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Andrew shows up to practice after his session with Betsy and Aaron to discover that a certain exy superstar is nowhere to be found. He scans through every imbecile dressed in orange and doesn’t find his ward. He’s one of the tallest on the team, he can’t be this easy to miss.
“Where’s Kevin?” he asks as soon as he gets on the court.
Matt shrugs. “We thought he was with you.”
“Since when have I ever taken him with me?” Andrew huffs. “I already have enough trouble trying not to kill Aaron.”
Not even bothering to join in on drills, Andrew heads back the way he came, albeit with a simmering in his chest. Finding Wymack isn’t hard, it is kind of his job to be at these things.
“Where’s Kevin?” Andrew asks him.
Another shrug. “Haven’t heard from him. Wasn’t he with you?”
Why is Andrew on a team of idiots and Dr Phil rejects? Kevin has never once come to see Betsy with him, won’t even talk to her on his own, and they all think he would miss practice for it? It’s laughable really.
“I’m going to go and find him,” Andrew says, handing his racquet to Wymack who takes it and just shrugs again. Andrew doesn’t need his permission. He storms back to the locker room. He shoulder checks Aaron on his way as his twin is heading for the court.
“Bitch,” Aaron spits.
“Fuck you.”
It may be counter-intuitive to what the session with Dobson is trying to accomplish, but it does make him feel a bit better. He quickly changes and grabs his keys, slinging his bag over one shoulder and heading for the exit.
The closer he gets to Fox Tower, the more unsettled he feels.
An itching deep in his chest, he tries to rub it away but it is tucked away under his ribs and he cannot reach it. He maybe breaks the campus speed limit but he does that all the time, what he usually doesn’t do is throw the car in park and jog to the door.
The elevator feels too slow, like wading through knee-deep water. Andrew’s sense of unease keeps growing with every passing second. Something is wrong. The floors click by until they hit 3 and the doors open. Andrew is out and storming down to his dorm as quickly as he can.
His instincts had been right.
There’s blood on the wall next to the door, just a smear, a few drops on the floor, and all over the door handle. Kevin’s bag and textbooks are abandoned on the floor, more red on the open pages. Andrew tries the handle just to find it’s locked. He pulls out his keys and curses how much they slow him down. If he’s right, that’s Kevin’s blood, and no one has seen him for at least an hour—maybe more.
Opening the door and flicking on the light reveals a trail of blood on the beige carpet, leading straight to the bathroom, the amount of blood growing as Kevin went. Another shut door, that is locked from the inside.
He knocks. “Kevin?”
Pressing his ear to the wood, he can hear Kevin groan. Fuck it. He steps back and kicks the door just below the handle. Two hits and the wood splinters. He pushes the rest of the way in with his shoulder and at first is taken aback by the blood smeared on the sink and cabinet below it. Only to turn, almost slip in a small puddle of blood, and see Kevin lying in the bathtub.
He’s super pale, covered in streaks of red, and clutching at a growing dark stain on his shirt, over his abdomen. His eyes are shut but as Andrew grabs him by the chin they flicker open, glassy and unfocused.
“Kevi,” Andrew starts. “Are you with me?”
Kevin just groans.
There’s blood on his thumb as he pulls back. He goes straight for Kevin’s hands, pressed to a wound. Kevin doesn’t fight him as he moves them out of the way, pulling up the hem of his shirt to reveal a short wound, no more than an inch and a half long but bleeding heavily. It’s deep.
Andrew climbs into the bathtub, tangling himself in Kevin’s long legs. “What the fuck happened?”
“There was,” Kevin’s breath catches as Andrew presses down on the wound—hard. “There was a guy—I don’t know. Andrew—ah. Hurts.”
“I know, I know,” he says. “You’ll bleed out if I don’t.”
Retracting just one hand, Andrew goes fishing in his pocket for his phone. That might be still sitting uselessly in his locker because he was in such a hurry to get here.
“Where’s your phone?” he asks.
Kevin moans something incoherent before finally saying. “I tried to call you, but I dropped it.”
“In the bath?”
A nod.
Andrew starts sliding his hands up the sides of Kevin, until he finds the little silver flip phone, smeared in blood and pulls it out from where it was probably quite painfully digging into Kevin’s ribs.
He types out the number he needs and as soon as he presses the phone to his ear, he uses his free hand to resume holding pressure on Kevin’s wound. His hands are slick with crimson as it wells up between his fingers. There’s a growing puddle in the bottom of the tub, pooling up along the back of Kevin’s shirt, soaking into the knees of Andrew’s jeans.
Crying out in pain, Kevin tries to push Andrew’s hand away, gasping. He’s shivering now. “Drew–Drew please, it hurts.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Andrew snaps, teeth grit. He knows Kevin is in pain but he also knows that if he leaves it as it is, Kevin is going to bleed out before any help can get here.
Who knows how long he’s been in here bleeding? At least the hour he missed of practice, likely more. He’s already cold and clammy with shock, he needs an ambulance now.
By the time Andrew has given their address to the operator on the other end of the phone, Kevin’s eyes are closed again and he doesn’t stir when Andrew shakes him. His breaths are coming so shallow that it takes Andrew pressing his hand over Kevin’s chest to make sure that he’s breathing at all.
Kevin didn’t realise that splitting ways with Neil to dump some of his textbooks at the dorm instead of carting them along to practice just to take up space in his locker, would be him signing his own death warrant.
When he gets up to the third floor and the elevator dings as it opens. The corridor is empty save for a student leaning on the wall a far ways down, scrolling on their phone. A bit unusual for anyone not on the team to be here but he doesn’t think much of it. He doesn’t get enough time in the day to worry about more idiots than the ones he’s contracted to play with.
He gets to the door to his dorm and adjusts the way he’s holding his textbooks to reach into his pocket for his keys, only to have the textbooks knocked from his grip.
The keys fall to the floor as he is slammed into the wall, pinned by his neck and the fight goes out of him entirely. He’s tried to be stronger since leaving the nest but old habits die hard.
As the stranger from up the corridor chokes off his air, Kevin feels something firm get pushed into his abdomen. A sharpness, then an all-consuming burn.
Although he tries to be strong, a pained whine breaks free from his throat.
Gasping for air, Kevin slides down the wall as his attacker lets go of him and pulls the blade from his stomach. It doesn’t look super imposing but the entire length is covered in red. It went in deep.
“That’s for Riko,” the intruder spits before taking off for the stairwell. Gone like the ghost they’re serving.
They leave Kevin bleeding and struggling for breath, abandoned in the corridor, clutching his wound. Grasping desperately for his keys that are just within reach, it takes him a good thirty seconds before he picks himself up, he can’t feel his legs but they must be supporting him somehow.
His hands are shaking and he misses the keyhole a few times, scraping the finish off of the lock, but he makes it eventually.
Closing the door behind him, Kevin turns the deadbolt and leans heavily against the door. In case they come back to finish him off. He can’t catch his breath and he gets dizzier the longer he stands. He needs to get himself safe, one lock won’t do it and looking down reveals that he’s making a huge mess.
Bathroom it is.
He staggers through the living room, sharp pain in his stomach as he takes every second step, past the kitchen, where he throws open the door and closes it. It takes him a few moments to find the strength to engage the lock. It’s getting harder and harder to stay upright, his legs are threatening to give with every step.
Using the sink as a crutch, Kevin uses one hand to pull up his shirt and inspect the wound. Not the biggest but he knows it’s deeper than it looks. And it’s bled a lot in the few short minutes he’s had it. Red soaks through most of the stomach of his shirt, and seeps into the washed denim of his jeans.
“Fuck,” Kevin breathes. The world is tilting dangerously, he needs to lie down.
His only options are the floor or the bathtub. At least the tub doesn’t have grout lines to scrub blood out of.
He’s shaking as he climbs into the bath and he feels cold all over. He knows he needs to call for help but he’s so tired and he just wants to catch his breath first.
When the sleepiness creeps in, Kevin knows he’s fucked. He grabs for his pocket, feeling for his phone and thankfully finding the device.
Pulling it out, Kevin tries to dial Andrew’s number but his head is fuzzy and his flingers keep slipping with the blood that just gets smeared all over the phone. He loses his grip before he can hit call and the phone slips from his grip.
He runs his hand around feeling for it, but it’s long gone and Kevin cannot move from this position, he doesn’t have the strength.
All he can do is pray that someone will save him.
Kevin’s surgery takes four hours.
Perhaps the longest four hours of Andrew’s life. He sits in the little waiting area outside the operating room, and waits. He doesn’t text anyone, or read the outdated magazines on the coffee table—the most recent one being from February of 2004.
There’s blood caked to his hands, he’s already tried to wipe most of it away but it lines the grooves in his palms and is caked under the edges of his nails. Kevin’s blood.
Kevin lost a lot of blood in the time he spent in the bathtub. He didn’t wake up after he passed out, not even when the paramedics and Andrew were lifting him out of the tub. If he doesn’t pull through now, Andrew isn’t sure he could ever stomach cleaning it all up. Maybe he would get Neil to use his stolen millions to pay for cleaners.
When the surgeon comes out and talks to Andrew it’s all static in his head. All he needs to hear is that “the surgery was a success” and “he’s in recovery now if you’d like to see him.”
So Andrew follows a nurse the short way to where Kevin is recovering. He’s only just blinking bleary eyes open when Andrew comes to a stop at the foot of his bed.
“Andrew?” Kevin asks, voice scratchy and clouded with remaining anaesthetic.
Taking a few more steps, Andrew grabs hold of Kevin’s hand and says, “I’m here.”
He sits in the chair next to Kevin’s bed and holds his hand in both of his, feeling him warmer now than he had been in the bathtub.
“I missed you.”
“I’ve been here the whole time,” Andrew says. “I wouldn’t leave you.”
Kevin hums. “I know.”
They sit in silence and Andrew tries to ease his anxious energy by tapping his foot. It doesn’t serve any real results, aside from annoying Kevin despite the fact that he's barely awake.
“You’re shaking the bed,” he mumbles.
Andrew stops the tapping but there’s still so much adrenaline that he feels like he could run a marathon and keep going until he drops dead. “You almost died,” he says finally.
He doesn’t say how much it scared him, or how guilty he’s been feeling for not being there when Kevin needed him. He broke his promise to Kevin and he will never for as long as he lives, ever forgive himself.
Kevin looks at him with hazy green eyes and a lazy smile. “I knew you would come.”