Archive of Our Own ^beta

It starts with headlights, golden streaks of illumination blurring in his vision, going too fast, too close, where did that other car come from, and the horn is blaring, the noise is deafening, and then there's nothing.

No, that's not quite true.

When Andrew comes to in the sterile whiteness of a hospital room, hours or days or weeks later, he remembers everything.

This is nothing new, of course. Andrew always remembers.

He remembers the night, the sweaty, stifling southern heat, and the sound of his footsteps on the pavement. He remembers the overwhelming need to get out. Not to get away, not to escape. He's not Neil. Just to be on his own, just for a little while.

Even after all these years there are still times that the presence of other people grates on him.

He remembers starting the car, turning it away from the university, away from the city, out onto some remote road winding past farms and fields and forest.

He remembers looking away from the road, fumbling for his lighter, going too fast for someone with only one hand on the wheel and one eye on what's in front of him.

But then again, Andrew's never had much regard for his own life.

Even after all these years, he has trouble thinking of himself as anything other than expendable.

He remembers looking up to find the other car hurtling around a turn and toward him. The road is too narrow, here, for them to pass one another safely, not without slowing down. And they're both going too fast for that.

He remembers that all-consuming brightness of headlights. He remembers the horn. He doesn't remember if it was his hand or the other driver's sounding it. He doesn't remember anything about the immediate aftermath of the crash.

That would be the head-injury, he supposes.

But he does remember more.

Andrew has never really believed in the concept of someone's life flashing before their eyes in a near-death situation. Surely he's been in enough of those to have evidence of that. A reasonably sized data pool, even.

But that doesn't change what he remembers.

There are the memories of his own life, the one he's lived for the past twenty-three years, of home after home after home and every hurt dealt to him and every small comfort he's found in the recent past.

But then it's every turn his life could have taken.

In this one, he's only a few weeks old when he is adopted—permanently—by a couple who wanted nothing more than to have a son. He never wants for anything, and never knows real pain. He smiles readily, laughs genuinely. He never plays exy, never gets recruited by Wymack, never even finds out he has a twin brother. He thinks he might have been happy.

In this one, Tilda keeps him, not Aaron. He chooses not to dwell on this life. He already knows how it ends. His brother lived it.

In this one, he's killed by the Moriyamas for breaking Riko's arm.

In this one, he's once again adopted as a child, and raised alongside two other children. A brother and a sister. They laugh with him and yell at him and fight with him and all three of them would die for one another. Their skin is dark and his is fair, but they're family. The kind he's never really been able to understand, not in his true lifetime.

In this one, he cuts his arms too deeply in Cass' bathroom. He'll soon grow dizzy from the blood loss. He won't wake up again. She'll never understand why he did it.

In this one, he kills one of the men who attacked Nicky. He's tried as an adult, and won't see the world outside of prison walls for years to come.

In this one, he plays for the Ravens.

In this one, Tilda never comes back for Aaron. They go through the system together, family after family and abuse after abuse. They're both hurt and miserable but neither of them is alone.

In this one, he hits Neil Josten with his racket in Millport, and that's the only time he ever sees him. By the time May comes around, Neil is long gone from that dying town. The Foxes lose that season spectacularly.

In this one, he kills Drake in Columbia. In another, Drake kills him.

In this one, he's with another gentle, loving family. He meets a boy, a beautiful boy with brown skin and eyes, when they're in high school. They get married at twenty-one.

In this one, the last words Neil ever says to him will ring in his head forever, the sound of something left hanging, unfinished: Thank you. You were amazing.

In this one, Tilda keeps both of them. She's still erratic and unstable and generally a terrible mother, but she can't fuck them up too badly. Not when they have each other.

In many of them, he's well-adjusted, even happy. In just as many others, he's even worse off than he is now. In a good number of them, he doesn't make it to twenty-three. Sometimes he goes to Palmetto State. More often he doesn't.

There's no common thread uniting all the possible lives he might have led.

That's good.

Andrew has always thought that the ideas of fate and destiny were complete bullshit.

He takes his time, thinking over all of this in the quiet austerity of his hospital room. Everything hurts, but he can tell there's something in his system dulling the edge of the pain.

It's not enough, but he doesn't want his mind to be any less clear than it already is. He's probably concussed. The lights are too bright, swimming slightly, and there's been a persistent ringing in his ears since he woke up. The faint antiseptic-and-linoleum smell to the room makes his head ache in slow pulses, like the beating tattoo of some leviathan's heart.

He doesn't call for a nurse, doesn't say anything at all. He doesn't try to get out of the bed. He's not sure he could if he wanted to.

He's still drowning in memories of lives that never were, falsely-remembered pain mixing with the very real pain of his bruised everything.

In the final lifetime he had seen, there were those headlights, that blaring horn. They were the last thing he ever saw.

He'll never think of it in these terms, but he's lucky to be alive.

With an effort, he's able to turn his head slightly, to see something other than the water-stained ceiling tiles and the top of an IV-drip in the corner of his vision.

It's not easy; his neck is in a brace and each slight movement sets his head to throbbing and his vision blurring at the edges. But Andrew has never been afraid of pain—at least, not this sort of clean, natural pain.

He sees a window, darkened. It must be nighttime. Hours after the crash? Or days?

To the other side is a door, and next to it, a chair.

It's the contents of the chair that give him pause. There's Neil Josten, curled as tightly as he can be in the vinyl seat, knees to his chest and arms wrapped around them. He's got his hood pulled up, but the shadow over his features doesn't stop the scars on his face from standing out lividly in the unremitting light from the fluorescent bulbs overhead. He's asleep, somehow, in his uncomfortable position, dark circles under his eyes proof that he hasn't been doing enough of that.

If Andrew were anyone else, it might occur to him to feel guilty for being the cause of his exhaustion.

But he's not anyone else, and what he is is tired and sore and vaguely irritated that Neil feels the need to be here with him, instead of at the dorm, sleeping on a real bed when it became obvious that Andrew would be fine.

(He knows that if their positions were reversed, he'd be in that chair, too, if only to be the first one to get to tell Neil what an idiot he is when he wakes up.)

Still, he doesn't say anything. Part of it is the dry rasp of his throat when he tries to swallow. Part of it is Neil's obvious lack of sleep. Most of it is that he just doesn't really want to talk.

But he does watch. The small rise and fall of Neil's shoulders with his breath, and subtle shifting of his face, the familiarity of his features. Safe. Home.

Andrew isn't sure how many lives he lived, however briefly, while he'd been unconscious. He is sure that if he tried hard enough, he would remember them all. Andrew always remembers. But he'd really, really, rather not, in all honesty. Not that he shies away from hard truths, but dwelling on what could have been is a little maudlin for his tastes.

And yet, he can't help but consider, as he watches Neil sleep, the many paths his life could have taken. Now that he's seen them, the endless permutations, he can't help but think about it. This is the only timeline that leads to this, to Neil Josten in the room with him as he recovers from a head-on collision with a magnolia tree—he remembers that, now. He had swerved off the road at the last second and into a roadside tree.

The myriad convolutions life could have taken, and he's here, in this room, and so is Neil. He could have had a real family, a real relationship with his brother, a childhood free from fear, a life free from abuse.

Instead, he got his own life, the one that led here. His own life, from which he'd spent the past years recovering. Trying to heal, in his own way. He got his little fucked-up family, with all their issues. He got his team, who would never really get him, but at least didn't go out of their way to hurt him. He got a lot of shit he didn't deserve, and just as much that he did.

But, all things considered, he thinks, looking at Neil from under his lashes—his eyelids are already starting to droop with the soporific effect of the pain meds he's on—he's not entirely dissatisfied.

He's not okay. He might never be okay, not by anyone else's standards, but he's here, at the culmination of all that he is and all that he's been through.

And right now, it's enough.