Chapter Text
Kevin lets out a breath that’s halfway between relieved and hysterical.
“But I’m gone if the Moriyamas get too close. I’m serious. That’s not about me, Kevin. That’s about this place. I’m a dead man walking. I won’t pull you down with me.”
And Neil can see that Kevin wants to argue. Can see that Kevin believes , ludicrously, that the Foxhole can actually protect him. Or, at least, that Neil is worth the risk to it.
Neil doesn’t want to have that argument.
“And you need to call me Neil, Kev. I don’t want people knowing who I am.”
“They won’t care.”
Of course they’ll care. They probably won’t hold it against him, but they’ll care . It’ll make him more memorable than he already is. It’ll tell them just how valuable turning him in would be. Neil—as odd as it continues to be—trusts Wymack. But the rest of these “foxes”? The only one he’s met other than Kevin held a knife to his throat and accused him of being a Moriyama spy.
Which is at least an attitude that Neil can respect.
The rest of the foxes are unknown quantities. Neil won’t—can’t—trust them on the strength of conviction. Won’t take Kevin’s faith that they’d be able to keep their mouths shut for truth.
Maybe Kevin’s right. Maybe it’s unnecessary.
But ‘unnecessary’ has kept him alive more than once.
Kevin, for his part, continues to look aggrieved by Neil’s continued skepticism. But he also doesn’t look willing to push the issue any further than he already has, which is all Neil needs from him.
Ten minutes later, he’s standing back in front of Wymack.
“Okay. I’m staying.”
“Just like that?”
Wymack fixes Neil a look that says he’d expected much more of a fight from him. Neil can’t blame him. He’d expected the same.
“Kevin had some information I wasn’t aware of. It… Changes things. This is now my best option.”
“Okay,” Wymack says, easy as that. Just as unwilling as Kevin to look the gift horse in the mouth. Or, more likely, experienced enough to know that questioning Neil further would just push him in another direction. “I’ll get the word out to the foxes, and we’ll call them home so we can get on the same page and work out a strategy for you. Set up the story of you as a permanent fox so nobody contradicts it. If you want, you can play skittish to keep away from the temps—it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch,” he adds, wryly. “But we will need something to tell Janie.”
“I think you should tell her about the Moriyamas.”
Neil surprises himself by saying it, but the second it’s out of the mouth, he knows that he’s right. She probably won’t be dissuaded from trying to get close to him by anything less. “Just enough that she knows the stakes. If she’s serious about wanting to stay.”
Wymack is as surprised as Neil is, he knows. He can see it in the way that Wymack’s eyebrows shoot to his forehead as he talks. But he’s pleased him, too. He agrees too readily for him to be anything but pleased by Neil’s suggestion.
“Speaking of Janie—Abby should be done with her by now.”
Abby is a middle aged woman who, in contrast to Wymack, with his tattoos and large build, looks an awful lot like somebody who’d be at home working in a middle school. Her office, cordoned off from the rest of the ward where Neil and Janie had slept last night, oddly… Doesn’t.
The ward had been sterile but cheerful, like any other institutional infirmary. There were cots and chairs, cabinets of basic medical supplies, plants that looked like they'd seen better days hanging in pots from the windows… But nothing much outside of that.
Abby’s office, in contrast, is positively personal . There’s a pull-out couch where Wymack must have slept, and framed pictures of Abby, Wymack, and another woman scattered around the space. Drawings, clearly made with varying levels of skill, carefully tacked flat against the walls. The cabinets lock, but they match the desk, which matches the couch, which matches the little end table scattered with a variety of sealed snacks. Even the garbage can matches the decor.
The effect is lived-in and put together, but tidy. Cozy , even. If it weren’t for the desk, or for the medical examination table and other sundry equipment arranged just-so on the far end of the room, Neil would be sure he’d somehow been led into the wrong room.
He has plenty of time to poke around it. When Wymack guided him over, he’d pulled Abby aside to “update her on the situation,” so Neil had spent the last fifteen minutes cataloging the space and trying not to think about the medical exam ahead of him.
Neil has never liked doctors.
In his experience, they come in two flavors: eager to take him apart, or far too full of questions. Both were too dangerous for comfort.
Neil doubts that Abby will be anything like his father or his underlings, but she is sure to have questions.
In some ways, Kevin being here has simplified that angle. Neil won’t need to explain why the scars stretched across his skin won’t exempt him from the unwind line, not if she knows he’s connected to the Moriyamas. But the story they tell isn’t one Neil would want to share, even with people who know the broad strokes.
It’s not just the hallmarks of a childhood in the Butcher’s home, after all. Oh, they’re certainly there — neat lines from surgical “practice” that was only ever an excuse for Lola or his father to vent their cruelty, messier lines where he’d first practiced stitching himself up, a brand burned into his chest marking him Moriyama property, and other scars so faded he didn’t remember how he’d gotten them… All of it damning enough on its own. But Neil’s more worried about potential reactions to the rest of them.
Nobody shoots at kids in the US. It’s counterproductive, a waste of resources, and most firearm users have followed the juvey cops’ example and switched over to tranq guns. Those who haven’t tend to stand out, especially outside of rural areas, and even then there’s an expectation that you use tranqs against people. Neil might be able to explain away the road rash, the knife wounds, the crisscrossing scars from crashing through broken glass in a desperate escape or from fights that he didn’t end quick enough to get out of without the other person snagging a good few hits of their own, even the missing chunk of flesh his mother tore out of his shoulder the night they ran so she could remove the tracking device his father had placed there — but the puckered and long-healed bullet wound less than a hand’s breadth away can’t be mistaken for anything other than what it is.
It’s not the kind of thing you’d expect to find on an AWOL.
It’s not the kind of thing one usually survives, not without extensive medical knowledge, resources, and a fair amount of luck.
The Foxhole already knows that he’s not a typical AWOL, but he’s not sure he’s ready to explain the extent of what that means. How, exactly, he’s survived this long. What happened to his mother.
That he suspects that the recent tightened borders are targeted at him, specifically.
He doesn’t want to see them decide that he’s too much of a risk after all. He doesn’t want to see the pity or revulsion that comes with looking at skin so scarred in a world where skin grafts are, relatively speaking, so easy and cheap that a genuine disfigurement is a rarity. Most of all, he doesn’t want to deal with the questions that he’s always had to fear, but never had to answer. The how , and who , and why .
A knock at the door interrupts his worrying. After a second of silence, he hears Abby from outside the door. “Neil? Are you alright if I come back in?”
“I’m fine,” he answers, and Abby comes back in, shutting the door behind her. “Is this when you clear me for the dorms?”
“Well, you’ll be getting a room in the tower, from what I understand. But yep, we’ll get you all set and then you can get settled in. Did David tell you what that involves?”
“Not really,” Neil says, “just that you need to clear us.”
“Yes, well. It’s nothing too major. Just a general check up—weight, height, medical history, vaccinations, and so on. You’ve already met with just about everyone, so there’s not much point keeping you in isolation waiting for results,” Abby says as she reaches to her left to pull a clipboard and pen out of a drawer, “but most of the important screenings—flu, and other contagious illnesses—give us rapid results anyway.”
“That’s it?”
“There’s also some tests, and bloodwork, but pretty much.” Abby shrugs. “We’re not able to give everyone the same standard of medical care as they’d be expected to if they weren’t AWOL, but establishing a baseline helps us deal with it if any problems crop up further down the road. And screening for illnesses is just basic sense—not as big a deal right now, when we’re slow, but when we’ve got 20 kids already here, some of them getting ready to head out to the wall, where we have well over a hundred at any given time—well, illness spreads like wildfire. And prevention’s a lot easier than trying to deal with half the Foxhole puking their guts out.”
Neil nods. It’s never been worth the risk for him and his mother to seek medical care, not for anything that wasn’t immediately life threatening, but they also didn’t have a trusted medical professional living with them. It makes sense that the Foxhole would be a little more proactive.
It doesn’t make him any less reluctant, but he sees the logic of it. Enough that he’s ready to just get this over with.
The exam that follows is relatively painless. Abby draws blood into vials, sticks swabs up his nose, frowns at his answers about his recent vaccinations (there’s no point in lying about that, not here) and writes a few notes on her clipboard before jabbing him with various needles.
Neil sighs in relief when she takes his refusal to lift his shirt for her stethoscope gracefully, and tenses when she moves to examine his eyes.
“Are the contacts prescription?”
“...No.”
Abby hums, but the only question she asks after that is if he needs them to put it on the supply list.
He must stare at her for five minutes before he relents and nods at her, but she doesn’t press him for more.
Then there are the questions. Some, he doesn’t know the answers to—if there are any genetic diseases in his family, Mary hadn’t bothered to mention it, and Nathan certainly hadn’t. Others, he gives partial answers to—he tells Abby about maybe half of his broken bones, but he doesn’t mention the gunshot. She doesn’t follow up and ask him how his ribs have been broken before, so he doesn’t have to lie about it.
Neil idly wonders if Wymack warned her off probing too deeply, to avoid spooking him.
Then she asks him if he’s had any replacements, and Neil can’t help a grimace.
Technically, no. All of his parts—as far as he knows—are original.
Certainly he’d stared at his legs enough times, scrutinizing the skin on either side of the barely-perceptible scar above his knees searching for any difference in skin tone, any unfamiliar marks, any missing scars. But no, they were the same as they’d ever been—Neil had to believe it. Had to believe the careless cruelty of his father dismissing Mary with a remark that he’d just been practicing, don’t worry so much. You know I won’t waste the boy on Tetsuji’s little pet.
Had to believe in Lola’s mocking laughter at his mother’s incandescent rage, her snide Don’t take it so seriously, Mary, Junior’s fine. Aren’t you, Junior?
They’d run barely a month later. As soon as Mary was sure it wouldn’t slow them down.
Neil just tells Abby that no, he doesn’t have any non-original parts, and leaves it at that.
She doesn’t press him on it.