Work Text:
Michael has been to church before.
Churches. Abandoned ones overtaken by eldritch mother nature, stained glass stabbed by royal fern, their sun-lit interiors more green than kaleidoscope rainbow because of the war won by time, whose war was won by nature; the greens. There was comfort in the abandoned, the loss. Corpse buildings were Michael’s north as a child, the south of him always searching for something lost to be found.
It was common to see hogweeds cobwebbed in the corners, their white heads tucked and hidden beneath the decadent pews, as if trapped in a forgotten game of hide-and-seek. In every res nullius church there were layers of gossamer thin dust floating in the air, particles tending love to surfaces that had been untouched since.
Michael would draw a single line across the napes of each standing pew, their bodies shivering at the touch long starved for and the dandruff falling from their heads. He would sit in the corner of the pew closest to the altar, or what had once been an altar, the imprint of his body etched into it until it, too, was forgotten; dust-covered.
On the altar there was foxglove. In three different abandoned churches, some distance apart, for whatever reason. Perhaps it was the ritual of a cult, or perhaps it was just a coincidence. Whatever the why’s and the how’s, Michael didn’t think much of it beyond a single raised eyebrow.
One church was partially surrounded by purple loosestrife around its perimeter. It’s a flower that has annoyed Michael ever since he learnt of its name, because it looks more pink than it does purple, but he digresses. Maybe he is colour blind, or maybe it is such a bright purple that it looks pink. It doesn’t matter. It’s still a stupid name for what is clearly a pink flower.
Blue Lock, however, is not a church. It is whatever the opposite of a church is; like a prairie or a garden with no crosses. Or, to be more precise, a parliament building. It is a prison with its own made-up laws.
Michael has recently learnt that there’s a prayer room in each stratum. Lorenzo mentioned it absentmindedly when he came to annoy during training, and Michael ignored it. Or pretended to. The matter never left his mind, and the next day his feet led him down one concrete corridor after another until he found it.
It was bland. Too put together, too complete. You could smell the overuse of teenage boy cologne, both the can and the cologne. It gave Michael a migraine for four hours. There was a mat laid out and body-printed. A shrine. A cross. Michael didn’t stay for more than a once-over of the room, and he didn’t pray, because he’s not a religious man. There is no God. If there was, he would know.
The Blue Lock cafeterias are large, bright, too many lights. Not even Michael’s blue light glasses can stave off the lumen of them. There are a thousand of them, a moth’s heaven, dancing like sugar cubes with legs. Michael keeps his head down as he eats, the intensity of the white burning bite after bite.
He wonders if each square panel of light fixed into the ceiling is a former member of Blue Lock. It feels as if the lights are staring at him to be the next victim, their eyes fixed on another one to add to the total number of Dalmatians. Be not afraid, Michael hears the wavelengths whisper. Be not afraid, but not ‘be not annoyed’, which Michael very much is.
Worse still is the smell, as if the cafeteria had recently been admitted to the hospital with third-degree burns. Michael can smell seventy-five percent ethanol sanitizer and firelight drunkenly kissing in the air. It makes each bite of food blander than the last, as the smell takes over and the taste jumps off a cliff like a murdered lion.
Squeeeeeeak. The chair opposite Michael slices the couple in half and spits on their Valdaro Lovers’ corpses. He doesn’t bother to look up, dice rolling in his orbits as he takes another bite, the dull grey flavour exploding on his tongue like a misstep in a minefield. He already knows who it is, and he isn’t going to give the loan shark a single bout of attention.
“Congratulations on the La Real bid.”
Michael looks up, his face aglow with former-Blue-Lock-member now present-too-bright-light shock. Like a cherry blossom in the middle of winter, a pink fire in the snow, Julien takes a seat across from him. Michael narrows his eyes at the black hole in the room as he takes a bite of too much chopstick instead of rice.
“What do you want?” He mumbles through wooden grains of rice. Purposefully. Julien doesn’t deserve any respect. He gets enough from everyone else.
Julien smiles, which always has an added jingle of a laugh to the end; even if he didn’t actually laugh. “I’m just congratulating you. It’s a big deal.”
Big deal. A big deal is all a bid from La Real is. So is being scouted by Bastard München as a German teenager with carved eyes and no manners. Everything is a big deal when put in perspective, but Michael is just trying to find something bad about Julien to be mad about, because there is nothing. Not a single washing machine of Julien is ill-intentioned. He is too good for his own good. He wouldn’t know what a big deal was if it ran him over with studded snow tyres.
When Michael met Julien for the first time, he felt like he was about to throw up TON 618. A crippling, swallowing mass in the centre of him, eating up everything Michael had built up to that point. All it took was some prodigy boy to send him back to square one as if he didn’t take hundreds of steps out of it, which is the thing—life is square, just like the fixed ceiling lights staring down biblically, and no matter the number of steps you take, they are all taken in square one. It is a prison just as much as it is a utopia.
It must be a utopia for Julien, because he’s still sitting in the chair that should be empty, in a cafeteria that is; save for the former Blue Lock members strewn heaven across the ceiling. God is a child who likes arts and crafts. God has no respect for people who have a family to feed back home. God sends them back anyway, underworld rivers of tears streaming. Perhaps it will be enough to feed the starving family.
“Have you been eating well? Your cheeks look hollower.”
Fuck’s sake. Julien is still there like a dog waiting for an owner who will never come. He can feel the food he’s just eaten threatening to crawl out, like a spider who’s decided that being a vagabond is its vocation rather than the throat of someone chosen by God.
Michael puts down his chopsticks like a bouquet of tansies. "Why are you so nice to me. Is it because you pity me?"
It is meant to be said as a joke. No, that’s not the truth. Michael intended it as a jab from the get-go, a stab from the dagger of his mouth; half-threat, half-beg. But Julien appears undeterred as his shoulders square more sharp, like the ears of a rabbit, or the head of a gazelle in the middle of the . His eyebrows raise and then furrow with the blinks of his eyelids, and then his dark summer eyes narrow behind the bulwarks of his squinted lids.
“Do you really think so lowly of yourself?”
A flash of silver glints in Michael’s vision, the dagger now turned towards him. It was meant to face Julien. It was meant to fall on someone other than himself, but there aren’t many people in a circle of two for a spinning dagger to land on. So, it’s landed on Michael, even though he spun it. It has landed on him and it is staring at him with teeth of its own. He sees the nails that hold down Christ’s palms and feet. He sees his reflection in them.
Before him, he sees Julien draped in black and white, a white collar tight around his neck, showing who he is most loyal to, who it is that he plays dress up as. His hands are clasped around a beaded, burgundy cross, eclipse dark-bright eyes sunken in a crossroads of pity, understanding, empathy, and prayer. It makes Michael’s body heavy with the void.
Julien Loki is built in an impossibly reversed way. No matter what you throw at him, it is always guaranteed to come right back to you. Julien is what comes back around when it first goes. He is the bend in spacetime. He is a singular multitude, the centre of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. It is he who is the answer to the universe, a glimpse into a distant past hundreds of billions of light years away.
Michael doesn’t answer. The silver is too bright, too blinding. Julien takes it as a sign for him to continue, because that is how Julien works. He hits you with a truckload of words, and once the words have made their impact, he has the audacity to walk up to your sprawled body on the pavement and ask if you’re all right.
“Can you not comprehend that I do it simply because you're a good player and I respect your abilities? That it's just how I am?"
Michael stares at the Father in front of him, but he must have said something—like „Was?" or a sound of pain—because Julien’s next reply is an answer to something unasked, words spoken more to the atmosphere of the cafeteria than to Michael.
"Your automatic conclusion that I treat you with the bare minimum is because you believe I pity you," Julien reinstates like a gentle parent or a therapist, and Michael continues to stare at him, dumbstruck but ceiling-high pissed off. Pisstruck?
"Michael... Who hurt you?"
The question—the accusation—causes Michael’s birthmarks to flood his face with red. His chapped lips tear into a sneer, his dark pupils circled blood-water. Julien doesn’t flinch, doesn’t even look away. He looks at the south of Michael as if he himself is the north, unafraid of the open space between them. There is no screen between them, but they are in a confessional all the same, and Julien has asked something he shouldn’t have. Julien is playing God.
What are Fathers but dogs of God? They are but boys playing with the idea of a higher entity in the skies, watching your every breath behind a screen to determine whether you are possessed by an abomination of the Devil or not.
The burgundy cross hymns in Julien’s cradled dove-hands. Michael wants to wrap the beads around his neck and asphyxiate him, but the lights fixed into the ceiling widen their eyes and neuralyze Michael’s mind of blood-stained thoughts.
“You and Noel Noa.”
The sentence sends Michael plummeting from the summit of a rollercoaster, his stomach squeezing and his nervous system untangling its roots. Michael glares at Julien, a futile attempt to end the conversation that spirals and spirals word after word, an ant’s fist raised to the sky.
“You act like you’re the only one in his shadow.” Julien stares like a thousandth-one square light. “Every single one of us is for as long as he’s on the pitch.”
Des-fucking-picable. Everything about Julien is despicable. He is like a mother who apologises for being a poor parent before continuing to be one. An apology with no weight, a sentence with no structure. Julien spouts out weeds and talks about how they are roses.
Too many lights. Michael shrivels into himself like a touched shameplant, his petals retreated and folded like neat piles of clean laundry. Julien does not stop. Julien says thousands of words that mean nothing. Julien cares too much about things he shouldn’t.
“Michael, you’re not alone.”
Who the fuck does he think he is? Michael almost tears the flesh from his own thighs with the grip he has on his lounge pants. Blue Lock is a prison, so inmate fights are only natural. Michael could get away with it, even with the thousand eyes staring, wheeled-angels watching mortal play immortal. He hears a laugh, distant and tickling nape shorthairs, a single blue rose where there are now two. The past watches, and it laughs.
“Shut the fuck up with your Lego movie teamwork bullshit. We’re all alone in this fight to be the best.”
Growl. The words scrape the bumps on Michael’s tongue like a growl, but they come out like the yelp of a kicked baby animal. Weak, thorned. He can feel the pricks digging into the flesh of his arm and drawing blood. Red roses. Blood roses.
Julien rolls his eyes slightly, a child’s first rolly polly, playing Michael at his own game. He wants to throw up. He wants to kill the church that sits midnight under a thousand suns a table away.
“I’m saying that you’re not alone in your grief, blaireau.”
The rare expletive that falls from Julien’s chestnut-tainted lips is the overture to The End: of your career, of your pride, of your everything. Julien is not a boy of anger or malice, but of prodigy after prodigy. At what point down the line does he separate from man? At what point is Julien just prodigy and no boy.
Michael is sick of the smell of jasmine rice. There’s quite a variety of options, considering it’s a prison, but there is always rice as a main course, as a side dish, as an appetiser, as a fucking salad. Blue Lock is a Japanese prison, so it always smells of rice. Michael can feel his stomach curdling with the dead bodies used to build the Great Wall of China, which is also made of rice. Fucking rice. Everywhere.
He can feel Julien’s beady brown rice eyes staring at him. Julien was taught proper etiquette when he was growing up. He is a dog who, as a puppy, was socialised enough to be able to maintain eye contact as easy as threading a needle.
Tick, tick, tick. Michael isn’t looking into Julien’s eyes because they’re sinking, the singularity of a black hole that comes closer and closer the longer you look eye-to-eye. He’s staring at Julien’s chin, drawing rivers through the little ingrown hairs that peek out from between little mountains of acne.
Tap. Michael presses a finger hard into the table, the nail singing a single high note before falling silent, his knuckle as white as the table; as the lights reflected in its surface; as the halo revolving above Julien’s stupid face.
"Why do you self-harm?"
Michael grips the edge of the table with one hand and imagines it’s Julien’s antelope neck. He glares at him, an electric buzz jolting between them as their gazes meet, fire shore meeting gasoline sea.
"I haven't self-harmed since I was a kid."
"You're still a kid," Julien adds, a point clear to the both of them, his eyelids drooped. Michael will soon be twenty. He is an adult-child. Very different. "Self-harm isn't just cutting, Michael. I mean your whole act." Julien gestures to... Michael. Just him. His whole body.
Michael almost pulls a heart out of Julien’s chest. You know, archangels, warriors of God. That doesn't mean they can't betray God. They won't, but they can. But they still won't. Before Michael can snipe a snide remark—hit Julien right in the space between his eyes, where his second heart beats behind a bone-wall—Julien does him one better. Because he's Julien. Loki. A name to remember.
"Why are you chasing after that Yoichi kid anyway?" He asks, but Julien isn't looking for an answer. He's playing with the dial of a ticking bomb—adding ten seconds, subtracting five. Adding twenty minutes. Removing seventeen. "I get that he's Blue Lock's it boy, but—"
"Jesus fuck, you sound just like Chris." Michael mutters disdainfully under his breath. He’s back to staring at the pew-space between them, but he can feel Julien's gaze piercing at the foul use of the Lord's name.
"You're self-destructive."
Michael rolls his eyes twice. Once clockwise. Once anticlockwise. "What-fucking-ever, boy prodigy."
Slowly, Michael lifts his gaze to search the body of Julien, not daring to go any further than the buttoned black that isn’t actually buttoned or black. They’re both wearing Blue Lock loungewear because Michael’s special robe, the one he spent three paychecks on, is in the wash. He huffs under his breath, his nails scraping crescents into the unstable bones of the table, of Julien’s imaginary frail neck.
“You asked who hurt me earlier.”
It’s a subtle movement, but Michael’s predator vision catches every insignificant prey movement of Julien’s. He shifts attentively in his seat, his torso moving slightly to the right, then more to the left. He’s sitting on his hands now, although Michael can’t see them. He can tell by the slight lean of Julien’s torso. Michael drums his fingers on the tabletop once, pauses, and then twice.
“You already know who.”
Then he looks up at Julien fully, the square lights pulsating like the saltation of a heart. The white bounces and then plunges off a cliff like a suicidal seabird. The lighthouse does not blink at the casualty. The waves envelope the body like liquefied soil.
The answer is present in the room; it has been there all along. Julien knows this. At least, he had a hunch, as all Frenchmen do. The French would be nothing without their hunches, for without hunches they have no schemes. And without schemes, they have no land to colonise. But since Julien is only French nationally and barely a quarter ethnically, he needs a nudge. He needs a moment of eye contact.
The answer has eyes and it is looking at the question. Michael keeps his hands flat and steady on the underside of the table, as if it’d be enough to drag him from the singularity and from thinning into the next new Italian pasta. Lorenzo would like that almost as much as he’d be equally devastated by it.
Michael sees more with his pupils than he does with his eyes. A flash of emotion thunders across Julien’s face as quickly as a double stroke across the surface of a suede cushion. In but a nanosecond, his face returns to the same expression it had a stroke ago, but Michael saw it. Michael saw the ruth.
In slow motion, Julien shakes his head, the movement barely visible. It is as if he’s shaking world-dandruff off his head, the ground quaking shyly under Michael’s planted feet. And then Julien laughs.
"You're so stupid." But it's not painful, or exasperated. Julien seems almost... content, his dark, river-bent eyes half closed, and his mouth caught in the pause of a laugh.
It’s the exact opposite of what Michael was expecting. He stares at the religion of Julien with drowning pools that have held a body or two; are permanently stained with red in the cracks, blood streaked across the tiles like a prayer only half said. He braced himself for more pity, more of the flood of Julien’s care and love that far exceeds his body and the open space of the ninety-eight percent empty cafeteria, not counting the decapitated angels in the ceiling. It is the response Michael would have preferred, but not the one he expected, so now he is lost. Now he is hurt that Julien has played him at his own game. Again. And again.
When Julien stands up and pushes the chair back into its rightful niche, there is no prolonged, ear-bleeding screech. This time he lifts the chair a centimetre off the ground, gifting it a moment’s worth of angel wings before mercifully placing its feet back on the ground.
He is not the only one built in an impossibly reversed way. Michael is as well. He will show vulnerability by baring his teeth and digging his claws into flesh. He will ask for help by jumping into a pool when you’re not looking, hoping you’ll notice his absence. This, Michael will learn, is not the way to show vulnerability when he is perhaps twenty-five, or thirty, or fifty (if he makes it). This, Michael will have to learn on his own, of his own will, for one cannot be helped if they don’t will it.
"See you around, Michael." The words are whispered rather than spoken. Julien lingers for a moment, as if to make sure he hasn’t forgotten his car keys, which he doesn’t have because they are inmates of a blue, blue prison. Neither of them have the luxury of a getaway Lamborghini. Both are clothed in a brand of the ages.
Michael closes his eyes and looks to the ceiling. "I hope not." He says with a small spark, the fire shore and gasoline sea touching for a moment before they’ve completely ebbed away from each other.
Julien huffs slightly, the end of it curling into a short pig’s snort. It’s his own personal jingle that Michael has seen repeated in others. It angers him red, but not in a fire way.
He doesn’t need to see Julien to know he’s leaving. He can hear the quiet, mousy squeaks of his slippers as he moves towards the exit, out of this cloud grave dug below heaven. Michael wonders if there are levels to heaven like there are to hell.
He opens his eyes, the lights staring at the crown of him before he turns away from the light and to the dark. Michael watches Julien’s form shrink and shrink, and as he watches him, he’s filled with revelation. Julien can read him like a perfectly broken church that’s been long forgotten because of what he is.
For Julien is not a servant of God, he is Him.