99: “Calm down. I look a lot worse than I am.” (second prompt from the anon who asked for andreil! This is going to be exactly what you think it is :)))))
When Aaron’s ringtone bleats at Andrew from his jeans, he feels hyper-focus snap through him like the crack of latex gloves going on: skin-tight, hands about to get dirty.
He holds a finger up to Bee where she’s thumbing through her appointment notes, and flips his phone open, pressing it in snug to his ear.
“Andrew?” He hears, Aaron’s voice sounding stretched thin, his usual annoyance worn away in the middle.
“Aaron,” he replies, and Bee smiles in absent understanding, turning back to her work.
“Listen to everything I’m going to say before you hang up, okay?”
Andrew goes still. “Talk fast.”
“It’s Neil,” Aaron says, like his mouth is full of stinging bees. Andrew’s skull trades places with his ankles, or, something too small to be real has his head in a vice, and his legs are sloshy useless.
“I told you to listen,” Aaron hisses.
“Where?” Andrew repeats evenly. He’s already calculating the time, the steps to the court, fox tower, Abby’s place, Wymack’s apartment. Aaron shares Andrew’s resentment, though, and the other end of the line goes glacial.
“Aaron. Tell me where he is.”
Bee looks up, all her features tipping down like a kaleidoscope shifting — smile inverting, mouth shifting sideways.
“He’s not dead. And you can’t tell me you didn’t expect him to get beat up at some point, Andrew, he’s a hazard.”
He knows. He knows, Neil is the only caution sign that Andrew regrets ignoring, he’s a bad fall waiting to happen.
“I don’t care what you think he is or is not,” Andrew says, and Bee makes the mistake of looking sympathetic in his direction. Andrew slams one hand down on the desk, enjoying the controlled jump of the objects on it.
“Right. You just care about you,” Aaron says. Andrew gets up from his chair and leaves the room, ignoring Bee’s resigned sigh behind him. “And him, I guess. Josten,” he clarifies, like Andrew doesn’t know, like he could stop knowing.
Aaron pauses, then exhales. “Nicky should’ve been the one to call you, but he’s. He’s staunching the blood flow. I told him what to do.” It sounds important to him that Andrew knows this. Andrew barely registers it, he’s busy throwing every door open between him and his car with his phone still pressed to his ear.
“It’s… your boyfriend got hit by a car,” Aaron gets out, finally. Andrew takes a knife out, just for the feel of it in his palm. “It was a dark—I dunno. SUV? Tinted glass. We think it was a— no Kevin, I know— we think it was a Wesninski, not a Moriyama.”
“Don’t say that name.” He says it on a dry throat, and the words catch. There’s a sticky silence.
“Fox Tower parking lot. Should we call the cops?”
“No,” Andrew says, and he climbs into his car, turning the engine over, wanting it as angry as he is. “Don’t call anyone, don’t talk to anyone, not until I get there.”
The fact that Aaron called Andrew before 911 at all is a miracle.
“Keep him awake.” He hangs up, and the parking lot he’s in might as well be a peak on a mountain for how remote it feels. He speeds. A lot. He crumples the space between him and Neil into a ball and throws it in the fucking garbage.
When he rounds the familiar turn into the parking lot, a small crowd has amassed near where Matt’s car is parked diagonally and a dozen athletes are wringing their hands.
Andrew swerves close enough to them that they have to physically leap out of the way, and he’s out of the car without turning the engine off or closing the door behind him.
He shoves some kid to the ground, and then it’s Allison and Dan linked at the arms, and they move out of the way without being told.
Andrew’s eyes find Neil’s and he wants to go back to last year and physically cut him out of his life, he wants to raise a fist or a knife at Neil and have him take it seriously, he never wants Neil hurt again.
He’s propped up on the curb with his left arm in pieces and blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth. He smiles when he sees Andrew and his teeth are red.
Andrew drops to his knees and fists one hand in Neil’s sweaty bangs.
“What the fuck did you do?” He shakes him. “What did you do?”
Neil jostles hard, and the pain of it shows on his face. His mouth is a slash of white paint. “Calm down. I look a lot worse than I am.”
Andrew takes his broken arm by the wrist and lifts it. Neil cries out, and his good hand twitches towards Andrew’s shirt but stops. Still not taking without permission, even in the throes of mindless agony.
Andrew can see that there’s something seriously wrong, Neil’s shirt is ripped and his side is already mottled with bruising. Neil’s breaths take two tries before they go anywhere. Internal bleeding, probably. Any number of trashed organs. A shitty brave face and a future narrowing to a crack in a closing window.
“Look,“ Neil says, and he raises his broken arm until it’s at Andrew’s face level. “I’ve got some grip.” He makes a loose fist and a tear rolls down his cheek.
“Your bone is outside your arm,” Andrew says. He puts both hands on Neil’s neck, and notices for the first time Nicky kneeling a metre away, a jacket on over his naked torso. The missing shirt is wadded on Neil’s side soaked in blood. Matt’s hovering at Neil’s head, watching them both. Beyond him, Renee’s standing guard, her expression carefully controlled and her eyes trained on Andrew.
“I don’t know,” Neil slurs. His right hand is back at Andrew’s shirt, hovering, blind. “One of Lola’s maybe. One of dad’s. Loose ends, victimless crime. I don’t exist, anyway.”
It’s barely coherent. Andrew’s grip tightens and tightens. “You’re Neil Josten.”
“Number ten, stick size three, starting striker,” he recites. “Andrew—“ his eyes are open but they’re looking too far to the right.
He takes Neil’s hand and pulls it up so it meets Andrew’s chest. It instantly twines in the dark fabric and Neil’s mouth twitches then slackens. His grip on consciousness is starting to look like that sad fist he’d tried for: more painful when it’s there than when it’s not.
“Thank you,” Neil whispers.
“I mean it.” In an act of supreme defiance, Neil stays awake, and focuses more, blue eyes clear and forward-facing. “Last time I wanted to say more.” His hand splays across Andrew’s heart. “I wanted to kiss you again before I died.”
“I’m not doing such a great job of surviving.”
“When have you ever,” Andrew says, and then he hooks his fingers in the long ends of Neil’s hair. “Try harder.”
Sirens kick in somewhere nearby, and Andrew’s eyes instinctively find Aaron.
“Don’t look at me,” he says, and points at Matt.
“We got home and he was bleeding on the ground, what was I supposed to do,” Matt says, and he reaches to stabilize Neil’s neck when it cranes towards him.
Andrew bats his hand away easily. “Don’t touch him.”
Matt’s expression sours. “He’s not just yours, you know. We’re a team.”
Andrew doesn’t respond. He feels like he’s the one with a punctured lung.
Neil tugs his attention back where it should be with a gentle pull on his collar. The ambulance pulls up a minute later, but he’s only peripherally aware of it. “You don’t need to come. I know you don’t like hospitals.”
“I have to,” Andrew says.
He’s jostled sideways by a paramedic, and it wrenches him out of his head.
“Andrew,” Kevin warns, and if it were anyone else he would’ve ignored them.
He stands and watches Neil’s uncharacteristically weak-looking body fold onto a stretcher. It’s sickening, the juxtaposition of blood and woozy smiles. The chaos of Neil’s broken body is starting to look familiar, something violent and troubling like the foxes are violent and troubling.
“He’s coming with me,” Neil orders, his grip bruising Andrew’s wrist.
Other people are speaking but Neil’s water and Andrew’s face down in it. He leaves his car; he leaves the foxes and the bloody t-shirt and his panic. When he’s forced into the waiting room not by doctors or security but by Neil’s quiet voice, he thinks he might be learning to breathe underwater.
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