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The announcement that Kevin Day would be playing with the Foxes for the upcoming season came nearly two months before he was actually allowed to step back onto the court. This became a point of contention the moment the announcement was made and it had sunk in that he was going to play . It was happening. He wanted to start as soon as possible.
The truth of it, though, was that Wymack and Abbey wouldn’t let him hold a racquet before they agreed he’d healed enough. Kevin fought against them almost every step, pressing and prodding and pushing. His defense stretched out loud and long, and in Kevin fashion, he never left it alone.
It had been enough time, he was prepared, he was willing, he was Kevin fucking Day . He had to be.
The idea that he would stumble and overstep in practice was scary, but the idea that he wouldn’t be ready for the season was worse. If they didn’t let him play with the rest of the team, if he couldn’t step on in June, step up like nothing had happened, how would anyone take him seriously? This argument backfired when Wymack pointed out that something had happened, fucking obviously , and that’s why they had to be sure he was as healed as he could be.
He held out until Neil Josten signed as a striker and then it was a downward click the month and a half until he arrived. Kevin was expected to train him. The time had come.
Up until then, though, he took it out on everyone, tense like a wire and an uncooperative child and a kitchen with too many cooks but one of the cooks wasn’t even allowed to touch the fucking stove, just watch the rest of the incompetent sous chefs run rampant. Kevin simmered in it.
Which is to say, the day he was finally allowed back on the court was something he’d been sitting on the other side of for a long time coming. Kevin bounced his way through morning workout, through classes where everything was tying up at the end of the semester, repeated and rehashed. They were discussing final papers but Kevin didn’t care, didn’t listen to the timeline or follow the lecture, recorded everything instead just to be sure it didn’t matter that he kept glancing at his left hand whenever his mind wandered, would flex it almost like a blink each time, watch his fingers pull and feel his palm flat on the wood. He’d flex his right hand next too, would imagine the racquet’s weight, curl his fingers around the imaginary wood. He was tense and quiet all the way through lunch, biding time in the dorm afterward, and he didn’t snap at a single person the entire silent ride to the stadium.
When he finally steps onto the cool, slick, enamel flooring, practice goes exactly as it usually does.
Which is to say, the yelling starts within the first ten minutes.
And hours later, Kevin stalks out of the inner ring, storms the locker room and pulls his helmet off one handed, feels his fingers flex as he unsnaps the clasp, throws it at a bench, imagines his fingers shaking and his whole hand shaking and he’s furious . He’s frustrated. He wants to grip, move, crush something, but he can’t do anything except stride fast to his locker and lean against it, relieve the force and the pressure and the responsibility of his legs and his body from keeping him up.
He manages to begin unbuckling the rest of his armor, strips off his leg braces, rips them off his arm, his torso, as he tries to keep his mind blank. Tries to focus on the repetitive motion of removing cloth and plastic, ignoring the rest of the Foxes following into the locker room and he’s breathing, managing to breathe, thinking of the task at hand, and he is furious. He’s shaky and his arm his burning and he. Doesn’t know.
He can’t keep watching the plays in his head, the misses on the goal at Andrew that feel like a slap in the face, the passes he could have made fifty, sixty, eighty times in a row that felt like a struggle, that felt like a missed step, that feel like learning something from new and he’s sick, he’s going to be sick, and suddenly he’s sitting, can’t remember sitting on the bench. But of course he’s unlacing his shoes and he focuses on his fingers, on the fabric. Focuses enough that Andrew must have said something because he kicks at Kevin’s foot and when Kevin looks up he’s staring like he’s expecting a response.
“What?” Kevin breaks out and his voice sounds off even to him and he knows that Andrew will notice and he knows that Andrew will say something and his breath feels like thick liquid in his chest because he can’t think of anything, can’t think of anything he’ll say that will make this better.
“Kevin,” Andrew repeats only his name and he thinks that he can feel the coolness of air, the press of something other than oily heat and sweat and his finger’s slipping on the laces. “Look at me.”
He makes the mistake of looking up, of seeing Andrew’s smile like a slap and Kevin feels too taut, too wrong , too fucking close to this. He turns his face away but Seth is a ready, unwelcome distraction when he slams a hand against the lockers.
"The queen’s finally knocked off her fucking pedestal, huh? Played with the rest of us and realized he isn’t the hot shit he thought he was?” And he’s always the first to pry at Kevin’s skin, like Andrew but nothing good, and Kevin feels raw enough that he considers ignoring him for only a split second before he swivels around, turns on him --
“Oh! Seth! Didn’t see you there, sitting in our personal business!” Andrew’s faster and his smile’s turned icy. “But let’s say you don’t. Instead, let’s think of shutting your mouth and not inserting yourself somewhere you’ve got no place, alright?” It’s a testament to Seth’s assholeness that he doesn’t falter, just turns his own grin on Andrew instead, content to throw his angry weight around to either of them, any of the monsters in sight.
“It is my place when it’s our fucking court, that he’s been breathing down our goddamn necks and shouting at me for fucking months! And now he’s out there playing too and it isn’t that fucking easy! I’ve been waiting for his bullshit to mellow out --”
“Your bullshit reeks ten times more than his and I’m telling you again to shut the fuck up and leave us be. You’re not the only one Kevin’s temper tantrum has affected but you are the only one who’s being the biggest pain in my ass right now. It’s a real feat considering the rest of this team, so congratulations to you but get lost .”
Andrew commands a room like no one else, ignores it like he hasn’t stopped all breathing, like he’s not a threat on everyone’s horizon. He hasn’t even taken a step towards Seth but the upperclassmen hovers like he’s considering toeing the invisible barrier between them. Like they’ve been swirling around it for months and months.
“Seth, go shower.” It’s not often that Matt inserts himself into anything they do -- and less often that he sides with the monsters -- but he’s shooting wary glances at Kevin, at Andrew, and finally turns a cold, even stare at his roommate. “Leave them alone, it’s not worth a fight now.”
And Seth’s grin finally slows, like he’d been expecting backup from Matt if not anyone else, and his face hardens. Kevin watches his grip flex around his helmet before he stalks out of the locker room into the shower, throwing his shirt off in whatever direction it lands.
And the threat’s out of the water, into it even, and Andrew looks back at Kevin. Maybe he can tell how dead serious Kevin is, can see the tension in him, maybe they’ve been doing this long enough that Andrew can see when Kevin needs breathing room more than a shove in the only direction they can go, the only way they ever go, escalate farther and farther. Maybe it’s only wishful thinking on his part but it doesn’t matter because Kevin’s already spiraling down his rabbit hole and he catches on the edges of Andrew every time.
Maybe it’s something they can’t help, fucking tugging at each other the whole way down because Kevin’s tied them together and he can’t look at him sometimes, can’t understand a single fucking thing about him.
So maybe Andrew was going to say something helpful, maybe he was going to give Kevin space, maybe he wasn’t going to say anything for once, but Kevin doesn’t give him the chance. He slams that door shut, brings out the only thing that ever makes it worse.
“Do you know how fucking difficult it is to want it so bad and you don’t even try?” he spits in Andrew’s face, doesn’t acknowledge the fight with Seth -- just a single stinging drop of sweat in this whole mess -- but Andrew’s eyes have narrowed. Like Kevin’s not playing fair, like this is ever fucking fair. “You have so much potential and you don’t give a shit .”
Kevin’s boiling in an anger that feels acidic, that feels wrong too, but he can’t imagine feeling anything else, can’t imagine anything being easy in his entire life -- exy, practice, his feelings, Andrew . Because Andrew’s eyes don’t waver from his as he crowds into his space. Kevin doesn’t flinch away from him, just stares up and feels the stubbornness like a wall between them. Sometimes it’s the only thing either can grab onto but wouldn’t it be ten times worse without it at all, to free fall with nothing? This, this between them, is something .
“Don’t blame me for things that are out of my control,” Andrew reminds him. “I cannot have all your answers, I’m only human,” and he’s smiling and Kevin is so frustrated , so fucking tired of this circular fight, of this smokescreen, of the minute space between their chests.
“When is anything out of your control? You like control more than anyone I’ve ever met! I am trying to give it to you! Your game, your future ! And you refuse it!” Kevin gets back in his face and he sees the frustration mirror backed at him in the empty stare, the empty eyes, the fucking problem. “You refuse me !”
But it’s all more complicated than that, never simple, and they both know it. Andrew’s stuck in more ways than one, the evidence evident in the way his smile sharpens, inches closer to a fucking fracture, to that forever fight they’re sucked into. They never see eye to eye and it burns hot in Kevin’s entire being because he is right there, he is always right there .
And it’s worse because Andrew looks back at him and he knows. He knows that Kevin’s talking about more than exy like he’s been talking about more than exy for weeks and neither of them will acknowledge it. Kevin is another rung in Andrew’s long winding ladder of apathy and neither of them will say it. Neither of them will say more.
“Just because you try to hand me something doesn’t mean I have to take the bait,” Andrew’s voice has dipped low, cutting everyone else out of this. “Say what you mean, Kevin. I can’t keep up with all of your problems.”
He doesn’t say coward but Kevin feels it in the way his mouth sharpens, the way he leans forward and doesn’t touch him, barely inches between them, and Kevin can imagine the feel of his hands on his waist. His own hands feel heavy with it, heavy and clenching convulsively at his sides. He’s too warm, still sweaty and out of breath from practice, still buzzing with the uncontained energy, the pressure, the failure of it.
He is Kevin Day and easy is nothing but a dream to him, nothing to his entire life, and he’s so sick of it. Sick of every single complication that drips thick and slow off of him. Kevin’s entire being is swamped in it, wrapped up like an intricate fuck you just for him.
“Fuck off,” Kevin says, voice savage and loud because Andrew’s closer, close, so close and he must know but Kevin can’t handle that now, can’t do it, can’t breathe.
“Best idea you’ve had all day!” Andrew grins, tilts his head like he knows the storm in Kevin’s head, hands the savage right back and looks away from him. “Nicky!” Nicky drops something to their right, startles at the sudden change in tone, at his inclusion in this. Kevin doesn’t bother to look at him, stares at Andrew’s profile, pristine and cold.
“Yes?” Nicky sounds hesitant to say anything, of getting in the middle of something that he obviously wants no part of, that he’s waded into by simple means of proximity. To step between Andrew and Kevin has become a crime while Kevin hadn’t been paying enough attention to care.
“We’re leaving,” Andrew says and drops the rest of his gear at Kevin’s feet.
“Uhh,” Nicky pauses. Kevin imagines that he’s looking to him to gauge Kevin’s opinion on the matter, unsure still. Kevin doesn’t help him. “What about…?”
“Not my problem. Grab your keys, shower at home, live your life but don’t make me say it twice.” And then Andrew’s gone, turned about face and out the door. Kevin stares at the wall where he’d been and still refuses Nicky’s silent attempts at eye contact, refuses to confirm whether he’s sending worried glances Kevin’s way.
“Okay, I’m coming. Aaron?” Kevin hears the shuffle of more gear, the slam of a locker, Nicky’s voice and keys and everything.
“No, it’s okay,” Aaron says, low, quiet, like he’d expected to be ignored and unincluded. Like he wasn’t sure.
“Alright, cool.” He doesn’t try to impart any false cheer in his voice, feels the air in the room. Nicky, ice breaker extraordinaire and the only one in their quartet that wanted to ooze social skills, that seeks out conversation enough to balance the way they all reject it. Kevin keeps staring ahead but Nicky passes in front of him, sends Kevin a look that he can’t ignore: worried, kicked puppy. Kevin doesn’t wish any of his anger on him but doesn’t bother to hide it either, plain on his face. Doesn’t know if he could.
And then they’re both gone and the locker room descends into silence. Distantly Kevin can register the ring of the shower but Matt and Aaron have stopped moving, the metallic click of the lockers gone. He breathes in and out before pulling off the rest of his gear, sweat-wet, and everything feels heavier, fuzzier. But he keeps going and doesn’t say anything, even when Seth finally returns in a huff. Kevin doesn’t give him the option of conversation and disappears into the shower to sit under the hot water. The other two come and go while he stays put, listens to the other showers click silent, the slap of their feet disappear. Washes it down and stares at the tile, at the shine of the pipes, feels the water stream down his face and doesn’t move. Soaks up all his bad feelings and tries to let them go.
He’s surprised when Matt and Aaron are still there when he finally comes out. They’re not talking but both are seated on the bench, Matt cramming the rest of his stuff into a bag and Aaron with a towel around his shoulders, clicking away on his phone. Neither look up when Kevin crosses the room.
But once Kevin’s dressed he makes the mistake of glancing over and Matt’s looking back, makes awkward eye contact before tipping his head, bag over his shoulder.
“Do you, uh, want a ride back?” Matt offers and he sounds hesitant for whatever reason that may be: that the cousins refuse to befriend him on principle or that he’d just witnessed a screaming match that was orchestrated, dragged on, cut short, half Kevin. It’s a toss up.
“No, we’ll walk,” Aaron interrupts, stands as well. Kevin’s head turns and he looks at him sharply, hadn’t invited himself to anything. Aaron barely gives him a glance, strides across the room towards the exit.
“I don’t need a babysitter,” Kevin tells him and the anger’s still there. He can’t swallow it, still simmering in his blood, glares at him.
“Funny considering you’ve had one the entire time I’ve known you,” Aaron shoots back coolly, pulls the towel from his shoulders and runs it across his head again. “But I’m not job hunting, don’t worry.”
And he walks past Kevin, throws the towel into the hamper. Kevin’s mad still, mad that he’s stuck between walking with Aaron and sucking it up to ride with Matt, but it really isn’t a question. Aaron and he are Andrew’s charges before Kevin and Matt are friends, so he grits his teeth and follows him out, doesn’t bother to look back or acknowledge Matt’s awkward offer.
And Aaron stays true to his word, doesn’t babysit or hover or even look at him and they walk for ten minutes in silence, trudging along the sidewalk. It’s not hot out yet, still a month until summer begins in earnest, the afternoon cooling into evening. Aaron ignores him and Kevin returns the favor, stubbornly stares ahead as Aaron taps away on his phone for awhile longer, looks the other direction, stoically stares at his shoes.
He almost holds out the entire way back. Almost.
“I don’t get it,” Aaron says out of the air, doesn’t slow down, doesn’t even look at Kevin.
“Get what?” Kevin takes the bait because he feels calmer now, minutes and almost half a mile from the fight. He’d been thinking in circles: practice and Andrew and exy and Andrew .
“Why you don’t give up on him? He’s never going to take this seriously. He’s incapable of it and it doesn’t seem worth your time.”
And Kevin considers this for exactly a moment before the anger’s back, just that easy. It’s different, though, and he realizes its on Andrew’s behalf. Here is Aaron, his literal twin, and he didn’t think that Andrew was anything other than a unbreakable, blank barricade either. Just like everyone else. Kevin can picture the scene from earlier, the entire room of them, and everyone thought he was stupid for this. For caring about this. For caring about Andrew.
“You don’t know anything,” Kevin snaps, pauses, tries to reign himself in. “He will take it seriously eventually, I know it,” he says, voice more even. He means it.
“You were there when we tried to recruit him for the Ravens. I stand by everything still. He’s good, he’s court worthy .” Kevin exhales, remembering the first time they’d met in person. How frustrated, how angry, how off-foot Kevin had felt afterward. “Unfortunately, he’s also stubborn and convinced that he knows everything. I just have to wait him out.”
Kevin shrugs, feels strange being alone with Aaron, of talking this openly, this honestly. It isn’t an alien concept -- they’ve been left alone together plenty of times, they’re friends in the way that Kevin understands friendship, but they usually avoid anything serious and they never talk about Andrew. Kevin had decided months ago that Aaron wouldn’t acknowledge Andrew was alive if he could help it. Andrew was the same -- the twins were their own taboo subjects and yet they always came back together. Kevin didn’t get it but he’d learned not to ask.
“You don’t really believe that,” Aaron says, and he still won’t look at him, and Kevin can’t help but smirk. The similarities between the two boys are etched in even if they’ve both tried to shed them, rid themselves of each other.
“I do. When he gets off his medicine he’ll need something. He will have this and he’ll care,” Kevin says. They walk in silence for a minute, almost long enough that Kevin thinks they’re done.
“You’re going to be disappointed if that’s what you’re holding out on. You’ve never seen him off his medicine, he’s not suddenly going to become a normal person.”
And Kevin knows that. He doesn’t expect Andrew to become a new person, and he doesn’t want him to. He just wants... more of him. Kevin wants to have Andrew in more than just a few hours at night, those small pockets of clarity. He wants to glance over in the middle of the day and have his level, calm eyes looking back at him as if he’d been looking all along. He wants to feel settled and he wants to know if it’ll stretch. If Andrew will keep looking at him longer, if he’s given the chance. He wants to give Andrew the chance. He wants to give him something.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says because he doesn’t expect to change Aaron’s opinion of Andrew, knows it’s a lost cause. He won’t pretend to know the intricacies of their relationship but he knows enough to be sure that it can’t be fixed on a single Thursday afternoon stroll. “I promised him I would.” Because Andrew deserves it.
“Whatever.” Aaron drops it like Kevin knew he would. The key difference between the twins is that Aaron’s no fighter. “It just seems like you’ve got enough problems without adding his to the list.” He finally glances over at Kevin, eyes flicking up to his face, laser fast and gone.
Kevin doesn’t say He’s been carrying mine for months .
“Today was your first day back. Give yourself a break.” Kevin doesn’t bother to acknowledge this, feels it like a platitude. Like Aaron had watched Kevin struggle for the last few hours and could see the strain in him. The words felt like an olive branch he wasn’t worthy of. “Besides, half of Seth’s problem is that you’re better than him regardless. And you’re going to have your hands full with the newbie.”
“Both good reasons to not settle for mediocre,” Kevin responds, hears the flatness in his voice and hopes that Aaron does too. Nothing he says is going to make Kevin feel better about the uphill climb he has resigned himself to. There is no point.
Aaron gives a noncommittal noise and they walk the rest of the way in silence, finally exhausting the amount of seriousness they can both handle. Kevin’s grateful for it.
When they finally make it to Fox Tower Aaron stops at the fork in the sidewalk that loops further into campus. He holds out a fist and Kevin knocks it gently before Aaron nods, everything resolved easy, and keeps going. Kevin watches him for a moment before turning the other way and making his way back to the dorm. When he steps inside, it’s empty and quiet.
“You want to fight with me,” Andrew says, hours later. After Kevin had fallen asleep to cushion every negative emotion he was swimming in, after Andrew had come home finally and held his keys up, opened the front door and gestured out of it without saying a word. After Kevin had silently lead them down the stairs to the car.
Now they’ve both settled into their usual seats but Andrew doesn’t turn the car on, doesn’t shift the gear, doesn’t do anything at all to indicate that they’re going anywhere. Kevin feels on edge, picked up easily from earlier. He doesn’t want it.
“It’s what we do,” Kevin says instead, taps his fingers on the dashboard in front of him, stretches his long legs out as far as he can in the cramped space. Andrew accepts that in silence. Still doesn’t move.
“I’m not the cause of all of your problems.”
“I never said you were,” Kevin’s voice is sharp, just in the span of a breath, and he exhales, feels the tingle in his fingers, feels the energy that’s too caught up in his throat.
“You imply it,” Andrew shoots back but his voice is level still and Kevin looks over at him. He is studying the steering wheel, one hand gripped around it, the other tracing the shape of the logo in the middle. “It is not my fault you’re starting over. It’s not going to be me that fixes it either.”
Kevin doesn’t have anything to say to that. He feels the ghost of the possibility of a fight on his fingertips. It’s so easy. It’s so easy to drop everything at Andrew’s feet and call it something useful, call it productive to push . It’s always there because Andrew never hesitates to pick up the reigns that Kevin hands him.
Except today he had walked away. Andrew had said You want to fight but he really meant I don’t want to .
But what was there otherwise? Kevin was stuck in his own never-ending storm and Andrew had stepped up to take a portion of it and it had been easy but everything after hadn’t. It had stopped being easy and Kevin doesn’t know when. Whether it ever actually had, or if he’d just been tired and done and ready to hand it off to someone else.
He was still tired and done. So close to done but that wasn’t a possibility, really, was it?
And how long, too, would Andrew be a possibility? How much could Kevin ask of him before he couldn’t face himself, before he became an endless pit of problems? Before Andrew gave up on him, like he’d given up on himself, like everyone had said?
What if Kevin was wrong?
Kevin doesn’t say I don’t know if I can fix anything. He doesn’t say I’m so tired of trying . Because there’s no point. They’ve hashed it back and forth, they’ve argued and Kevin’s yelled and Andrew’s absorbed it, thrown it right back. There’s nothing else to be done. He couldn’t force Andrew into an argument just as he couldn’t force him into acknowledging the space between them. The intensity.
Because that’s what it is. That’s what Aaron doesn’t understand, what none of them understand. That someone as intense and as intentional and as hard as Andrew is, that there was no way he couldn’t care, that he didn’t want something. That this wasn’t real. Kevin watches his face across the car, watches him sit out Kevin’s silence. He is there, he is always there despite it all. Why wasn’t it enough? Why did Kevin have to make a fucking problem out of everything? Mounting mountains of issues and built up complications and none of it is easy. Kevin wants easy. His eyes shift to Andrew’s face, his lips, the faint light across his profile in the car.
“Can I--”
“No,” Andrew says, and his hands have stilled, stopped. He looks up at Kevin, knows what he was going to ask for, knows the comfort that Kevin seeks from him. For a moment he feels unsteady, feels adrift. “Not tonight.”
Kevin let out the exhale of breath he’d been holding, swallows his disappointment.
“Okay. Are we going to drive?”
“Not tonight,” Andrew repeats. But he takes his hand off the wheel and finally turns the key, wakes up the car. Kevin feels it like a storm miles away, like the beginning of something falling, loud in the dark silence they’d been captive to. He reverses it out of the spot and turns out of the parking lot like normal and Kevin settles back in the seat, doesn’t care what they were doing. He rolls down the window and rolls it down further when Andrew doesn’t say anything, feels the pull of the warm air on his face. Shuts his eyes.
They slow faster than he thought, a few minutes at most, and he opens his eyes to the exy stadium in front of them. Andrew has pulled up to the entrance, cut off the engine decisively, settles back against the seat and turns to look over at Kevin. Kevin returns his gaze and they sit there for a moment that feels devoid of air.
“I don’t understand,” Kevin says finally because he had started to focus too much on Andrew’s eyes, on the curve of his jaw, on the comfortable way his legs are spread in the front seat the way that Kevin never could, his knees barely brushing the dashboard.
“I drive him to the center of his world and he says ‘I don’t understand,” Andrew’s voice is pitched in a way that makes Kevin think he’s laughing at him in an alternate universe where Andrew laughed and it didn’t sound forced and manic. A laugh just as hard, dry, and monotone as his own voice. Amused. Kevin looks back at him, takes the chance to memorize the lightness in his eyes.
“I will watch you. If you want to run yourself ragged without all of them underfoot, tonight and as many nights.” Andrew holds his gaze as Kevin catches on, catch in his breath. His eyes flick lower to Kevin’s lips -- just a blink of an eye -- and back up again, so quickly that he thinks he must have imagined it. “Start solving your own problems.”