Chapter Text
The sad part was that Jeremy had started to like his team quite a bit.
Everything he turned to as an escape inevitably became something he began to love—it’s difficult not to feel safe with something you know is protecting you. First, of course, it was exy—enrolling to try out for the junior team at his middle school because team members had to stay back for about two hours after school ended, and he was just fast enough to be considered promising. It also provided him with a ready excuse for everything, letting him leave home while everyone else was barely awake under the guise of leaving for practice, giving him purchase to return as late as he liked—as long as it was before dinner—because “practice ran late today.”
He'd started going to bed by nine, waking the next day at 4:30, and being out of the house by five, before his brother had even begun to stir. He’d then find a comfortable spot in the park to sit and finish the previous day’s homework, and would begin his fifteen-minute walk to school at a quarter to seven. An unintentional side effect of this was a particularly awkward situation that involved his mom phoning the school to complain about how the exy coach was “overworking the kids”, but that was easily mitigated when Jeremy walked up to his coach the next day and explained that his mother was simply worried he wouldn’t be able to handle schoolwork along with playing exy, and that this worry was entirely unfounded.
Soon, however, exy became more than just an excuse. He found his eyes darting to the clock over and over during the course of the day, itching for the school bell to toll after the final lesson so he could stuff his textbooks into his bag and make his eager way over to the court. Exy morphed from a crutch to a handhold.
College, too, was supposed to be an escape, but it was just his luck that the university he'd gotten into was thirty minutes from his house. It wasn’t like he hadn’t been approached by other universities—Breckenridge and Palmetto State had both sent him offers—but USC was a hell of a name to have on your resumé, and actually being accepted there wasn’t an opportunity he was going to squander. Instead, he resolved to make the best of the situation and involve himself in the game enough to never have to spend more time at home than was utterly necessary. He took all his meals either on campus or at one of the many coffeeshops littering the area surrounding it, studied either in the library or the park, and returned home only at night to sleep.
Once again, this escape, too, turned into love. He loved waking at the crack of dawn to drive over to the nearest coffee shop and down enough caffeine to kill a small animal, and he loved arriving at the court before anyone else. He loved practicing his shooting against an empty goal so he could learn all the angles and edges of his game, find the ragged corners and smooth them out. He even loved being near his teammates—lacing up his shoes in the dressing room to the sound of somebody excitedly relating the events of their trip to Marseille, taking horrifically unintelligible notes during strategy meetings, letting the cheery openness of his teammates drive out lingering thoughts of less cheery things.
The captain of the Trojans was a shockingly short goalkeeper called Aasha Chasoura, who was endlessly patient if slightly irritable. There should have been far too many people on the team for one person to handle alone, but she somehow managed, and found herself simultaneously be adored by everyone on the team. There were two other goalkeepers—a third-year with an offensive buzzcut and a wide smile, whose name seemed determined to elude Jeremy, and a fellow freshman named Laila Dermott.
The first time Jeremy had run into Laila off-court had been at the library. It was already ten in the evening and he’d been expecting the library to be largely empty save for those who, like him, were planning to stay the night. When he’d made his way to his usual spot, however, she’d been sitting there with a textbook propped up against her knees and an energy drink in her hand. Not wanting to ask her to move, he’d sat down in a beanbag chair a few feet away and taken out his reading for the night. The next night, she’d been there again, and this became a ritual of sorts—studying together in silence, exchanging no conversation save for a nod.
The first time they'd broken the silence was when Laila had asked him for a pen, and he'd floundered ignominiously for a good ninety seconds before determining that he did not, in fact, have a pen on him. The interaction had been amusing enough to eliminate whatever awkwardness lingered between them, and before he knew it, he'd found himself looking forward to the time he spent with her. He was on friendly terms with a number of others on the team as well—two other freshmen called Shawn and Catalina, who seemed to be friends with everyone, had done their best to include him in that number—but Laila was different. Quieter. He liked sitting with her in silence, and he knew that she liked it too.
He was going to miss her. He supposed he was going to miss USC at large, but especially her.
Did the thought of leaving the Trojans wrack him with guilt? Yes, it did. But did he have a choice? No, he did not. He had tried to stay, he really had, but there are some things that no amount of effort can fix, fears that no amount of coaxing can assuage. There were only so many sleepless nights in the library an athlete on one of the best college teams could afford to spend, only so many questions he could brush past. Even though he could hardly look Aasha in the eye when he broke the news, even though he would never forget the disappointment in Coach Rhenneman’s face when he handed in his contract, there were no two ways about it. He had to leave.
After the events of the first banquet of the season, it became very clear to him that there was no place for him in Los Angeles anymore. In fact, there was no place for him in California at large—the further away from The Incident he was, the better. And although USC was unparalleled by most others in terms of education, it was not the best in terms of sports—that position belonged undoubtedly to Edgar Allan. That was why he had been skeptical when Coach Moriyama had sent a scout to offer him a place on the Ravens’ lineup, and that was why he had put his signature on the contract without a second thought anyway. Things could not get much worse for him than they already had, and he was just self-destructive enough to be ready to find out if they could.
It was a shame he had to leave the Trojans, it really was. But they couldn’t give him the most important thing the Ravens could: distance.
***
After the first week at EAU, Jeremy was feeling particularly optimistic, because at this point, it could only get better.
The Ravens were apparently insane and for some godforsaken reason followed 16-hour days instead of 24, which meant roughly six hours of sleep, four hours of practice, two hours of rest, and another four hours of practice. This naturally left no time to study actual course material, but that, of course, was no problem, because they had made him drop his major and take fucking business instead. Under any other circumstances, that alone would have been enough to make him pack his bags and leave without a backward glance, but given that he couldn’t exactly go back to USC, he didn’t have many options. He’d considered the Breckenridge and PSU offers again, too, but he doubted they’d take him in the middle of the first semester after he’d already rejected them, and he’d be a fool to leave the best team in collegiate exy to join any other.
The ravens in general, too, were fascinating. He did not quite understand the dynamics that ran among them, but the fact that an eighteen-year-old freshman was the team's captain was enough in itself to garner interest. This was abetted by the fact that said freshman had the number '1' tattooed on his cheek—which was dreadfully on-the-nose and also very presumptuous—and his partner the number '2'.
The partnership system of the Ravens was another box he was afraid to explore, so he quietly resigned himself to the fact that he was supposed to spend the next few years of his life at the side of another freshman called Scottie, who seemed determined not to talk to him at all, which was fine. Good, even. He'd been afraid people would ask him why he'd joined in the middle of the semester, but they seemed satisfied with simply glaring at him every chance they got and tripping him on court whenever they could without getting in trouble. He hadn't yet seen anyone get in trouble, and he was a little afraid to, because for some reason, Coach Moriyama frightened him—he probably just had a frightening resting face, but Jeremy still didn't want to have to listen to him yell at his teammates. As for the fact that said teammates seemed to hate him, well, he was sure they would warm up to him soon enough. 16-hour days left very little time to socialize, so he was content waiting it out.
And, maybe above anything else, he had no doubt that the fact that going to Edgar Allan was technically another escape meant he’d soon fall in love with being a Raven, too.