Chapter Text
Jeremy is not the leader he wishes he could be, nor is he the leader the faction needs. In fact, he didn't even want to be a leader; he would have preferred to leave all of this to someone else, someone more capable than him, someone who could handle this pressure.
Yet, he is always the leader, and one day he will die like that kid he used to be with the crown in Switzerland.
He is genuinely surprised that the others haven't yet confronted him with all the things he believes he is doing wrong, for it is not as if the others never talk about him behind his back. In fact, he knows that Kaak has already done so at least twice to Duncan and Shappo, probably more.
Besides being bad at taking care of his faction, Jeremy is also bad at taking care of himself. He begins to see in the attic mirror how bags are starting to form under his eyes and how his hair is starting to look longer and more unkempt. His skin is starting to become increasingly pale, most likely due to a lack of sunlight, but his malnutrition and low hydration surely have something to do with it as well.
But he has no time for that kind of nonsense; he has things to sort out. Jeremy looks up at the now-broken mirror in front of him, on which he has written the words "I'm not crazy!" in red marker—how long ago was that, anyway? Suddenly, he feels something sharp on his knuckles, as if the pain from the glass he just smashed had input lag to make contact with his hand. Jeremy quickly pulls his hand back to examine the damage but stops when he suddenly hears the sound of footsteps, up the stairs of the TCG.
The shop owner quickly panics at the thought that the person actively running upstairs right now might see the attic. Although he had hung a virtually perfect picture of a stone wall in front of the entrance to his room, he knew deep down that it would eventually stop working, but Jer would do whatever it took to prevent that day from happening, so he quickly ran out of the basement only to nearly collide with none other than Duncan Massink—the *real* Duncan Massink, that is; it still feels confusing having to keep explaining that.
“JERRR–” Duncan shouted enthusiastically until he nearly bumped into the man, after which he leaned back again with a scream and had to use the stair railing to avoid falling. “Jesus, where did you come from, the wall or something??” Duncan laughed, but Jeremy took his words a little too seriously; he hadn't seen him, had he?
“I came from the staff room,” Jeremy answered in a voice just a bit too cold, his hand gesturing towards the code-guarded chests in the room right next to them.
The joy that had previously emanated from the engineer almost like sunbeams faded into a kind of combination of confusion and sadness when the Dutchman saw Jeremy’s hands. “Paper cut,” Jer said quickly before Duncan could begin asking his question. “I was printing cards,” he explained further, but Jeremy could see in Duncan’s face that he didn’t believe him, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, since he normally wasn’t really the type to confront things like that. “Jer...” Duncan seemed to want to say something, but gave up on what exactly it was within three seconds. “You really are busy with your cards all the time...” he began suddenly. “And believe me! We all think it’s really awesome that you’re putting all this effort into this project, but sometimes I feel like you’re in the shop more often than with us.”
‘Sometimes’ was a softening of the situation that Duncan likely used intentionally to make it all seem less bad. In reality, Jeremy had practically never been there for the past one or two weeks. He was no longer sitting at the dining table, a routine that Jeremy had brought up to them in the first place for better group cohesion, which actually made it all the more remarkable that he wasn't there himself. When Jeremy went outside, it was to go to Camp Fatal, always with a camera and stacks of paper in his pocket.
Oh, what Duncan would give to understand what was going on in his best friend’s head.
“We— uhm— I… miss you.” He suddenly admitted in a soft voice. Although Jeremy fully understood where he was coming from, he simply couldn't bring himself to be honest with him about the things that had been bothering him for the past few weeks.
“What do you mean you miss me? I’m here, aren’t I?” Jeremy replied with a fake smile on his face. It is true in a way; Jeremy is physically in the TCG shop day in and day out, just not for the reasons his friends think.
Still, Jeremy would rather they all think he is a workaholic than that he is crazy.
"Yeah... okay..." Duncan mumbled back as if he wanted to come up with a counter-argument but couldn't find one. "It's just—you're here but you're... also not..."
here....
"Never mind, I'm happy to see you again." Jeremy's friend forced a smile back anyway to let Jeremy know he wasn't angry with him. The only thing the leader gave back was a nod, one small nod to show that he had heard the other. He didn't say that he was happy to see him too, he didn't say what was bothering him, nothing about Camp Fatal, nothing about the monsters, the attic, everything.
“Jer...” Jeremy looked up at Duncan again. “If anyone knows what you’re going through, it’s me, talk to me.” Jer didn’t react to his friend’s hand resting on his shoulder. The words were sweet, but Jeremy almost rolled his eyes when he said them. Duncan has no idea what Jeremy is going through. Maybe the man thinks this is about North and South, but the world has already become much bigger than those two little islands with their meaningless squabbles, that constant war.
That is something Jeremy doesn’t miss, and he thinks Duncan feels the same way. The constant fear of being chased, of not being able to trust anyone around you. Precisely because of this past, the Dutch managed a bit better to always be sincere with each other, with a few exceptions for whom someone who is totally not Don Kaaklijn has already apologized for a hundred times. It is strange.. When Jeremy looks into his friend’s eyes now, he doesn’t see the person who won season 2, the person who sat on the mountain with blood on his hands and a smile on his face. Yet it didn't seem as if it had ever disappeared, the person shaped by this kind of past, but how can you remove that?
“I have to get back to work...” said Jeremy after taking Duncan’s hand and removing it from his own shoulder. At first he said nothing, but eventually he took a step back and a sigh of disappointment escaped him.
“Okay… You know where to find me.” said Duncan quickly before walking out of the shop. Jer walked quickly to the staff room to his right to watch him walk to his factory from the windows there. It is not as if Jeremy doesn't want to tell him. In fact, a part of him feels guilty for hiding this about both Duncan and Don in his big list of secrets.
And now he is alone again. How does he still manage to be alone every single time? He knows that Don already thinks he is crazy—he has told him that countless times—so it is not as if that is a secret. If there is anything he likes about Don, it is his directness, the way he always knew what he thought about certain matters. Unlike Kaak, Jer has no clue what Duncan thinks about things; he hasn't really had a strong opinion yet about his 'paranoia,' as Kaak is starting to call it now, but Jeremy can assume with almost certainty that the two of them have discussed it behind his back at some point.
There is, however, one opinion Duncan clings to strongly when it is brought up: the marriage between him and Molly. Whenever Jeremy and Duncan have argued over the past few weeks, it always revolves around that. He himself does not understand why such a big deal is being made of it, but the engineer absolutely does not want to marry her under any circumstances. Their final argument got specifically out of hand because Jeremy had told him again that he really had to do it for the faction. “It is necessary for the connections between Holland and the North,” he had told him. Then came… perhaps the last thing Jeremy ever expected to hear from someone he considered a best friend.
“If you want to join the North so badly, save us the trouble and just sign up there.”
So perhaps he was indeed a disappointment to this faction, at the very least to himself. Perhaps he really hasn't learned anything in all those years. Given so many chances, and yet…
Suddenly, Jeremy hears a sound all around him, echoing from all sides in a way that was actually very disorienting. Jeremy quickly spun around with a sword in hand to try to pinpoint the sound, but it seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere. Only when he really tried to pay attention to the sound itself did he arrive at a terrible realization.
It was laughter, terribly irritating laughter that could really only be from one person…
“Link?”