Chapter Text
At first, none of the Foxes realized what was going on.
Of course, since they’ve kind of unofficially, illegally adopted Rob and it was all off the books, they didn’t know she wasn’t unable to bear children. They’d just. You know. Assumed.
Not to mention that she was pretty much constantly around one or more of them, so she didn’t exactly have the time to sneak off. This area wasn’t usually famous for its fox population, either.
But unexpected things, as unexpected things happen, happen unexpectedly. Which was why, sometime in mid-March, Neil noticed Rob was— y’know, bigger than usual. So he’s taken her to Abby, just to check if everything was alright.
And then Abby told him the news.
Neil stared at her, shocked. “She’s what?”
“Pregnant,” Abby told him again, a faint, amused smile on her lips. “And pretty close to giving birth, actually.”
“How’s that even possible?” Neil asked, starting to pace inside the room and wringing his hands. “I thought she was neutered!”
“We’ve never actually checked,” Abby reminded him.
“I thought we did!”
“You also thought she was male at first,” Abby said. “It’s far too late to do anything except make sure she’s as comfortable and happy as she can be by the time she gives birth.”
“Gives birth,” Neil said. “To fox pups?”
Abby nodded.
“She’s gonna have fox puppies,” Neil muttered, half to himself and also still in shock. Then he suddenly stopped. “I’ve got to tell Andrew. No, I’ve got to tell the whole team.”
And so, that evening, Neil gathered all the Foxes around for the important announcement. He refused to tell anyone what it was about until the moment of truth arrived. Frankly, he didn’t know how they were going to react.
“I’m starting to get worried,” Matt jokingly said. At Neil’s expression he turned serious and added, “do I need to be worried?”
“Maybe?” Neil’s voice cracked halfway with uncertainty. Everybody finished settling down, including Rob — who was sound asleep on Robbie, the resident massive fox plushie.
“Okay, so,” Neil started, still standing. He was sweating profusely. “We all know Rob.”
Most of the Foxes’ gazes jumped to the sleeping Rob, before turning back to Neil with clear confusion.
“I think it’s a bit late for an introduction,” Nicky pointed out.
“It is,” Neil agreed, which didn’t help clear the confusion whatsoever. “And we all know how in life things happen.”
“Very eloquently put,” Dan said, eyebrows scrunched in baffled amusement.
“And how,” Neil said, “when one thing ends, another starts. A window closes, a trapdoor opens, you know how it goes.”
A few of the Foxes paled.
“Neil,” Renee tenderly said, squaring her shoulders. “Is Rob dying?”
Nicky sharply inhaled. “But she’s so young!”
“She can’t die!” Kevin exclaimed. “Who’ll be our mascot?”
“Guys, guys!” Neil said, frantically waving his hands to try and calm the panic. “Rob isn’t dying! She’s—“ Oh, for fuck’s sake— “She’s pregnant!”
The room fell into startled silence.
And then a bunch of grins broke on the Foxes’ faces.
“I’m bringing the champagne!” Allison exclaimed, jumping up from where she was sitting. Dan, Matt and Renee were cheering. Kevin had the color returning to his face. Nicky was blinking bemusedly, looking as if he were trying to solve a difficult math question in his head.
“Wait, Neil,” Nicky said. “How can Rob be pregnant if she’s neutered?”
“Yeah, about that,” Neil said, smiling apologetically. “Turns out she isn’t.”
“Hallelujah,” Andrew dryly said from where he was sitting in a beanbag, playing on his phone. “Took you all long enough.”
A bunch of gazes snapped to him, and Neil put a hand on his waist. “What, you knew?”
Andrew looked up at him and nodded.
“How could you have possibly known?” Allison skeptically asked.
“It was obvious.”
“It was not,” Neil indignantly said. “I didn’t know until Abby told me.”
“Yeah, because you’re stupid.”
Neil scowled at him. “Why didn’t you say anything, then?”
Andrew leveled him an even look. “You really want me to answer that?”
“Who’s known what doesn’t matter,” Dan declared, standing up. “The important thing is that this is great news. Rob’s going to be a great mother.”
“Who’s going to take care of the pups?” asked Aaron.
“Rob, obviously,” Nicky nostalgically said. “Ah, the struggles of single motherhood.”
Aaron shook his head, as if trying to convince himself he didn’t know Nicky. “So I take it Neil and Andrew are going to harbor the pups.”
“Nooo,” Kevin said.
Neil frowned. “Why not?”
“Look around you, Neil,” Kevin said, spreading out an arm to indicate the average-sized room they were in. “We already have two residents too many.”
“Don’t you dare imply Rob shouldn’t be living here,” Allison threatened.
“And you’re the one who brought the demon cat,” Andrew added.
“The fact remains,” Kevin insisted, ignoring the backlash, "that we don’t have enough space for an average of four to six pups.”
“Why do you know fox statistics,” Neil said.
Kevin’s expression turned wistful. “I’ve had a feeling this was going to happen one day.”
“Until ten minutes ago, you, like everyone else in this room, thought Rob was neutered,” Neil flatly replied. Andrew cleared his throat and Neil amended. “Like almost everyone in this room.”
“You never know what life’s gonna throw at you, Neil,” Kevin said. “Look at what happened to Virgin Mary.”
“Yes, because this is exactly the same.”
“I can’t believe Rob’s pups are going to be blessed,” Matt said. “We’re going to win all our games now.”
Kevin looked intrigued by the idea, but quickly waved it off. “Aaron, you take them.”
“Why me?”
“Yeah, why him?” Allison indignantly asked. “I reckon us girls will be much better at looking after the pups, mother instincts and all.”
“But it would be cruel to separate them from Rob,” Renee said.
“We’re not giving you Rob,” Neil interjected. “She lives here, with me.”
“It appears we have no other choice, Kevin,” Andrew said. “The pups must reside with us.”
Kevin’s face twisted into a deep scowl, and he crossed his arms with disdain. “We don’t have space.”
“It’s fine, we’ll give them your bed,” Neil dismissively said. Kevin opened his mouth to protest when Dan’s phone started ringing. She picked up, her face lighting up cunningly.
“Oh, hey Coach,” she said, looking right at Kevin. Kevin, on his part, looked to his sides, before narrowing his eyes with suspicion. “I know we’re late, yeah, but— no, listen, we’ve got a good reason. You’re about to become a great-grandfather.”
Allison snorted. Kevin paled.
Dan, on behalf of the rest of the Foxes, put Wymack on speaker. They all listened, perfectly civil, as their coach started ranting to hell and back. Kevin paled another shade every other sentence.
Then, as abruptly as the rant started, it was cut off. “Wait, did you say great-grandfather?”
“Mhhm.”
“Rob’s pregnant,” Neil supplied.
There was a long, thin silence, in which, they were pretty sure, Wymack was reconsidering his decisions in life. “We’re not making her pups our mascots.”
Several voices spoke up. “But, Coach—“
“Get your asses to the court,” he said. “Because we— wait, is she giving birth right now?”
“Abby said it would be another week or two,” Neil said. There was a relieved exhale from the other side of the line before Wymack spoke again.
“Congratulations, I guess,” he said. “Just get here already.”
And then he hung up. Dan put the phone back in her pocket with a self-satisfied smirk, while Kevin buried his face in his hands and stalked out of the room. He shortly stalked back in, grabbed his sports bag and left again, all the while grumbling incoherently.
“I think you broke Kevin,” Matt told Dan.
“He’ll get over it,” she said. Then she frowned. “I think.”
Now, all they had to do was wait.
***
A few days after the announcement, Rob has given birth to eight healthy, adorable fox pups. They were tiny and cute, and all of the Foxes have immediately fallen in love with them. Including Kevin. Neil suspected that even Andrew has taken a silent liking to them.
Neil wanted to harbor the pups in his dorm-room as soon as they were born, but in the end, they, along with Rob, stayed with Abby for two weeks after the birth, because Abby wanted to monitor them and make sure everything was okay in the pups’ first days walking the Earth.
Two and a half weeks later, Neil, with Andrew’s help, walked into Fox Tower with Rob and the eight pups in tow. Or rather, the pups have been evenly divided to be piled up in their arms, because they couldn’t yet walk.
“My children!” Nicky exclaimed as soon as he saw them, running toward the fox-piled arms of Neil and Andrew. Neil swiftly evaded him, while Andrew’s glare got Nicky halting in his place. Rob, from her place between Andrew’s legs, laughed at him.
“They’re not your children,” Neil admonished, keeping a protective hand over the heads of the four pups in his possession. “Right, guys? You all love your mother Rob very much.”
A flurry of squeaks came from between his arms, and Neil’s face broke into a delighted grin. “See, Nicky? You can’t fool ‘em.”
Andrew walked past Neil with his own bundle of fox pups. “And we’re not giving them to you.”
“Andrew,” Nicky said, sounding heartbroken. “One night. I’ll teach them all I know and then you can have them back.”
“They won’t be the same after that,” Andrew somberly said, struggling to unlock the door to the dormroom without two fully usable arms. “They’ll be tainted.”
Nicky scowled. “Way to talk about your family, Andrew.”
“I got a new family.” Andrew finally, successfully unlocked the door, and pushed his way inside with Rob at his heels. Neil walked past Nicky to follow, but halted when Nicky spoke. “I can’t believe he’s replacing me with a litter of fox pups.”
Neil raised an eyebrow. “You really believe that you can’t believe that?”
Nicky stared at him for a moment, before a thoughtful expression crossed his features. “No, you know, it’s not actually that unbelievable.”
That was when a bunch of exclaimations came from the other side of the corridor. “Where are they?”
Neil and Nicky turned to see Allison, Dan and Renee coming toward them, the former two nearly red with excitement and Renee just mutedly happy-looking. Neil’s grin widened and he revealed the pups he was holding, receiving three sudden inhales before his personal space was invaded.
“They’re so cute!” Allison said, carefully patting the head of one of the pups. “Their fur is a different color, though.”
“They do that, apparently,” Neil said, nodding. “Abby said they got their red coat like two days ago.”
Dan bent slightly to come face to face with four blinking pairs of eyes. She made a face at them, before smiling and petting each head in turn. “Where are the other four?”
“Andrew’s got them,” Nicky told her. The girls all lifted their gazes to him — Dan and Allison with a start, while Renee looked simply curious.
“You sure that’s a good idea?” Allison asked. “They’re pretty delicate.”
“Hey, Andrew can do delicate,” Neil said. Everybody turned skeptical looks to him, and he opened his mouth to say something else, before changing his mind and closing it. His lips thinned in thought. “Either way, the pups are in good hands with him.”
“He basically disowned me right now for them,” Nicky vouched. “So they’re probably going to be fine.”
That was when a crush and a howl came from inside the dormroom. Neil, Nicky and the girls all hurried inside to see what happened — were the pups okay, what’s happened, who’s dying — to see Rob and Steve, Kevin’s demon cat, facing off next to the beds.
“Where are the pups?” Dan exclaimed, voice full of panic. That was when Andrew walked out of the kitchen, his arms full of foxes, and stopped.
He quickly scoured the room for the source of the panic, before his eyes fell on the hissing Steve and gekkering Rob. “Oh, for the love of God.”
Nicky hurried to come to stand between the two mortal enemies, placatedly spreading out his arms each in their direction. Steve hissed at him, while Rob tried to snatch a bite out of his palm.
“Andrew, what did you do?” Neil accusingly said.
“Nothing,” Andrew said, absently petting one of the pups he was holding with his eyes fixed on the cat. “Rob’s probably just territorial.”
“But she’s always tolerated Steve before,” Nicky said, doing his best to keep Rob and Steve from fighting. “They’ve been roomies for so long.”
“It’s the pups,” Renee realized. “She’s trying to protect the pups.”
Everybody’s attention turned to Neil and Andrew and their eight fox pups.
“But if Rob doesn’t want Steve around the pups,” Dan said, her brow furrowed with concern, “and Steve lives here, where the pups are going to live—“
“What a shame, it’s time to kick Steve out,” Andrew flatly said.
“We can’t kick Steve out,” Neil told him. “He can’t fall asleep without Kevin around.”
Andrew opened his mouth to speak, but Neil beat him to the punch. “And we can’t kick Kevin out either.”
“Why not.”
Neil’s expression flattened. “Andrew.”
“What?” Andrew said, the innocence he’s tried putting on his face fooling absolutely nobody. If anything, it just made everybody a little scared. “It’s either Kevin and his demon cat or Rob and all eight pups. Do you really want to have Nicky taking care of them?”
“Hey,“ Nicky protested. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Neil looked like he was trying really hard not to decide to kick Kevin out right there and then, but his moral groundings were still etched deep in the earth, and he couldn’t bring himself to justify betraying Kevin’s trust for all of eternity. One day, when they’d play Court, Neil knew Kevin would remember the way he’d acted today.
“We can’t kick Kevin out,” Neil finally said. “There’s gotta be another solution.”
That was when Kevin walked in, all cheery and clueless of the turmoil surrounding his dorm-room. When he saw half his team standing in there, though, accompanied by eight fox pups and the antagonistic Rob and Steve, he caught wind of the atmosphere and paused. “What’s going on?”
“We got the pups,” Neil supplied, gesturing his chin at the pups in his arms. Kevin’s eyes lit up for a moment, but then the atmosphere caught back to him, and his eyes narrowed.
“And…?”
“Well,” Dan started. “Rob doesn’t want Steve around them.”
“We’re not kicking Steve out,” Kevin said.
“Yeah, we kind of went over that already,” Neil told him. “We still need a solution, though.”
“We could put them in different rooms,” Kevin suggested.
“We only have one room,” Andrew said. “Unless you want Steve to sleep in the bathroom.”
“Steve can’t fall asleep without me,” Kevin said, dismissing the suggestion. “But we can make another room.”
“We can’t do a reconstruction,” Neil said, frowning. “Kevin, this is the dorms.”
“Not like that.” Kevin grabbed the pillow from Neil’s bed and held it up, before gesturing at the lounge undivided from the bedroom. “We can build a wall.”
“A pillow wall,” Neil flatly said, narrowing his eyes at his own pillow in Kevin’s hand.
“Or, like, a pillow fortress,” Dan said, catching on. “The pups would only benefit from living in an entirely cushioned section.”
“Will it really work?” Allison skeptically said. Kevin shrugged while Dan excitedly nodded and Neil shook his head.
“We don’t know if we don’t try,” Renee concluded. The room’s occupants exchanged wary looks, and, in the end, seeing as they had no better ideas, they decided to try it.
Which was why, two hours later, Matt walked in to find the room in complete disarray. “Okay, who’s the bastard that stole my pillow?”
“It was me!” Dan confessed from somewhere, her voice dulled out. “I’m sorry! I had no choice!”
Matt stepped over a bundle of blankets to find Neil sitting on a bare mattress, his pillow and blanket gone. Around him, the other beds have also been stripped off their pillows, blankets and sheets. Neil, alone and solitary in his position, was surrounded by the eight fox pups, who were all peacefully sleeping.
“Oh, hey Matt,” Neil said, smiling up at him. Matt came over to pet one of the sleeping pups, carefully, so that it wouldn’t wake up.
“The hell is going on here,” Matt asked. Neil pointed at the other side of the room, which Matt has originally dismissed, to indicate to the mountain of pillows and blankets and sheets standing halfway between the beds and the T.V.
“What the hell,” Matt said again.
“Rob doesn’t want Steve around the pups,” Neil said. “So we’re building them a panic room.”
“Out of pillows?”
“Yep.”
Matt looked back to the pillow fortress, behind which the sounds of arguing could be heard. He recognized Dan’s voice, as well as Kevin’s, shortly followed by Allison’s.
“Where’s Rob?” Matt asked Neil.
“Andrew took her for a walk,” Neil said. “He couldn’t take Kevin’s architectural inadequacy.”
“Excuse me, are you the one who took a course on the history of architecture?” Kevin exclaimed from behind the pillows, startling Neil.
“For the ten-thousandth time, Kevin!” Neil yelled back. “You taking a course about the history of architecture does not make you an architect!”
“It makes me the only one in this room who knows what he’s doing!”
“It really doesn’t!” Neil retorted. As if to emphasize that notion, at that moment, the whole pillow fortress came tumbling down.
There were a few oof’s and fuck’s, and Neil and Matt got to see Kevin, Dan and Allison struggling to free themselves of the mess. Renee chose that moment to come out of the kitchen with a water bottle, blinking at the catastrophe. “You need some help?”
“I’m managing perfectly fine, thank you very much!” Kevin indignantly said, pulling himself to his feet.
“Yeah, clearly,” Neil said.
“You don’t have the right to criticize, Neil, you’ve been absolutely zero help,” Kevin snapped at him.
“Excuse me?” Neil replied, voice pitching in disbelief. “I’ve been taking care of the pups!”
“They’re sleeping!”
“Yeah, thanks to me!”
“Guys!” Allison exclaimed, wildly waving her hands. “Calm down!”
“No!” Neil and Kevin simultaneously replied. Then they glared at each other.
“You’re going to wake the pups,” Matt pointed out. Neil and Kevin both huffed and looked away from each other.
“We need a better way to build that,” Dan said, gesturing at the mess of pillows now covering the floor. “Because it’s not working.”
That was when Nicky entered the room, followed by Aaron. “Good news, guys! I brought help!”
Aaron grumbled something incoherent and walked over to the once-fortress. “The fuck is this?”
“This is Rob’s new home,” Allison informed him.
“Which you are going to build,” Nicky clarified. Aaron gave him a narrow, uncomprehending look.
They quickly brought him up to speed, and by the time they were done explaining, Aaron had gone away and returned with Andrew and a hammer. “Okay, everybody, out.”
“Why did you bring a hammer?” Neil bemusedly said.
“To build your stupid pillow fortress,” Aaron retorted. “Out.”
“No can do,” Neil somberly said, gently patting the head of the closest sleeping fox pup. “I’m needed right here.”
The rest of the Foxes, however, bar Andrew and Aaron of course, found themselves leaving the room to let the twins work their magic. Have they ever built anything together before? Frankly, it was questionable. But in the end, they did what nobody has managed to do insofar.
An hour and a half later, the center of the room sported a stable, cozy-looking pillow and blanket fortress. Andrew and Aaron, surprisingly, have managed not to kill each other in the process.
When the rest of the Foxes were allowed back in, Nicky explained how this magical occurrence has been possible. “I’m telling you, it’s all those Ikea furniture they’ve built together.”
Neil gave Andrew a funny look. “You’ve built Ikea furniture together?”
“Unfortunately,” Aaron answered instead of his brother.
“You’d be surprised at how efficient they can be,” Nicky said, nodding his head all seriously. Aaron smacked him over the head, looking agitated. “It’s all your fault.”
“It’s not my fault you two have taken my bait for brotherly bonding time again and again,” Nicky said, voice triumphant. “And look at that, it turned out to be useful, too.”
“Now that we’ve solved the most pressing issue,” Dan said, “we have time to attend to the rest of what we need to settle down.”
Matt frowned at her. “What else is there?”
“We need to name them,” she said. Everybody looked to the fox pups that Neil hasn’t yet stopped petting, including Neil.
“Eight names is a lot,” Allison pointed out.
“We can name them after ourselves!” Nicky suggested.
“Let’s not,” Neil evenly said.
“Or we can use our very developed imaginations to give them unique and beautiful names,” Renee countered. Kevin straightened.
“Let’s name them after famous exy—“
“No,” everybody retorted.
Kevin slumped back down with a deep pout. “Killjoys.”
They all fell quiet, thinking for a long moment.
This, they knew, was going to define their entire relationship with the fox pups. Giving a name to your child was a very important, crucial step in their lives. And what could they call their foxes? Would it be something stupid, or meaningful?
That, they were soon going to find out, wasn’t going to be a simple question to answer.