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Jean is ten when he meets a fumbling Kevin Day, arms too long for his sweater, on his first ever day in a new country. He is all bird bone and clumsiness. The strong curve of his jaw looks out of place with his hunched shoulders. It’s unfitting for the boy he knows is supposed to be a carbon copy of Kayleigh Day, the genius behind Exy. Where the pictures of Kayleigh Jean has seen showcase a willowy woman, all pale freckles and shockingly blue eyes, Kevin is tan. Tanner than anyone in Appalachia has a right to be, at least. His dark hair flops unflatteringly to one side like he doesn’t know what to do with it, and there is almost no trace of the grace the boy’s mother undoubtedly had. Despite his disappointment, Kevin is— well, nice to Jean. He works his way through a stilted introduction—
(“Hi, I’m uh— you’re living here now? My name is Kevin. Um. Kevin Day.” The hand that reaches out to Jean’s is sweaty and cold. There’s a bitten hangnail on the boy’s ring finger. The knuckles are a little raw, and Jean wonders if it’s the dry West Virginia air or a nervous habit.
Jean raises one eyebrow— his nanny taught him that— and says simply, “Quoi?” He shakes the hand offered to him, despite the gross way it leaves sensation on Jean’s.
If Kevin had inherited any more of his mother’s complexion he would be green. “Oh my god— what, what language is that? I’m—“ he points to himself, eyes wide and imploring, “Kevin. Day.” He slowly pronounces each syllable like it will help Jean out. “Kevin. I’m Kevin.”
Stifling a laugh, Jean decides it would be cruel to drag out the boy’s earnest discomfort. “I know. Sorry, it was a joke.” Kevin’s eyes grow impossibly wider than they were, and his mouth ticks at the corner.
And then they are separated and Jean is on his way to the Nest, one of the best Exy training facilities in the world, and everything is going to be amazing.)
— and when they meet again, Kevin looks less nervous. They’re deep underground, Kevin has just come from watching Edgar Allen University practice, and Jean has just finished his first shower in America. He feels exhausted and worn thin, but he’s going to play Exy with two prodigies and so that’s okay. The black and red walls of his dorm room make the space feel smaller, so even though it takes four steps for Jean to make it to where Kevin sits on his bed, it feels like Jean could have bridged the gap from the door. It’s nice, being this close. Confined, like there’s a bubble that only Exy players get to experience. That only Jean and Kevin get to experience.
“Your hair is uh— it’s dripping.” One of the water drops is slowly making its way down the back of Jean’s neck. He knows he’s dripping. He also knows he hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in nearly three days and his shoulders are twinging with an exhaustion he’s too scared to name at his miniscule age. And yet— this is Kevin Day.
“Do you want to play?”
And— this is Kevin Day. Of course he wants to play. With Kevin’s spare racquet and helmet, both too big for Jean, they make their way down to the edge of the court.
When they reach the plexiglass though— Jean is fifteen. He can feel it in the tips of his fingers when he reaches for the handle to the court: his name is Jean Moreau, he gets what he deserves, he is fifteen, and he’s immensely scared. Kevin doesn’t turn to him or look over his shoulder when he pushes onto the court, but deep down Jean knows there is a number two inked high on his cheek. His shoulders aren’t hunched anymore and his steps are sure, and Jean feels out of place.
He’s still in Kevin’s borrowed gear, he knows. Maybe his own is blood soaked. They line up opposite each other, striker and backliner, racquets on opposite sides because every Raven is left handed, heads ducked low, and Jean doesn’t know what drill they’re doing anymore. He only knows this: Day, stretched not like a brand but like a blanket across his back. Impossible hazel eyes cutting through the noise in the back of Jean’s mind. Strong hands and strong shoulders that he can’t take time to appreciate because being alive means he must take them apart. Un, deux, trois, and then the clack of Exy sticks and pressure in his wrists.
With half a twist, Kevin breaks away from the half-hearted mark Jean was attempting to display, and he’s off like a rocket. It takes Jean three steps to catch up to him. His legs are longer than Kevin’s at this point, and his arms are too. Despite this, his knee twinges and Jean remembers: Riko left a smarting bruise on the back of it last week when Jean couldn’t get the ball to him before someone broke their way through the defensive line. With a nasty reach, he tries to pop the ball away from Kevin to no avail. It’s— he needs to be more. More aggressive, more physical, more engaged, more more more.
Counting Kevin’s steps— five, six, seven— Jean swings around to put himself between the striker and the wall. If he can’t outreach the second-best striker in the sport, he’ll outsmart him. For the next few steps, Jean matches the other boy perfectly. Kevin’s eyes go wide the second his right foot comes down on his last allowed step and the ball releases, a direct trajectory straight for Jean’s hip, and he manages to slip out a “Jean, wait—“ but it’s no use.
In an explosion of stars, watercolor, and glitter, Jean’s hip hurts.
But—
The scene is bigger. Jean is back in his own gear and he is still on the ground, and his hip still hurts, except now it is Riko’s foot digging into the meat.
“Jean,” he says, his eyes burning with a fury Jean can’t really remember except in moments like this, “you need to learn how to turn corners tighter. This is pathetic.” That’s when Jean knows: he is sixteen and Kevin does not live in his room anymore. Kevin stays in Riko’s and Zane is not a nervous boy who trips over a new language. Jean does not stay up teaching Kevin nursery rhymes anymore— he stays up to make sure Grayson is not outside the door.
Before he registers his own words, Jean’s fingers are prying under the heel of Riko’s shoe and he’s pleading, “I’m sorry, Riko I’ll do better.” They both know it’s a lie: Jean is too tall to pull off some of the sharper maneuvers shorter backliners can. He’s going to have to try anyway.
Riko puts more of his weight on his foot, pressing down down down on Jean’s fingers, and tells him “Maybe you need help.” Jean tries not to look at the boy who used to play keep away with him and Kevin, tries not to see the monster he grew into, but all he can see is Riko sneering down at him as he is today, not as he was when they were young.
Jean looks past the behemoth in front of him to catch Kevin’s eye. Kevin, who stands strong and sneers right alongside Riko, but not at Jean—never at Jean. It’s like Kevin sees something no one else can in the brokenness of a failed Moreau. Right now he is trying not to wince at the crush of Jean’s hand.
It’s only when Kevin jerks his head toward his striking partner, clearly waiting on Jean to say something that Riko’s words sink in. Riko lifts his foot and reaches out a hand that Jean doesn’t want to take, he doesn’t, but the shoe that dug into his hip ensures that if he stands on his own he will collapse.
Jean clenches his eyes closed, reaches out with a wince, and when he’s upright again Riko is thirteen and small, his eyebrows scrunched together tightly.
“Jean! Is your arm alright?”
Riko’s not grabbing for the appendage, not yet, and Jean knows that he’s not supposed to be afraid of the boy yet at this time in his life. Still— he flinches when fluttering hands hover over his injured arm. The butterfly of worry in Riko’s face shuts down just as quickly as it crops up with the motion, but Jean sees it despite this.
Jean has spent two years in the Nest, two years trying to be worthy of his family’s debt, two years of Exy with two boys older than him and better than him, and two years with Riko close enough that he knows the other boy would throw a fit if he were injured in any capacity.
“It’s— I am fine, Riko. Thank you.” He isn’t Riko’s friend, Jean reminds himself. He is Tetsuji’s investment and Riko and Kevin will both catch up to that fact shortly. Riko is already starting, despite putting in effort otherwise. He lets his hand be dropped and steps back from the other boy. Kevin is on his way across the court, freshly shorn hair being shaken out of his helmet and long legs pushing his arrival. Riko turns to him, and the crease is back in his brows again.
“Kevin, take him to ice his arm. I’ll tell my un— the Master that he’ll be back on the court tonight.”
It isn’t a reprieve but it is a dismissal. Jean nods a goodbye to Riko and he and Kevin traverse their way back to the dorm in silence. It goes like this most days: Kevin and Jean wait for Riko to end his Exy filled routine, room dark and quiet, and when the other boy gets there with protein bars he has smuggled from older University students and divvies them between the three, it nearly feels like they’re three normal boys.
Tonight, Riko’s return is marked by uncharacteristic joy. The accustomed health food in his arms is overshadowed by the Ravens gear and sparse amount of USC coozys.
“Jean guess what? The Master wasn’t even mad at you for getting yourself hurt,” Riko announces in a rush, like it wasn’t his own check that resulted in Jean catching himself awkwardly, “and he said we can go to the Ravens’ game tonight.” His mouth is split into a smile and the hair he has cropped to look just like Kevin’s falls over his forehead in a way that makes him look younger than thirteen.
Kevin lights up and drags Riko over to his bed at the mention of getting to see the Trojans play. Riko lands with a heavy thud and Kevin reaches out automatically to steady him, ignoring Jean’s wince when their knees knock together.
“Is that,” Kevin tries, hand creeping toward the red and gold pendant nearly escaping from Riko’s grasp, “are those for me?” Riko bats his encroaching hand away, but after the second try allows Kevin to run his hands reverently over the object.
Winking at Jean, Riko bites out, “Well they aren’t for me or Jean, you traitor. Just remember who you’re playing for in a few years tonight, okay?”
Kevin nods and Riko throws an arm around him, his hand twisting into Kevin’s hair far less harsh than Jean now knows it could. They tilt their heads together conspiratorially, and Jean thinks of California, and the Trojans, and Exy.
He doesn’t tell Riko, that despite being ever-loyal, he hates the cold. That he thinks the Southern California backline has shut down better players than the Ravens this year, and they’ll shut down the Ravens just as easily. Instead, he sits and he watches Riko and Kevin’s knees bump together and he aches.
Jean watches them like that for a bit, moving in and out of awareness in that hazy schoolboy feeling of comfort, and only comes out of it when Kevin calls his name and beckons him over. There is a number two shakily drawn high on his cheek, and Riko holds the sharpie he used to do it between his forefinger and his thumb.
It’s like the other boy isn’t the hurricane his uncle intends him to be when he asks Jean, “Can you do it?” Kevin’s handwriting sucks, Riko explains, except when Jean takes his cheeks between his hands, he can feel the apples of Riko’s smile threatening to burn through his palms. They are boys and they are taking on the Nest together, and Riko is in Jean’s corner, for now.
Their knees bump when Jean finally releases Riko, and Kevin lets out a huff that Jean wasn’t aware he was holding before Riko’s hands find Jean’s jaw next. There are calluses near the knuckle, but ultimately they’re soft and brush over the high points of his face gently. Kevin uses Jean’s brief moment of immobility to drape himself over Jean’s left shoulder, looking on intently as Riko works.
“Your turn,” the boy says, and catches Jean’s eye. He only sees teenage devotion in the dark depths. Then, just as shaky as Kevin’s number two, Riko deliberately traces a number three onto Jean’s cheek. The action is wobbly, as if he’s afraid in his adolescent ineptitude he’ll mess it up, but is done with care that Jean has never been treated with in his life. For a gut wrenching moment, before Riko pulls back, Jean thinks it’s an unthinkable eight— lucky to Riko maybe, but for Jean it means being eighth on the Perfect Court while Kevin and Riko are second and first. He shouldn’t have worried; as soon as Riko finishes the last line, the marker is capped again and Riko is twisting his face to make sure the number looks good from every angle.
Everything twists and snaps then, the small room shrinking from something comforting and close to cramped and claustrophobic. Kevin’s arm on Jean’s shoulder loses the familiar weight and morphs into a heavier limb, holding him down instead of simply resting on his shoulder.
Riko is the worst. His fingers curl meanly, bend and bend and bend until Jean is sure that if he looks down they’ll be some monstrous clawed extremity. There is blood beginning to bead up on his skin. When Jean catches his breath and hedges a glance at what used to be Riko, he finds the same boy there, no baby fat or fraternal love to be found in his face.
It is with a start that Jean realizes that Riko can still look like the boy who treated him kindly and be capable of this cruelty. It is then that he also realizes that this memory doesn’t include Kevin at all— the restraining arm across his shoulders is too pale, too insistent to be the boy who used to hover his gentle fluttering fingers over the breaks and bends in Jean’s ribs.
With the cloying scent of burnt wood Grayson’s memory comes into focus, and with it comes the phantom feel of his hands on Jean’s waist.
“Are you going to keep being a distraction?”
Jean’s cheek stings red hot before Riko is palming over it again, fingers digging into the hinges of his jaw, and he can feel the rabbit that lies between his ribs begin to thump its feet. The burnt wood smell is giving him a headache and Riko’s fingers are forcing Jean to gasp out breaths like a dying man.
Riko’s hand is striking him again before Jean can remember to answer. “I asked you a question, Three,” he snarls. His hand tangles in Jean’s hair and pulls him down to eye level. “That’s nine of my players,” the man tells him, “nine good players who can’t focus because of you.”
Jean knows it’s untrue. He didn’t ask for this, for Riko’s nails in his cheek or Grayson’s fingerprints on his hip bone. Yet, he also knows this is his role. The rage and fury he finds in Riko’s eyes has only ever lived there with this intensity after Kevin flew the Nest. After Jean let him flee the Nest, a broken wing cradled in an arm, and Jean’s heart on his sleeve. He is a Moreau, for Christ's sake, and he will endure what he must. Kevin not being witness to his misery is a small, albeit embarrassing, salve to the sting on Jean’s cheek.
And so, with Grayson’s hot breath in his ear, Jean lies. He apologizes over and over, with each strike of Riko’s palm, and counts each sting. At cinq, Riko’s tattoo is gone. His hair falls unruly over his eyes and the lip between his teeth is bitten raw.
Unbidden, Jean remembers his profuse apology after the first time Tetsuji showed Riko how to discipline his dogs. The tears streamed down Riko’s face as if his were the ribs that were shattered, and he told Kevin that he couldn’t even bear to look at Jean. Riko avoided him for days, a ghost in the halls of Evermore, and had bitten through his lip when Jean had seen him again.
When did the boy become the monster?
Was it at sept, blood splashed across Riko’s face and his hair cropped closer to his forehead? The ink on his cheek is fresh, and Riko’s hands curl into unkind fists. He no longer cries when he breaks Jean’s ribs. This Riko is one who still turns a blind eye when Kevin rubs ointment onto Jean’s split skin, but digs his elbows into the bruises at practice. The cocoon he wrapped himself in served him well here, his cruelty hidden under genius and raw talent.
Neuf, and Riko finishes the barrage on Jean’s cheek, his visage morphing back into reality. Neuf, and Jean knows Riko hates him. Neuf, and a wave of nausea hits him so hard that he feels his shoulder blades dig into Grayson’s grip. Neuf, and it sounds distorted when Grayson tells Riko that Jean is pretty when he cries. Neuf, and Jean’s stomach twists when Grayson’s fingernail scratches along his spine.
Neuf, and Riko wrings his arm back with a smile and tells Jean, “One more for good measure.” Jean feels the scream tear from his throat before he knows that his face hurts.
Dix, it takes ten stitches to stop the bleeding from Kevin’s mangled hand. He’s on the ground twitching his pinky uselessly, snot dripping off of his strong chin, and Jean can’t get him up.
It’s ugly to see Kevin like this. Kevin, who leaned close to whisper “Will you teach me when he’s not here?”; Kevin, who uses the cotton gauze instead because he knows the adhesive makes Jean’s skin itch; Kevin, who lends Jean his clothes when Jean’s own are too bloody to wear; Kevin, who was always spared the worst. Kevin, who is now pathetically sitting inches away from his own vomit.
Steeling himself, Jean fits his hands under Kevin’s armpits and heaves, levering the shorter boy into a standing position. Kevin slumps. He does not take a step, and the crushed hand is still there.
“I was better than him, wasn’t I?”
The words sound hollow and cold. Jean thinks of the number two on Kevin’s cheek, the three on his own, and the shaky first drafts they all used to draw on each other— and he realizes Kevin is not asking for confirmation. The other man is coming to terms with Riko’s jealousy, finally.
“You always were,” Jean whispers, and takes most of Kevin’s weight. It isn’t much: for as imposing as Kevin is with an Exy racquet in his hands, he is still slight. His waist dips in perfectly for Jean’s forearm and the cut of his collarbone would arch beautifully into Jean’s mouth if he let it. Instead, Jean moves Kevin off the court as quickly as he dares, keeping Kevin a respectable distance from him. No one else stayed to clean up the wreckage. That doesn’t mean that no one else is watching.
They push through the plexiglass, Jean using one arm to maneuver them around any obstacle, and the whole time he tries to ignore the tremble of Kevin’s shoulders. Tries to ignore the steady stream of blood following them. The shards of bone jutting out from Kevin’s car crash hand.
He fails. In between flashes of Kevin’s ruined hand, Jean sees his own broken fingers, crooked nose, twisted ankles. When Kevin’s shoulders shudder as he slides down the wall Jean leads him to, it is a seventeen year old Kevin Day’s nervous fingers that thread through Jean’s hair instead of his own.
It is not Jean’s voice that comes out when he says, “You can still coach,” because he does not believe it. If Kevin Day is not on the Court, there is no Exy. If Kevin Day is not on the Court, there is no Kevin. And yet— this is Kevin Day. There isn’t a world without him in it.
“Do you really believe that?”
And— this is Kevin Day. He looks up at Jean for the first time in his life with something akin to anger, and of course he couldn’t coach. Kevin is never more alive than when he is sweaty and red, barking orders from center court, and he has never looked more dead than now.
Somehow, Jean finds himself sinking down next to the older man. Not caring to mind Kevin’s hand, his monster, he fumbles to get a hand on him. Jean claws Kevin towards himself, white knuckled and selfish, and for a breath clutches him like he is fourteen again.
Then, Jean pries his fingers off of Kevin’s shaking form and they stumble their way to his room. It is blissfully empty, the other Ravens scattered in the wind in the aftermath of Riko’s rage. Of Tetsuji’s rage.
It is with apologies on the tip of his tongue that Jean forces Kevin’s skin back together, every language he knows spilling forth from his throat. Sorry, gomen ne, désolé, désolé, désolé. And with each stitch, he can feel Kevin taking another step away.
“If you ever cared for me,” is the final nail in Jean’s coffin. “You’ll distract him,” is the dirt over his casket. Like always, Jean nods and tells Kevin yes, and knows he will be out of West Virginia by the morning.
For all ten of Kevin’s stitches, Jean breaks three of his own fingers. With every crack and pop he tells Riko that he does not know where Kevin is and with every snap Riko calls him a liar. They both know that Kevin could not have made it out of the Nest alone. They both know that the only one who loves Kevin enough to suffer whatever Riko could think up is Jean. The only one who could ever suffer Riko was Jean.
When Jean wrenches his pinky back and gasps at the wet sound it makes, the boil of pain bubbling from his wrist and out through the tip of his finger, Riko laughs. In a brief, desolate moment, he almost expects to hear Kevin’s windchime join in.
The moment is over when Riko asks if Jean is okay and the words bounce around his skull. Riko is thirteen and Riko is twenty and Riko is seventeen. They are brothers in arms and teammates on the court and they are a slice of meat and a butcher’s cleaver. Jean’s fingers are shattered, Kevin is at Palmetto state, his sister is somewhere on the French coast, and Riko is the beginning and end of everything Jean will ever know. He is the thirteen year old with rosy cheeks and the seventeen year old with bile in his throat. Riko is the monster smiling down at Jean in every nightmare and Riko used to love him.
Riko stayed when Kevin did not, and Riko will probably be the one who buries Jean at the end of this night.
Riko asks if Jean is okay with no mercy in his voice, and when he fails to answer he asks again—
“D’accord?”
It’s a voice that haunts Jean’s dreams and he doesn’t know what it’s doing here of all places. Kevin is out of the Nest, he’s out, so why his voice is here washing over Jean when he knows Riko will kill them for sharing something he doesn’t is beyond him.
“Jean,” the voice tries again, “Jean, ça va?”
“Non! Non, non, non, fiche-moi la paix. S’il te plaît, va t’en, va t’en! Get out!” It’s an ugly mix of French and English that Jean isn’t sure if Kevin can keep up with, but he gets the words out anyway. With the words out of his throat, the world slowly seeps in: his hands clenching his sheets in the room he shares with Jeremy, the soft moonlight filtering in through the blinds, the blood under his fingernails where Jean’s clawed fingers are digging into his own ribs. The phone pressed securely against his cheek, screen sticky with saltwater tears, and Jeremy trying his best not to touch a single inch of Jean’s skin.
Jeremy doesn’t look away from the jagged wreckage for even a second, his eyes intently on where Jean’s shirt has ridden up to reveal the gorges in his side. He holds the phone steady as Kevin babbles in Jean’s ear, an endless stream of complaints ranging from Minyard— the goalie, not the subpar backliner— refusing to vacuum the couch to not knowing what to get his father for his birthday. When Kevin circles back to Allison Reynolds’ newfound penchant for leaving a pair of heels outside his door to trip on for the third time, Jean speaks again.
“Why are you on my phone, Kevin?”
It gets Kevin to stop his ramble and Jeremy to squeak out a sound of surprise. He drops the phone where he had been resting it at Jean’s cheek and it skitters off of Jean’s knee and across their shared floor. In the blink of an eye, Jeremy drops to his knees at a speed that makes Jean’s own ache to retrieve the device.
“I think,” Kevin says when the phone is in hearing range again, “you should ask Jeremy that.”
He doesn’t need to. Jeremy is good for a lot— being a captain, being a friend, being someone to lean on. He is not someone who has ever belonged in the Nest, even to yank Jean out of a nightmare. That particular job was always best suited for Kevin and he finally feels enough guilt to take the task on.
“Get him a George Foreman.” Jean will not talk to Jeremy about this, not with Kevin on the line. They haven’t discussed the lingering touches or the nightmares that only evidence that the Foxes won nationals can pull him from, and they won’t start tonight. “Why are you on my phone, Kevin?”
The desperation in Jean’s voice launches Jeremy into action. Moving slowly, he crawls onto the bed with Jean and rests his hand on a shoulder. No more, no less. Just a reminder that there is a knight in this hound’s corner. With the hand that doesn’t have a white-knuckled deathgrip on Jeremy’s phone, Jean flails out to find something solid to hold onto. He comes up with the edge of Jeremy’s sweater. The knit fabric snags on his dry hands, but Jean holds tight anyway. He needs to hold onto something for once.
“I— I thought maybe you’d done it.”
Jean is back at the Nest clutching onto Kevin. He knows he’s wild eyed, snapping at anything to keep Kevin with him. If only he could catch the other boy between his jaws, maybe he’d have a chance. As it is, he can only twist his fingers into the fabric of the sweater Kevin has on. Kevin can’t look directly at him but he still refuses to move from Jean’s grip.
“You have to promise me,” he whispers, “you’ll never try it again, Jean. I don’t want to lose you.”
Jean promises. And he calls Kevin time and time again, hoping to break that promise. And each time, Kevin doesn’t answer, and Jean keeps his oath.
“Jean?”
He’s back in his own room in LA. The phone is in his lap and Jeremy’s fingers are clutching his cheeks. The blond in front of Jean looks wild and panicked, the dark circles Jean has refused to notice for weeks drag his face sallow, a decidedly bad look for the Trojan captain.
“Jeremy.”
It’s hard to manage the name that falls from his lips, the relief he says it with dooming him. Jeremy, like an ointment to his raw knuckles. Jeremy, like an answer to a question he’s too afraid to say out loud. Jeremy, like a prayer he learned in Sunday school, his collar starched uncomfortable and his sister digging her dress heels into his ankle.
Sunshine breaks through the cobalt washed room, slowly, starting at the center of Jeremy’s lips. “Kevin is muted,” the other man starts, “I can tell him to go if you want.”
The thought that it could be that simple has never struck Jean— that he could leave Kevin and the Nest and the spilled blood behind, even as mangled as he is. Jean thinks of the Trojan pendants hanging on Kevin’s walls, of the postcards from LA he used to send, of the hungry way he used to watch Jeremy Knox— Jean’s Jeremy— on ESPNE. Jean recalls the way Kevin’s fluttering pulse felt under his fingers and the rabbit-quick thumping of his own heart in moments of shared whispers in French. If Jean wanted, he could say yes, and Kevin would never call him again. Would never answer again. Jean would never need to hear the way he butchers his “r” when he says Marseilles, he would never need to relive the sound of bones shattering, he would never need to hear the sound of Kevin’s world collapsing again.
A fingernail grazing the soft underside of Jean’s eye reminds him that Jeremy is still waiting for his answer.
“Non, no. I—“ Jean starts and stops, chewing his lip. He’s unsure of how to phrase it. “I owe him this relief.”
At that, Jeremy bristles. Before he can argue, his mouth parting to undoubtedly tell Jean that he owes no one anything, Jean barrels on.
“I love him more than I know what to do with some days.”
He’s gutted himself on the operating table. Jean knows Jeremy won’t understand what he means— as much as Jean wants, he and Jeremy are teammates— won’t understand what Jean means by love. Jean loves Kevin like the lamb loves the slaughter, like the cheek loves the palm of one's hand, like the hilt loves the sword. In every iteration of his devotion Jean and Kevin exist within each other.
The furrow in Jeremy’s brow tells Jean that this means nothing to him, that he believes it is something as juvenile as romance and not as primal as necessity. Yet, he passes the phone to Jean anyway. He doesn’t give him the decency of space, electing instead to loop one long arm around Jean’s shoulder and trace stars onto the skin of his bicep while Jean resumes his conversation.
For a brief moment, he thinks Kevin has hung up in the time he kept him waiting. Jean wouldn’t put it past the other man— he’s been impatient in the near-decade Jean has known him, so he would never expect any less. And yet, he is there waiting with baited breath.
“Jean-Yves,” Kevin breathes out in relief, and Jean’s heart trips over itself in its hurry to span the states between them.
“You know I dislike that name.” He doesn’t. Jean loves when Kevin throws things back into Riko’s long dead face.
“And you know I hate being woken up,” Kevin quips, “almost as much as I hate crumbs on the couch. Should I get a cover?”
“Nathaniel can’t collar his dog?”
“Doesn’t wanna.”
Which tracks. The redhead probably grins wildly when Andrew smashes crackers into the cushions, just because he knows it will irritate Kevin later that day. He’s insidious like that, annoying and grating like that. The demons deserve each other. Some faulty forever partner, Jean allows himself to think spitefully. Nathaniel leaving him too is a nightmare for another night.
They make small talk like this for Jean doesn’t know how long, until he knows that Renee is keeping things from him when she texts him once a week because apparently Allison Reynolds had a hickey so obstructive on her hip that she had to ice it between deals, until he knows that apparently yes there are international fees on Wifi because apparently one of the less memorable Foxes used all of their international data on a Skype with his boyfriend. Until Jean knows the gravelly tone of Kevin’s Appalachian drawl still makes his heart twitch and thump. Until Jeremy’s breath puffs out slowly across his collarbones and the stars along his upper arm disappear.
“Jean,” Kevin finally whispers over the line, his voice hazy with the slumber Jean knows Jeremy somehow roused him from, “je t’aime.”
The rabbit thumping in Jean’s chest dies. Jean is nineteen when he understands that he will orbit Kevin Day for all eternity, just to make up for whatever teenage idiocy it was that didn’t beg him to bring Jean with him. Kevin’s hollow bird bones have filled out, his mild manner rearing its head into a selfishness Kayleigh Day would likely applaud, his kindness doubled back onto him and wielded like a whip. Despite this—
“Je t’aime, Kevin.” It feels both like a lie and not on Jean’s lips with Jeremy’s drool drying on the side of his neck. He waits to hear the line go dead before he throws Jeremy’s phone across the room, letting it clatter beneath his desk in a fit of frustration. He wishes it was an appropriate hour to call Renee. He wishes it were an appropriate hour to go on a run, or practice drills. Jean wishes Jeremy Knox wasn’t asleep on his shoulder. Jean wishes he and Kevin were the boys knocking shoulders on an Exy court. Jean wishes, briefly, that Kevin was still setting his bones. Then, at least he could tell him thank you, and mean it.
Jean wishes he would have said the words back in English.
Instead, he carefully allows Jeremy’s slumped form to gently lilt to the side, guiding him down with a barely there touch. This is a familiar sight at least: Jeremy has not let Jean sleep alone a single time he has awoken from a nightmare. So there the boy lays in Jean Moreau’s bed, golden and warm despite Jean’s hands leaving bloodstains on him, and there Jean tucks him in before allowing himself to sink into the mattress as well.
When he dreams, he dreams of the French coast, he dreams of open oceans, and he dreams of a girl in pigtails who has never heard the name Riko Moriyama. When he sleeps again, Jean sleeps in peace.