Archive of Our Own ^beta

Neil is quiet in the car.

They roll out of the parking lot and towards the interstate, and he keeps his eyes trained on the landscape out the window almost the entire way. Like he might still spot the court in the distance, materializing out of the horizon and calling him home.

Andrew resists the urge to roll his eyes.

His own retirement party, as Coach called it, happened nearly four years ago to the day. A grand thank you gesture for the six years he played in Denver before his knee took him out at last. Longer than most. Not nearly as long as Neil, who celebrated his tenth anniversary last season. And now, in the same lounge, with the same party streamers hanging from the ceiling and a nearly identical, sappy montage of his top ten best moments on the team, his retirement.

It was time. Neil knows that, too. He's thirty-six. In the words of Zendaya from a movie they watched earlier this year, he has a better shot with a handgun in his mouth. (Neil didn't like that one, though Andrew has yet to figure out if it was the tennis, which Neil appears to consider some kind of affront to mankind, or the fact that he saw his own reflection in the main characters).

Still, he stares out of the window like a forlorn puppy, and Andrew has to stop himself from reaching out and snapping him out of it.

He still might. If this goes on for too long.

It was easy for him, stepping back from Exy. Strange, at first, only because he lacked a routine without it. No more scheduled gym time, no more practice, no more games taking up most of his weeknights. But easy once he got used to it, once he found ways to make his own routine.

He schedules his own gym time now. He works around the house. He tries to match his daily goings-on to Neil's, so it still feels like they follow the same schedule.

He doesn't need to work, really. Even with eighty percent of Neil's paychecks going straight to the mafia, they have more money than they could hope to spend in this lifetime. Andrew still takes on the occasional odd job, a press appearance here, an ad campaign there, to pass the time. But mostly, he doesn't want to be bothered with it. He's left Exy behind. All that stayed was the life it gave him, and he finds that to be more than enough.

It won't be that easy for Neil. Though the ending of his professional contract means freedom from the Moriyamas — for good this time, as negotiated with Ichirou — Andrew knows he will miss it.

Already, when they reach the house and Neil rounds the car to get his bag from the trunk, Andrew watches him run his fingers over the polyester of his duffel strap with a kind of melancholy. Andrew does want to snap his fingers at him then, but settles for jingling the car keys, loudly, and marching into the house.

They will figure it out. Neil did not survive the things he did to be thrown a curve-ball by something as silly as retiring.

Over the next few weeks, Andrew watches Neil wander the house like a ghost.

He still wakes up every morning at six sharp, his movement and rustling stirring Andrew awake, too, and rolls out of bed to dress for his run. This appears to comfort him, give him something to focus his mind on. He will leave with a pep in his step and his water bottle at his belt.

But when he returns, trying to sneak past Andrew but inevitably waking him again, Andrew sees him reach for his practice gear in the closet as if to start packing his bag, only to freeze, take a moment to stare, and retreat to the shower.

It's a sad showing, really. All throughout the day, Andrew watches for the little signs of the hole Exy left in Neil's life. His half-packed gym bag on the bed. His practice clothes repeatedly surfacing to the front of the closet, no matter how many times Andrew stuffs them into a shelf in the way back. His leg bouncing beneath the dinner table with unspent energy. The longing glances he sends the game recaps on TV. His morning runs now being joined by an occasional evening run.

It's ridiculous. He's not even this bad during the off-season, which it would be now, anyway.

Andrew tries distracting him. Tries new and creative ways to burn off Neil's energy, usually beginning with planting himself in his lap and ending somewhere between their luxurious sheets. And it works, for the most part. Being with Neil is, in many ways, like owning a retriever.

But no amount of spent energy seems to fill the void Exy left behind.

When Andrew catches him standing by the living room window one night, King cradled in his arms like massive, fluffy infant, staring out into the street like a Victorian widow, he decides enough is enough.

Neil needs a new hobby.

—

He finds the class online and signs them both up before informing Neil, who blinks at him from behind the kitchen counter like Andrew's grown a second head.

"Woodworking?" he asks, a little incredulously.

Andrew shrugs. Leans his hip against the counter. Casual. "Seemed like something worth trying."

Neil stares at him. A few long seconds stretch to finality between them before he at last raises his brows and says, "… Okay."

So they go. On Thursday night, Andrew parks the car in the dinky parking lot of the local community center and they head inside the little woodworking shop in the back. The instructor is a bubbly, dark-haired woman their age who welcomes them and directs them to a free workbench in the middle of the room. The other people scattered across the room vary greatly in age — Andrew spots everything from a gaggle of three teenagers to a man who looks to be at least seventy.

The class starts out simple, with basic instructions on how to use various tools and some mild theory on how to handle wood. By the time they move on to starting their first small project for the day, Neil has given himself a splinter and is rather grouchily sanding away at his cutting board.

Andrew, whose own little plant stand is coming along rather well, watches him out of the corner of his eye.

He doesn't look happy, but at least he's occupied.

"I'm hating this," Neil says, sounding surly and only confirming Andrew's thoughts. He glances over at where Andrew is fitting the pieces of his project together. "How are you so good at that?"

Andrew hides his pleased smirk by pursing his mouth in concentration. He has always been good at working with his hands, no matter the task.

"Personal skill," he says, and greatly enjoys the eye roll he gets in return.

The instructor checks on them and compliments Andrew's stand, though her face pinches a bit when she turns to Neil, who has done a better job at covering himself in wood shavings than at making a decent-looking cutting board.

She tries to show him how to use the little carver, which he pretends to be invested in, but when she walks away Neil looks both flushed and disgruntled. He attacks his board with more fervor than before.

By the time the class ends, Neil has carved some crude letters into the back of his board, and spends the duration of the instructor's closing remarks picking little spirals of wood out of his hair.

They walk away with Andrew's plant stand tucked under his arm and Neil's wonky little cutting board, bumpier and smaller than he intended for it to be. He places it in his lap in the car and stares at it for a good few minutes before he looks up at Andrew and says, "I don't know about this."

Andrew looks down at the shitty little board and snorts. "Yeah." He pulls out of the parking lot. "Me neither."

—

(Andrew's plant stand goes on the window sill with a little terracotta pot and a new, cat-friendly plant they picked up on the way home. Neil's cutting board, definitely not food-safe with the amount of splinters sticking out of its uneven surface, goes as decoration onto the back of the counter. The failed design in the front turned towards the wall, it leaves Neil's back carvings to show to the room:

A + N M.-J.)

There are other things. Less involved things.

Andrew picks up a sudoku book at the corner store and chucks it at Neil on the couch, not expecting much. But when he emerges from the kitchen with dinner half an hour later, Neil has nestled himself into the corner of the couch with the book in his lap, and has completed the first five pages.

After that, the book keeps appearing in random places across the house — the dining table, Neil's nightstand, the porch, the little table beside the bathtub — the cracks in its spine showing Neil's slow but steady progress. When he finishes it, Andrew buys him a new one.

It gets him thinking, too. When he goes out to buy a third book, he picks up a Rubik's cube from the toy section. Neil eyes it suspiciously when Andrew holds it out to him.

"What am I supposed to do with that?"

Andrew raises a brow. He has long figured out that most of the time Neil appears not to recognize something as simple as a Rubik's cube, he is, in fact, fucking with you. Or trying to get out of something. So he messes the thing up, twists and turns it until it's all out of order, and presses it into Neil's palm.

"Figure it out, Sherlock," he says.

Two hours later, he finds Neil hunched over his laptop in the dining room, a YouTube video pulled up and the Rubik's cube in his hand, looking more messed up than Andrew left it.

It takes him another few hours, but at last, he scurries up the stairs to the bedroom, prize in hand, and presents the solved cube to Andrew.

Andrew looks at him over the rim of his glasses and gives an approving hum. The next day, he finds the Rubik's cube resting next to Neil's latest sudoku book on the couch table.

It becomes a thing for Neil. He carries it around with him wherever they go, spontaneously whipping out of his pocket at any moment to fidget with it. Twisting it up and solving it faster than Andrew thought was possible.

And with this, it seems Andrew has unlocked some long-untapped potential in Neil. His love for problem solving had not really reared its head much since he finished his degree. But now, with the sudoku and the Rubik's cube under his belt, Neil seems to naturally gravitate back towards it.

Instead of staring wistfully at game recaps on TV, Neil spends his Friday night with his laptop propped on his thighs. When Andrew leans over, fitting himself into the space between him and the backrest, he hardly believes his eyes.

"Chess?"

Neil shrugs. He's got the tip of a pen in his mouth and his finger hovering almost anxiously over the laptop's touch pad, eyes flicking as he, Andrew assumes, plans his next move.

"Seemed like fun," he says, distractedly. "And it is."

Andrew squints at the screen. It's been getting harder to make things out without his glasses, which annoys him to no end. "Who are you playing against?"

"Kevin."

"Kevin?"

Neil shrugs again. "Queen and all. He's losing, though. Ha!" He presses something on his digital chessboard, and the screen flashes with confetti and a pop-up box reading: You won!!!

Neil turns to Andrew, grin satisfied. In the on-screen chat box, he types Looooser, before exiting out of the site and dipping forward to peck Andrew on the mouth.

"Bed?" he asks, already snapping the laptop shut and swinging off the couch.

Andrew looks up at him, his bright, glorious face, and feels something move to settle next to his heart.

"Yeah," he says, winding his fingers around Neil's outstretched palm and allows him to pull him up.

They shuffle on to the bedroom, where Andrew falls into their sheets and listens to the quiet, gentle sounds of Neil getting ready for bed. The unmelodious hum he keeps up as he putters through the drawers.

Happy almost, Andrew thinks. Or at least content.

Much better than he was just weeks ago.

And that is that, then.

Neil still misses Exy. Still sometimes gets that look on his face when they watch a game at night, still spends hours on the phone with Kevin dissecting a play, still runs his fingers over his gear and stares at the trophy shelf in the hallway. Their Olympic medals, and all the little personal awards they won over the years.

It's a part of his life in the way hardly anything else ever will be, besides perhaps Andrew himself. Andrew knows that.

But there are other things to take up the space it left behind, now. Things Neil enjoys doing that have nothing to do with Exy, that are not a remnant of his past or bound by a contract with the yakuza. Little things like online chess, like puzzle games, like attempting, and more often than not failing, to bake sweet treats for Andrew to come home to.

All of this is also part of living the life he fought so hard to have.

And deep down, when he is done pretending to be annoyed at Neil's competitive streak while beating strangers at digital chess, or the mess he's made of the kitchen, Andrew is glad he is here to see it.