watches him put the heat on when Neil shivers. Slowly he reaches out and curls his fingers around Kevin’s wrist. His fingertips are cold against the inside of Kevin’s wrist, right over the place where his pulse is and they’re smooth. It’s another thing he doesn’t ask about, doesn’t care to know if Neil burned the prints off himself or if Mary did it for him.
“I don’t think you know how gentle you are either,” his voice shudders like he’s afraid of the space those words will occupy.
“There’s nothing kind about this,” Kevin says with the weight of the stone in his pocket, but he drives them home and sits in the car as Neil breathes. Sits there until he can uncurl again and never once tries to dislodge his hand from his wrist.
iv. always whispering “it’s all your fault”
Of course it’s Neil who finds him crouching in the yard like a demented sort of scarecrow.
The air outside has finally taken the sort of humid heat that speaks of a hotter summer that he has yet to get used to. Still, it’s chilly enough that he needs a jacket even if it’s open to the breeze and the humidity helps the perpetual dry throat he has. It has been hard to swallow for multiple reasons since Neil came back, hard to put the face of violence on the same face as safety. Perhaps it should be easier considering he’s done it before, but it’s a more bitter pill to swallow the second time it seems.
It has been a harsh lesson in learning that safety is conditional—he shouldn’t have let lies come between that, but it had been important to him then. Still is, even when it’s finally in the open. He doesn’t think that many people have ever kept promises to Neil and it had been a selfish want, to be the kind of person that could do that. To earn the kind of wonder Neil sometimes watches him with.
“You don’t smoke,” is the first thing Neil says, looking at the package that Kevin had stolen out of a pocket on his way out with a vindictive kind of anger burning in his belly.
“Doesn’t mean I don’t know how to,” Kevin says with a breath of smoke. And he does know how to smoke, has since the first days of Eden when he plucked cigarettes from Andrew’s fingers with the bravery only alcohol gave him.
Neil sits down beside him, stretches his legs out and wiggles his feet in the open air. He’s been restless the past couple of days, told not to play until he’s healed once more and Kevin wonders about the resilience of having to patch yourself together as many times as Neil has had to do. Only this time it’s not with dental floss and the cheap anesthesia alcohol provides.
It’s the survival of a scavenger and Kevin wonders how to attain even a little bit of that. His tattoo has been burning since he saw Neil’s face. Since it was exposed to them all but not in any way that the other foxes seem to think. Kevin is just tired of being the second option. He misses the time when he was someone’s first option, when he was still part of a them that mattered.
There’s a certain kind of rose tinted glasses he puts on, when he looks back. When he tries to reason with himself that it couldn’t have been all bad, that there was a reason why he stayed for so long. There’s a certain kind of satisfaction in remembering the transgressions that Riko did young, the way he would pinch Kevin to get his attention or let Kevin take the fall if it meant he could slip away.
It doesn’t mean that there weren’t good parts as well, but Kevin thinks he’s finally starting to learn that someone else’s violence is not something he is responsible to stop.
“I thought that the body was a temple,” Neil snatches the cigarette from Kevin’s fingers to take a deep breath from it. It must have been Neil’s cigarettes that Kevin took. It’s the only brand that Kevin sees Neil smoke like that.
“I think I’m allowed my vices,” there’s a bitter curl to his voice and he wants the cigarette back only to be able to say that it’s the smoke that makes his voice rough.
Neil looks at him, eyes hooded and pale blue. There’s been a kind of serene stillness to him since he came back, the blankness of a still lake that’s deeper than one would think. The kind that Kayleigh would take him to when she taught him how to swim, throaty laugh as he stood by the shore because the water was cold and the lily pads scary when they would twist around his legs.
Kevin isn’t stupid enough to think that Neil is as placid as he tries to be. He sees the cracks when Neil stops and looks around him like he still doesn’t believe he gets to keep it. The cracks when Neil suddenly has to make decisions that last. Neil is balancing on very thin ice trying to keep himself from going under and Kevin doesn’t want to see him ruin himself trying to find footing in this world where Nathan is dead and Neil doesn’t have to be afraid.
“Watching you not care hurts sometimes, you know?” It’s a bit more honest that he wants to be with the way Neil’s face flattens out.
“I’m fine,” is the easy answer he’s met with and Kevin sighs.
“Do you have to lie to me?”
“We’re both liars.”
Kevin slips out another cigarette, doesn’t look away from Neil as he lights it up. Breathes smoke into Neil’s face because he’s enough of an asshole to feel it’s validated. It puts a strain on his throat again.
“Kevin,” Neil starts only to stop. Furrows his brows.
It’s the first time they have been alone together since he came back. The first time Kevin has seen him without Andrew following him around and Kevin has been keeping his distance. It’s not that Kevin didn’t expect it to go down like that in the end, he knows how Andrew looks at lies and Kevin had clung to this one to the end because he had wanted to believe that Neil would appear. Anything else meant an end to things. Even though he can see reason in it, can put it in the perspective of being a person that kept secrets when the truth could have helped avoid all of it, doesn’t mean that it didn’t hurt.
“You didn’t deserve that.”
Kevin scoffs. “I don’t think Andrew looks at it that way.”
“Andrew isn’t always right,” his voice is harder than Kevin expects, “I don’t think he’ll apologise, but you’re allowed to be angry about it.”
“Lying isn’t something Andrew takes lightly.”
“Yeah, but you lied because of me, not because you wanted to. Kevin, you didn’t deserve violence. ”
And sometimes Kevin forgets, with the way Neil surrounds himself with it, how much Neil hates violence. How he uses it sparingly because he doesn’t want to be a violent person and watching him try to detach himself from it other than on the court is something else.
“I haven’t thanked you for that,” Neil turns to him, tilts his head until Kevin has to look at him, “so thank you, for keeping that secret. You didn’t deserve to take the fallout for my lies, yet you did. I think if you talk to Andrew, you’ll be surprised.”
Kevin snorts but it sits in his chest, lodges there behind his ribs. He never expected to be thanked for this. It’s hard to not think that Neil will still be taken from him in some way, he spent so much time thinking he would lose him, but it loosens somewhat.
“Did you talk to him?”
Neil gives him half a smile, “I did, but I didn’t make him a deal because you two still have yours and he can’t protect you if you’re afraid of him.”
The smile stretches the scar on Neil’s cheek, pulls on the burn and cracks the skin a little bit. Kevin can’t help but reach out, press his fingertips against it, this brutal funhouse mirror of himself. Neil lets him do it, only stiffens a little bit because he still expects harm, even now as Kevin keeps his fingers gentle against his cheek.
Kevin licks his lips, takes a moment to find his voice, “Thank you for believing in me.”
v. life ain’t always fair, always fair, but hell is living in resentment
They’ve left the couch for Kevin to sprawl over, body sagging down in the soft leather. It smells like comfort and home. There’s a spot on the ceiling from when Nicky opened a champagne bottle that exploded, and Kevin can’t remember what he was celebrating but the stain still remains against the white paint.
Andrew is sitting curled up in one of the beanbags, and Neil is on the other side of the low table by the couch, deftly mixing a deck of cards. Kevin watches him for a little while, until the movements become dizzy and blurred in front of his eyes.
He doesn’t know if they’re sitting there because they want to or because Wymack told them to keep an eye on him after he dropped Kevin off. He got a night at Wymack’s place, a cold bottle of vodka to get through the car ride down and he thinks at one point he puked at the side of the road but he doesn’t know if it was because of the alcohol or the news. Already the next day Wymack’s apartment had become cloying, the itching underneath Kevin’s skin bad enough that he had to walk around it and the news of Riko’s death sits neatly between the news of Wymack’s parenthood and now, crammed into the ledger where it isn’t wanted.
“Kevin, do you want something to eat?” Neil asks. The words cut through the quiet of the apartment.
Food doesn’t sound very nice, the idea curling his belly, but he supposes he should eat. He knows that he should.
“Coach left some rice we could heat up?” Neil tries again, flips the cards between his fingers and shuffles them together. He looks over at Andrew and whatever passes between them has Andrew leaving with a soft noise from the beanbag crunching as he rises. It’s still a bit odd between them, the space that has been left and neither of them know how to approach. They’re getting there though, Andrew careful and slow even when Kevin flinches.
There’s a question on his tongue he needs to know the answer to: “Do you hate me?”
“Why would I hate you?” Neil asks.
Kevin sighs, a noise that rips through his throat. “For mourning him.”
The cards stop spinning for a second, before starting up again. “I don’t blame you for mourning him, no.”
But the other foxes do. Kevin knows this—he’s seen the way they looked at him when he came back. They don’t understand how he can mourn something so foul, but they never saw the parts that had mattered. They don’t seem to understand the parts that Kevin is mourning are the memories of something he lost a while ago. That the finality of never having that back is much more jarring by death than by the distance that was already between them. He’s mourning the potential of what Riko could have been and the loss of fear that leaves something raw and empty inside of him. Not sure how to let it go when it has been so all consuming.
“I would have been buried as Nathaniel,” Neil ventures carefully. It has Kevin looking up at him and he gets another one of those small smiles from Neil. “They would have buried me as Nathaniel Wesninski, if I would have been buried at all.”
He shuffles the cards again and then holds out the deck for Kevin, who leans over and plucks the top cards. Stares at the Queen of Hearts looking back at him and he can’t help the laugh that tears out of him.
“My mother didn’t get to have a proper funeral and I barely got to mourn her,” Neil continues, “nor was I ever given the chance to hate her or be angry at her for the things she had done. You can hate that you love someone. And sometimes, you have to mourn the loss of that love, it also has it’s time.”
Kevin lifts his legs up, tries to remember how to make them move so he can look at Neil who studies his cards and refuses to lift his face. He hates him, more than he loves him by now. But perhaps he has to give it time, to bury the last remains of something soft and raw.
The cards make another flip in Neil’s hands, he doesn’t know where Neil learnt to shuffle them like that, “Teach me something.”
“What?”
“The cards, teach me a card game.”
“Hm,” a smile breaks out on Neil’s face. “Ever played 52 pick up?”
“No, you know this,” Kevin says, watching as Neil bends the deck in his hand.
Slowly lifting it up towards Kevin’s face, he says before he pinches his fingers together: “Catch.”
The cards smack against Kevin’s chin and chest, down into his lap. “You’re not nearly as cute as you think you are.”
“You think I’m cute?” There’s a slow warmth in Neil’s voice, a lazy kind of curl to it.
“I hate you.”
“That’s fine. Now pick up the cards and I’ll show you how to play cribbage. It involves math. You'll love it.”
This is something he doesn’t think he’ll come to hate; the easy way Neil tugs him down to his level or the lazy gace of Andrew when he returns with the rice and watches Neil draw out the cribbage board.
vi. chose redemption
The door room looks emptier without Kevin’s things in it, packed together into a bag and a couple of cardboard boxes that have already been shipped off on the basis that they won’t fit in the Maserati. Andrew and Neil are driving him up North. It’ll be a little road trip for them to spend those last days together before they’ll leave him there by himself. He knows that Neil has put red dots on a map, has seen Andrew cross some of them out with a green marker.
He’ll have a new team in a city he doesn’t know, it’s close by to come and visit, for him to return and see the last of the foxes graduate and continue to work on that fragile ground that Wymack and him have put out.
His new apartment already feels terribly empty and alone.
There’s one last thing he hasn’t touched yet in the dorm room. Kevin hasn't opened the drawer in a long time, hasn’t felt the need to even if he’s been painfully aware that the collection is still there waiting for him. His own private graveyard.
Wiggling the drawer open he can see the whole thing, he hasn’t added anything to it either since Neil came back, since mourning him felt silly. It’s harder to let go of them than he thought, though. Taking the step between thinking your friend is going to die and letting that go is much steeper, and there’s little relief there when they come back scarred and burned.
Maybe he should have expected it, when it’s Neil that slinks into the room as quiet as always. His presence is familiar enough that Kevin doesn’t have to turn around when he steps up beside him and looks down into the drawer. He hasn’t explained the need to collect stones to anyone and he’s skeptical of Neil understanding their meaning. Yet he still wants to hide them away in case he does, in case he sees the ugly need Kevin has to hold onto things.
Neil is here now though, standing besides him with careful consideration and at the end of their road trip there’s a new city and a new team waiting for him. Kevin can’t let it be like it was before but taking that step, thinking of himself as someone brave, is still hard.
Jean still doesn’t speak to him, but there have been messages initiated by Neil playing middle man once again. “I spent a lot of time looking away, pretending things weren’t the way they were.”
“Looking away doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”
There’s still traces of the Nest lingering inside of him, but they’re letting go, Kevin is cutting off one thread after the other but he can’t imagine it being as easy once he’s by himself. “I know that, I do. But if I had looked, what then? What then , Neil? I just want to be better than that.”
“Then try.” It’s a careless answer that borders on something cruel. Trying has never been enough in Kevin’s world, not when he has always needed to be the better. Better than anyone else but not the best.
“I don’t know how to. You never looked away from it.”
Neil scoffs, tilts his head and the light from the window cuts a harsh line over his face so he has to squint. “Doesn’t make me better. There were a lot of things I don’t care to think about. I’ve never been a good person, I’m not trying to be one. I’m changing for me, and Andrew.”
He hesitates, “And you, Kevin.”
“Me?”
“You gave me a reason to stay, you stayed with me all those nights keeping a promise with no gain,” Neil laughs. “Do you know that you’re the last person who remembers that Nathaniel was happy? Not always, rarely—but it’s you who remains who saw that and you made me happy as well, made Neil something real.”
He plucks one of the stones, a black one that Kevin remembers picking up after a game close to the coast where Neil had refused to go near the harbor, and there’s silvery lines shot through the middle of it.
“Look, cracked like me,” he continues to turn the stone in his palm, flipping it from one to the other. “Are you going to be able to let this go?”
“I don’t know how to. Not alone at least,” it’s a careful branch between them, held out hoping Neil will latch onto it.
“If you think we’re letting you go, then you’re just plain stupid.” Neil grabs another stone and peers at it for a moment before chucking it out the open window to Kevin’s choked shout.
He can’t hear it land from here but— “That could have hit someone.”
“How sad,” Neil chucks another stone out the window, laughs when Kevin smacks his hands away. “You’re going to have to be a big boy now.”
Neil holds out the hem of his t-shirt, lets Kevin dump the rest of the stones there and probably stretches his collar, but he doesn’t seem to mind carrying them down and dumping them on the concrete outside of Fox Tower. They’re just a sad little pile of rocks there, thrown around and Kevin regards them for a long moment.
It seems so insignificant watching them right then, even if they had carried more weight than he would ever care to admit to anyone. Even Neil, who's still rubbing his thumb over the black oval stone in his hand.
Neil’s skin is warmer than the stones when Kevin tugs at his hand, his palm soft because he’s using lavender lotion and he doesn’t strain against Kevin’s hold when he pulls Neil in against his side. With his shoulder against Kevin’s chest he can feel every breath.
The Maserati is waiting for them. Andrew’s smoking where he’s leaning against the hood and Kevin isn’t ready to let go but neither is Neil nor Andrew. There’s promised future dinners with Wymack when he returns, Nicky still messages him with text far more jubilant than the ones he gets back. Aaron calls sometimes. He can build from that, he thinks.
He thinks he’s ready to let go of that guilt.