#countdown to tsc

[thesunshinecourts]

countdown to tsc: apr 6., 2024, 07:48 pdt

17. your bed after travelling // jean moreau thinks about belonging

They had an away game against UT Austin, which was more exhausting in flight time than as an actual form of competition.

It’s three hours to Austin from Los Angeles. (“Non-stop flight time is 2 hours, 55 minutes,” Sebastian says, pushing his sunglasses further up the bridge of his nose because he thinks it makes him look cool. It makes Jean want to spit on him. It makes Jean think about Kevin at age thirteen, when he dubiously tested out reading glasses at the recommendation of one of the doctors at Evermore. That kind of makes Jean want to spit on Sebastian more, but he restrains himself. Kevin Day at the beginning of teenagehood is not a crime that anyone should have to answer for, save the man himself and maybe Riko. He can’t, though. He’s dead.

It still thrills Jean, that thought, explicit and direct and true. It had been a fantasy for years, the kind he could never share, and certainly not with Kevin, who had loved Riko as desperately as he had come to fear him. It had been a wish, once or twice, entrusted only into Renee’s steady hands, the kind phrased not as a request, but as an expression of guilt given to the only person to whom he could lay himself bare. It is a fact, a gun pointed by Neil and a trigger squeezed by Ichirou and a new type of shackle on Jean, still heavy, but lacking teeth.

No, Jeremy Knox’s Sunshine Court has no such skin-torn, blood-soaked, jagged edges, except those which Jean brings with him. It’s almost harder to bear.)

Three hours to Austin from Los Angeles, meaning six hours round trip.

Jean is used to playing for that long on the Ravens’ court: a much more punishing endeavour than any training plan Rhemann and his cohort of coaches at USC could come up with. Playing the game against UT is laughably easy for Jean, at least when it comes to stamina and skill. Patience is a different matter, but while the Trojans are no Ravens, they are an exceptional team. When Jean makes his meagre attempts at forbearance, he thinks to himself that he is lucky to not have been a Fox. He would likely have lost his voice, given the arguing necessary to whip them into a vaguely-tolerable shape.

Kevin had always been better at that. Jean is not a natural teacher. He taught Kevin French out of loneliness, and he taught Neil to survive out of necessity. Kevin would always have been more suited to the walking catastrophe that called itself the PSU Foxes Exy team.

Belonging is always easier, Jean thinks, when one has a foothold. Personality aside—and truly, Jean has never met a person more stubborn than Kevin, which is less a compliment and more an expulsion of grief—Kevin would always have been better-suited to the Foxes than Jean, for Kevin had a man who would never turn him away simply because of who his mother was, even without knowing Kevin was his son.

Jean does not envy Kevin his father. Jean prefers not to think of fathers at all.

So no, the game is not especially taxing. The Trojans have a strong roster, and are less inclined to allow personal pique to have a say in which players get substituted, and when. (This isn’t to say that there is no personal pique to be found amongst the Trojans; whilst Jean’s experiences with them thus far have proven—if exasperatingly—that the Day Spirit Award has been rightfully awarded all these years, he’s also discovered that Alvarez has stroppy tendencies when she’s tired, and Jeremy’s occasional remarks about the Ravens are cavalier not out of ignorance, but a quiet disdain for their conduct.

So it’s not that the Trojans are all foolish Golden Retrievers rolling over to show their bellies to the world; it’s mostly that none of them are Riko, and nor are they Foxes. They can afford to offer grace as they move through the world. Jean is not sure he can.)

The flights are infinitely worse, because without an Exy racquet in his hand and the court beneath his feet, there is no escape from Jean’s own head.

The flight to Austin is better, of the two. It’s still not ideal, but Jeremy and Laila sit Jean firmly between them and essentially force him into conversation. It’s mostly grudging, and almost entirely about the upcoming match—there is not a single player at UT who Jean finds compelling, but one of their assistant coaches is a former player who once suggested something rude about Thea, who responded by checking him so hard when he next had the ball that he sprawled to the ground and slid three metres across the court.

Jean enjoys this story. He thinks Laila and Jeremy did too, from the way Laila’s eyes gleamed and how Jeremy’s voice had a laugh in it when he said, not exactly a strategy in our playbook, but I daresay it would have been satisfying to watch.

The flight back to Los Angeles is worse.

The ache from the game is settling into his body now, muscle and flesh and bone. It’s not enough to draw him out of his own head.

One of UT’s dealers had pitched herself right at him, driving herself into his hip. That level of force wouldn’t usually have knocked him over, but there’s an old ache there from Riko’s fingers and favourite toys. Mostly Jean stays standing, but sometimes he gives in.

When Jean had lived in Abby’s spare bedroom, there had been a revolving cast of visitors, though there was more frequency than variety. Renee had visited most, then Wymack. If Jean counts the times he shut his door and refused to let Kevin into his room and Kevin stayed in the kitchen asking Abby questions in a quiet voice that was never quite quiet enough, then Kevin probably takes third place. Otherwise, Jean thinks it would be Aaron.

This was less about Jean, and more about the lesson he could provide in Abby’s hands. Jean didn’t care. His whole life had been made of debt and pain and prodding. Cool fingers re-dressing his wounds—all steady hands and clinical efficiency and blunt responses—was almost a balm in the face of it.

Besides, there was something comforting in his lack of expectation. Jean has no idea what most people want from a doctor. He’s heard grumblings about bedside manner and seen some memes through the Twitter timeline Xavier and Alvarez inflicted upon him, but he found his greatest relief in the way Aaron inspected all his wounds without flinching.

Sometimes Kevin would come quietly into the room, and Aaron would roll his eyes at him, and then look to Jean, as if waiting. Jean did not mind so much if Kevin came in with someone else, like Renee or Aaron or Thea. (Well, he had minded very much the time he came in with Thea, but that was due more to the lack of warning. Thea herself had been someone Jean found himself missing.) He liked it more when Kevin came in with Aaron, which was less to do with their behaviour—Aaron was more likely to tell Kevin to shut up or fuck off, but Renee’s quiet presence was equally effective at keeping him in check—and more to do with the fact that Jean preferred to speak to Renee alone, because she was the person he could trust most in the world.

Once upon a time, that had been Kevin, but then Kevin left Evermore, and left Jean, and the first time Jean heard from him in months was when a terrified Kevin called him to beg Jean to tell him that the rumours were false, that Edgar Allan was not coming south.

The rumours had been true, and Jean Moreau has never been a liar, not even for Kevin.

Jean thinks about this as he thinks about the thudding ache at his hip, where Aaron’s fingers once re-dressed a wound, where Kevin had placed a cool compress years before, where Jean’s younger sister had once drawn a rose when they were five and seven, because a rose had been the only thing she had known how to draw.

He supposes it still might be. He wouldn’t know.

Jeremy shifts in the seat beside him, and Jean cracks open an eyelid to glare at him. He hadn’t even realised he’d shut his eyes, but no matter. He cracks open an eyelid, glaring, and finds Jeremy making a half-apologetic, half-beleaguered expression back at him. It’s an astounding combination, one he would have considered impossible prior to the Trojans, but sometimes Jean wonders if it’s less that Jeremy is particularly talented at facial expressiveness and more that no Raven ever had cause to teach Jean what apology looked like in the lines of a furrowed brow and downturned lips.

“Sorry,” Jeremy whispers, as if the facial expression wasn’t enough. “Were you napping?”

Jeremy has known Jean for several months now, so Jean feels as if this is a foolish question. He makes a derisive noise. Something flickers in his chest when Jeremy shakes his head, looking rueful and amused and sleepy-soft all at once.

Jean ignores it, obviously.

“Right, right, Mr No Naps,” Jeremy says. Jean has suffered many indignities since his arrival in Los Angeles, but being dubbed something that a six year old child would name an especially belligerent cat is a new low.

“We’re not that far now,” Jeremy says, glancing up at the flight map in interest. Jean looks over. He’s right. Twenty minutes or so. “Which means there’s no point in sleeping…” Jeremy continues, almost cajolingly. That gleam from Laila’s eyes earlier seems to have jumped to Jeremy’s as he looks at Jean.

Jean sighs, surrenders. He seems to be doing this a lot lately. Riko never managed to break down that last final inch, that holdout within Jean that refused to lose his accent or stop speaking French to Kevin or any of the tiny rebellions that Neil dismissed but Jean needed in order to have any pieces of himself left for Renee to save that day.

Riko tore every concession from Jean’s bare throat, but the Trojans seem just as adept as getting what they want out of Jean with teeth bared in smiles instead of snarls.

“You should have knocked over that backliner,” Jean says. “He’s a lunk. He would have taken seconds to get up. You could have scored in that time.”

Jeremy, because he is terrible, laughs. “You have such a way with words, Jean,” he says, but he sounds amused. Almost infectiously so. “I ought to be able to score without knocking anyone down,” Jeremy points out.

“Yes,” Jean agrees immediately, “but until that’s the case, you should drop them.”

There is probably something seriously wrong with Jeremy Knox, Jean thinks, watching him laugh. He seems as delighted as ever by Jean’s honesty. He won’t abide unfair barbed statements to his team, but he always seems game to field Jean’s criticisms himself.

It’s only right, Jean thinks. They’re Kevin’s favourite team, and they took Jean in when the backlash would be far greater than whatever meagre thanks they managed to get out of Kevin. Of course there’s something wrong with them.

They pass the rest of the flight in much the same manner, until the descent swoops a little steeper than expected and Jeremy squeezes his eyes shut and grips one hand over his arm rest and the other over Jean’s forearm. Laila wakes up during this, blinking sleepily at Jeremy, before saying, “Oh, babe, your cuticles look awful,” which makes Jean look incredulously at her and Jeremy laugh.

Sleepy chatter gets them through disembarking the plane, and baggage claim, and onto the bus, winding all the way back to campus, traffic egregious even at this hour. Alvarez tows an exhausted Laila by the elbows with an excruciatingly fond expression, Sebastian almost snaps his sunglasses underfoot when they slip off his nose before Derek says, “Dude,” while Emma throws up an arm to stop him in his tracks, and Jeremy half-stumbles into the door before he gets his key in the lock and opens up their room.

Tomorrow, at some point after breakfast and coffee prepared with entirely too much creamer by an overzealous Cox, Jean will marvel at that thought. At the ease with which it sprung to his mind: their room, meaning Jeremy’s and Jean’s, meaning Jean’s, meaning that which belongs.

In the morning, he will think about what it has meant to be Jean Moreau: his first home lost to him through a transaction, where he was an object and not a person, a thing to barter and not a boy with a bed and a family and his own mind; Evermore, his second place to exist, where his bed was so often a landscape of his own destruction; and that bed that he slept in when staying with Abby, crisp and clean and safe and entirely, undeniably unknown to him.

Kevin asked Jean once, when they were younger, to tell him about his home. Jean had looked at him and asked in the blankest possible tone, what home? A home is a space you’re meant to belong, Jean had meant, and there was no place like that for him. There was Riko and his chains, and everyone told Jean that was his place, but he would never call that home.

In the morning, Jean will think about this, and what it means to have a space that belongs to you – to be a boy who owns something for once, instead of just being owned –

In the morning, Jean will think about this, but for now, he kicks off his shoes, peels off his socks, and falls onto his bed, a place he trusts enough to sink into a dreamless sleep, long enough to start to soothe his tired bones.

[okjii]

preparing to go to battle (going though tumblr and NOT clicking on posts that say “tgr spoilers below!!”) within these next few days. i wish you well soldiers

[disastersappho]

tgr bingo because only one more day!

[blueseysyogurt]

the golden raven comes out today and i am SO normal about it 😊😊

[elara-in-the-sky]

haven't had time to do my tsc reread yet and I was gonna do it today and skip out on my friends concert cause she's in a band but then they were like its also actually an early birthday celebration so now I really have to go and im kinda salty about it and debating ditching but im not that mean so I am gonna go and then debate calling off work Monday so I can reread tsc tomorrow and ditch the hangout Sunday and read tgr Sunday and Monday

[eleanorpowers]

Jeremy day 2:

This one is almost entirely self-indulgent. Maybe I just think Jeremy would bop to Troye Sivan 🤷‍♀️

[andrew-minyard-stan]

my girlfriend is staying the night with me on Saturday… she’s never read AFTG but by the time im done sobbing into her arms she won’t need to.

[jeanmoreau29-3]

2 DAYS TIL THE GOLDEN RAVEN!!!!

[stick-ball]

plot-twist: the ominous countdown is actually counting down to the Sunshine Court release date.

[animalecfest]

Animalec Fest Countdown

It's officially September and we're only 19 days away from the opening of Animalec Fest 2023. For a quick check-up with our wonderful creators, if possible, please give an insight, general idea, or snippet into what you're working on 👀

🦋Introduction & rules

🦋List of prompts

🦋The Animalec Fest 2023 collection on AO3

[annabeth541]

happy “The Golden Raven” eve!! Here’s my little jean moreau playlist to listen to while you read ❤️❤️❤️❤️

[thesunshinecourts]

countdown to tsc: apr 8., 2024, 23:51 pdt

63. indigo skies just before dawn // jeremy knox, in the early morning light

“Why are you – Jesus, Cat, would you turn that off?” Jeremy says, holding a hand over his eyes.

“Whoops, my b,” Catalina says, flicking off her torch. She gives Jeremy a smile, one that doesn’t shift off her face even when Laila snorts and Catalina drives an elbow into her side.

“Ow! Bitch,” Laila mutters, no heat.

“Why are we out here?” Jeremy asks before they can start up again. He loves them dearly, down to his bones, but they’re like a runaway train sometimes, and he’d really like to get an answer for why they’re up and huddled on the roof access at fuck o’clock in the morning.

Laila points. Jeremy’s gaze follows her finger, over the air vents and powerboards and whatever the fuck else is encased in metal boxes on the roof (Jeremy wouldn’t know, but his sister might), all the way through to a solitary figure sitting on the edge of the roof, one knee pulled up and tucked beneath his chin, the other leg dangling over the side.

Ah.

“Your room literally has a TV,” Jeremy says to Catalina, even as he slides past them on the roof access stairs to head properly towards Jean. She scoffs.

“This is way more entertaining,” she says, then turns to her girlfriend. “Babe, we should have brought popcorn.”

“What happened to your meal plan with Xavier?” Laila asks, snorting.

Jeremy can’t hear Cat’s response, only that the tone is vaguely indignant, because he’s halfway across the roof now. The wind isn’t very strong, but the light breeze snatches her words away, carrying them out towards the ocean.

They’re some thirteen miles from the beach right now. Jeremy wishes he were closer. Historically, the only thing he gets up this early for—unless one of the coaches is calling for an especially early practice for drills—is to catch the best waves before the rest of the city wakes up.

Jean Moreau isn’t so bad, though, as far as new habits go.

“Fancy seeing you here,” Jeremy says, stepping onto the raised edge next to Jean.

Jean, predictably, ignores this, just tilting his head back to look at Jeremy. “They’re not very subtle,” he says dryly.

“No,” Jeremy agrees, folding his legs in a complicated single movement to end up sitting beside Jean. “They’re not known for that.”

With a hum and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glance at Jeremy’s bare knees, Jean returns his gaze to the horizon. This high up, they can see the blue of the ocean, but only just. It’s not enough for Jeremy, who immediately misses it. He wishes they were at the pier, or the beach, or in the backseat of Cat’s van down the I-5, with her stubborn manual wind down windows and the salt air in their face as they approach San Diego.

Jean’s eyes are on the sky, the deep purples and blues of a world before the sun decides to show her face. Sometimes, when they sit here like this, Jeremy wonders what Jean thinks about. If he’s still angry to be here, if he thinks about Riko, about Kevin, about Renee. If he misses his family, or if they even count as that to him anymore. Sometimes Jeremy thinks maybe he’s thinking about Exy. He’s never been able to decide if that’s a sad or happy thought; on almost anyone, Jeremy would think Exy could be a good thought in moderation, but sad when it’s all you can think about. Jean is something different.

Sometimes Jeremy thinks it would be sad, if that were what Jean was thinking about so intently as he stared out into a sky full of possibility, because there should be something that matters more than a sport Jeremy isn’t sure he even likes. Sometimes Jeremy thinks it would be a relief; he’s known Jean for several years now, though only really since he came to USC, and even the last few months has been enough for Jeremy to know, bone-deep, that there have been many other things Jean has lived through that would be worse to think about.

Exy, for Jeremy, is a sport. It’s a game. He loves it, and he’s good at it, and he leads a team for it, but at the end of the day, it’s a game and he gets to choose to get up and play it.

He’s not sure Jean has ever really had that choice, but he doesn’t know how to ask. He’s not sure if he should, even.

The last time he spoke to Kevin, he’d started, a little hesitantly, “So, Jean doesn’t really l—” and Kevin’s face had shut down so fast—eyes big and green and mournful, jaw tight, lips drawn closed, like he didn’t know what would emerge if they didn’t—that Jeremy had immediately shut up, shaken his head, and said, “You know what, never mind. Hey, where’s the nearest vending machine? I need gummy worms.” That had drawn Kevin out of his head enough to pull out his phone and text Aaron—get fucked, came the reply, but Kevin just kept texting until Jeremy assumes Aaron gave up just to make him stop, because nine minutes later there was stomping outside and then, in quick succession, a scowling blond emerging in the doorway and a small plastic packet whizzing at Kevin’s head; Jeremy thinks that the one thing everyone in the world must agree Kevin Day possesses, other than the best hands in the game and the most handsome smile on the planet, is more tenacity than anyone else would know what to do with—whilst simultaneously lecturing Jeremy about his body being a temple.

(Jeremy’s heard the unabridged version of that lecture, where Kevin gets increasingly irate with Nicky, Andrew and Aaron as they one-by-one pull things out of the kitchen pantry that make him prone to cardiac arrest; he gets off pretty lucky. Maybe Nicky has a point about Trojans privilege.)

“I’m surprised they got you up,” Jean says, and Jeremy smiles ruefully.

“I think it would be worse if they didn’t,” he says. “It’s weirder if they’re just watching you by themselves.”

Jean shoots him a look, mostly blank, but something wry and amused flickering in his eyes. “And with you here instead, we’ll, what, give them a show?”

Jeremy chokes on saliva, his own tongue, and approximately any shred of dignity he’s managed to repossess since he was seventeen and he was trying to unzip his neighbour’s bra under her guidance and he accidentally got it stuck half-undone.

There’s a smirk on Jean’s face when he turns back to the sky, but his tone is impressively neutral when he says, “Yes, this must be endlessly entertaining for them. A much better decision than sleeping in, I’m sure.”

Jeremy forcibly pushes the flirting—was it flirting? He thinks so. He hopes so, maybe, but that’s a whole other can of worms to deal with later in the privacy of the shower—aside to clear his throat and say, “Hey, if it works for you…”

There’s a beat. Two. Then Jean says, a little quieter, even though he was already quiet to begin with, “At the Nest, we never got to see the sunrise.”

Well, now Jeremy feels like a dick.

“Not that anyone would have seen it with me,” Jean adds. “Kevin is terrible at waking up, Riko was terrible at being away from Kevin unless it suited his whims to be, and my roommate—” He breaks off. It sounds like a pause, but Jeremy waits, and no more comes.

“Would you have wanted company?” Jeremy asks. He’s aware it’s a loaded question, given he is company right now, but it’s a real one. He hopes Jean knows that.

Jean furrows his brow. “It wouldn’t have mattered,” he says. He looks at his hands, then Jeremy’s knees again, then the sky once more. “My wants did not enter into equations. It never occurred to me to think about that.”

It’s maybe the saddest thing Jean has ever said. Jeremy has this thought at least a dozen times per month.

“Well,” Jeremy says, injecting a little more brightness into his voice than he actually feels, “now you can think about it. You’ve got company. How does it feel?”

Jean glances back from the sky, eyes roving over Jeremy’s legs, then his knees, staying there for a beat longer than Jeremy knows what to do with, then all the way up to Jeremy’s face.

“It’s not so bad,” Jean says, and Jeremy smiles.

[billdenbrough]

i’m going to be so restrained abt tsc (well. mostly) on this acc but it’s not bc i’ve like gained any more chill it’s bc i foresee the carnage this book will wreak upon me and made a sideblog to be my depository for tsc feelings lmao

[falafels]

pt.20!! <pt.19 pt.21>

tsc heavy bc i miss them and my bones are vibrating with the countdown to tgr

tag gang @andrewsleftarmband @blurryhour @you-know-i-get-itt @notexactlythatgirl @strangeoffputtingrat @tessasilverswan @minyard-05 @carbon-dated-gal @bisexualchaosdemon @stormiiflies @watercoloureyes01 @vampire-overlord @iron-sides @azure-wing @buffalo-fox @ohgodnotagainplease @pink-hydrangea @jaywalkerss

[knox-knocks]

I've been thinking of rewriting/revisiting a few of my fics a lot lately. There's a few I left unfinished and others I wish I had done differently, and I can't really get them out of my head. I've been dying to write fanfiction again and even though I want to write new fic for aftg + tsc and have a ton of ideas, I think I really need to get these out of my system first.

Soo, I have a few ideas, but I wanted to gauge interest! I have more information about each of the project under the read more, and if anyone has questions, I'm always happy to answer :)

Fic summaries and rework explanations below !

The Court Motel

Andrew is the unfortunate owner of a haunted motel, Kevin is the shiny, new detective looking for Nathaniel Wesninski, and Neil is caught somewhere in between.

Neil is a ghost in this one. I had at least three chapters planned for this fic, one chapter for each pov character (Andrew, Kevin, Neil). I think I tried writing chapter two but for whatever reason, I was never able to get past the beginning. But I have a soft spot for this fic and the weird little motel Andrew and Neil have found themselves in. I definitely want to edit the first chapter and finish the story.

The Absence of You

Neil Josten has been a liar his entire life. Neil's secrets got him killed and they linger after he dies, making the Foxes wonder who Neil really was, if they knew him at all. The aftermath of their beloved striker's demise still hurts the Foxes, most of all Andrew Minyard, who probably knew him the most when he was alive. What they don't know, is that Neil Josten has thwarted death ever since he was a small child and he's done it again.

I actually hate the description of this but Neil is basically the human embodiment of a headache for everyone involved in this (including me 😔). I don't know why but this fic was s hard for me to write, despite actually having a substantial amount of outlining and notes behind it. plus I feel a lil bad for leaving it after like two chapters

Timeless

Neil has died more times than he can reasonably count. No matter how much he resisted, he would always be returned to the void eventually. The void, as Neil called it, was a dark and empty place, and Neil had spent more time there than in any of his lives. With no family left and hardly any time to start a life of his own, he never bothered to think of a solution to his cycle of deaths. And then Andrew Minyard came along.

As you can see, I like killing Neil and I'm definitely on Andrew's shit list. I really like writing this but I literally had no idea where I was going with it at all times. I think at one point I was planning on Andrew getting kidnapped by Nathan/Lola which did not end up happening. thankfully. But it definitely feels disjointed and I want to clean up the plot a bit.

Things That Go Bump in the Night

Neil inexplicably comes back to life after being seven months dead and buried. He has no memory of how he crawled out of his grave, or even when he died. He has a heartbeat, he needs to breathe and eat and sleep, he's irrefutably alive, but that should be impossible. But he doesn't have time to dwell on it, because some very weird things start happening to him, and they all seem to revolve around Neil's mysterious reappearance and a certain countdown to Halloween.

....another one where I've killed Neil. okay. I swear I love him like that;s my boy.

This is fic is another one I've been wanting to rework the most. The plot itself is okay though the writing could definitely be cleaned up (I was rushing to meet the self-imposed halloween countdown deadlines and it really impacted that I think rip).

I mostly want to expand on the story and world building. I was thinking of rewriting it, but starting at the beginning of canon when Neil joins the Foxes. For some reason I keep coming back to the magic system, which admittedly is not very well fleshed out in the original fic, and I want to make it a larger part of the story. And the idea of a runaway Neil harboring an illegal book of magic to protect himself while he's playing sports ball at his college sounds like so much fun to me.

[eleanorpowers]

Neil day 2:

I mean, how could I not include Enemy? If I'm remembering correctly I have this song in a handful of my all for the game playlists. It's fitting for a fox, and it's fitting for Neil.

The really strong beats with brass(? You know what I'm talking about if you've heard the song) give the energy of Neil's paranoia when he first joins the foxes, always suspicious and always looking over his shoulder. And isn't that just fitting of a fox?

Sometimes a song puts a clear story In my head, and this is one of them. It's always the kind of cheesy edgy ones I've found. It begins when Neil lands in South Carolina, after Kevin fought to have him on their line and spends the next six weeks verbally beating the shit out of him. What the hell did Neil sign up for? Put a bit of exy playing montage in there and boom! A very fun amv about Neil's first month-or-so with the foxes.

If only someone explained to the poor guy he wouldn't have half as many enemies if he learned to shut the fuck up 💀