Chapter Text
JJ is in trouble.
Not just any kind of trouble either. Not “kooks are out to get me” trouble, or the typical shenanigans the impulsive boy often finds himself in. He’s in deep, deep trouble that he can’t quite see his way out of.
He’s got a thing for John B’s sister.
As bad as that may sound, it’s not like he intentionally fell for his best friend’s only remaining family member. In fact, he actively resisted it for as long as he could, but things changed after he and Sarah disappeared in the storm. He went from admiring her from a distance and fighting the urge to go to her anytime they were in the same room to being her support system in the absence of her brother.
If he’s honest about it, it scared him shitless to realize that he was the only thing holding the poor girl together. Pope and Kiara helped too, of course, but the fates must have designed for it to be him. With their other two friends growing closer with their newfound romance, they were left to look to each other for company when they went off to do couple-y things together. They didn’t mind it either. They understood their friends’ needs to have their alone time and it wasn’t like they ditched them, so they took it in stride and spent the time they would’ve had together as a group alone together.
He is particularly scared today because today is the day of John B’s funeral.
JJ worked on carving his name, mimicking what would’ve likely gone onto a gravestone, into the magnolia tree hanging over the back yard while Kiara and Pope went out to get flowers to place at the bottom of the tree for him.
None of them are wealthy enough to put together a proper funeral for the unofficial leader of their little group, but they knew they had to do something for him. They couldn’t in good conscience do nothing. It felt wrong, like a gaping wound left to fester with no antiseptic or stitches, so they picked up a metaphorical needle and thread and got to mending things to the best of their ability. With little life experience in how to process the death of a friend this early on, none of them are sure what ways of coping are right and wrong, but this seemed like a step in the right direction.
The only one of them who stuck by their initial state of denial surrounding his and Sarah’s deaths up until recently was Y/N. It took ages before she even admitted that her brother not coming back was a possibility, and it saddened her friends every time she’d correct someone when they’d say he was gone. Disappeared, she would clarify, “He’s not dead, he disappeared.”
It wasn’t until last week, when JJ found her sobbing, wrapped up in one of John B’s hoodies, on the end of the dock that she accepted defeat. It hit her in one sweeping, aggressive realization that the last person she had left in her family was dead, and she didn’t want to wake him with the sound of her cries, so she slipped out of the back porch to cry on the dock.
But she didn’t sneak away unnoticed.
In the time since his initial disappearance, JJ has taken to spending nights at the Chateau with her when he can and he felt her leave the bed. Their legs were tangled together beneath the sheets, bodies pressed into each other until the line distinguishing what was him and what was her blurred into nothing, and his half-awake mind alerted him of her absence instantly. He felt the warmth of her slip away until he was met with the empty outline of where she cuddled up next to him on the worn-out mattress in her bedroom.
He got up and searched the house until he was led outside by some instinctive voice inside of him that suspected he’d find her there, and, of course, that instinct was correct. When Big John disappeared, he accidentally found her out there one time when she needed a place to cry without letting anyone see, so he had a feeling.
This time, when he sets the blowtorch down, sighs at the “gravestone” he finished making, and decides it’s time to go get her for the funeral, she isn’t at the dock. He checked, just to be sure, and there was no sign of his favorite girl sitting with her head hung low and feet dangling over the water.
That’s what has led him here.
JJ stands at the side of her bed with his hat in his hands as he tries to keep himself from fidgeting. As soon as they started making plans for today, she began to regress bit by bit, and he’s been dreading this moment since he started working on the tree outside. He didn’t want to have to see her wide, sorrowful eyes glancing up at his and feel his heart sink into the pit of his stomach with helplessness.
“It’s time,” he says and braces himself for her tears, “Kie and Pope are back with the flowers, and I just finished the headstone.”
The thing is, when she turns around to see him there, she isn’t crying like he thought she would be. Her eyes aren’t puffy and red, nor are her sun-kissed cheeks marked with tear tracks to reveal the emotion she often tries to hide from him. She is not happy or sad. She looks like Y/N, and if it weren’t concerning, he’d feel relieved.
The only words that leave her mouth are, “I’m ready.”
She takes a steadying breath as she walks to the desk at the corner of her room and picks up a wooden jewelry box that was sitting opened on the tabletop. It was her moms. The one thing she left behind for her daughter before she up and left their family behind with no warning, no care for the little girl and boy who needed her, and it’s been Y/N’s most cherished possession until now.
Until she found a new cherished object to immortalize an absent loved one with in the form of one of John B’s bandanas that she never leaves the house without wearing. Right now, it sits on the edge of her bed closest to JJ while she takes a glimpse at the contents of the box and shuts it to take outside.
There’s silence for a moment. The gaps between their brief sentences are filled solely by the sound of her steps that near closer and closer to the door past him before he stops her.
“Wait a sec.”
She can’t help but stop dead in her tracks with one simple command from him and watch him take the box to set down on the bed in silence.
JJ could honestly tell her to do anything and she’d comply without questioning it. And maybe that isn’t too healthy. Maybe it has a lot to do with her putting him on this untouchable pedestal for being her anchor through this shitstorm of a situation, but she knows he’s the same way. She knows that he idealizes her just as much, if not more, for the ways she shows support for him in return.
It’s a mutual codependency that promises an ending in flames if they don’t work on fixing it, which they are trying to, they really are, but it feels so safe sometimes.
Before anyone else knew about what his dad did to him, she was the one he sought out for help. She patched him up, invited him into her room, and held him until he fell asleep. Long before either of them admitted their feelings, she was the protector in their relationship, and now that the tables have turned, they both understand the comfort to be found in having your safe place be another human being.
It feels like hell when they’re apart. It feels like drained energy and a thousand paper cuts in that pesky spot between the thumb and forefinger in the mental form. It feels like an achey, desperate longing, but when they’re together? It’s like stepping into sunlight, or being encased in a bath flooded to the top with steaming water that will relax you to the edge of sleep.
So, how could either of them be compelled to fix it? It may not be healthy at the moment with the circumstances of how they were pushed together, but it’s theirs. It’s the first real connection he’s ever had with someone and he doesn’t want it to disappear, even if it’s as mutually clingy and needy as it’s been since John B died.
“What?” she asks.
Her brows are furrowed in confusion at why he stopped her in the doorway leading to the living room, but that confusion is blown away like ashes in the wind as soon as he reaches for the bandana laying atop her messy bed.
The old floorboards creak beneath his half-laced boots with the few steps he takes to return to her, and she has to suppress her smile at the thoughtfulness of the gesture. Smiling at a time like this feels like a crime punishable by death. It sparks a pang of guilt in her without fail every time and makes her wonder if she’s a terrible person for smiling after what happened, but that’s also something they’ve been working on—albeit in their own roundabout ways. They’ve never been great at talking out their feelings together, but they try, and she has asked him if he felt the same way about it.
Apparently, he shared the sense of guilt that haunts her when she finds herself laughing at a joke or smiling ever since the disappearance. It made her feel a little less alone to know he felt it too.
JJ sweeps the two braids she slept in to the side to slip the grey patterned bandana around her neck. Pieces of hair stick every which way in the messy plaits hanging from her head, and he takes a brief second to tuck a strand behind her ear before resuming the task at hand. The cold steel of one of his rings brushes her skin as he loops the worn fabric into a knot and arranges it to sit on her neck exactly how it did on John B’s.
“There,” he says. Once he’s done, he doesn’t retreat his hands away from her. One runs the fabric between his fingers while the other drifts up the side of her neck to cup her cheek until she leans into the touch like a cat nudging its head into your touch. “You almost forgot it.”
Her hand reaches up and grabs his where it fiddles with the bandana some more, lacing their fingers together. The touch is so casual yet intimate, it makes her stomach feel airy and light with butterflies. She’ll never get past the fact that they’re a thing now. After years of pining for her brother’s best friend, she never would’ve assumed her crush would actually lead them anywhere, but now…
Now, she’s in over her head with him. It has her torn somewhere between using the L word and being too terrified of scaring him off to dare drop that bomb on him this soon. It’s not like their relationship is completely undefined, they are exclusive, that much she knows since he told her he stopped sleeping with other girls after they started hanging out, but it’s not necessarily serious yet. Not in the way that it must be for those words to be said.
The sound of her voice is soft when she breaks her silence, squeezing his hand once, “Thanks, angel.”
That is something that has taken getting used to on his part. He’s not used to being treated with such tenderness and care, not used to pet names and holding hands and kisses. It’s all welcome, though, even if it makes his face heat up and flush bright red whenever she likens him to a figure as innocent and holy as an angel. It makes no sense to him why she calls him that, seeing as he’s literally the stark opposite of an angel with his attitude about sex and affinity for stealing whatever isn’t nailed down, but he secretly likes it.
He watches her look around for a second, eyes flickering from left to right in the direction of the living room, and cuts her off before she can bother to ask the question.
“Pope and Kie are outside if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Keeping it a secret wasn’t his idea, it was hers. It was one more thing that would take needless explaining and conversation that she already didn’t have the energy for with everyone pestering her about her feelings, so she wanted them to keep it to themselves. At least for a little while.
Y/N’s face seems to twitch with an urge to smile that she doesn’t completely fulfill. She gives him as much of struggling half-smile as she can given the current circumstances and says softly, “Well, that’s fortunate for you ‘cause I wanted to do this,” as she leans up on her toes to kiss him.
The taste on his lips is sweet, which might have something to do with the orange they split for a snack right before he left the comfort of her bedroom to carve the headstone for John B, and she savors it for the limited amount of time she gets to kiss him. Their kisses are often not this calm. They’re usually desperate and explosive, panting for air in the seconds-long breaks they allow themselves before diving back in for another go that will inevitably lead to sex.
However, knowing that their friends are waiting, it’s a chaste, short-lived kiss that would normally leave them both wanting more, but it doesn’t today. Their minds are elsewhere, more focused on the importance of the goodbye they’re giving to someone so close to their hearts, so this is all they need to sustain themselves.
When they part, there’s a sad smile on his face, and he doesn’t even need to say anything for her to understand it.
It’s bittersweet to enjoy the feeling of being together while mourning the absence of another person that should be here. John B should be chasing JJ around and threatening to throw him into the marsh for screwing around with his sister. They should be cracking jokes about it and laughing at his protective side, not preparing his makeshift funeral.
“C'mon,” JJ says, stepping aside to pick up the closed jewelry box and hand it back to her, “Lets go before they think we eloped.”
Brought back to the reality of what they’re doing today, Y/N is a lot less talkative on their way out of the Chateau to meet their friends in the back yard. There was a brief span of seconds when she leaned up to kiss him where she almost forgot the rest of what was happening in their lives. The gold hunt, the disappearances, and the general chaos of the summer didn’t swarm her thoughts as aggressively as usual.
The air is charged with a strange energy between the Pogues when they finally venture out into the yard. She walks across it with bare feet, minding the sticks and possibly splinter-y the plants here or there, and feels the need to keep her eyes averted from them despite the fact that they’re the only other people who understand what she’s going through.
JJ has to resist the urge to take her hand into his by the time they come to a stop in front of the carved tree. He hears her take in a trembling inhale at the sight of the words he burned into the trunk. Singed in the open wood, the words, “John B. Routledge. 2003-2020,” glare back at her.
Standing shoulder to shoulder between Pope and JJ, she finds it hard to conjure up the words to say to begin this mini funeral of theirs. In her head, there is so much to be said, too much even. Sometimes it gets so loud in there that there’s nothing she can do to drown it out short of getting high with JJ or drinking, and she knows it won’t work long-term, but it helps.
The mahogany box is smooth beneath the tips of her fingers rubbing over the the top of it in a repetitive motion in the hopes that it will calm her, interrupted by the odd scratch or scuff that occured long before it came into her possession.
She never lets anyone else touch it, whenever it gets dust it on, she cleans it, and whenever John B used to ask her why she takes such good care of something that belonged to their deadbeat mother, she defends it. For some reason, this was what she clung to when her mom left, and with a thought about the bandana secured around her neck, she understands why she needs these tokens for the ghosts in her life.
Her dad’s token was the Chateau itself.
It lives and breathes his memory back to her whenever she wakes up and walks around to see the framed pictures, furniture he used to sit on, and the door of the room he often hid himself away in to research that damned gold that got everyone she had left killed.
Well, she thinks when she feels JJ’s shoulder brush hers, almost everyone.
“Um,” Y/N stammers for a second and fiddles with the latch on the jewelry box, unsure of whether or not she can handle this. “Can one of you guys go first? It’ll be easier if…”
“I can go.”
Her head turns to see Kie on the other side of Pope with a sad, yet reassuring smile on her face. The late afternoon sun washes her features in a veil of marigold that compliments the natural highlights sweeping through the curls of her hair.
The brunette beauty steps forward once, just to be a pace closer to John B’s “resting place”, and takes a deep breath to herself before starting.
Having to listen to her friends pour their hearts out to the empty air where her brother should be standing is like rubbing salt into the festering, unstitched wound of her grief for him. She tries to tune it out for the sake of holding herself together enough to be able to say what she’ll need to last, and it makes her wish she got it over with before the rest of them stepped up to say their goodbyes.
She keeps it together the best she can when Pope steps forward, just one step, and speaks his mind. It’s mostly short and sweet, an attempt to stop them all from tearing up the way they would if they went on sprawling speeches about what they miss the most about him.
That’s what the letters inside of the jewelry box are for.
A few days ago, she came to them with the idea after Pope proposed the idea of a funeral between the Pogues for their late friend. They decided that they’d come up with ideas of what to do to memorialize him, and she found herself wishing she could speak her final words for him into the universe. That was when she marched into the living room, pulled out a notepad, and brought it back to her bedroom to draft up a letter to him.
JJ didn’t mind offering to let her ride on the back of his bike for a trip to the store to pick up envelopes, paper, stickers, and the glittery pens at the checkout line that she simply couldn’t resist when she set eyes on them.
“Snazzy,” he joked when he uncapped the hot pink glitter pen as they wrote their letters together on the hammock, “He’d appreciate the glitter. Even in the afterlife, he can’t escape you putting your girly little stickers all over his shit, the poor fucker.”
She playfully shoved his leg with hers for the remark and let the action devolve them into a minutes-long wrestling match that nearly landed them ass over teapot onto the grass beneath them.
The comment didn’t upset her, though, it made her stomach ache with the familiar feeling that came along with missing her brother, but it didn’t upset her. It made her to laugh because of how right he was. Since they were kids, she’s always kept around a packet or two of stickers. It started with teachers in preschool leaving them on her worksheets and resulted in Big John treating her to a value pack from Dollar Tree that warmed her giddy heart beyond words.
This led to her leaving her mark everywhere she went with them, which meant John B was the unfortunate victim of her sticker attacks more than he wanted to be. His handmade textbook covers, his hats, his hands, his desk, his phone case, and the interior of his beloved Volkswagen van. Everywhere.
He pretended to hate it too. He groaned and told her to stop putting her unicorns, butterflies, hearts—you name it, she had it at one point or another—on his things, but he secretly lived for finding those things on his stuff. And when they fought, all it took was him finding a scratch 'n sniff sticker with the words, “Berry Good!” printed onto it for him to take a second to debate if the petty argument was worth it.
That was why she laughed through the duration of the pretend fight she and JJ had on the hammock. She laughed until he stopped, hovered over her, and leaned down to kiss her for a second or two. Then, the second or two bled into a moment or two, which bled into five minutes of panting, open-mouthed kisses and wandering hands before she finally redirected them back to their unwritten letters.
Four letters are tucked safely into the box between her hands along with his favorite t-shirt folded up along the bottom as a cushion for them. Her envelope is decked out in stickers, and the rest of theirs have one each stuck over the flap to keep it secured in place.
Her mind is drifting to keep her emotions at bay when she feels a strong, familiar hand grab onto her shoulder. Despite her having the pattern of his palm memorized down to the swirls of his fingerprints, she always knows it’s him based on the confidence with which he touches her nowadays. Before, it was more unsure and apprehensive in the way you touch someone who you aren’t used to touching. Now, he doesn’t have to spare a second thought to slip his hands beneath her shirt, let alone innocently settle his hand over the edge of her shoulder.
Those tense shoulders melt into a heavy exhale she hadn’t realize she was holding, and she looks over at him with the urge to cry rushing to her tired eyes.
“What?” she asks, sniffling.
“I said it’s your turn.”
He pauses, thumb daring to stray for a second to rub circles into her soft skin in comfort before retreating entirely. His hand falls back to his side.
“You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to,” Pope says softly.
They’re all fighting off emotion at this point for reasons they don’t know why. They shouldn’t hide their feelings, they should share them and let themselves feel them in their full vivid intensity until they run their course, but they don’t want to get themselves too worked up. They may be the closest friends they’ve ever had, but this is a lot, even for them.
She shakes her head straight away.
No way. After they opened themselves up the vulnerability of bidding John B goodbye, there’s no way she can allow them to do it alone. That’s a rule violation whether they know it or not. Never leave a Pogue behind. They’ll do it together. All of them or none at all.
“No. I want to, I was just thinking too much. I’m sorry.”
Taking a step forward require every ounce of courage she has, but she does it. She takes a step forward until the tips of her white painted toes are digging into the freshly turned earth that dips into a jewelry box-sized hole JJ dug for her earlier this morning.
She forces the words out before she can overthink it, like jumping into a freezing pool in a rush of adrenaline pumped excitement to get the adjustment over with.
“Um, I feel like I said everything I could think of in my letter, but I wanted to say goodbye to you for real this time,” she begins to speak directly to the name inscribed on the tree trunk.
“You were the best big brother ever. Like in the history of the universe, I don’t think it could’ve gotten any better than having you to grow up with. Even when we fought over how I stole food off your plate, or when I whipped you with my phone charger cord for pushing me off the dock"—her friends laughing softly behind her at the memory makes her grin through her stuffy voice speaking the next words—"you were still my favorite person.”
“I honestly still think I see you sometimes. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you’re still around, 'cause you’re everywhere. I’ll see someone from behind and think it’s you. Or, I’ll be driving in van with your favorite song on and if I try hard enough, I can pretend you’re sitting there too.” She chokes back a cry and continues, “And, Sarah, I’m really sorry I didn’t have more time to know you. I know you loved him so much, and I know this puts a lot of faith in my shithead brother to not fuck up sometime along the way, but it would’ve been fun to be your sister one day.”
Her lip wobbles with the urge to cry, and she can’t help it this time. The tears spill over the brims of her eyes without anything to stop them as her hands squeeze the sides of the box harder. The rest of them watch her shoulders tremble with the quiet sobs and let the sound sink their aching hearts.
The feeling of Pope coming up behind her and wrapping his arms around her in a hug makes her cry a little harder, then she feels Kie and, finally, JJ, and loses any semblance of control of herself.
“Goodbye.” The next few words are a hardly audible whisper, “I miss you.”
For a while, they remain huddled together in front of the tree with their arms tangled around each other’s bodies. Her tears brought on theirs, and now they’re all crying softly to themselves in a moment of sweeping emotion that is so vulnerable, they don’t know what to do other than let it pass without interference. The only other moment they’ve shared similar to this was when she, Pope, and Kie held JJ as he cried in the hot tub. It was a difficult day for them, but little did they know, that wouldn’t be the end of their hard times.
It’s when they pull away that she presses a kiss to the top of the jewelry box, crouches to her knees, and sets it down in the hole in the ground.
They bury it together.