Chapter Text
It starts in a panic of cold sweat and fast breaths, in and out and in, too quick to count the number of times it takes to stabilize the onset of this nightmare induced panic attack. A black fog of an image, of Riko standing over a boy, eyes slicing in amusement at his own handiwork. A battered and pummeled mass on the floor, covered in black, the uniform requisite of all Ravens at Evermore. But it’s the red that Jean sees that’s the most distressing. It seeps out from the boy’s body like a dam too full, built sturdy and strong but a fracture line running along its structure. This boy is going to die, Jean thinks and he’s standing on the sidelines watching it happen. But to resist Riko or to challenge him means his life would be forfeit as well. So he stands, watching the rapid rising and falling of the familiar angles of the boy's shoulders. He cant quite place the familiarity of the sound of the moaning escaping the boy's mouth, his height almost a mirrored reflection of his own.
"S'il te plaît.” A shattered plea, indecipherable, but Jean hears it with complete certainty. French. Jean’s gaze shoots from the boy on the floor to Riko who still stands, impeccably put together, back straight with his hands clasped formally behind is back. Authoritative, imposing, intimidating. The boy’s plea does nothing but cause Riko’s lip to curl into a deeper shade of cruelty. Riko cocks his head, a mere fraction of movement, but Jean had been on guard every day, every minute of every second of the day. To miss something like this would be a mistake no Raven would ever be ignorant enough to make.
“Vous êtes celui qui a échoué. C'est de ta faute que ça se passe.” Riko tells the boy, effortless and fluent French flowing from his lips. Jean’s eyes widen in shock, a combination of confusion and concern. Riko doesn’t know French. This is what saved him most days. Being able to speak in his native tongue without any of his teammates, or Riko for that matter, being able to understand him.
The figure on the floor curls into himself more, making his body as small as possible. As if the smaller he becomes, the less visible he would be too. It only takes seconds, the blink of an eye, before Riko’s posture goes from rigid and regal, a king in his castle demanding respect, to a king at war, advancing on his prey. His lightening quick kick into the boy's ribs, a deafening crack of a rib splintering like a thin layer of ice over a frozen winter pond. Another blow would unquestionably lead to a break.
Watching Riko wind up for another kick, Jean looks around for the first time to see other figures gathered in a semi-circle around the scene, but the varying sizes and shapes of what had to be his teammates were cast in shadow, indistinguishable from one another. Not one of them moved or made a sound. They were like midnight ghosts of obscurity. An echo of an idea of his teammates, housing nothing but a shell hollow of any tangible thoughts or feelings or logic about them. They were pillars of desolation. Emotionless statues that only served as onlookers to the kings malice & destruction.
A soreness begins to grow beneath Jean’s side. An ache that starts like the beginnings of a sunrise, the pain creeping slowly over the horizon. Jean’s right hand slids beneath his blazer to ease the stinging, his eyes searching for a wound but finding nothing but the silken fabric beneath his fingers.
None of this made sense. Where was this place? This couldn’t be Evermore, years of life within Evermore’s stone walls had given him more than enough time to memorize every room, every piece of furniture. But this room was unfamiliar as it was vacant of any furnishings. Not a single chair or desk or bed to be seen. Looking back up, it felt as if Riko’s secondary blow had been held in slow motion, frozen in a reprieve from his callousness and savagery.
Realizing he was the only hope this boy had to be spared from possible death, Jean walks forward a step closer to the two. His heart hammering with adrenaline. As much as his head was screaming mistake, he didn’t want to have the heavy burden of yet another death on his conscience and in his mind. He didn’t want to be complicit to more death or heartache where he carried more than anyone should in a hundred lifetimes over.
Jean opens is mouth in protest, but the sound heard first is from the boy on the floor.
“Arrêtez, s'il vous plaît, arrête.” The words leak out into air but the voice is all wrong. The voice could not belong to that boy. That voice belonged to HIM. It was Jean’s voice.
“Non.” Riko tells him. A non negotiable tone, hard and flat. Clipped at the end as he swings a fist down into the boys left cheekbone.
Jean flinches in response, an instinctual turn of his head to avoid the brutality of the assault as it begins to escalate again. But when he turns toward them again, pain bursts throughout his cheek. A cry escaping his lips but sounds further away than it should have. Dropping to his knees, Jean presses his hand to his face. Whether to stop the pain or to hold what felt like his face disintegrating underneath his palms, he's not sure. But the pain is real, the feeling exploding into life.
When he manages to control the the rapid pain signals lighting up from his face to his brain, Jean opens his eyes. Still partially on the cool floor. What he sees startles him even more. The boy's body has turned in his direction from Rikos punch, holding his cheek, curling tightly into himself and the pain. His face.. his FACE, the number 3 tattooed beneath his eye. This boys face was also his face. He was Jean and Jean was him. As impossible as it should have been, they were twins in their pain & agony.
Everything slowly slides into a plain of understanding. The familiarity of the boy's body, the sound of his voice, the way any words Jean spoke were silent from his own mouth but fell off the tongue of boy on the floor, the pain he felt was the same pain that was inflicted on the version of himself on the floor. The French. Everything.
Jean was been too busy piecing all of his realization together to notice Riko walking to the side to collect a long sword. He watches, eyes saucered in recognition to what this meant.
He’s going to kill me. Jean thinks to himself. And there isn’t a thing he can do. His presence is just as irrelevant as the other Ravens. Mere spectators, unable to alter the events. Like a scene that’s been played endlessly over and over. An unchangeable ending.
A quiet string of words start to float across the air. They are jagged and unpolished. Broken pronunciations and the sounds struggling to fit the smooth curves and elegant loops of the French language from a mouth that had hardly housed them. Standing shakily to his feet, Jean looks in the direction he thinks the words had come from, spinning to the left and right but not finding it’s source.
“…Puis nous allons fleurir les beaux pissenlits d’or..”
When the words pause, Jean turns to Riko and his eyes catch hold of the scene again, the figure of Riko and the tortured version of himself. They both flicker softly, a hazy snow about them. When the voice starts again, reciting more lines of poetry that Jean recognizes, the figures in the room all began to flicker in and out, their solidity giving way to an opaque sheen as the darkness of the room begins to lighten. Golden rays of light quietly fill the darkness and banish the figures. He watches the last two remaining figures, nearly invisible now.
The broken French continues on, picking up where it’d left off. The voice was male, warm and eases his anxiety. An antidote to the feelings of fear and panic harbored in his chest. Jean watches Riko disappear first, a plume of black smoke wisping out of the darkness, being eaten by light. Then all that's left is the tortured Jean on the floor. But unlike Riko, rays of light break through cracks in his flesh, emanating seemingly from within him. As if he were a Sun being birthed into creation. Jean covers his face when the light becomes too luminous to stare at. Golden light paints the darkness in every corner of the room and the last thing Jean can think before he falls back into a darkened oblivion is, “Oh. This. I remember this. Sunlight."
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Jean wakes with a start, a lone ray of sunlight peeking through the curtains of a window in his room. The clock on his dresser reads an ungodly hour. Too early to be awake but his heart thumps wildly remembering his dreams, his nightmares. Remembering a voice that slipped into a horrorscape and chased away malice and fear.
Jeans eyes study the room. The surroundings still slightly unrecognizable since he’d only recently transferred to USC. Where black had covered every inch of Evermore, the contrast of waking up to hues of gold and red were always a bit startling. He spots the bed across from his. His roommate, Jeremy Knox, Captain of the Trojans, sprawled out in a mass of golden sheets and soft breathing. He can't be certain but the voice he’d heard in his dream, the one reciting unsure french, the one that filled the nightmares of his time at Evermore and the events of his last meeting with Riko Moriyama, sounded like it could have belonged to the captain of USCs Exy team.
But that didn’t make any sense, did It? He’d clearly been asleep for hours, maybe his mind blended his recently forced interactions with Jeremy and melded it with his past with Riko.
Jean knows things are still fragile. Knows his frequent nightmares were going to linger for quite a while longer.What he needs to do now is put the past behind him and focus on this new future he had been given. The last thing he needs is to have his mind playing tricks on him about what's real and what isn't.
So Jean eases himself back down onto his bed and closes his eyes for a few more hours of sleep before practice, sleep that comes peacefully outlined with golden dandelions.