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His ruined body served as a tool when he was young, and while his soul crawled inside of him in search of help his mother ignored his anguished cries of pain.
At the end, being capable of hiding in very small spaces, predicting rain and bending into impossible poses just to get a better angle with a gun were benefits to be applauded for, minuscule pros that marked a big difference during their time on the run where even being an inch off could take them to their end. The tenderness with which she caressed him after he had to reinsert one of his limbs into its socket was almost enough to make him forget of her slaps, beatings, and all the bruises left by her hand, everything erased just with a small brush from her.
They didn't name it back then. Naming it meant giving it an identity, making it something when they were supposed to be just two unrecognizable, unidentifiable humans. Disorders were for the crooked, for people who you could spot in a multitude and point a finger at, a red mark painted right on their forehead that could so easily mean death for Neil and Mary.
Andrew was the first one to talk about it outloud, breaking the curse that for so long forced Neil to keep quiet and hiding it behind a curtain of smoke, just waiting for it to be blown away.
It was pouring outside, on a Saturday where Kevin had left hours ago to visit Wymack's apartment and have some very needed bonding time.
They had the dorm at their disposal, and there they were, lounging on the couch with two cups on the table besides them. One filled with burning hot, dark coffee, and the other half-empty of chocolate with more sugar than Neil could ever manage to ingest in his whole lifetime. With time they had come to learn how much their preferences and tastes formed a contrast, like oil and water evading each other, but their differences never mattered in the big picture of things. They formed a pair, bonded by their mutual understanding and their conjoined souls, even as they kept their own autonomies.
Neil laid in between Andrew’s legs, both of them horizontal and with his head taking place over the other’s belly, just the perfect balance between strong and tender to act as a pillow. The warmth irradiating from Andrew was almost enough to overpower everything else that anguished Neil, like a blanket covering a child from the monsters under their bed.
Really, if he was to die, he’d wish to be embraced by Andrew just one more time, and then he’d go in peace.
Their intimacy didn’t need words, which didn’t mean that they didn’t enjoy talking to each other, sharing truths under starred skies and encompassed by the smell of nicotine, but the silence between them was never uncomfortable. As long as it didn’t give space to the memory of gunshots being fired next to one or of door locks being forced open, then nothing could force them to change anything in their dynamic, passionate but quiet.
As much as Neil enjoyed the drops of rain hitting the window, he couldn’t help but be annoyed by it when the humidity in the air forced his knees to crack as soon as he tried to reposition himself to a pose that didn’t make him feel his ribs threatening to pierce through his skin. The click resounded like the echo between two mountains, bursting the bubble that created distance between both of them and the outside world. He immediately felt Andrew’s head move, and knew that he couldn’t avoid the conversation about to follow, not if he wanted to keep his trust.
“There's something wrong with your knees.” Andrew didn't ask, he didn't need to when the evidence was right in front of them.
“Not really,” he tried to deny it, to just brush it off like Mary would do every time something in Neil slipped out of place.
Andrew scoffed, “Don’t be a liar.”
The words bursted through Neil’s ears and pierced into him, leaving him barely able to contain a flinch when they settled inside of him like a bunch of anvils dragging him down.
“I don’t think it’s that important.” And that wasn’t a lie, but a fully-formed thought that had been pestering and growing in his brain for years, like an infected cell consuming his meat until he couldn’t discern between what was real and what was an idea; a parasite, planted by his mother. “It’s always happened, you know? Just a very practical party trick.”
The rain worsened, thunder resonating every few minutes around the streets. Eerily, now that the words had been uttered into reality, sharp pain forced Neil to sit down just to be able to reach his knees with his hands, deeply hoping that the friction would calm it. Andrew sat down too, just right next to him, his calculating gaze checking him from head to toe as if a scanner was analyzing Neil for anything else that could be wrong with his body.
“You have to see Abby.”
Neil scrunched his eyes, moving his head from left to right in denial, but he couldn’t hide how his hands shaked or the force with which he tensed his jaw to get his mind off the pain. At the end, Andrew only took a look at him before he gently guided Neil's legs horizontally into his own lap. They sat down facing each other, and when he opened his eyes he saw Andrew’s hands hovering over his lap, being obvious with what he wanted to do, giving Neil a moment so he could’ve time to reject the touch if he didn’t want it.
Neil said yes, and Andrew poured everything he didn't say in his touch, gently massaging his skin and the muscles under it, starting from his shins and going up his calves until he reached his knees. Andrew was careful with them, making sure to not move Neil’s kneecaps around, having paid attention before to how they tended to have more mobility than they should normally.
Andrew's hands transmitted their warmth to him, the connection between the two sending Neil a wave of peace and snapping all the connections in his body until he relaxed completely, abandoning himself to Andrew's mercy to do whatever he wanted. The next day they’d go to Abby’s place to figure out the details of what'd been carved into Neil since his birth, dooming him from the start, just like Nathan's blood did. But just in that moment, he’d indulge in his partner's touch and the song of the rain saying what he couldn't express.
It was hard for him, at first, to ask for accommodations.
Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder, Abby called it.
Neil envisioned it like a little creature, a beast that lived inside of him and saw his body as a toy, chewing on it whenever it got bored and running from limb to limb trying to find something just the littlest out of place to push and push until it reached its breaking point.
He shouldn’t play an impact sport, not with the fragility of his tissues, of every ligament, tendon and articulation that worked extra hard to keep his body upright like the strings of a puppet.
But they knew what Exy meant to Neil, what it meant for the longevity of his own life, being under the same terms as Jean and Kevin. Before abandoning it he would rather eat his own heart with a fork and a knife, or be fed alive to an anthill. Everything but having to leave behind the only thing that’d kept him upright after his mother’s death, and what’d impulsed him to just try to give his all before he died –what ultimately guided him to Andrew and everyone else who decided to keep him around, even after they had to nurse him back to health after the Nest, cleaned bloody mirrors and took him on vacation to heal from what went down in the horrific basement in Baltimore–.
Making Neil, a student with a sports scholarship leave that very same sport was out of the picture, but he was forced by Abby and Andrew to find other ways to help make the situation easier, even if it threatened to drown him in a river of shame with every indication written down. He couldn’t go on anymore with no support to his limbs considering how much of his flexibility he exploited to be a better player, not if it meant constantly subluxating his shoulders just to get a wider range to pass the ball or to have his wrist demolished by the opponent players when they striked his racquet to make him flail. Braces, k-tape and compression sleeves got fully stocked both in Abby’s infirmary and their dorm, like anti-inflammatory creams and medication too.
There were also lots of other factors to take into account in his daily life. Temperatures, humidity levels, even his sleeping position influenced his symptoms.
Neil had to accept taking a plastic bench into their dorm’s shower so he could comfortably sit down on days where even standing was a difficult feat for him, instead of ending up on the floor when he couldn’t do it anymore and the weight on his shoulders dragged him down. It was difficult to get into his brain that it didn’t make him weak to need it, and even if he was actually weak sometimes, there was nothing wrong with that either, not when he’d managed to survive despite it.
Having to accept that he wasn’t invincible was another part of the process that he preferred to ignore for now –for as long as he could–, and because of that, he rejected the idea of also keeping a bench in their locker room so he could use it in the court’s showers too.
One step at a time, okay?
Sometimes, in class, Neil had long stopped writing notes by the time their teachers told them that they were finished for the day. The lack of care and attention his parents gave him when he was a child, added to how little time he spent on school during his adolescence on the run meant that he never learnt to use a pen correctly, or any writing utensil whatsoever. His wrong positioning of his fingers mixed with his slipping tendons and the rough and charred skin over his knuckles only caused a mess of hot, sharp flashes marching through his wrist and specific parts of his hands.
Andrew only discovered it because Neil slipped up one day, forgetting one of his notebooks open on his desk. After seeing all the uncompleted notes and messily-done exercises by a shaking and forced hand, he didn’t even ask Neil to take action. He organized his schedule so he could sit down next to Neil on the more theoretical classes, where he needed to write down the teacher’s oral summarizing of the long and intricate texts, and he spent some hours on the evenings helping him write down all the steps for his Maths homeworks so the numbers could be understood. They didn’t really talk about it, and every time Neil tried to, Andrew shut him up however he desired to do it that day. Sometimes he brought his index finger upon Neil’s lips to shush him, on other occasions, it was his own lips that got the job done.
Another thing was that, during most nights, achieving it thanks to lots of therapy and trial and error, Andrew could allow Neil to drape one of his arms or legs over him, acting as a support. It made it easier for him to sleep like that and have a better rest. Otherwise, his shoulders and scapulas bent weird, managing to not only disturb Neil but to also freak out Andrew, who even if he didn’t admit it, stared at him like a hawk every time something poked out weirdly.
And if his nightmares also got more infrequent thanks to having a warm body next to him to distract him from his terrors, then Neil wouldn’t dare to complain about it.
But no matter what, he stood his ground on not using a cane. It’d help his legs, obviously, a vital part of him considering what, who he is –a runner–, but he couldn’t indulge in that pleasure. Ichirou was like an omnipresent creature, surrounding Neil with a million eyes that didn’t even seem to stop to blink, attentive all the time on the Moriyama's investment. If word came out that Neil was using a medical cane, that there was something wrong, then he would’ve been dead before sunrise could come.
Instead he learnt to look for alternatives; holding his weight on a wall beside him or hanging from a door’s frame, going upstairs with a rail by his side to grab if necessary, and on good days, placing a hand on Andrew's sturdy shoulder, knowing that he wouldn't have let him fall.
“You're stubborn.”
“I'm not.”
“Yet you aren't wearing your knee braces like you should've been if you knew it would be a bad day.”
Neil gripped the sheets under him, but the force he used caused one of his fingers to crack. The sound invaded the room but neither of them acknowledged it. They had both learned to ignore it by then, after months of long talks and discussions regarding Neil’s health. He was tired of his body being the center of attention, and on occasion, he desired to be just a floating soul with no physical vessel.
“I'm tired, Andrew.” He sighed, and he moved his leg up and down once the bandages were secured around his knee, trying the movement range under Andrew’s attentive eyes. “My own body betrays me on and on, it feels like a bad joke.”
“Your whole life could be written into a tragic comedy.”
Neil snorted against his own wishes. That is what made him fall in love with Andrew in the first place, his ability to stay immobile like a stone in front of his ups and downs, just like a brick wall protecting a hay house from a storm.
Andrew claimed he wasn’t kind, said there was a void where a heart should’ve been, filled instead with the same toxin that rushed through snakes’ fangs when they attacked. He alluded to an existence with no desire or demands, of having been born into a lifetime where he was not meant to love anything or else it'd be ripped out of his hands.
But Neil demanded and starved for Andrew; there was not a single cell in his body afraid of the monster everyone claimed him to be. He asked and was given a response every time, one full of now old promises about staying and protecting, tied itselves to both of them with a rope loose enough to be freed, but with no want whatsoever to do it. He knew that Andrew could walk away, he was free to do so, but trusted that what they had for each other was strong –stronger than Neil’s body at least.
He stood up to serve himself a glass of water, if only to get his head out of the matter, and Andrew followed him. Neil fumbled to close the tap, his inability to do so fast enough making the cup overflow and lose his grip. A sob escaped his lips as soon as he was forced to let it fall.
With trembling fingers, he ignored Andrew advancing towards him and just laid down his arms on the counter, hiding his face on the nook between his elbow and bicep, biting as hard as he could into his bottom lip just to contain the gasps that threatened to inundate the space with his anguish.
He allowed himself just those few seconds to bask into the sadness that flew through his veins, but he couldn’t stay like that, not when Andrew could see him break in front of him like a tall child. Instantly, he stood upright and cleaned the tears that managed to fall over his cheeks, and swallowed the lump in his throat with disguised difficulty.
“Neil,” Andrew demanded next to him, but he ignored him. Instead, he grabbed one of the kitchen towels.
Cleaning his mess draped a cape of fog over him, distancing him from his screaming brain and numbing him to the humiliation. The problem wasn’t having spilled some water per se, but knowing how little control he had over his own vessel, the temple that held his soul and every memory that had marked both his psych and skin.
Everytime a tremor interrupted his day, he mourned for the surgeon-precise hands his mother used to have even during high stress. When he woke up with numb legs from having subluxated them just by sleeping, or a sharp pain ran through his knees just from going down a step, he was desperate to scream from the rooftop of Fox Tower because at the end of all, he couldn’t do anything to fix it. Genetics just decided to play a prank on him since the moment he was born, and his life on the run was just another tool used upon him to deteriorate his existence into not a human, but a toy that could be done and undone in just a moment.
“Yes or no, Neil?” Andrew tried.
The simple question broke down every barrier that Neil had tried to put up to protect his useless, broken body from everything that tried to put him to the ground, even his own mind.
He nodded yes, and as soon as he did, Andrew’s arms came to embrace him, forcing Neil’s head into his neck and catching him when his legs threatened to give up under him.
If nothing else was fine, then at least Neil knew that Andrew would be there to catch the shattered glass of his existence, just to glue him again and again into a mosaic made out of his good and bad parts, like Neil would do for him too.
Months later after getting his diagnosis and accepting what came with it, Neil found himself arguing with Kevin as soon as they were given permission to leave the court. After being accused of being lazy multiple times during the morning, he couldn’t help but to explode like a timed bomb that had reached its countdown.
“I'm fucked up, Kevin!” he snapped, and with the dam broken, the whole weight of the running water started falling down from his lips. “I know it's stupid, and that being hypermobile shouldn't be an excuse but I can't help it, not when my ankles and hand burn and my back has been killing me for at least the last two weeks.”
Neil arched into himself on the bench where he was sitting and pressed into his eyes with his closed hands, trying to act as if nothing was real and the only thing that mattered were the multicolor spots flying around his closed eyelids. Despite everything, he was still forced to move one of his legs around, trying to find a position that pushed his hip back where it should be, having it long fallen out when he was trying to do a quick pass to Kevin during one of their plays.
“Hypermobile?” Matt piped up from his position at the court’s door frame.
Aaron was the first to perk up to answer, his medical education turning on a switch, “A connective tissue disorder,” he frowns, before deciding to add, “It’s a spectrum of joint flexibility that ranges from asymptomatic to even disabling symptoms.”
Out of the corner of his eye Neil saw Andrew leaving the room, but Neil didn’t have time to dwell too much on it. He sat upright and grimaced, the eyebags under his eyes exposing how tired he felt from his sleep being interrupted all week with pain and cracks.
“I was born with it, obviously.” He sighed. “It started giving me problems ever since I reached Millport, I think. Maybe my body got tired of me and decided to try to force me into being still, but I obviously ignored it and here we are.”
Renee frowned, rubbing the cross between her collarbones with two of her fingers as she thought. “Is there anything you can do to make it better?”
“Just ways of reducing its impact and shit,” Neil shrugged, pretending as if finally being able to explain it to the others didn’t warm his insides with gratitude for their connection. “I don’t like taking painkillers but sometimes I have to if I’m having a subluxation that doesn’t seem to want to fix itself.”
The team was tense, everyone finally getting a piece of what it meant for Neil to live like this forever, knowing that there was a big possibility that it would get worse as the years came and went, and there was nothing he could do about it. At that moment Andrew returned, and he walked until he was right in front of Neil. Without saying anything, he gave him a towel with a pack of ice inside of it, which Neil grabbed without hesitation, putting it instantly onto his hip. To the touch the skin over it was bumped and tender, where his bone rested where it shouldn’t be.
Icing it managed to calm a big part of the pain and uncomfort, and his lips formed a small smile that he couldn’t contain. Upon seeing it, Andrew’s frown reduced its sternness and he allowed himself to sit down next to Neil to keep an eye on him, not caring about the others being there to witness his very human demonstration of affection.
“Don’t be dumb,” Andrew told him.
Neil smirked, ignoring every preservation instinct that he’d developed. “Why?”
“It slipped out during the first scrimmage and you kept running.” He grunted, “If you injure yourself, you won’t be able to play again.”
“I know that, Andrew.”
“Then act like it, you’re not indestructible.”
Neil blinked slowly, frowning at the floor, but he didn’t deny that Andrew was right. If he didn’t start listening to the warnings, then one day he’d run himself to the ground and won’t be able to stand up again, and he wouldn't forgive himself. With permission, he let his head fall over Andrew’s shoulder. And right there, surrounded by his family, he closed his eyes for just a second and thought that yeah, not everything was fine, but with their help, hope was something that he could grab and hold onto just to keep himself upright.
He didn’t know if it was just a few seconds or some minutes later, but at some point, he gained courage to face Kevin again, prepared to encounter the same gaze that he used to see when Neil was their new recruit and not more than a stone in Kevin’s shoe, never up to his standard. But to his surprise, he didn’t find disappointment like he guessed he would.
In Kevin's eyes he only recognized something akin to compassion, and his nod let a fresh breath of air enter Neil’s lungs.
“I don’t want you to pity me,” he addressed everyone. “I just ask you for… empathy, I guess. Understanding, at the least, but I promise that I won’t let it get in the way of my playing,” that he said to Dan, even if she and the rest of the upperclassmen were soon to graduate and leave the team. She was still his captain, and probably would forever be in his heart and memories.
“It’s fine, Neil,” some of the others laughed at her choice of words, and he smirked too, “Don’t worry about it, really.”
Neil managed to get himself together and stand up, and with that, practice was finished. Wymack let them go, most likely needing to recharge his energies after the emotional scene, and Abby waved them goodbye.
Andrew entered the lockers right next to Neil, who took his time to get his gear off, and he did the same. By the time they were done, everyone else had already entered the showers, and because of pure instinct they both entered the same stall, the one at the far end corner of the room.
There were no double intentions in their touch. The air was only charged with love, the one word they never would’ve ever dreamt of being able to feel and be reciprocated with. Andrew helped Neil with scrubbing his body with soap, massaging his scars with tender but calloused fingers. Neil closed his eyes, letting the wall behind him hold part of his weight, slightly bending one of his knees to allow the other one to rest. He easily ignored the pain in his legs, widely distracted by the man standing between them.
To the ‘Yes or no?’ murmured into his neck he answered with a fierce nod, leaving no place for hesitation. As soon as he got his response Andrew started kissing the skin there, and with his hand he rubbed Neil’s hip. Neil smiled, fighting against every voice in his head that had ever forbidden him from doing so, in fear of the look in his face being too similar to someone who he didn’t want to think about. Instead, he reminded himself of the subtle change that went through Andrew’s eyes every time he made Neil laugh with his whole chest, the softening, the hidden desire to make it happen again.
Neil carefully brushed Andrew’s blond wet locks out of his face to be able to admire him fully, and as soon as he managed to make eye contact with him, he kissed Andrew with everything in him, smiling into the kiss too. Andrew bit his bottom lip, not hard but playfully, and Neil just barely refrained to laugh with joy right there.
They could only gather the will to disentangle their bodies once Nicky and Kevin started whining outside for them to already come out so they could get back home, and Neil did so knowing that he had his family by his side.