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The takeout grows colder in the seat next to him. Andrew doesn’t care, his appetite eaten by the panic that grips his heart, its cold fingers digging into his flesh like his hands on the steering wheel. He thinks of Wymack’s words, his call connected to the Bluetooth in his car, the somber, crackling tone filling the air. There’s a two-hour flight between Chicago and Philadelphia.
Unfortunately, flights don’t work that way, so he goes home and shoves his clothes in a bag. Andrew sends a screenshot of his ticket to Wymack and then calls an Uber. He gets to the airport too early and spends the next two hours at the gate bouncing his leg up and down. His takeout still sits on the seat next to him, though Andrew hadn’t noticed he brought it to the airport. He eats it on the flight, still too jittery to sleep. He doesn’t even mind the flying very much; he’s gotten used to it with exposure and he’s too distracted to care. Andrew tells himself to get some rest so he can be awake when he lands, but he spends the whole flight watching random episodes of the Big Bang Theory on the guy’s screen next to him. Judging from the captions, he’s glad he doesn’t have to hear the sound.
At the PHL, he steps off the plane, rubbing bleary eyes at a tired-looking mom trying to quiet a crying toddler. He checks his phone for any updates, but all he sees is a text from Wymack telling him he arranged for him to visit around 4 in the morning. They have to wait nearly half an hour for their luggage, some kind of mix-up. A few people seem to get upset, but Andrew’s eyes are drooping and his head pounds incessantly. He should feel hasty to get to Neil, but he’s falling asleep from where he’s leaning on a pillar and then their bags start to come out nonetheless.
Outside, he flags down a taxi and does his best to say as few words as possible to the driver. He almost falls asleep in the backseat, lost in his thoughts and staring blankly at the traffic lights. Andrew perks up when he sees the hospital, and by the time he’s dragged his bag to the lobby, his mind is whirling again, itching to see Neil.
Wymack is waiting near the desk, and he can’t help wondering if he’d stayed there for half an hour or he just remembered he had Andrew’s location. He does all of the work checking in with the receptionist, and Andrew can’t help feeling like a little kid as Wymack hands her his ID.
Andrew assumes they’ve worked it out beforehand, because Wymack leads him to Neil’s room.
Dan and Matt are sitting outside, but they follow them when they go in. Neil has a room to himself, but it’s still crowded. Andrew doesn’t bother greeting Allison or Robin; he barely realizes they’re even there, chairs facing the bed, slumped over and tired.
Neil is still asleep when approaches, dropping his bag as he goes. Nothing looks visibly wrong from the outside, but vaguely he remembers something about a broken collarbone and a dislocated shoulder. Andrew doesn’t know if it even mattered that much, if Neil could be hospitalized and Andrew wouldn’t rush over to give him the very heart that sat in his chest, rabbiting louder than the rush of the plane engines.
An indeterminably short amount of time later, Neil shifts, waking. The room is silent besides the harrowing chatter of the medical machines Andrew would kill to know more about right now. The small TV is playing something old and on mute.
He squints his eyes, pushing himself up more. “-ndrew?” he asks.
Andrew doesn’t dignify this with an answer. “How did you get here so fast?” Neil says, not bothering to feign surprise at his arrival. He sounds almost accusing, but it’s too close to his usual tone to mean anything.
“By plane. What’s wrong with you,” he asks, flatly.
Neil smiles a little, though it’s clear he’s still groggy. “I’m tired,” he replies, and whatever it means, Andrew has missed him like he’d never imagined; like he’d forgotten how he’d got here but he knows he’s going to find out. Their hands are so close, and it’s like a drop of water in an endless desert.
Andrew is so, so thirsty. He wants to press their faces together, to pluck Neil off of his stupid bed and lock them away so they can never be apart long enough for Neil to be crushed against the plexiglass again. He’s not lucky enough, though, it is almost certain Neil will make a full recovery.
“Get out,” he says, not bothering to look behind him. He hears someone shift, but no footsteps. Whirling around, he turns to look at the rest of the foxes. Before he can tell them he’s not going to repeat himself, a nurse pokes her head in. She asks them to step out whilst she checks on Neil, and they all obediently file out of the room.
They sit in the cushy blue chairs outside the door, ugly and patterned with triangles and soaked with more tears than anyone could ever cry alone. They’re stark against the whitened background.
Andrew takes the time to assess everyone else. Kevin looks how he usually does, but asleep and a few years older. Matt rests his head on Dan’s shoulder; he’d say he was sleeping if it wasn’t for the grip he has on her hand. Dan’s eyes droop from the bags that weigh them down, but her leg bounces with surprising vigor. Robin is typing something on her phone, and Andrew hasn’t seen such a permanent notch between her eyebrows since they first met. Allison stares at the door, makeup smudged just enough, the corners around her eyes dark and tired and they all look like how Andrew feels.
Wymack just looks like himself, and Andrew almost asks if he has other kids to corral back in Palmetto. None of them look at him the whole time, but they follow him back into the room when the nurse leaves.
Neil looks more alert now, but it’s clear he’s still a little out of it. “Leave,” Andrew says, the first thing anyone’s said in a while, and Neil looks at him with confusion.
“Don’t,” he tells them, shooting a look at Andrew. “Even if I fall asleep.”
He looks unexpectedly hurt, though it manifests itself as surprise. He meets Andrew’s eyes meaningfully. “They’re here too,” Neil tells him pointedly.
Andrew should have expected this, but in his mind he could only picture Neil and himself, standing beside his bed. Neil coughs, and Matt brings him water; the nurse pokes her head in again and talks to Robin, and all of a sudden Andrew thinks he’s misjudged the situation.
It’s not like how it was in college, warring factions and drawn-out teen angst. Andrew watches Dan from where she sits by Neil’s bed. She looks the same as she did the last time he saw her, but far too different. If he asked her to go, she would leave, but Andrew’s not the only one who flew here as fast as he could, and Andrew’s not the one in bed, either.
It almost makes him sick, seeing them here, draped over their chairs at four in the morning and just as tired and concerned as he is; that maybe having Neil in common meant they were practically the same; that he’d have to reassess the Foxes and that maybe he was misguided from the beginning. Liking Neil is easy, anyone knows this, but getting him to like you is infinitely more difficult. Andrew doesn’t know what Neil choosing to stay says about them, and he doesn’t know if he will ever figure it out.
Almost absentmindedly, he wonders if any of them would do the same for him, but it’s useless and it’s 5 in the morning and he doesn’t know what he would even do if the answer was yes.
Neil tugs on his shirt and pats the bed next to him, and Andrew makes the effort to cram himself into the side. Allison opens an eye from her nap on Dan’s shoulder and raises an eyebrow when Neil tucks an arm around him. Robin’s head lolls from sleep, and Andrew squishes himself against the hospital sheets and tries to follow suit.