Chapter Text
Andrew has never been stupid enough to believe in fate, or inevitability. The first thing he was taught to truly believe in, he sticks to: blunt force. Mass times acceleration. Arcs and circles. The arc of a fist flying towards his chubby toddler head for trying to steal another thing of applesauce out of some foster kitchen without permission. The amount of counterweight needed to hold a closed door closed when someone else is trying to hurtle into the room. The perpetual motion of being kicked from home to home.
The beat-up physics textbook he finds in the corner of the library he’s lingering in to avoid going back into the house tells him so. An object in motion stays on its path unless acted on by an external force. There’s no such thing as fate, or destiny, or God, just a bunch of external forces punting Andrew Doe down trajectory after trajectory.
Here’s one: The arms that flung him into the foster system didn’t quite follow through hard enough for him to leave her orbit entirely. It all comes back around when he runs smack into his twin fucking brother at some baseball game. Here’s another external force: what Drake threatens to do when there’s two of Andrew in the same room. Putting something in motion makes the end path clear, but it can be changed, if you use enough force. Andrew sends himself to juvie.
Putting something into motion requires commitment, trust, a willingness to brace for the recoil. You don’t throw a punch unless you are prepared for the bones in your hands to break on someone’s broken nose. He prefers knives. On others, on himself. Those are about control. Andrew gets into one too many fights, and is acted on once again. You need a hobby, they say, and you can’t be trusted to do anything other than goalie. Too violent.
See the trajectory and call the fucking shot. Swing the racquet up in the right arc with the right momentum to act on the ball with a greater force than the one sending it into the goal. It’s easy. Simple. The kind that makes his brain go quiet.
Whatever other bullshit that happens in this stupid game is not his problem. He can read a book in his head. He’s been liking the one about the gay guy and the whale. The shitty juvie English teacher they pay to come in once a week told him the whale is really his soulmate, because the book is really about fate and free will. Feint to his left, block the shot coming in on the right. Ten goals stopped in ten minutes. Whatever.
This is complicated by the fact that no one else can do what he does. “This is your way out of here,” the volunteer-coach tells him, frowns more than he usually does when Andrew tells him he doesn’t give a fuck about exy, that it’s just a way to pass the time.
He wakes up the next morning with a fuck-off huge soulmark on his clavicle, stretching from shoulder-to-shoulder: FUCK YOU! WHOSE RACQUET DID YOU STEAL? It’s the dumbest fucking thing he’s ever seen in his life.
Soulmates. The ultimate external force. Divine intervention. Universal fate, predestined love, or some other such bullshit. Someone he’s now been pitched on an inexorable trajectory to meet. How he meets that moment of impact, though, is still up to him. Unless Andrew wakes up the next morning having miraculously lost his ability to block shots and subsequently spends the next ten years of life taking exy balls directly to his developing cerebellum, he will have no reason at any point to give whatever jackass exy player who is going to aggressively accuse him of delinquency upon first meeting him the time of day.
Andrew passes the time blocking more shots and getting better at throwing punches at his fellow inmates who agree that Andrew’s soulmark is the dumbest fucking thing they’ve seen in their lives. Throw the arc from the shoulder, not the wrist, and people break on you and not the other way around.
He doesn’t care about exy, or his soulmate, or his way out of here. There are other forces in the universe that act on him first. The Minyards pull Andrew back into their orbit. Tilda Minyard is sorry, or something, wants to play happy families. Andrew couldn’t care less. Aaron, though. Every action has its equal opposite reaction. Goalies have strikers, souls have soulmates, and Andrews have Aarons. Ha-ha. He wants to spend his life acting, not reacting.
Andrew doesn’t forget the fundamental laws of the universe, of motion, of fate. The velocity of Tilda Minyard’s downward spiral is strong enough to pull Aaron completely under where Andrew can’t get to him. He doesn’t forget anything. The amount of blunt force it requires to blacken the eye of a fifteen year-old, even if Aaron lies about where he got it. Promises hold real weight. Enough mass to bend gravity around them. Andrew says what he means, and will bend the world around itself to keep his word. He promises to protect Aaron, and sees where the end trajectory of that promise will take him dead-on. Andrew remembers his rules. Arcs and circles, mass and acceleration. When he pulls down on the steering wheel of Tilda’s speeding car, he knows exactly where the impact will hit.
(He doesn’t know everything, though. He wakes up in the hospital, after all.)
Sweet Cousin Nicky leaves his soulmate in Germany and struggles against gravity every day to make things work for Andrew and Aaron in Columbia. They don’t make it easy for him, but hey, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Struggle begets struggle.
His teachers say he’s not applying himself. He needs a hobby, apparently. As long as it isn’t–Aaron tells him he’s going out for the exy team because he has a crush on one of the goalies. Ugh. Andrew replaces her on the team’s first line, because he’s better. He needs to work on his teamwork, his coach says. Andrew earns a detention for bouncing a ball off the wall at just the right angle to hit the striker who called him a mean and nasty word in the part of his neck that his helmet doesn’t quite cover. It’s an impossible shot, and they can’t even prove he made it, but it doesn't matter. Aaron attends the detention. Andrew gets him a 5 on his AP Physics exam. Nicky buys them both the best dinner he can with their Eden’s money. He also shows up to all their games, learns how to be a backliner to practice with Aaron in the backyard. Nicky is volatile and flighty, but he makes his promises with the same weight that Andrew does. Not that Andrew would admit it out loud.
They win South Carolina’s state exy championship their junior year. Andrew shuts down the goal for the entire back half of the season. He takes care to always use his own racquet. Call the shot, stop the shot. Easy. At least no one tells him to fuck himself and asks whose raquet he’s stealing.
“How do you even do that?” Aaron asks after practice one day. He wouldn’t know what to do with the answer, because this isn’t the question he really wants to ask.
Every stupid question must be met with an equally stupid answer. “Well, brother dearest, you look at where the ball is going and then you stop it from going there. Traditionally, you even use a racquet. It’s all just swinging, one way or another.”
Nicky, putting dinner–hot dogs and mac and cheese, again– nods like this makes sense to him. Andrew knows it doesn’t. “And I’ve been saying this. Am I a philosopher?”
Aaron wrinkles his nose. “Ew.” Brother dearest has been struggling with Nicky’s generally flaming nature, for reasons unknown. Maybe having a gay identical twin would bother Andrew, if he was straight and also an asshole, but Aaron doesn’t even know about that. Aaron doesn’t know how to look with his eyes. Andrew’s pretty sure he’s too busy using at work to even notice that he works at a gay bar. Tilda’s momentum, her leftover addiction, is going to carry her son into the grave with her at this rate.
Over the summer, before senior year, he makes the call. He throws Aaron into the bathroom by himself, applies the appropriate counterweight to the door to keep him from hurtling out until he’s sober. He trusts that he will come back around. Andrew keeps his promises, and Andrew carves out a deal: it’s just the two of them, no one else. Aaron looks at his soulmark dubiously. His twin doesn’t have one at all, worries deep down Andrew will drop him for the exy jackass at the first opportunity. As if. Andrew resolves to block that particular shot when it comes. They shake on the deal, and that’s that.
Senior year is for Aaron’s big dreams, for Nicky’s quiet insinuations that Andrew also deserves a future, the brochures slipped under his door about various colleges and career programs. Whatever. Senior year is also for reading the entire school library in his head during exy practices. Too late. Andrew’s attracted too much attention already. After practice, Kevin Day and Riko Moriyama, the pretty and perfect future of the sport from all the magazines Andrew hadn’t even bothered to pretend to read, are waiting for them after practice.
“Which one of you is Andrew Minyard?” Riko says. Riko talks, Kevin smiles at his side.
“If you can’t tell, neither of us are hearing you out.” Aaron is funny, sometimes.
Kevin Day turns to Andrew and launches into a passionate description of just how good Andrew is as a goalie, rattling off his statistics down to the hundredth place. His pretty green eyes get all glassy, his cheeks pink. It’s like he has a crush on Andrew’s game. Weird.
Riko smiles, sharper. “They showed us the security tapes from last year. You should not have been able to snipe that third-rate striker from that angle off the wall. It was a perfect shot.”
“Perfect,” Kevin echoes.
Riko makes him an offer Andrew absolutely can refuse: join their team, their little Perfect Court, be the best in the world, win the Olympics, get out of here, leave all of this behind. As he talks, Andrew notes the way Day’s gravity bends around Moriyama. Aaron says later that it’s freaky how the pair of them move in synchronicity and finish each other’s sentences. Andrew sees what he can’t: Riko is the one with the inertia. He moves first, Kevin follows. Completely stuck in his orbit.
Aaron is funny, but Andrew is hilarious. “Black isn’t my color,” he drawls, knowing damn well he is wearing three shades of it right now. “And I don’t give a fuck about exy.” Knowing full damn well he has the biggest and most exy-themed soulmark he’s ever seen on anyone.
Poor Kevin Day is heartbroken, and Moriyama says some contrite and ominous bullshit about Andrew regretting this later. He throws them out of his gym and out of their life, puts them back on whatever creepy bird trajectory will fly them straight home.
“The Ravens are the best team in the country,” Aaron says, shocked. “Why wouldn’t you want to get out of here?”
As if he’d drop Aaron for the low, low price of committing his entire being to the world’s dumbest and most boring sport and a prime piece of real estate under the middle of fucking nowhere, West Virginia. Of all places. No. Andrew keeps his promises. They’re his center of gravity. “Are you stupid?” Andrew asks.
“Fuck you,” Aaron spits. “Fuck me for wanting you to have a future, Andrew. What else are you going to do?”
Andrew doesn’t know, but an object in motion remains in motion. Unless, of course, it gets arrested for aggravated assault for beating the shit out of some homophobic assholes that were going to kill its cousin in a dirty alley outside of work. And put on nasty, nasty pills to make it nicer and more palatable in polite society. The medication complicates things. Gravity gets heavier and then too light all at once at random intervals. Things speed up and slow down without reason. Trajectories bend when he throws them straight. Playing games high off his fucking ass makes them not easy, makes his brain even louder.
The second collegiate offer is a surprise. David Wymack from Palmetto State, two hours west, specializes in sad sacks from busted homes with dubious relationships to the concept of exy as an activity. Andrew is three for three. A perfect fit. An inevitability, even. He’s inclined not to take it, but he figures he should at least try to do what he does best and follow through with what’s been put into motion.
“Take my brother, too.” He’s not leaving him behind, and maybe going to college for free so he can be a fancy big-shot doctor will teach him some semblance of gratitude. He’s not holding his breath, though.
“Done.” The coach doesn’t even hesitate. Interesting.
He pushes the arc out further. “Take my cousin?” Andrew isn’t delusional, he and Aaron will probably kill each other without some kind of supervision, and Nicky’s been halfway decent at preventing this so far. A zero double-homicide track record. And he’s given up a lot. Andrew wants to meet promise for promise, clear the debt.
“He’s 20, right? Backliner?” Andrew nods, the coach repeats the gesture. “Done.”
Andrew follows the trajectory to its end point. “Let me go off my meds. During games.”
This, the coach hesitates on. Andrew can’t pretend he’s surprised. “Can’t put that in writing, but sure, I’ll shake on it. Under medical supervision.” Huh.
“If anyone ever accuses me of stealing their racquet, can you promise to punch them in the head?”
The coach just raises his eyebrows. Andrew likes that in people, the refusing to be surprised or scared of him. It’s rare. “No can do, son.” He doesn’t comment on why Andrew would ask that of him, what story is behind that. “First three goodies on the table have gotta be good enough. ”
Andrew acts, signs on the dotted line, and changes the trajectory of their lives. Nicky’s eyes get shiny when Andrew comes home with his contract, starts crying when he pulls the second one out for Aaron, and is full-on inconsolable when Andrew gives him the third. As if he would forget.
When Nicky’s finished with his bawling, he calls his soulmate and bawls over it all again. Tears of joy, he says. I’m just so proud of you, he says. Because Nicky cannot ever help himself from believing in the power of love, he also gasps and says: “Andrew! Maybe when you’re there and playing Class I you could meet…them?” There is a very weighted and gender-neutral pause there. Nicky loves soulmates, loves his more than breathing. When he saw Andrew’s mark, he’d clapped and cheered because he was so happy for him. Andrew hadn’t spoken to him for a month, after that.
“I can’t even say ‘nice try,’ with that, because that sucked.” Andrew turns to leave. He wants a cigarette by himself on the roof. “I still don’t give a fuck about exy. Or that.”
Palmetto is—well, whatever. The team sucks shit, there’s no point in trying when exy is as boring as ever, and the constant rocking between being higher than a kite and being in the lowest pits of withdrawal hell have Andrew spiritually nauseous. Aaron excels in all his classes. Nicky makes lots of friends.
Andrew makes enemies. Andrew protects his family by any means necessary, even if it doesn’t make sense to the rest of the team. Andrew has too many eyes on him to snipe Gordon in the head off the wall for calling him the same nasty word. Andrew meets a nice Christian girl, and they beat the shit out of each other. The American Dream. In between rounds, Renee looks at his mark and tells him that the whole soulmate thing is a choice. She of all people would believe this–hers says YOU MUST BE NATALIE, right over the heart, and Natalie she is not. She teaches him how to use a knife, how to keep control over a situation without trusting momentum and gravity and velocity. He appreciates this. She appreciates the company.
He takes Nicky and Aaron to Columbia on weekends, to Eden’s, but the whole routine feels a bit dull. An object in motion remains in motion, unless acted on by an external force. For the first time in Andrew Now-Minyard’s life, that force is drag. Friction, boredom. Slowing down and down until he burns up into a million little pieces. One practice, he uses 3 different racquets, and no one calls him on it. He’s losing sight of the point, the end of the arc.
And then. Turns out Andrew didn’t pitch Kevin Day out and away hard enough for the striker to leave his orbit, and he slingshots back into Andrew’s life in a messy, sobbing heap. You’re so fucking good at exy, he slurs. Kevin likes liquor even more than he does, it turns out, and lacks any of Andrew’s discerning taste for the good shit. I want to make a deal. Kevin is graceless and oblivious and broken, but his aim is dead-on. Protect me. Try at practice, for real, and I’ll give you a reason to live by the end of the year. Hm.
Andrew agrees on the condition that Kevin pick himself off the floor and start actually playing again, right-handed. No point in trying for someone who’s already given up. Kevin takes this as ironclad proof that deep-down, Andrew really does care about his stupid sport. He’ll be looking for that for a long fucking while. Aaron narrows his eyes at Kevin sometimes, when he thinks Andrew isn’t looking. Wondering if Andrew’s broken their deal. He hasn’t, but sometimes, as Kevin follows him around and they bicker like an old married couple, Andrew thinks there’s not a point in having a soulmate anyways if he already has whatever that is in his life. God, he’s annoying. It’s very mutual. Andrew needs the new center of gravity to keep everything else moving along, just as badly as Kevin needs to feel safe.
What Andrew doesn’t need is to be in the middle of nowhere, who-cares Arizona, chasing after some random that Kevin has decided through some Kevin-istic metric just absolutely has to be their striker sub after Janie fell through. A tragic coincidence. He watches through the little window of the locker room as the guy stares at a cigarette for ten minutes and does nothing about it. When coach gets to talking with him, he worries with his hands, darts his eyes to every single exit in a matter of thirty seconds. Ah. Kevin’s striker is flighty.
Andrew calls the shot before he starts moving. Rabbit running away, coming through the door in the next breath. Andrew picks up someone else’s racquet, left on the bench. The drugs make him think: maybe this will be interesting after all, don’t let him realize why until a split second too late. When he puts the racquet into motion, his arc is clear and perfect. He has to act because he’s already acting. Damn. Andrew follows the swing through, and strikes home.