Before you read any of this, aionwatha actually wrote a little ficlet about the aftermath a few weeks ago! :D

It took the Foxes forever to catch on, but I don’t blame ‘em. It was pure pandemonium there. A lot of people ((86)) were taken to the local hospitals; a lot more were treated onsite. ((because of the size of the riot, the injured were split up between several different hospitals)) Three of the Foxes were admitted even though Abby was right there with her travel kit. Wymack wasn’t going to risk anything, and he wanted official paperwork regarding the extent of their injuries for liabilities and school records.

So for a while they thought they just hadn’t figured out where Neil was taken– which made sense in a way, because they knew Neil didn’t respond well to authority figures. He’d refused to speak to the police at Luther’s house, unwilling to even give up his name, so they assumed he was treating the doctors with the same tight-lipped attitude. They were nervous with him out of sight for so long, but they weren’t ready to worry yet.

Andrew knew better, because in no universe would Neil have left his game things behind. He looked high and low for any other sign of Neil and came up empty, and this did not make him feel any better.

Wymack knew better, in part because Neil was too pigheaded to accept medical treatment for Riko, so he was definitely not getting hauled off in an ambulance over something like this, and partly because of the clues Neil had been dropping since New Year’s Eve.

((Abby wasn’t sure what to think, because Neil had told her he & doctors didn’t get along, but she was faster to assume Neil had perhaps been knocked unconscious in the fight and therefore couldn’t argue when he’d been carried away.))

Except Andrew reached out to every hospital in the area, and Neil wasn’t in any of them. And it didn’t matter to him that the hospitals were crowded; it didn’t matter how many times the others suggested that maybe Neil just hadn’t been checked in yet. Something wasn’t right. Andrew went through Neil’s phone, found the 0, found the unfamiliar number who’d called Neil earlier tonight, and called both. Both were disconnected.

The more Andrew refused to stop looking, the uneasier the Foxes became. And then some four hours or so after the riot first broke out, when the Foxes were starting to really understand We can’t find him anywhere, when the last of the Foxes was finally treated and released from an overworked hospital and Andrew called the hospitals again to hear their updated intake list, Wymack’s phone rang with an unfamiliar number, and someone on the other end said, This is Special Agent Browning with the FBI.

That was when the panic really set in for most of them, because what the fuck, what was Neil doing in Maryland when he’d been here in New York just a few hours ago, and the FBI—??

It took Matt, Wymack, and Renee to pry Andrew off Kevin’s throat, but at least the Foxes had time to react to the truth before hearing the story from the suits. It was not a happy three-hour ride south–the Foxes took a sharp ride through disbelief, outrage, betrayal, and grief before settling on desperate love and loyalty.

((When Andrew brought Neil’s gear back to the Foxes’ bus, which was serving as a rallying point in the chaos of the stadium grounds, Kevin worried, because Kevin knew like Andrew knew that Neil would never let his things out of his sight. But he listened to the Foxes’ theories on Neil’s whereabouts because he needed to believe in something good. But beneath that stubborn denial was fear, because Kevin knew Neil was living on borrowed time.

He kept thinking, Is this it? Has it finally happened? and he wavered between fury that the Moriyamas/Wesninskis had taken Neil before Neil could finish the year on his terms like he’d wanted, and a wild and gnawing grief he wasn’t expecting. While the Foxes were waiting to be treated he obsessed over Neil’s racquet, trying as hard as he could to fix the strings and straighten the head and clear the smudges from its paint. By prepping Neil’s things for Neil’s return, he was delaying the ugly reality of Neil’s disappearance.

He couldn’t voice these fears because he’d told Neil he wouldn’t tell Andrew. He considered telling Wymack instead, then made himself a promise: if they hadn’t heard from Neil by such-and-such a time, he’d tell Wymack and Andrew the truth. He’d tell them Neil was gone, gone, gone, that Neil had never existed, that there was no saving him now because in no universe would the Moriyamas let a loose string like Nathaniel live.

Browning beat him to his deadline by four minutes.))