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Kevin could barely remember the day Kayleigh died. On the best days, he mostly remembered her smile, her green eyes. He could remember the way she would ruffle his hair, welcome him in open arms, with a bright warm smile and words of appreciation for the first goals he scored. The worst days, he could not even remember her burial. Sometimes, the name on the back of his jersey meant nothing at all, just a few letters stuck to each other. He would card his fingers on the fabric, trying to find meaning in the tightly woven cotton. But there was none to find.
The one thing he could never forget, though, no matter how much he tried to drink it all away was his brother’s dead eyes, on the infirmary’s bed, a few days before Kevin’s mother was buried. A dull, empty gaze staring back at him, lost in a too-big, too-white bed, sclera covered in blood in one eye, bruises on his jaw, running down his neck.
When the coffin would come down in Kayleigh’s tomb, it would be heavy with her body and Riko’s last shards of innocence.
He would never know what happened that day. All he knew was that one minute, Riko was walking with them, each one of Kayleigh's hands busy holding on to the little ones'. Guiding them from one street to another. He couldn't remember where they were going, but it didn't matter. Riko looked young, in this memory, throwing gleeful smiles at Kevin, talking about a sport they did not entirely grasp the importance it would have later on. Talking about exy as if it were nothing but one of those recess games. Asking questions about rules, eager to learn more, eager to hear Kayleigh's voice.
Kevin blinked and the memory dissolved into the other, the one he could never forget. His mother nor his brother were nowhere to be found, he had been forbidden to walk into the infirmary, and he broke the rules. It would be the last time he would do such a thing.
Riko was lying down on this cot, broken and bruised and dead. He looked like a ghost. Kevin had no idea why Riko was in the infirmary. He did not know that Riko had undergone the most painful procedure ever, all the kind bones in his body surgically removed. No matter how much Kevin could love him after, it would not weave them back together, there were no shards to fix or repair. It was simply too late. His brother died a few hours before that, on the Master's carpeted office floor. Red flecks in the black fabric that would never get caught by light, that nobody would ever suspect. Cruelty blending in shadows. People would later hold a mind that was immensely shattered and would rather think it was always like this, that the canyons and rifts and fractures only grew with the boy.
Kevin knew the truth. He was simply too weak to face it when he was sober.
His brother was not insane. His brother had not always been a monster. He used to be a boy. He used to be a son. Love was not something the Master had allowed him to have. He was a second-born, he was not allowed to have things. He was not even a spare, a mistake thrown at another mistake to raise. Merely a pet, one of those with a duty, and the pet was asked to only ever use this duty to stay alive. He had kissed the hand that fed him and everything was taken away from him - the hand and his own lips, to forbid him from kisses. His mouth was sewn shut. He wouldn't ever be able to kiss, to whisper or to have anything. He had let himself be wanted, be loved, and in turn, his soul had been taken away from him.
Sometimes Kevin could not stomach what his teammates, his friends, his family, would say about this monster that they did not know. They would call him cruel, heartless, they would talk about the things he so-called deserved to see happening to him. And Kevin would excuse himself and drink until his hands stopped shaking with the urge to pull the curtain back, to remove the shadows surrounding his partner to show them what he saw.
They would only say he's behaving like an abused housewife, trying to defend her handler.
They all turned a blind eye on the pile of mangled bodies spelling "HELP ME" because the murders do not have the kindness to be ethical.
He saw. He saw the calls for help, he could hear the begging inside his own mind, a loud scream that sometimes kept him away from court. Kevin had always been helpless. His anger had always been nothing but bravado, a long game of playing pretend.
Kevin Day was not able to feel anger.
The deadliest piece on the board could only give him so much power, he was always destined to be a spectator in a tragedy that made him collateral damage.
The day he lost Kayleigh was the day Riko's self-destruction had begun. A narrative spurred on by the Master's knife and cane to Riko's innocence. Kevin Day was not in this story. He did not have rebellion and anger etched onto his spine. He could not stomach the grotesque plea. He could only stay from afar, body facing the monster but gaze turned away.
Kevin Day was no saviour. He was the silent witness. The abiding sheep.
Kevin was not angry; he could not save Riko.
⁂
He only had ever been angry once in his life. When the Master brought an angry boy from abroad, grey stormy eyes planted in front of him, a resolute pout on his teenage mouth and fists held by his sides as if he were to throw them at the slight disrespect. He was tall, he held his head high.
Riko had seen him from the shadows of his heart and had claimed the storm his.
Kevin had been angry, as he held Jean Moreau's wrists too tight in his hands, as he watched his brother draw bloody lines across miles on male of pale, exposed skin. He had been angry at the new guy's silence. He had hated him. He had wanted to take everything from him to stitch it to his own skin, an absurd, bloody spectacle. He had tried to take his secret language from him, he had tried his best to teach him that family meant nothing here. He could not have a family that was his, without Kevin trying to take it for himself first. He had given him things, to make Jean a little more his, an extension of himself.
Was Kevin not enough to tame Riko's shadows? Was his blood not red enough? Were the scars littering his body not pretty enough, that they had to take this stranger, this foreigner and throw him in there? Was he not enough of a docile sheep that they had to bring in a rabbit to feed a young hungry god?
Kevin had been angry when Jean had first walked in. Kevin had hated him, and Kevin had wanted to bleed across the number three drawn with sharpie on his cheek, because three was odd, three was a mistake in the Nest. Pairs and partners came in twos and they were uneven, limping on broken legs. Kevin had tried to urge Riko to amputate the newfound tumor, but Riko had refused, obsessed by the storm in Jean Moreau's grey eyes, until it dissolved, until the hunger was back.
Kevin's anger receded. He started to dissolve, too. He gave his soul to the court, in hopes to keep his brother's eyes on him. All he could get was the right to sit by the bedframe and hold Jean down, without the French boy ever accepting to scream. All he could see were Riko's dull eyes and the makeup staining his jaw, down his neck.
To this day, he did not understand why the Master had thought they would ever have the need for Jean Moreau. Why Isaac was brought to Abel's sacrifice.
He had tried to make something out of this anger, and he had tried to reclaim his place next to Riko's throne. Jean had a three made with markers and destruction on his cheek but Kevin knew what Riko looked like before the master had taken everything away from him. He had memories and knowledge, knew where the tender spots on his body were. He had been the one taking a tattoo gun to Riko's cheek and marking it permanently.
Riko had been six years old when his mouth was sewn shut so he would never know the taste of affection.
Kevin had been fourteen when he had decided to bite at invisible stitches to pry that jaw open and lap at the bloodied mess that was Riko's tongue, cheekbone still red and swollen with fresh ink.
He hadn't known, at the time, why Riko had stepped back, why Riko had held his wrists away from his own body. He would not get it until he would meet Andrew Minyard, until he would try to hold a goalkeeper close to himself in gratitude.
Riko still let him kiss him. Riko still let him bite and kiss and fight for a place by his side. Riko had melted under the weight of Kevin's blind devotion, and Kevin had pulled away with the selfish satisfaction of being the only one to be able to know how Riko tasted. Satisfaction of seeing that despite everything, Riko's blood was as red as his or Jean Moreau.
When a few days later, he was sewing Jean's back whole again, French whispers, his own brand of shadows surrounded him and he got to take Jean's first kiss too.
All the firsts were his. First kisses. First on the leaderboard.
Firsts and thirsts alike.
Kevin was not angry; but oh God, how greedy he was.
⁂
Sometimes, from the back of the club, while the music was blasting and the alcohol was making his heart pound so loud he couldn't even see, this specific memory would come back and haunt him. Waiting anxiously at the Nest for the Master to come back from the ERC meeting.
Tick, tock, went the clock.
Riko's heart had stopped beating long ago, and his breaths did not make a single sound.
All Kevin could hear was the sound of his heartbeat. Tension grew thicker by the minute. Somewhere, deep down, they both knew what was going to happen. He could not think, but Riko's lips were moving without making a sound. He should have seen the shadows had parted to reveal a boy with a heartbeat too, a boy whose lungs expanded and collapsed in rhythm. A boy who had his eyes wide open and refused to shy away from the oncoming truth, but still tried to pray it all away.
People liked to believe Kevin had been the one pleading while the hammer came down again, and again. It was easier for them to imagine Kevin's lips biting back the "please, please, please" and begging to stop. They could not fathom that Kevin had offered his hand, knowing he could learn to play with the other. They did not know Riko had looked like a boy, hammer in hand, bruises everywhere on his body for letting Kevin get better than him. He had loved and he had decided to let Kevin win, to gift him the successes that were supposed to be the King's and he was getting punished for it. He had begged Kevin to fight him.
They did not like thinking about Kevin who had ruptured the stitches on Riko's mouth, they did not like realising that when he had given up his hand to a scared, threatened boy, he had decided to leave the boy's mouth hanging open like the hinges had come loose. He hadn't screamed.
The Master had watched, ready to strike Riko at the first sign of weakness. Riko had begged Kevin to fight for them both. Hushed whispers, tears on his cheeks. Before Kevin passed out from the pain, momentarily, Riko had begged him again.
"Please leave. Please run away. Don't make them force me to take your life."
Somewhere deep within him, he had hoped this would happen. He would be his first murder too, he would be the blood permanently stuck to his fingernails, he would be the ghost haunting his memories and nightmares. After letting Kevin take everything from him, Jean took this away from Kevin and threw him out, put him in a car with a badly patched up hand.
Under the warm spray of water, in the Foxes' locker room, Kevin would wonder what happened to Riko after this. How the Master reacted to him following orders, did his jaw get wired shut after the stitches had come undone? Did they muzzle him? Did they make sure he would be too scared of hands to accept them against his hair? Did Riko try to break his own hand after that, so they would match, a slow suicide because he wouldn't find playing without Kevin worth it?
Kevin had contemplated crashing the very expensive car, gas tank full with a stranger's kindness.
He hoped Riko had, too, looking at the hands covered in his brother's blood.
He had offered his left hand with a smile, knowing the memory would never leave Riko, hoping to save him - because despite not having the words to explain why Riko always kept Kevin's hands far from his body, he always knew. He had offered his hand, trying to prove he was the superior sacrificial lamb, trying to show how white his fur was. He had listened to his brother's pleas, knowing he would come out of it disfigured but victorious.
He had undone all the Master had tried to do.
Riko had surgically removed all the anger from his body with tears in his eyes and prayers on his bloody tongue. He had tried to force the kindness he used to have between Kevin's teeth so he would hold on to it, and Kevin had spat it back at his face.
Yet he had not given up on all that made him Kevin Day, number 2 player of exy, out of revenge, out of the desire to annihilate Riko. He had done it in worship, in complete trust. It was a show of love, another way to put his fingers in his partner’s mouth to keep it open, so he would never be able to escape affection. A backdoor kept unlocked so someone would be able to come back and save the boy standing in the middle of shadows.
It wouldn’t be him.
He was no longer angry or brave, he had no longer a throne to sit next to. He had a broken hand, a torn-up limb at his side, a kingdom made of ashes and deserted battlefields. He had a tomb in shape of a brother.
He could not die to repent himself. He was not allowed to find redemption by lying down in the dirt. He would live with the ghost of Riko's tears and the bitter taste of his own lies when he told the story of how it happened. Seeing his reflection was always the hardest thing to do after that.
He could not let others know the taste of Riko's tears.
Kevin was not angry; he held onto the memories like one holds onto a glass shard and hopes they get hurt by it.
⁂
He shouldn't have been surprised. He had known Neil Josten's anger like the back of his hands, as much as he knew Andrew's. He should have known this would happen. Yet, shock still painted his face when he saw a monster-shaped boy, by Neil Josten's side. Both of them covered in flecks of blood.
He barely remembered what they told him had happened. People had died. A gun was handed to Neil to enact his vengeance on the monster who had dared to try and shoot down a meteor, a supernova, a burning star.
Neil hadn't seen a monster, so used to walking through shadows of his own. He had seen a puppet, controlled by an exoskeleton forcing his bones into uncomfortable positions, he had seen the struck dog who didn't know anything but survival. He had seen someone eager to let death redeem him. So he had taken the gun and aimed it at Ichirou.
He had cradled the monster, and told him something that Kevin could only imagine sounded like this.
"You do not get the easy way out. There are no higher powers that will judge you. You will live with the consequences. You are your choices."
Neil had taken redemption away from Riko's hands. Neil had helped him keep his balance until they had gotten to Kevin's hotel room. He had thrown the monster to a brother's cautious hands.
There was no higher being that would absolve Kevin either, it seemed. He had to watch as Riko recoiled in fear of touch. He could not ignore it anymore. There was blood under Riko's fingernails. Nothing kept his mouth shut but his tongue had been cut off. Silent. Silent. Silent. Unable to give affection. Limbs bound by fear so he would not be able to escape it. Living with the permanent hunger for someone else's kindness, a kindness he had been forced to push away. A kindness he could not give to anyone, not even to himself. Hunger, and hunger and more hunger.
That night, Kevin drank himself away watching the bathroom door that concealed Riko from him, not wanting to break it down but still suffering from being so far away.
It was as if his partner had died, some time in the Nest, after Kevin's departure. He had come back, yes, but wrong, oh so wrong.
Riko was not angry anymore; he was docile and silent.
He was the wolf shed of his fur, fangs taken out with pliers, claws so overgrown they looked like hooves. His tongue did not let him bleat. He was not a lamb, he was not a wolf, he was halfway between both, a ghost haunting the kitchen in the late hours, and the Coach's office, waiting for permission to beg for forgiveness.
Kevin did not know what to do with a dead boy wanting to crawl back in his grave. He did not know because he, too, often felt like a dead boy who had surrendered his life on the green synthetic grass, to an unstoppable hammer coming down on his hand.
All he could do was pass him the bottle of vodka.
They drank together, in perfect silence. For the longest time they could not even look at each other. They were not angry anymore, but Riko had neither kind nor angry bones and he could not stand upright. He was slowly collapsing like a ragdoll.
Around four in the morning, after hours of silence, he laughed.
It was an atrocious sound, an ugly little thing, but he laughed and laughed, like a terrified little boy, he laughed the same way he would have laughed in the too-white, too-big, too-empty infirmary cot, with bruises along his jaw and down his neck, with an eye covered in blood and a mother nowhere to be found. He laughed and despite himself, Kevin had started to laugh too.
"Your father said I was free, now." Riko finally said, after he had calmed down from the nervous laughing fit. "I told him the only way to be free would be for you to break my hand. Except I know you wouldn't beg. You never begged for things. You gave them, you took them, but you never begged."
He addressed Kevin a sad smile, pulling his legs against his chest.
"I know you could never kill me either. Maybe Jean would, but only if I asked. Then it would not be a murder, right?" Kevin listened, enraptured by the drunken ramblings.
"Then, since suicide is out — I guess I can only live with what I've done. I don't want you to forgive me."
Riko had dragged himself to bed after those words, letting Kevin think about them. There was nothing to forgive. They were only boys, playing for their life, trying to survive the monstrous hunger in the pit of their stomach.
Jean would not forgive his cowardice.
Kevin would not forgive Riko's cruelty.
Redemption did not exist, the skies were empty. There were only new opportunities at making different choices.
He could break Riko's hand to show affection. Or he could hold out his and wait until Riko would finally come and put his head in Kevin's palm.
Kevin was not angry; anger would not save Riko from his guilt.
⁂
Riko could remember what death tasted like. He could remember his closed eyes and his throat tying itself into knots around words he would never say, words he could never use after that. Riko didn't know what mercy felt like, but he knew death. He knew it intimately. Death felt like punishment for calling another woman mother. Death was when you wanted things too hard and took them from your brother. Death was what happened when you forgot your place. He had been taught how to die, they called it survival. He called it being strong. All Riko ever wanted was for his brother to survive and be strong, too. So he dealt death like some people gave kisses. He had been shown strangulation, it had been called love, so he had loved people close to him with rough hands.
The only thing he could never do was touch. He could not let them touch him, he could not touch them either. He used to be six years old and dead for wanting. He had never wanted after that. Dead little boys do not want. They take.
In the middle of every night, after Neil Josten had refused him salvation, he woke up in cold sweat with memories he would never be able to share, and had nobody to share them with. He could remember Tetsuji bringing him to a cold, unfamiliar place. He could remember sitting on a chair, and his uncle had told him to wait. Do not make a noise. Do not avert your eyes. This is your fault.
He had remembered Kayleigh walking in the room after them, ruffling his hair, the way she often did. He could remember her kind, green eyes on him, before she looked at her best friend. He could remember her kneeling on the carpeted floor.
He had called her mom. Someone had overheard them. Someone had reported the betrayal to Kengo. A second born was a possession, a second born was nobody's child. Kengo had given the only order he could.
Riko was six years old, and he thought he had just gone deaf, the loud bang hurting his eardrums. He did not hear the sound of Kayleigh's body when she slumped on the floor. He did not remember the sound of his own ragged breaths, could not shake the feeling of blood coating his face.
Tetsuji had punished him, too, for making him kill his best friend.
Riko died twice that day. A third time, even, when Kevin had walked in the room and had looked at him with so much worry and kindness in his eyes. Kindness got people killed. Kindness was not something he could afford, no matter how much he would sell his soul.
Jean Moreau had been thrown at him like a bone to a dog gnawing at his own hind legs, trying to amputate a rotting limb. Jean Moreau was not a gift, he was a distraction. They had told Riko: turn your knives on him. They had told Riko to stop trying to kill your brother. Somewhere, he thought bitterly while making coffee at four in the morning, they had always known the Son of Exy was the better striker. They had to protect their costly investment. Jean Moreau was expendable. For all sports matters, he could die, it would not change anything, he would not be missed.
His eyes were grey. His mouth had a challenging pout to it. He held his fists as if they were a minute away from flying into a face. He had wanted to be pushed down the stairs. He had hoped the chew toy would rebel and kill him yet another time. He did not. No matter how much Riko pushed, Jean endured. Not bending, not breaking, not revolting.
Kevin ruptured first.
A forceful hand pushing Riko to a chair — and by all the gods, alive and dead, that he could name, who was going to die again, was it him? was it a father? secretly, he had hoped it would be a Master — and a tattoo gun taken to a sharpie-drawn marker. The pain was blinding. The blood spilled everywhere on his cheek. The gun was forced into his hand and Kevin turned the other cheek so he could put a hot iron to it, too.
He heard what the Foxes thought of the tattoos. He heard the sniveling comments, nicknaming them "Riko's tramp stamp". He had looked to Kevin, silently, hoping he would laugh it off, hoping he would correct them. He would say that they were his own doing, because Riko could not want or have things, but the golden child could. He did not.
Kevin did not correct them, and he let them believe he was not greedy.
Yet, they could all believe Riko was angry. They thought his shadows were made of fury, they thought he was the little boy turned heartless monster by greed, envy and jealousy. They thought he dealt deaths out of cruelty, because he liked the feeling of power that went with watching someone's eyes glaze over.
Death was survival. Death was the only way to escape the Nest's cruelty. Jean had understood it, too, he had let himself die inside, too.
Edgar Allan smelled of rot and mildew and specks of blood on carpeted floors.
He did not want forgiveness for his survival. He could not want. He could not be angry, he could not survive because he had been taken out of his personal inferno. He was not a person. He was just a corpse walking through hallways and living rooms. He had no purpose, no reason to exist anymore so he stopped.
A corpse walking because rest had been taken away from him. He had to live with the guilt. He had to see Kevin's face and witness him hiding his anger every time he took a step, pretending he had none. He saw his mouth shut again, because he had no words to speak.
"Scream at me," he thought, all day, every day, every time he saw green. "Throw something at me."
Kevin refused to.
Riko was not angry; Kevin had no reason to allow him to survive.
⁂
Like a puppet rehearsing the same sets of moves again, with no rhyme or reason, Riko took to the court, sixteen-hour days, studying without retaining information, running around the court, practicing drills. He would not react when people called to him. It was as if he had forgotten the very act of language. He would practice alone, left arm laying limp by his side as if it had been cut away from him, like he had forgotten he ever had one in the first place.
His movements were sloppy because of it.
Kevin did not know what to make of a fallen star that only rehearsed moves without playing. This was not Exy, this was not a dance either, this was pure muscle memory, this was a soulless choreography. A ghost haunting a court. A dead boy trailing after a meaningless dream. Sometimes, the boy would stop and look into the distance. He often wondered if he was listening to a voice that only echoed inside his own skull; like Kevin did sometimes. He had no answer.
What was he supposed to do with all this? Should he throw his racquet at his brother? Should he coax him back into the locker room?
He did not know, so he did nothing. He simply walked away. He did as the others did, avoiding the boy.
One day, a month after Riko had been returned to him, as he was taking off his uniform, he heard voices. Someone was talking to ghosts. Someone was whispering words. For the first time in weeks, Riko walked into the showers before everyone had left. His eyes were still dull but he was holding himself as if someone had broken every bone in his body. The kind ones, the angry ones, the tired ones. Andrew stepped right after him.
The following Friday, because they were not on the court that night, the Monsters piled up in Andrew's car. Neil kept flicking his gaze into the rearview mirror, or turning, as if to check that nobody was following them. Kevin did not have the energy to care about the black car behind theirs. Kevin just wanted to get drunk, hammered enough to forget everything about ghosts haunting his bedroom, hoping to even forget the weight of his own lies. They skipped ice cream, that day. He did not understand the change of pace, did not care to ask about it. All he craved was the taste of vodka on his tongue to chase away the lingering taste of Riko's tears as the hammer fell down on his hand, and music loud enough to rupture his eardrums so he would not hear the silent footsteps at four in the morning or the sharp intake of breath as his new roommate woke up from nightmares.
Eden's Twilight would give him exactly this, he thought.
He was wrong.
That night Eden's Twilight welcomed a stranger's body, clad in head to toe in solid black. Number one tattoo glinting in the dark because it had been covered with a sparkly kind of makeup. Brows furrowed. Riko joined them on the sofa they had picked for the night and the only answer Andrew offered Kevin's puzzled gaze was a simple:
"When bones heal wrong, you have to break them again."
Neil had said that about the twins, once. Truth be said, Riko's gaze was not as dead anymore. He looked furious, he looked bored, he looked like he needed a drink and Kevin could not fight his hand as it handed his own to his brother. He took it, drank it. He drank more than one that night. Everything was a blur.
They danced together in the middle of the club and nobody noticed them or recognized them. Their dance looked like a fight and Kevin ended with Riko's wrists in his hands, the same way he had held Jean's, seven years ago and long after that, with fury and rage and jealousy creeping in his veins. There was a challenge in the look that was thrown at him.
Through sealed lips, despite the festering wound, Riko told him words that night. Sentences, like their bond, were fractured.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"You're a coward," he snarled.
"Don't forgive me, fight me," he asked.
"Don't let me die again," he drunkenly pleaded at some point, before stepping out for a cigarette with Andrew.
When he came back, Kevin was angry again. He had lost his brother and his mother when he was six years old. Neil Josten had brought one of them back, and the boy had decided to let himself waste away. How incredibly selfish.
Kevin was angry; he was greedy; he wanted to taste death and bring him back again. Without forgiveness, he kissed the taste of cigarettes away, bit at the stitches and shoved his fingers to keep the once-bruised jaw from sealing shut again. With Riko's mouth opened again, he fed him kindness so he could stitch it to his spine again.
The hands that cradled him were soaked in unfathomable quantities of blood.
But they cradled him. And he let them.
Forgiveness would not wash the blood away but he did not mind the taste of it. Claws had been cut short a long time ago. Fangs had been filed down. Riko did not want to hurt. All he had wanted was to survive.
Kevin was not angry; but he could be brave and put a stop to this meaningless race from phantom threats.