Work Text:
Who You Were Before
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Tap. Tap.
At first, Aaron doesn't know what wakes him.
One moment he's sleeping, dreaming of absurd scenarios involving coloured pencils and the Xs and Os of a thrilling defensive play and the silk soft touch of Katelyn's shiny brown hair through his fingers.
Tap. Tap.
He starts, his body jerking under the cozy warmth of his dormitory duvet. Duvet isn't a word Aaron would've used a year ago but it's the first thing that comes to mind now with his thoughts hazy and torpid.
Tap. Tap.
There's a noise, familiar but distant, prickling the hairs on the back of his neck, sneaking into his awareness like a nagging thought. Aaron cracks open one eye to squint bleary-eyed at the warning red glare of the alarm clock lights on his nightstand.
Three twenty-five in the morning.
Tap. Tap.
And there's someone at the door.
Aaron sits up so fast at the realization, his heart pounding so fast he feels it at the base of his throat, feels his vision swim at the vertigo. He looks through the darkness but the noise is still too soft to wake up Nicky or Matt.
Tap. Tap.
Aaron rips the blanket off his legs, already edging into fury as he takes in the situation. It's probably a drunk jock knocking on the wrong door, unaware that Aaron has practice in three hours, and less patience for interrupted sleep than most college students.
The carpet is cold under the rough soles of his feet as he slips silent and wrathful from the bedroom, making sure to close the door without a sound.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
It's that little extra noise, aggravating and pointed, that makes Aaron gnash his teeth. An unspoken " hurry up " that has him twisting the lock before he can think it through and swinging the door open with a violently whispered "what the fuck do you wa-"
He swallows the rest of his words at the sight of Neil Josten standing in the hallway, his expression pained and irritated.
"About time," he says in that way of his that makes Aaron want to punch him more than usual. "Put your shoes on and come with me."
"It's three in the fucking morning, go the fuck back to bed." Aaron tells him, checking over his shoulder to see if his roommates have heard them. "Go. Away."
Neil stares at him as if Aaron is the stupidest person he has ever met, his jaw clenching before he bites out, "I need your help."
Aaron scoffs, the sound too loud in the quiet of the night but as he opens his mouth to tell Neil that he would rather eat his own jock than help him, Neil grimaces and sways in the buttery light of the hallway and that's when Aaron notices the blood .
There's already four droplets on the hall floor, bright red splotches that remind Aaron of another hallway, another wall painted in vivid red by his hand.
He shakes himself from darker memories and looks closer at Neil, taking in the hunch of his back and the hand he has clasped awkwardly over his shoulder. The long sleeve of his shirt is dark but now that he's awake and looking, Aaron can see it's soaked with the same blood slowly running down over Neil's wrist to drip off his fingertips.
"What the hell happened?" He asks, already reaching out to help, somehow. Neil flinches back from his hand for a moment before something like embarrassment flickers across his stony expression.
The other Foxes love to act like Neil is some baby deer, wide-eyed and sweet-faced in a too harsh world but Aaron has always found him too cold, too detached and as hard to read as his twin brother. Neil Josten isn't a wilting flower, he's the wasp waiting at the center to sting anyone foolish enough to get close.
That he's throwing emotional cues now , to Aaron of a people, is enough to tug even at his hardened heartstrings.
Neil licks his lips, clearly thinking through his responses when a noise down the hall startles them both. The noise quickly settles but this is the last place either of them want to be caught bleeding and vulnerable by someone Not A Fox. He steps away from Aaron, jerking his head painfully towards his own dorm door. "Come on, I just need a few stitches but I can't reach the wound."
He walks away like he fully expects Aaron to follow and damn his arrogance, but Aaron does .
He isn't lying when he says he hates Neil, not really. Neil came to them as a runaway problem, stuck his nose into every part of Aaron's life like he deserved to know all of his secrets and- worst of all- judged him for them.
Neil is a hypocrite and a liar and a bona-fide bad idea but Aaron can remember how it felt to lose him in that rioting crowd, how it felt to see Neil on his knees in that motel room, beaten down and expecting to be left behind again.
Aaron hates him, he swears he does, but Neil is a Fox and Aaron will always go to bat for this messy group of stupid stickball assholes.
He jams his bare feet into the nearest pair of boots- Matt's if the way the clunk off the heels of his feet are anything to go by- and snatches the keys off the counter, locking the door behind him before he hurries to catch up.
There's a line of blood on the sticky hallway carpet leading to and now back towards his old dorm and Aaron can see the seeping red on the waistband of Neil's pants at this point- he's bleeding a lot and the possibility that Aaron can't help him creeps up his spine to whisper sinister self-doubts into his ear.
Neil opens the door without a backwards glance but he does look quickly around the barely lit common area, his shoulders slumping when he doesn't seem to find what he's looking for.
When he goes to settle onto the couch, Aaron can't help but click his tongue. There's a small but powerful light over the sink in the dining area and blood is easier to clean off of tile and peeling linoleum. Neil sighs loudly at him and picks up the small first-aid kit from the coffee table, marching over like a surly teenager to stare Aaron down expectantly.
"Sit down and take off your shirt." He says briskly, turning away to wash his hands in the sink. He'd rather something a little less fragrant than the bottle of foaming cinnamon apple hand soap from Bed, Bath and Beyond but clean is clean.
When he turns to throw out his damp paper towels, Neil is still standing there, an uncomfortable look on his face. He's looked that way all night, distinctly and profoundly on edge and that's when Aaron remembers the scars .
"The shirt has to come off, I need to clean it out before I stitch you up, dumbass," he says, keeping his voice as normal and as annoyed as possible. Aaron can't deny, at least to himself, that he's curious though; the scars on his arms and face are impossible to hide, brutal reminders of the wrath of his father and the things Neil is capable of surviving but...
Not even Matt, who roomed with Neil for nearly a year, has seen his torso. Abby has- this Aaron is sure about because he's one half of the reason Abby makes them all strip down during their yearly physicals- and maybe Kevin and ugh, definitely Andrew.
Aaron will blame the sleep deprivation for the reason why he doesn't clock the absence of his brother's over-protective hovering when it comes to a bloody Neil Josten. He looks back at the bedroom door over his shoulder while Neil struggles to pull his shirt over his head but it's closed and quiet, even if he can see the splash of red on the door handle.
It looks ominous in the dark, like a spooky slasher movie come to life. When Neil curses softly under his breath, Aaron turns away from the sight with a shiver and rolls his eyes.
"Just sit down and I'll cut it off," he says and physically turns Neil with impatient, impersonal hands to sit on the shortest stool. He's still a little too tall, even at this height but Aaron refuses to complain- being five feet flat means picking your battles in a world clearly built for people unfairly taller than you.
The scissors in the med kit are small but sharp, cutting through the cheap, wet fabric with a ripping sound that breaks the tense silence between them.
Neil is stone behind his hands, his muscles bunching as if for flight as Aaron pulls the two ends of the shirt open.
"Where's Andrew?" He asks, trying for a casual tone as he starts mopping up the blood that's painted the skin of Neil's back red and flaking brown. The blood has covered most of the scars but as Aaron wets more paper towels, a road map of trauma comes to life before his eyes, like the restoration of an extremely old painting.
Neil breathes so softly that Aaron almost puts a hand to his back to make sure he's still alive before he speaks. "Out."
"Is he getting more supplies? We don't have anything in here to numb the area- it's going to hurt when I start stitching."
Neil huffs. "No, I can take it. I've had worse."
Aaron can see that. There's a hint of road rash along his side, faded with age but large enough that he knows it must have hurt like hell when it happened, all open and torn up skin that would need to be picked clean.
One of the vertebrae in Neil's bent back pokes out more than the others, a bony spine of an old fracture that wasn't set properly. He wonders if Neil has ever been to a hospital before Baltimore- if he's even up to date on his shots.
It would be just like him to take the Foxes down with a case of mid-season measles.
Through the wet paper towels, Aaron can feel the thick lines of scar tissue, the bumps and knots where someone with a rushed, imperfect hand hastily pulled Neil's seams back together. Most of his scars look like the results of a fight but some are too uniform, too intentional to be anything but torture.
It isn't until his eyes find the clear outline of a hot iron burned into his shoulder than Aaron's hands stutter.
It's an old wound, quite possibly the oldest of the bunch, and that's what burns because Aaron knows that Neil was a child when his mother took him on the run. They wouldn't have a need for something as domestic, as mundane as a clothes iron.
Aaron thinks of Neil at nine years old, at seven, at five , being touched by the metal plate of that iron long enough for it to leave an everlasting mark and has to swallow a lump of knowing rage for that tiny child.
He wants to know , even if it isn't his place; Neil would push if the roles were reversed, would poke and prod until Aaron exploded and blurted the entire story out in a shameful spiral of anger and hurt. He touches his thumb to the corner of the scar and Neil twitches.
"My father," he says, toneless with affected apathy. "It's my other shoulder you need to worry about."
"Next time I'll just let you get blood everywhere," Aaron mutters, mostly to himself as he turns his eyes and his mind to the sluggishly bleeding wound still covered by Neil's hand. "Let me see it."
Neil lets go of the wad of blood-soaked cloth he'd been keeping over his shoulder, sighing quietly with relief.
Aaron takes his time, gently peeling back the cotton sleepshirt to reveal a long slash curving diagonally down the right side of Neil's back.
"Jesus Christ, what the hell happened?" He asks loudly, surprise stealing his caution. The wound is a clean cut, the only sign of its hastiness told in the hooked ends where a sharp point cut deepest.
"It was an accident," Neil says, dropping his head down to speak into his lap. Aaron can see through the movement of his shoulders than he's twisting his hands, clearly upset at the questioning.
"It looks like someone got you with a knife-" The words die in his throat as the night comes together in a sharp, horrifying sort of clarity. He can barely speak the idea into existence when he says, "wait- did Andrew do this to you?"
Neil turns suddenly in his seat, uncaring that the motion has to hurt as it undoes any of the clotting his body has been trying to do. Fresh blood trickles down his back as he faces Aaron, his expression twisted up in fury and outrage and heartbreak .
"He didn't know it was me ," he says, his voice that icy, diamond-sharp whip Aaron remembers from every time Riko Moriyama thought he could out-maneuver someone as clever as Neil. "I didn't know he had a knife. I shouldn't have gotten that close but he was-"
His teeth clack together painfully, biting off the tip of a secret Aaron maybe isn't supposed to know but can figure out on his own.
Everyone knows now why Andrew carries knives on his body, why he startles awake at loud noises and unfamiliar- or perhaps too familiar- touches. Andrew, off his medication, sleeps like he's under attack, keeps strange hours and has three locks on his bedroom door at the house in Columbia.
It isn't hard to imagine Andrew having a bad night. It isn't hard to imagine that this could be the outcome of it.
Especially if he and Neil are sharing the same bed.
Neil squints at him, as if waiting for Aaron to say something vile and cruel but Aaron simply holds up the unpacked gauze and gestures to his back. Neil takes a second, his eyes pale and searching in the white-blue light above them, but he turns around and lets Aaron push the gauze onto the worst of the bleeding.
It feels different now, to look at the slice of a blade into Neil's already scarred skin and know that Andrew put it there. Truthfully Aaron hasn't thought of his brother as a danger to anyone in months, to Neil for longer than that. Once that first trip to Eden’s Twilight had gone tits up, Andrew had taken to Neil in a way that had almost made Aaron jealous.
He'd wanted to be his brother's confidant for years, the person Andrew told all his secrets and thoughts to. Instead, his brother had saved it all for someone like Neil. Someone sneaky and exy obsessed and unworthy in his eyes.
Even now, after months of joint therapy and a coexistence that wasn't on the say-so of a desperately toxic deal they'd made as teenagers, Neil still has all of Andrew's secrets and Aaron is still on the outside desperately looking in.
"He had a nightmare." Aaron keeps it a statement and not an inquiry. It's a fact and they both know it now. Neil doesn't have to confirm or deny a truth.
"I know better than to wake him up," Neil says and the words tumble out of him in a guilty pile up. "He's usually so quiet but this time- I couldn't just lie there and listen to it. I didn't know he had a knife."
Aaron lifts one end of the gauze to inspect the bleeding. It's slower now but the skin is gapping open, too big to be left that way.
"I turned away to turn on the lamp when he-" Neil hisses as Aaron applies alcohol to the cut, gripping hard at his sweatpants as the sting starts and fades. "He ran off when he realized he had pulled the knife out. I don't even think he knows it got me."
A slice of panic eats away at Aaron's cool at the idea of his brother out there in the night alone after whatever it is his mind had conjured up to torment him with while he was asleep and vulnerable but the gash on Neil's back is more than enough proof that Andrew can take care of himself right now.
"He either can't sleep with you or he can't sleep with knives, he's going to have to choose," he says instead, going over the wound with a fine eye. There's surprisingly little to no foreign bodies, even though the sleepshirt had ripped like an old tablecloth under his touch.
Neil makes a noise of derision. "You'd love that, wouldn't you."
It takes him a moment to connect why Neil's rising vitriol and the memory of wrapped hands baby punching his chin in a cabin hours from here. Aaron rolls his eyes before tossing the wad of gauze into the trash.
"You're right, I love being woken up at three in the morning because someone's been slashed up with a knife." He flicks Neil's ear spitefully. "I don't care about whatever it is you and my brother get up to. I would die happy never having to think about the two of you like that ever."
His voice turns serious as he starts setting up the stitching floss, trying to remember the quickest way to close a wound this long.
"But he could've killed you tonight. It being an accident wouldn't make you any less dead, Josten."
Neil kicks lightly at the cupboard, letting the words fall heavy into the silence between them. Aaron doesn't break it- he's said his piece and if Neil still ends up dead on the edge of Andrew's own blade one day well, Aaron will say "I told you so" at his funeral.
There's absolutely nothing to help with the pain of him literally sewing Neil's skin back together in the med-kit but Kevin Day still calls this dorm home and when he checks, Aaron finds a fully stocked cupboard of vodka, gin and whiskey.
He holds two up and shakes them, sloshing the liquor around inside. "Pick your poison."
Neil pulls a face at the vodka and reaches for the whiskey, uncaring that it's Andrew's favourite brand as he uncaps the top and swallows down a couple of mouthfuls in quick succession.
Aaron is kind of impressed at ease of it- Neil has never been much of a drinker on their nights out even after Andrew took him in as one of theirs but if the state of his body is anything to go by, Aaron guesses whiskey was probably the medicine of choice while on the run.
"It's still going to hurt," Aaron warns him as Neil takes another swig of the bottle in his hands. He waves his free hand through the air in a cyclic motion as if to say "such is my life" before pulling the mouth of the bottle away from his lips.
"It can't be worse than knowing what your own burning flesh smells like," he says matter-of-factly and really, what can Aaron say to that.
Stitching is slow work, especially with an inexperienced hand. The first push of the needle has Neil sucking in a sudden, hurt breath before his body tries to help the whiskey numb the pain.
Aaron keeps his stitches uniform and neat, paying an undue amount of care. The cut will scar but maybe this one won't be as blatant as the others. Maybe he can disguise this enough that it won't be a reminder- to Andrew or to Neil -of the unintentional way violence has left its mark on them all.
Neil is listing to one side by the time Aaron gets to the end of the wound, the sky a steadily lightening navy in the dormitory windows.
The other Foxes will be waking up for morning practice sooner rather than later and between the wound on his back and the alcohol in his blood, they're going to have to do it without their team vice-captain.
"I'll tell everyone you're sick today but Coach will want to know what happened," Aaron offers tiredly. He's going to be useless himself but a body is a body. Maybe Abby will let him nap in her exam room.
"I can still play," Neil says, the smallest slur of his words on the s. "It's just a cut."
"You're halfway to being wasted and if you bust open all my hard work because your exy obsessed ass can't sit still long enough to heal, I'll kill you myself."
Neil opens his mouth to say something snappish and sullen and most definitely annoying back when a voice from the doorway cuts him off.
"Neil."
Aaron's head jerks up, his hand tugging on the final stitch a bit too hard. Andrew is in the doorway, his hair a flyaway mess of white blond in the morning dim room.
Neil sags in exaggerated relief, nearly tumbling off the stool at the very sight of his brother. "Andrew," he says but it comes out like "hand-dru" and Aaron is more than a little embarrassed at how affectionate it sounds.
Andrew's eyes are dark as they take in Neil's noodly posture and the mess of bloody gauze and medical supplies. Aaron ties the end of the last stitch off and sets down his instruments with a sobering quiet.
It's almost a minute of Andrew's intense stare and Neil's gentle hiccuping breathing before his brother speaks.
"How bad is it?"
Aaron glances up from his work, thinks about softening the blow and then doesn't. "Come see for yourself."
For someone who wears such heavy boots, Andrew’s tread is as meek as a mouse. Not in personality but in a learned way, in the way a rabbit knows when to hide and when to run.
Neil must be dozing because all he does as Andrew draws near is hum something soft, tipping his head into the open palm Andrew lifts towards him.
He doesn't hesitate, the night's unfortunate events already a distant forgiveness to him.
Andrew isn't quite so lucky. Aaron has always believed his brother was a still, haunting lake; an uninterrupted glass surface hiding a dark, unpredictable depth below it.
Anger doesn't come to Andrew as easily as people have been led to believe- anger is Aaron's security blanket all things considered- but when it does it burns him from the inside out.
Here and now, Andrew directs those flames inside himself, one hand clenched tight while the other holds Neil's slack face with the softest touch.
"Thirty-eight stitches," Aaron tells him. "It bled a lot but it wasn't deep. It'll heal."
It'll heal. Those words, that reassurance, relaxes something in his brother. Andrew moves his unclenching hand as if to touch the stitches but pulls away before Aaron can tell him not to.
"He's a fucking moron," he says instead, his voice a deadly simmer of regret and self-recrimination. "I told him this was a bad idea."
That rouses something in Neil who stirs long enough to mutter a childish "sorry."
He sounds like a kid, breaking the word up into a dragged out sore-ree that makes Aaron want to laugh. Drunk Neil might be the only version of him that Aaron finds vaguely tolerable.
"Shut up. Don't apologize," Andrew shakes Neil by his chin a little. "I don't need it."
Neil groans at him, reaching up to tug at Andrew's sleeve instead of his hand. He holds on there, his grip tight as if he's worried Andrew might disappear again.
"Next time, I won't forget," he promises with all the drunken sincerity he can muster. Andrew's nostrils flare as he brings his hand up to run soothingly through Neil's sleep tousled hair.
"No more knives," Andrew promises in return. When Neil makes a protesting sound, Andrew brings his hand down to cover his pouting mouth. "Shut. It. We'll figure it out. Go to bed."
"It needs to be covered first," Aaron reminds him, twisting to find a piece of gauze long enough. With Neil's attention fixed solely on Andrew's hands on his face, Aaron tapes down a double layer of gauze with quick fingers and steps back.
The dawning light slowly reveals just how much blood Neil managed to lose everywhere, splashes of it against the wall, smears against door knobs. Aaron realizes there's probably blood on his own door and stifles a sigh.
He hands Neil over to his brother's clutching hands after they work together to get his shredded, bloody shirt off his arms. Andrew's gaze shoots to his once when he realizes Aaron has seen Neil's scars, that tonight has peeled off another layer of secrecy that surrounds the Foxes most troublesome investment but Aaron keeps his expression placid, revealing nothing.
He doesn't look at the front of Neil's torso though, as Andrew grabs a soft black hoodie for them to work carefully over Neil's tipsily bobbing head. It's a familiar shirt, one he knows he's seen Andrew wear around campus and the little embroidered 3 on the cuff of the sleeve confirms it.
It's big on Andrew most days and Neil swims in it, letting the extra fabric flop over the tips of his hands like giant mittens.
"The bed's a mess," he murmurs, not quite as out of it as the joint dressing would imply. "I didn't know what to do first."
"Forget about it," Andrew tells him, leading Neil away from the stool with a touch to his elbow, to his hip and a tug to the front of his hoodie. Aaron doesn't know if they've always been this tactile or if it's something they've grown into, but it's good to see that an accidental fileting hasn't irreparably damaged his brother's....whatever it is.
Bee has told him for months now that it's good to notice these things about his brother- to see him as a real person with flaws and desires. Aaron had built Andrew up in his head long before they'd even met and the reality of having a twin versus the fantasy had left him reeling for years.
The reality is this: Andrew's harsh voice hides his gentle hands as he settles back onto their couch, pulling a weakly protesting Neil down to lie draped over his front.
The clink of metal clanking together pulls Aaron from his thoughts and he watches as Andrew tugs the ends of his armbands until they fall into his open hand before he folds them together and tosses them onto the closest bean bag.
They're not particularly out of reach but they're far enough away that Andrew will have to stop and think about it and maybe that's enough. Neil lifts his head to say something Aaron can't hear and his brother pushes him back down without a word, covering his eyes until Neil's body relaxes into a deep, exhausted sleep.
Aaron cleans up the med-kit, making a note of what needs to be replaced as he closes the plastic cover with a quiet click. Kevin's grapefruit scented counter cleaner takes care of the blood and before long Aaron is left with the choice of leaving without a word or saying something . Anything.
He fidgets near the door before looking back at the couch.
Andrew's eyes glitter at him, his hair a whimsical flash of pink and purple streaks in the rising sun.
"You won't be able to sleep sitting up like that," Aaron says for lack of a better topic. His brother looks down to where his hand is resting lightly in the middle of Neil's back, measuring the gentle rise and fall of his breathing.
"I don't intend to."
Aaron wonders when Andrew realized he hurt Neil. How far had he run before he could see the night for what it truly was. He doesn't know and he doesn't feel like he should. Sometimes secrets should stay just the way they are.
"I'll tell Coach-"
"He knows."
Right. Of course. It's good to know that Andrew had somewhere safe to land after all.
God, he's tired. Of this conversation and this entire night. Fuck this day and fuck the next ten hours of his life. He's getting himself the biggest, strongest cup of coffee the cafeteria can legally sell him and mainlining it directly into his veins.
"Yeah, okay, whatever," he mutters and it isn't until his hand is on the doorknob that he hears his brother's voice again.
"Aaron."
Andrew's voice is softer than his face would allow you to assume- that had taken Aaron by surprise the first time they'd spoken face to face. The quiet rasp, the flatness of his vowels; it would be gentle in any other universe and right now, between the darkness of the night and the cusp of another day, it's gentle here too.
He looks back over his shoulder just as Neil lets out a quiet snore between them. Andrew's hand is fisted in the back of that sweater but he doesn't flinch away from Aaron's eyes as he speaks.
"Thank you."
It might be the first time Aaron has ever heard him say those words. It takes them a moment to land, to settle into his mind as something that just actually happened and for him to understand what Andrew is and isn't saying.
"Of course." Aaron probably cares a little more about Neil Josten now than he did before he was pulled out of bed to stitch him up but that's not the point. Andrew cares about Neil and for Aaron that is enough.
If it means losing a little sleep will keep that mouthy asshole breathing, and keep this version of Andrew alive in this universe, Aaron will take it.
There's nothing left to say between them after that and with a firm nod, Aaron turns the knob and leaves the room and the night behind him. -
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