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You’re fifteen years old and everything is still simple, or at least as simple as it gets with you. You remember very clearly talking circles around Jake about some nonsense slice of horseshit nothing, cryptic and friendly and you guess, so ultimately funny (youre a stitch strider really!!) that you hear him snort between laughs and you call it a point in your corner for a game you aren’t even aware you’re playing yet.
“Truly only one of you on the planet, man,” Jake bustles cheerfully, and you think you’re half right and fleetingly consider telling him everything for about the thousandth time - but he short-circuits you, and - “Flippin’ Christ, you’re just so bloody fascinating.”
And that’s that. It’s a before and after moment all of a sudden. Because he’s said one damn thing - one word, even, it all comes down to fascinating - and it’s like he’s shot it down your throat (ha-ha, Roxy, I know, I heard it before it left my mouth thank you very much) and it’s taken up residence there for the rest of your pathetic, overinvested, overbearing life. It’s the beginning of the end. Some kind of divine joke. Somewhere in your throat (not even that deep, you can barely keep it down) the word fascinating sits like its expanded to reach from one end to the other and suddenly nothing goes down your throat anymore without wobbling it and making you think about it and think about Jake and think think think about everything all the time.
You remember being in the crawl space at some point, the edge of the attic trapdoor digging into your gut while you spaced out and stared at the shape of a bottlecap and thinking: I’m fucked.
Immediately, everything you do carries that extra weight. What’s he even fascinated by, anyway? He never told you. Just listened to one of a million little anecdotes about your daily life and called you That. That thing. The thing that’s lodged itself firmly in your heart right next to your brother’s voice and you can’t reach it to try to examine it, learn everything about it. You end up having to accept it very similarly to how you accept remembering your brother - grudging and wistful and - welp, no time to worry about it now, shit to do, everyone else’s problems to worry about.
It worms its way through you and never leaves.
•
You’re looking at him now and for some reason you’d expected to laugh. Some crooked image hitched to a daydream you might’ve had once (about purple prison walls and a robotic voice you couldn’t place) had given you a harebrained clue as to what he might be looking like at about this point. And yeah, it was absurd at the time - Jake is about 160 pounds of pure muscle and trying to imagine him shoved into a canary-yellow unitard and cape with any grace never made sense to you.
But you’ve seen him move now. You’ve seen the look on his face, a thousand-yard-stare quirked around by optimism. You’ve seen him fighting for his damn life in the fucking thing and you know you can’t even begin to make fun of him for it. It’s too much a part of him now, a part of who he’s become (the term fully realizedjumps into your brain and you run with it) and no matter how fucking silly you thought he’d look you have to take him seriously, it’s become sacred.
He doesn’t say anything, just looks at you. And you think god damnit, hurry up hurry up, I have to -
And then you think no. And you fight yourself, can practically feel the manual movement of priorities in your brain like cinderblocks as you bite your lip and think it’s okay to need things and, even harder, it’s okay to need people. It’s okay for you to be here because you are just as important as they are.
You look up to him again and push your shades up your face, balancing them in front of the solid little tiara on top of your head. He’s still not speaking and somehow you know it isn’t his nerves, you know it isn’t him feeling awkward. As if he even could, anymore. You power through another barrage of embarrassing anxieties and decide to fucking man up and do what Jake is hoping you’ll do.
You’re in his arms in ten seconds flat, your own slung over him and gripping the back of his shirt so tight you wonder if it will recover. You’re grateful for fingerless gloves. You’re so, so grateful to be alive - and the feeling hits you oddly, feels new in your head, as if Jake radiates it and you’ve just breathed in enough of it to get your first full hit all at once.
You hear him smiling, chuckling, maybe cooing who even knows and you shove your face into his shoulder, eyes wide open and startlingly sure of yourself.
"You’ve always been kind and caring," he says, no hesitation at all, just - presented as fact and your grip on him tightens, you’ve never felt quite so noticed- “but that was different.” You swallow, throat working against where his cape has bunched up under your chin. You have no idea what you want him to say, have no idea what direction you want this to go in, but you know without a doubt as soon as he says it because it breaks you:
"That was brave.”
You gasp as if he’s branded you, and maybe he has, you feel dizzy and your head starts pounding and just like that you’re doing something you can’t ever remember doing in your life.
You’re fucking bawling.
You hiccup and beg yourself fervently to not puke on him and you don’t, you just gasp, and then gasp again - again - again and he’s still holding you even as whatever this is wracks you to your core and scrapes back out of your mouth.
You’re registering little noises that sound like your voice, but at the same time sound so foreign you barely recognize them to be coming from you. Weak little things, panic between breaths between genuine sobbing, pathetic threatens you but you barely even have to fight it before it drops off like a dead branch.
You know that Jake isn’t regretting calling you brave, that he doesn’t see eventhis, this outpouring of - whatever - as anything but brave. You can’t even remember why you thought this was the thing to avoid, the thing to be feared. You love him so damn much and he never knew. Point blank, to the point. All because you never showed him this - this thing that’s been inside of you from the beginning, growing out of the word fascinating tattooed into your heart, fully prepared to be let out.
Being heartless and being hopeless are hardly the same thing. And holding him now and feeling him around you, hearing him call you little whispers of things like good and loving and hardworking, things you never thought you’d be called, makes you realize that he’s come a long way but that some part of him always knew you and knew that for all your hours spent trying to appear smarter than you were, more mature, more worldly, faster and stronger and totally unfeeling, post-human, anti-human, that - god damnit, all you ever wanted to be was a boy.
You wanted to be a boy who didn’t have to shower in flat soda or have to stay awake through each night in a self-sacrificial vigil or have to lead tragic, overcomplicated existences with people just so they would give up on understanding him and he’d have no one to disappoint.
"I love you," you tell him, pointlessly, and it makes you feel so damn good, it’s so unnecessary and rewarding and he pulls you closer.
"I love you so much," he replies, bare and undecorated, just true.
You don’t know what’s going to happen now. You remember the priorities you’d rearranged, your brother and Roxy among them, but to have done this first feels like having run a marathon because you know you did the right thing, you know now that having Jake with you, in your heart like this will make everything else more meaningful. You let out a shaky breath, feeling pride in yourself and in him, something you hadn’t figured out how to label until now.
Even as you back off from the hug, feeling sore and loved and honest, Jake takes up your hand. He swings it. Somehow it isn’t childish.
"Thank you," he says, and you wobble out a smile, you think. "I mean it."
"I know you do."
"Feels different?"
You gulp. “Yeah. Yeah, it does.” And it does. You don’t know if you’ve ever understood gratitude in more personal terms than a custom of a dead species, but you’re running so high on it right now you’re surprised you haven’t started to float, carry him with you. You bite your lip.
"Thanks," you say to him and somehow it doesn’t feel cheaper than his, doesn’t feel overdone. He squeezes your hand, unwilling to let go of you.