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Renee had heard Andrew cry out from down the hallway and got increasingly worried as she got closer to him. Andrew could handle pain well- and she’d seen him with some pretty bad injuries from playing exy. She heard the water running, which was odd because she hadn’t heard a flush or anything and they hadn't come from practice, so he wasn’t showering. When they met in the doorway, almost running into one another, Renee could very clearly see something was wrong. For one, the bags under his eyes were worse than finals week and Andrew had to borrow her concealer, two, his eyes were red and puffy like they are when he tried and fails not to cry, and three, the gaping fucking wound on his collar bone.
“Andrew?!” Renee exclaimed as she rushed forward fast enough to reach him without scaring him. She knew Andrew’s boundaries. She knew how to ask. Her hands hovered a comfortable distance from his face as she asked, “Can I?” Andrew nodded tearfully, holding back a sob that was threatening to rip itself out of his chest.
Renee cupped his face in her gentle hands, her expression one of worry. “...You’re wearing your arm bands again, Drew.” She said it as a statement, not a question, because she knew why he was wearing them again. This wasn’t the first time she’d seen Andrew like this. He was still trying to fight the emotions, but it wasn’t very useful. Eventually, he gave in. He sank to the floor, pulling his knees up to his chest, desperately holding them against him as a form of comfort.
“Andrew, can I fix it? I need you to tell me.” He couldn’t verbally reply to her request, but he lowered his legs to the ground and tilted his head back so Renee could dress the wound.
Renee Walker and Neil Josten were the only two people on the face of this fucked-up planet that Andrew would ever let touch him. Renee knew how to be soft in a way Andrew had never gotten to experience growing up. She didn’t yell at him, hit him, or threaten him. She taught him things about being a person with a certain kindness and patience Andrew could only hope to have one day.
On nights like these, when Andew was covered in his own blood on the bathroom floor or when he was left trebling and sobbing from nightmares, Renee didn’t yell at him. She kept a soft, motherly tone. Her voice carried a comfort Andrew hadn’t known he needed. She always managed to show up when he needed her most, like it was some kind of sixth sense.
Neil knew his inside and out. Literally. Neil was the only man that Andrew had ever trusted to touch him after what happened with Drake. And that didn’t just mean sex. Yes, they’d had sex a few times, Neil constantly reassuring Andrew and telling him that they could stop if he got uncomfortable, and Andrew was grateful for that. But that wasn’t all Andrew had trusted his boyfriend with. The first time Andrew had fallen asleep on Neil’s shoulder during movie night, he woke up to Neil crying silent tears of joy. Neil made him feel safe in a way that he really couldn’t describe. Somehow, he made Andrew feel safer than Renee did. So safe, in fact, that when Andrew was medicated, he convinced himself that Neil was just a hallucination. But he wasn’t.
Andrew managed to disassociate when Renee bandaged his wounds. The feeling of her gentle hands fixing the damage Andrew had caused to himself was drowned out by his thoughts. Andrew was tired. He missed Neil. He was mad at Kevin. He wanted to see Aaron. He needed to hear Nicky’s dumb jokes. He missed Neil even more.
After a while, his thoughts got hazy and his hands felt cold. Renee had just finished cleaning off his neck when she went to remove his armband. Her hand brushed over it and she felt the sticky wetness that covered it. Renee, growing more concerned, gently wrapped her hand around Andrew’s forearm, resulting in a blood-covered had for the former and a sharp hiss of pain from the ladder.
Renee quickly helped remove his armband to reveal that his arm was drenched in blood. It hadn’t stopped bleeding when Andrew thought it did. Apparently, one of the cuts had gone just deep enough to strike an artery. His brain felt too foggy to process the copious amounts of blood covering his wrist and forearm. Renee let out a frightened gasp and called Abby, the team nurse and makeshift mom.
Abby reached the two in record time, Wymack and Aaron in tow. As Abby put pressure on the bleeding wound, Aaron rushed to his twin brother’s side. He tilted Andrew’s face to look at him properly. “Andrew, listen to me, you’re going to be okay, okay?” Andrew wasn’t sure if Aaron was saying that to him or himself. Either way, he didn’t think Aaron was right. Andrew leaned against his brother as tears he didn’t know were there slowly rolled down his cheeks. Everything seemed to move in slow motion. Wymack was on the phone with someone. When he hung up, he dialed another number. After that conversation, he said something to Aaron that Andrew was too dazed to pick up on.
“Neil’s on his way, Andrew. He’ll be here soon.” Aaron told him. What felt like hours, which were actually minutes according to his phone, passed by before Andrew was put on a stretcher and put into an ambulance. He didn’t remember what happened at the hospital, other than he fell asleep. When he woke up, he was hooked up to all sorts of beeping machines and things like that. But Neil was there, so everything was okay.
“Neil?” Andrew whispered. His boyfriend perked up at his voice before rushing over to the bedside. “You’re awake.” Neil said. “Sweetheart, what happened? Why did you-” He cut himself off by wiping tears off of his face. “You could have called me.” Andrew didn’t say anything, but he wrapped his arms around Neil and actually cried for the first time since he was 10 years old. And sadly, Neil could do nothing but hold him because he didn’t know how to help.