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Kevin follows where Jean leads, holding what Riko has for him in his hands. Jean could have slipped it into Kevin’s pocket, but he didn’t. Instead he steps out into the hallway, into one of the stadium’s indistinguishable and empty rooms. It’s a new experience: there were no indistinguishable rooms in the Nest.
Kevin shuts the door behind them.
“For your petit ami,” Jean says, shoving the paper into his chest. “Do you understand?”
Jean has a nasty little sneer on his face, his manner brusque like he wants to get this over with, like he wants nothing to do with Kevin.
But: he could have slipped the paper into Kevin’s pocket.
It’s a ticket. Kevin reads it over, then folds it back up and puts it into his jacket. “I understand,” he says, because he does. It’s not so far off from what he expected of Riko, what he’d told Neil to expect. The thought makes him feel a dull sense of horror. But it’s not worth arguing about. Jean has nothing to do with it.
Jean, who has been watching his reaction in careful silence, scowling. Up close, away from the lights and the crowd, he doesn’t look so good. Sickly, and kind of gray. He’s lost weight noticeably since Kevin saw him last, and he didn’t have much to spare. All this makes something awful and frantic start churning in Kevin’s stomach. It’s not fair that it’s his fault, but it is.
Jean says, “He could have stayed hidden from Riko forever, but he threw it away to defend you. And you will deliver him right into Riko’s arms, won’t you?”
“What do you expect me to do?” Kevin says.
“I doubt there is anyone on earth who expects anything from you, Kevin.”
Kevin always has sympathy for Jean, right up until Jean opens his mouth and makes him forget it.
“Am I honestly supposed to believe you care about Neil Josten?” he says, already regretting the words. If Jean wants to call him a selfish coward, well, he deserves far worse.
“Why not?" Jean smiles meanly. "He’ll be my teammate longer than yours.”
Kevin takes a deep breath, trying not to react, to him, to all this. It never used to take any effort to feel bad for Jean, but then again, he usually had a more up-close view of the carnage.
Jean says, “He will come, you know.”
“Maybe,” Kevin admits. He knew Neil’s desperation, the price he’d pay to hold onto Exy for even a second longer. Yes, most likely, Neil would go.
Jean sniffs, then says, with a dismissiveness that’s not at all believable, and in a strangely catty tone, “Probably you think he is very brave.”
Kevin stares at him. Jean looks almost — embarrassed, strangely — but he doesn’t drop Kevin’s gaze, his expression cold. The fluorescent lights overhead give a sudden flicker, and Jean startles so violently it causes Kevin to flinch on reflex. Jean’s eyes dart over Kevin’s shoulder to the closed door. He’s very pale.
It is, Kevin realizes suddenly, taking every ounce of willpower Jean has to stand here with Kevin like this, and he's using that time to needle him to some pointless and incomprehensible end.
A wave of pity hits Kevin, almost too painful to bear within his own body. In the Nest, Jean never laughed, but sometimes if Kevin was being particularly difficult, or tactless, or rigid, the corner of his mouth had curved upwards and he’d turn his face away, not so much hiding the expression from Kevin but keeping it for himself, something private being tucked aside. Of course in the moment it had always infuriated Kevin more, but now it seems unthinkably cruel that he had taken himself away from Jean, if for no other reason than that: because sometimes Jean had looked at him and felt something precious enough to guard it before someone could take it from him.
All of a sudden Jean’s anger seems a pitifully transparent pretense.
“I’m sorry,” Kevin says, and his voice comes out awkward with gentleness. Clumsily, and missing all the signs — how Jean has stiffened, the hard shuttered look on his face — he tries, “I know it will be hard for you to have him there.”
Jean slaps him. He puts his heart into it; it snaps Kevin’s head to the side, makes him stumble half a step. When he steadies himself Jean is staring at him, his mouth open a bit like he’s surprised himself. Then he turns sharply away. Kevin resists the urge to raise his hand to his cheek and touch the place where it’s hot and stinging. Instead he watches the harsh rise and fall of Jean’s shoulders.
“It’s alright,” Kevin says. It is; either the blow itself, or Jean’s rare lapse in self-control, was so perfectly unexpected that it made Kevin’s mind go blank.
“Shut up,” Jean says through clenched teeth. He’s shaking all over.
Kevin’s never seen Jean like this before, so close to the edge. It’s not difficult to imagine what Riko’s reaction would be if Jean ever dared to hit him, or even if Jean had dared to hit Kevin, like this, in front of him. Kevin feels almost… untethered; because something that would have been unthinkable in the Nest had just happened, and it didn’t matter at all.
It seems cruel to ask the question, but more selfish to avoid it, when Jean is so — unstable, so shaken up, such a clear reminder that Kevin has no clue what the Nest is like anymore without him. He says, “Is it… very terrible?”
It’s a long moment before Jean turns back around. There’s still a trace of surprise on his face, and Jean is very hard to surprise.
“You are unbelievable,” he says, faintly. Then: “It is fine. Sometimes, it is fine.”
At first Kevin thinks that’s all he’ll say. But after a moment’s consideration, with some of that caustic, cruel amusement returning to his eyes, and holding Kevin’s gaze like a dare, he adds, “Riko gets lonely, too, now. All alone in your empty bedroom. No one else to hold his attention. So it is lucky for me, you see.”
For a moment Kevin feels himself resist understanding, and then he flinches, jaw clenching. He’s… surprised to find he can imagine it quite easily, some hideous parody of intimacy, which probably means Jean is telling the truth. Worse, that Jean wants him to picture it, to send Kevin’s mind spinning away.
For all the violence he imagined Riko taking out on Jean, it hadn’t really occurred to him that he’d left them no one to turn to in his loss but each other. But of course he’d noticed, in retrospect, how closely Jean stuck to Riko’s side now, how close to him he had sat at the banquet table, the usual strict apartness Jean had always tried to enforce around his body gone, too subtle a difference for anyone but Kevin, probably, to notice. Riko wouldn’t fuck Jean — not personally at least (and with a usual rush of strange resentment at the subject, Kevin can’t help but think that if Jean was just a bit better at Exy the thought of what kinds of noises his body would make when someone pushed inside of him might never have occurred to Riko, and maybe that would have left them all as something a bit more salvageable, one last line uncrossed) — but there would be something novel for Riko in whatever of Jean’s final reserves had broken.
Kevin sees a whole handful of nauseating possibilities: Jean with his head moving rhythmically in Riko’s lap; curled asleep on the floor at the foot of his bed. Begging for scraps.
He never could have imagined that Jean would debase himself in that way.
Too late to hide any of this on his face. Jean is watching him with a hard smile, something coldly amused in his eyes.
“Jealous?” Jean says.
Kevin hears the anger in his own voice before he’s even aware of feeling it. “You don’t have to humiliate yourself to me to make a point, Jean. You’re more clever than that.”
“I hate you,” Jean says.
Kevin laughs humorlessly, exhausted. “Fine.”
“No one even…” Jean cuts himself off, pressing his the heels of his hands to his eyes with a laugh of his own. His voice has gone tight. “This is the longest conversation I’ve had in months.”
“Jean—”
Kevin reaches out, catching Jean’s elbow, and Jean lifts his face up. If Kevin thought he might be crying, he was mistaken, but the relief is short-lived. Jean’s eyes are red, not with sadness but with fury, and he lifts the arm that Kevin is touching and backhands him across the other cheek.
The bright burst of pain is sharp and clear. Familiar, even in a new form. Kevin does touch his face this time, as though to hold himself together along a fault line.
“Do not touch me,” Jean is saying, short and vicious, shoving Kevin back a step. If he ever sounded like this before, this undone, Kevin can’t remember it. “Do not talk. Stop saying anything. I do not want it.”
Kevin feels a cold bolt of fear, only remarkable for its intensity. Riko is just outside, back through the court doors, and Jean knows this, and he’s fraying apart anyway, splitting at the seams. It makes Kevin want to say absurd things that neither of them have ever believed, to placate him with nonsense, it’s okay, it’ll be okay, just to get him to pull himself together.
But when he straightens and blinks his vision clear, he sees that Jean is staring at his cheek with a riveted intensity, at the place where it must be stained red. Jean raises one hand, as though to touch the mark he’s made, before stopping. Something about the look in his eyes sends a swooping little jolt through Kevin’s stomach.
It’s not an unfamiliar expression. An abrupt sense of devastation passes over Kevin at the thought. Nothing will remain of them for much longer, Kevin knows that. What he and Jean had been to each other would erode — too much stood between them. Already, they’re different, and Kevin isn’t sure if the person Jean had wanted this from even exists anymore.
Kevin had made it out, at least for as long as it’ll last. The Foxes would always be worth something as long as Andrew stood in goal. What did Jean have, by comparison? What had Kevin left him with?
And Jean had always wanted this so badly, hid it so well, caused no problems.
Kevin wishes he could be kind to Jean right now. He’s not sure what that would look like, but he’d like to try. Still, he understands why that’s so intolerable to Jean. Dangerous, even.
So instead he says, “You can.” Watches Jean’s breathing get shallower, more ragged, his eyes very dark. “You can do what you want.”
“Shut up,” Jean says, forcing the words out, punctuating them with another shove. “I am. I am doing it.”
“Okay.”
Kevin knows the expression on his face is patronizing, but he just likes Jean so much, a despairing kind of fondness, even for this horrible version of him, who probably lets Riko touch his hair and his face and would hit Kevin now if he tried to do the same. What would he have let me do, Kevin thinks, half-hysterically, a year ago?
Jean shoves Kevin back up against the door, and Kevin lets him. It’s really the least he can do. There’s an almost crazed look in Jean’s eyes when he steps closer, and his breathing is rapid.
Kevin’s not stupid enough to think it’s anticipation, or even desire. It’s terror. He holds still, letting Jean approach, letting him—
Just letting him.
“It’s alright,” he murmurs, lifting one hand to Jean’s side. Jean makes a sound, sharp and desolate, then says, “Stop — giving me — permission—” and Kevin expects it when he hits him this time, hard at the side of the head. When his knees buckle, Jean catches him by the hair before he can stumble, slaps him again across the face.
The inside of Kevin’s lip splits where his teeth snag on it, hot sick iron in his mouth, his eyes stinging. It’ll swell overnight; others will see; it hardly matters. Andrew isn’t here.
Jean is standing close to him now, and when Kevin collapses back against the door, he tips forward to rest his forehead against Kevin’s shoulder. Kevin stares dazedly out at the empty room, thinks: ow, thinks: why.
There’s a strange, shuddering sound every time Jean exhales. Jean’s hand, cramped between them, skirts down Kevin’s stomach, then starts working his shirt loose from his belt. Somehow, it still seems like an almost nonsensical thing to happen next, even as a hot throb pulses low in Kevin’s gut. He’s not sure how this is happening. He’s not sure how to tell if he wants it to stop.
“You’ll like it,” Jean says, so low that it might not matter to him whether or not Kevin can hear it. He opens Kevin’s pants, his fingers quick and sure as they slip inside, take hold of him.
Kevin’s body responds, to the touch itself and to the press of Jean against him, lean, hard muscle, the absurdity of being close to him again. No one ever touches him; if they do, Andrew makes them stop. Certainly no one touches him like this.
He’s glad that he doesn’t have to do anything. He’s not sure what he would do. He doesn’t, after all, know very much about sex. If that’s even what this is, if it even counts. Each time before, Riko was watching, instructing him, slower and there and guess no one’s good at everything.
No one is instructing him now. Jean’s other hand is tight on his wrist, holding it immobile against the door.
So he does nothing. Pleasure coils up inside of him. Jean breathes in wet, ragged gasps against his collarbone, his head still bowed. He smells like the shampoo in the showers at the Nest, his hair tickling Kevin’s chin. Kevin wants to look down, but he also knows he won’t be able to bear it, the sight of Jean’s hand on him, touching him. Or that he’ll have to bear it, for a long time.
Then it doesn’t matter, because he’s closing his eyes and his head tips back, his body tensing in a rush, a sharp twist like a fist clenching in his gut.
In the sudden receding of sensation, he is aware that he's the one breathing loudly now, and Jean has fallen silent. Embarrassment floods him, hot. He sounds — needy, uncontrolled, like some animal. So he shuts his mouth. Waits for something else to happen.
Jean steps away, his stare fixed to the floor. He turns and wipes his hand off. Sweat prickles Kevin’s forehead as it cools.
“Is that…” he says, his voice cracking. “Are you done?”
Jean flinches. It’s just that it seems like Jean is done with him now, just standing there like someone’s flipped an off switch. His eyes are so flat and empty it would scare Kevin, except that this is what he wanted: Jean looks more like himself again, more recognizable.
“We should hurry,” Jean murmurs, still looking anywhere else.
Kevin tucks his shirt back into his pants, does up his button and his belt. It’s difficult, watching the edge of Jean’s sharply turned face, watching him take careful even breaths as though forcing himself to steady, to imagine why Jean wanted any of that to happen. But he’d done it.
It kind of… hurts, almost; makes something clench deep inside Kevin’s chest for Jean. He wants to say: Can’t you ever just make it easy on yourself? And the sheer wrongness of that statement, the undoubtable fact that Jean has always tried to do just that, makes Kevin feel that he’s probably got this all wrong somehow, that he hasn’t understood much, if any, of how their lives have happened, and that makes something else happen inside of him, something panicked, until he lets the thought go away.
The edge of the ticket presses against him from inside of his pocket. He swallows hard until he feels that he can speak. “Don’t let Riko…”
The memory of Andrew half-naked on a bed is very close; Jean half-naked on a bed, closer still. He doesn’t know why in that moment he thinks Jean would have any power to stop it, when he couldn’t — when he hadn’t, for himself.
Then, for a shameful half-second, Kevin wonders if he’s revealed too much, told Jean exactly how to hurt him if Jean wanted to.
But of course not, and Jean is finally looking at him now, no spite or scorn or calculation on his face. Kevin doesn’t even try to read the expression that is there, some layered and private sorrow, and he knows Jean has understood his meaning.
“He won’t,” Jean says. “Neil’s yours, so he won’t.”
There’s something terrible about that logic, but, Kevin supposes as he turns numbly for the door, it’s true regardless.