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There are roughly twenty-five minutes left in the game when Neil takes the hit. Even from the box Kevin and the other former Foxes are sitting in, they can tell it’s a bad one, a sickening crunch resounding through the arena as Neil’s body is slammed into the plexiglass by the backliner.
He picks himself up off the floor a little too quickly, and when he does, he wobbles. Kevin watches as the Raiders coach exchanges words with Neil. Even though there’s no way he could read lips from this distance, he’ll eat his own post-exy practice socks if the conversation isn’t exactly like this: Neil repeatedly insisting he’s completely fine, his coach very clearly pointing out that he cannot in fact be fine given that he can barely stand upright, and that he better haul his ass off the court before he gets someone to haul Neil off for him.
Neil resigns himself to losing the argument, but he still needs to be hauled off by someone else anyway. He barely makes it two steps before wobbling dangerously, so it’s up to Courtney, the other Raiders striker on the court, to help get him to the sidelines.
Whatever sort of examination he gets on the sidelines goes poorly, because it doesn’t seem to be enough to let him sit there and watch the rest of the game. Neil is ushered out of the arena entirely, now held up by one of the team’s doctors.
Dan, still their level-headed leader after all these years, is the first to tear away from staring out the window of their box. “I’ll go see if I can figure out where they’re taking him,” she says, taking Matt with her as she leaves the room.
Gameplay resumes, and all of Kevin’s focus is on Andrew. He’s always a solid goalkeeper - consistently near the top of Everything Exy’s goalie ratings - but now he’s a vicious one, never letting a ball or a player anywhere near his piece of the court.
Kevin wants to stay and watch, because watching Andrew play fired up is a rare thing of absolute beauty, but then Dan comes back with the news that Neil is being taken to the hospital down the road, and it becomes obvious that they will all be clearing out.
Aaron shoves his own phone into Kevin’s hands, a livestream already mirroring the game they’re turning away from.
“That obvious?” Kevin asks.
“You always are,” Aaron replies, staying close as they trail everyone else. There’s a fondness even in the acid of his dig, one that no one else would pick up on. No one but Kevin, who’s had years to pick apart every single detail and tell about Aaron Minyard’s mannerisms.
Who has the rest of his life to do it, as evidenced by the simple titanium engagement ring he only gets to wear on exy off-days like these.
He contents himself to watching the gameplay on the small screen, and Aaron takes his free hand, playing the very helpful role of guiding him through the stadium crowds and the busy sidewalk so that he doesn’t do something stupid like walk straight into a metal pole.
(He’s done that, once. But it’s barely his fault - Jeremy Knox had just scored a goal so flawless it would make even a casual exy fan fall to their knees in awe, so the fact that he’d remained upright enough to smack into the pole should be considered an accomplishment.)
The tiny general hospital is woefully unprepared for the descent of eight fully decked out professional exy fans on their waiting room. The group of them - Kevin, Aaron, Renee, Allison, Matt, Dan, Nicky, and Erik - are all swiftly denied any further intrusion into the emergency room space and assured by multiple staff members that Neil is being examined as they speak, but that hospital policy only allows immediate family members to go in.
“That’s going to go over real well with Andrew,” Matt comments, flopping into one of the shitty chairs that has absolutely no business seating anyone over six feet tall and grabbing the first magazine he sees, which appears to be about knitting.
“Has someone told him where we are?” Allison asks the rest of them.
“I texted him,” Aaron says, waving Kevin’s phone. Aaron’s is still in Kevin’s hands, showing the aftermath of the game. The Raiders won by two points, but Andrew doesn’t stick around to shake hands with their opponents or even celebrate with any of his teammates. He’s off the court immediately, and Kevin swipes out of the livestream.
“I give it roughly five minutes,” Kevin adds, sitting down in one of the chairs as well. Like Matt, he’s poorly proportioned for it, his legs bent at an odd angle to fit.
“Ten bucks says all his gear’s not even off,” Nicky replies, and in no time at all the Foxes end up in some sort of betting pool about Andrew’s arrival.
The full array of bets haven’t even been finalized when the front door swings open, revealing Andrew, his blond hair still plastered to his forehead with sweat from the match.
“Where the fuck is he?” Andrew asks, so lethally calm that Kevin fears it’s only a matter of time until one of his knives makes an appearance out from underneath his armbands.
Renee’s the only one with enough guts to approach Andrew in this state. “He’s in one of the examination rooms, apparently, but they told us only immediate family members are allowed back there right now. We’ll all wait here until - ”
She trails off as it becomes clear that Andrew isn’t paying any attention to her, brushing past and up to the middle-aged woman at the front desk.
“Josten. What room?” he asks, clipped, as the woman looks up at him with mild disinterest, clearly failing to clock Andrew as the absolute threat to her livelihood that he is.
“As your friends mentioned, sir, access is limited to - ”
“What. Room.”
“ - immediate family members, so you’ll just have to - ”
“And that is my husband, so you can either tell me what room he’s in or I can throw open every single door in this hospital until I find him.”
Kevin can practically feel the Foxes react to Andrew’s bold-faced lie. Even Matt, who’d continued flipping through his knitting magazine through Andrew’s entire stormy arrival, looks up now.
Aaron tenses beside him. Of all of them, his fiancé has the most experience with hospital protocol, so he fully knows that Andrew’s declaration won’t get him anywhere without documentation.
Kevin just hopes security doesn’t get involved. The last thing they need is Andrew getting cuffed to a chair - or worse, one of the other Foxes, in the absence of a Coach Wymack willing to take on the role.
Yet somehow, what happens is even stranger. “Check his emergency contact field, if you must,” Andrew says.
And sure enough, the woman clicks around a few times, glancing at the screen and then back up at him. “Andrew Minyard?”
“Room number.”
“201,” she answers. “Turn right and it’s at the end of the hall on your left.”
Andrew is through the door before she’s even finished her directions.
The once-noisy waiting room falls damn near silent in the wake of the revelation and Andrew’s sudden departure. And then, all of a sudden, it explodes.
“Was that - ”
“Did he just - ”
“Are they really - ”
Not a single one of them seems capable of finishing a sentence. Kevin just glances wordlessly at Aaron, trying to gauge his reaction to his twin’s revelation. As well-known as Andrew is for his cagey-ness, he and Aaron have spent years building their relationship into something like trust, and Kevin’s not sure what a secret of this magnitude could do to that.
But strangely, Aaron seems more pensive than stunned.
“Did you know?” he asks, his voice low and only for Aaron amidst the chaos that is the rest of the team.
Aaron shakes his head. “No. But I think… I think he did tell me, once.”
He releases a small laugh under his breath. “I don’t remember how the conversation started, but I snarked at him that if he and Neil ever got married we’d probably all never actually hear about it, and he just went ‘exactly.’”
Around them, the other Foxes are still shouting, except now the conversation has apparently turned to the fact that, for all the money and participants in the ‘when are Neil and Andrew getting married’ pot, not a single person had gone with ‘already married.’
“There was literally over a thousand dollars riding on that one,” Allison mutters.
“Renee, you do owe me ten bucks though,” Nicky says. Everyone turns to him, and he grins, foxlike. “Andrew still had his neck guard on.”