Archive of Our Own ^beta

The stadium inside is silent.

The only sounds filling it as he moves up the rafters are of the blaring of police cars from outside; police cars and the wails of ambulances, because there's been a riot, a riot in which Andrew has done his part and protected his kin.

He takes the steps two at a time, ignoring the ever-growing ache in his legs. It doesn't matter that they've just won a match, doesn't matter that he's just fought against who knows how many people, weaving his way through a violent crowd, because he has to—has to what, exactly?

Neil.

Neil is missing.

Perhaps he should've known it would be like this. All year long, he's told himself over and over again, do not trust him. So what if Neil somehow summed up enough courage to decide he wanted to stand on his own two feet? At the end of the day, he was a pathetic, pathological liar; an instigator at heart, but a natural born murder magnet.

Andrew ignores the buzzing of a phone in his pocket and continues his second lap of the stadium. The place is huge; it would be easy to miss Neil in the mass of chairs, too easy, especially with the too-close hit near his eye that has left it throbbing.

Neil's dusty bag is slung across Andrew's bruised shoulder, the grey phone Andrew bought him in its side pocket, and the keys Andrew gave him in the bag itself. He doesn't want to believe it, but like a compass needle finding its way north, it's all pointing toward one conclusion:

Neil is finally gone.

It should bring him some sense of relief, a semblance of relaxation, to be finally rid of this burden of a man.

It doesn't.

Doesn't, because even if they don't have a deal anymore, Neil had still promised to stay until the end of the year.

Andrew knows Neil keeps his promises, but can it even be considered a promise he has to keep anymore if their deal has ended? And even if that isn't the case, Neil can always twist and twist his words into a tangled mess, find a loophole, and break free of any bounds a promise holds him in.

Andrew knows this.

He knows Neil is stupid, and just as fucking smart too, but just a few hours ago Andrew let him go. He let him go. How did he not see it coming?

But Neil wouldn't have left now—they've come too far ahead in the championships, something Neil and Kevin have only been dreaming about since the start of the year. And that is worse; that is much, much worse because that means that Neil isn't just gone, it means that he's been taken, that he's likely dead, if not today, then tomorrow.

Hope is something he neither believes in nor holds on to; like most things, it's something he stopped believing in a long time ago.

"Luck, then."

"Only the bad sort."

Only the bad sort.

Andrew stops midway up the rafters, only because he has to; otherwise, his legs will give up on him. The breaths he takes rattle on the way in. He stands there, searching, searching, searching as far as he can from where he is, trying to find that damned red of flaming sunrise.

Sunrise, Abram.

Death.

It is as if the colour around him is vanishing, like a hole opening up and sucking the life around him of all red, of all blue, leaving behind a monotone canvas of green, green, green.

He closes his eyes for a moment to collect his breath, trying to take in the smell of beer and sweat. Instead, he only finds his lungs drugged on cheap cologne and laundry detergent, because his mind likes to put his ever-so-perfect memory to use at the worst of times.

Neil, Neil, Neil, his traitorous mind sings, where are you?

When he opens his eyes again, his sight fixates on a chair to his left, and he can almost imagine it: Neil, sitting there with his arms folded across his lap, his hair an uncombed mess as usual, staring down at the court.

"You knew this would happen," says not-Neil casually, a hallucination, a pipedream. The frozen of his eyes glide across the court before finally settling on Andrew's disheveled form. Their eyes meet, blue on hazel, ocean and earth, an ever-living contradiction. "You still let me go."

Andrew blinks, and suddenly, not-Neil is covered in red, an image from forty-nine days ago. It seeps into his already red hair, drips down the curves of his calm face, disappears under the collar of his shirt—only this time, his body is as lifeless as his eyes had been.

He takes a sharp step back, almost stumbling on his own feet, because suddenly the pain in his temple is nothing compared to the sudden bursts of heat in his chest. He refuses to believe it, he refuses, but there's no way it's anything else, because this has to be fear, is this fear, is this fear?

He's done everything to try and forget it, but he knows this feeling all too well. He's felt it before, countless times when he's sat on the edge of a roof so high, when the innocence of his only good home had been stripped away by one man's greed. When, despite the fact, he'd held on for one person alone. The last time he'd let someone in, he'd almost killed himself over it, over and over again, every single day. He'd told Neil as much.

Still, a small part of him had held open a door for him, a door to a room only one person had been allowed to enter before, and Neil, Neil, Neil, Neil, had taken it as the opening it was, poking the gap open wider like a feral beast, wedging his way through the crack, carefree and yet so careful, with all his baggage and then some more.

Shut the fuck up, he tells his mind.

Breathe, Bee's voice commands in his mind. Bee. Andrew should call her, but no, he can't now, not after he made it clear to her, the one time she asked, that Neil is nothing to him; nothing but another fox with a shit ton of problems which are not his concern.

His phone is ringing again, or maybe it's just his ear, because suddenly everything is loud, too loud.

He pictures himself standing at the edge of a chasm. The jagged bottom stares at him, its jaws wide and inviting. The ground beneath him is disappearing, an opening just for him, and then he's falling, he's falling fast, and damn it if it isn't from high, high above the ground, and damn him if there's nothing that scares him more than the weightlessness of falling and what comes after.

For years, the ghosts of his past have worked to shape his mind into a new entity, one so selectively devoid of emotion, but even that can't help him now. Helplessness is not a thing Andrew had ever wanted to cross paths with again.

He's gone, he's gone, he's gone.

Words echo in his mind like the phantoms unrepentant.

Stand with me, but don't fight for me. Let me learn to fight for myself.

Thank you. You were amazing.

"Andrew?"

The voice cuts through the fog in his brain like a sharp knife, and he snaps to attention.

Aaron is standing at the bottom of the steps.  A frown tugs at his face. He holds up his phone and opens his mouth as if to say something, but then stops when he catches the sight of the bag slung across his shoulders. "That Neil's?"

Andrew takes a steadying breath before making his way down, beating his voice into apathy. "I told you to stay on the bus."

Aaron glares at him at that. "You told me to stay on the bus about half an hour ago. Wymack told you to be back in twenty minutes. It's been thirty-five. Andrew, we need to go."

Yes, Wymack. Andrew had left him behind with Renee when they'd found Neil's abandoned things a gate out from the bus, leaving the racket with him to hold.

Aaron stares at him now, as if trying to peek a glance into his raging thoughts, and the crease between his brows deepens. "Renee's hurt."

It's funny, how insignificant of a statement that is. Andrew supposes Aaron thinks a point has been made, and if he had been on his drugs, he would've been howling with amusement right about now.

Renee could handle herself just fine, could endure a few injuries, could fight off however many people came at her. Would Neil be able to? Had he been able to?

His own phone is still buzzing insistently in his back pocket. He finally pulls it out, flipping it open to blink against the messages crowding the screen.

Wymack, Nicky, Wilds, Renee; he lets the words blur together into an incoherent mess of leave, hospital, need, now, and will find.

He looks up again to meet Aaron's hesitant eyes, and makes up his mind. There's nothing he can do standing here in the empty stadium, nothing that will help him get to Neil, so he makes the rest of his way down and out, his grip tightening on Neil's bag, a vow already forming in his mind.

Die and I'll kill you myself, Neil Josten.

****

It's almost four hours after the start of the riot that Andrew's phone powers off. The battery flashes momentarily, a warning, before his screen gives way to black.

He stares at it, eyes hollow.

He should be tired. He should be tired, because he spent most of the day travelling in a bus, played a match in which he actually gave it his all because someone promised him anything, then proceeded to lap a stadium not once but twice, inside and out, right after fighting in a riot.

His eye stings and there's hunger glancing at him from afar, but he can't give a fuck about either. It's a little past midnight, and he sits alone in the abandoned corner of a hospital's parking lot, the distant hum of traffic and late-night ambulances ever present.

He's spent the past few hours reaching out to all the hospitals in the area. He's tried and failed to find any new entries under the name of 'Neil Josten'. Again and again, he's heard nothing but the patient voice of receptionists telling him that yes, we've rechecked our records, and no, there's no one here by that name, are you sure those are the correct spellings?

It should be nothing, but Andrew knows it's not, because this is Neil, and he's gone, and it's never nothing with him.

Thank you. You were amazing.

With each passing second, it sounds more and more like a goodbye, and Andrew hates Neil for this, then hates himself because he'd known something had been wrong; the dead look in Neil's eye had been wrong, so wrong, tired and defeated, but he'd seen it and done nothing about it.

Regret is not something Andrew believes in, but damn it if he wouldn't set the world on fire right now. An urge to go back bears its claws at him, screaming at him to tear down the stadium chair by chair and bolt by bolt, to burn it all to the ground and find Neil.

There's a lighter in his bag, and it seems so little, so insignificant, compared to the vast world around him. He realises, with a sick feeling, that he could spend a lifetime looking and not even begin to walk in Neil's direction now.

The phone in his hand snaps shut with more force than necessary.

Despite the bone-deep night chill, he makes no move to head inside the building or the bus to find the rest of the team. The panic of we can't find him anywhere must finally be sinking in on them, and Andrew really can't deal with their anxiety-ridden words right now. Instead, he pulls out Neil's phone from his back pocket.

It's similar to Andrew's in all except colour, and Andrew stares at it for a moment.

Neil had called him. He'd called him back then, when he'd wanted to run, his voice weak and quiet as he said come and get me from the stadium. It hadn't seemed he'd done it consciously, but he had.

It only makes him mad now, because he knows if Neil had wanted to run, he would've called him. He hadn't, which meant he hadn't run; he'd been taken.

Andrew flips the phone open and goes to press the call option. He must misclick, though, because instead of a keypad, a call log pulls up.

He blinks.

There, stamped just a few minutes before the riot, is an incoming call that Neil accepted. The number isn't saved in, and the area code isn't one Andrew has seen before. The call only lasted only about a minute.

He dials the number before he can think better of it, and finds the number disconnected.

What now?

Thinking, he opens up messages.

The world does not come crashing down around him. There's no sudden flight of birds, no echoes of screams, no tilt of the earth on its axis. Nothing of the sort happens, and the silence around him remains unbroken.

Instead, past the various messages of his concerned teammates, a chat with another unsaved number blinks at him. He clicks it open to find just one single message. It was received a few hours before the game started, when they must've been on the bus.

0.

The number you have dialed is dis—

The automated voice doesn't finish its message before he clicks on the other number again, and it takes almost everything in him not to chuck the phone across the lot when the same message greets him.

He's on his feet and moving before he even realises it. Halfway to the entrance of the hospital, he changes his mind, pivots on his feet and heads off in the opposite direction—the blinding lights of the hospital will only make thinking about all of this worse, he can't give up on this one loose end, and because he knows he can find answer elsewhere too.

The bus is oddly quiet when he steps on.

The overhead lights are too bright for the night outside, and he hides his grimace as his headache becomes worse.

Heads shoot up at his arrival, but he ignores them: they're of no concern to him. Wymack is in the hospital with the upperclassmen, so he heads off towards the back where Abby stands next to a fidgeting Kevin, his hands holding Neil's racket in a death grip.

Abby looks taken aback by his abrupt arrival, but a hopeful glimmer appears in her eyes. "Have—?"

"Where's 443?" he cuts her off.

Now he has the attention of the others, he knows. Cloth rustles as Nicky and Aaron turn to look back at him.

"443?" Nicky questions.

He doesn't acknowledge him; he just stares at Abby. She looks at him, frowning, before her eyes settle on Neil's phone in his hands. A flash of recognition appears on her face. "Oh. The area code? 443 is Baltimore."

Apparently, this is big news because Kevin practically chokes on air, and Andrew's sharp gaze snaps to him.

"What do you know?" He doesn't mean to sound so vicious, but his patience is thinning by the second, like a thread coming undone.

Kevin pushes himself against the window, his expression fearful. "Nothing," he says quickly, but his eyes are wide and his hands are shaking too much for that to be true, and it's so clear that he knows something.

He knows something, and he's not telling Andrew, while Neil could be out there suffering. Dying.

Andrew takes a threatening step towards him, ignoring Abby's outstretched hand telling him to back off. "I will only count to three."

Kevin's eyes go comically wide, larger than even before. "No," he shudders. "No, no, no, I can't. I can't tell you this, I ca—he—Neil wouldn't have wanted you to know."

The others are definitely watching now, and Abby's hand pauses in mid-air as she glances at Kevin, unsure.

"What wouldn't Neil want us to know?" Aaron asks suspiciously at the same time as Nicky says, his voice dripping with concern, "What's going on?"

"Kevin?" Abby's voice is mild, but there's clear confusion on her face.

But Kevin just shakes his head, and as Andrew feels the thread snap, he thinks, I warned you.

Even though he knows his hands are moving, it takes him a moment to process his own reaction.

His hands are tight around Kevin's throat. There's yelling in the background, yelling and then hands around him, one too many for it to be fine in any sort of the meaning, but he can't think about that right now—it's as if he's staring at Kevin's choking face through water, a buzz beneath his skin.

Of course, Kevin knows something. He's known about Neil or Abram or whoever before Andrew was even aware of the existence of a boy as such. He met him before he even decided to run; he knew about him without any traded truths.

The world comes slamming back to him as people finally manage to haul him back. Kevin sits there gasping in his seat, hands covering his neck where Andrew knows bruises will bloom.

Good, he thinks, good.

Renee appears in front of him, a barrier for Kevin to hide behind. Next to her stands Matt, his expression pinched. "Dude, not cool! What the hell?"

Andrew breathes heavily through his nose, trying to calm his heart down as he takes stock of the situation.

Wymack and the upperclassmen are back, crowding the inside of the bus. He looks from one shocked face to the next, his eyes landing last on Wymack's grim expression.

Alarm bells flare up in his mind at once, images of worst-case scenarios flashing. Something's wrong. Something's wrong, and Wymack knows it now, too.

"What," Andrew manages to grit out. "What."

Wymack takes a step forward. "Alright," he says, "Alright. Everyone, listen up—and I expect none of you to open your damn mouths for the next three minutes—I recieved a call from the FBI."

There's a startled silence, and Andrew feels his stomach twist a little.

FBI?

The silence lasts only a second before exclamations erupt all over the bus, despite Wymack's order. Wymack has to speak over all of them to get them to quiet down. "Shut up and listen, god dammit. While the last of you got checked out, I got a call from some Special Agent Towns. Everyone on this bus right now is expected to be present in Baltimore by tomorrow morning."

Baltimore, Baltimore, he thinks, what the hell does Neil have to do with Baltimore?

"Baltimore?" Dan asks, face contorted in a grimace. "Maryland? What does the FBI want from us there?"

"There's..." Wymack looks around as if for inspiration of words, and Andrew thinks this is the first time he's ever seen him look hesitant. It makes his heart beat faster. "They need us for questioning. There's been—a case. About Nathaniel Wesninski."

Confused noises ring out, but all Andrew hears is the pained noise Kevin makes, because that's exactly what his insides feel like: like metal that's melting way too fast, bubbling and hot. Andrew stares at his panicked expression and knows he's already lost.

"I'm not. I'm Nathaniel."

"Kevin," he says, clenching his fists lest he lash out again, "Speak."

The team looks from him to Kevin.

"Andrew?" Renee asks, ever trying to be the calm in the storm. "Andrew, what does Kevin have to do with this?"

"It is the Moriyamas?" Allison demands. "Is that what this is about? Who the fuck is this Nathaniel Whats-his-name?"

There's a heavy silence, and Andrew's not sure if they're asking him or Kevin for answers. It doesn't matter. He stares at Kevin, and Kevin stares back. There's contemplation on his face, accompanied by a dread he's never seen on him before.

"I..." Kevin begins, then hesitates.

Andrew wants to smash his face in.

Wymack looks at Kevin and runs a hand over his tired face. "Look, kid, if you know something, speak up. We're all foxes here—none of us will peep a word about anything off this bus."

Kevin shakes his head, but speaks regardless. "Nathaniel is—he's—"

"Neil," Aaron says, and it's unexpected enough that even Andrew feels a glimmer of surprise. "It's Neil, isn't it? We all know he's been hiding shit—he changed his age, his looks. Who says he didn't change his name too? And it's a bit convenient, isn't it? Neil disappears and oh look, a few hours later there's a call from the FBI about some Nathaniel."

Renee looks to Kevin for confirmation.

Kevin takes a deliberate breath.

Then, slowly, he nods his head.

"Nathaneil Wesninski was a boy I first met when I was twelve, nine years ago."