Work Text:
The world is pretty full of delusional pieces of shit, as far as Jean Kirstein is aware, and this means that his particular case is not special.
It’s just that he remembers the moment that the gasoline was poured over the campfire, metaphorically speaking—the campfire being the dreams. Nightmares, really, not that he wants to sound like a pussy by admitting it, but what else do you call the ones that make you wake up in a cold sweat and scream so loud you never get invited back to a sleepover with friends?
Anyway, it was that time mom took him to New York City when he was thirteen, and despite grabbing him by the arm and telling him to be careful because there were crazy people on the street, she’d still left him standing outside while she went into a shitty little convenience store to buy a bottle of water.
Should’ve taken twenty seconds, but fuck knows what she was doing in there, and it took long enough for an old woman with a million lines on her face to walk up to Jean (awkward, slouching, counting the methods a kidnapper could use on a street like this) and ask if he’d like her to tell him his fortune.
No, he’d thought. And then, because he was thirteen and stupid, he’d gaped too long, and then his palm was in her hand and she was smiling up at him to tell him how wonderful it was to meet someone so young, on just his second reincarnation.
His mom came out of the store then, but the memory’s stuck with him.
Campfire, fuel… the other ingredient is maybe just a strong wind to fan the flames, which he thought he’d found when he stumbled across the message boards online.
Tons of people apparently have memories of past lives. And for a lot of them, it’s the expected shit— I was a WWII dogfighter pilot. I was a thirteenth century cloistered nun. I was a Tang dynasty bureaucrat. I was Elvis.
Last one’s straying into the category of batshit insane people, obviously, and Jean had felt confident he wasn’t like that, so he made his own post about the giants and the military.
The post stayed up for twenty minutes before he deleted it. During that time, it earned one comment:
“lol dude lay off the drugs”
Username springer52 can go to hell for that one.
Point taken, though. Jean Kirstein is in the delusional idiot category. The fortune teller was just crazy and the dreams are probably a response to something he saw on the TV when he was a kid—dad used to fall asleep on the sofa and the shows would keep running, so maybe there was some Halloween special about the giants that snap spines and bite heads and grin as their huge, fleshy fingers reach out.
In day-to-day life, Jean doesn’t think about it that much. Sometimes there are the days like today where he’s lost sleep and has to reflect on the reasons why as he waits in the line at the coffee shop, but it’s a thought in the back of his head, tumbling around with the impending essay deadlines for this semester and the ever-present dread of picking what to eat for dinner…
He steps up to the register when it’s his turn to order. He looks up at the freckled boy in the green apron, who’s definitely new here. Nametag, Marco.
The emotion that feels like it’s bursting in his chest is strong enough to make spots appear in front of his vision, taking Marco out of sight, and he knows on some molecular level that it’s wrong—he can’t let him go, he needs to protect him, and fuck if he’s ever felt a damn emotion like that before.
It’s usually the opposite. The people he’s called friends would laugh because they all know he’d push someone in front of a bus as long as he could get out of the way of its oncoming wheels (not strictly true, not all the time, depending on the person too, but he wouldn’t exactly be jumping towards said bus without calculating the odds of survival first, which he feels is reasonable).
Marco, who has freckles and a patient smile—Jean wants to tell him to get behind him. Imagines the defensive posture he’d assume with a blade in each hand. What the fuck? Shit, he’s losing his mind.
“Latte,” Jean says. Marco asks him something, and he nods, numb from head to toe.
By the time he shuffles down to the end of the counter to pick up his coffee, his heart rate has slowed enough to make his head clear. His hands are still cold, and when he lifts one up, he notices it’s shaking.
Why the fuck had he ordered a latte?
Sleep deprivation. Caffeine deprivation. Marco has a distracting smile. Jean is revising his thoughts on the bus and wondering if he’d jump towards it on purpose after all. He can’t come back to this coffee shop anymore, he decides, and that means he might as well lie down on the asphalt on the bus route—there isn’t another decent shop on the way to the lecture halls.
“Excuse me,” Marco’s voice interrupts. “A latte for you… sir?”
“I’m, like, fucking twenty years old, dipshit,” Jean snaps. “‘Sir’ is for gross old men.”
Marco momentarily looks embarrassed, and Jean feels some satisfaction at not having to be the only one feeling that way during this whole situation anymore.
“Well, I don’t know what else to call you,” Marco answers as the latte exchanges hands. “You nodded when I asked you your name.”
Jean blinks mournfully at him, and takes a sip of latte so he doesn’t have to use words. Bus, asphalt…
The latte is fucking gross.
“I don’t want this,” he tells Marco.
Marco should have it. Marco looks like he’d enjoy lattes. Soy ones, though, full of syrup and foam. Jean’s stomach is churning, and he thinks he should probably leave now. But if he walks out those doors, who’s to say he’s not going to walk in front of the bus on accident out of sheer fuck-awful idiot luck? His senses don’t feel sharp right now anyway—or they do, but they’re keyed into the wrong reflexes, waiting to respond to leering giant faces and trigger fingers on maneuvering devices.
He goes to sit at one of the tables near the window. Grabs his laptop out of his bag and dumps it on the table surface, along with his headphones and a notebook. The latte finds a place between them, looming in its oversized cup…
Wait.
What size had he ordered, anyway? He never gets large… Marco must have assumed, and charged him for the most expensive…
When he looks back at the register, Marco flashes him a smile and waves.
It’s several minutes later, after Jean has angrily flipped through his Statistics notes and found nothing that will help him with the online homework, that a horrible realization crashes over him.
Doesn’t matter what Marco charged him for, because he never—
The chair across from him is scraping backwards across the floor. Jean sees a green apron around the edges of his laptop screen. Black hair above, and the freckles dotted across his nose. He has nice eyes, not that it makes it any more tolerable to have to look at them and admit through gritted teeth: “I forgot to pay.”
“I noticed,” Marco assures him. “You looked like you were having a bad day, though, so consider it my treat. Do you want to talk about it?”
Jean glances back at the register. There’s someone else working at the counter now, some kid with short hair who doesn’t look nearly as nice as Marco. “Are you on break or something?”
Marco nods. “I hope you don’t mind.”
By all laws of Jean’s universe, he should mind. He’s doing work, and he fucking hates being interrupted. He wants to be absorbed by the statistical analyses and forget about the snapping jaws in old city streets. He wants to drag Marco by the hand and drag him into the numbers too, predictable and sterile and safe as they are.
He’s going to tear his hair out. His fingers are already digging into it, and he slowly presses his laptop closed with his other hand.
“You ever have a really shitty dream?” he says, feeling emboldened by the fact that Marco probably hates him already. He’s only here to collect the latte money the shop is owed. It’s part of some masterful, guilt-inducing plan. “You know. The kind you can’t forget even after you wake up, and you know it’s not real, but you wake up feeling funny and the feeling doesn’t go away?”
Marco’s smile fades a little around the edges, and Jean feels like a monster. Of course he doesn’t know. He looks happy and normal, and Jean is the freak here.
“If it makes you feel better, I have this recurring dream,” Marco tells him quietly, and this is surely going to be something innocent—forgetting to roast the coffee beans, wearing his apron inside out at work, yeah? “I’m sorry—this is kind of gross. But there’s this giant man, and I try to run away from him, but I can’t, and he—”
It must be Jean’s shaking hands that disrupt the latte cup.
It’s on the table. He sees it tipping. It falls in slow motion, making a graceful arc on its way down towards the checkered tile floor of the coffee shop. The milky coffee arcs before splashing against the ground, fountain-like as it rebounds.
The reason, Jean realizes a second later, is really his hand after all. His itching trigger finger has finally reacted, but it’s to reach for Marco’s hand. The target is locked and the fingers connect, and he finds time to notice that Marco’s hands are warm.
“I know,” Jean stutters.
He’s never felt the bites himself, but he’s seen it happen to others. The biting, the chewing, the snapping. Scenes so gorey that he should honestly see a psychiatrist, except that he’s terrified they’ll laugh him out of the room like everyone else does.
When his brain resumes its functions, he notices Marco blushing beneath the freckles. This should be of secondary importance to the latte spreading across the floor, and the other barista swearing and waving his arms at their table.
“—stop flirting and get a mop, you idiot!”
“I’ll get it,” Jean offers, gritting his teeth.
“It’s in the employee store room,” Marco answers solemnly, glancing downwards—probably at the spill. Mostly at the spill, but his eyes still take the time to observe the hands that are still—
Jean hastily withdraws his hand, feeling the mortification returning. “Sorry.”
“It’s alright.” Marco slides out of his chair, and gingerly steps around the lake of coffee surrounding them. “Don’t worry about it. I guess we’re even now, since you didn’t pay… um, there’s just one thing, though.”
“...Yeah?”
It’s going to be a request like this: never come here again, loser. Marco will say it with his honey eyes and cute nose, and Jean will politely take his laptop outside before slamming his head inside of it and ending his mortal suffering.
“You still didn’t tell me your name,” Marco says.
Oh.
“Jean.” Should he offer a handshake? He’s already held Marco’s hand, so what’s the point of that now?
“Nice to meet you, Jean.” Marco hesitates before turning to get the mop; his coworker is making gestures towards a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. “I hope you don’t have any more bad dreams, but if you’re tired again, you can always come here for another latte. Just promise not to spill it next time.”
“Fair,” Jean agrees, which isn’t true. Marco will get him; addled, messy, exhausted. And he’ll get Marco; kind, cheerful, responsible. The weights on this scale are not evenly tilted. “...Thanks.”
He throws all the change he has in his wallet into the tip jar while Marco is in the store room preparing the mop, and flees from the shop before Marco can become too far ingrained into his ongoing delusions. Monsters are enough; there’s no need to add a boy with a nice smile into his list of problems. He probably only said that thing about the giant because of some rumor about Jean— there’s the guy who woke up screaming in the dorms again, or something.
No need to be checking the margins of his Statistics notes in the hope of finding Marco’s phone number, in other words.
No need to be returning to the coffee shop the next day, and immediately exiting when he sees that Marco is not behind the register; no need to feel panic rising in his chest at the thought that something might have happened to him, and he’s an idiot for ever taking his eyes off of him after finding him. No need to end up crouched outside the building with spots dancing in front of his eyes and sickness in the pit of his stomach, or—
Or to recognize the hand that touches his shoulder to help him up.
“Jean,” Marco says, and Jean thinks he might break into a sob, because he remembers.