Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The Ravens were falling apart. That was what made Thea run.

It was a clarity that came with the smell of blood on the carpet of the Nest. Kevin had left about a year or two prior and said nothing on his way out. Jean was bloodied and bruised and saved in California by Renee Walker. Riko was dead. Tetsuji resigned from coaching, so the only asset the Ravens had anymore was their legacy. As more and more investors pulled out of the Raven’s pockets, there were very few secure spots on the team. Thea had always known her presence on the Ravens was a fraught thing, challenging the bigotry of Tetsuji and most of her teammates. She saw the writing on the wall; either she could leave her reputation in the hands of rich assholes, or she could run with what little power she still had. The story was easily sold.

Following Kevin to Palmetto was obvious — so obvious that she hadn’t thought to consult him about it. They hadn’t seen each other since the last Ravens game, where she was sure their relationship wouldn’t survive that kind of competition. That was, until she saw Kevin switch to his marred left hand, and Kevin saw Thea’s proudest smile on him. Their reconnection after the game had been brief and confusing. Thea had seen a new hope for the two of them; and Kevin was saying goodbye.

When everything felt like it was falling apart, Thea followed her instincts and snuck away from the Nest. It was only possible through her prior connection to the Perfect Court and knowing exactly what weaknesses the Nest was dealing with in such dire times. She managed to snatch $10 from the Master’s office on her way out, already looking dilapidated from his sudden resignation. It was inconspicuous for her to go to Castle Evermore, and she told anyone who asked that she was going to practise. Then, when she was certain she had time, she bolted.

It was bad enough being alone and vulnerable in the Nest, but she hadn’t expected it to be dark outside. Now she was in the cold, West Virginia wind, on her own for the first time in years, too scared to do anything but run. 

She followed one road until it merged to another, looked for any signs that would tell her where she was or where she should go, until an hour or two had been wasted she ended up at a bus junction on the edge of a city. She was watching her back, of course, because she knew there were risks with being outside the Nest. They had sheltered her for a reason. It occurred to her, as well, that she was weary of Tetsuji hiding behind any corner. 

An information kiosk opened, right at 6am. The old lady watched Thea walk up, hands shaking, and sighed. 

“Edgar Allen, huh?” She asked. Thea realised she was still wearing her team jacket. “Another one.” The lady shook her head. “Where do you need to go, honey?”

“South Carolina,” Thea said. Quietly, just in case.

The kiosk lady nodded solemnly, typing as she spoke. “Ain’t no one who can hurt you here, honey.” A ticket was printed and handed over to her. “No charge.”

Thea wondered how many Ravens had passed through here. So many of her teammates had disappeared in her time at the Nest, but the rumour that followed them was always suicide. She wondered if Kevin had been one of the Raven the kiosk lady had helped. As she memorised the details of her ticket, tucked in a corner where only the kiosk lady could see her, she tried not to think too hard about what would happen when Kevin saw her again. 

He was the only person that Thea knew the whereabouts of. She’d been out of the loop for so long, she couldn’t even be sure that her parents were in the same place as she’d left them. Houston was too far for her first excursion, although an 8 hour bus ride to South Carolina was barely better. It gave her too much time to worry about what she was travelling into. She tried, for a few hours, to accept a reality where Kevin had moved on with someone better suited for him. Then, she tried to decode what their last rendezvous had meant, and if he really was done with Thea.

Then, she came back to her senses and remembered that this wasn’t about him. She was going to anchor herself in Palmetto for no more than a few weeks, figure out her next move to get back on a team before the impending season, and wherever that left Kevin was for him to figure out. It was hard to stick to her backbone when she was unable to trust herself, feeling reckless enough to leave the security of the Ravens and stupid enough to run right into enemy territory. This all felt so unlike her, so detached. She’d not felt such a present fear like this since she first entered the Nest.

For the second half of her bus ride, she closed her eyes. Despite her best efforts, she wouldn’t allow herself to sleep.

Missing , Thea felt, was a strong word to describe her situation. It had been 3 days since she’d left the Ravens, yes, but she wasn’t missing .

She was just…somewhere else.

Kevin didn’t agree with her when he saw her passing out on the steps of the Foxhole Court. Her legs were blown out and she was shaking with exhaustion. It felt like a bad hangover and a borderline seizure. He’d held her face in his warm hands and tried to ask too many questions at once, interspersing them with angry concerns about her ‘going missing’. His Foxes were standing around them, from what Thea could tell, but she had walked 12 hours from Columbia to Palmetto without sleep or food. She was barely keeping her eyes open.

“Should we call an ambulance?” A soft voice asked. 

“The Ravens will have a watch out for her,” someone else answered. “We shouldn’t get authorities involved.”

Warm hands squished her cheeks together. “Hey,” Kevin murmured. “Thea, keep your eyes open.” He stroked his thumb over her eyebrow. “It’s going to be okay. I’ve got you.”

She did open her eyes, enough to see Kevin’s pretty face. She’d openly thought he was a pretty boy and told him as much many times. He looked so much older now. Tanned and barely shaven. Dark circles under his eyes. Thea touched his new, better tattoo and felt palpable relief.

“All right, maggots,” Wymack grunted. “Get inside. Kevin — get her to Abby.”

Thea had thought she was too heavy for Kevin to carry. Back before Kevin left, it was a patch of pride Thea had. She was strong, muscular, and intimidating on the court. Kevin had no problems with being unable to piggy-back her in their quieter, softer moments. Things had changed, though. She felt how much stronger Kevin was now, and she knew how under-cared she’d become. Not by much, but enough for Kevin to ask: “Jesus, Thee — what happened?”

“Sorry,” was all she could think to say. 

“Don’t be sorry.” 

Kevin was placing her down on a bed, soon enough. He gave a short introduction of Thea to Abby, who was quickly taking notes and as many vitals as a medical bay could offer. Thea still winced and panicked — as much as her exhaustion would let her — at getting her blood pressure taken, a fear she’d had since childhood, and Kevin held her other hand until it was over.

A juicebox was given to Thea while Abby made a few notes. Dehydration, exhaustion and malnutrition, as well as the anxiety levels of a prey animal. The prescription was 2 days of rest and proper meals. Just the juice alone was enough to make Thea feel a little more alert.

“You’ll be staying with me, sweetie,” Abby smiled, her hand on Thea’s. “Nice warm bed and all the Real Housewives you can watch. Kevin, you’re welcome to drop by whenever.”

As a mercy to him, Thea didn’t look at him. She closed her eyes and lost her grip on his hand. In response, Kevin squeezed her fingers together, thrice. 

When Abby left to convey that diagnosis to Coach Wymack, Thea expected Kevin to follow her out. 

“You can’t fool me,” he said. “I know you’re awake.”

“I was giving you the opportunity to leave,” Thea replied, opening her eyes slowly. 

“I’m not leaving you.” He shifted to sit where Abby had been, rolling the chair over to Thea’s side and leaning on his elbows. “I happen to care about you.”

Thea had a memory, then, of Kevin in the small room they’d stolen away to. New tattoo, freshly a champion, his pride and elation waning when he had to tell Thea it was no use trying to keep a dead thing living. Thea remembered agreeing with him, because that made the most logical sense, and beating down her heartbreak so she could congratulate him one more time.

“We broke up,” Thea reminded him.

“Because the circumstances were impossible. Besides, I don’t have to be your boyfriend to care about you.” He held her hand again. “I’m really glad you’re here, though.”

“Where else would I go?” 

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just glad it’s here.” His hands were rough and calloused, as always. Thea catalogued the feeling of them against her previous images of Kevin. “I’m staying with you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“ Stop .” Kevin held her cheek again. “I’m trying to make up for leaving you the first time.”

Guilt was going to kill Kevin before Tetsuji got the chance. The odds he’d been given and the cards he’d been dealt made his success look like a deal with the Devil. He’d left 2 notes in his escape from Evermore; one for Jean ( I’m sorry. Don’t trust Riko. Thank you for everything ) and one for Thea ( I love you. I’ll find you again. Take care of Jean ). Then it was game after game, chaste touches and exchanged notes, the two of them trying to fan a dead flame. Thea saw the sense in breaking up, even if it hurt, and didn’t hold that against Kevin.

“I took care of Jean,” Thea told him. She still remembered finding him so beaten and bloodied. He cursed Kevin out for abandoning him while Thea tried to quieten him down, lest they get caught again. She remembered trying to help Neil when he’d been branded, not daring to tell him her name. She did everything she’d learnt from Kevin. “I tried my best.”

“I know you did.” He pressed the back of her hand to his lips. “It was never supposed to be your responsibility to keep anyone alive.”

Or yours , Thea was going to say, but knew better than to start an argument with Kevin that would never end. 

She only intended to close her eyes. There were still too many risks to name that should have woken her up, but Kevin was warm beside her, telling her all about something she couldn’t recall the details of. Thea felt content, for the first time in ages, but she fell asleep before she could properly enjoy it.

Chapter Text

True to her Raven training, Thea only slept a few hours. Her body was still screaming, starving, waning with exhaustion, but she was abruptly reminded of why it was so important to sleep so little. The unfamiliar bed she was in was soft and almost uncomfortably warm. The South Carolina sun was unforgiving in the middle of the day. After the night she’d had, shivering outside the court in nothing but her sweat-soaked team jacket and sweatpants, the feeling of real blankets was luxury.

The room she’d woken up in was bright and neutral. Pale furnishings, beige walls, an inoffensive comforter that weighed Thea’s still-tired arms down. It was all so different from Evermore. The window beside her was huge. She tapped it to gauge how thick it was, wondering how difficult it would be for someone to break it on their way in to find her. The curtains were more of the same sandy beige that was smeared around the room and did little to keep the daylight out. If she weren’t still on edge about betraying a prominent crime family, she could have felt calm. 

Propped up next to her was a teddy bear, which felt both sweet and patronising. It was over a decade since Thea had slept with a stuffed animal and she hardly felt like it was necessary for Abby to provide her one. She wasn’t a child. Then again, when Thea picked it up and held it for less than a moment, she felt a young, fear-stricken part of herself begging to hug it tighter. A strange sort of comfort settled in her. That little girl she used to be (her body too small to carry all of her scars and bruises and burns) quietened to a whimper.

When she felt more stable to stand, Thea left the warmth of that room, (teddy bear tucked into bed,) and followed the sound of people talking down the hallway. She stood in the doorway between the hall and the kitchen, waiting for a break in Abby's conversation with Coach Wymack.

Thea had never seen Coach Wymack so relaxed before. He was always a gruff, foreboding presence on the sidelines of a game, arms crossed and yelling at both his players and the crowd. With an image like that, Thea could be forgiven for thinking he was just like Tetsuji. Here, though, he smiled fondly at Abby, his posture relaxed and bordering on leisurely. Thea could trace the family resemblance between him and Kevin: wide nose and heavy brow bone, teeth that lean inwards when he smiled. Wymack was bulkier, though. Maybe Kevin would be like that someday. 

“Hey, sweetie!” Abby peered around the corner. Like a cornered cat, Thea shrunk back. “You okay?”

Wymack spared her a look as he sipped his coffee. The feeling behind it was murky at best.

“I need to shower,” she said. 

Abby’s bathroom was suspiciously clear and clean, though Thea supposed that with as many flight risks as the Foxes, there was reason to put a ban on razors and stray pills. There were unopened shower products stacked on the counter, including a hair mask that was, apparently, a gift from Allison Reynolds. Thea finally looked in the mirror and saw what might have prompted that; her usually bouncy, well kept curls were clumped in messy tangles, which might have been causing the pain in her head that she’d been ignoring. On top of that, she didn’t remember looking that thin before. Her collarbones never stuck out that much and she wasn’t used to seeing the ridges of her sternum. She felt like a snuffed candle, staring at the corpse of an 18 year old that hadn’t been laid to rest. 

Her shower wasn’t relaxing in the slightest. There were a couple of matts in her hair that she tried to massage out, but the frustration got the better of her and she began tugging, intending to just rip them out, and slammed her fist against the shower wall when that wouldn’t work either. For a moment, her body went numb. She raised her aching hand to her mouth to muffle a frustrated sob. Abby called her name from outside the door, and Thea was back in the Nest.

It had only happened once. She’d been so exhausted from practice and a flu that her legs had failed her in the bathroom. The humiliation of being naked on the shower floor, water still falling on her, had been quickly overshadowed by the sound of someone calling out her name. She was alone, she realised, with some guy who was taunting her from outside the door. Thankfully, the doors weren’t easy to break into. Unfortunately, he didn’t leave for hours, stranding Thea in the cubicle while she begged to be left alone.

The memory stopped after a while. Abby was knocking on the door, sounding more alarmed by the second. Thea turned the water off and wrapped herself in a towel.

“Theadora, honey?” Abby asked.

“Ye-ah.” She couldn’t stop the crack in her voice. 

“Are you okay?”

Barely dry, Thea pulled her clean clothes on and slowly opened the door. It was just Abby. Still not the Nest. She wasn’t 18 anymore, and her hair was giving her a headache. 

“Can you help me untangle my hair?” She asked. 

It was a double-edged plea. Underneath, it also begged to not ask why she was crying, nor why she was cradling her hand. Abby agreed — to all of it.

There was something uncomfortably intimate about getting her hair washed by someone she didn’t know. She couldn’t deny that she needed help, but Abby still called her by her full name. She was kind and careful, but she wasn’t someone Thea could implicitly trust.

“Kevin dropped those clothes off for you,” Abby commented, doing a terrible job of hiding her smile. Another step too close.

The hoodie was his. It was his team hoodie, with his name and number emblazoned across the back. The colour was an assault to the eye, but it was starting to grow on Thea. The sweatpants fit her too well for them to be Kevin’s. 

“I didn’t know you two were together,” Abby pressed. She was working through another particularly bad knot. The whole situation was making Thea’s skin crawl.

“I don’t think we are,” Thea answered honestly. She was making sure to not look at A

Abby frowned.

“We broke up last season.” Thea was starting to see how ridiculously out of place she’d made herself. “Hard to date someone who can only be looked at from afar.”

No contact with people outside the team. Just one of the Ravens’ rules to minimise distractions. Thea didn’t know, though, if she was talking about herself or Kevin. Abby looked pained. “Well, he cares about you. I can’t say I’ve seen that from him before.”

“Kevin cares about a lot of people,” Thea argued softly. She was still too exhausted to put her full force behind anything. “Like Jean. And Neil.”

Abby raised her eyebrows.

“He cares about Wymack a lot,” she whispered, because in any state she found herself in, she knew how to get under someone’s skin. That knot in her hair was finally dealt with. 

It was true. It was logical. Thea felt Abby pause for a moment, then continue massaging her scalp. In any other case, Thea would have enjoyed the feeling. Abby was still a stranger, though, and it wasn’t time to let her guard down. 

A dozen tense moments passed and Thea was done. She could run her hands through her hair freely and realised she hadn’t been able to do that for a while before coming to South Carolina. Abby told her to go sit on the couch in the living room so she could eat something, and the motherly warmth was replaced with motherly scorn. The shift in tone was deserved, but it made Thea tense all the same.

Her mom was like that, sometimes, before they lost contact. A symptom of burning out on all fronts, from overworking and holding her family together, navigating one daughter who wouldn’t look at her and another who still held her hand until she was whisked away to a different state. Cold dismissal was as far as she’d get with setting boundaries, shaking Thea off her arm and belatedly remembering to smile. Her mind, Thea figured, was always planning for the next disaster, and there wasn’t much to smile about with those thoughts always circling. Her dad, in contrast, was determined to live peacefully. He didn’t ‘do’ stress, by his own admission, and used his relaxed nature to mitigate any potential disasters his wife could predict. She created the waves and he sailed on them. Somehow, Thea got the worst parts of both of them; prone to disaster, scared of the future, and unable to feel that fear enough to do anything about it. Her sisters swam. Thea sank.

In a way, that was what made the Ravens so comforting: she knew exactly where she stood, and she had a clear list of instructions to follow. She wasn’t a brilliant academic like her older sister, or a muser like her younger sister and dad, so her achievements, at times, lacked lustre at family reunions. Then, Edgar Allen picked her , out of the rich lacrosse transfers and brutes who were twice Thea’s muscle mass (through natural and nefarious means). They picked her because she was good. Strategic. Tenacious. A true Raven had been a compliment once. She wondered what that meant to her now.

Thea sat in the middle of the couch, directly in front of the dead television and waited for her next instruction. In her free time at the Nest, she was safe if she was training or studying. She had neither of those options available to her, so she sank into the (many, many ) cushions and stared at the blank screen in front of her. Every thought she had was an exhausting exercise in hope. The constant argument she had in her head was giving her a headache, and she remembered why she’d focussed so much on thinking about Kevin; the one thing she was sure hadn’t changed. Still caring, still scared, still grief personified. 

Wymack’s eyes were the same kind of sad as Kevin’s, lined now with tired wrinkles and the weight of caring for Foxes. He didn’t look at her too long. Like she repulsed him,

“The crazy thing about going missing,” he said slowly, “is that people notice when you’re not in the place they’re expecting.”

Terror, deeper than she was used to, shot up her spine.

“You ain't in trouble, kid.” He slapped some papers on the table with a sigh. “I made some calls. You’re all sorted out.”

Abby placed a plate of cut fruit in front of Thea, not gently, not lingering for pleasantries. The unease in Thea’s spine made the sharpness of that interaction uncomfortable, which wasn’t helped by Wymack’s visible concern about it.

“What, did you bite her?” He asked, which might have been a joke. 

Thea pulled her sleeves over her hands.

“I’ll take that as a maybe.” He sat back heavily, head tilted back and eyes resting. “You, at least, aren’t begging to be taken back to that shit-hole.”

Thea didn’t think that was an option. The second she broke out of Evermore, she crossed West Virginia off the map and had started on burying every memory she’d made, like she could undo the last few years. She felt nothing but regret and humiliation for running straight into a trap.

Still. She liked the simplicity that came with living and breathing and nearly dying for Exy. It was a solid purpose. It was still tempting.

“Eat your snacks,” he instructed, a firm and gentle command that was laden with practised care. “My next step is to ask who’s looking out for you outside of the Ravens. Friends or family or a stray cat you’re particularly fond of.”

“My dad?” Thea immediately answered. It was a child’s response, hopeful and melancholic. 

Wymack mistook it for fear.

“Think on it, then get back to me. You’re overdue for a proper sleep. Eat your snacks .”

Apple slices didn’t feel appetising, and nor did the handful of nuts on the edge of the plate. She forced some food in her mouth anyway to get him off her back. The acidity in the apples made her cracked lips sting.

“I’m going to talk to the team this evening,” he was less enthusiastic to tell her. “You understand that they might be a bit resistant to you, yes?”

Thea didn’t say any of the venomous responses she came up with. She didn't confess that she was tempted to run away. “Yes, sir.”

“Don’t—“ Wymack all but cut her off. “‘Coach’ is fine.”

“Yes, Coach.”

He stared at her too long, like he was trying to figure out what made her wrong . Looked real, spoke words, had a heartbeat, but Thea knew he saw the gap in her canniness. She was a catalogue of prerecorded answers, coded by someone who feared human souls. Every stray away from her algorithm was a step toward her violent recalibration, because Lord knows the Master was never gentle. 

It was worth it to take that step.

“Call my dad,” she requested, just before Wymack could leave. His pause in step gave away no emotions for Thea to read. “Tell him I miss them both. Ask if my cat is okay.”

Wymack nodded slowly. “Is that a code for something?”

It was because Thea really missed her cat. “It’s so he knows it’s me.”

He gave her a smile that tried hard to be genuine but clearly hung heavily on his heart. He looked so much like Kevin, Thea almost said so.