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“Sasha?” Jean asks his mother one day, right before a play date with the new kid that’s just moved in down the street. “So it’s a girl? I have to play with an icky girl?”
“Jean Kirschtein, you will be nice to this girl. She probably doesn’t have any friends yet, and you may be the first kid she meets here. Besides,” the woman answers, “you just might like her.”
Jean grumbles and finishes tying his shoes. As an eight year old, the last thing he wants to do is play with a girl. She’s probably obsessed with Barbies or Disney princesses, and he is not playing dress up or anything stupid like that. He sneaks his Game Boy into his jacket pocket and gets into his mom’s car.
“Sois gentil avec elle!” his mother calls from the car as he knocks on Sasha’s door.
“Bien sûr, maman.”
As it turns out, Sasha Braus is pretty cool. The first thing she says after her mom lets him in and offers him a snack is, “Is that a Game Boy?”
He nods, wondering why she cares.
“I have Pokemon in my room! Wanna see?” she asks, eyes lighting up.
“Uh… sure?”
They spend the rest of the afternoon sprawled out on Sasha’s carpet playing Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire. It’s a coincidence that they both picked Mudkip as their starter, Jean tells himself. They battle each other and trade until her mom calls them down for dinner.
“Jean,” Mrs. Braus starts, “your mother is on the phone. She wants to know if you’d like to stay over here for the night.”
He considers it for a moment. Go home, where his mom will make him go to bed at 8:30, or stay here, where he’s sure he can stay up and play video games? The answer is obvious. He takes the phone and answers.
“Oui, maman.”
“You speak another language?” Sasha asks, her mouth already half full of spaghetti.
He nods.
“That’s so cool! I wish I spoke another language! You should teach me,” she continues, dropping pasta into her lap, “and then we can talk secretly!”
“It’s not a secret language; it’s just French.”
“Then you should teach me French!”
Her mom smiles at them and gets Jean a plate of food from the kitchen, leaving the two children alone in the dining room. Jean takes the moment to study Sasha. She’s wearing overalls and a pink shirt, her hair tied up in two pigtails. She’s barefoot and there are stains all over her knees. All in all, she looks reasonably normal. He decides in that moment that he wouldn’t mind being friends with her.
“Sure,” he says, watching her break into a huge smile, “I’ll teach you French. Just as long as you promise to only speak it with me, okay?”
“Deal!” Sasha yells, almost falling out of her chair in excitement.
After they finish dinner, the two of them lie on the couch, playing video games and eventually falling asleep. Jean wakes up with Sasha’s head on his torso, and he scrambles to move to the ground. He can’t sleep next to a girl, no matter how ungirly she might be. It’s weird.
The next morning his mom comes to pick him up and Sasha’s last words to him are a butchered, “Au revoir!”
Jean spends the next month before school starts either at Sasha’s house or with her at his house. They play tons of Pokemon and when she becomes the champion of the Hoenn region she kisses his cheek. He blushes and tells her she’s a dork. She replies with the only phrase she’s truly mastered.
“Non, vous êtes!”
When they’re twelve, Jean meets Mikasa Ackerman and decides he’s going to marry her.
“Sure you are,” Sasha laughs on the playground one day during recess. She’s on the swings, pushing herself as high as possible before jumping off into the wood chips. She sticks the landing and Jean gives her a thumbs up.
“I am!” he replies, indignant.
Sasha smiles and rolls her eyes. “You know Mikasa’s practically in love with Eren, right?”
Jean scoffs. It doesn’t matter to him that Mikasa barely even looks at him. All he knows is that she’s the prettiest girl he’s ever seen. He doesn’t even notice Sasha’s frown when he spends the rest of recess staring at her from across playground. He doesn’t notice her increasingly annoyed expression when he composes a note to Mikasa on the bus ride home, either.
“Hey, Sash? Could you read this and tell me what you’d say if you were Mikasa?”
He hands her the notebook paper he’d been writing on without listening for a response. She scans the note, not paying particular attention to what it says.
“So?” Jean asks. “What would she say?”
“Vous êtes stupide,” Sasha replies. It’s been four years since Jean started teaching her French and she mostly gets it now.
Jean scoffs. “She’ll love it, I’m sure!”
She doesn’t love it. In fact, Mikasa doesn’t even get to look at the paper before Eren rips it up. Not that she stops him, of course. Jean is upset for the rest of the afternoon, until Sasha promises to trade him her shiny Pikachu when they get to her house. That perks him up a little.
Walking in the door, Jean shoots Mrs. Braus a greeting and kicks off his shoes. Sasha’s house is practically his second home now. He lands on the sofa, Sasha leaning against him. They play video games for an hour or two before Jean notices his friend start to sag against his shoulder. She’s asleep,of course.
Sasha shifts a little and then she’s falling into his lap. Her head rests on his knees as he grabs her Game Boy to change her starter’s name to JEANROX. That’s what she gets for falling asleep on him. When she starts drooling on him, Jean shakes her awake and she rubs her eyes and stares at him in confusion.
“Did I fall asleep on you?”
“Yeah. You drooled on me too, you crap head.”
“Sorry,” she says, combing her fingers through her hair.
Just before she can yell at him for touching her game, Jean’s mom arrives. It’s a blessing, because Sasha was poised to chuck a shoe at him.
“Bye!” he yells, narrowly missing the projectile aimed at his head.
She just rolls her eyes.
The next year they have their first real fight.
“You’re such a jerk!” she yells on the walk home to her house one day. “You always treat me like I’m not even there! All you ever do is stare at Mikasa!”
“Sasha, you’re being crazy! You always over exaggerate stuff!”
She storms off, Jean trailing behind her. “Well maybe if you paid any attention to me at school, I wouldn’t have to!”
“Well, it’s not normal for my best friend to be a girl! Can’t you understand that?” he yells after her.
“Go home, Jean. Your house. I don’t want to see you right now!” she screams back. There are tears in her eyes, but she refuses to let him see. Jean stands there on the sidewalk, watching his best friend run away from him. When she trips over a root and skins her knee, he almost goes to help her up. But she gets up on her own and doesn’t look back.
They make up the next week at lunch, with a hug and a promise to never be that stupid again, but there’s something different between them. If Jean notices Sasha hanging out less with him and more with Connie Springer, he pretends not to care. He chalks it up to them growing apart. But deep down, it hurts.
About a month after his fight with Sasha, Jean has his first wet dream, starring… not Mikasa.
They’re fourteen when Sasha’s mom is diagnosed. It’s stage five glioblastoma, and the doctors know that she doesn’t have long left. Jean stops going over to Sasha’s house and starts inviting her to his. They spend their days playing Mario Kart and telling each other horrible jokes. Jean goes to the hospital with Sasha when her mom gets worse and holds her hand. She blushes a little and murmurs a quiet, “Merci.”
It only takes about three months for Mrs. Braus’ memory to start going. It starts small, her forgetting the day of the week, or what Sasha brought her for dinner the last night, but gets worse rapidly. By the fifth month of treatment, she doesn’t remember her own daughter.
“Mom?” Sasha asks one afternoon, Jean at her side.
“Huh? Who are you?” her mother responds, looking confused. Jean can pinpoint the moment that Sasha’s heart breaks.
“Mom, i-it’s me, y-y-our daughter? It’s me, Sasha?”
“Are you my nurse?”
“Mom, it’s me!” Sasha cries, tears streaming down her face. She starts to shake, begging her mother toplease remember.
“I’m sorry,” her mom replies, “are you sure I know you?”
Sasha shatters after that. Jean has to hold onto her to keep her from hitting the ground. She’s in tears the entire ride back to his house, her face buried in her face. Jean’s mom tries to ask about their visit, but Sasha refuses to talk. All she does is sob harder and harder as they get closer to home.
When they get to his house, he leads her up the stairs and into his room. He holds her on the bed as she cries into his shirt, not being able to do anything other than stroke her hair and whisper to her in French. Eventually, Sasha falls asleep in his arms. Instead of doing something stupid, like draw a moustache on her, Jean just lies down and watches over her. She wakes up after a few hours and notices how close Jean’s face is to hers. Blushing, she pulls away from the sleeping boy. But then she hears a low voice say, “Ne vont pas.”
She does.
At the funeral, Sasha doesn’t cry. All of her tears have been shed already. Jean still holds her hand like she’ll blow away if he lets go, though. When she goes up to give the eulogy, Jean is right there beside her, anchoring her to the funeral home. When she can’t finish talking about her mom for fear of crying again, Jean is there to read the rest of her speech. He leads her back to their pew and hears her last words to the casket.
“Au revoir, maman.”
A year later and Jean is fucked. Like, in love with his best friend, Mikasa be damned, fucked. After her mother’s death, Jean starts inviting Sasha over to his house a lot. She doesn’t like her dad all that much and prefers his bed to hers.
That’s where he is currently, in his bed, with a sleeping Sasha on top of him. She’s fallen asleep on top of him tons of times before, but this is… different. For starters, the last time she really fell asleep on him was when her mom was sick. Plus, over the summer, Sasha’s filled out. They used to be almost exactly the same size and shape, but they definitely aren’t anymore.
Now, Jean can feel the swell of Sasha’s breasts through the thin fabric of her shirt. He can make out the curve of her waist and her ass as she fidgets, trying to get comfortable. He wants to yell at her to get off, but he won’t. All he can do is try to find a safe place for his damn hands to go. They settle themselves at the small of her back, where her shirt happens to be riding up. Shit.
Sasha’s skin is soft and warm, and it’s going to kill him. She’ll wake up and find a puddle of melted Jean all over the sheets, and he’ll never see her again. As he contemplates all of the ways that Sasha’s going to kill him, she grinds her hips into his.
That’s it. He’s already dead. He must be dead.
Except dead people don’t have blood flow, which Jean definitely has at this point. A blood flow that is currently betraying his love for his best friend. Double shit.
Everything would be fine if Sasha would just stop moving. But she’s never done what Jean’s expected her to do in the past-- why would she start now? She keeps fidgeting and it’s literally driving Jean up the wall. He’s willing his blood supply to return to his brain, thinking of the most un-sexy things he can imagine. But, somehow, his thoughts keep returning to the girl on top of him.
“Baise,” he whispers, trying to return his breathing to normal. Her hair is right underneath his nose and she smells damn good.
“Wha?” Sasha mumbles, opening an eye to peer up at him. Apparently his whisper wasn’t so quiet after all.
“N-n-nothing! I didn’t say anything!” Jean replies, voice frantic.
Sasha looks at him with sleep clouded eyes. “Okay,” she says, elongating the o. She slides off of him and sits upright, stretching and yawning. Then her gaze falls to his… problem.
Jean’s face turns beet red in about half a second. All he can think is that she’s gonna throw something at him and call him a pervert, or worse, she’ll leave and never come back because he can’t keep his dick under control.
But of course, Sasha always does the unexpected. Instead of turning on her heels and never looking back, she smiles. She smiles, and then leans down to press their lips together. Jean’s in shock. The girl he’s been friends with since the second grade is kissing him and he can’t move. It’s like he’s frozen.
“Shit,” Sasha says, pulling away, “did I read the boner wrong?” Her face is a little flushed and she looks worried.
“No! I just, uh, I wasn’t expecting you to do that…” he trails, grabbing her hand. He scoots over on the bed and tugs her closer to him. “Can I?” he asks.
“Can you what?” she grins.
He bumps her shoulder with his and starts over.
“Puis-je te embrasser?”
“Oui,” she says, leaning in to close the gap between their lips. She tastes like the french fries they’d eaten earlier and the Sprite she’d downed afterwards. But mostly, she tastes like home.
Six years later he gets down on one knee to ask his best friend to marry him. She says yes before he can get the question out of his mouth.