#so basically..... kevin & andrew were ravens the upperclassmen were part of an unsuccessful team of foxes and neil dealt w his dad in a who

[ravenvsfox]

hello, i love ur fics! can u write something where neil uses the "do u play exy bc ur a keeper" or something like that pick up line to andrew in front of the foxes maybe hes drunk idk i think itd be super funny xx

(so uhhhh I made this not funny at all and also an au but hey! it’s a thing!!)

Neil’s blearily grateful to be wedged into the dark embroidered fabric of a low-slung couch, pushed away from the sweat and throb of the dance floor. He feels enough like a raw vein without the club sucking the blood from him.

He knows he’s drunk because the blue lights are making him see ghosts in strangers’ faces. When he speaks it feels like he has a marble tucked into each cheek, just enough to garble his words. He knows that his legs won’t come with him if he stands, and it scares him.

Dan and Matt are crooning into each others’ ears, rocking to the sugary remix overhead, stacked next to him on the couch. He wonders how long he’s been swallowing shots to drown the taste of the last shot, trying to raise his pulse, trying to feel something. He opens his mouth to ask for the time and realizes, unsettled, that he’d asked less than a minute ago. He makes an aborted sound, smothering the stupid question before it can find oxygen and catch.

His friends notice anyway. Dan breaks away from Matt’s mouth at the noise, both of them gasping, adjusting to life on land.

“You look fucked,” Dan tells him. Neil nods seriously. He can taste so much salt. He’s drowned it in tequila and limes and rum and ice but his mouth still tastes savoury and sick.

“You need to get out of here?” Matt offers. Neil zeroes in on where Matt is rubbing circles into Dan’s bare thigh with his thumb. He knows they don’t really want to leave. He knows what their kindness tastes like because he’s gorged himself on it. He shakes his head, but it feels like his brain sloshes one way and his skull the other.

“I need a cigarette,” Neil says. He puts all his focus into standing without knocking over empties. Matt reaches out to steady him anyways but Neil pulls back hard, overcorrecting and falling into the wall. He stays there for too long, face pressed to the dark wall-paper, swallowing over and over again. He feels along the wall, liking the way it holds him up.

He finds himself on a short staircase down to the exit, and his feet and eyes are attached on a string. He can’t stop looking down because he can’t stop moving, and he doesn’t trust his body to do what he asks unless he’s watching, holding it accountable.

He’s struggling to light up before the door’s even open, hands shaking, lighter circling and sparking and coughing out in cycles.

Someone’s hand swims into view, and Neil watches his cigarette come alive like it’s happening to someone else. There’s a sharp-featured face and a pink mouth and moonlit hair and smoke peeling out of a mouth when it breathes.

“Thanks,” Neil mutters. The face doesn’t respond. Neil gives him a rare second look, squinting. “Did I thank you out loud?”

“You did,” the face says simply. His voice is cool and deep; it reminds Neil of cold patches in open water, and he gets phantom goosebumps.

Neil takes a drag of his cigarette. He sees his mother’s hair on the pillow next to him when he closes his eyes, and when he opens them, the stranger looks the same somehow: comforting, smoky, eaten by darkness, a good memory made painful.

It’s Andrew Minyard, he realizes suddenly. It’s the best goalkeeper in the world, smoking vacantly outside of a random seedy club in the middle of the season. The alcohol pitches and tries to come up his throat. Neil remembers that Minyard’s life intersected with Kevin’s somewhere in the timeline that he’d made himself put together half a dozen years ago. He remembers wishing for a way to be hidden but also to have Exy, his most treasured, unattainable obsession.

He looks at Andrew again, this time with recognition needling him so much that it hurts. He drops his cigarette on the ground and walks stiltedly away, feeling that old wish effect him more than the booze ever had. He keeps seeing steely brown eyes and that puzzling mouth even though he’s facing the other direction now.

Before everything, before he’d met Dan interning as a coach at his university, before Matt and Allison and Renee and Seth had become the only social circle he’d ever had, before he’d scared them and left them and killed his father, he’d thought of Kevin Day like a key, and Andrew like a keyring.

He’d watched them in black and red and scowls from afar and thought, things could’ve been different.

He stumbles back into the club with his past trying to introduce itself to the forefront of his brain, his eyes glued to his friends. They’re all bunched on the couches now, craning their necks for him, and things feel easier now that he’s focused on something other than the alcohol for a minute. He finds his way back through the masses, steadying himself on the arm of the couch as soon as he’s near enough.

“There you are, Christ Neil,” Matt says. “We were about to send out the world’s drunkest search party.”

“It’s fine,” Neil says. He wants to say more but he doesn’t know how to articulate that a professional athlete and former Raven just lit his cigarette for him, and he certainly doesn’t know how to explain why the thought of it makes him sick to his stomach.

“He’s fine,” Allison repeats. “He needs another drink.”

Matt goes to respond, but his mouth goes suddenly slack and his hand claps automatically to Dan’s arm. Neil’s throat closes up. “You’ll never guess who just walked in.”

All eyes swing to the door but Neil closes his, feeling the room tilt angrily around him, trying not to listen to the whispers spreading like a disease.

“No way, the monster?” Dan says. “Haven’t seen him since we played the Ravens in senior year. God, he’s hell in goal, remember?”

“He’s hell everywhere,” Seth says snidely.

“Maybe we should evacuate,” Allison says consideringly. “He’s an unpredictable little fucker.”

“I heard he stopped taking his meds when he made court,” Matt says. “—And he hasn’t said a word since.”

“He has,” Neil says unthinkingly, mouth cottony dry.

“What?”

“Nothing. He— nothing.”

“Oh,” Allison laughs. “I forgot that you were like— an Exy groupie.”

“I’m not,” Neil says firmly. He finally gives in and looks back towards the entrance, and he sees flickers of pale blond hair over a black ensemble. He feels himself sliding off of the arm of the couch and onto the cushion. Renee is a gentle pressure at his side.

“I think it’s good,” Renee says. “That you’re defending him. I have the feeling that he needs friends.”

“Maybe if he didn’t look like a serial killer,” Allison muses.

“Maybe if he didn’t act like one,” Seth agrees, and they exchange a mean, knowing glance. Neil always hates it when they agree.

“Anyways Neil,” Dan says pointedly. “We’re playing truth or dare, and you can’t get out of it.” Neil rolls his eyes and she flicks him in the face. “Whose turn was it?”

“Seth’s,” Matt tells her, and Seth succinctly tells him to fuck off.

They jump back into the rhythm of the game that they’d started while Neil was away, and he tries to focus on anything but the phantom panic in his stomach. The memory and the alcohol don’t want to coexist inside of him.

The group cycles past an uncooperative Seth and a sweet truth from Renee. Neil watches Andrew, a complex shadow on the opposite side of the room. He slips in among a group of people jostling around a table and Neil looks hastily down when a head turns and he narrowly avoids Kevin Day’s eye.

He recognizes the group now, Kevin and Andrew and Aaron, the infamous duo and the twin who didn’t make the cut. There’s someone else too, tall and dark and visibly enthusiastic.

“Neil,” Matt says abruptly. “You’ve gotta go try to pick him up.”

“Who?” Neil asks woozily. His focus is ice and Andrew and Kevin are salt.

“Minyard. Of fucking course. Don’t tell me you’re not in love with the way he plays at least, Neil.”

“No,” Neil replies, agitated, rubbing his own arm and feeling the weight of his scars beneath his sleeve.

“Uh, yes,” he says. “I dare you.”

“I choose truth,” Neil says petulantly, and Allison snorts.

“That’s new for you.”

“I’m not doing it,” Neil reiterates. He’s drunk enough that he would, though. He’s twitchy and unfiltered and he wants to know why Andrew did something for him without asking for anything in return.

“Then you lose,” Dan tells him. Neil glares at her. The club seems to get louder around them, an ocean reacting to a charged sky.

“Fine,” he says, and makes to get up with his glass limbs and his jelly focus. Somewhere in his sweaty palms he remembers to be terrified that Kevin might remember his face. Neil’s stopped putting in the effort to dye his hair since the butcher died. It’s grown out auburn, darker at the tips, curling around his neck. He still puts in brown contacts, scared of the ice in his own eyes.

Matt tugs him down. His expression is gleeful when he says, “wait, wait. We’ve got to give you your script.”

“Script,” Neil repeats, incredulous. Dan starts to reply but then Matt ropes her in close, whispering in her ear until something surprises a laugh out of her. She takes his phone and passes it along to Neil, grinning.

“We’ll be here, if he tries anything.”

“Fine,” he hears himself say again. He doesn’t know why he’s agreeing to this. He doesn’t know why he can’t disconnect the smoke on his tongue with Andrew’s face, soft but still in the light from his cigarette. He’s not used to wanting anything except adrenaline, but its possible Andrew’s just a version of the same thing.

He pushes through the crowd with the phone clenched in his hand, dizzying colours flashing over Andrew’s bowed head, his brother’s a shocking mirror across the table. Neil can hear his own breathing, curiously loud in the thunder and rain of music and voices.

He stops a couple of feet away from the four of them, eyeing Kevin’s tattoo and feeling very very foolish. He paces the last handful of steps closer and feels their eyes land on him like a coffin door closing. He looks down at the phone in his fist, trying to find meaning in the glaringly bright screen.

“Do you play Exy,” Neil starts, watching despairingly as Andrew’s interest fizzles out. “Because you’re a keeper.” He turns to go immediately, suddenly uninterested in a response, throat burning with humiliation. He should’ve read the note first. He shouldn’t have engaged. He shouldn’t have made friends with a bunch of malicious former Foxes. He can hear someone laughing in Andrew’s group, something about boys being too scared to even wait around for rejection.

“You,” he hears. Neil stops short. He breathes through his nose and rolls his shoulders.

“Don’t worry,” he says over his shoulder. “It was a dare. I didn’t come looking for a ‘you’re welcome’.”

“I wasn’t offering one,” Andrew says. Then, “come here.”

Neil glances back at his assembled friends without really seeing them, like feeling for the shape of your phone in your pocket. He weighs his options as best he can through the gauze of alcohol and exhaustion, and returns unsteadily to the group clustered around Andrew. He knows it doesn’t make sense for them to be assembled around someone as explosive as Andrew, but he seems to manufacture his own gravity.

Andrew regards him for a long moment. He’s pristine on the outside, like a stainless steel fridge with all manner of rot and vitality inside.

“I know who you are,” he tells Neil calmly. The tall boy titters nervously. The fine hairs on Neil’s neck stand straight up.

“You too,” Neil says as clearly as he can. It still comes out dirty. He can’t keep his past out of his voice tonight.

“Lots of people know who I am,” Andrew says, uninterested, and Neil gets a knick of pure anger. He wants Andrew to care.

“I’m sure,” Neil says. “I’d reckon that not quite as many know about the murder of your mother. Or about the real reason for your armbands.” He’s blowing smoke on that last one, but he enjoys the way Andrew’s face leaps, for a minute, barely able to strangle his own feelings before they get loose.

“Nathaniel,” Andrew tries, vindictive and crystal clear. Kevin’s gaze snaps in his direction, and Neil ducks his head, turns, trying to be lost again like he always is.

Andrew catches his arm in a shockingly strong grip, and Neil wrenches it around. He gets an inch of surprise, but Andrew outmatches him for strength and clearheadedness. He finds himself pinned to the bar, the room swimming but Andrew fixed.

“Pretty convenient that Tilda’s side of the car went non-functional and yours was untouched. Were you even trying to cover it up?” Neil hisses.

“Who are you,” Andrew says, jostling him hard so that his shoulder digs painfully into the lip of the bar.

“I thought you knew?” Neil mocks. He’s running on fumes, using every un-loaded gun in his arsenal until he finds a bullet. He half hopes that Andrew will knock him out before he finds one.

“I’ve seen your face. The runaway killer. You were on the news for patricide,” he says the last word like he’s tasting it and daintily spitting it out again.

He doesn’t bother denying it, Andrew’s eyes are too clever, even in the slur of the club. They’re all murderers here, anyway. “Two years ago,” he says instead. “A grainy photo on the Maryland news two years ago.”

“I do not forget faces.”

They stare at each other, Neil breathing hard, Andrew’s hands flexed tight in Neil’s shirt. He spots the club’s security shoving their way towards them over Andrew’s shoulder, looking grim and important.

“Let go,” Neil says, and Andrew does, instantly. He gives himself a moment to be impressed and then he’s being hauled up by a heavy hand on his bicep.

“You guys going to continue to destroy property?” He understands dimly that Andrew must have broken something on the bar with Neil’s body.

“Might,” Andrew says, and Neil’s mouth twitches. The hands get tighter, and he lets himself be manhandled towards the exit without digging his heels in too much.

“No way,” he hears, and when he looks up he sees Matt’s face on the outskirts of a distracted crowd of dancers, flushed drunk and obviously horrified. He spots Allison laughing into Renee’s shoulder just beyond him, the whole group navigating the line between amusement and horror. Renee gives him a thumbs up, and Neil follows her gaze to where Andrew is already looking at him.

They’re dragged the rest of the way out of the bar and deposited on the curb, and the whole affair is ridiculous: their utter silence and stiff compliance, security’s over-performing, the way the lingering smell of smoke calms Neil down so much that he sinks into the wall as soon as arms are gone from around his body.

His head lolls towards Andrew when he hears the twist and spark of a lighter a minute later. Andrew looks at him and then out into the street when he extends a second cigarette in Neil’s direction. Neil shakes his head, mostly to clear it.

“I just like the smell. Thanks, though,” he mumbles.

Andrew accepts this, tucks the cigarette back into the pack, and leans up against the wall beside Neil.

“Nathaniel,” Andrew starts, not cocked to hurt this time, but Neil still flinches.

“Neil. Not—“ God, he’s still drunk. “That’s not my name anymore.”

“Neil,” Andrew corrects smoothly, blowing smoke just right so that the wind carries it into Neil’s face. “You’re welcome.”

#im falling asleep so there might be mistakes man what can u do #aftg #andreil #au #tfc fanfic #prompt #mine #murder mention #so basically..... kevin & andrew were ravens the upperclassmen were part of an unsuccessful team of foxes and neil dealt w his dad in a who #sorry i.. butchered ur prompt I was trying to figure out the logistics of it and this was the only way it clicked for me #Anonymous #ask