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Jean’s eyes slowly opened at the weight of someone else’s stare.
Years ago this would have sent him into a panic, probably still would today if the eyes on him weren’t so familiar. If they didn’t instead bring about a comforting feeling born from years of care all wrapped up into something beautiful and content.
Kevin stared at him from his position sitting up in their bed. The bed that they had been sharing for the past five months, after they had moved in together. When they finally decided that they were comfortable enough in their relationship that they could take that step.
His eyes lingered gently over Jean’s face, seeming like they were soaking in every detail. They were soft and loving, a look that took Jean’s breath away. It was intense to be looked at in such a way, but Kevin did it with such simplicity. Like it was just how it was always going to be. Like it didn’t take them fists and tears and so much anger and pain to get to the point they are at now.
Perhaps that history was reflected in Kevin’s gaze though. It was loving, and the softness conveyed the contentment of the look, but there was something sad in the turn of his brow. His eyes speaking of devotion but the crease in his forehead showing a quiet distress.
“What are you looking at me like that for?” Jean asked, wanting to understand what was going through Kevin’s head to have him make such an expression.
“I’m not sure. I guess I thought I lost my chance at this”
Jean furrowed his brow and Kevin huffed a quiet laugh at him, smoothing his hand over the wrinkle while his eyes shone with joy. He was so beautiful, and Jean didn’t think he would ever get used to the emotion that Kevin looked at him with now.
As Kevin’s fingertips lightly traced over his eyebrows and his cheekbones, Jean closed his eyes and let himself feel the touch dancing across his skin. Kevin’s fingers brushed down the bridge of his nose, stopping halfway as they began to move up again. When they stayed on that point on his nose, he opened his eyes once more. They crossed briefly as they caught on the finger still pressed between them, but he quickly looked up at Kevin and his vision cleared.
Kevin was looking at him with an odd expression. It was more sad than happy, but Kevin did not seem to be grieving. Jean wasn’t sure if it was regret or nostalgia, perhaps it was something else entirely. Kevin always had been good at hiding the specifics of what he was feeling from view.
Then Kevin’s finger began stroking back and forth across his nose, down to just under the corner of his eye before moving back up and down to just under the other. And Jean realized what he was doing, why he was making that expression.
He was moving his fingers across the scar on Jean’s nose.
Jean reached up and grabbed Kevin’s hand, moving it towards his mouth to brush a kiss across it. He didn’t know what was going through Kevin’s head, but he knew it was destructive and likely false. He wasn’t going to let him stew in those thoughts alone. Especially not after that odd answer to his question earlier.
Jean mentally kicked himself for getting distracted from it with a few loving touches. He should have known that Kevin was trying to avoid the conversation.
“Talk to me, Kevin” Jean asked, hoping to get a glimpse into what was currently plaguing his mind.
“I knew. When we were kids.”
Jean had to stop himself from reacting, a choked off sound forcing itself to still in his throat. The sudden breach of the topic had startled Jean, but he wasn’t surprised by the confession.
Because of course Kevin knew. Jean had not been secretive about his feelings in the slightest. Riko had noticed and had punished him for it. He was not foolish enough to believe that he could’ve slipped by without the object of his affection catching wind of it.
It still stung a long dormant part of his heart though. The phantom pain of an old wound flaring up again. One that had healed with time and with declarations of love and apologies, but still throbbed every now and then.
He breathed steadily through the pain, looking up at Kevin to see the worry and hurt that his own eyes were likely reflecting, and it faded away again. He wasn’t going to be hurt about a long healed heartbreak that had mended itself better than Jean could have ever hoped for.
Kevin must have seen the steel in his eyes and took a steading breath before continuing.
“I knew. And I shouldn’t have hidden the way I did. I shouldn’t have kept you so close when I knew I was never going to do anything about it. I just wanted you to keep looking at me that way.”
At that Jean did let a sound of protest slip out of his mouth. Kevin was his safe haven during their time at the Nest. As complicated as their relationship was at the time, Jean knew that he made it through thanks to Kevin. He knew that his life would have been much different without the proximity he had to the man, and he does not believe that it would have been better.
Jean had been desperate for the contact that Kevin had provided. Whether he knew of his feelings or not, Jean would have chosen to stay with the beautiful man that he had laid so many of his hopes upon. That had wrung true despite everything else that happened in that place, and it was not Kevin’s fault that Jean could not separate himself from him.
“I wanted it that way.”
Kevin opened his mouth, a protest clear on his tongue, but Jean cut him off.
“Do not interrupt me. Despite thinking you might have noticed my feelings for you and hoping that you would return them, I knew it was a foolish endeavor. I stayed close to you because I wanted more of what you made me feel, even if I knew I would get nothing out of it. Do not apologize for a decision I made, Kevin.”
“And then I left, and I left you alone. And I wanted to take you with me, but you wouldn’t have gone, and I didn’t have time to think. I know that’s a shitty excuse but it’s true”
“It is.” Jean agreed, despite the wince it elicited from the other man, “And I was so angry at you because of it. For such a long time. I felt so betrayed. But I realized that as much as it hurt, I was selfish in what I wanted. I was selfish in wanting you to stay somewhere I knew was hurting you. Somewhere I knew you would die. Because Kevin, I wanted you dead.”
They both stared at each other, Jean cataloguing the way Kevin’s breath caught on a sharp inhale. They both knew what he was implying. Knew that as much as it was a hatred fueled by betrayal that made Jean crave the death of the man he was laying on, it was also more than that. It was the promise that Kevin had drawn from him back in the Nest. Jean wanted Kevin dead so that he could be dead himself, because what was a world without Kevin? What was the point of enduring the hell that he was living in if he was forced to face it alone? The only person he had to comfort him since he was brought to this godforsaken country was gone. The trust Jean had in him left shattered across the ground, pieces trailing all the way down to South Carolina. His presence and his words and his hands and everything that Jean had relied on were gone from his life, so Kevin was dead to him in all ways but the physical already. He just needed that last push before he himself could finally be let free.
He survived. He healed. Him and Kevin patched themselves back together with years of tears and soft hands, screaming and gentle words, anger and love. He no longer wanted Kevin dead, but that didn’t change the fact that he once did. It didn’t change the fact that Kevin’s departure nearly tore him apart irreparably.
“I’m sorry.” Kevin breathed, apologizing for leaving, for staying, for false hope.
“I am too.” Jean responded, apologizing for resentment, for hatred, for suffocating devotion.
“It should have been you. It should have been us” Kevin choked out, raising his hands to start gesturing between the two of them. And then to the world outside of their bedroom.
“I mean there was everything with Thea. And what you had with Renee and- and with-”
Jean caught Kevin’s hand and pulled it slightly across the sheets, his own resting lightly atop it. He slowly turned his hand until Kevin’s was sitting above it, the other man’s palm balanced on his index. The scarred fingers of his playing hand folded over his own, Jean’s thumb coming to rub over the skin there.
He did not need Kevin to start reflecting on their other relationships, not when they were together now. Not when Jean’s devotion had finally found a settling place. Somewhere it could spread out comfortably instead of nestling in his chest like a physical reminder of all he could not express. Not when he learned to turn that devotion into fondness rather than fixation. A fondness given and a fondness returned, after waiting for so long.
“I don’t think I’ve stopped being yours since I was fourteen” Jean whispered, pressing a feather-light kiss to the knuckles of the hand he was still cradling.
Kevin’s breath hitched, and his eyes warred between affection and guilt before Jean sighed and raised himself into a sitting position with Kevin’s hand still placed in his own.
“I haven’t stopped being yours, and I never will.” Jean repeated the sentiment, “But we would have torn each other apart back then”
“What if we hadn’t?” Kevin denied, coming to rest his other hand on Jean’s cheek. “What if I hadn’t been such a coward and said something? What if things could have been good?”
Jean feels his eyebrows pull together at that. He knew that word had been thrown in Kevin’s face before. Coward. Like him leaving was something weak and not the strongest thing anyone could do in the Nest.
Jean had hated him for leaving, but never because he thought it had made him a coward.
When Jean had first seen him again on the screen, donning the garish orange of the Foxes, he was overcome with a crushing hopelessness. He felt more than betrayed, it was as though his heart had been ripped out of his very chest. He was so angry with him for leaving, for shoving Jean into the path of destruction as he used the distraction to run. That Kevin could do all that and then smile in front of the cameras with another team made Jean’s blood boil.
But he couldn’t help but notice the difference between the Kevin that he saw on that screen and the one he always knew.
Perhaps it was because he has spent so much time observing him, in his best and worst hours. So much time gazing at him longingly, that he ended up noticing more about how Kevin held himself. Even when he spoke to reporters with his winning smile and his charm turned up as high as it could go, there was also a tension that ran throughout his body.
That tension had still existed as Jean watched the same boy with the same smile, but in different colors this time. The tension still existed, but it was different than it was before. Still there, but seemed to have a looser grip on him than it did when he was by Jean’s side.
So Jean hated him for leaving, and perhaps he hated him for being able to find a life without Jean by his side. But he could not hate Kevin’s happiness – or as close as he could get to it – when it looked so good on him.
There was a radiance to a more content Kevin that knocked the air out of Jean’s lungs before he even knew he needed to breathe through it. Despite all his hatred, Jean was not immune to Kevin’s charms. To the beautiful boy that had kept him alive, shining even brighter when he was fully in the spotlight. When he was out of direct view of the shadow he had spent the rest of his life ducking down to fit inside.
For once he stopped, once Kevin drew himself to his full height, he towered above anyone else in exy. Jean knew of his talent and of his drive first hand, but it did nothing to stop the awe he still felt crash over him all these years later at how much Kevin was.
He was a presence felt even when not seen, he was the face and the standard and everything that people thought of when they thought of the sport that had so thoroughly become their lives. He was Kevin Day, legend of exy and the best in the game.
As much as Jean wanted to hate him and all he stood for after he left, a part of him would never cease to be awestruck by the Kevin that existed in the light of day.
“You’re not a coward Kevin.” He said, his voice firm and leaving no room for the argument that was sure to fall from his partner’s tongue. “You got out of there. And even if I couldn’t see it then, I see it now. You saved both of us.”
And it was true. If Kevin had stayed in the Nest he wouldn’t have survived. Jean didn’t know what – or who – exactly would have done him in, but he knew it would have happened. He knew that he would have been dead before he ever got the opportunity to make Court. The broken hand and the jealousy Riko held for him only feeding the fire of the cruelty he would have been subjected to. Jean would have heard the news, maybe he would have been the one to find him even, and he would have followed right along.
Jean had seen no point of living without Kevin. Still doesn’t if he’s being fully honest with himself. The older man would have panicked if Jean ever voiced that out loud though, still terrified to have held the life of someone fully in his hands. Especially when he had believed he had failed that man, that boy, he met years ago.
But Jean was working on it. He was getting better at finding worth in things outside of Kevin. In people outside of Kevin. In himself.
There were some days where the force of the emotions he felt for his partner were so overwhelming that the thought of ever being without him made him feel like he couldn’t breathe.
There were other days where he was able to think about a time, far in the future, where one of them would not be with the other without breaking down over it. Those days he was able to think of the great things he had in life. All the time that he has spent building good memories with Kevin, and the time that he has spent building a good life surrounded by good people and good things.
Most days he was somewhere in the middle though. He hung out with his friends. He ate the fruit he enjoyed. He rode his motorcycle down the street at sunset. He went back to his list when he wanted to remember the good in life. He was scared of losing all that he had gained, and grateful that he even had it in the first place.
Most days he sat in the balance of terrified and placid. Not seesawing to one extreme or the other too often. It sounded exhausting, but he was content with his life. He was content sitting in the peace that Kevin and him had carved out for themselves after so long of pain and anguish.
It wasn’t perfect, and it was never going to be. They would still fight and snip at each other and be taken back to that place on their bad days. There would be times where they couldn’t stand to look at each other, but they knew how to handle those now and they were becoming fewer and farther between.
“I love you, Kevin Day.” Jean said, shifting to look Kevin directly in the eye. “You are alive. And so am I.”
Alive. Both of them. It was almost enough to get Jean to believe in miracles. It would be the lead contender for a faith in the kindness of the universe. Jean Moreau, in love and alive. Something he was sure he’d never get the chance to be again. Breathing deeply on long rides and smiling softly in untroubled, fulfilling moments. And he was doing it all with the man that first stirred awake that feeling within him. The first man to kick-start the racing in his heart and the flush in his cheeks. The one who, despite all his flaws and mistakes, came back and chose to help build them up again despite holding all the power to tear him down.
Kevin stared at him with an expression that flickered between horror and hope. Jean gave him a second to process the words before he continued. Letting his face smooth out, the tension seeping out of his forehead but his nerves about the conversation showing through the way he bit his lip.
Jean smiled lightly at the action before looking up at Kevin’s eyes again. Green. They had reminded Jean of the foliage outside of his house that he and Elodie would sneak out to play in back in Marseille. It had made him oh so homesick when he first awoke in the Nest, might have even been one of the reasons he had been drawn to Kevin in the beginning.
Jean still sees that vision when he gazes into his eyes, but it is accompanied by everything that is Kevin. Brightly flashing across the court after a reckless goal, squinted and watery after a hard burst of laughter, sparking and angry in his defense, calm and intimate in so many moments.
“You stupid, beautiful man,” Jean breathed out, “How could I ever wish for more when I have this now?”
And Jean truly meant it. As he laid in bed with the man who had kept him alive for so many years, he knew he meant it with his whole heart. Just laying here would have been enough, just being the object caught in Kevin’s gaze would have been enough. Jean would have cherished a fleeting moment for the rest of his life. He would have learned to be content in his yearning.
But it was Jean making breakfast for them in their shared apartment. It was Kevin’s protein shakes on the shelf above Jean’s fruit drawer. It was driving to workouts together, talking exy strategy, and driving back, silent and satiated from the ache of their muscles. It was watching the other’s games on the couch and cheering when they scored a goal. It was critiquing each other on their performance while they got dressed for date night. It was kisses, soft in one moment and intense in another. It was finding a life with each other. It was building that life with the other in mind.
It went beyond all that Jean ever wanted. He did not want more because he already had more. More than he ever thought he’d have, more than he even allowed himself to dream of.
He was happy.
He didn’t understand how Kevin could not see his part in that.
“I love you too,” he whispered, “I just wish things could have been better to get here.”
In the face of Jean’s hard stare, Kevin gave him a thin smile.
“I can’t help but think that maybe in another life things could have been different. That maybe we would have more time. That we hadn’t wasted so much of it”
In another life…
Jean scoffed, and ignored Kevin’s affronted look as he continued, “Who cares about another life? I have this one, and it has turned out better than I ever could have imagined.”
What he didn’t say was that he feared that in another life he wouldn’t have made it to this point. He fears that they never would have been brought back together. He fears that nothing good happens to him in another life, because it is a miracle that a Moreau is happy at all. The thought of it happening more than once is a fairytale and Jean is not willing to think about the definite destruction of his happiness in another life when he has it here.
Perhaps it is selfish, and he spares a quick apology for the Jeans in other lives that are surely suffering so he has the chance not to. But he wouldn’t trade it. He wouldn’t give up what he had found if it meant the happiness of another version of him.
Kevin huffed a half-laugh and rolled his eyes at his partner, drawing Jean out of his thoughts, his usual self-satisfied smile back on his face. He brought Jean’s forehead to press against his own. Jean couldn’t see the smile change into the soft one reserved for these moments, but he knew that it resided on the man’s face by the gentle creases along the edges of his eyes.
“Alright, you win, you’re right, whatever.” Kevin pressed a light kiss to Jean’s cheek, “This is all we need,” he breathed out, “this is all I want”
And wasn’t that something? To be all someone wants, especially when that someone is Kevin Day. When that someone has been striving to be more, to have more, for longer than you’ve known him.
To be all that someone wants at the end of the day, Jean thinks that might be his favorite thing about being alive.