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The world doesn’t end with a bang or a whimper.
No, it ends with the well-rehearsed tones of some federal drone, chosen like a sheep for the slaughterhouse. A nervous, balding man who seems like he would be more at home rejecting a car loan than announcing the end of the world.
Well, not the end of the world, the would-be salesman rationalizes on-screen. Just a few nukes that American anti-missile systems couldn’t disarm, heading straight for the three most populated cities in the United States.
He’s minimalizing, Andrew thinks. One of the defense mechanisms the juvie therapist told him about, trying to psychoanalyze him to death. Obviously, there’s going to be a World War following this, one to make all the geriatrics from the 60s crow that they told the government so before the radiation poisoning kills them.
That’s beside the point, though. The point is that on-screen, the balding man lists off estimated times to annihilation. New York City has an hour. Los Angeles has thirty minutes. Chicago has twenty. Andrew and Neil live in the heart of Chicago. Traffic is shit enough without the city’s destruction hanging overhead. Neither he nor Neil will be able to get out, even if they try.
Beside him, Andrew’s phone is blowing up, and he’s sure Neil, who had been making them lunch in the other room, is on a call right now with someone demanding he go and look at the TV.
As if summoned by his prediction, Neil bursts in, demanding answers from someone, probably Dan. He stops when he sees the countdown the balding man has been replaced with. The phone falls from his hand, and distantly, Andrew hears a female voice yelling. He was right then, it was Dan. It’s a shock he can hear anything through the ringing in his ears. He looks at Neil.
“We’re going to die,” Andrew shrugs. “We can’t get out of the city in twenty minutes.” Neil turns to him, eyes wide like he didn’t even notice the blond. Maybe he didn’t. Andrew is considerably less entertaining than impending doom, in his own opinion. Neil sits down next to him.
“No,” he agrees, “We can’t.” Neither of their phones has stopped going off, Andrew’s next to him and Neil’s on the floor. Neil huffs a sigh. “We should respond to them.” Andrew considers it for a moment, picking up his coffee from the glass coffee table Bee gave him when he and Neil moved to Chicago. Then he shrugs, carefully keeping his face blank.
“There is nothing to say. They want to hear that we’ll be alright, that we made it out. They want their worries assuaged, to know that this won’t affect them or anyone they know. We can’t give that to them.”
He can see Neil trying to form an argument, trying to persuade him to open up the flip phone that can’t seem to play anyone’s ringtone longer than ten seconds before someone else calls.
“Is there nothing you have to say to anyone before we die?” he finally responds. He doesn’t avoid the word ‘die’. Andrew has always appreciated that about Neil. He doesn’t deal in euphemisms. He saw too much death as a child to dance around it with pretty words. “Not to reassure anyone, but just that you have to say to them.” It’s a point with some merit on the surface.
“You’ve never written a suicide note.” Neil raises his eyebrows but correctly assumes there is more to come. “It is not easy. There is always more to say.” Andrew sets the coffee down with the abrasive sound of ceramic on glass and moves to the window, drawing open the curtains to look outside. It’s a nightmare. People without the predilection to realize they have no chance are running the streets like they can marathon their way out of the fallout zone of a nuclear bomb. He can see several people on the sidewalks kissing like they’re about to die, which they are, of course. “There is nothing I can to say to them that could encompass everything."
He snaps the curtain shut. There is nothing out there for him now. A glance at the television tells him that he has fourteen minutes until he is vaporized, likely extremely painfully. “If there is anything you have to say, that is your business.” And with that, he turns to leave. If Neil has anything parting words for his new or old teams, he deserves the sanctity of privacy.
He goes in their bedroom instead of listening in. It’s a mess, clothes lying everywhere. Aaron was always the cleaner twin, and Neil’s minimalism as a kid meant he didn’t know how to handle having. Well. Anything.
It occurs to him that if it isn’t cleaned now, it never will be.
Andrew picks up a book lying on the floor, a broken-in copy of Heart of Darkness, and puts it on the bookshelf they built together. He must have kicked it off the bed in his sleep.
Next, he makes the bed. There’s no time to change the sheets, but he straightens them as best he can. He throws clothes in the hamper and puts up books and picks up his reading glasses from where they fell under the nightstand.
God, the fucking reading glasses. Neil gave them to him about a year ago, solid black with the logo for their Exy team stamped on the side, because god forbid anything not lead back to that game with his stupid junkie. He must’ve noticed Andrew’s constant squinting at his phone screen and connected the dots, like the infuriatingly observant person he was when it came to Andrew.
He wears them on nights they don’t have practice or a game. One of the backliner subs makes a habit of lending terrible romance novels to Andrew when he's finished with them, and Andrew likes to read them if only to insult the author's abilities to construct any kind of compelling story. He reads into the late hours with the light of the piss-ugly orange lamp Neil got as a housewarming gift and refused to part with. Neil makes fun of him for being an old man, which Andrew does not dignify with a response, fuck you very much.
Except.
Except, except, except.
Without the promise of a repeat, none of those memories seem as interesting as they used to, because Andrew has lost many houses but he has never lost a home like this.
There’s a knock, and Andrew places the glasses where they belong on the nightstand and turns to see Neil in the doorway. He examines the now spotless room and the glasses with a critical eye. He sits down on the dark gray covers Andrew brought from his apartment in Charlotte and the firm mattress Neil brought from his apartment in Houston before they played for the same team.
“Why?” Neil asks, looking around the room.
“Because-” because there will never be enough words to tell Aaron or Kevin or Nicky everything he feels when he looks at them, his pride and his anger and the stone-cold shame that sits in his stomach like a pebble in his shoe. Because he was always going to die with more to say but never with this much. Because he can’t tell them everything in twenty minutes but he can straighten his room, because that is a finite activity, and the way he feels about his teammates, new and old, could only ever be infinite, “-it was dirty. How long?”
“Six minutes.”
“I was right. There is always something else to say.”
“Yeah. You were. But I told them enough.” Andrew nods and lays back on the bed, and Neil follows suit. “There was one more person I needed to talk to, though.” Oh. It’s him, obviously. Cautiously, Neil places his hand an inch or so above Andrew’s. “Yes or no?”
“Yes.”
Neil’s hand in his is warm and familiar, and this is the last time he will ever feel it. It might be a tragedy, but it might be a comedy too because for a moment Andrew is filled with an almost medicated mania. The end of the world, and he’s spending it holding hands with an Exy junkie. How awful.
“Are you ready to die, Andrew?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m going to.”
Neil squeezes his hand and looks at him. “Thank you for telling me to stay.”
Andrew squeezes back. “You listened when I told you to.”
They sit in silence until an alarm sounds outside, warning them that they have sixty seconds to find cover. Neil leans over and kisses him on the forehead.
“We did alright, didn’t we?”
“Infinity percent, Abram. A percent for every year I would have stayed with you.”
Andrew tilts his head to meet Neil’s, and the world explodes.