Chapter Text
Neil remained curled up in his window seat on the plane until it was almost empty, and when the last few stragglers began to file out, he unfolded himself, grabbed his bag from beneath his feet, and followed them out through Arrivals. He didn’t have anything other than the duffel, so instead of joining the crowd huddled around the baggage carousels, he peeled off and made for the sliding doors.
Coach Wymack had promised that a ride would be waiting for him. Neil didn’t need to search the room—his eyes immediately found Andrew’s in the crowd. Hazel, with flecks of gold. He couldn’t see the colour from this far away, of course, but they were imprinted in his mind, along with every emotion that had ever played through them. He remembered how they warmed with every rare smile, darkened whenever Neil edged to close to a topic he didn’t want to think about. But then, the blonde-haired boy shifted awkwardly on his feet, and an ice-cold shiver went down Neil’s spine.
This wasn’t Andrew.
Even though he and Andrew had parted months before the other boy had even known his twin brother existed, Neil knew enough about the two of them from the articles he’d printed out and added to his binder every time he’d managed to find a computer someone forgot to log out of in the school library. Aaron. The “normal” twin.
Neil hated him on principle.
Nonetheless, he slowly made his way over, weaving through the crowd with the ease of practice, not brushing against a single person. He couldn’t help but feel disappointed. He’d known, logically, that Andrew wouldn’t be the one picking him up. He hadn’t been at Millport to recruit him, even though Kevin had, and the news articles said that they didn’t go anywhere without each other. Neil knew that Andrew must’ve recognised him despite the changes he'd made to his appearance, must be avoiding him, but when he seen that mop of familiar blonde hair, his heart had leapt with traitorous hope. Stupid.
“Josten?” Aaron asked, when Neil stopped in front of him.
Neil nodded.
“I’m Aaron.”
Neil nodded again, and Aaron rolled his eyes before turning and shoving through the crowd, leading the way to the parking lot. He didn’t look back, but Neil followed dutifully.
“Coach gave me his car to pick you up,” Aaron explained, stopping beside a large grey four-wheel-drive. Even Neil, who cared only about how easy a car was to hotwire, could appreciate the beast. “He’s never let anyone else drive it, but Andrew refused to let me use his.”
Neil’s stomach sank. He’d known Andrew would be furious, he reminded himself. He’d been expecting this. It didn’t make it hurt any less.
Coach Wymack’s apartment was only a 20-minute drive from the airport. “Nicky’s upstairs,” Aaron said, swinging the car keys around his finger as they got in the elevator. “Coach is at the stadium, chatting with the ERC, or he would have picked you up.”
“What about Andrew and Kevin?” Neil asked, hoping his voice didn’t give anything away.
Aaron looked over at him, but didn’t seem suspicious. He just looked pissed off. “Fuck if I know,” he said. “They left last night and haven’t been back since.”
The elevator doors dinged open at the seventh floor, and when Aaron rapped sharply on door number 724, a tall, brown-skinned man opened it.
“Hi!” he said brightly, grinning to show off two rows of shiny white teeth. “Welcome to South Carolina. I’m Nicky.” He stuck out a hand to shake and Neil ignored it.
“Neil,” he said. “Am I staying here?”
Nicky’s hand dropped, but his smile didn’t, even when Aaron shouldered past him into the small living room and flopped down onto the couch.
“Yeah,” Nicky said. “I think you’re crashing on the couch. Coach has a few blankets for you.”
“Okay,” Neil said. “Can I come in?”
“Oh, yeah, sorry.” Nicky returned to the couch, and Neil sat down in one of the two armchairs in the room, grip still tight around his duffel strap. Aaron had changed the channel to a show that Neil didn’t recognise, so he just stared at the floor until Coach got home and kicked the two of them out, wishing that he’d never said yes to coming here. Wishing he’d never thought that maybe—just maybe—Andrew would give him another chance.
Neil spent the next few weeks alternating between Wymack’s couch and the Foxhole Court. That first day, Wymack had driven him to meet Kevin there. The other striker had looked uneasy and kept glancing over his shoulder.
“Where’s your bodyguard?” Wymack had joked.
Kevin didn’t seem to find it funny. He had just shot Neil a dark look and said, “Didn’t want to come. He dropped me off.”
“Weird.”
And that was that.
After that first day, once he knew the way, Neil ran to the Court. It was only a few miles, and it meant that he was warmed up and ready for Kevin’s particular brand of torturous practice once he got there. Playing Exy at such a high calibre left him buzzing every afternoon, and exhausted every night, but he still had time to stare at the ceiling and wish Andrew would slip up and stay just a minute too long after dropping Kevin off, but Neil didn’t even catch a glimpse of his car through that entire three weeks. A few mornings, he went early, and waited on the curb for Kevin and Andrew to pull up, but on those days, Kevin would come walking around the corner with a surly look on his face and complain that Andrew had made him walk from the road.
When Neil wasn’t playing Exy or sleeping, he was running and worrying and and hoping. The hoping was the worst part.
The Foxes’ practices were scheduled to start on Monday, June 10th, but Neil met the rest of the team the day before. When Matt—Neil’s new roommate and teammate—finally arrived, Wymack had dropped him and his duffel outside the athlete’s dormitory, and left him there with a reminder to be at practice the next morning.
Matt was nice enough, but Neil hardly paid attention to him, instead giving himself whiplash whenever he heard the scuff of feet outside, knowing that this was the same floor where Andrew had been living—along with Kevin, Aaron, and Nicky—for the past few weeks. Of course, there was no sign of him, though Nicky poked his head in at one point to see how he was settling in. The backliner had refused to attend any of Kevin and Neil’s practices, but he’d been a fixture at Wymack’s, stealing his food and his TV, along with Aaron and, sometimes, Kevin.
Practice the next morning was what Neil was most looking forward to, half because he’d finally be playing on a team where the members weren’t falling over their own racquets, and half because Andrew couldn’t avoid him there, unless he was planning to never attend practice and get kicked off the team.
Even when Matt marched him down the hall to meet Dan and Renee—their own third roommate, Aliison, missing—he couldn’t help but glance over his shoulder at what he knew was Andrew’s door.
“I’m sorry that your first introduction to us was the Monsters,” Dan said, when she saw him glance at the door with every slight noise in the hall. Renee made a sound of admonishment, but didn’t say anything, and Neil didn’t either. Andrew had probably worked hard to cultivate a reputation that would get people to leave him alone, and Neil wasn’t going to undermine that. Not when Andrew hated him enough already.
That night, Neil didn’t sleep, distracted by Matt’s deep breaths below him and the thought of what tomorrow would bring. He just closed his eyes and waited until morning.
Neil had been a frequent visitor to the Foxes’ quarters in the Court over the past few weeks, but he’d never seen the longue so full. The couches and chairs—usually empty—had people crammed into them. Dan, Renee, and Matt all squeezed onto one couch, and Nicky, Kevin, and Aaron were already waiting on another. Wymack had claimed one of the armchairs, Abby standing behind him, and Neil selected one in the corner, where he could see all of them and the door.
“Where’s Andrew?” Renee asked Nicky.
“Parking the car,” he said. Renee frowned.
The door clicked open, and Neil’s breath caught in his throat, startled, before he realised that it wasn’t Andrew. He recognised the pair from news articles. Seth Gordon and Allison Reynolds.
Seth slumped down into an armchair, and Allison was sashaying her way over to Neil in a terrifyingly skintight dress when the door slammed open, doorknob smashing into the wall behind it.
“Fucking hell, Andrew,” Wymack yelled into the sudden, startled stillness. This time, it was Andrew standing there, eyes fixed on Neil. He had thought that Andrew was on court-mandated drugs that left him in a manic state 99% of the time, but right now, Andrew wasn’t smiling. Neil wasn’t sure if he was off his meds, if this was that 1%, or if Andrew was so pissed at him that he’d managed to overcome the drugs’ euphoric effects.
Neil drank him in, despite suspecting it was the latter option. He had barely grown since he was thirteen, though his blonde hair had darkened a few shades. His eyes were the same.
“Hey, ‘Drew,” Neil said, standing.
Wymack slowly twisted to look from Andrew to him. On the couch to his left, Nicky’s jaw dropped open and Aaron’s eyes went wide. On his other side, Allison had frozen, and Matt was halfway to rising out of his seat when Renee’s hand reached out to stop him. Dan looked between him and Andrew like she was watching a tennis match between Roger Federer and a grizzly bear, Seth looked out of his mind on drugs and Kevin seemed utterly terrified of Andrew's reaction.
Andrew continued to stare at him, face impassive, eyes flickering between bright relief and fear and anger all at once. His fingers scrambled for something to do, landing in his pocket. He pulled out a pack of Newports—the same brand Neil used to steal from his mother to give to Andrew—and Neil couldn’t help but smile. It felt unfamiliar, the muscles aching with disuse. He could still read Andrew like a book.
“Rabbit,” Andrew greeted in response. Neil wasn’t sure if it was an admonishment, a reminder—the words, you left, went unsaid. A given. But even as Andrew clamped down again, withdrew, took a step back, Neil realised that the old nickname meant something else too.
“I came back,” he said, stepping forward.
Andrew flipped open the box and chucked an unlit cigarette at his face. Neil caught it before it could rebound off his cheek and fall to the floor. To anyone else, it would’ve been an insult, but to Neil, it was an invitation.
“I don’t care,” Andrew said. Another familiar phrase.
When Neil had told him about his father, and looking over his shoulder, and jumping every time he heard a loud noise, and about the running—back when they were 12 and 13, when they were both terrified and still learning to hide it—that’s what he had said. Back then, it had felt like the end of one thing, and the beginning of something else. The first good thing he’d ever had. His father didn’t matter if Andrew said it didn’t, and even though his mother left scars on his torso from their nightly knife practice, and bruises up and down his arms from clutching him so hard whenever they went out in public, everything would be okay. Because Andrew didn’t care who he used to be. Didn’t care what he had done. And now, even though Neil had left, and then Andrew did too, he still didn’t.
They stared at each other a moment longer, then Andrew said, gaze not moving from Neil’s eyes—brown, thanks to the coloured contacts—“I’m taking your latest fox off your hands, Coach.”
Silence, for a beat too long, and then, like Coach Wymack hadn’t expected to hear his own name in the tension-filled room, he scrambled to say, “Don’t kill my new striker.”
Andrew snorted, raising an eyebrow at Neil. Neil just shrugged. He could explain the change in position later, when they weren’t surrounded by a roomful of young adults who were gaping at the two of them like fish on a boat deck.
“Whatever,” Andrew said, and spun on his heel to make his way out of the room. Neil shoved himself out of the chair he had chosen and followed dutifully, door slamming shut behind him.
Their exit broke the spell that had descended across the room, leaving a cacophony of noise in their wake, most namely Nicky yelling, “What the fuck was that?” But nobody tried to come after them, and the pair remained silent as Andrew lead the way towards the parking lot and got into a sleek, black car. Neil hopped into the passenger seat, stretching his legs out into the footwell, and buckled himself in.
They drove for a long time—forty minutes, maybe, or an hour—before Andrew deemed them far enough away from anyone or anything that either of them knew.
“Neil is a stupid name,” he said.
Neil rolled his eyes, looking over at Andrew, not for the first time this car ride. He kept sneaking looks, knowing that Andrew would tell him to stop if he caught him. He couldn’t help himself—couldn’t stop staring at the boy he once knew, and the man he’d grown into. Still those same hazel eyes, bright blonde hair, and that freckle on his right earlobe that looked a bit like a piercing, but wasn’t. The freckles that had dotted his cheeks as a teen had faded, sadly, but that single one remained.
“Thanks,” he said dryly. Maybe he deserved that. He told Andrew everything—except his legal name, not that Andrew had known that Abram wasn’t the name written on his original birth certificate. “You can still call me Abram if you want.”
“Is that even your real name?”
“It’s the one that counts.”
Neil watched Andrew turn that over in his mind, one hand clenched around the steering wheel, the other tapping out a nonsensical rhythm on his thigh.
“Where’d you go?” Andrew asked finally, instead of pressing further.
“France, Germany, Slovenia for a bit. All around the US. Canada. They didn’t understand my French. Back to the US. My father caught up to us a few times.”
Andrew’s hands tightened on the wheel.
“Mary?” he asked.
“That was the last time he found us,” Neil said hollowly. “I burned her body on a beach in California.”
“Where?”
Neil swallowed. “I don’t remember.”
“Liar,” Andrew said, but it was almost fond. “When?”
“A year ago.”
Andrew didn’t offer his condolences, or any false words of comfort, but Neil knew that he wasn’t saying what he really felt about Mary, and for that, he was grateful. He didn’t want to talk about his mother right now, or how much Andrew had hated her.
“You got my letters,” Neil pressed. “You know nearly everything—everything that matters. Now it’s your turn.”
“What if I don’t want to?” Andrew asked. Neil knew it was only a courtesy. If Andrew didn’t want to say anything, he wouldn’t.
“C’mon, ‘Drew,” he said. “You don’t have to do anything. But I want to know—everything.”
Andrew barked out a short laugh. “You don’t want anything, Rabbit.”
“Yes, I do,” Neil said quietly, and neither of them spoke for a long time.
Another half hour later, Andrew turned the car down a little used exit off the highway and they were trundling down a dirt road, parking by a river. Andrew got out and began rummaging around in the boot. Neil unbuckled his seatbelt, but stayed where he was until Andrew slammed the boot shut and came around the right side of the car to rap on Neil’s window. “Hurry up,” he mouthed, frowning. He had a blanket in his arms, and Neil wondered if he had planned this—all of this. It wouldn’t surprise him.
Neil got out of the car, and when Andrew laid down the blanket by the edge of the riverbank, he sat on the very edge. Andrew copied him on the other side, and then, very slowly, began to tell Neil about finding a boy who looked like him, about going to juvie to protect him, about killing the woman who birthed them both, and ending up with a brother who hated him, a cousin who was scared of him, and a friend who only cared about surviving long enough to play Exy. Neil listened, watching the river, until Andrew’s voice began to grow hoarse, and Neil couldn’t think of any more questions he wanted answered.
It was almost dark now, and there was a cool breeze coming off the water that made Neil shiver, even though he had curled his knees tight to his chest for warmth.
“Idiot,” Andrew said. Neil turned to look at him, finding Andrew scooting closer to the centre of the blanket, and then down, so that he could lie down across it and flip his side of the blanket over his body.
“Can I—?”
“I’ll tell you if you do something I don’t like,” Andrew assured him. Neil edged closer and closer, slowly enough that if Andrew didn’t want it, he could jump back, or shove Neil away, or something, but instead he lay there, watching him with dark, glittering eyes.
Neil carefully lowered his head to rest on Andrew’s shoulder.
Andrew shuddered, but before Neil could leap back, alarmed, he was turning to clasp his arms around Neil’s back, keeping him close, curled together like they did when they were kids, legs tangling together.
“Okay?” Andrew asked.
“Okay,” Neil whispered back.
Andrew removed a hand to pull the blanket over them, and then returned to his previous position, hugging Neil to his chest. They fell asleep like that, Neil’s nose against Andrew’s shoulder, Andrew’s arms enveloping him, and the blanket cocooning them both.