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They miss the moment because they’re playing.
Andrew comes off the court to the text, and he grabs Neil by the front of his jersey before he can shower, and they get in a cab, and they go to the airport, and they’re on the next plane out.
Neil asks him what he’s feeling, and Andrew is annoyed, because usually Neil just knows. (Actually, he’s annoyed, because he doesn’t fucking know what he’s feeling, and he would like Neil to tell him).
He looks at his hands, still shaking as he clasps them in his lap on the airplane, and thinks that there was a time his self-revulsion was so strong that the thought of touching a child with these hands, of touching his brother’s child with these hands, would be unforgivable.
Neil inserts his hand between Andrew’s, and Andrew lets him, and Andrew thinks, so many things have changed.
They’ve already missed Katelyn and Aaron at the hospital. With their late start, the layover, and the time difference, it’s already evening again by the time they land. Aaron and Kate are home now, and tired, and Andrew and Neil stand outside the door, and Andrew is breathing too quickly.
Andrew knocks, Aaron opens the door looking flushed, and Aaron makes them sanitize their hands in the doorway, and Kate is standing just inside the foyer, and Kate is smiling softly, and Andrew is looking and looking and looking at the tiny bundle she is holding close to her chest.
“Andrew, Neil,” Kate says, nodding at them both. She looks tired, but she looks proud. “Meet your niece.”
Your niece .
Instinctually, they both lean in, and the little face that meets them looks more like soft dough than human, but then she opens her eyes, and they’re hazel, and Andrew feels a lump in his throat, and Neil takes his hand.
“Hi, baby,” Andrew says, very quietly, in a voice he has never used before. Neil grips his hand, tight.
“Come out of the doorway, morons,” Aaron says, and Andrew glares, and Andrew lets his brother usher them in.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Kate says earnestly, passing the baby smoothly to Aaron. “But I’m going to lie down, and go sleep forever.”
Aaron kisses her and says goodnight, and Andrew cannot look away from the little face in Aaron’s arms. Katelyn hugs Neil, and waves warmly at Andrew, and she disappears up the stairs, and Andrew is still looking at his niece’s incredibly tiny features.
From his peripherals, Andrew sees Aaron look back at him, sees him follow Andrew’s gaze.
“Do you want to hold her?” Aaron asks, with no pressure, and because there’s no pressure, Andrew really thinks about it. Do I?
He is surprised to discover that he does, that he wants to hold this precious being, this pure being, this little brand new being who is his niece . He looks at his hands though, and the old dark thing perks up, and he realizes he can’t. Not yet.
“Can I?” Neil says, and it’s only the slight flick of his eyes towards Andrew that betrays that this is Neil smoothly stepping in.
“Yeah, sure,” Aaron agrees easily, and Andrew thinks absurdly, there is no way college Aaron would ever have handed his child willingly to Neil.
Aaron passes the baby to Neil, and Neil holds the baby, and there is a moment where Andrew wishes he was any kind of artist, so that he could capture Neil, all rough edges and jagged scars and fierce eyes, holding the baby like he has never been anything but softness. Neil bows his head down, and the baby tilts her head up, and they share that special intensity of eye contact only babies can manage, and something pangs in Andrew that he can’t quite name.
The baby lifts her little chubby hand, and she places it gently against Neil’s scarred cheek, and then something is happening to Neil and it’s horrible .
Neil has dropped into some horror of his – his eyes are blank, his face is pale, he is sweating too much – and Andrew is flipping through the folder in his mind that is Neil, and he doesn’t understand. What’s happening?
Neil’s breath is getting ragged, and Andrew looks at the little hand on the scars that don’t pain Neil anymore, that haven’t pained him in years, and he thinks, has he gone back with Lola? Is he in Baltimore? Does he know where he is?
And then he stops trying to figure it out, because Neil is about to pass out, and he is holding a baby.
“Aaron, take the baby.”
Aaron responds to the urgency in his tone, even if he looks as hopelessly confused as Andrew feels. The moment the baby is out of his arms, Neil is up and across the room, is out the door, is outside.
Andrew – a expert in Neil’s favoured trauma response of get the fuck out – is not far behind, but still, by the time he gets out the door, Neil is halfway down the block and almost out of sight.
Andrew tries to weigh the value of backtracking to the garage to get his car against the risk of taking his eyes off of flight-risk Neil Josten for a single second – but Neil makes the decision for him when, instead of continuing down the block, he falls roughly to his knees. Andrew watches his shoulders shake, watches him dry-heave , and then Andrew is walking very, very fast.
It feels like an hour to get to him. It feels like a second.
“Neil?”
Neil looks hollow and nauseous and haunted, and Andrew feels very cold.
“Abram,” he says, firmer, and Neil looks at him, face anguished.
“Tell me what happened,” Andrew orders, and he thinks, it has to be Baltimore, hasn’t it? What else could it be? What else am I missing?
Neil looks at him with that horrible, caved-in expression, and chokes on saying, “He did this to a child. I was a child when he did this to me, Andrew.”
And then Andrew understands, and then Andrew is so cold he burns.
Neil’s abuse under parental care is an old rage for Andrew, one he keeps on simmer. Andrew knows intimately the unique horror of abuse starting so young for you that you can be taught nothing is wrong. Andrew knows intimately the sick scald of recontextualizing what happened to you as wrong, of unlearning what you had to let yourself believe in order to survive, of feeling the ensuing rage and learning to live with it.
Andrew knows that what happened to him, what happened to Neil, is depraved and deeply wrong, and it’s only been years of therapy which have given him the possibility to let these truths simmer, rather than boil so violently they burn him.
Andrew should’ve considered that Neil “I’m Fine” Josten (Neil “I don’t need therapy” Josten) has never stopped to let himself feel the ugliness of what was done to him in his youth.
Neil is shaking, and Neil is sweating, and Neil’s rucking up his shirt to jab at his scars, and under the street light, Andrew sees the jagged topography of torture he’s learned by touch.
“I was a child,” Neil whispers, and his hand is hovering over a small scar over his solar plexus, and Andrew doesn’t know if he actually wants to know the answer when he asks,
“How old were you? For that one?”
Neil swallows. “I don’t know,” he says, and his voice is barely more than breath. “I’ve never known. This one is from before I could remember anything.”
The simmer in Andrew surges back to scalding, and he carefully breathes it down. Not for the first time, Andrew wishes he were the one who killed Nathan Wesninski.
Andrew has never seen Neil’s face like this – open, vulnerable, agonized. He looks young. He looks so young.
“Children should be safe,” Neil says, voice broken, and it’s taking Andrew everything he’s got to not boil over.
There under the streetlamp, Andrew sees the line up of children who should’ve been safe, who should’ve been safe goddamnit. He sees Neil, and then he sees Aaron, and then he sees Kevin, and then the rest of the Foxes join the circle, and it’s been awhile since he let himself think about what happened to all of them, and how young they were when it started for each of them.
Andrew reaches for Neil, and puts his palm on Neil’s shoulder. Neil leans into his touch, even now.
“Aaron is not going to hurt this baby,” Andrew says, and waits for Neil to nod.
Andrew squeezes his shoulder. “Katelyn is not going to hurt this baby.”
Neil’s second nod is quicker in coming.
“I will never, never hurt this child,” Andrew says, and Neil must hear the vow in his voice, because he focuses his eyes on Andrew, and this time his nod is firm and sure.
“And you will not hurt this child, Neil Josten,” Andrew emphasizes. “You know you will not.”
Neil’s face spasms in pain.
“Neil–”
“Don’t let me, Andrew,” he says, too earnest, too scared. For a moment, he looks the way he does sometimes, when the color of his eyes and the color of his hair in the mirror make him feel like he might be someone else.
“I won’t,” Andrew says, and it’s another vow, and Neil stills, and then he exhales so jaggedly it sounds like a sob.
Andrew moves his hand from Neil’s shoulder to his hand. Neil lets Andrew help him up to his feet.
Neil is covered in a thin sheet of cold sweat, and shivering hard. His feet are bare and bleeding, and Andrew thinks, idiot , and then he feels surreally grateful that the house they’re going back to is both heated and full of doctors.
Just before they go in, Neil turns to him and makes his own vow.
“Nobody is going to touch this baby. Ever.”
Andrew looks at him, intentionally blandly. “You say that like it’s not a given.”
And then finally, finally, Neil grins – fierce, bright, savage – and Andrew is so relieved he has to brace his hand beside the door to keep himself steady.
“Ready to go back in?”
“Yes,” Neil says.
They open the door, and Aaron cracks an eye open from the armchair as they come back in. He lifts an eyebrow at Andrew – everything okay?
Andrew nods. Yes.
“Can I take the baby again?” Neil asks as he comes into the living room, and Aaron passes her back without hesitation, and something clangs in Andrew’s chest again.
Neil holds the baby, and this time, Andrew makes himself think about the uncanny resemblance between Neil and his father. He makes himself think that Neil is probably now nearly, if not exactly, the age Nathan Wesninski was when Neil was born.
He looks at Neil, and he watches the careful way he holds his newborn niece. He watches the softness of Neil’s hands, the gentleness of his face, the fierceness of his eyes which say, nobody is going to hurt you, I won’t let them.
He sees again in his mind’s eye the children they were. He sees the ghosts of themselves as children, of their friends as children, and in his mind’s eye, they are all holding hands around this room, around this child who is pure, who is precious, who is new. They form a circle of protection, and Andrew thinks,
We are not who we come from. We will not let ourselves be.