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A freak accident, they called it on the news and in the papers. Jean knew. He’d kept all the clippings even though he knew he shouldn’t have.
TWO KILLED IN FREAK CAR ACCIDENT said one headline.
ELDERLY DRIVER LOSES CONTROL AND CRASHES INTO HOUSE said another.
What happened was that the ticking time bomb in the brain of an elderly man with an iron deficiency finally went off in the form of an aneurysm and he was dead within seconds at the wheel in a nice upscale residential neighborhood, crashing through the living room wall of a Laurelhurst bungalow. One of the TWO KILLED was the elderly driver; the other was Marco.
Marco…
“Didn’t feel a thing,” the doctors said. “Multiple fractures and punctured organs, massive internal hemorrhaging, but unconscious from impact so he didn’t feel a thing…”
Jean skipped class for two weeks straight and failed his winter finals. He couldn’t cook, so he didn’t contribute to the flood of I’m Sorry casseroles the Bodts received. He walked around Calvary Cemetery on a particularly brisk and misty day where the rain spat in his face and he kicked flowers off graves and he decided that he was Donnie Darko and this must be some alternate universe where instead of jet engines randomly falling from the sky, sick old men blacked out and ran over your boyfriend in his own house.
It just wasn’t part of Jean Kirschtein’s Plan For Life, you see.
What was supposed to happen was that he and Marco were going to finish school together, successfully, with no bad juju from the college parties and self-exploration stage, and get good-paying jobs downtown, and live in the kind of place you could boast about, where you could host classy parties and invite your folks to holidays and they had no reason not to say, “Why, son, you really made something of yourself, didn’t you, never mind that you’re gay and I’ll never have grandbabies!”
Five steps of grief, right? Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. Bullshit. All bullshit. Because in reality it was just a cold black void with no articulation for the violent feelings, just this surging maelstrom inside, an uncomfortable place where you cycled through those “five stages” in no particular order and with no particular precedence even though you were trying so hard to be happy because your dead boyfriend would have wanted you to be happy and pretty soon the mourning glimmer would wear off and nobody would want to put up with it anymore.
It wasn’t like Jean disappeared into a deep depression or anything. The world definitely seemed an ugly gray place with nothing to promise but no, the worst part was that he still felt things and understood things and couldn’t stop being alive just because he turned to talk to someone who wasn’t there anymore. Or woke up in the middle of the night reaching for a body that was no longer between the sheets beside him. Or wondered why the fuck it couldn’t have just been a bad breakup or something.
He just didn’t know what to do with life anymore, because Plan A had been cruelly blown down like a house of cards. He was restless and reckless and dissatisfied with the universe at large and then one day—
—he just got over it.
It wasn’t that the pain just stopped, which was the funny part. It was that all of a sudden, in one shining moment, Jean was keenly aware that it was time to move on and it had to be a conscious decision.
He was picking Flintstone’s gummies out of his left molar and staring at Eren Jäger when that stunning blade of clarity pierced the dizzy tingling fog of Dyna-Pep and Red Bull, which was there mostly to counteract the comedown from the molly.
They’d all somehow convinced him to go to Burning Man that year—they being Armin, and Mikasa, and Eren, and the rest of his nuclear friends. They did Sasquatch already and they were doing Bumbershoot back at home right before fall quarter started, but this—this was the pinnacle of the new age counterculture, this long weekend in the infamous Black Rock City. Road-tripping down with fast food garbage in the backseat and your bare toes curling on the dashboard, flicking cigarette ash out the window and blasting good music on a seemingly never-ending blacktop through the barren wastelands of America’s west. Sleeping in tents and toasting to good music and art over bonfires at night, and watching the stars spin overhead while music echoed and voices collided and the night was alive. God if only Marco were here to see Conny and Sasha, dancing like idiots. Christa all in boho white, and Ymir wearing no bra under that ripped-up shirt. Reiner and Bert and Annie and—
And Eren.
Eren, like a fucking mirage in the desert. Eren, with his chest bare and shirt tied around his waist. Eren, all tan and toned, naked toes curling in the sand as he threw back his head and laughed. At what? Did Armin say something funny? Mikasa? Anyone? Didn’t matter. The sun glared down on them and Eren glistened sun-kissed and hot, and the way his sides and stomach tightened with that bewitching laugh was slow and erotic as Jean watched from behind his shades.
It just clicked.
Fuck.
He was beautiful.
This fucking friend of his that Jean hardly did more than argue with half the time, this bitch-ass little maniac with his irrepressible hunger for life, his thirst for experiences, his wide blazing eyes and the way they were so manic at three in the morning when the creativity sank its teeth in and he refused to keep it down despite all his roommates trying to sleep—
He was fucking beautiful in every way, shape, and form, and Jean thought to himself clearly and simply:
It’s time to move on.
Of course certain things would always haunt him.
The newspaper clippings, the T-shirt Marco had left at his house after their first time (and never retrieved because it was a cute excuse to come over), birthday gifts and Valentine’s Day pictures and the occasional phone call from Mr. or Mrs. Bodt, checking up on the boy who used to come over for dinner every Sunday but now hardly showed his face on that side of town at all, books and smells and random remembered moments and songs they used to sing together and songs that now stabbed him right through the heart because dammit, if only Marco could hear it, too…
“Baby, I’ve been here before. I’ve walked this room, I know this floor. I used to live alone before I knew you…”
There was something bewitching about Eren that Jean had been jealous of before. Everyone loved Eren; even if they hated Eren, they loved Eren. Eren had that certain joie de vivre about him, that breath of passion in his violent temper and nearly PMS-grade mood swings, his intense drive and dimpled smirk, and the way he meant everything he said and said everything he meant and wasn’t afraid to cry despite strict rules of masculinity.
But when Eren sang, it was a strikingly different kind of witchcraft.
Lyrics hovering over the soft and slightly sad guitar chords in a messy bedroom with terrible acoustics, voice hardly more than a raspy and lamenting hum that even in its off-key moments sounded just perfect— It was raw. It was real. And it shook Jean to the core.
“I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch. Love is not a victory march. It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah…”
The strings of the guitar uttered an awful whine and scraping sound as Eren’s fingers abandoned them roughly, when Jean grabbed him by a fistful of shirt. What the hell kind of face did he wear if Eren looked at him so fearfully over his shoulder?
“I have so many songs I want you to sing,” Jean whispered, knuckles aching where they locked at Eren’s shoulder.
Ah, fearful perhaps because Eren knew already. Because he could read it all over Jean. Because he’d been waiting. “Why?” he breathed, the little shit.
Jean shook his head, swallowing over a lump in his throat. “Because when you sing them, it doesn’t hurt.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re singing them.”
“Jean…”
Jean’s jaw tightened. He didn’t mean to; he shook Eren by the shoulder. “Love me, dammit. That’s all I’m asking of you!”
And there it was, uncanny and inexplicable. That Jäger black magic. Dark, evaluating glance from the corner of the eye. Fingertips falling on the guitar strings again, dissonant whisper reverberating around the room. Lips parted. Thoughts, storming behind that depthless stare. “You’re playing hardball asking that, Jean. You think you can handle me?”
Jean wanted to say: Is your moral compass jammed or defective or something? I’m the one with the dead ex you’ll never live up to. What could be harder ball than that?
But he didn’t. He let Eren have his moment in the spotlight and then he welcomed him forward into a kiss. Fingers curling in a T-shirt, in the soft hair below a beanie. Ah, heat. Chests pressed together. Awkward fumble of knees as two bodies knotted in a desperate embrace. Wet nudge of tongue. Soft, breathy sigh. The sigh of giving way completely. Letting go and free falling into the unknown.
It wasn’t Jean Kirschtein’s Plan B For Life, by any means. It had all been utterly accidental. Beyond his wildest, most drunken, most lonely concoction. And maybe he and Eren wouldn’t have a nice classy place or even want to tell their families about it, but it didn’t matter because it was also conscious and unavoidable, and Jean welcomed it. Eren’s hair in his face, the weight of Eren’s body on his, Eren’s guitar forgotten on the floor as Eren whisper-sang into his ear, trailing his fingers up and down the side of Jean’s neck…
Hallelujah…
Everything was going to be fine.
end.