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Jean Moreau is blood on ice, a scarlet stain seeping through transparency. The harsh lines of his profile mark him as separate, apart. Sometimes, he struggles for the right word, and reaches instead for the beautifully cruel language of his motherland, French words ricocheting off his tongue like bullets. Jean is collateral damage, but damaged all the same.
*
“What’s it like to be one of the first openly gay male professional exy players?” the reporter asks, ignoring his obvious discomfort. Ahead of him, one of the people sent to help him deal with the press begins to clear a path.
“No comment,” he says, forceful. He has somewhere to be.
“How long have you out in the exy community prior to today?” asks another. A low blow, but Jean supposes the reporters all have bills to pay.
“No comment,” he repeats, words sharper this time as he slowly pushes his way forwards through the crowd.
“What are your thoughts on the rumours of a relationship between you and Kevin Day during college?”
“No comment.”
“How does it feel to be-”
“No comment.”
No comment, no comment, no comment. Je ne veux pas parler. Jean thinks of the French on autopilot, and flinches. Old habits die hard. A reporter picks up on it somewhere, but Jean just repeats his chant. No comment. A prayer, almost. No comment. Please, God above, je veux me réveiller maintenant, I want to wake up-
Then he’s in his car and driving on autopilot, and it isn’t until he’s on the highway that he realises he’s making his way back to California, back to USC, back to where he used to belong.
*
In the dream, Riko is leering at him. That is how Jean knows it is a dream, because Riko is dead, because Riko was shot in the head by his own brother five years ago if Neil is to be believed (which he isn’t, of course). But Jean never does anything, never did when Riko was alive either, so he sits through this nightmare of warped faces and rough hands and wakes up screaming, thank God, at least he’s feeling something.
The words don’t come. He leans over and spits blood onto the nightstand, and the world turns full circle, and Jean is nineteen and spitting up blood after losing a game, except Jean is also twenty five and it’s midnight in California and none of this is real.
A drink is in order, he decides. The last time Jean went out drinking properly was after USC won the championships his final year, but he keeps a bottle of spirits under the cabinet for home emergencies. Never vodka, though, because the sight of a familiar Smirnoff bottle only ever sends him spiralling back into various flashbacks of Kevin downing entire cabinets during banquets and after matches and during other things that Jean would much rather forget. Despite all that, though, the last Jean heard is that Kevin hasn’t touched the stuff since he went pro. Still, old habits die hard, so gin it is, and he pour himself a sizeable glass and examines his own marred reflection in the dim moonlight. No matter where he goes, nothing will ever match the skies of Marseille, Jean thinks, and then gulps as much of his drink as possible to block out that particular thought entirely.
In the Marseille of Jean’s memory, there is no exy, and there is no father of his. In the Marseille of Jean’s memory, he and his mother still traipse to the market every Thursday and he’s still struggling to remember the hymns for Church and the sand is always a perfect cream. But memories are flawed. In the Marseille of Jean’s memory, he stays there forever, but in the California of his present, he does not, and only one of them can be true.
The glass is empty. Jean goes back to sleep.
*
Things Jean does not want to forget: the quicksilver of Laila’s smile, the harsh lines in Alvarez’s hair when it’s freshly cut, the dimples in Jeremy’s cheeks that always seem desperate to be put on show. Things Jean wishes he could forget: the razor burn of a knife, the weight of a Moriyama gaze, the feeling of ten broken fingers and a cracked rib while running around bodychecking Neil Josten in his first match against him.
He remembers both categories with a shocking vividness, which is odd. Jean’s used to most of his recollections being filmy, tinted; most of them discoloured by future events. These six memories are crystalline, as if Jean is experiencing them for the first time whenever he recalls them.
There’s also one more thing he remembers clearly, but it’s neither good nor bad, and Jean hates it and cherishes it at the same time.
(It’s waking up in Fox territory after Renee’s rescue and bringing up nothing but bile and the stupid Fox nurse - Ally, or whatever her name was - holding back tears as she cleaned him up. It’s the blood on those sheets, the looks on their faces, the feeling of being on enemy territory. The feeling of being free, but only as free as a bird with a broken wing, only as free as he’s allowed to be.)
It’s irrelevant.
*
Renee cajoles him to visit more often, which is difficult since Renee is always off saving the world somewhere in Guatemala or Peru or somewhere else too far for Jean to reach. Renee tells him to visit and he never does but always promises to, because he wishes he could see Renee again and thank her for everything. He wishes he could see Renee and explain that he’s trying to be the person she saw when she saved him, wishes he could tell her that life sucks and I sometimes miss my dead rapist but at least I have you and thank God for that. But Renee would never put up with that kind of wallowing, so he bites his tongue, makes an excuse, threads another lie as smooth as the phantom stitches that hold him together. Jean fears she can see right through him. Jean fears that she can’t. Jean fears that one day he will wake up and all of this will be a dream, even Renee, and he will be right back at square one where he started.
*
Jean goes back to France once, in the dead of December at the end of the season. It is clear and cold, and the shitty hotel room he’s staying in has barely any heat, and his accent has deteriorated so much that occasionally a shopkeeper attempts to talk to him in English. It’s not even closure, because he’s not in Marseille, he’s not even in the south at all. Still, he’s in France, which is progress, and he takes a photo of the Eiffel Tower just to remind himself and the ten year old boy he used to be that he came back. “Where were you?” asks Anna, his teammate, when he returns from his vacation. Jean doesn’t answer, not because he’s ashamed, but because she wouldn’t quite understand.
And he doesn’t go back to France after that, but it’s okay. He’s gotten his closure, or at least as much of it as he can bear, and he isn’t interested in ruining much else.
*
Of course, Jean cannot run from the Moriyamas forever. He sees Ichirou’s face on television and physically recoils until his back is pressed up against the wall. Riko is dead. Ichirou is not. Riko is dead. A thousand ghostly wounds split open, each one dousing him in feelings he thought were long gone. Perhaps thought isn’t the correct word - more like hoped. There’s a sickness in his heart that makes him feel turned inside out with sweat and fear, and it will never be over as long as I live , and nothing’s coming up and everything’s coming up and no, no, no-
Jeremy turns off the television. Jean can’t see his face, but he doesn’t want to, either, because what if it’s Riko? (It’s not, he knows it’s not, but trauma does this, it clouds your brain and makes you think everything twice over until suddenly nothing is real and even your own name is a lie.)
“That’s enough of that,” he says neutrally, and Jean slides to the ground. “Let’s get you some water.”