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ninyard · 7 months ago

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Hey, so you said to send you prompts... Could you talk about some things Neil starts to remember and how he copes with remembering?

Here’s the time where Neil remembers being waterboarded, because I haven’t stopped thinking about that. Like not even once. cw; torture, vomitting

It’s not long after the Foxes big championship win that Andrew and Neil find themselves in a too-big, too-fancy hotel room for the first time. Kevin is staying with them, but he’s busy doing something with Wymack for a couple hours.

They have no responsibilities, nothing to do other than enjoy a hotel room to themselves. They do what any other couple would reasonably do; they order a bottle of champagne, a couple of desserts, and they run a hot bath. Not for them both, in the beginning, but Neil’s muscles are sore after a tough practice with Kevin the night beforehand, so he decided to run it for himself. The water is perfect to touch, almost a perfect amount in the tub, and Andrew is sitting up on the bathroom counter with his own glass of champagne in his hands.

“This feels weird,” Neil comments, twisting the knob until the water ceases to spill from the gold coloured faucet of the bath. “Like it’s something couples do.”

“Normal couples,” Andrew corrects him, putting the glass to his lips as Neil removes his clothes one article at a time. “You’re cleaning yourself and I’m here for moral support.”

“From all the way over there?” Neil steps into the hot water. The steam from it has fogged up the mirrors already, and he slides down into the white porcelain, relaxing back until the hair at the back of his neck is darkened by the water that wets it.

“I’m comfortable.” Andrew says around the rim of the flute. “But if you’re not used to it I can show you how it’s done.”

“Why would I not be used to having a bath?” Neil scoffs, running his wet hands over his hair to slick it back off of his face.

“I can’t picture it,” he shrugs, but he doesn’t really mean it. “I don’t imagine you had many while on the run.”

Neil’s sweet laugh reverberates around the room. “You’re right, but it’s not like it’s hard. I lie here and relax until I get so warm that it feels like I’m going to pass out. Right?”

Neil shuts his eyes and sinks back until the water surrounds his face, his hearing muffled by its calming rumble. He holds his breath to dip his face under before coming back up to the surface. When he opens his eyes after wiping the water from them, he looks over as Andrew crouched next to him with a washcloth in one hand and Neil’s glass in the other. Neil takes the glass in a dripping hand, and looks at Andrew as he sips from the cold, bubbly liquid.

“Are you going to show me how it’s done?” He says, and Andrew waves him off. He slips out of his robe with ease, and gestures for Neil to move forward in the tub. There’s plenty of room for the both of them, and Andrew steps in to sit behind him, his legs on either side of Neil. Neil waits until he is comfortable before reaching out to place his glass on the floor, moving to rest his back on Andrew’s chest.

They don’t speak as Andrew dips the small square cloth into the water to brush it over the top of Neil’s back. Neil shuts his eyes. The only sound in the room is the movement of the water between them, and the relaxed breathing that leaves the both of their noses. Andrew’s free arm rests on the edge of the tub, and Neil reaches out to interlace their fingers together. It’s so calming, the warmth that surrounds them, the peace that comes with the two of them alone together like this, so normal and comfortable.

Andrew’s squeezes out the liquid from the cloth onto the top of Neil’s head, then, startling him from his thoughts.

“I was just about to say how nice this was,” he tilts his head to let the water run off of it. “Thank you for changing my mind.”

Andrew’s response is to mumble a sound that could’ve been misconstrued as an apology, until he dips the cloth back under the water, and does it again. Neil tried to take the cloth from him, and the tub squeaks as he moves around, but Andrew keeps pulling it out of his reach.

Andrew gives up when Neil gets a hold of it, accepting as the gesture is returned. Neil loves how his blonde hair darkens under water, and smiles as Andrew’s bangs flatten over his eyes. He’s not quite turned around to face Andrew, but he twists his back to push his hair back off of his face.

“Yes or no?” He asks, and Andrew opens his eyes. His cheeks are pink from the heat of the bath.

“Yes.” He answers, and Neil stretches out to kiss him softly on the lips, before plopping the sopping wet square of fabric on the top of his head. Neil is laughing as Andrew takes the cloth from his hair and throws it at him, flat against his face, but that beautiful and melodic sound does not last long. It does not last long, as Neil’s laugh leads him to inhale beneath the fabric, and his flinch is almost strong enough to send a tidal wave of water cascading out onto the tiled floor.

For a second, Neil is back in the nest.

For a second, the memory is hazy, something unfamiliar. It’s not a memory he’s had before, more like a dream than a conscious reminder of Evermore.

There’s Jean’s hands on his shoulders, or somewhere else, as they tended to be, holding him down with as more force as required to keep him still. Riko’s maniacal laughter scores the scene, as he takes a break from whatever words he’d been spewing to admire his work.

“What is it?” Riko says. No, it’s Andrew, in their hotel bathroom, with this look across his face.

The washcloth is in Neil’s hand, and he looks down to it, but he sees nothing as he lifts his head back up. He can feel it, though, the water-heavy fabric spread over his face, over his head, draped without a chance of falling off. He doesn’t scream, but he hears it, the gargle of a plea to stop, incoherent as he feels himself drowning.

He can see Andrew as he wraps his fingers around Neil’s wrists, to pull them away from the mouth that they’d found themselves clamped over. There’s too much water. Too much water that feels like it’s filling his lungs, and it’s around him, and it’s in his hair, it’s in his eyes. Even the hands that protect him are damp with liquid. With lungs unwilling to fill at all, he tries to kick the water away from him, but with every movement, it just comes back to him stronger.

“You’ll drown him,” A cry of English words dipped in a French accent passes in front of him. He can’t hear it properly at all. It’s too loud; the slapping of water on a surface, the sputtering as he desperately struggles out of the path of pouring. Jean’s strained words mean nothing to Riko, a worthless request that would only lead to a desire for Riko to fulfil such a thing. “The master will not be pleased if you do.”

Riko snaps back at him then, a bark in Japanese as the spilling water subsides. He lifts the towel, or the bedsheets, or the heavy item of clothing that covered his lips. One hand in auburn hair he holds Neil back. He remembers how he pulls his own hair from its root while trying to lean forward to get the water out of his lungs.

He is standing now, and Andrew has wrapped him in a dry bathrobe before dressing himself, and he is rubbing a towel over Neil’s skin to dry it. Neil catches a glimpse of himself in the foggy glass of the shower door beside them, his lips almost blue, and face as pale as the porcelain tub that had started to drain.

Andrew snaps his fingers to pull Neil’s attention back to him, and does it again when it is unsuccessful at evoking any reaction. Neil looks at him finally, and Andrew places one hand on his chest and the other wrapped around the back of his neck.

“Breathe,” he says, one word, like it’s an easy thing to do.

“I can’t,” Neil gasps, but his lungs fill with water with every fill he takes in.

“You can.” Andrew says, sternly. “Breathe, Neil.”

Neil breathes in deep, but with it, another unexpected splash from an emptying basin pours down his throat without reprieve. He doesn’t remember falling to the floor, but suddenly his hands are flat on cold tile, as he heaves in oxygen that refuses to fill his chest at all.

Andrew lets him fall to his knees, and he doesn’t touch him. Instead he kneels down in front of him, his presence noticeable as Neil struggles through flashes of darkness and water and water and water and water.

“Stop,” he doesn’t mean to say it. His words are clear now, not a foolishly daring gargle, but still he feels the stream that travels from the sides of his lips down his cheeks.

“You’re killing him,” Jean’s panic doesn’t help. It doesn’t help, as the idea of torturing Neil to the point of extinction is nothing more than a turn on to Riko. It doesn’t stop him from holding each side of the towel over his face and pulling it backwards, crushing his nose, the water held in its fibres forced to escape. Riko does not fear the threat of a life taken by his hand. He is nothing less than excited by it.

Neil knows fear like an old friend. Neil knows this slow-dance with death like a movie on replay - it is as familiar as it is terrifying. Something about this though, this twisted assault born from sick fascination with torture, it’s different. He wouldn’t say that it was too far, even for someone like his father, but truth be told, he’s never known fear like this. The scars on his chest from the pointed touch of his father’s knife, or the smell of burning skin beneath a hot iron, or the puckering hole left by a gunshot wound had nothing on the sadistic things that Riko even thought of doing. He didn’t know how long he sits, or stands, or lies in that room for, hands holding him down, darkness of black walls parallel to the wet fabric over his eyes - and mouth, and nose, tight around the edges with rogue breaths finding their way beneath water and the penetrable thing that it pours onto.

“It will be much more satisfying if you just hand me over to my father,” Neil’s coughs are wet after he vomits out the water that had made its way to his stomach. It’s not until he looks up, and Riko’s eyes are on Jean instead of him, that he realises he’s spoken in French. He switched to English while spitting out water through gargling burps and coughs. “The master will kill you if I don’t come out of here alive.”

“I will be happy at least,” Riko shoves two fingers down Neil’s throat while pulling on his hair. He wipes the watery puke that coats his fingers onto Neil’s face after he vomits again from the force of Riko’s touch at the back of his throat. The noise that leaves his lips is guttural and unintentional. “Perhaps a long and painful death will be enough of a lesson learned for you. Oh, aren’t you having fun?”

Andrew’s voice pulls him back, again, but this time he grips Neil’s face so tightly it will leave a mark. “Come back,” he says, or maybe it’s, “fucking breathe.”

Neil battles against the flood that fills his mouth with no escape. There’s no room for air. There’s no room to breathe.

“Ten minutes,” Jean says, and the water stops. “We cannot be late.”

Then a rogue breath slips through, and another, and another, and the bathroom comes back into focus. Andrew is sitting in front of him, his face still as he waits for Neil to come back.

It’s a while before Neil’s heart starts to slow, and the bath is long emptied.

A long time since Neil had had such a visceral reaction to the next, perhaps the worst part about it all is the reminder of how much Neil had forgotten about the treatment he’d endured at the nest. If he’d forgotten about something as serious as torture banned by the Geneva Convention, what else had happened? What else had his mind stored away, too traumatising to be kept in view? Riko’s proclivity to going so far as committing an act that is considered a war crime is as unsurprising as it is fitting. It angers Neil, much angrier than he’s felt about Riko since his death. He remembers it in terrible and vivid snippets; the things Jean said to him afterwards, the smile on Riko’s face as he watched Neil come back from the brink over and over and over again. He remembers drying himself off afterwards to pull gear on over his head to start their evening practices with water in his lungs and a blur over his eyes. All he had wanted to do was sleep. Jean had helped him shower afterwards as he fought through laboured breath while avoiding the spray of water.

“Where were you?” Andrew asks, quietly, as neither of them dare to move.

It frustrated Neil to be unable to find the exact location of the incident in his head. Were they in the locker room? Or had a door locked behind them, keeping the Ravens out, who pretended to ignore the muffled screams as they walked past?

“Evermore,” Neil answers, and it doesn’t seem to be the answer Andrew is expecting. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Andrew doesn’t need the clarification, but still he nods.

“Riko,” Neil looks at his hands, and they’re shaking as he flexes his fingers. “He fucking waterboarded me. And I forgot.”

A flash of unmedicated rage crosses in front of Andrew’s vision. He doesn’t seem to have the right words to say, no response appropriate enough to explain what he wished he could do to the king.

“I’d kill him if I could,” Neil rests his fists on the floor. “I wish I pulled that trigger myself.”

“And still it wouldn’t be enough,” Andrew agrees. It’s hard to talk about the nest, even with him, especially with him. They both are too aware of what happened over those few weeks, in Evermore, in Easthaven. Neil knows too well how Andrew hates how he was unable to protect him. “Talk to me.”

“He would’ve killed me,” Neil says. “He would’ve kept going if we didn’t have to practice.”

Andrew can’t hide his grimace. It’s the part about Exy that he fears Kevin or Neil will find themselves toxically invested in - he occasionally worries their investment is born from necessity instead of true purpose. He sees their passion, clear as day, but that part that fears a life without it sometimes felt like it swallowed their passion whole.

“What do you need?” He asks.

“To know he’s burning in hell for the rest of eternity,” Neil pushes himself up to a standing position, and Andrew follows. Andrew doesn’t exactly hold out his arms, but something about his body language invites him close. As Neil steps into his space, he reaches out to hold his neck, as he hovers a hand over Andrew’s chest until he nods in permission for him to place it. Neil rests him head on Andrew’s shoulder as the goalkeepers fingers hold the damp hair at the back of his neck. “I have to talk to Kevin.”

Andrew doesn’t respond.

He simply holds Neil for as long as it takes for him to ground himself back on earth.

#kind of want to write Kevin’s reaction too #but I just #yes #had to get this out there #because it’s been in my head for too long #fell out of love with this idea towards the end so #it iiiiiisss what it issssss #mine #Andrew minyard #Neil josten #andreil #ask

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