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It starts like this.
Wymack recruits Janie Smalls to the Foxes. She is small, bitter, thin—a bar of chocolate, 85%. Under normal circumstances, Andrew does not think she’d last a summer in the Foxes’ den.
He remarks on this quite freely.
Renee looks like she wants to chide him for it; Captain Wilds does, stopping just shy of finger-wagging. He will forgive Renee because she didn’t say a word; because she agrees with him; because she knows that he more than anyone is an adequate judge of how much a person can take before they break.
Word gets back to Janie—between Reynolds’s gossip and Gordon’s asshattery, there’d been little chance that it wouldn’t. She faces him in the hallway of Fox Tower, and it’s like seeing himself in a funhouse mirror. Unlike him, her scars are uncovered and weeping. Where he is built steady—built to endure, to outlast—she is almost frail. When she speaks, her voice is always overfilled with emotion, a cup very nearly sloshing over.
“You think I’m going to kill myself.”
She says it accusatorily, like she wants this to be the thing that makes him break. As much as Andrew can find something like that within himself, he respects the nastiness that motivates her.
He doesn’t do regret, though. She’s shit out of luck there.
“Aren’t you?” Said without inflection, it’s hard to say whether it’s more or less of a taunt.
She tilts her head; a birdlike gesture of consideration, like a swallow, all hollow bones. He is off his meds to sleep, but there is still something almost funny about this. What exactly has Janie Smalls swallowed, he wonders, that might have led her here?
His hands feel conspicuously empty. It turns out there is a little room left for hate beneath his rising nausea and the dregs of his mania, after all.
“Maybe.” Still an indictment, but now it’s almost a lob, a return volley of his own wretched attitude. Better. He wonders if he could make her a Monster. He wonders if he should even bother trying.
“Neat.” Andrew’s smile is a slow thing, weighed down as it is by exhaustion and drugs. Still, he thinks it manages to encapsulate everything he cares to say quite nicely.
Janie Smalls looks at him for a long moment, disbelieving, then cracks.
The sound of her shuddering guffaws echo in the hallway long after Andrew has closed the door to his dorm behind him.
It starts like this.
Nathaniel Wesninski is born to Nathan Wesninski (and Mary Hatford, incidentally, though Wesninski the senior sometimes appears to forget that Junior wasn’t born from a rib, or a headache, or a chunk of flesh cut from the thigh) on a cold January morning, bright and early. Maybe this would be a pleasant surprise if Mary’s contractions had started that day, or even the night prior, but after 35 hours of labor, the only feeling anyone can muster is relief.
This sets the tone for much of Nathaniel’s young life.
He holds a knife before he can properly walk; he stabs one before he can run.
“You’re a regular prodigy, Junior,” Lola sneers at him, eight years old and thin as a rail, when he first gets a throwing knife to stick in a punching bag. “Good to see that it’s your father’s genes that run you in skill as well as looks.”
Nathaniel blinks slowly at that, pale lids closing over paler eyes, something sour and unfamiliar brewing behind his tongue. Don’t start fights you can’t finish, Junior, Nathan often says, cruelly paternal, but even losing, Nathaniel thinks, would be better than this.
“My mother’s genes wouldn’t be all bad,” he says, light and carefree in a way he’s never been before. “They would, for example, be better than yours.”
Lola backhands him; copper fills his mouth. When she stomps off, Nathaniel smiles, blood on his teeth.
It had been worth it, after all.
Eighteen— nineteen— thirty if you count by Raven time— years after a difficult birth, and Nathaniel Wesninski has only grown harder to deal with. More than anything, this is what leaves him under the care of Tetsuji Moriyama—the master, except not really.
But he doesn’t know the last part yet.
“I expect total obedience,” the master says when Nathaniel is finally, fully his. Nathaniel is thirteen; the Sons of Exy are his most regular friends. “Do you understand?”
“And then you’ll let me play?”
This is not the correct response, but for the first and last time, the master lets him get away with it. When Nathaniel thinks back on this moment later, he will wonder if the master let it go only because of the greater gifts he received in return. Love. Fervor. Devotion.
Desperation.
As it is, the master only gestures with his cane. “So long as you obey,” he stresses. Nathaniel is a Wesninski; the master does not have to elaborate on alternatives.
“Okay.”
It could have started like this.
On the cold January morning when Riko and Kevin extend their offer of perfection to one Andrew Joseph Minyard, Nathaniel could have been beside them, 3 blazed starkly on his cheeks, instead of in Baltimore—the only vacation he ever gets. He could have been there to watch Andrew snub them like no one ever had before. He could have seen the flicker in Kevin’s eyes as he realized that no was a thing you could say to a Moriyama—without being punished for it. He could have stopped Kevin. He could have helped him.
He could have been there beside Jean when Riko decided that a no couldn’t be tolerated, that it didn’t matter that Jean would never say it, only that someone had.
Instead, he’s with Lola, with Nathan (conspicuously not with Mary, even after all these years), as they bleed Wesninski blood back into him. Nothing vital, the master had said, but they are experts in pain and purpose, and Nathaniel is used to running on fresh wounds.
It could have started like this.
Riko Moriyama confronts Kevin Day on national television, and somehow, Kevin acquits himself well. It’s a piss-poor showing by Moriyama standards, but then, Kevin has already proven his lack of interest in abiding by them anyway. In the darkness of their shared room, Jean and Nathaniel theorize about what finally made Kevin grow a real spine.
(Neither of them count his leaving as an example of this. Real bravery, they agree, would have been in trying to take Jean with him. What Kevin had done was survive.
Jean pronounces survive like some might say coward. Nathaniel gives it more respect than he has ever afforded Kevin outside of Exy. It’s one of the few disagreements they’ve ever had.)
It comes down to Andrew Minyard.
Who Nathaniel could have met, incidentally, if Riko had gotten his way.
“Kevin will return,” he’d argued to the master, “But I don’t need to appear as though I am awaiting it. If it comes down to it, he is replaceable. It would be good for him to remember this.”
“It is one thing to have a Wesninski on the court,” the master had replied, his words, as always, so final, “And quite another to claim him for a camera to see.”
“He is already mine!”
Not yours, Nathaniel had thought. Exy’s.
The master had agreed with what Nathaniel had left unspoken, and even the still-throbbing wounds of Riko’s wrath had been nothing compared to what Baltimore would have had in store for him as punishment for unnecessary risk—had been nothing compared to the thought of being without Jean.
But Nathaniel could have seen Andrew there, an inkblot against the riotous Foxes, and seen in that moment of surprise exactly who he was.
It could have started like this.
There is a fall banquet to celebrate the (loosely) successful start to another year of Exy. Nathaniel is even there, flanking the Ravens’ furious, faltering king with Jean just one body away.
As is often the case for people like them, though, even one body of separation is a body too many.
It does not matter what sets Riko off, or even if it was any one thing in particular. When he is done administering a punishment even Nathan never would have thought of (though whether that speaks to Riko’s creativity or the Butcher’s lack thereof is a toss-up) in a stuffy, isolated side room, there is still too much anger boiling in his bones to present even the facade of a man.
Nathaniel is 3. Jean is 4. With no 2 to stand by his side, it is no surprise when Riko forces Jean to his knees.
(In the future, there will be many reasons to dislike Andrew Minyard, many of them reasonable and agreed upon via consensus.
Nathaniel will skip past all of them to resent him for not being 5, for not taking the lion’s share of Riko’s wrath. He’ll regret that thought later, but he will never stop wishing for a scapegoat, for Jean to have been more than last place in an imperfect Court.)
Nathaniel doesn’t have much here, but he does have his tongue—for as long as Riko will let him keep it.
Whether Riko realizes it or not, he forgets to keep count of Jean’s punishment when his fists are distracted with Nathaniel; Jean’s blows are lessened by a quarter.
Riko enters the banquet alone.
Because of this, Nathaniel misses the moment that Riko’s snares draw too tight. No matter who they are, all Foxes will bite when cornered.
Allison Reynolds does so with her fists.
For a while after that, the banquet is bedlam; it’s the only way that Nathaniel and Jean can limp away undetected, back to the dubious safety of the Raven bus. The master isn’t pleased to see them back so soon—if Nathaniel were a different sort of cunning, he might have been able to drive a wedge between his cautious tormentor and his sadistic, unwieldy captain.
As it is, he only asks for a report, and Nathaniel and Jean trade on snatches of rumor through bruised and swollen lips.
(Later, Nathaniel will ask Allison why she did it, when Riko had only mocked Kevin and Andrew—as if either of them were only anything, even then. Allison will fix him with a look that says she knows why he’s asking, knows it better than Nathaniel himself. She will smile her jagged little smile, the one she only ever gives to him and Renee, and she’ll say that she likes her arrogance to have a little bit of substance behind it. It will be an inroad to peace.
But that comes later.)
When the bulk of the unkindness returns, Jean and Nathaniel will keep their mouths shut tight, their fists clenched, knuckles brushing on the seat they share. Riko will see something in Nathaniel’s gaze anyway—and whether it’s real or imaginary, Nathaniel honestly can’t say—and take what he feels is his due. The Ravens will return home, and Nathaniel will have no cause to think about how close he was to meeting the monster face to face.
Not yet, anyway.
It could have begun in so many ways, but when every piece is placed on the board, it starts like this.
Riko doubles Nathaniel’s—and by extension, Jean’s—practice time two weeks before their PSU game. For a moment, Nathaniel thinks of it as a punishment, bestowed for any number of small slights. He isn’t wrong—no one could ever claim Riko’s attention to be a reward, after all—but he isn’t quite right, either.
Of course Riko can’t go into battle unflanked; what is a king without his retinue?
Or, more accurately: If Kevin has a dog, then shouldn’t Riko bring his own to heel?
So it is that Nathaniel and Jean becomes Nathaniel vs. Jean. It is practice. They’ve run worse drills, done worse to each other than go head-to-head.
When he steps onto the Foxhole Court with the firstborn Son of Exy at his side, it feels more like severing a limb than accepting an honor. Nathaniel is not a striker; despite his frame, he was never meant to be one. Settling in at the half-court line, a few scant feet from the space Kevin will occupy, feels something like sacrilege.
Seeing Kevin—back straight, lips white—opens a wound Nathaniel had long thought scarred over.
The weight of Riko’s eyes has nothing on the heaviness of being among those left behind. All Nathaniel can do is smile, pretty and heartfelt and seething, and when Kevin flinches, he will remember that Nathaniel has been a student of many masters—and he is never sick of learning.
And there is one last thing for him before the game starts. An indulgence, insofar as he is allowed such things. He pushes back against the magnetic pull of Kevin Day, willing himself to look through him like he is something spectral, and fixes the ice of his eyes on goal.
Andrew Minyard, number three, a not-Nathaniel if he’s ever seen one.
You are wrong, he wants to say. Your existence is an immeasurable slight, and if you had only made any other choice, ever, we would not be here.
But Minyard looks back, eyes sharper than they should be, and for a moment, all Nathaniel can do is lament the future that will never be: Court, perfected.
And then the game begins.