Chapter Text
“Aaron found someone,” Nicky announces, his head shoved in through the only-just-large-enough gap of the door in its frame. He has the two-way radio clenched tightly in his hand. “He’s bringing him here.”
“Willingly?” Andrew asks.
Nicky’s face creases momentarily into a grimace. “Aaron didn’t sound the friendliest.”
This isn’t news. It’s also not illuminating. Theoretically, Aaron would warn them if it was one of those Raven dickbags, but the possibilities still run the spectrum between ax murderer and Ghandi. Whatever it is, they’ll deal with it when it gets here. Andrew nods and asks, “How far out?”
“Maybe five minutes.”
“Grab Kevin,” Andrew instructs. “Have Aaron bring our guest to the lobby.”
It’s more like three minutes. Andrew has only just stepped into the front of the abandoned daycare center they’d claimed for themselves, up onto a chair, and settled cross-legged on the reception counter when the door swings open with a loud, gregarious ding. A guy steps through, his face blank but his body tense. Andrew barely gets a look at the dingy beanie on his head, at the few shiny, bright strands of hair escaping around the edges, before the guy stumbles further into the room, propelled at the end of Aaron’s bright pink baseball bat. Perhaps “guest” isn’t the right word, then. Andrew returns to scanning, taking in the baggy black cargo pants cinched severely at the guy’s waist by a brown belt. There are a few layers of shirts--something long-sleeved and frayed around the wrists, a t-shirt over that, a dumb fleece vest over that. It’s awful, but. High fashion is hard to come by these days.
It’s not until Andrew looks back up that he notices the eyes. And freezes. Two vivid blue rings surround pupils dilated by the abrupt drop in light inside of the building. There’s a wariness in them, a defiance. Danger.
“Your name,” Andrew demands.
The eyes narrow. Andrew only notices because he’s occupied with the density of the eyelashes ringing them.
“Neil,” the guy says grudgingly.
“Hello, Neil,” Andrew says with insincere cheer. “To what do we owe this pleasure?”
“Oh,” Neil says, his voice dry. “Just a run-of-the-mill abduction by your doppelganger.”
Andrew’s eyes want to narrow. Or widen. He’s not sure, but he doesn’t find out. He doesn’t get a chance to, really--doesn’t get a chance to do much of anything before the door behind the receptionist’s desk swings open and Kevin steps through it. Andrew spares him a quick glance, then another when he sees the look on Kevin’s face.
Kevin says--breathes, gasps, whispers--”Nathaniel?”
Nathaniel. Wesninski. Kevin’s said the name so many times that Andrew places it immediately. He whips his head back around just in time to see the flash of metal appear in Neil-Nathaniel’s hand and the first spill of blood onto the floor as the blade slices sure and deep up the guy’s arm.
Kevin’s, “Andrew,” is anguished, but Andrew is already moving, sliding clumsily off the counter, paying precious seconds for the affectation of his casual position, and lunging towards Neil-Nathaniel as he transfers the knife to his blood-slick hand and slices, much less steadily, into the veins of his other arm.
Fuck. Fuck.
Andrew knocks the knife out of the guy’s slippery hand. It skids, spinning, across the laminate of the floor. He clamps his hands around the deeper cut, the six-inch-long one, but Neil-Nathaniel fights him. Their feet slip in the gathering blood and they go down together, wrestling for control over whether Neil-Nathaniel’s blood stays in him or keeps sluicing onto the floor. Deep red stains are spreading onto Andrew’s shirt. A few flung splatters ping against his face. A bit of the dank, coppery taste soaks into his tongue. His heart pounds in his ears but his movements stay deliberate and methodical, one hand clenched in a vice around the cut, the other knocking away Neil’s attacks.
No one else has moved.
“Aaron,” Andrew snaps. “For fuck’s sake.”
Maybe it’s the extra hands that finally subdue Neil-Nathaniel. Maybe it’s the blood loss. Maybe he just gives up, gives in, sags back against Nicky’s chest and allows Aaron to fashion a desperate tourniquet out of the light jacket he strips off his own back. Andrew doesn’t think so, though--the shadow of a fight is still in Neil-Nathaniel’s eyes when they flutter shut.
.::.
“If he’s gonna live, he’ll live,” Aaron says, shrugging.
Kevin glares. “Don’t be flippant.”
“I’m not. But I can’t transfuse him and we don’t know how much blood he lost.”
“Could we…” Nicky starts, but falters when he doesn’t seem to have a destination in mind.
“We don’t know his blood type. Even if we did, where would we get the blood? I stitched him up and put him on that saline we found, but that’s as good as it’s going to get.”
“He has to live.”
“Well, it’s not up to me.”
“He’s my friend.”
“Didn’t look like a friend,” Aaron says snidely. “One look at your face and he--”
“He’s the key.”
“That’s a fucking myth.”
“It’s not. It’s real. And he’s the key.”
“To some legendary weapon? This idiot?”
“Him and his mother.”
“I didn’t see a mother.”
“But he’s going to live, right?”
“Maybe.”
“Yes.”
“What if he doesn’t wake up?”
“We don’t really need him awake, do we? If he’s stuck in a coma, whatever. Harder to transport, but still good for Kevin’s imaginary armory.”
“That’s awful, Aaron. Don’t say that.”
“I’m the one who sewed this asshole up.”
“He’s not an asshole.”
“Shut up,” Andrew interrupts. “All of you. Get out.”
Once the bickering fades out down the hall, Andrew is left with nothing but the sounds of their patient’s shallow breathing. Neil-Nathaniel is still grubby, his face smeared with drying streaks of blood. With the hat off, Andrew can tell that the hair is auburn, deep and red and in need of a good washing. The blue eyes are hidden behind thin, bruised-looking eyelids. His skin has paled beneath his tan, blending alarmingly into the clean, white bandages wrapped halfway up his left arm.
Yeah, Andrew knows who this is. Nathaniel Wesninski. Or, no—he’d introduced himself as Neil. The least Andrew can do is honor that. Neil is the only son of the infamous warlord Nathan Wesninski, the legend of whom lives long after the man. As the story goes, Nathan saw the writing on the apocalyptic wall before the world went to shit and built himself a weapon, something so big and so dangerous that only its wielder would be guaranteed to survive.
The further they all descended into desperation, into the realization that their old way of life was not coming back, however fucked up it had been, the more fervent the whispers of the Wesninski weapon had become. The sole surviving Wesninskis--Mary, who Andrew had heard described as everything from a brain surgeon to a biochemist to a madwoman, and her son, Nathaniel, perpetually aged at fifteen despite having been taken on the run almost a decade ago—were campfire stories, the kind of creative lie you savor because the impossible is better than reality.
Except, Kevin had actually known them.
Kevin talks about Nathaniel all the time, with a complicated mixture of guilt and awe in his voice as he recounts the boy he’d known, the boy he had played with at gatherings of the rich and powerful and awful.There's a fierce pride in Kevin when he talks about Neil's triumphs, but it never lasts long--it's always dimmed by what comes next: slurred, drunken halting descriptions of the public and private beatings Neil suffered, the impact of hands and belts and knives. Before Riko there was Neil's father, a cruel sadist, and a woman named Lola. The way Kevin says her name makes Andrew's skin crawl. The violence haunts Kevin, though Andrew has never been able to tell if the specter is Neil's helplessness or Kevin's own.
Neil had lived with Kevin and Riko at the Nest for two long, bloody years before his mother grabbed him and ran. Kevin had been fourteen or fifteen when their new friend moved in; Riko a year older and Nathaniel maybe thirteen. Andrew refers to this period of time as Riko’s experimental years. Hormones and rage and daddy issues had molded him into something sadistic and uninhibitedly cruel. Kevin had borne a little of the brunt of Riko’s temper, but it was Nathaniel and another kid, Jean, who’d received the lion’s share of Riko’s bloody experimentation. The specifics are things Andrew has learned only in vague, miserable snatches when Kevin is at his drunkest and most morose. He supposes he shouldn’t be surprised that this was Neil’s reaction to seeing Kevin again.
Obsessively thinking about Neil—about his motivations, his intentions, his connection to the weapon, whatever it may be—isn’t going to get Andrew anywhere. Not until they know if Neil is going to wake up. Huffing quietly, Andrew pushes off of the wall and grabs a clean-looking cloth from one of the cabinets, dipping it in a bucket of water and using the damp fabric to carefully wipe the blood and dirt off of Neil’s face. He can’t do anything about the hair, not really, not yet, but he gently scrubs everything he can reach, even rubbing at the dried flakes between Neil’s fingers and under his nails.
Satisfied with his work, Andrew drags a chair over. He slumps into it, props a booted foot against the side rail of the bed, and tips it back onto two legs to wait. They’ve zip-tied Neil to the bed, just in case, but Andrew wants to be here if (when) he wakes up. If he gives Neil enough time to plan, to adjust to his new circumstances, Andrew thinks Neil will have the edge, even if he is tied up.
.::.
It takes three days. Three full fucking days. Andrew spends as much of them as he can in the nurse’s office, waiting for Neil Wesninski to wake the fuck up.
Nicky and Kevin have hope—or confidence, or desperation, or uninformed optimism—that Neil will simply wake in the morning after a good night’s rest. He doesn’t. When Andrew rouses from a few hours of snatched sleep, his body aching, Neil hasn’t moved. The blanket they’d tucked around him is maybe a little looser, as though Neil has stirred in his sleep. Or, maybe it isn’t. Andrew had been memorizing Neil, not the drape of the blanket.
That day, he supervises the limited sponge bath Nicky gives Neil and watches Aaron take vitals and hang bags of saline. When Kevin pulls up a chair and wraps Neil’s pale hand in his own, clutching it and mumbling anguished, unintelligible things against the knuckles, Andrew shamelessly stays put and tries to make out as much as he can of the garbled appeals.
That night, something like twenty-eight hours after Neil’s spectacular attempt at martyrdom, one of his fingers twitches against the bedspread. It curls weakly, dragging silently over the rough texture of the linen. Andrew goes very still and holds his breath. The finger moves again, then crooks faintly, and then goes still again. “You’re in there,” Andrew tells the quiet room. “Stop being dramatic. Wake up.”
Neil does not wake up.
Morning on the next day dawns bright and hot, the rays slanting through the high windows of the office and heating it to just this side of uncomfortable. This time, Andrew wakes in the pile of beanbags he’s relocated from around the facility. Neil is still where they’d left him. Maybe less pale, Andrew thinks--though perhaps it’s the heat that claims credit for the color in his cheeks.
He can’t stand to watch Neil’s filthy hair get any worse, so they wash it. Andrew makes Nicky man the buckets of water while he works shampoo carefully through the oily, tangled mess of auburn. He finds three leaves and what appears to be part of a shell.
“You’re being weird about this,” Aaron says flatly. “About him.”
“Oh?”
“You’re fucking tenderly washing his hair while he’s unconscious.”
“I got tired of looking at it,” Andrew says evenly.
“No one asked you to look at it. You’re in here all the time.”
“Someone has to watch him.”
“No, someone doesn’t,” Aaron says. “He’s zip-tied to the bed. And if you want him watched all the time, we could take shifts.”
“We saw what happened when Kevin walked in,” Andrew points out. “Do you really want a repeat of that?”
Aaron scowls. “Or is this about the way he looks?”
“Unconscious?” Andrew asks. “Underfed? Anemic?”
“You are impossible to talk to,” Aaron says. He throws his hands up in exasperation and leaves, shooting one last pointed look at Andrew on his way out the door.
“Don’t listen to him,” Andrew tells their patient. “You’re not anything special. Very average.”
It’s possible that Neil’s eyes move, that the thin skin of his eyelids ripples with it, but Andrew can’t be sure. What he wants, what Andrew really wants, is for Neil’s eyes to open again so that he can see the color. It’s almost neon in his imagination, a pure blue lit from within, a fucking bug-light that lures you and then destroys you.
When Kevin appears later to continue his vigil, he has a half-full bottle of vodka in one hand and two scavenged coffee mugs in the other.
“Tell me,” Andrew demands as Kevin starts unscrewing the bottle cap. “Everything.”
“I mostly have,” Kevin says cagily.
“You have mostly self-flagellated about the past and the fate of a long-lost childhood co-hostage. Now he is here, he apparently has some very extreme thoughts about you, and I will not ask you nicely again. Tell me everything.”
Kevin takes a generous sip and settles in to tell the story with his mug of vodka clenched tightly in one hand and Neil’s fingers cradled gently in the other. It bothers Andrew, a little, that Neil is being touched without his permission. It’s the least of the liberties they’ve taken, though, and it seems to bring Kevin some comfort.
If Kevin moves above the wrist, Andrew decides, he’ll put a stop to it.
“I think you know pretty much everything about his family,” Kevin says. “Most people do by now. They were part of a circle of rich assholes that kept living the good life well after the dirt died. Friends with the Moriyamas. When things kept getting worse, they made some kind of deal. Everyone knew the Wesninskis were working on something they called the Advantage.”
“The weapon.”
“The weapon,” Kevin confirms with a sharp nod. The movement seems to remind him of the vodka in his mug. He takes a generous swallow. “I believe Nathaniel was meant as collateral. Something valuable the Wesninskis would have to come back for.”
“His mother,” Andrew muses.
“She snatched him right out from under everyone’s noses. The timing was good. Nathaniel was getting older, and, well...” Kevin waves towards Neil’s beautiful, immobile face, a ‘you know’ gesture. Andrew does know. He understands the appeal. He understands what some men will do when they want something.
“Riko,” Andrew supplies. Kevin has never suggested before that Riko could be predatory in that way, but the implication isn’t surprising.
Kevin’s nod is grim. “Riko. The Master was so angry when they discovered Nathaniel was gone. The next time I saw Riko, he looked more like Nathaniel than himself.”
Beaten. He means beaten, bruised, and bloody, the way Riko’s things so often are. Andrew says flatly, “And Riko passed on the message to you and Jean, I assume.”
Kevin grimaces but keeps his eyes trained on Neil’s hand, on the precise path his thumb is traveling between and over the knuckles.
“That doesn’t explain why Neil did this.”
“I never helped him. I don’t know if I could have, but I didn’t even try.”
“You think he’s holding a grudge against you for not taking your turn as a punching bag? Why wouldn’t he try to kill you instead?”
Miserably, Kevin says, “Riko and I were. Older. Closer. Like brothers, or Riko’s approximation of them.”
“You were on Team Riko.”
“I was on Team Keeping My Mouth Shut. I didn’t even try, Andrew.”
“Don’t. You were kids.”
“I was sixteen.”
“Kids,” Andrew repeats firmly. “You think he thinks you’re like Riko.”
“Like Riko. With Riko. We were--we were always together. Always.”
Because Riko wouldn’t let Kevin out of his sight, Andrew would wager. Because it would have pleased Riko to make Kevin complicit, to destroy any shred of self-worth he had. Because men like Riko love an audience.
“Did you take part?”
Kevin blanches. Andrew doesn’t press. He wouldn’t learn anything that would make it worth it for Kevin to relive that shit.
“We will figure it out,” Andrew says. “He will see that we are different.”
“Am I different?” Kevin asks morosely.
“Maybe not,” Andrew says. “But you have choices now. Make good ones.”
Andrew kicks Kevin out after his second mug of vodka, before he can start weeping on Neil’s bandages. After Kevin leaves, though, Andrew stays put for a while, his chair pulled up to Neil’s bed, his socked feet propped on the mattress.
“Wake up,” Andrew tells him. “Dying would be stupid.”
Neil doesn’t so much as flutter an eyelash.
“Wake up,” Andrew says again, quietly. “I want to meet you.”
.::.
Day three feels different. There’s more tension. Aaron’s movements are jerky as he changes out Neil’s IV. Nicky’s sporadic pep talks sound a little more desperate and a little less believable. Kevin drifts through the building with all the presence of a ghost.
How many more nights of “good rest” could Neil need? If he’s going to wake up, it has to be soon. They can’t keep him alive on a saline drip forever.
Andrew stays planted next to Neil’s bed with a handful of scavenged juice boxes and watches him aggressively, almost a dare: I dare you to stay unconscious, asshole.
Neil takes the dare. He lies still, breathes steadily, doesn’t react when Kevin swings by mid-morning to gently brush Neil’s hair off his forehead and whisper something Andrew imagines is half supplication, half apology into his ear.
He’s still unconscious in the late morning, when Andrew drags Nicky in to stand watch so that he can go take a piss and grab some pretzels. He is unconscious when Andrew falls asleep slumped in his chair and wakes up an undetermined time later feeling too hot and stiff where his neck has been tilted at an awkward angle.
He is unconscious when Aaron comes by to take his vitals again, and he stays unconscious through the pointed looks Aaron gives Andrew when he takes Neil’s pulse. His pale, washed-out hand sags limply beyond Aaron’s grip.
“He’s malnourished,” Aaron says.
Andrew knows.
“The human body can go a while without food, but we don’t know how far into ‘a while’ we are.”
Andrew knows.
“Did you try slapping him?” Aaron asks.
“If he dies, he dies,” Andrew says flatly. “We are not going to help him along.”
“No, you’re just going to stand obsessive vigil until he wastes away.”
The nurse’s office has a few east-facing windows that meet the day bright and plummet the room into dusk far earlier than it has any right to. When the shadows in the corners deepen, Andrew grabs a couple of hand-crank lanterns and winds them up; one he leaves on a shelf across the room, the other on the counter next to him. The stark differences in light highlight the deepening circles under Neil’s eyes and the too-sharp lines of his cheekbones.
There’s one juice box left in his pile, so he grabs it, shoves the straw viciously through its foil target. The straw is small and hard between his lips, relinquishing only tiny sips of juice no matter how hard he sucks. He doesn’t get anywhere with the juice box any faster than he has watching Neil sleep for three days.
The shadows deepen. Andrew slurps the last bits of his juice by angling the straw into the corners. A flicker of the lanterns darkens the skin around Neil’s eyes. Or--Andrew barely has time to think the thought before Neil’s entire body stiffens. His eyes stay closed, his position unchanged, but there is undoubtedly a new tension in his shoulders, his arms, his neck. Relief surges violently through Andrew’s body, but he keeps still, the straw in his mouth now relegated to chewing, his gaze narrowly focused on Neil’s face.
Neil’s eyes don’t flutter open so much as they crack. The faintest slice of white is visible. Andrew’s head screams at him; he’s careful to keep any of that off his face.
“There’s no use pretending,” he says mildly when Neil’s eyes quickly shut again. “I know you’re awake.”
Whatever response he was expecting, it definitely wasn’t Neil’s resigned sigh. Neil squeezes his eyes tightly shut for a moment and then opens them. The color is--it’s everything Andrew remembered and then some. He remembers that shade of blue, the way it seemed infinite when he was a child lying in the grass, gazing at the endless expanse of sky. He bites down hard on his straw.
“You aren’t in danger,” Andrew goes on. “We won’t kill you.”
“Yeah, no shit,” Neil says. The intrinsic sarcasm in it cracks and breaks along with his voice. They’ve been giving him fluids intravenously, but Neil hasn’t had a sip of water for days. He hasn’t spoken, he hasn’t eaten, he hasn’t moved. For all of his bravado--for all of his actual courage--he’s weak as fuck.
Andrew lets his chair fall back onto all four legs and levers out of it, heading for a little stash of kid-sized water bottles. Neil watches him closely, sharply, if not entirely focused. Back at his bedside, Andrew makes a show of twisting off the unbroken cap and taking a sip.
“Okay?” he asks. At Neil’s nod, he holds the bottle to Neil’s mouth so that he can take small, careful sips.
It takes a while for Neil to empty the bottle. Holding himself up that long exhausts him; Andrew cups a hand around the back of his head for support while he finishes the last third of the bottle. He’ll need to eat. But what? Probably Aaron will know what to feed someone who’s been out for three days. Fluids. Light things. Soup, probably--they’ll have to dig up some cans or make it themselves on the grill.
“I have questions,” Andrew says once Neil’s emptied the bottle one small sip at a time; he lowers Neil’s head back to the pillow gently and retakes his seat in the chair. “Mostly about that performance out there.”
Neil says, politely, “Fuck you.”
“Manners.”
Whatever sharp comment Neil plans to make next is cut off by a loud bang--Kevin dropping the tray in his hands, the plastic clattering, the ceramic mug shattering. He gasps, “Nathaniel.”
Neil jerks hard at his plastic bindings but goes still as soon as he realizes they won’t be broken. Andrew watches as the panic in his eyes is smothered under a blanket of faux calm.
“Kevin,” Neil says bitterly. “Why am I not surprised to see you again?”
Kevin flushes. His shoulders tip forward, hunching and caving in his chest, the picture of miserable guilt.
“Is it Nathaniel?” Andrew asks, ignoring the drama of the scene. “You said Neil.”
“It’s Neil,” Neil says sharply. “Nathaniel is long dead.”
“Neil,” Andrew says placidly. “Can I untie you without you doing something dramatic again?”
Neil says, “Yes.”
He is clearly lying.
“He’s lying,” Kevin announces.
“Fuck you,” Neil says. He jerks at the plastic cuff and then winces at the sudden awareness of stitches and healing skin. The gash had been long and worryingly deep. Aaron hadn’t said surviving would be a miracle, just that there wasn’t any more he could do. And yet--and yet, Andrew has a suspicion that Neil’s continued existence is at least a little miraculous.
Rapid footsteps echo in the hall; Andrew watches Neil’s attention catch, watches the shutters come down over the anger and disgust he’d been directing at Kevin. Nicky tumbles in first, crowbar in hand. He stops short when he sees Neil, blocking Aaron’s view and then stumbling when Aaron impatiently shoves him further into the room.
“Oh good,” Aaron says. “He’s awake. I’m a genius.”
“I should have killed you when I saw you,” Neil says. “I’d say I won’t make that mistake again, but,” he lifts his arm, showing off the length of the zip-tie cuffs. “I guess I won’t get a chance to.”
“If I can’t trust you not to do something stupid, I can’t untie you,” Andrew says. Reasonably. Logically.
“You won’t untie me,” Neil corrects. “There’s a difference.”
“No shit we won’t,” Aaron scoffs. “You just threatened to kill me.”
“Did I?”
“Nobody is killing anybody,” Kevin inserts emphatically. “Nathaniel, just promise to behave and we’ll--”
“Go fuck yourself,” Neil says mildly. “Or does having your head that far up your own ass mean you’re always kind of doing it?”
Kevin flushes. Aaron snorts a laugh. Nicky, Andrew can’t read. He’s either horrified or delighted.
“Neil,” Andrew says, emphasizing the name. “Riko is not here. Riko is a sadistic asshole.”
“We can do it together,” Kevin says urgently. “You know where it is, the Advantage. And I know you can get to it. We can beat Riko to the punch, and Andrew will keep you safe, and we can all--”
Whatever they can all do or be, Kevin must not have a word for it. His voice trails lamely into nothingness, crushed beneath the hard, dismissive look on Neil’s face.
The pressure at the bridge of Andrew’s nose is building. He wants to pinch it to relieve it, but he has a feeling that showing Neil any weakness would set him back. A lot.
“Come on, Nathaniel,” Kevin says stiffly. “We can help each other.”
“It’s Neil,” Neil snaps. “And I’m familiar with how helpful you can be. I’ll pass on this round.”
“This is stupid.” Aaron huffs.. “Tell us where it is, Wesninski.”
Silence.
“Didn’t your mother tell you?” Kevin asks. “You know where it is, right?”
Silence.
Nicky rallies and tries. “Hey,” he says quietly. “I’m Nicky and I swear we’re not like Riko. We hate Riko. If you’d just talk to us…”
Silence.
“Well,” Aaron says. “We tried doing this the easy way.”
“What’s the hard way?” Nicky asks warily.
Neil’s laugh is bitter. He lets his head fall back against the inclined bed and closes his eyes. He looks like he’s a million miles away. Andrew wants to grab him and shake him and bring him back here to tell Andrew to go fuck himself, to try to bite his way out of his zip-ties. Anything but retreat into himself again. Consciously, this time.
“C’mon, Nicky. You know what the hard way is. If Andrew won’t do it, I will.”
“You will not,” Kevin snaps. It echoes around the small room.
The soft sound from beside him, Andrew thinks, is Neil huffing out an almost inaudible sigh of resignation.
“I would like to have a conversation,” Andrew says, addressing Neil flatly and directly. “Without restraints. But I cannot release you if you’re not going to behave yourself.”
Aaron’s muttering is quiet, pissed and impatient.
“Actually,” Neil snaps, “you can. You just won’t. Because it doesn’t advance your own interests. You can tell yourself you’re different from Riko all you want, but this--?” he lifts his wrist again, shaking the ties, “this is who you really are. If you want to play make-believe about how noble you are, go for it. But you’re using all of his tools.”
“Oh, fuck this,” Aaron says. “I’m getting my bat.”
“Stop it, Aaron. He’ll help. We just have to earn his trust.”
Nicky offers hesitantly, “What if we untie him and just lock the door until he’s feeling better and can talk?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Kevin says, scowling. “There are fifty ways he could escape or actually kill himself in this room.”
“So we’re back to my plan. I’ll get my bat.”
“We’re not torturing anyone,” Nicky protests.
After a short pause, Kevin says, “We’re not torturing Neil.”
“Get out,” Andrew orders. “Aaron, Kevin—patrol. Nicky, find something he can eat.”
He hadn’t given himself a task, but he follows them out of the room anyway and drops his head against the wall beside the closed door. He’s spent so much time staring at Neil’s face that he could draw it from memory. He could trace its planes and angles in the dark and be sure of who it was. It’s what's happening in his mind that Andrew can’t read. Doesn’t recognize. Here’s what he knows: Neil doesn’t trust Kevin and, by extension, Andrew. Here’s another thing he knows: Andrew is no fucking Moriyama. He takes three deep breaths, counting out the seconds until his lungs empty, and then walks back in.
Neil barely cracks his eyes to see who it is.
Andrew slides a knife out of its hidden spot and holds it up for Neil to see. He knows he doesn’t imagine the moment of tension in Neil’s body, but it’s gone in a blink. He steps closer to the bed and, reading the resigned fear in Neil’s expression, doesn’t fuck around; he hooks one of the zip-tie links over the blade and slices through it. Neil looks at his now free hand and then up to Andrew.
“Can you drink more?” Andrew asks.
Neil nods hesitantly. Andrew flips the knife in his hand and offers the hilt to Neil. Very deliberately, he turns his back on their—patient? Hostage? Visitor?--on Neil, stepping away to grab a bottle of Pedialyte from one of the cupboards. When he turns around, Neil has cut himself all the way loose and is staring at the knife in his hand with an inscrutable expression.
“Heads up,” Andrew says, and tosses the bottle at Neil.
Neil’s reflexes are good, Andrew can see that much, but he’s in no shape to use them to their best advantage; he catches the bottle with his left hand, but awkwardly and a little too close to his face.
“Can we talk now?” Andrew asks. “You are armed and you are not a prisoner.”
“Yes,” Neil says, just before the silence stretches into discomfort.
Andrew climbs up onto the bed, sitting cross-legged at the foot of it. “Why did you pull that stunt?”
“Stunt,” Neil mimics mockingly.
Andrew raises an eyebrow.
“I saw Kevin.” Neil shrugs. “He’s the thunder to Riko’s lightning.”
“You fear Riko?”
“I fear what Riko could do if he got his hands on me. I can’t let that happen.”
“You’d rather die,” Andrew observes.
“I’d rather live,” Neil corrects. “But I’m willing to die.”
“Let me get this straight. You were just passing through.”
Neil nods.
Andrew continues, “Aaron happens to see you and brings you by for a meet and greet. You snark at me. You see Kevin. You pull a knife out of thin air and try to bleed out on my floor. And you do this because you believe Riko must be where Kevin is and you are—what? Afraid of what he would do to you? Or are you just trying to save the world?”
“Not the world,” Neil says. “That’s fucked. But the people still in it, yeah.”
“Martyr,” Andrew accuses with disgust.
“You’re welcome.”
Andrew changes the subject abruptly. “You were right. If I hold you here against your will, then we are as bad as the Moriyamas.”
Neil takes a long sip of the weak orange liquid in the bottle. He’s silent, but his eyes scream a wary hope.
“So I am asking you to stay,” Andrew says. “You should have the right to choose who you work with. Give me three months. If you decide to help us, we will move forward together. If you decide not to, you move on without us.”
“Stay,” Neil echoes incredulously.
“We took in Kevin. He can vouch.”
Neil’s laugh is brief and bitter and ragged. “In what world would Kevin’s endorsement matter to me?”
Andrew says, “You have history. He feels shitty about it. Forgive him or do not, it isn’t my business. But I helped him and I can help you, too.”
“Two weeks.”
“Two months.”
Neil says, “One month,” but Andrew can see the flexibility of that offer in his expression.
Andrew delivers the next line: “Six weeks.”
For a long moment, they watch each other. Andrew meets Neil’s eyes steadily, catalogs the shades of blue in them instead of the dark circles beneath.
He sees the moment Neil decides. He sees Neil calculate his options, sees him weigh this against the chance that Andrew will simply change his mind if he says no. Sees Neil consider the length of his leash and his chances of escape.
“Alright,” Neil says. “You get six weeks.”