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The first time Jean travels, he’s six years old.
He’s by himself on the balcony. It’s early afternoon, late spring, and Maman is humming along with the radio in the kitchen. Papa is away for work, which means Jean is allowed to color in the book of pictures Maman had given him. He’s found a bright patch of sun to sit, nestled among the plants, and Jean sings along too, or tries. He doesn’t know the words to the song but the sound is sweet, and the bread Maman is baking makes his stomach rumble. The sun is warm on his hair and Jean is happy. He wishes it could be like this when Papa comes home, but he knows Papa doesn’t like music, and doesn’t like when Jean colors in his book.
From down the street, a car honks. Jean glances up at the sound, distracted, and suddenly feels a twist in his belly that's nothing like the feeling of being hungry. There’s a pop in his ears, and then–
There is no street, no sun. The world has gone dark and still and cool around him. Jean searches around himself dazedly, but recognizes nothing.
This isn’t his house. The moonlight shining through the large window opposite him is enough to reveal that much. Jean blinks hard, squeezing his eyes shut and opening them, but the scene doesn’t change. He’s not on the balcony. He shuts his eyes again and rubs at them hard until he sees spots, just in case they are playing tricks. When he opens them it’s to the same dark living room and the same wide window.
Jean stands on shaky legs and blinks against the wetness building in his eyes.
“Maman…?” he calls quietly, stepping forward into the room. There’s a hallway to his left, a long couch to his right, and a kitchen behind him. “Maman?”
Jean’s breathing hitches into rapid, shallow puffs and he scrubs at his teary eyes. “Where am I?” he whispers to the dark room, and creeps to the window. He can see the sea, and for a moment there’s relief in thinking he must be home. He must be in Marseille.
But then he looks more closely. The buildings outside are massive, stretching skyward, all lit up, and the beach is—wrong. It’s not the beach where Maman would take him walking or where she taught him to swim. Realizing that—wherever he is—he is far, far from home, Jean begins to cry.
He sinks to the floor with his back against the window, curling into himself as sobs wrack his small frame. He’s trembling, and his hiccuping gasps are so loud in his ears that he almost doesn’t hear the quiet footsteps coming down the hall.
A lamp clicks on, bathing the room in yellow light, and a voice calls, “Hello?”
Jean’s head jerks up in alarm. Through the tears he makes out the figure of a man standing in the doorway to the hall. He is blond and wide-eyed, his mouth dropping open as he spots Jean by the window.
Jean’s gasps grow more desperate, his rapid heartbeat pounding against his ribs. He is alone, he does not know where he is, and there is a stranger—it’s everything Maman had ever warned him about.
Do not wander off, Jean. Do not stray too far.
He had only ever disobeyed her once; accidentally losing her in the crowded market, Jean had found his way to the beach. A kind stranger happened upon him and stayed with him, keeping him calm and teaching him to skip stones while they waited for his mother. Even so young, Jean knows that good luck doesn’t work that way twice, and a strange house is very different than a familiar beach.
The man steps forward slowly, saying something to him that Jean doesn’t understand in a language he thinks is English. Jean merely cries harder, then, and doesn’t respond; he curls tighter into himself and calls for his mother.
The man says something else under his breath, and suddenly begins speaking in French.
“Hey, hey, it’s alight, you’re okay,” the man says quietly. The words sound funny when he says them, and he’s holding his hands up in front of him the way Jean does when approaching the skittish cats that live near the market. “You’re okay. I promise you’re safe here.”
Jean stares at him in wide-eyed, panicked confusion, wracked with sobs and unable to catch his breath.
“Shhh, shh, hey. My name’s Jeremy.” He keeps his hands in the air and doesn’t come any closer, instead slowly sinking to the floor himself and putting himself at Jean’s eye-level. “Can you tell me your name?”
“J—Je-Jean,” he gasps, smudging his eyes on his sleeve. His breath comes a little easier now that it seems the man has stopped moving.
The man—Jeremy—sucks in a breath when he hears Jean’s name, eyes going wide again. His smile is gone.
“Jean,” Jeremy repeats, slow, wondering, and Jean blinks at his confusion. “You’re—Jean?”
“Yes,” Jean says, frustrated; he knows his own name.
“Jean, do you… do you know where you are? And what’s happened?”
“No,” Jean insists. He curls back into himself and tenses at the scrutiny, gripping his own sleeves.
“Shhh, shh, it’s alright—you’re safe here, remember?” Jeremy tells him, and he smiles at Jean again. “Plus, if I understand this right, you’ll be going home before you know it.”
Jean just shakes his head, not understanding and not liking that this person, this stranger seems to know what’s going on while Jean himself does not.
“Where am I?” he demands, voice going watery around the edges.
“You’re…” Jeremy sucks in a breath and runs a hand through his messy hair. Jean blinks and finally notices the man is wearing pajamas, like he’d been sleeping before Jean’s arrival. “The United States. You're in Southern California.”
Jean feels like his ears are ringing. “No,” he insists, shaking his head. “You’re lying. I was just home, where am I?”
Jeremy frowns at him, but his voice remains soft. “I’m not lying, Jean—I promise, I’ll never lie to you—”
“Stop playing tricks! I want to go home!” Jean is almost yelling now, in a way he could never do at home, but the fear is high in his throat and he needs answers, he needs to go home—
His stomach twists again, and the next time he opens his eyes it's into the sun over Marseille.
——
It happens again. And again. And again.
Jeremy is the one who tells him about traveling.
Jean had known about time travel in the way that all children know about time travel. It’s not common—barely one in hundreds of millions—but it’s understood: some people, through a twist in genetics or a fluke in the universe, are able to travel in time.
Over the course of a half dozen trips that next year, Jeremy explains it to him. Jean learns that every person is different—some people only travel to the past, while some only travel to the future. Some only travel within their own timeline, and some never visit their own lifetimes at all. It’s thought that people are often drawn to important events or people in their own lives—but sometimes it’s just random.
Years go by, and Jean only ever travels to one place, in one time. To Jeremy, who is 23 years old, who always smiles when he sees Jean. To Jeremy, who plays Exy and lives by the sea.
He enters the Nest knowing that if he has nothing else, he has that.
——
It takes less than a week for Jean to experience something about traveling that Jeremy had only ever told him about in hypothetical.
For travelers, pain acts like an anchor. Fear, too. It roots them in the present, and makes it so that no matter how badly Jean wills, or wishes, or cries out for the reprieve he knows traveling would bring him, it never comes.
He learns to stop crying out. But the wishing…
They can break Jean’s body, but Jeremy is something they can’t touch.
——
Jean is sixteen when Kevin comes to him buzzing about a senior Striker from Huntington Beach who’d just broken the state’s scoring record. He drags Jean up onto the bed next to him and they both lean in close to watch the highlight reel looping on Kevin’s phone. Kevin does a better job hyping him up than even the adoring Exy reporters on ESPNU.
“His name is Jeremy Knox,” Kevin says eagerly as the clip switches over to his postgame interview. “I think maybe I can get Riko to convince the Master to recruit him for next year—just look at him!”
Jean is, and Jean doesn’t answer. Panic chokes his throat, an icy stab of fear into his chest, because staring up at him from the tiny screen, looking years younger than Jean has ever known him, is Jeremy.
“No,” he manages to gasp, forcefully enough that Kevin stares at him in surprise. Jean doesn’t take his eyes from the screen as he talks. He forces some composure into his voice. “Think about it: you, Riko, and J—" he grits his teeth, swallows, “Jeremy. Three strikers. Riko would never allow it.”
Kevin frowns, already looking like he was crafting a counterargument, but Jean forces on.
“And even if he did,” he says over Kevin’s protests, “He’d never let him on your line. He’d never let him start. You’d be ending his career before it even begins.”
His eyes flit up to meet Kevin’s, and seeing the crumbling resignation in his face, Jean makes no move to hide the steel in his voice.
“Don’t.”
——
That spring Jeremy Knox signs for the USC Trojans, and Jean nearly cries in relief.
They may have him, but they’ll never have Jeremy.
——
Jeremy never told Jean his last name. He never told him which professional team he plays for, or the school he attended, or the name of the man he shares an apartment with. He’d joked about protecting the space-time continuum, and the unimpressed look Jean had leveled him at age nine caused him to laugh so hard tears streamed down his face.
He knows that Jeremy knows him, Jean, in his time—and that his time is some years into the future.
But he never expected them to be this close in age.
He never expected he’d get to play Exy against this person whose been his friend nearly his entire life.
Or that, when he did, Jeremy would have no idea who Jean was.
After that realization, it doesn’t take much to separate this Jeremy from his Jeremy. They’re not the same person, not really. Not in the ways that matter.
It’s easy.
Almost.
——
By the time Kengo Moriyama dies, Jean hasn’t traveled in over two years. Not since before he’d learned of Jeremy Knox’s existence in Jean’s present. Laid up recovering in Abby Winfield’s guest room, traveling is the farthest thing from his mind.
(He’s hurt enough on the outside, and not enough of a masochist to feel the need to hurt himself inside right now too.)
That’s one reason why, when Abby knocks on his door in the afternoon to announce he has a visitor, Jean expects Renee. Instead it’s Kevin, but he’s not alone.
Jean had not expected Jeremy Knox.
He pushes down the cascade of emotion the sight of his face (still too young) brings about, and reminds himself that the boy standing in the doorway is a stranger.
Jean narrows his eyes at the Trojan captain. “You should not be here.”
Knox blinks at him, curious and looking a little bemused. “No?”
“You have a game tomorrow.”
“We do.” Knox nods, unfazed by Jean’s disapproval.
Jean cuts a glare to Kevin, instead, and switches to French, “You expect me to play for a team whose captain abandons them the day before a Raven match?”
Kevin frowns, looking offended on Knox’s behalf, and opens his mouth to reply—but to both of their surprise, Knox cuts him off.
“I’m where my team needs me to be,” he states in measured, accented French. “Your team, if you choose.” He holds out a file folder containing, Jean assumes, the last of his contract.
Kevin’s bafflement breaks first.
“You speak French?” he gapes, lapsing back into English. One more thing to build his ridiculous crush, Jean thinks. He scowls, and reminds himself it’s because of Knox himself, not Kevin’s hopeless pining.
Knox smiles in reply, small and private. He’s looking at Jean again. “I learned growing up; it’s my minor.” He sounds amused, and Jean can’t fathom why—or why Jean cares. “Actually, Kevin—do you mind if I talk to Jean alone for a minute? I’ll meet you back downstairs when we’re done.”
“Uh—yeah, of course,” Kevin blinks and agrees readily, already moving to the door. Jean would laugh at how accommodating the usually obstinate Kevin Day was behaving if it wouldn’t hurt his battered ribs to do so.
The door clicks shut behind him, and then Jean is alone in a room with Jeremy Knox for the first time in years.
He’s not Jeremy, a voice reminds.
But he will be.
If Jean stops to think too long about how the boy in front of him will grow into the man who soothed a terrified child lost far from home more than a decade ago—and years from now—it twists both his heart and his mind. So he pushes it down.
“You don’t have to do Kevin any favors,” Jean says finally, breaking their stalemate.
“I didn’t come here for Kevin.” Knox looks surprised, and the earnest honesty reads so plainly on his face that Jean has to look away.
“Because of him, then. As a favor.”
Knox just shakes his head. “ I came because of you. For you.”
Jean rolls his eyes, uncomfortable at the squirming feeling in his chest. “Semantics.”
“I meant what I said, Jean.” Knox looks at him steadily, and when Jean glances up and catches his eye, he feels pinned. “I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.”
Knox holds out the file folder once more, the challenge clear in his face.
Jean reaches out and takes it.
——
There’s a part of Jean that’s convinced he’s stopped traveling for good. It’s been almost four years, now. He’s started to think that maybe, since he’s met Jeremy in person, he’s caught up with his own timeline.
Which is why when he’s lounging on their dorm room couch in late January and he feels that familiar twisting in his gut, there’s a brief moment of surprise—followed by a hollow relief.
That relief is quickly eclipsed by panic when he realizes he’s not in Jeremy’s apartment. He’s not anywhere he recognizes from the seven months he’s lived in LA.
He’s outdoors, in a park. The sun in blazing overhead with what must be summertime heat. Kids run around a playground, laughing and yelling, and somewhere close by an ice cream truck plays an obnoxious, jingling tune.
Jean starts walking in hopes it’ll quell his rapid heartbeat. He’d always traveled to Jeremy’s apartment, always. It was his one rule, the one certainty he had. What had happened to break that pattern? Some quick observations (the palm trees, some license plates) reassure him he’s still in California, but what makes him nervous is he has no idea when.
He’s nearing a line of trees when he hears the quiet thwap of an Exy ball. Rounding the trees, a court comes into view—not an Exy court by any stretch of the word, but a basketball court. The path winds along the court toward the main road, so Jean observes the sole figure inside as he walks.
It’s a young boy, who appears to be running his own sort of Exy drills. He’s a tiny thing, but he’s quick, and more than that he appears to be accurate, catching every pass he throws. He repeats his wall passes the length of the court, twice, then skids to a stop at the end line, chest heaving as he leans on his kid-sized racket.
Jean looks away as he nears the edge of the path, but something makes him take a last glance back and—
… There’s no way.
The boy is staring back at Jean curiously where he’d frozen in place. Jean whips his head around to check his surroundings once more, hoping for a giveaway, because this is impossible. When he looks back, the scene is the same, the boy staring at him in open confusion now. Jean watches him glance behind himself, perhaps wondering what Jean was staring at, but Jean feels the insistent pull at his stomach and he’s gone again before the boy looks back.
—-
Jean manages to ignore the encounter, to delude himself into thinking it won’t happen again until it does. He manages to get through another day of classes, but he’s barely dropped his backpack to the floor when he feels the twisting and he’s gone.
He opens his eyes, and it’s the park again. The sky is overcast, this time, and while there are kids on the playground, the court is empty. There’s no sign of the boy.
Jean doesn’t know how to feel about his own relief.
For lack of a better place to go, he makes his way to the court once more, pushing open the creaking door to stand inside. It’s… nearly decrepit, honestly. Only one wall is usable to pass against, the nets aren’t even regulation size.
(Jean spares a thought to wonder if these are the conditions he would’ve played in as a child had things been different. Had he been playing Exy out of a love for the sport, instead of a blood debt. He shuts that thought down faster than it came.)
There’s a racket and ball left off to one side of the court, and Jean makes his way to them. The racket is scuffed and scraped so bad nearly all the paint is flaked away, and it’s too small for him, of course. He scoops up the ball and begins to toss it against the wall anyway. What else can he do to pass the time? He gets into a rhythm after a while, zoning into the motion and trying some more complicated maneuvers with the smaller racket.
He doesn’t know how long has passed when high voice pipes up from behind him.
“Wow!” it exclaims, awe coloring its tone, and Jean jumps about a mile high. He spins to face the voice, and it’s the boy. He’s just as small up close—couldn’t be older than six or seven, Jean thinks. Blue eyes stare up at him, wide and excited, set in a flushed, tan face. He’s got an Exy racket clutched in a death grip, and it looks like Jean startled him back as bad as the kid startled him.
“I’m sorry!” the boy scrambles, anxiously, “I didn’t mean to scare you!”
Jean blinks at him, jaw dropping minutely at the perplexity of this situation.
“You’re just, like, really good,” the boy continues, shrugging. He stares back at Jean, unbothered, and tips his head to the side. “Are you a pro or something?”
Jean lowers the racket, pushing back on the niggling in his mind. He tips his head right back at the boy, answering honestly. “…No.” The boy’s shoulder’s start to sag. “But I will be.”
The kid’s face lights up. “That’s so cool!” he exclaims again, ambling past the metal door and onto the court.
Up close, Jean can see that he’s practically covered in neon band aids. They’re patched over his knees and his elbows, and there’s even a lime green one on his cheek. His eyes are blue, his messy hair brown-blond, and when he reaches Jean’s side he beams up at him with a partially toothless grin.
The paranoia Jean’s been feeling, the familiarity, solidifies into a sinking sort of resignation.
“I wanna go pro someday, and play for the Knights!” the boy is saying.
But it can’t be, it can’t be, it can’t–
“My name’s Jeremy, what’s yours?”
Jean knows the boy–Jeremy, that child is Jeremy Knox–is still speaking, but Jean can’t hear him over the rushing in his ears and the pounding of his heart.
Of course it’s him. It’s always him.
——
When Jean travels back to USC, he’s angry. Also confused, and overwhelmed wouldn’t be an exaggeration. He stews in the feelings for hours until Jeremy is through with his evening classes.
Jeremy is barely through the door before Jean is rounding on him, voice like ice.
“You knew.”
"Jean—?“ Jeremy blinks up at him, wide-eyed, and Jean flashes back to the boy on the court. He grits his teeth.
“You knew about traveling. About me,” he bites, and understanding shutters across Jeremy’s face, followed closely by what looks like guilt.
“Jean—" he tries, but Jean doesn’t let up.
“You knew. Is that why you took me on the team?”
“No, Jean,” Jeremy interjects firmly, leaving no room for argument. He pushes off the wall and squares his shoulders; in the motion Jean sees a flicker of the older Jeremy, his Jeremy, and a treacherous voice at the back of his head wonders if this isn’t his Jeremy now too. “No. It wasn’t… pity, or sympathy, or whatever you’re trying to convince yourself it was. I can see it on you face, don’t deny it,” he points out, and that’s his roommate, his captain, who has always been able to read Jean with scary accuracy.
Maybe this is why.
“You traveled to me, Jean," Jeremy continues quietly, the words slow and measured, and it's only then that Jean realizes he'd lapsed into French—and that Jeremy had followed.
His eyes flit away, staring at the wall. He swallows. ”For how long?"
"A handful of times, after that first. The last when I was thirteen."
"And then?"
"Then nothing. I never saw you again… until one day I turned on ESPN and there you were,” Jeremy holds out his hands, a hopeless, wondering gesture. “You can't have been more than seventeen, and already promised to the Ravens, lined up for Court."
Jean processes this in silence, and Jeremy lets him. The silence sits between them, broken only by their breathing, and Jean finds that the boiling anger he’d felt earlier has all but faded away.
"How…” Jean finally says, looking back to Jeremy. “How much did you know? About me.”
Jeremy watches him cautiously, guessing where Jean could be leading them. ”Only as much as you told me, which wasn’t much.”
"...."
"I was a kid, Jean. I didn't know—any of it,” Jeremy’s voice chokes on the words, and his hands fist the hem of his t-shirt. “Nothing that mattered, nothing that could’ve helped. You never told me. If I’d known, I would've... somehow I would've..."
Somehow I would have helped you.
The vice grip around Jean’s heart loosens. He breathes.
"That's not why I asked,” Jean feels the need to explain, to give some sort of comfort as regret wracks Jeremy. Jean can see now how this has been eating him from the inside since the day they met at Abby’s.
It’s just like Jeremy Knox, punishing himself for things he cannot control.
“It doesn't matter,” Jean says. “Even if you'd known, there's nothing you could have done."
“I could’ve!” Jeremy protests.
“You could not.” His voice is steel, for both of their sakes.
But Jeremy just shakes his head, agitated now. “What's the point of time travel if you can't fix anything?!"
Jean thinks of himself, traveling to Jeremy as a child. Of coloring books, and fresh fruits, and someone who asked Jean questions and cared about how he answered. Of finding comfort in him, the moments of sunlight in a dark, dark world.
Jeremy hadn't been able to change Jean's past. But he'd shaped it all the same.
“The point?” Jean repeats, quiet now, and Jeremy looks up at him with the same blue eyes he’s known almost his entire life.
"I think... it brings people together. Across time and space. People who need each other the most, when they need it the most."
Jeremy stares at Jean, cheeks pinking slightly, and he doesn’t know it yet, Jean thinks. He doesn’t know what he’ll do for Jean in his years to come. Like Jean doesn’t know what he’s done for Jeremy. What he will do.
“So,” Jean takes a breath, breaking the stare, “What do we talk about then?"
Jeremy blinks, off guard at the change in topic. “What?”
“When you were little. What did we talk about?”
Jeremy lightens at that, smiling soft. He leans against the wall, looking up at Jean. "School. Exy. Me, mostly."
"You didn't strike me as a narcissistic child, Jeremy.”
Jeremy laughs, a bright, ringing thing. "It's you! You'd always ask so many questions..." he smiles at the memory, and Jean feels his own cheeks warming at the affection in his tone. It’s not for him, this softness.
Not yet.
But it will be.