Chapter Text
There were people who healed from their wounds, and then those who were hurt too often to heal at all. Jean Moreau was the latter, and, that, he didn’t really know until he earned the opportunity to close his eyes long enough to breathe.
It hadn’t been easy. Convincing Wymack, at first, though it ended in reminiscent speeches and Neil’s violent gesture, reeking sincerity to its core. The boy chose his fights, he knew, and Jean was one of them.
Then Kevin, and this, it had never quite ended. It was an ongoing struggle, an effort to make every passing day a little more, but Renee called it forgiveness and Neil called it alliance.
Of course he would. Of all the Foxes, Jean should have known, Neil was his closest acquaintance—and though not the warmest, there were things he didn’t need to say when Neil was close, things he could only have whispered to the rest. Renee felt Jean’s hurt deep in her guts, but what she had recovered from herself, she had left behind for good; those were things from her past she could only stir through far-off memories. Neil—Neil was like a wound that wouldn’t close, a fresh cut too deep to heal.
Neil was the remedy to everything, because Neil knew.
He knew too much and then, not enough, but in the end they’d share a glance and Jean would close his eyes, images of Neil bruised and battered and lying on the ground flashing behind his eyes. If he focused hard enough, he could almost remember how cold he had to shower him to speed up the healing process and avoid themselves more injuries.
Everything had been cold back then.
“Jean?”
Jean looks up, tightens his lips and then nods. Neil shuts the door behind and steps forward, just a little, just enough for it to be either respect or timidity. The choice was fast.
“What do you want?”
Silence. Always silence.
He’d always thought Evermore was something quiet and terrible, so deep underground no sound could ever escape; but Riko’s loud words were missing now, and all he had was void.
“Kevin asks why you aren’t at practice.”
He shouldn’t have been surprised.
The only scrimmage Jean had been to was the very first one, and it’d ended in fights Renee, Matt and Wymack had to interrupt with firm, unforgiving fists. The stern violence, Jean hadn’t minded. What he had liked less, however, were the disapproving frowns from the Foxes, and the wavering uncertainty flashing on Wymack’s face here and there. It was quick, almost imperceptible, but Jean had learned to analyze people’s expressions upon joining the Ravens.
An angry Raven’s violence, after all, was easier to withstand if he could brace himself for it first.
He’d seen them coming, all resigned to end it here, and Jean had kneeled on the floor to cup his own skull, knowing somehow what to prioritize. A passionate player would have gone for the knees, a frail one for the stomach, but Jean was a different sort of victim; he was a survivor, and those aimed for the very necessary.
His head. That was all he needed. Spine, bones, flesh—broken as they may have been, he didn’t care. He needed to stay alive by all means, even if it meant he’d never touch a racquet again. Kevin had been quick to bring cold words to the silent aftermath, but then Renee was kneeling in front of him, reaching out to grab his wrists and uncover his crumpled form—
But Neil had screamed “no!” and everyone had stilled mid-gesture.
Dan had looked ready to persist, but the moment after everyone was gone, and Neil was standing there, quiet and patient, staring at Jean as he shook on the ground. He didn’t know how long he stayed there, waiting for Jean to come back to him. He wasn’t even sure if Jean had come back at all.
Now he stares at Jean but Jean doesn’t stare back.
“You don’t have to just yet.” He felt like adding something soft, like perhaps: when you’re ready, or: you’re not alone. He didn’t because he knew how empty those words were, how unnecessary they sounded. They were not wanted, not even hoped for. They were simply reminders of what he had gone through, of how alone he really was at the end of the day.
Jean sat there without moving, on the edge of his dorm bed, still made, so neatly Neil wondered if he had ever slipped under the covers at all. One could have thought Jean was in shock, but he wasn’t.
He was breathing, or he thought he was. His shoulders were relaxed, his hands rested sloppily against his thighs, knees spread with the nonchalance of someone who stops trying. He wasn’t in shock. He was only… there. He was just there.
It was too painful to be more.
“It’s been a few days now,” Neil said. It wasn’t awkward with embarrassment, or quiet with shyness—but blunt with the facts nobody could deny. It wasn’t tainted with emotion or pity. In fact, he sounded like Kevin, and realizing so made him look away in confusion. “But you can still go back on your decision.”
Jean looked up from the ground but didn’t budge. He didn’t talk, either.
“We might not be for you.”
He meant it, somehow. The Foxes were a chaotic and troubled bunch, all still dealing with issues Jean couldn’t bear. Exposing him to the restless fights and the atmospheric bitterness was a danger, he knew, but he also knew he had never felt safer than with the Foxes. He hoped it could be the same for Jean.
Neil hoped safe was a word Jean could use someday, too. Learn the odd sound of it by twisting it on his tongue, repeating it until he got drunk on the comfort it brought to his ears. Whisper it to himself at night.
“If Kevin is part of the problem, we—” Neil started, but Jean cut him off before he could go on.
“Kevin isn’t a problem.”
That was a lie, he knew, but on the great scale of things, Kevin wasn’t much. He was nothing and no one to worry about—he was only resentment and bitterness, anger that lingered from his past and refused to heal. He wouldn’t let go and Kevin wouldn’t bend.
This wasn’t a problem, it was background noise, and Jean didn’t care.
People like Jean could spend their entire lives resenting people for the awful things they did. Torture, abandon—treason. What Kevin had done had a name. Then again, people like Jean, they never lived too long.
“Then what is?”
Jean thought about it, examining the bedroom floor as though trying to catch all the answers there. He didn’t find any.
He looked up. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to—Neil heard it anyways.
Me, the broken thing said, glancing back down again.
Neil stood there for a moment, unsure what to do but refusing to leave prematurely. He wasn’t sure what Jean would do once he would. Chances were—nothing more than he already was doing.
It almost hurt to watch.
The second week, Neil asked Wymack to count him out of practice for a while. Wymack frowned and opened his mouth, ready to call every bit of this a bad idea, but Neil’s eyes were serious and unblinking, cold with the truth. An hour later he was shoving half his closet into his duffel bag and walking down the corridor to where Jean’s room was.
It was the last one—they had kept it devoid of junior years for obvious reasons—and when Neil entered, he found darkness. Darkness where the blinds were still shut at one in the afternoon on a sunny day, darkness where the little food Jean had bothered to consume was half-eaten on the counter, collecting dust and mold and misery. Darkness all over, in every corner, like Jean had brought Evermore along.
“Jean,” he said. It was quiet and soft, like he wasn’t sure Jean was sleeping.
There he found the boy, sitting on the ground against the bedroom door. The living room had no couch, no TV—no furniture and no poster. It was the home of a ghost, which Neil sometimes thought Jean was. At least, this of the loud and obnoxious boy he had learned to know at the Nest, months ago.
Sometimes he wondered if he even existed anymore.
But then there seemed to be nothing behind Jean’s eyes.
“Why the bag,” Jean forced out, and it was so slow and rough he knew those were the first thing he had said in a while.
Neil shrugged it off and it fell on the ground in a soft puff. “I’m moving in temporarily.”
Jean snorted in disbelief, mocking to the core, but it had nothing of what he had known before. It was meek and brief, half-hearted.
“I know you don’t need me,” he said before Jean could. Jean didn’t look like he’d say anything, but he felt like preventing the annoyance of it anyway.
He sat on the ground next to him, at arm’s reach to Jean’s comfort. But then, surprisingly, he caught Jean’s Adam’s apple bob up and down as he swallowed dry, and studied the shiny skin of his bare torso. He hadn’t showered in a while. A week, two perhaps, he couldn’t tell. The sweatpants were different, but the sharp smell of smell was hard to miss, and Jean’s dark hair was starting to go flat and greasy.
It was a pathetic sight, but he didn’t feel it necessary to tell him. Jean, after all, already knew.
“Where are you,” he asked. It was a simple question, rude yet gentle, and Jean turned his head to the side.
He met his eyes, briefly so, and Neil needed a minute to realize he was tearing up.
“What do you want?” Jean cleared his throat, and Neil recognized the first signs of a sob. He was holding back, he could tell, but he did a good job at it. This probably wasn’t something he had been allowed to do at Evermore, and old habits died hard.
“I want you back.”
Jean stared, empty. He rested his head against the wall in a loud thud and Neil watched, patient. For someone so eager to play and get into fights, it was strange—but it wasn’t disagreeable, not quite, watching Jean fight every passing second. He could have called it inspiring if it wasn’t so damn miserable.
The poetry was gone; there never had been any to begin with.
How could there, when Jean reeked transpiration and hurt? It wasn’t recovery. It was drowning.
He was drowning and he couldn’t breathe.
“You don’t know me,” Jean said.
“I do,” Neil pressed, because he did.
Maybe he didn’t know what Jean’s favorite color was, or what the skies looked like from his hometown. Maybe he didn’t know what his parents were like, maybe he didn’t even have any idea what Jean had been before all of this.
But he knew, with unshakeable certainty, what Jean was like now. He knew the disdainful curve of his smirk, the cold tint of his eyes. He knew the speed with which he spoke French, and the elegant care he took to pronounce every word when he wasn’t. The perfectionism. The search for conformity and norm and pride—within the lines, never out—oh, standing out could be a mistake you couldn’t come back from under Riko’s watch.
Now he was gone and Jean didn’t know what to do anymore. Who to be. Where the limits were. He didn’t know where to fit, where to stop—he had no hopes and dreams, nothing to hold onto. All he had ever had… had vanished when Riko had.
They had cut his ankles by leaving him alone and unguided, and now he couldn’t walk.
“I can leave,” Neil said.
“What’s the point.” It was a no, he knew, and he tried to find contentment in that certitude.
And so he stayed.
He didn’t go to practice the day after. It was eight in the morning when he decided he had to do something, feeling Jean’s body shake underneath his own bunk bed. It was soft and repressed, like he was trying not to bring any attention to it, but it was hard to ignore when the room was cold and silent.
Empty of life.
Jean wasn’t even strong enough to be angry.
“Jean,” he called, but of course nobody answered. He jumped out of his bed and approached his, standing against the edge and waiting for a sign. “Jean.”
His head slightly tilted, but fell back down against the pillow, and Neil stared as his body shook. He was feverish, perhaps, but Neil knew he was probably crying.
It took a moment to ponder—and then he was cautiously leaning down at his sides, wrapping firm arms around his body to grab his wrists and… squeezing.
Jean fought back for a minute or two, shaking and kicking and grunting in his ragged breaths. Eventually, though, he tired himself out and stilled, sobbing hard against the pillow like he refused to accept Neil’s help. There was nothing he could do against Neil’s warmth against his back, or the steadying feeling of his firm fingers around his arms, holding him there.
Nothing, at least, he cared enough to deny.
It did take a while but he leaned into the touch, bringing Neil’s arms closer to his chest and crying because—he knew he could. He was allowed to, now. He was quietly told to.
He had to let it go, somehow.
He had to fight for air.
“Breathe,” Neil whispered in his neck, and closed his eyes when Jean’s shoulders violently shook with the effort it took to obey. “Breathe, Jean. Please breathe.”
They lied there an eternity. Hours, the day perhaps, Neil couldn’t tell—how easy it was to lose track of time and reality in this pitch black fortress, shielded from everything and everyone to only let inner demons ask questions.
Neil waited until he was sure Jean had fallen asleep, until he could tell his breath had steadied and calmed down; but even when he did, he stayed there, holding onto the sound of Jean fighting his every breath and onto the cold and beaten body he had left behind.
He couldn’t possibly fix Jean, he knew. But he could remind him to breathe when Jean forgot to.
They grew the habit of sharing Jean’s tiny bed at night, or in the middle of the day, lingering underneath the sheets to share human warmth and reassure one another everything was bearable. It was not fine—but it was bearable, for a survivor like Jean, it was all that mattered for now.
Neither spoke much, and when they did, the other hardly answered at all. It was easier to sit in silence than to do anything else, and they cherished this rare calm like a treasure they had never been given. Neil realized he had never really done this: know someone through their gestures rather than their words, through the scattered rhythm of their breath rather than their voice. It was intimate and terrible, and sometimes, if he was lucky, he’d catch a glimpse of the boy he had known long ago.
It had been days when Jean finally left the dorm. It was the middle of the night, which had been Jean’s only condition—save for staying alone, which hadn’t really been a condition at all.
“You are supposed to run, you know this?” Neil asked when they walked down Perimeter Road. Jean had his fists down the front pocket of his sweatshirt, and they knew by heart the rhythm of their running shoes hitting the concrete by now.
Neil had asked him to go on a night run with him, but now they were walking in silence and nothing more, and eventually Neil found it pleasurable.
It had nothing of the numbing satisfaction of a run, nothing of the cold and stunning speed of it; but it was different, and he glanced at Jean from time to time, even just to make sure he was still there, in one piece, breathing and walking.
“We should do this at least once a day. Otherwise, you’ll lose the habit of walking. You’re already out of shape.”
Jean listened but didn’t intervene. It was like talking to a child who didn’t know the language, or a quiet animal, or perhaps a robot which didn’t know how to speak. A moment it was infuriating, the other it was agreeable.
When Jean spoke, it was never soft, and never serious. A harsh turnaround to avoid reality, Neil thought, but at least he still had a voice.
“You don’t have to wait for me,” Jean grunted.
“I’m not running if you’re not running.”
“I was talking about the rest,” Jean mocked, but his lips barely moved.
He was talking about Neil moving, about Neil skipping practice to catch up with Jean instead of the other players, Neil preferring to stay on the same wavelengths as his than going on with his own normal life. And now he was offering a broken sleeping pattern just to get Jean out of his room, and though it felt like too much, Jean couldn’t grasp why.
“I never do anything I don’t want to,” Neil shrugged.
“I know.” Neil glanced at him at the words, but Jean ignored him easily. This was one of those: the scarce and brief moments during which they mentioned Neil’s stay at Evermore without even bringing it up at all. It lingered in the air between them, heavy, a souvenir that never faded. Jean knew him—Neil knew him. They did, because that’s what they had been forced to do in order to survive. Patch each other back to health, or what seemed to be sufficient for the day; grab a hand or a shoulder or an arm to lift the other up when they fell down.
They had never talked about it, not really. Some days it felt like they were still there, but Jean refused to have it any other way. He’d rather relive Evermore’s hell in Neil’s presence than something strange and frightening with someone he didn’t want and didn’t know.
He wondered if that meant he wanted Neil.
“Let’s head back.”
Jean looked up, eyes asking ‘so soon’ but saying nothing. Then Jean went straight to bed, hardly even stripping on the way to it, and Neil stilled by his side, eyes staring at the bunk above—until Jean shyly and wordlessly reached for his hand and pulled it against him. Neil yielded and turned, wrapping his tiny self around him as he usually did, Jean accepting the shield because it was all he had. It was small and, sometimes, a little too clumsy, but it was better than being alone.
Neil asked nothing in return and that’s all that mattered in the end. Because, really, Jean had nothing to give.