Work Text:
Andrew takes an immediate dislike to their newly drafted rookie striker. Neil Josten. Everything about him is irritating, every half smile, every bite at his embattled bottom lip, every flop of his bangs into his eyes. He rubs Andrew the wrong way. Against the grain. The air crackles with it like static electricity; every hair on Andrew’s arms stands on end.
“The pleasure is all yours,” Andrew says when Kevin introduces them, puts the face to the name Andrew’s been hearing for the last few weeks.
Neil’s smile is of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it variety, no teeth.
Andrew spends the rest of the night sinking into corners across rooms from Neil, feet braced against the inconvenient urge to go tell the man he’s not welcome. Their eyes catch so many times that Andrew sees electric blue ghosts haunting the inside of his eyelids when he goes to bed that night. They mock him as long as he’s awake to stare into them, and then he falls asleep and meets Neil Josten for the first time again, except it’s 1888 and the Parisian skyline is ruined by the monstrous skeleton of the beastly thing that will become the Eiffel Tower. Andrew has his back to it, his paintbrush in hand, a watercolor he can’t seem to finish on the easel.
“I see the problem,” a voice says beside his ear.
Andrew startles, nearly drops his paintbrush. The voice steps up to his side, turns into a man only a few inches taller than him—Neil Josten, more or less. The man Andrew is in the dream doesn’t recognize him, but he sees something inviting in the tuck of Neil’s hands into his pockets, the easy drape of his shoulders.
“What’s that?” Andrew asks.
“You need something better to paint.”
Andrew scans him up and down—the subtle floral patterned trousers, the jaw-length auburn waves that escape from behind his ear the minute he stops paying attention. That, and the dimple that presses into his cheek when he smiles at Andrew is emboldening enough that Andrew risks the flirtation. “Are you volunteering?”
The smile widens. The man pulls his hand from the pocket of his trousers and offers it to Andrew. “Gaspard.”
Andrew takes it. The dappled light dances over his unmarred forearm. “Henri.”
He wakes the next morning with three months worth of memories of a lifetime lived in Paris. At practice, their first proper meeting of the pre-season, Neil finds him in the locker room, plants himself in front of Andrew, looks him right in the eye.
“What?” Andrew asks, tossing his towel over his shoulder.
“I had a dream about you last night,” Neil says.
“That’s not the kind of thing you should tell your coworkers,” Andrew says.
“Didn’t you?” Neil asks.
“Nope,” Andrew lies. He steps to the side and leaves Neil, his forehead creased, staring at the spot where Andrew stood.
By the end of the week, Andrew knows the feeling of braiding Neil’s damp hair in the tub, of Neil’s weight pressing him into a field of lavender, of painting landscapes on the planes of Neil’s body. He’s licked drops of wine from the hollow of Neil’s throat, slept tangled beneath billowing curtains, and kissed private vows into the palms of Neil’s hands.
At practice, Neil’s blue, blue eyes are sticky, tempting, but Andrew keeps his own moving, doesn’t let himself get trapped. Andrew has gotten caught in this flytrap before, the desperate hope of it—he’d needed it to be true then, but he needs it to be a lie now, can’t calm the anxious pounding of his heart when he thinks the word: soulmate.
On Sunday, Andrew wakes with a memory of salt water and wind, the creak of rope and metal, the snap of sails, the boom of canyons. He closes his eyes again and sees Neil laid out on a beach, freckled all over, drunk on coconut milk and stolen gold. When he runs into Neil at practice the next morning he can feel the sand between his toes again, Neil’s tangled hair around his fingers, his own sun-tight skin.
“I half expected you to be sunburned,” Neil says. Andrew blinks and sees him ruddy and wind-swept, blinks again and sees him wrapped in velvet and brocade, again and sees him the way he is, this time—lean and serious and scarred.
“It’s Nate, right?” Andrew asks.
“Neil,” Neil says drily, but the corners of his mouth curve in a way Andrew knows well. Andrew has been caught bluffing.
He presses his thumb against the knuckle of his index finger and feels the memory of that smirk like it’s carved into his skin.
Everywhere he looks that day, he finds Neil—in the mirror behind him at the gym, a quarter-lap ahead of him on the track, at the far end of the court, moving so fast his number blurs. The only place he isn’t is Andrew’s apartment. It’s a silence so deep Andrew’s speakers can’t fill it. He puts on headphones and goes to bed early, falls asleep and finds Neil tending a fireplace in a one-room log cabin. The flames dance with the whispers of the howling winds that sneak in through the wood-shutter windows. It’s been a long winter. They’re running out of wood.
“I can think of another way to warm up,” Neil says, pulling Andrew’s attention from their dwindling food stores. He smiles wickedly. It pulls the chapped skin of his bottom lip tight.
Andrew wakes too early, foggy, his fingers splayed over cotton instead of skin. In the space between dreaming and thinking, a memory sneaks in—hot breath in his ear, “I don’t know why you’re not having the dreams yet. There must be something wrong with you.”
Andrew’s eyes fly open. He’s alone in bed. The lock on his door is intact.
He gets to the stadium early, changes out, starts his workout while the rest of the team trickles in. He’s avoiding Neil, but the collision is inevitable, unfolding exactly the way Andrew knew it would: Neil’s immediate awareness, the tilt of his head at the precise angle that Andrew’s world has been off-kilter since his first soulmate’s voice echoed in his ear that morning. Neil’s hand lifts, his fingers gently curling towards Andrew.
“Fuck off,” Andrew tells him tightly.
The other strikers look at Andrew in surprise. Even Kevin reacts, forehead pinching.
Neil’s hand stills. His brow furrows in concern, but he keeps his mouth shut and doesn’t follow when Andrew walks away.
The Neil who had tumbled Andrew under a pile of furs the night before would never have allowed it. The Andrew who’d made five jars of preserves and half a box of ammo last another three weeks would never have needed it.
Andrew drinks too much whiskey that night and follows it up with too much coffee. The little sleep he gets is too fitfull for dreams. He oversleeps his alarm and opens his eyes to the milky light of early morning feeling hollow and hungry. He’s the last one to the stadium, grunts a response to a coach’s brusque admonition to hurry it up. He drops his shit in front of his locker and reaches for his gear—freezes. There’s a sealed glass jar on his top shelf. Sugared blueberries. Andrew’s favorite. He remembers feeding them to a hollow-cheeked Neil one by one, remembers the soft touch of Neil’s tongue against his fingertips.
That jar gets him through the day. His nerves are frayed thin, his eyes bloodshot, lids heavy, but the shiny sapphire of the berries gleams in his imagination—the shelf in his locker, the shelf in the cabin, Neil’s blue-stained fingers when they’d harvested the berries in the autumn, his indigo lips.
When he gets home, Andrew eats half the jar with a spoon. It’s his dreams made manifest, real in a way that Neil himself isn’t. When he dreams that night, the hard winter finally thaws. They shave off their beards and take the first bath of the season in the quickening river. Neil dunks himself fully and pops back up from beneath the surface, whooping at the shock of frigid water, startling the nervous blackbirds out of the budding branches of trees. They lie on sun-baked rocks to dry, pinkies hooked, Neil’s breath deep and even.
Andrew wakes alone in an empty bed, staring up at his dim white ceiling instead of the wide blue sky. He could find his way there again, to that little cabin—but the centuries will have had their way with the land. Andrew has lost enough homes in this lifetime already.
In the gym the next day, Andrew taps in to replace Neil’s spotter. Neil looks up at him from the bench. His eyes are so familiar now, a cloudless sky even on Andrew’s darkest days.
“How’d you sleep?” Neil asks.
“Just fine,” Andrew tells him.
“Anything interesting happen?” Neil asks, and Andrew remembers him barefoot and topless in the woods, summer skin bronzed, the juice of a fresh-picked apple dripping down his chin. He remembers untying Neil’s pants, rolling him into moss and grass.
“Nope,” Andrew says, but it rings false even in his own ears, and Neil smiles in a slow, satisfied way that Andrew remembers from hundreds of nights spent naked and tangled. Neil will have had the dream, too, but he’ll have seen on Andrew’s face what Andrew has only felt—the breadth and depth of Andrew’s love, the wild joy of it, the intensity, the gratitude. Out of all the people in the world, all the souls in infinity, somehow this one is Andrew’s. In every lifetime, his good fortune has been hard to believe. In this one, Andrew thinks, it’s too hard, another of the Universe’s cruel pranks.
It doesn’t get any easier to believe after a few more nights spent growing old together in Acadia. Neil feels as out of reach as ever, an impossibility, a shimmering mirage.
The weekend is endless, the hours painfully long, his apartment empty. By Monday, Andrew is so parched that he gets to practice an hour early, watches the door for Neil like it’s the horizon.
Andrew expects Neil to shimmer when he walks in, expects him to waver, to scatter on the air if Andrew exhales too hard. But Neil is solid and whole. His eyes find Andrew’s—Andrew feels their gazes lock like a bone snapping back into place. What does Neil see on his face? Is it the same as in his dreams?
That night he dreams of meeting Neil at the county fair. A cousin from two towns over introduces Andrew to the most beautiful man he’s ever seen. His dream-self dreams of sharpening Neil’s spears before he goes into battle. In the morning, he packs bread and fruit and cheese and fills a canteen with water from the pump. It’s a long walk to Neil’s town—miles. He only makes it a third of the way before he meets Neil on the road. Neil’s smile is brilliant, dazzling Andrew. It’s Andrew’s seventeenth birthday. A soulmate is a hell of a gift.
The drought gets worse the year after. It drags on and on. The land dries out. The dust storms start. They wait too long to evacuate. Andrew’s cough doesn’t get better when the air does. The dust in his lungs suffocates him from the inside out. His eyes close for the last time on Neil’s tear-stained face, but he lingers long enough to feel the helplessness and desperation in the grip Neil has on his hand.
It’s pitch black when Andrew’s eyes open in the real world. The pillow beneath him is soaked with tears. He checks his phone—half past two in the morning.
Andrew rolls out of bed and pulls on sweatpants, a sweater. He shoves his feet in slides and grabs his keys on the way out the door, speeds down empty roads to the stadium. The parking lot is empty other than one car—Neil’s inconspicuous silver Honda. Andrew parks next to it, but it’s empty. He settles a hand on the hood of the car. It’s still warm.
He finds Neil by the side door, a cigarette held in his unsteady hand. Neil’s eyes are red, his face splotchy. Andrew takes the cigarette from him and grinds it out beneath his heel. He hooks a hand around the back of Neil’s neck—Neil bends beneath it, his forehead dropping to Andrew’s collarbone. His body trembles, his breath ragged and raw. Andrew turns into him, his mouth pressed to the hair at Neil’s temple.
It’s hardly any contact, but it breaks through Neil’s flimsy defenses. His shoulders shake as he weeps, purging his grief. It pours out of him, leaving him gasping for breath to fill his lungs and keep from caving in on himself.
When the storm passes, they go inside. Neil falls asleep with his head in Andrew’s lap, his body curled protectively towards Andrew. Andrew threads a hand into Neil’s hair and lets his own head drop back. He dozes until someone switches the lights on, flooding the room. Andrew squints at a familiar silhouette—Kevin.
Kevin flips the lights back off. He kicks a doorstop into place, borrowing enough hallway light to illuminate the couch. He is silent as he crosses the room, silent as he stares down at a still-sleeping Neil and the hand Andrew has buried in his hair.
“Bad dream,” Andrew says, and it’s the whole truth, if you look closely enough.
Kevin does. Understanding dawns on his face. He’d met his soulmate on the court back in college. Andrew had watched him go through the dreams alone, a continent away from his other half. Some of them had almost broken him. He’d had a string that woke him up in the middle of the night and sent him hurtling to kneel before the toilet. He hadn’t said much more than “Macedonia” when Nicky pried, but he’d taken up smoking for a week, sat up on the roof with Andrew way too late, his hand trembling with every inhale. He’s familiar with this brand of bad dreams.
Kevin knows all of Andrew’s variables, solves his equation quickly. “I thought you were done getting in your own way.”
Andrew looks at the sleeping man in his lap, at his soft mouth and thick lashes. He’s riskier than committing to exy was, riskier than letting Aaron into his life. There’s a part of Andrew that has believed Drake all these years, has believed that he was broken, defective. He’d hung on the stories Drake had told him, the memories he’d claimed to have of them in Boston, in Ireland, in Alaska. He’d needed it to be real. It wasn’t.
Neil is. The distance Andrew keeps between them is futile. Andrew remembers lifetimes together, hard times and happy ones, fear and joy, Neil’s unshakeable loyalty. The only thing standing between them now is Andrew—but he’s a hell of an obstacle. Makes a living that way.
Neil wakes when the rest of the team starts trickling in; Garcia and Peterson enter mid-shoving match, laughing loud, and Neil’s eyes fly open. He’s instantly alert, no grogginess. He sits up, grimacing apologetically at Andrew.
“Don’t,” Andrew tells him.
“Sorry.”
“I said don’t.”
Andrew’s hands miss the heat of Neil’s body, the silk of his hair, the delicate curve of his ear.
At lunch time, he sits across from Neil and Kevin, ignoring Kevin’s eye roll and the little smile that curves one side of Neil’s mouth.
“We’re talking about the game next week,” Kevin says.
San Francisco. Their first pre-season match. Neil’s first game in the pro leagues. Andrew tears a piece of bread off his roll and shoves it into his mouth, chewing blank-faced and silent.
Kevin turns his attention back to Neil. “I want to try you against Andrew on goal today,” he says.
Neil’s answering smile is sharp and deadly, sharkish. It strikes a match in Andrew’s gut, lights a fuse. Andrew has seen Neil play. He knows Neil’s stats, his four-minute mile, the distance he covers in an average game. None of it prepares him to face Neil on the court. They’d danced a waltz in Vienna once that had looked a little like this, the same feather-light touch of feet to floor, the same graceful spins and pivots, the same disciplined lock of his arms.
The memory is so vivid, so perfectly clear, that Andrew forgets where he is for a moment. He doesn’t hear the squeak of court shoes against the floor. He hears violins. The wall behind him lights up red. Andrew forces himself back to the present and finds Kevin, looking disgusted, and Neil, his expression raw and open. Andrew has never been looked at like that before, not even in his dreams.
In bed that night, he dreams of pyramids and jungles and bathing Neil in sacred oils beneath the sprawling infinity of the galaxy.
It’s still dark out when his alarm goes off, but there are no stars. Just that same cataract haze of modernity that curves over every city in the world. Are there still places where you can see the stars? Andrew picks up his phone—finds Neil’s contact—texts him the question.
Neil’s response is immediate: a Maps link to a state park in Oregon. It’s a seven hour drive away.
Andrew texts back: Saturday?
Neil sends a thumbs up emoji. A star emoji. A car emoji. He texts like Nicky, Andrew thinks, allowing himself one moment of despair before he goes to start the coffee.
Neil’s emojis hang there the rest of the week, and they don’t say much more to each other at practice than they have been, but Neil nods when Andrew suggests “9 a.m.” on his way past the bench that Friday. He sends Andrew another Maps link, this time to an apartment building that Andrew recognizes as Kevin’s, and he’s waiting outside with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder when Andrew pulls up at 8:53.
Andrew leaves the windows down and the music loud as they head South. Neil tips his head back against the seat and lets the wind whip his hair around his closed eyes, teasing it into a frenzy that Neil self-consciously tames in the visor mirror when they stop for drinks two hours in. Neil keeps finger-combing his hair. Andrew knocks his hand out of the way and fucks it back up. Neil feints toward a retaliatory swipe at Andrew’s close-cropped hair, but Andrew dodges it. He pinches Neil’s side to prove he can
That night, they lay side by side in the open air. Neil watches the galaxy. Andrew watches him. They’re so small in the grand scheme, so insignificant, but the thing that dreams of escaping Andrew’s maximum security containment is huge—and pushy. It’ll tear Andrew apart if he lets it out
Neil looks at him and smiles and Andrew feels his first seam rip.
Three days later the team flies to San Francisco. Neil sits between Andrew and Kevin and presses his leg against Andrew’s when it gets jittery. It shouldn’t turn Andrew on, but it does, and he spends the rest of the flight thinking about touching Neil and watching old episodes of House Hunters on the built-in TV.
Andrew feels the pull of Neil like a magnet that night, but he puts himself to bed early, tucks himself between crisp hotel sheets and counts backward from one-hundred. He loses his place and has to start again at fifty a few times, and then he’s drinking warm beer in some guy’s basement. His shirt is plastered to his back with sweat and the black jeans tucked into his black boots are suffocating his ankles. Some wannabe punk band is making a racket.
He goes to piss and winds up in line in front of a little group of uni kids—two women and a man. They stick out like sore thumbs. The man’s shirt is blue with little white buttons. Andrew eavesdrops and idly thinks about taking it off of him. The man’s name is Martin. The women want him to live a little. They think he needs to find the right girl. Martin says he’s done plenty of living. He’s not worried about it. They’re fond and overbearing. He’s fond and indulgent. The line creeps closer to the bathroom door. The women ask if he’s tried men. He says no, because he spends way less time thinking about his love life than they do.
They think that’s both obvious and not something to brag about.
The bathroom door opens. The person in front of Andrew goes in. Andrew props his back against the wall by the door and watches the women fuss, tsking insults at the man even as they smooth the wrinkles in his shirt and tidy his wild hair.
The bathroom door opens again. Andrew acts on an impulse—he fists his hand in the front of Martin’s shirt and pulls him into the bathroom. He pushes the man up against the inside of the closed door and turns the lock on the knob.
“Hi,” the man says, his electric eyes sparking.
“Try me,” Andrew says, and the man smiles. The kiss is the best thing Andrew has ever felt, better than any high. He trips on it all night long, keeps going back for more. It’s hours until he gets Martin alone—nearly sunrise. They drop Martin’s friends off and walk the two miles back to Andrew’s shitty studio, talking about everything and nothing until they land on Andrew’s double mattress.
Andrew takes Martin’s clothes off and he’s Neil under all of it. Andrew blows him, rides him, comes on his face. Every minute of it is steeped in fine detail, the tastes, the textures, the sounds. Andrew wakes abruptly. The distance between them is intolerable. He pulls on sweatpants and grabs a room key and then he’s knocking on Neil’s door, barefoot and suddenly impatient after weeks of stalling.
Neil opens it, sleep-rumpled but bright-eyed, a wide awake habit formed over years living on the razor’s edge. Andrew sees his own hunger sharpening Neil’s face and steps closer, crowding Neil in the doorframe. Neil holds his ground, closes the distance between them. His mouth is hot and insistent, no hesitation.
Neil’s t-shirt has none of the buttons Andrew had so enjoyed undoing in the dream, but it comes off just as easily. Beneath it, Neil is covered in scars, something Andrew knows but doesn’t really understand until he feels all those old injuries rough against his palms. A flash of rage just as blinding as his desire has his hands tightening on Neil’s hips.
Neil’s fingertips cradle Andrew’s jaw. Andrew feels the tenderness in that touch and understands—Neil knows suffering. He knows pain and betrayal. He knows survival. He knows what it means to amputate things you can’t be sure you’ll ever grow back. He knows what it means to hate and fear and love the same person. He knows what trust can cost you. He is exactly what Andrew needs. And he’s real. Some-fucking-how, he’s real.