Work Text:
stock photo by Drew Graham on Unsplash, Kent added in by me
Kent storms out of Jack’s frat house and doesn’t stop for his rental Spyder. He has a smartphone, he can’t be bothered to worry about getting lost. He picks a direction and walks until he ends up on an overpass and leans over the guardrail to stare down at I-95.
What if I jumped.
It’s not a new thought, not really.
Countless times, he’s been driving his car and thought about taking it off the road, purposefully flipping it. He pushes the thoughts away, tells himself he just needs to get where he’s going, just make it to the rink, just play one more practice, one more game. When he had a bit more of a grip, it became, just wait for Jack.
God, seeing Jack was like a punch to the stomach, made feelings well up in Kent that he didn’t have names for, that overflowed from his chest until it was all he could do to plant his elbows on the guardrail and sob.
He’s usually so much better at repressing. Fuck Jack, really.
He remembers being seventeen and not always feeling like he was going to die any day, any week, any month now, that his eventual death by suicide was inevitable and it was just a matter of how long he could cling on by his fingernails. He remembers feeling like he had a future.
But he’d managed it, he’d clung on and waited for Jack, put out of his mind anything that could mean Jack wasn’t coming back. He’d convinced himself their last meeting wasn’t as bad as it had seemed, that Jack hadn’t really been that cold, he hadn’t let himself think about how many texts Jack hadn’t answered and concentrated on the few he had, even though they didn’t tell him anything.
It wasn’t like it had been radio silence for the past five years while his mental health steadily deteriorated. It was just. Jack being Jack. He was bad enough at not being a hockey robot in person, Kent hardly expected him to get beyond “good game” and “thanks” when there was a whole country separating them, did he? Never mind that Jack didn’t text him when he got into school. Or got the C. Things would be better once they were together. Jack would get to the show and they’d be on the same footing again and Kent wouldn’t miss him so goddamn much all the time. That was what he had to focus on. Except. Except tonight.
Jack isn’t--
He doesn’t finish the thought.
He’s scratching at his wrists and forearms, he realizes. Which. This isn’t the first time for that either. He moves his fingers to fresh skin to avoid making himself bleed.
He doesn’t cut anymore. Too easy to get caught. There’s no fucking hiding those scars. He figured that out the first time he pulled a hamstring a week or so after taking a razor blade to his inner thigh and was shepherded in to visit the trainer. She—Kent knows Kimee is a she now, he didn’t then, but if he’s ever going to train his cis white boy brain to see her as a girl without effort he has to think of her that way in retrospect too—got his pants off and hissed as she immediately spotted the cuts. Heart rabbiting in his chest, he flipped through a few options, trying to figure out the most believable excuse when she asks him where they came from, there are only a couple—but she doesn’t. She says, “Kent,” voice dripping with pain, and rolls up her own sleeve to show him an arm covered with parallel scars.
He opens his mouth to say something, to deny it, but he meets her gaze and she knows, she’s looking at him with bone-deep recognition, and there’s no point.
Kimee puts her number in his phone and tells him he can call her if he needs her. That she’ll be there when he’s ready to quit. And then she puts another one in and tells him to call that one if she doesn’t pick up.
“So you’re not gonna tell management to lock me up?” Kent jokes feebly, but she doesn’t laugh.
“I’ve been there, Kent.” Locked up, she means, not just a cutter. “It’s an addiction. You need to want help.”
It’s not an addiction, Kent tells her, he’s not like Jack, he doesn’t drink every day or take prescription meds or smoke, everything he’s ever put in his body he can and does do without for days at a time, that’s what addiction is, and Kimee says, “You live in Vegas, Kent, you gonna tell me you’ve never heard of a gambling addiction? It’s got everything to do with how your brain reacts to an experience, whether the experience is taking Xanax or drinking or winning at poker or cutting, if it makes you feel better, your brain can build an addiction pathway.”
“You got a minor in psych or something?” Kent deflects, and she tells him that no, she just did a lot of research on her own mental illness and she can send him the studies if he wants.
But he could at any point get a trainer who isn’t Kimee, or the guys could see in the locker room, or whatever, so he sticks to scratching and pushing himself too hard in his workouts. Kimee tells him it’s still self-harm, and not to fool himself, but she’s still proud of him for the small victory.
They get drunk together sometimes. Kent wants to kiss her sometimes, but he’s still so fucking scared of coming out, and then they get drunk enough that he asks her why she started cutting, and that’s how he finds out she’s trans. He makes an idiot of himself with stupid comments for a bit, but Kimee tells him to shut the fuck up and google the etiquette, and he gets better about it, and then he tells her he’s gay right around the time he realizes with a start that he isn’t attracted to her anymore as long as he’s thinking about her being a girl.
He wishes Kimee were here now, on the bridge with him. Because all he can think about is how he’s spent all this time waiting for Jack, and how Jack isn’t coming, and does he have anything to live for anymore?
Another Stanley Cup? says a voice in his head.
You’ve got two of those, what’s the fucking point, says the nastier voice.
“FUCK!” he shouts down at the passing cars.
God, but he’s lonely. He’s so fucking lonely and he doesn’t think he’s ever really realized that before.
Jump, says the nasty voice. Jump, no one will fucking miss you, least of all Jack.
Literally everyone will miss you, you stupid fuck, says the nice voice, which doesn’t pull its punches either if it feels the need.
They’ll miss Parser the hockey prodigy, not Kent the person.
Kimee will miss Kent the person.
And there, there it is, and Kent already has a foot up on the bottom bar of the guardrail with quite a lot of his weight on it, and it takes a supreme amount of effort, but he pulls his phone out of his pocket.
He googled the second number a long time ago out of curiosity, he knows what it is. And his first impulse is to call Kimee direct, but this a fucking lot to put on her, when he’s this close to just climbing over, and it’s the middle of the night by now, what if she doesn’t hear it and doesn’t answer, he’s not sure he’ll have the strength to try again, and so he promises himself he’ll call her later, and he calls the second number instead.
“Hi, this is the Suicide Crisis line, what can I do for you?” says the lady on the other end.
“Hi,” says Kent, feeling wild and reckless and like he’s absolutely out of things to lose. “I’ve spent my whole goddamn adult life living for this one guy and he doesn’t want me back, and I’m literally standing on a bridge right now. Can you convince me I want to get off it?”
He calls Kimee a couple hours later and says, “I want to get better,” and she cries and tells him she’s proud of him and. It’s going to be okay.