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Jean drags himself up from underneath the sink of Riko and Kevin’s room, smearing a handprint of blood over the porcelain as he does. His head rings from the impact. Riko’s already stormed out, screaming with rage, covered in Jean’s blood also. Not that anyone would notice. It’s night, by now, and the Nest is always dark.
Jean squints through the pain at his own reflection in the mirror, his eye stinging as blood spills from the gash on his forehead into it. It’s the only injury, bleeding sluggishly, already matting his hair. Riko had been too angry, for once, to go any further. He’d dragged Jean by the hair into the room, motioned at the other, empty side of it, and started screaming. Jean leans his weight against the edge of the sink, ignoring its creaking, and rubs the heel of his hand against his eye to clear the blood—looks at his own reflection as he runs his tongue over the edge of his teeth to check they’re all still intact.
Kevin’s bed is empty behind him. He’s left with a pair of shoes and the padded sling that the Ravens nurse had given him two days ago. His toothbrush is still on the sink. His postcards are still on the wall. Jean is still here.
Kevin hadn’t said he was leaving. Jean isn’t surprised.
.
Jean is questioned twice by the Master, both times with the cane. He’s questioned once by an assistant coach, another time by one of the security guards who stand at the main entrance, and once by a tall man in a baggy suit who Jean assumes works for the Moriyama’s in a similar position to the man who brought him here from Marseille.
Eventually they either believe him, or they get tired of Jean repeating that he doesn’t know where Kevin is. It’s half a lie. He knows where he’s probably headed, but now, at this moment, Kevin could be anywhere. Palmetto is a good six hundred miles from EAU. The southern winter banquet is in two nights in Atlanta, equally as far.
Jean wants to know just as badly as them. He just has different reasons.
He drags himself back to his room after the questioning; he’s missed morning practice, and most of the afternoon practice. No one will miss him until evening meal, which gives him time to sit on the edge of his bed and wrap his upper arm where the metal end of the Master’s cane caught the skin, rub bruise cream into every other mark. The cut on his head from Riko has scabbed over, and Jean scratches hesitantly at the edge of it where the blood crusts.
The injuries are only marginally worse than a normal beating, which confirms Jean’s dual-pronged fear and relief—that not even the Moriyama’s have an idea where Kevin is, and therefore they know subconsciously that no matter how much violence they put him through, neither does Jean.
He’d seen Kevin not more than 12 hours ago, Jean thinks, picking the blood-dust out from under his nail-beds while he shuffles back to sit against the wall. He knocks his shoulder against the wall and winces, teeth making a grinding noise when he clenches them.
The injury only happened the other day. Kevin had been clean of blood and pale in the face yesterday, and his hand had been held protectively to his chest. The nurse had wrapped the injury after the incident, but not after gagging at it, and covering it with gauze as quickly as possible to avoid looking at it.
“Oh, Moreau.”
Jean flinches at the voice, then looks up to the doorway. One of the assistant coaches—Collins—has his head through the doorframe, eyeing up Jean where he’s crouched on the bed. All the staff have learned not to ask questions. As it is, his eyes just flicker over the wound on Jean’s forehead and the way Jean’s arm is paling from where he’s pulled the bandage too tight.
“Are you on the court for training tonight?”
Jean nods jaggedly, even though the motion makes his head spin, and he blinks the black spots away. Even if he wanted to skip, the Master will not have it. One member of the Perfect Court absent can be waved away as a beating done too hard, an interview that wasn’t announced to the rest of the team. Two begs questions. All three absent might as well be announcing that the mythology of the Nest is dead in the water.
Kevin and Riko’s sudden absence seems to have been explained away to most of the Nest for now, because Collins doesn’t ask about it. He’s a younger guy, graduated from the Nest in 2000. Jean had been brought to the Nest the year beforehand—he’s been stuck here for the entire cycle of Collin’s professional career, from collegiate graduation to five seasons of play, and now an injury-mandated retirement.
He has his number tattooed onto his forearm—12. Jean wonders if that’s where Riko got the idea to ink the sharpie into the three of them in the first place.
“Well,” Collins says, plain-faced and narrow-eyed, “evening meal is in an hour. Don’t miss it.”
He stalls before he leaves Jean—pale eyes flickering over the injury. Jean just stares back. He knows what he looks like, six foot something of scarring and dried blood, the singlet fraying at the sleeves. He almost wants someone else to know Kevin is gone so he can ask them the same questions he’s just been interrogated on—did you see him leave? Do you have any way you can contact him? He wants someone else to help him through this gaping fear. He wants, foolishly, for someone to see this all for what it is.
Instead, Collins just says: “Take a nap, Moreau.”
Jean takes the order for what it is—slumps onto his side on the scratchy cotton and faces the wall. The lights are already off. Collin’s footsteps recede, the hollow thump of foam soles on the thin carpet, and Jean stares at the wall until his head hurts too much to do even that.
.
No one suspects anything at evening practice. Riko is still gone, and Kevin is wherever he’s run to, but Reacher just makes a comment about a night off from the hell-duo and one of the first years snickers at the joke. Jean says nothing; just ducks under the questioning gaze of the assistant coaches and focuses on his footwork during the drills. They’re mid-season and no one cares about anything in the Nest beyond the upcoming game. After the upcoming game is the next game, and after that is the next game. Then when the season is done, there’s just the season after. For once Jean is glad for the single-mindedness of the EAU Ravens. No one questions Kevin’s absence; likely no one will for a few days. Not with a game coming up, at least.
“This evens it out a bit,” notes one of the first years, a sharp, pointy boy of a Chicago native on the defence line. He’d taken to the Nest with far more ease than the others in his cohort, to Jean’s expectation and equal distaste. “Neither of those two on offence.”
Jean’s been relegated to scrimmage captain in Kevin and Riko’s absences, and nods jerkily. The motion makes his head spin, the wound on his forehead throbbing, but he stays upright. “Do not build a game off of your opponents offence.”
“I didn’t—”
“Do not talk back, either,” Jean says, snappish from the pain, the dull ringing in his ear, the echoing image of Kevin’s blood, the sudden slack on the leash from Riko and the Master’s absence. The whiplash of the last twelve hours is dizzying. He ignores the look Reacher throws him, and the huffed annoyance from another third year who he does’t turn to look for. “Just—get on the court.”
The answer to everything since Jean was thirteen. Get on the court. No wonder he’s ended up like this.
They win the scrimmage against the other half of the team. Standing alone in the showers afterwards, dripping water turned bronze with blood, it doesn’t feel like a victory. They rarely do, these days. He rolls his ankle out in the shallow pooling of hot water around his ankles, then does the same with his permanently stiff shoulder. The scab on his forehead has broken, the wound wet again in the water and spilling down his cheek to pool as reddish water in the hollow of his clavicle. The other Ravens have already started to change out, Jean’s bare feet the only ones still under the hot water. He can hear the quiet, blunted chatter from here.
“Where do you think Day and Moriyama are?”
“Probably an interview or something. They just leave sometimes. You’ve only been here for a season, anyway. You’ll get used to it.”
“It’s been three days though.” The voice drops—Mason, he thinks. One of the freshman. Jean stares at the scars over his knee while the water keeps steaming on his skin. “The Master would have said something, but he’s gone too. That’s not weird to you?”
“I mean, Moreau’s still here.”
“Bleeding.”
“He’s always bleeding. That’s not new.” The second voice—Avery, Jean can tell now over the water pouring, the ends of his sentences lilting upwards with his accent—cuts off when a door bangs. Jean doesn’t flinch at it, too accustomed to sharp sounds and slammed doors, but it startles the rest of the locker room silent. The public sees the Ravens as stern and silent under the helm of their captain, but the Nest itself is never entirely quiet. Gossip runs quickly down here. Rumor reigns over all else. There is always a conversation happening in a corner.
No one’s in the locker room by the time Jean leaves the shower stall, the noise following the rest of the the team down the darkened hallways to the crypt-like rooms. Mid-semester classes means a reprieve from the 16 hour schedule, a need to function within the time constrains of the university, and the Ravens take advantage of the spare extra hours to sleep they’re afforded by it.
He doesn’t look at the corner of the locker room while he gets changed—keeps his eyes firmly on the bundle of clothing in his locker and not at the now-clean spot where Kevin’s blood had been seeping into the grout for twenty minutes before Riko sprinted past Jean’s room alone and Jean had gone to see what had happened. Jean had cleaned most of the blood from Kevin’s arm around the bone, but they must have sent one of the cleaners in to scrub the iron rot off the tiles before anyone else realised what had happened.
Jean’s still reckoning with the fact that they somehow haven’t found Kevin yet. It would be impressive if he wasn’t so terrified. He would be happy for him if it weren’t for everything that the Nest has made of them.
Sweater. Socks. Shoes. Jean wipes the last of the re-clotting blood from his forehead with his practice shirt and throws it in the laundry basket in the corner of the hallway as he leaves, eyes fixed on the ground like he’s trying to follow a blood-trail.
Reacher isn’t in Jean’s room when he walks back to it from the showers. There’s just the flat silence that Jean’s grown used to fearing, the kind of emptiness that begs something worse to fill it. It takes five minutes of droning silence and nothing more before the knock.
When he turns from the desk , Riko is in the doorway with Joseph Blake, one of the fifth years still gunning for approval of the King. Jean’s hands don’t shake, which is more testament to the destruction of their nerve endings over the years than any courage Jean might have, but he does feel himself tense.
Riko had been gone for the last day Kevin had been here—presumably answering for his crime. Even the boy king wasn’t above punishment for destruction of such an expensive asset. Kevin is worth five million a year in advertising contracts at minimum. Jean is foolish to think that Riko’s absence would ever last long enough for his injuries to heal beforehand.
“If you know anything,” Riko says, clipped, “now would be the time to say it.”
.
Stupid, beautiful Kevin. Too talented to even hide it effectively. Too proud to save himself from an inevitable fate. He’d been crying, when Jean found him. Bones stark white against the floor.
He’s gone, now. Jean lies on the floor with a bleeding lip and re-bent finger and considers all the ways to leave a place.
.
Jean stops counting Kevin’s absence in hours by the second week. The whole team knows, by this point. Jean doesn’t know how, or when, or by who, but by the sixth day of Kevin’s continuing absence, the whole team knows he was hurt, and that he ran.
“You’ve got to know something, right Moreau?” Erin asks, chewing on a piece of contraband gum. “I know Kevin was Riko’s partner, but you two were thick.”
She doesn’t say it casually—she says it with both eyes narrowed and pinned on Jean like a warning. She’s a senior, number eleven. The only positive thing Jean has on her is that he was offered to her by Riko, once, and she said no. That doesn’t mean much down here, but it did to Jean.
“Do you know where he is?” she asks. A threat. Jean swallows, looks down at his hands where they’re wrapped tightly around the hilt of his racquet. If he could see his knuckles through the thick padding of his gloves, he’s sure they’d be bright white over the scars. It’s a continuing realisation these weeks. Jean hasn’t just lost Kevin—the Ravens have lost him too.
It’s different though—Jean needs Kevin so he can stay alive. The Ravens need him so that they can win.
“I do not know,” Jean tells her, honestly. Something about it must bleed through, because she doesn’t press him any further for answers. Just turns around, smacking her gum, eyes dark, pinned on the court.
“Wonder if he’s dead,” she says. “It’s a big world out there.”
Jean swallows down the sudden presentation of bile in his mouth, and welcomes Riko’s waved hand from the court, calling Jean into the scrimmage. Tugs his helmet on, navigates the mess of water bottles to the court entrance. The first hit against the wall from a striker is distraction—the second knocks the thought of Kevin’s body out of his head fully, if only for the afternoon.
.
It feels useless, going to class. It always did, even before Kevin had left, but it’s exacerbated now by his absence.
The Raven’s accompany their partner to classes—back the Jean first joined the Nest, this was the main source of arguments between partners, both having to compromise on the same degree course to match classes with. They eventually mitigated that by giving the Raven’s no choice at all. Now every sports science class is attended to by a flock of athletes in dark team-gear and an understanding with the professors that no one will be allowed to fail the class—whether through the offer of money, or other services. It’s not uncommon. The football team’s coach pays other students to write his athletes assignments.
It feels odd, today, though—borderline illegal to be out in public without Kevin. For the rest of the student body to look at the mass murder of Ravens and notice one missing is a threat to the Nest, let alone look at the Ravens and notice Kevin missing. Jean wonders how long they will hold the media off. He wonders how long they will hold general wonder off. It has been not yet even two weeks. He thinks they should still be grieving, in a way.
At the back of the classroom, sat in his normal seat with an empty one beside him, Riko is stony-faced while the professor speaks about injury mechanisms. The subject would almost be funny if it wasn’t so raw. The image of Kevin’s bones stark white and exposed in the locker room will be seared into Jean’s brain the rest of his life, a memory in the same vein of the first time he realised he will never leave this place alive.
Jean ducks his head when Riko turns his gaze on him, focusing back on the professor. He and Reacher have an agreement that Jean will trade Reacher’s class notes in exchange for Jean doing the physics equations in the assignments they share, but Jean still tries to take his own notes. English remains a labyrinthian puzzle to him, worsened by academic speak, and it takes every amount of focus to trade in the context clues for the words he doesn’t understand.
Beside him, Jonah—one of the second years—is poking his pen into the back of his partners neck, ignoring how Heleen tries to bat it away. The Nest gets away with being what it is publicly because college sports are already intense, hyperincestual environments. The fact that the Nest is worse in all aspects changes little, but it does heighten the disregard most of the Raven’s feel for any study.
Jean, if he gets out of here alive, doesn’t imagine he’ll ever need to use any of this information, but the exposure to English outside of the Nest’s specific dialect of violence is enough motivation to pay attention. Beyond that, the study is a good distraction from the ever present anxiety that he doesn’t know where Kevin is. He doesn’t know how to find out. Kevin left, but beyond that everything else is a shining question mark. Jean doesn’t even know how he got out, much less how he might have begun to get himself anywhere.
The initial denial of Kevin’s absence has waned and faded by now; the first week was full of looking around corners, checking Kevin and Riko’s room between trainings, checking the phone he has with only a few numbers saved for any message at all. Deluding himself into a childish belief that Kevin will come back, would come back, couldn’t have just—left Jean here. Alone. Unarmed.
The faith that Kevin was going to come back soon died when the Master had to round up the entire team, coaches and staff and all, and tell them that Kevin Day, number two, son of Exy, had disappeared. There’s a point where the search parties stop looking for a person and start looking for a body. That was the point Jean stopped hoping for Kevin coming back and just started hoping he was alive.
He can feel Riko’s gaze at the back of his neck. He can feel the pressure of the rest of the Raven’s bearing down on him, demanding the location of their golden boy, demanding his return, his game, his distraction tactics.
Jean isn’t sure if he would give it to them or not if he did know. If he would pull Kevin back just for the sake of having him back within reach of Jean, only far enough that Jean could just turn around to make sure he was there. If he would out Kevin’s hiding place or if he would let him go.
Jean doesn’t think he would be brave enough for that. The mounting rage at Kevin’s absence already is enough to spitefully wish he could drag Kevin back here even if only to see him punished for leaving Jean here alone. For giving Jean reasons to hope and then abandoning him alone to fulfil it.
The lecture ends. The Ravens rise to leave, one single movement of black hoodies and backpacks and rustling paper like wings. Jean, like muscle memory, does too. He can leave the room, but he cannot leave this place like Kevin has.
Outside, Jean swallows down as much mid-winter light as he can. It’s grey and cold and pale, but it’s all he has access to. Beside him, Reacher is silent, uncharacteristically—he’s not borne the punishments Jean has for his silence, despite the rules of a Raven partner, but the both of them are waiting for him to. At some point, Riko will probably rope him into the debacle in an effort to get Jean to talk more, but therein lies the fatal flaw of Jean’s partnership with a member not of the Perfect Court. The only person Riko could hurt to make Jean talk isn’t even himself; it’s Kevin.
They all know it. The open secret of Jean’s attachment to what is Riko’s. He can’t help it, is the thing. Kevin is insufferable and awful and earnest and vicious when he wants something. He’s so easy to love. Jean never had any hope of escaping that. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t make him furious.
.
His room feels darker, these days. Reacher doesn’t leave the light on in the bathroom like Kevin used to when they were teenagers. The edges of Jean’s postcards don’t seem to glow like they used to.
“You knew him well, though,” Reacher says from the other bed, toying with a length of racquet wire. They let the players string their own racquets, if they want. Jean’s second plan behind an overdose has always been a coil of that and the food service stairwell. “You two weren’t exactly good at hiding whatever kind of fucked up friendship you’ve got with Moriyama in the mix.”
“We didn’t—I have been here a long time. You know that. Kevin was the only one I ever really trained with.”
“Whatever,” Reacher sighs. He’s been wheedling Jean for the last week about where Kevin is—if Jean knows anything. Riko’s probably promised him something for it. “You know, if you know where he is you’d better come clean.”
“I really, really don’t,” Jean sighs, and turns to face the wall, even if it puts pressure on his freshly broken rib.
.
“Hey, Moreau,” asks Benjamin, over the team nurses desk where he’s stitching up Jean’s calf again. “You sure you don’t know where he is?”
.
“Oi,” says Mark. He’s chewing through the end of his racket tape, having lost the privilege of scissors after he tried to take them to his partners ankle. Jean watches him blandly, the ragged edge of the tape fluttering between them, stained with spit. “Come clean. We’re gonna need him for finals.”
.
“Where is he,” Riko hisses, near hysterical, a knife digging dangerously deep into the gap between shoulder and bicep, his knee pinning Jean’s chest to the bed, a length of Kevin’s left-behind racquet string lashing Jean’s hand to the bed frame. “Where?”
.
They play BU. When Kevin’s name isn’t called for the lineup, it’s like all the air goes out of the stadium. All chitter from the crowd gone dead silent.
.
Erin doesn’t ask again, but she stares at him from across the dining room near the end of the thirteenth day with a dark, calculating gaze. She was mentored by Thea Muldani, in her first year on the team, and she learned more than just her playing style from the other girl. Jean looks back down to the salad in front of him, but he can feel the question creep over his scalp like an itch.
He shouldn’t be surprised that he’s the one who bears the brunt of Kevin’s absence. Jean’s been the Nest’s scapegoat for years, Kevin’s whipping boy for most of it too. The rage filters itself through the memory of Kevin’s hands careful on Jean’s cracked skull, the year they both tuned seventeen, and he swallows down a mouthful of lettuce that tastes of nothing.
.
The third week is the worst of them all. Beyond Riko’s apoplectic rage turned to frost-bitten fury, beyond Jean’s fear that maybe Kevin hasn’t made it out, beyond the fact that the rice-cooker in the service kitchen breaks and they’re all left eating slightly crunchy brown rice for lunch every day. It’s the continual slog, the cold waning horror that this is how it will always be now.
Kevin—whether dead or ascended or escaped—is gone, and will not come back. Jean—broken and bruised as normal—will never leave here. Jean might die here, and if he doesn’t then he’ll remain owned. Still in the dark. Still eating badly cooked rice. This ending is a permanent one.
It’s odd. Someone like Kevin can’t just—not be there, anymore. He’s been here even before Jean arrived, and every Raven knows him almost as part of the architecture of the Nest. He’s a monolith of this place, just as much as Riko and the Master are.
It’s almost worse that he left so suddenly, because he left things behind. Kevin is gone, and Jean can still hear him. Can still see him. His absence marked by everything he left behind—his practice racquet alone and upright in the plastic bin by the court, his practice bib left at the bottom of the box during training, his blood on the floor of the locker room. His locker. His shoes. Jean.
Even the media is antsy about his absence. The Nest’s deflections aren’t working anymore. The Ravens are allowed to watch the news at meal-times, on a tiny screen in the corner of the dining area at the end of the red and black corridors. Whether it’s to make sure they pass their global sports classes, or to make sure they don’t show up to classes and act like they’re kept in a basement for real, Jean doesn’t know. It’s usually sports news—ESPN, FSN sometimes. On occasion one of the assistant coaches pretends they’ve accidentally knocked the remote and they get twenty minutes of the war on Iraq.
For the last three weeks Jean has been waiting to see anything. He does not know where Kevin is. His only access to this is alongside the rest of the world, and that is through the rabid habits of journalists.
He’s not the only one. The whole team is on edge, waiting to hear of Kevin Day, dead or alive. There’s been no news on it, other than a cover as to why Kevin didn’t play last week's match against the WVU Mountaineers. Riko’s interview after the game called it a skiing accident—Viola almost choked on her water. No one called out the obvious lie. No one asked Riko or the Master what the truth was.
“Hey, Moreau,” Reacher had nudged him, whispering. Boiled chicken for dinner, that night; Reacher had shredded it to pieces on his place far too quickly and effectively for Jean to feel impressed. “What actually happened?”
Jean had contemplated not answering at all, but Riko’s dark eyes had narrowed at him from across the dining room like a threat. The seat by his side was empty—whether by Riko’s request or by the anxieties of the rest of the team to get any closer in the limbo Kevin’s disappearance had caused. When Jean blinked, he just saw the blood again, all over the locker room’s slatted bench seat. When he blinked again, he saw his own blood on the sink.
“What normally happens here,” Jean had muttered under his breath, masking the words with a forkful of unseasoned lettuce. Small rebellions. “O captain my captain.”
.
Jean has never thought himself a gentle person. Compared to the other two of the Perfect Court and their constant gripes, yelling, violent verbal outbursts, Jean knows he’s seen as the quiet one. The calm one.
At first it was the language barrier. You cannot be known as the loud, mean one if no one knows what you are saying. You cannot bite back if you do not understand the initial insult. Then it was the despair—then the understanding this was the safer option. It has never meant he was not the angry one of the three of them.
The mounting rage swallows him that week, the dead-air knowledge of Kevin’s location giving way to the fury of knowing he left. That’s what gets to Jean the most. How dare Kevin leave without telling him. How dare Kevin leave without him.
Across the court, Riko bowls one of the freshmen to the ground for the ball, the sound inside the box echoing louder through Jean’s head as she lets out a yell. The whole team has followed the same beat and ebb of Jean’s feelings around Kevin, at least generally. The silent denial of Kevin’s disappearance shifted into anxiety, then terror, now rage. Even in his grieving Jean is not exempt from the hivemind of the Nest partaking in it.
He imagines what he would have said to Kevin, if he knew he was leaving. Twists his hands tighter around the grip of his racquet as the play draws nearer to his end of the court. Je de deteste. Va te faire voir. Fous-moi la paix. Degage.
The other team’s striker passes the ball too close to Jean; he catches it, flings it back the other end of the court where Riko is waiting for it, all of it muscle memory. Goes back to a hazy acknowledgement of the fury in his bones, the memory of that morning. He’d had to leave Kevin for his own room, left him with his hand wrapped and cast and in a sling around his neck, the pale clamminess of pain still stark on his face around his tattoo. He replays the hours between the injury and the realisation of Kevin’s disappearance over and over, trying to pick out a moment he could have stopped it, could have realised what was about to happen. A look on Kevin’s face, something he’d said, something that Jean could have grasped onto and tugged him back with.
He can’t, is the thing. He found Kevin gasping for air around his hand, saw it set and cast and medicated by the only staff nurse available at that time of night. Watched him bite down a sob around the bandages, watched him fall asleep. It was only two days before Jean woke up and found only an unmade bed.
He hates him for leaving, for not telling Jean, for not taking Jean with him, for not ensuring there was any way that Jean could know he was alive. For going this long absent after nearly seven years within arms reach. The betrayal of it stings. Worse, even, for what Jean thinks Kevin was to him. Betrayal always points to love. You can’t betray an acquaintance.
At the other end of the court, Riko scores, the space at his side unfilled. He’s been playing scrimmages as the only striker, six on a team against a normal seven aside. Jean has no sympathy for his fucked up grieving, only an acknowledgment of its similar shape.
Heleen sighs, dragging her feet while they set up to reset the game, the scrimmage ready to be played over and over until everything is perfect. She says something too muffled by her helmet to make out, but Jean grasps the sentiment of it. Says nothing in reply. He has nothing to say to anyone here, anyway. All the words in his mouth are meant for Kevin and he doesn’t trust himself that they won’t just spill out in a mess of Marseillais on the court floor.
.
Riko comes to him the next two nights. Blessedly, alone, but for the company of a kitchen knife. Jean knows from Reacher that the days Jean and Riko were being questioned, someone went through Riko’s room and removed all other weapons. He’d already destroyed one piece of Moriyama property—no one wanted to risk any further damage.
Jean is silent; Riko is not. He leans over Jean with the sharp edge of the knife glancing over his bones, and rambles. He’s drunk, that much Jean can tell, but it doesn’t make the words less honest. He can smell the vodka on Riko’s breath when he leans in too close with the blade, hot and acrid in the cold concrete of the room.
The light in the hallway is on, glinting off the flat, dark shine of Riko’s hair. The three of them have always having been matched by their little dark heads, blackbirds in more than just name, and the bangs slip over Riko’s eyes, his manic look blurred by tears. Jean’s stomach twists as Riko digs the point of the blade into the curve of Jean’s shoulder while he tries to justify to both of them, uselessly, why he had to break Kevin.
Threats would be easier. This—the loose, messy honesty at the other end of the knife—puts Jean on edge more than anything else Riko has done to him. That Riko has turned to Jean to attempt to relate their feelings about the empty space between them is more terrifying than his violence. Jean feels himself tugged hungrily into Riko’s orbit while he bites out words about betrayal.
“I never thought Kevin would—,” Riko says, stutters to a stop. His voice slurs but his aim with the blade is precise. “All that talk about loyalty. You see what it amounted to.”
Jean doesn’t move. The knife kisses bone and retreats, Riko’s breath sour enough to make Jean think only about the antiseptic smell of the nurses office for a split second.
“He left,” Riko continues. “He ran. After everything we’ve done together.” His tone curdles, all the bitter, manic bravado giving way to a childish air of disbelief. “And you. You’re still here.”
Jean almost doesn’t regret the next words. “I am not allowed to leave.”
That makes Riko laugh, soft and sharp. “Allowed,” he repeats, amused. “You make it sound like you’d go if you could.”
Riko’s bangs fall over his eyes, shadowing the fever there. The knife point dips into the curve of Jean’s shoulder, slow enough to feel the tremor of decision. “Would you?” Riko asks quietly. “If I let you go?”
Jean doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to. The lie would insult them both. Riko breathes out, shaky, a near-laugh. “That’s what I thought.” He presses a little harder. “At least you understand this. Kevin never quite did.”
Jean closes his eyes; can’t quite bite back the whine of pain. Riko goes still. Stares at him for a long, static-filled moment. Jean almost thinks he’s about to drive the knife, blessedly, home. Then Riko grins, blood-slick and broken. “You sound like Kevin.”
Jean hates Kevin for this too. For placing Jean somewhere his closest equal in understanding this is Riko. He practices the words he’ll tell Kevin about this in, then burns himself with the reminder of his absence.
Jean keeps thinking, like habit, that Kevin will come back. Foolish, that’s what Jean’s father always called him. He supposes he still is.
Behind Riko’s head, the wall has two post-cards tacked up. Jean focuses his eyes on the fantasy of escape, and bites down the next scream.
.
When Jean was six, his mother got very sick. He doesn’t remember much of it beyond the sickly sweet scent of the antiseptic in their local clinic, the colourful medications, climbing into her hospital bed the week it got bad, but he does remember the dread of not knowing what happens beyond someone being sick, or sicker, or the sickest. She just was unwell—Jean had no words even in French for what he thought of that.
It is easier, he finds, in English, to name the old fear. Kevin was always adept at speaking it to him when he found Jean crumpled in the corner of a room, a hallway, the shower stall. Always bleeding, always broken. One of those was fixable. Kevin got good at it, eventually, when he was willing to help.
Kevin, damn him to hell, was one of the few things that made Jean feel like he has to be grateful for surviving all this. If only for those moments, quiet after the violent storm that was Riko or the Master, with Kevin’s hands over the wounds and his voice running through every soft word he’d managed to salvage from his own childhood.
You’re okay, was the go-to. Always English. Or sometimes we’re okay, as if trying to remind himself that if he was fine, then so was Jean. Don’t die, was the other. Jean, still angry, and still scared, and always alone, finds himself repeating it at night, as if Kevin can hear him, wherever he is.
Don’t die, he thinks, imagining the image of Kevin on the side of the road, in a truckstop, in a hole in the ground. He still doesn’t know how he got out. Don’t die. Don’t die.
Jean doesn’t even know if he really wants that to be the truth, but it’s the only thing he remembers how to say in response to fear.
.
The Ravens seem to taken in stride the fact that Kevin Day, boy prince of Exy, Riko’s second hand, their main striker line, is not coming back.
“I mean, Riko’s worse at the moment, don’t get me wrong,” Harry snarks between training drills sometime at the end of the month, teeth around the rubber stopper of a waterbottle, “but Kevin was always such an insufferable bitch. At least we’re free from that now.”
His partner, a willowy blond guy who’s name Jean still can’t pronounce properly elbows him with a snicker. “Don’t let captain hear that.”
“God no.”
Jean turns around. Remembers being two days without sleep, barely able to stand after Riko heard him say something to Kevin in French and took that as a personal affront. Kevin staring at him across from the court that morning, bottomless guilt in his eyes, then promptly pissing off the entire team so badly with his insults towards their playing that no one noticed Jean’s lack of balance in the scrimmage. Jean had hated him for the distraction, but it proved the easiest way through the years to keep the attention off of Jean.
“No love lost there,” Reacher snickers to Jean, also overhearing the juniors. “Trust me, we need him back if just to fucking balance out Moriyama. But I’m kind of enjoying the lack of assholish comments about my footwork.”
“You cross-step too frequently when you are trying to block a left-hander,” Jean bites, absentminded, and Reachers eyes darken.
“Fuck off.”
“Stop talking and listen, then,” Jean says, turning back to the coaching group and ignoring the looks the partner pair next to them throw him. The Raven’s have, for lack of a better term, rallied together in the wake of Kevin’s absence. There was a sudden moment that Jean cannot name, sometime last week, when Riko went again to stand alone on the centre line for a scrimmage, and the entire team understood acutely that they no longer had their core offensive line.
They are halfway through the season, and the Raven’s will not lose, not even without their starlet. There’s a sense of acutity to it—the anger waning from them at the same time it goes from Jean, leaving only the numb awareness of the absence.
.
Jean’s assignment grade comes back first with a 52% for grammar issues, and then twenty minutes later the grade is amended in his emails to a 89%. Jean spares it half a look before he trades off the laptop with another Raven to check their own grades, and turns back to the tapes they’re spending the afternoon watching.
“Turn it up Moreau,” Heleen drawls, rolling out her calves on the floor of the common area that sprawls off from the locker rooms in the Nest, eyes focused on where the Palmetto Foxes are being decimated by Breckenridge. Jean knocks the remote a couple of times where its sat next to him on the table; his hand slips where his middle fingers are broken and taped together and he hits the minus button mistakenly until he can angle his hand enough to press the right one.
“I said up,” she groans from the floor as the volume dips by five and then rises by eight, “Jesus, you’d think your English would be at least good enough to catch that. Fucking hell.” No one responds to her, for better or worse, and Jean turns back to the mangled mix of English on the page in front of him.
It’s an easy thing to respond to — the poor pronunciation of his name, called by teammates, the press, Riko. Jean has learned when to correct and when to let it rot in their mouths.
It’s never really worth the effort; his name becomes just another sound in the room, as disposable as the commentary bleeding from the TV as the Foxes collapse play by play. He traces the edge of the paper with his thumb, toying at it with the thick bandages over the skin, and lets the noise pass over him. Breckenridge scores again. Someone swears. The TV box rattles as it’s nudged with a foot.
At least Kevin spoke Jean’s name at all. Felt the full force of that word directed at him, for once, without being undercut by shame, or anger, or disappointment.
It’s the longest he’s gone without hearing Kevin’s voice in seven years, now. Even with press tours, or overseas games that Jean was absent from, Kevin was already back down in the dark of the Nest with Jean before long. He’s been gone a month. Jean wonders at what point he’s allowed to consider Kevin dead for good.
.
Two nights later, Jean’s digging through the cutlery drawer in the common area kitchen, trying to find something to loosen the too-tight stitches in his calf. Their meals are catered, meticulously, but the Ravens have still accumulated a messy drawer of takeout chopsticks and mismatching, too-sharp forks and a tangled lump of wire protein shaker balls.
He’s avoiding jabbing his fingers on a knife when he digs out an enamel chopstick rest from where it’s jammed in the corner of the drawer. It’s painted like a cat, chipped on one foot, a stupid little novelty item that Kevin had brought it back from a press tour in Japan and then forgotten about.
It’s so stupid, and Jean can’t look away from it. The Master and Riko had cleaned out Kevin’s locker after the first week to see if there was anything in there that would lead them to where Kevin’s gone, before restocking it with his uniform as if he’s still coming back. His room is intact, and so is his chair beside Riko.
The chopstick rest is still there even when Kevin isn’t. The dried blood in the locker room is still there even when Kevin isn’t. The love is still there even when Kevin isn’t.
.
It’s three days before Riko returns to Jean’s room. When he does, he comes with a hammer wrench.
.
“Hey,” Reacher says one night, while Jean is finishing a reading for class, now that they’re back to the university hours. The rest of the college had gone home for Christmas, and New Years—the Raven’s slept four hours a night and drilled passes until their hands bled into their gloves.
Reacher’s already abandoned his homework, underneath the thin covers with his lamp turned off. “Do you think Riko will make you his partner? I mean, if Kevin doesn’t come back.”
Jean stills. Loses track of the words on the page, cannot imagine he will find his way back to it when he already doesn’t know what kyphosis means.
The question feels ridiculous in a way; he cannot imagine a world in which Riko isn’t Kevin’s partner. It’s been that way for the seven years he’s known the two, and will continue into either one of their deaths. He doesn’t even think death would change that fact.
“No.”
“Actually?” Reacher rolls onto his side so that he can look at Jean across the small room. He’s a midwesterner, his hair cropped short like a farm-boy, but he speaks like he went to private school. Jean’s never asked. “I mean, what’ll he do? With no partner.”
“I do not really care,” Jean says. When he says this he means anything; this conversation, the entirety of the EAU Ravens, the world itself. “They would not pull me from the backline.”
“He hates you enough to.”
“Everyone does. Riko isn’t special.”
Reacher laughs, hard and mean, before he pushes up and reaches over the desk between them to turn off Jean’s lamp, too. It leaves them in the pitch black, hearing only the faint thumping noise from Riko’s room. “I guess. Don’t tell him that, though. Unless you want to end up like Kevin, too.”
This too. Always naming the bigger fear. Everything of English Jean has ever known was threats. It should be awful. Instead, Jean swallows the snicker of a laugh that rises in his throat, and shoves the homework to the other end of the bed in the dark.
.
The only bright point of the possibility is that if Kevin is dead, somewhere out there on the side of the road or in a truck stop, there’s nothing keeping Jean here either.
Kevin had been the one to find him huddled under the sink with a pilfered handful of painkillers—the good kind, heavy enough to keep someone practicing with a sprain or a light fracture. They were fourteen. Kevin had been serious and austere even as a teenager, brought up in the oppressive airs of the Nest, but the only thing he ever bled that severity into was his own earnestness. It was so hard not to believe him in anything he did or said.
And Jean was stupid, continues to be stupid, continues to be foolish and in love and endlessly handing hope over to Kevin to keep it safe for him when Jean can’t do it anymore.
Jean had let Kevin take the handful of pills Jean had stockpiled those last weeks, and hid them under his own mattress. Accessible only through Kevin’s knowledge, his awareness of them a threat and a comfort at once.
He’s not sure if Kevin intended it to be a trap. He doesn’t think Kevin would care if it was. Jean is stuck here in this limbo without him, alone, and he can’t even die about it. Jesus Christ.
“Here,” one of the service workers grumbles, shoving a plate in front of Jean, breaking the reverie. Turkey wraps. Two tables over, he can already hear Elijah complaining. Jean’s not hungry, but they get two meals a day in the Nest on the 16 hour cycle over break, and Kevin would be furious if he died from starvation.
Jean shoves the escaping peppers back inside the wrap, and takes a bite, pretending it doesn’t congeal in his mouth. The television is on—Iraq, today. All the glory of the United States falling down over a land closer to Jean’s home than he is.
.
No matter where Kevin is, he is miles from Jean.
Even in the Nest—even the way they used to plaster themselves close to each other like they were one person, there was always an irreparable distance. It was always Riko, or the way Kevin still had his eyes on the court at every possible moment. It was always the fact that Kevin would have stayed, if he could still play, while Jean has been trying to leave in any way possible since he was thirteen. That single core division that meant Jean on his own wasn’t enough to keep Kevin here. Jean shifts his racquet in his hand, holds the tape against the butt of the handle with his thumb as he starts to wrap it. They’re playing Breckenridge tonight, an away game that the team had spent an awkwardly silent bus-ride to get to. The wrap sticks to his fingers. He shakes it off.
Kevin had so much to do. Jean has nothing ahead of him.
Jean tightens the wrap until it’s almost translucent, then wraps it back around the handle. He’s still here. He’s still hurt. All he’s left with is these memories—the shy, muddling sound of Kevin’s initial attempts at French, his hands on Jean’s hands and on the sides of his face when he was hurt. He almost wishes he didn’t have them.
It’s the constant hypocrisy of Jean’s feelings. He wants Kevin to come back. He wants to never see him again. He thinks he would have followed Kevin anywhere, even out, if he could. He knows he never can.
The first half of the match is played with ease—one of the seniors subs in for the second spiker position alongside Riko, and then the Ravens fall into an easy formation that nets them three points before the end of the first quarter. It’s not as vicious as it could be—the Ravens, for all their bloodshed and sharp teeth underground, do not care enough to be rough players when their opponent is not even worth half the effort.
Breckenridge apparently is not impressed by the frank boredom of the Ravens starting string—they start the second quarter mean and messy, pushing forward against the Raven’s dealer line roughly until Breckenridge’s number 21 bowls into Jean with all the finesse of a loose truck and shoulder-checks him against the plexiglass.
Jean hits the ground hard, and the hardwood of the court knocks all the air out of him, leaves him dizzy and spinning and tasting iron. His shoulder aches, last weeks injury flaring up under its bandages under his shirt under his armour under the court-lights. Layers on layers of covering up bruises. The crowd hushes, drops the whole stadium into a tense quiet as footsteps approach on the boards.
Riko’s the one to kneel beside Jean, kneepads hitting the polish with a dull thud, his body sheltering Jean briefly from the bright lights beaming into his eyes. When they were younger and Riko was not yet so violently jaded, he used to have some genuine worry when Kevin or Jean got injured on the court, if only for their ability to play well.
Now, Riko lays his hand on Jean’s throat in full view of the crowd. Somehow, he makes it look like concern.
“Get the fuck up,” Riko snipes under his breath, grinning plastically, “and stop embarrassing me.”
On his way off the court, Jean smiles for the cameras, and tries to draw in breath through his bared teeth.
He collapses onto the bench, still winded, still trying to remember what a full lungful of air feels like while some of the team hide their laughs behind their bare hands. The Master is staring across the bench to him with a narrowed glare, but then the gameplay resumes and his attention falls back to the court instead of Jean.
Erin holds out a stick of her contraband gum between two thickly gloved fingers. Jean found out last week that one of the other sports science students sneaks it to her in exchange for game lineups so that he can place bets. She’s already smacking it between her teeth, hidden behind her game visor.
“Head up Moreau,” she says nastily, but she kicks at his knees until they’re widened enough that he can hang his head further to gasp in more air. “Don’t let the King see that.”
Jean accepts the gum by shifting enough she can tuck it into his shorts pocket. Her dealer partner scoffs, but he turns away, looking across the court where the game is continuing on. Erin presumably follows his gaze back to the game, because Jean hears her snicker at the same time the crowd roars, the sound seeping down to where he’s still gasping air from between his knees.
“Well,” she says. “At least we can still play a half decent game without Day.”
.
They win, because of course they do. Jean is trotted back out onto the court for the final quarter with Riko, but they’re already four up against the Breckenridge team and the Raven’s have no sense of moderation. The crowd roars, even if it’s an away game, because a win is a win and a good win is even better.
The debrief after the game is easy. The press afterwards is not. Jean’s still favouring his ribs when he talks, his cheekbone stinging from where he took a foul hit against his helmet—it smarts when he moves his lips, his eyebrows, when he sniffs. He keeps his expression guarded in the way he’s learned to, but Jean has also never quite learned press in the way Kevin or Riko did.
It’s always Kevin-and-Riko for press, the one and two of the team. The starlets with their white, straight smiles. Jean gets dragged out when needed, smiles, and then is hidden back in the broom cupboard. With Kevin gone, though, Riko needs a partner, and Jean is the one with enough leverage on to keep him compliant with the press.
It’s mostly simple questions—how do you think you played, how do you think your team played, how do you think the other team played? Jean nods and looks vaguely interested as Riko answers and offers a one-word, accented agreement when it seems like he needs to. The cameras flash. The room is too small for all the foam-covered microphones it seems people have. It smells very heavily of mildew in the way all court backrooms smell, but that may also be the smell of infection.
“One last one—you?”
Jean expects the question from the little blond reporter before she even stands to say it. Her ponytail swings like a high-strung noose.
“Where is Kevin Day?”
For a moment Jean almost entertains the thought of telling them. Of saying he went somewhere and I don’t know how to get to him. Of saying I couldn’t follow him if I wanted to. Of spilling every sordid detail of the Nest, even if it killed him, because it would.
But Jean made Kevin a promise, and for however long Kevin is alive, so must be Jean. And so he says nothing, and the silence is turned over to Riko to answer in his customarily cocky way—what, you don’t think we can win a game without him? He’ll be back in no time, just you wait. Tell me you haven’t seen way too much of him this year already, right?
Afterwards, one the way back to the bus, Riko grips Jean’s wrist hard enough to bruise, the bones of his forearm creaking under Riko’s fingers. Riko’s voice is low, controlled. A reminder that Jean will pay for this later.
“Next time they ask,” he says with customary chill, “you smile.”
.
In the dark of the bus, Jean tugs the stick of gum Erin had passed his way. It’s sugary—too sweet. It reminds him too much of the candy Kevin used to sneak back from overseas trips or the green rooms of television studios, fourteen year old pockets full of pilfered sweets.
He chews it anyway. Dreams, pressed up against the cold window, of a Kevin who is still here, and then of a Kevin who is not. Both are nightmares and fantasies at the same time, in their own way.
.
The first morning of the sixth week Kevin is gone, Jean wakes in a cold sweat, breathing raggedly. Waking like that is common, but the image of Kevin flashes behind Jean’s eyes, a patchwork of memories stitched together to show a corpse. Jean has seen Kevin sleeping, knocked unconscious; has seen him bruised and bleeding and bleeding even more. All of those make it easy for his brain to offer up Kevin’s body in a dream.
Jean rolls over to face the wall, willing his breathing back to normal. Kevin is not here. Kevin could be anywhere. Kevin could be alive, or dead. None of these are particularly comforting thoughts, so Jean focuses on this, instead—Kevin’s hands on either side of his face, Jean woozy with pain. Murmuring to Jean in a mimicked accent that made Kevin sound like every boy he’d gone to school with, a deep rooted sense of home even here. He focuses in on the touch, the memory, the knowledge that Jean has loved Kevin and Kevin, at least, has cared for Jean. Love is a strong word. Jean has accepted it. Hate is a strong word, too.
.
The dorm rooms always have one bed visible from the doorway at the angle, the other hidden. Here, standing in the hallway in the morning dark—different to the afternoon dark, and the evening dark—Jean can see the photos pinned up above Kevin’s bed, the architecture of places Jean will never see freely. His bed still unmade.
‘There’s a whole world out there,’ Kevin had written on the back of one of the postcards he’d sent to Jean—Sydney, a snapshot of surfers on glimmering blue waves on the glossy front. Filtered for whatever Moriyama staff would read it before Jean was allowed it, but Jean knew what the sentence really meant—there’s a way out.
Jean wonders now if he had it all wrong. There was a way out, but it was reserved for Kevin. That world isn’t Jean’s.
There wasn’t any future for Kevin in the Nest, really. Jean had known that since he first met him, staring into those green eyes, the only inheritance of his mother. Had known it since he first saw Kevin play. Had known it more surely when they found that letter.
He should have known. Kevin was always going to leave. Jean could never deny it, on nights alone in the little, cramped room he shared with no-one in those years before he joined the Ravens for good. Sometimes he could hear Kevin and Riko laughing together through the wall the rooms shared, and almost wished he could join them. On other nights he regretted ever thinking that.
Beyond that memory, though, Kevin was always going to leave, and Jean was always going to have to stay.
Jean’s almost foolish enough to step into the room. Like this, it’s almost like Kevin hasn’t been gone for nearly two months—the sheets mussed where Kevin had curled into Jean’s shoulder the night his hand was broken, the bookmark in the textbook that Jean had started reading through, too tired and too panicked by the events of the night to soothe Kevin in a normal way. He’d gotten through two chapters of the French sports section before Kevin dropped into a listless, shifting sleep, translating it into English where needed. Always the reversion to English when they were alone, unless Riko was listening. Always the language easiest for Kevin, when possible.
His foot’s on the threshold when Riko appears behind him, silent footsteps suddenly transforming into a sharp swear in Japanese that Jean doesn’t have the bandwidth to translate right now.
When he turns around to face Riko, tensed for impact, he’s got a kit-bag slung over his shoulder from afternoon PT. Whatever he’s about to say to Jean ends abruptly when his gaze slides from Jean to the room behind him, and Jean sees the increasingly common look of grief flash across Riko’s face.
Kevin, as much as Jean hates it, belonged to Riko more than he was ever Jean’s. They’d spent twelve years at arm length. Riko, the same way as Kevin, hasn’t been alone since he was seven.
The pain gives Jean some sense of glee. Vindication.
“You did that,” he tells Riko. Bland. Matter-of-fact. “But we both already know that, don’t we?”
It takes a split second before Riko’s bare palm strikes the side of Jean’s face, a smarting, shooting pain down his jaw, but that’s as far as he goes.
“Know your place, Jean,” Riko says. He’s one of the only ones who actually calls Jean by his first name. It always surprises Jean to hear it from his mouth. “I’m not the only one he left here.”
.
“He is not coming back,” Jean says, later that night, when Riko is putting the two of them through drills without the rest of the team. They’re both drenched in sweat, the room cold, Riko’s responding glare colder. “We both know that.”
“Well,” says Riko. Turns to the cones. Doesn’t finish the sentence. Jean knows what the aborted attempt at acceptance means. Once again, Riko is one of the only people who understands Jean feels in this. The terror. The grief. The, for everything proving it a horrible and unearned thing, love.
Jean knows he’ll always be angry. For this, probably. For everything Kevin ever did, up to and including letting Jean love him.
Jean never told him. He’s not sure if he regrets that.
.
The news finally comes at the end of the second month, from the television in the corner of the dining room. Jean is bloodied and broken and the Ravens are up in arms when the television tells them that Kevin Day has joined the PSU Foxes as an assistant coach.
The room nearly explodes. Forks clatter. Someone is swearing; someone else is crying. The TV is too loud. Jean hunches his shoulders, and presses his lips thinly together.
Across the room, Riko’s mouth is agape. The Master frowns. Jean is silent.
Kevin is alive. This is a fact, finally known. Kevin is alive for Jean to miss, and to mourn, and to hate. But if Kevin is alive, then Jean has to live. This is another fact. Both are equally true and acutely awful.
They show a picture of Kevin in Palmetto State orange as ESPN ends the story. Under-eyes dark. Arms crossed, one in a cast. All that terrible beauty encased in four hundred pixels.
Jean turns away from the television, and can’t leave the room.