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Like boot-stomps, like rolling drum-beats, like the thunderclap of a ball hitting the Exy stadium wall, Kevin knows.
He knows when Andrew pushes at his back, sharp and unrelenting, and when Kevin risks a glance backwards: Andrew has an iron grip around Aaron’s elbow, there’s beer-bottle-green glass blinking on both of their shoulders—and Neil is nowhere to be seen.
He knows when he and Aaron are unceremoniously heaped onto the bus, Andrew vanishing back into the roil and returning with a stumbling Nicky. He’s not the only one noticing the black hole of the final member to their monstrous little quintet; Nicky’s face goes all quivery, and Andrew’s eyes dart over the heads of the other teammates, counting and counting again.
(He knows when Neil comes late out of the showers and just looks at them, all of them, with this quiet, terrible sort of amazement; like a man looking up and noticing the sky for the first time.
When Neil says to Andrew, thank you, you were amazing, and it sounds like goodbye and we won and I’m fine.)
Andrew jabs Nicky non too gently and tells them all to stay the fuck on the bus, ignoring Wymack's fire-spitting in favour of dropping back into the crowd. Some people are being hauled away in ambulances and others in police cars. Most are fleeing the damn scene. Abby already has the ointment and gauze out and Renee is gingerly holding her wrist.
Andrew returns with Neil's bag in one hand and his racquet in the other. Kevin knows Neil’s not coming back.
There's a deadly precision with which Andrew lays the duffel across an empty seat and pulls out its contents. For someone who burns like a collapsing rooftop, he moves slick and silent as oil across the ocean. He doesn't even glance at Abby when she comes over, trying to check his bruised temple and blood-splotched eye.
(Moves like oil, twice as volatile.)
Kevin takes the racquet and starts picking at the torn-loose netting. Dan and Wymack are talking softly, keeping track of injuries and what to do about their missing Fox.
A sharp jangling noise cracks the uneasy, mumbling quiet of the bus; everyone turns to see Andrew pulling a ring of keys out of Neil’s bag. It doesn’t seem to mean anything to anyone but Andrew, whose knuckles go white. He places them on his lap and continues searching.
“Has everyone checked their phones for calls from unknown numbers? If Neil's been separated from his cell, he might have tried a pay phone, or borrowed someone else’s,” suggests Renee.
There's a collective rustling, a sighing, a shaking of heads.
Wymack pulls out of that godforsaken parking lot the second things die down, despite Nicky’s protests that they should give it another half hour, maybe Neil will show. Dan is already calling nearby hospitals and asking around for a Neil Josten, five three, nineteen, red hair, blue eyes, Arizona accent, and so on. Abby finishes dabbing disinfectant on Matt’s gashes and says, “We should stop by the UHS, it’s nearby.”
“Paperwork,” Wymack says sagely, as if that explains everything.
Little fuss is kicked up over being admitted. Matt can barely flex his knuckles for the swelling, Renee’s wrist is purple, and Abby shines a light in both of Aaron’s eyes before insisting he get checked for a concussion.
Despite his obvious pain in doing so, Matt catches Dan’s shoulder before getting off the bus and says, “Call us the second you hear something from Neil, won’t you?” Dan grasps his wrist lightly, nods once before leaning up to press a hard kiss to his cheek. There’s a dapple of desperation in the gesture, and Kevin has to look away.
They release each other, and Matt climbs off the bus.
Nothing’s confirmed yet. Neil could still turn up. He could confess to having pulled a runner, old habits, you’d know, Day, and Andrew would go foxes hunt rabbits, Josten, and the two of them would do that thing where they communicate half-telepathically, one saying something and the other replying completely nonsensically, until they go back to lighting each others’ cigarettes or whatever it is they do when they’re not practicing Exy. Wymack would thump Neil on the shoulder and give him an earful for disappearing and then another for the cheek he’s inevitably going to get back; Dan passing the phone over so Matt could hear for himself his best friend is fine and all of them talking over each other to let Neil know what’s happened in his absence; then Neil would catch sight of his shattered racquet and swear up a storm in American English, French, German, British English, and miscellaneous other languages.
Kevin presses the jagged edges of the broken racquet together. He does not look at the half-crushed duffel, lying where Neil had been sitting just hours ago.
Time slides around them like a grease-soaked sponge. Dan and Wymack manage to condense Neil’s description to a single sentence, which they rattle off like the early morning traffic report to every hospital and police station in the tri-state area. The first time Wymack says, “Hello, is this the Binghamton General mortuary? I'm looking for a Neil Josten, red hair…” the bus goes apocalyptically silent until Wymack ends the call and says, “Nothing.”
“Nothing,” Nicky repeats hoarsely, and bursts into tears.
Allison hands him a tissue without looking up from her phone. She has what Kevin is pretty sure is her ‘networking’ face on. The coach contacts a couple more mortuaries within the radius that Neil could have plausibly been brought to from Binghamton. None of the calls are as shell-shocking as the first one, but there’s always a tense quiet until he finishes.
Three of their four absent teammates return with the prophesied-of paperwork; Aaron declared officially okayish in the head, Matt and Renee now in possession of three ice packs and a wrist brace between them. Despite the lack of an updating phone call, Matt still looks a little sick when informed that nothing has really changed in the two hours they were gone.
Andrew starts click-click-clicking through Neil’s phone.
“Neil’s a survivor, same as the rest of us,” Dan says. “He’s gonna be fine.” It doesn’t do much for the low, thick spread of dread hanging around the bus. Kevin figures everything about Neil—the skittishness and the tendency towards disguises and how little of himself he’s ever willing to give up—is evident enough for the others to realize that Neil has been running from something for a very long time.
Aaron replies, “So was Gordon.”
If not for Andrew’s presence a couple rows back, the hike of Allison’s shoulders says she would’ve just clocked him for that. As it is, he gets a few dirty looks from the other Foxes and a positively blood-boiling, marrow-freezing one from Allison herself. “You don’t get to bring him up like that. In fact, you’ve lost the right to talk about him at all. Got it, you little freak?”
“What area code is 4-1-0?”
Allison jumps at the sound of Andrew’s voice, but he seems uninterested in the feud as long as no hands are thrown. Still, the undertone to his words is rough as a brush of shark skin. Matt says, “Baltimore.”
Baltimore.
Kevin’s limbs turn to astroturf.
Baltimore.
Baltimore.
When Kevin Day was thirteen, he watched Kengo Moriyama’s right hand cut a screaming man into a hundred bloody pieces. This was not the first time he saw someone die, nor the last. But it was carved into his memory as the most gruesome; the first time he truly understood how many soft, gurgling parts made up a person, and the various fluids those parts released when chewed up by a meat cleaver.
Kevin had clutched his Exy racquet like a teddy bear and fought down the burning nausea rising from his stomach. Even Riko, for all his haughty slickness, went pale and retched into his glove. Only Nathaniel Wesninski—almost-Raven, property of the Moriyamas, son of the man now wiping a foamy mix of blood, stomach acid, and something else watery-clear on his pants—was ‘unaffected’.
(In eight years, give or take, Kevin will become familiar with that blank expression; as fear responses go, Neil has ‘fight’ down pat—as anyone on the receiving end of it will tell you—and enough ‘flight’ experience for seven lifetimes. But when neither are an option, Neil’s face does that. Goes smooth and emotionless as rubber.)
(He’ll also learn that Nathaniel’s apathy wasn’t just because he’d seen this of his father a hundred times before. More than once or twice or a dozen times, he’d watched his father’s cleaver-work up close.
So up close, in fact, that he’d been on the receiving end of it.)
The Butcher of Baltimore mopped his hand with a kerchief and offered it to Riko. “Nathan Wesninski, little master,” he said. There was half of what used to be a man’s lung still lodged under his fingernails. “The bigger master and I have much to discuss.”
His eyes passed right over his own son. Not, Kevin understood, out of guilt or the whisper of a conscience, but a vague disinterest. Nathaniel was a worn-out toy, a legacy Nathan Wesninski did not want.
Tetsuji guided the Butcher towards the conference table with his classic businessman shoulder touch. The three boys were directed towards the shower. Behind them, a cleaning crew began scraping the man’s tendons off the walls.
That night, Kevin stole a bottle of tequila from an office cabinet. He’d be beaten black and blue for it later, but it became the first in a zipline-string of nights spent cock-eyed and insensible with drink. He's never forgotten the smell of the man's bowels strewn across the floor, his own shaky hollow-boned hands, Nathaniel's face, ten years old and made of plastic. Nathan Wesninki, the Butcher.
Baltimore.
Somewhere around him, in the present, discussion breaks out. A cellphone separated from its owner. A count-down. A phone call occurring exactly when they’d all assumed Neil was still in the shower. The area code 4-1-0.
Baltimore is calling.
Neil answered.
“—ou alright?” Renee’s voice. An already-fractured piece of racquet had snapped in his hands. Everyone is looking at him.
Kevin makes the mistake of looking to Andrew.
Their eyes meet.
Kevin knows.
Andrew knows.
Kevin realizes what’s about to happen a moment before it does.
It’s apparent even at a cursory glance that Andrew is not a slight person. He is, as Jean would put it, built like une brique shithouse. Still, the hands around his throat choke a surprised wheeze out of him—they’re more powerful than they look.
That, and the look in Andrew’s eyes.
“Where is he.” Andrew isn’t loud, but there’s no illusion of calm either. It’s the snap of the last pillar before the roof caves in. It’s a penned wildness, a last scrap of control keeping Kevin alive just long enough to squeeze some answers out of him. It’s the drop of a match to an oil spill. “What haven’t you been telling me. Where is he.”
“Andr—oh my god!”
Neil crouches, spreads his fingers over the gaudy orange paint, lining his hand up with the fox-paw printed on the stadium floor. He says, “I don’t want to run. I don’t want to be a Raven. I don’t want to be Nathaniel. I want to be Neil Josten. I want to be a Fox.”
“Christ, man, just—”
“Goddammit, don’t make me—”
“Let them kill me. It’ll be too late by then.”
Strangely, Kevin feels seasick. Like the ground is gently tipping to and fro beneath him. He struggles for a third option, for a chance to hopscotch back in time and rip the file reading ‘Neil Josten, striker’ out of his past self’s hands, to accept the first refusal and let Neil sprint out that door like he should have from the very beginning.
But that’s not fair to Neil, who said himself he’s sick of running. Maybe there was never a choice. Maybe they would have found him in the end anyway. Maybe when you’re a Moriyama plaything, you’re dead from the day you are born.
So instead Kevin speaks; “You should be Court.”
Kevin scrabbles lamely at his throat. Exy balls bounce around the edges of his vision. If he didn’t know better, he’d think there were tremors running through Andrew’s hands. People-outlines crowd behind Andrew, tugging at him.
Andrew’s hands are clammy.
“Will you still teach me?” Neil’s face isn’t fear-response blank, but still carefully arranged. He's guarding himself. Neil Josten is in front of him. Neil Josten is living and breathing. Neil Josten won't be in six months. He wants to keep playing Exy. He wants Kevin to keep teaching him. He wants, he wants, he wants.
There’s only one real answer to that. “Every night.”
His throat is released all at once—Matt grunts, Andrew exhales raggedly as he’s pulled away, and Kevin’s first inhale is so tight and fast that it whistles. He claws for breath between coughs, and Allison, not unkindly, sits him down and shoves his head between his knees.
Even after his spluttering dies down, everyone continues to watch him. Andrew stops struggling against Matt, Renee, and Wymack, but there’s still something feral in the set of his shoulders. They don’t let him go and Kevin doesn’t meet his eyes.
With a glance towards Wymack, Dan clears her throat and says, “Kevin. If you do know something…”
There are a lot of things Kevin could say to that:
He’s not who he told us he was — I’m sure you’re all aware that five million USAmerican dollars is a lot of money — He’s dead — We’re both property of the Moriyamas — It's my fault they found him — What do you know about organized crime in Maryland? — He wasn’t ready. He was supposed to have two more months. I’m not ready.
At heart, though, at the very knotted capillaries of his lungs and rumpled, healing tissue of his bones, Kevin Day is a coward. So what comes out is this; “Neil’s birth name was Nathaniel Wesninski. We called him the Butcher’s son.”
*
What she understands from a very young age is that hands are gorgeous, fragile things.
Their father breaks his thumb when she’s fourteen and her brother is twelve. The doc sets it, tells him it’s gonna be good as new in six or twelve weeks. And it isn’t. It never really is; he keeps his job, keeps putting his share of food on the table, but he never picks up another hunk of charcoal. His smudgy, dreamy drawings (of rolling hills frothy with flowers, rivers wide and lazy—a countryside none of them have ever seen) become a thing of the past.
She and her brother track down the woman who broke his thumb. She was paid to do it, so neither sibling really blames her. They ask to become her protégés.
The sinewy delicacy of a person’s hands and how a life can be ruined with a single blow are just one of three things Lola learned from that incident. The other two are; hurting people for money is far more interesting (and well-paid) than legal employment, and blunt force is such a brutish, distasteful way to hurt someone.
It’s something she ruminates on while knifing slow, savouring, precise lines up and down Nathaniel Wesninski’s (gorgeous, fragile) palms.
He makes quiet, guttural noises, the occasional whine or bubbling sob. Lola never really minds when the bodies make noises—though contrary to popular belief, she doesn’t get off to cries of pain. It’s only the really cracking, high-pitched screams that piss her off, when she’s hungover or otherwise in a bad mood. But Nathaniel doesn’t sound like that. Nathaniel holds it back, as he’s always done—even when he was really tiny and she carved him shoulderblades to collarbones, little cherub face scrunching up and making jumpy, wet gasps, but never anything louder than a yowl muffled behind his hand.
Despite the violent upbringing and the rough nature of that silly little sport he’s always playing, the Butcher’s son, grown up as he is, has lovely hands. Prominent knuckles, winding veins. He’s fetching in everything, really; he got that from his father. The deeply pressed indent above his lip, the burnt curls, cold eyes, raw-boned cheeks—as if someone had carved him from quartz and hated him every step of the way.
Nathaniel didn’t get everything from his father, sadly. Mary Hatford was by no means a delicate woman, short and sturdy as she was, but what little Nathaniel did get from her—eyelashes, sloping jaw, low-arch brows—transforms him from his father’s striking and his mother’s handsome to a distinct pretty, in a distant sort of way.
Meh, fun as his rancour is, pretty boys were never really her type.
Speaking of small, attractive things, the dashboard lighter. Perfect in every way; agonizing, yet both pinpoint-precise as Lola likes her methods of torment, and unassuming as the boss prefers to keep things. Bodies always have the most remarkable facial expressions when Romero pops it out and the realization sets in.
The car fills with the sludgy smell of charring meat. It makes her hungry.
*
Thing is, Allison’s pretty sure she’s the only one who realizes he’s doing it. Even Kevin himself, despite obviously knowing all of this beforehand, seems too caught up in his own words to notice exactly what he’s saying. But it makes her flinch every other sentence, the low certainty with which he puts it.
If he does it one more time—
“He was going to wait until May, until we won the championships and Riko came for him. He would’ve gone to the FBI, told them—everything, and let… the Moriyamas…” Kevin trails off when he sees Allison, standing, looming over him. Her fists clench, but despite Andrew still being held back by Matt and Renee (to be fair, she doesn’t fully trust Matt’s grip strength, given the slackened face) she doesn’t give into the temptation to grab and shake him.
“Stop it,” she snaps. “Stop talking about Neil in the past tense. You might have given up all hope as soon as you stepped onto this bus, but the rest of us aren’t so lucky.”
The entire team starts, as everyone else, including Kevin, becomes aware of what he’d been doing. Kevin jacks his shoulders, sheepish but not any more regretful than he’d been before. “I am hopeful,” he says. “I’m hopeful that he’s already dead, because if he’s not, they’re—”
Dan goes, “Kevin Day, if you finish that sentence—”
“What was he going to let them do.”
Everyone whips around to look at Andrew. It’s the first time he’s spoken since Matt, Renee, and Wymack pulled him, still lurching, away from Kevin’s throat. Kevin’s Adam’s apple bobs now, as if in memory, and Matt asks, “What?”
Andrew licks his lips. “The Moriyamas. What was Josten going to let them do to him.”
“Kill him.” Kevin replies. Andrew nods. At first glance, he’s reverted back to standard ‘flat and vaguely bored with life and living’ state, but something else, scalding and seething, agitates underneath his skin.
Allison has to sit back down. Nicky presses his knuckles to his mouth. Renee closes her eyes and mouths a Hail Mary.
“Let them kill him,” repeats Dan. “And how long has he planned this for?”
“Fall banquet. Since then.” Kevin shakes his head. “Five months.”
Wymack presses the heel of his hand against his eye. “Jesus Christ.”
For a minute or so, no one really says anything else.
*
“I won’t tell them,” Nathaniel says.
He was never particularly proud of it, but while Mary and Nathaniel stayed with him half a dozen or so years ago, Stuart would sometimes find his nephew inherited so much from his father, it made him hard to look at. Certainly not fair to ten-year-old Nathaniel, but aside from hair dye and contacts, there wasn’t much anyone could do about it.
Evidently, Lola Malcolm had done something about that face of his.
It looks like it hurts Nathaniel to speak. To blink. Breathe. The slits running in uneven, overlapping stripes along his face and arms must be deeper than they look, given the impressive blood-loss. (He’s not at risk of bleeding out, especially with the FBI wanting to talk to him up top, which is what’s important. Lola wouldn’t have dared kill Junior before Nathan got out his special little cleaver—and Stuart’s men pulled up just before he got a chance to use it.) Whatever Malcolm had scorched him with ate away at half his cheek, the burns mottled green-brown in the centres and gooey around the edges. Clear yellowish fluid trickles down to his jaw, and what’s left of the skin of that cheekbone hangs in flaccid grey folds.
“How’s this kid still conscious?” Jones mumbles as they help him up the basement stairs. Nathaniel tips him a sideways glance and doesn’t respond. Stuart suspects it has something to do with being the son of Nathan Wesninski.
Back in open air, Stuart’s people vanish into the dark, as instructed. He helps lower Nathaniel to his knees—mildly concerned the kid’ll just faceplant and not get back up.
“We will come back for you when we can.” Stuart tells him. His nephew just looks at him, blankly, mouth like a gash in wet clay. There are a lot of things Stuart could finish this hideous damn reunion with; a pat on the shoulder, a reassurance, asking about Mary, telling him about Mary, (letting slip a realization: you don’t look like Mary, and you don’t look like Nathan. You’re something else entirely, and I think it scared them) but none of those things he particularly wants to say, and certainly Nathaniel doesn’t want to hear them. So it ends, “I promise.”
Nathaniel doesn’t believe him. Stuart wouldn’t, either.
*
Wymack hits “end call” and lets himself pitch his head forward and press the back of his hand between his eyebrows for exactly two seconds—one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi. He drops his hand and turns to his Foxes, who don’t even pretend to not have been eavesdropping. Nicky’s eyes are wide and shiny, and Dan’s clenching her seat’s head-rest so hard she’s at risk of tearing it straight off.
“Neil’s alive,” says Wymack. “He’s in the custody of the FBI.”
He falls silent, allows the Foxes their moment of celebration. Matt punches the air and then winces, Dan jumps out of her seat—while Kevin damn near slithers to the floor, Allison raps her knuckles against her racquet and smirks jitteringly like she wasn’t worried for a moment, Nickly blinks, hard, and two tears make their way down his face as he wraps an arm around Aaron’s shoulders.
Andrew and Renee show no signs of triumph. Kevin is still wan and tense. Wymack figures they know best that there are worse things that can happen to a person than death. Jingle-jangle, go those damn keys that Andrew hasn’t stopped tossing between his hands since Matt and Renee released him. “But.”
Wymack wishes Neil at least had the decency to get kidnapped while alcohol was being kept on the bus. “What, Minyard.”
“I’m sensing a ‘but’ there, Coach,” Andrew drops the keys. Jingle-jingle-jing. He’s given up something, somewhere inside this godforsaken bus. That cushion of lazy apathy, keeping him detached from the rest of them. Now he’s Andrew Minyard, hard edges and bared teeth. “I don’t like hidden clauses. It's cheating.”
“That,” Wymack chucks his phone onto an empty seat. The other Foxes have quieted down, jarred at the change in atmosphere. “Was just a courtesy call. The FBI have no intention of giving Neil back to us.”
The previous celebration is drowned out in tsunamis by the uproar that follows.
Wymack still hasn’t even told them about Neil being in the ICU.
*
Browning’s first mistake is thinking that the shadow of the Butcher of Baltimore, knelt swaying in front of his own mansion, is smaller than the photographs and personnel files made him seem.
Lopez and Moore rip the figure to his feet, and Browning glares his flashlight directly into Wesninski’s face and begins reciting his Miranda rights. His second mistake is trailing off and taking too long to pick his own damn sentence back up and tell Moore, Lopez, and Towns to get the fuck down that tunnel—because he had a slight hunch that the mangled teenager before them wasn’t Nathan Wesninski, fifty-year-old serial killer.
Goddamnit, if Hatford double-crossed them—
“You’re too late,” the teenager says. He smiles sickly, teeth stained pink and gums milky in the light Browning has yet to point away from his face. “My father is dead.”
“Your father?” Browning recalls an older picture, at the back of the file. A family photo, Wesninski stood looming behind his comparatively tiny wife and son—a solemn-eyed, smooth-faced child with seemingly no resemblance to this manic young adult, dripping blood and pus all over the front of his orange hoodie.
Wesninski’s wife and child disappeared without a breath of warning some eight or nine years ago. It was generally agreed he’d killed them for liability’s sake and covered it up well, but if his son was alive, he’d be about the same age as…
The teenager appears uninterested in the mental calculations happening in front of him, and has taken to gazing vacantly down the dark maw of Weninski’s hidey-hole. He’s getting greyer and greyer around the edges, smile stretching thinner and thinner, so Browning snaps his fingers and tries to get what he can out of him. “Your father?”
“My name is Nathaniel Wesninski,” the kid says, “and my father is dead.”
The smile stretches until it snaps. Nathaniel lets out a yell and Browning reaches for his gun, alarm bells ringing (third mistake), but Nathaniel just crumples back to his knees and continues to make that rhythmic, keening noise that Browning takes a moment to identify as laughter. Frantic, whooping laughter.
Inevitably, he upchucks his guts right onto the well-kept pavement of this Baltimore gated community. The paramedics have gone from breathing down Browning’s neck to actively pushing past him at this point, so he lets them have the kid as long as he and Towns are brought into the ambulance as well.
“Wesninski’s dead.” Towns confirms. He pauses, and very deliberately continues; “Shootout between him and his own men. This one’s the only survivor.” He jerks his head to Nathaniel Wesninski, oxygen mask in place and completely out of it.
So, Hatford kept his end of the bargain. Good. “He claims he's Wesninski's son.”
“Gonna be a problem?”
“Says not.”
Towns studies the kid's face. “I can see the resemblance—wait, hang on.” He hoists up his case and begins rummaging through it.
“Hard to tell.” The paramedics cut open Nathaniel's shirt, exposing more abuse to his arms and chest. “Someone tried very hard to disfigure this guy.”
“I'd say they succeeded, but—hey, look at this.” Towns has his phone in his hand, but instead of a Wesninski family portrait, he’s pulled up some kind of sports article. “My niece’s a raging fan of this, she plays for her high school team, wants to get scouted by Penn State. He kinda looks like Neil Josten, huh?”
Browning scoffs and almost turns away when Towns scrolls down to the picture of said Exy player. First glance tells him they look nothing alike. (Fourth mistake.)
It's a photo of Josten on the court, just after a game, helmet off. He's… not vibrant, not smiling, but his ruddy hair sticks to his temples and his eyes are blazing under the stadium lights. Intense. Powerful.
It seems cruel to compare him to the sallow, mutilated creature twisted on the gurney in front of them. “Put the fucking phone away, we'll see if he has any other ID on him.”
“I'm serious,” Towns insists, zooming in on the picture. “Hair and eyes are the same colour. Burn’s where the tattoo was. Look at the mouth and nose.”
He does not want to look at the mouth and nose. The mouth and nose are crusted with blood and bruised within an inch of breaking. Towns shoves the phone in his face again, and Browning takes a moment to study the profiles of Josten and Wesninski Junior, side-by-side.
They’re not just eerily similar. They’re the same.
“Neil Josten, starting striker for the Palmetto State University Foxes,” Browning repeats, watching Nathaniel unconsciously flail, resisting everything the paramedics do to him. He sighs. “The plot thickens. I’m going to have to make some calls.”
*
The vote is unanimous that they’re going to Baltimore. Aaron is way, way out of his depth here. He leans his head on the window and tries for a nap, fantasizing about a universe in which Andrew had gotten them a scholarship in hockey, or whatever the fuck other sports not involving yakuza bosses or serial killers.
*
No one had expected Nathaniel to be jumping at the chance to spill his every deepest and most grotesque secret, but Christ.
“I want to see my teammates,” he intones for the eight hundredth time.
Browning has been awake since yesterday morning, has a killer headache, and all the nurses keep shooting him and Towns dirty looks for interrogating a battered teenager. Nevermind that the kid could be the lynchpin in taking down the biggest criminal empire darkening the east coast. And he’s refusing to talk.
So Browning makes another few calls.
According to the agents at the motel room, the teammates aren’t being any more helpful. They shut down the second they were told they weren’t going to see Nathaniel Wesninski. The “Andrew” Nathaniel insists won’t leave without him is Andrew Minyard, goalkeeper with a history of violent offences. A history he obviously hasn’t managed to peel away; Minyard had to be cuffed to the coach for punching the wall next to one of the agents’ heads, after Kurt refused to give up any information about the case—later claiming he just wanted to “scare the pig a little”.
If this is the crowd Butcher Junior runs with, they may be in more dire straits than previously thought.
Maybe the real mistake was taking this damn case.
*
“Twenty minutes?” They’ve all been worried sick about Neil for hours and he’s been in the ICU and just went through the possible worst night of his life, and the FBI is willing to give them twenty minutes? Twenty minutes before they whisk Neil back off to God-knows-where, alone. Matt grabs her shoulder as she goes to lurch off the bed. “You’ve got to be joking. Why do—oh my god.”
Neil walks in.
“Are you okay?” Is out of her mouth, reflexively, and she wants to jam the words back in even as Allison raises her eyebrows in a way that says does he look okay to you?
Neil’s eyes skip over everyone in the motel room, cataloging their injuries, counting and counting again. Dan does the same to him. What little of his face not bandaged is blotchy with bruises and swelling. The rest of him is swallowed in sweatpants and a hoodie, the pocket of which he hides his hands. He’s doing his “I’m hurt but I don’t want you to freak out over me” posture, head ducked and neck too stiff. Dan hates that she’s seen it enough to recognize it.
His eyebrows draw together, and his voice is creaking as he asks, “Where’s And—”
The door smashes open so hard it slams against the wall and splinters of wood fly from around the handle. Maybe she should have seen this coming.
(Neil lifts his chin in anticipation before Andrew grabs it. There’s this orbit, this wordless understanding between them. It’s something that Dan’s been vaguely aware of for months, but never front and centre as this. She wonders why she feels the need to look away.)
“The same goes for you, Nathaniel,” says one of the agents.
Dan bites down on her knuckle, teeth scraping against the bone. Sheer will and common sense, not a sweet temper, is usually what holds her back from fights on the field, from arguing with reporters when they make a particularly off-colour remark. Still, the crushing wave of anger surprises her. Don’t call him that.
His name is Neil.
*
“A dashboard lighter,” Neil says.
Nicky’s pretty sure that horrible, burbling feeling that’s been growing on top of his diaphragm since Andrew returned—alone, with Neil’s duffel—just warbled straight out of his mouth in some great noise-vomit. Aaron grabs his arm. Nicky didn’t even hear him get off the bed, but Neil obviously had, and he turns his head—
His face—
Oh, God—
Someone thunks hard into a wall. Matt careens to his feet. Abby steps forward, distressed, but Andrew yanks Neil back towards him.
When Nicky and Erik were staying in a really shitty apartment in a really shitty area, he’d hear cats yowling from the alley beside the building any hour of the day or night. Some of the kids below them would throw pebbles at the strays for fun, and would even hit some of the slow ones, so no one ever flinched at a sudden feline screeching.
One Friday night, though, a cat started bawling midway through the evening and didn’t stop. The following morning, Erik shoved his face into his coffee mug and Nicky said, “I will not deal with this any longer,” and stomped out of the building.
The shrieking cat half-lay half-crouched behind a dumpster, shivering and knotted with dirt. One of its front paws curled unnaturally towards its chest—as if it had been kicked, or clipped by a car. It bared its teeth at Nicky, and when he reached out to help it…
It bit him.
Right on the meaty segment of his hand, where his thumb met his palm. Quick as a struck match, it pulled back and continued hissing at him until, yelping belatedly, Nicky rushed back to the apartment. Erik croaked a laugh at him and disinfected and bandaged his terrible battle wound. He asked about Nicky’s last tetanus shot and then his ‘newest little buddy’. Nicky cheerfully gave his boyfriend the finger, then a thank-you kiss, before leaving for work.
When he came back, the alleyway still screamed.
“Get away from us.”
The wound didn’t scar, but Nicky traces the memory of teeth anyway. Starting at the base of his palm, curving along his lifeline.
In front of him, Andrew puffs himself up and clenches his fist in Neil’s hoodie. His canines are white in his face where he flashes them at Abby. A dashboard lighter, Neil had said.
(When Abby reaches out, Andrew doesn’t see a helping hand. Why would he? He sees threat, threat, threat, he sees Neil the way he is—wrapped up in bandages and hurting— so he bites at the danger until it goes away.)
“If you make me repeat myself you will not live to regret it.”
Nicky doesn’t… agree with the methods, but he understands. Neil’s one of theirs, after all.
*
The Foxes are all I have, Matt, Neil had said to him once.
He hadn’t even really heard it at the time, ears still ringing in rage at the scabs on Neil’s wrists, the bruises on his mouth, the bags under his eyes. That while they’d all been having fun, drinking cheap booze and swinging each other round to Mariah Carey, the Ravens had been doing… this to Neil.
When Wymack asks, “What do you want?”
And Neil replies, “I want—I know I shouldn’t stay, but I can’t—I don’t want to lose this. I don’t want to lose any of you. I don’t want to be Nathaniel anymore. I want to be Neil for as long as I can.”
Matt thinks, oh, right, he doesn’t want to leave because he loves us.
(Neil has that same expression on his face, I’m not sorry, and I’d do it again if I had to. Hidden under layers of standoffishness and cryptic jokes, of clay and rubber and quartz, unmistakable once you see it for the first time: a desperate kind of love.)
Andrew says, “I don’t trust them to give you back.”
Dan says, “Go. But come back to us as soon as they're done with you, okay? We'll figure this out as a team.”
Nicky adds, “As a family.”
And Matt thinks, of course we won’t let them take him, because we love him right back.