max • he/him • twenty-two • nz • gay • goth • julien baker enthusiast • aftg has me in its clutches
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hell is the talking type
fandom: all for the game title from: hozier - dinner & diatribes word count: 5.4k !!warnings: canon-typical self harm, mentions of suicide!! AO3
Jean sighs and pulls back his covers and prepares for another trek down the hall.
Usually his mind isn’t so persistent but tonight it won't stop looping on one thought. That Jeremy is dead in his bed.
So Jean has to check.
He’s already checked twice in the past hour, two times more before that. Each time he found Jeremy breathing deeply and sound asleep. Yet every time he gets back to his room and settles in bed the thought comes crawling back like a wild animal he fed one time. Maybe the checking is feeding it, maybe as long as he checks it will come back for more from him.
He looks over to his alarm clock that bears the angry red of 2:46am at him and he dreads morning practice. The start of a new week and Jean is going to spend it sleep deprived because he spent the entire night making sure Jeremy was alive.
The thing is, he knows that it only snowballs if he keeps checking, no matter how much he checks it won’t stop until he does. And he tries stopping, he really does, he makes it twenty minutes before he’s clawing at his neck and working the skin raw and stinging because Jeremy is dead and it’s all Jean’s fault.
So he has to get up now, wounds fresh on his neck and his own mind poised against him. He has to make sure Jeremy is alive, to affirm that his brain is lying to him because he couldn’t live with himself if Jeremy was dead right now and he just slept the night away. He couldn’t do that to Jeremy.
The world outside of his room is cold. His room probably only heated so well by his constant hyperventilating and his own raised body temperature.
He’s still breathing heavy as he closes his door to just a crack, he can see his alarm clock from here, a minute has passed since he last looked, the numbers are no less red or angry.
Jeremy’s room is technically the spare room because he’s only there on the weekends but it’s Jeremy’s room for all intents and purposes, aside from like a few boxes of random flatpack furniture Laila bought that they haven’t gotten around to building yet.
Jeremy sleeps with the door opened wide enough for Jabberwocky to come in and out. Jean can’t fathom why he would want to share his bed with the creature but Jeremy insists on it. Something about bonding.
“I have to do what I can to surpass you as his favourite,” Jeremy had said. “It’s no fair, you don’t even have to try.”
Jean gently eases the door open wider and cringes as it creaks loudly. He would have to talk to Laila about getting the hinges oiled for his nighttime breakdowns to not disturb anyone.
Jeremy doesn’t stir.
So Jean stands in his doorway for a minute or so, just listening to Jeremy breathe. Which he is doing so that’s one point for Jean and none for his brain. Jeremy is alive and his brain was wrong so now he can go back to bed, satisfied that Jeremy is okay.
He shuts the door back to its small gap from before and he pads back down the hallway to his room. He sits in his bed with his legs folded under him and pulls the blankets into his lap as he takes a few deep breaths.
His heart is still pounding.
It doesn’t take long for the thought to come slithering back, underneath his door and into the room where it drips venom and whispers “he’s dead, y’know?”
Jean’s breath catches in his throat.
Again.
There’s always an again.
He closes his eyes firmly and counts to one hundred in French, then back to zero. Opening his eyes doesn’t help. At some point he’d gripped his own wrist and dug his fingers in, trying to use the pain as a distraction but as he loosens his hold he is only left with crescent shaped dents in the skin.
The thought is still there, it waited for him but it knows he can hear it when it tells him that Jeremy is dead, over and over again.
He presses his hands firmly over his ears and counts again. Zero comes and the thought is still there. Burning now.
So he gets up.
He makes his way back out into the hall and back to Jeremy’s door where it squeaks again and Jean holds his breath. Jeremy doesn’t move.
But he’s breathing, Jean can hear him breathing.
It lasts for thirty seconds before Jeremy speaks. “Jean, what are you doing?”
Jean stills at that, he didn’t realise Jeremy was awake. How long had he not been sleeping? How many times has he heard Jean come and check on him?
“Nothing,” he says lamely.
“Then why do you keep coming back?” Jeremy asks, voice muffled by his pillow, his words slurred by sleep.
Jean wants to flee back to his room and act like none of this ever happened but he knows better than that, that Jeremy would follow him. “I’m just making sure you’re okay.”
“I’m okay,” Jeremy says.
“Okay.”
Jean closes the door maybe a bit too far for Jabberwocky to get out but he goes back to bed, burrows under the covers with his back to the room and counts to a hundred and back in every language he knows until he falls asleep.
-
It’s not graceful. Jeremy trips over his own feet and falls like the world’s worst swan dive as he hits the ground hard. Jean watches it happen. But before he can step out to check on him Xavier is already pulling him to his feet and Laila is sending the ball in his direction with a belated “Jean!”
Jean snaps into focus and sweeps his racquet out to catch the ball before he takes it a few steps and turns it flying through the air at one of the strikers, one of the double d’s, they both turn when Jean calls out “Derek”.
Once the ball is gone and he doesn’t have easy access to the distraction it offers, he casts a sidelong glance at Jeremy who is bouncing on his feet and calling for the ball that has traded racquets with the opposing team. His team.
He looks fine. Jean notes this. There is no reason for the prickling of skin on the back of his neck or the tightness in his throat behind its guard.
But Jean has never known his mind to take the most reasonable path.
His intrusive thoughts come back, always monstrous, always terrifying.
He hit his head, one says.
He’s got a brain bleed, another fills in.
He’s going to die, the third finishes.
Jean swallows thickly and tries to ignore them, gritting his teeth and turning his attention back to the game, but they aren’t that easily dismissed.
They loop.
He’s going to die. He’s going to die. He’s going to die.
Do something Jean!
Jean takes a shaky breath and runs his gloved knuckles along where his broken ribs used to be, digging there, hoping to elicit some sort of pain that will snap him out of this. He watches Jeremy run and play like there’s nothing wrong but his brain is screaming at him that it is all a farce and Jeremy is going to die.
“Jean!” someone yells and Jean snaps his attention back to the game, not realising he had been standing around gripping his racquet tight enough to hurt his hands and staring after Jeremy for so long that his team was noticing.
So he zeroes in on the ball and takes off in its direction, marking his striker, Ashton, who is half a court away.
He misses the way Laila tries to catch his eye.
He tries to lose himself in the game but the thought is always there and he finds himself looking to Jeremy more often than not.
But I didn’t see him hit his head, he tries to reason with his thoughts.
That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, they bite back.
His mouth is dry. He tries to swallow against it and just comes up with the sensation of scraping.
Dropping one hand from his racquet he taps against the base of his throat guard. It doesn’t help to distract him but at least it’s something to do with his hands.
I’m overreacting, he thinks this time, hoping that it’s enough to get his thoughts to back down in the slightest.
They rise to the challenge. He’s going to die. And Jean can’t argue with that.
Maybe his fixation with something bad happening to Jeremy is something to think about or ask Dobson about when he next has an appointment but Jean can’t seem to rationalise that any part of this is understandable. He’s just so scared that something bad is going to happen, that it’s already happened and he’s just the last to know.
There’s some unstoppable force out there that is trying to take Jeremy from him and these thoughts know that. Maybe they’re not trying to ruin Jean’s life, maybe they’re trying to help him. Sleepless nights and panic attacks at red herrings, but something is going to happen. It has to. It’s the only way any of this will be worth it. If he can keep Jeremy safe.
He earns himself a frustrated huff from Laila when Ashton scores a goal and Jean is metres behind him because he was heeding to his thoughts and desperately chasing Jeremy with his eyes again.
But the rest of the game passes mostly without incident but the thoughts do not leave Jean alone.
“Dude, are you okay?” Jeremy asks Jean before the backliner can duck into the showers, hand over his hammering heart. Maybe he can feel it, but Jean can’t find anything in his expression other than concern.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just, you’re our ex-Raven and you missed a lot of things during practice. That’s not like you, are you good?” Jeremy still has his hand on Jean, still stopping him from escaping even as Jean takes a half-step back, his touch follows him.
“Yeah,” Jean offers. “I’m okay.”
The pinch of Jeremy’s brow tells him he doesn’t believe him. “You’d tell me if you weren’t, right?”
This comes only two days after their last interaction on the heels of Jean’s irrational brain, that one shared in the darkness of the very early morning and without Jeremy looking up at him intently with those big brown eyes.
So Jean lies, “Of course.”
Jeremy purses his lips, not quite believing him but swallowing the lie. His eyes track all over Jean’s face, looking for a crack, anything to reach into and pull the facade apart and uncover what really lies underneath. But Jean is too good at this game and his mask is smooth.
Ultimately, he gives in. He pats over Jean’s collar and pulls his hand back. Jean wants to ask him if his head hurts. “Okay, I’ll talk to you soon.”
Jeremy flashes him one of his smiles he reserves for the camera, one that is only half-genuine and half for show.
-
“Did you forget the homework, too?” Shane asks, wide-eyed.
They’re in their business lecture and Jean hadn’t even known there was homework. Some part of his mind had just bundled it up and thrown it away, deeming the information unimportant and unnecessary.
Jean swallows and his throat is dry but he tries to laugh it off. He can already feel the thoughts creeping up his neck and wrapping their talons around his brain, squeezing, slicing. “Yeah, I guess I’ve been a bit preoccupied with training.”
It’s not true. He’s been too busy at war with his own brain to sleep and he only eats when Cat forces him to because he just feels sick all the time, his guts twisting and writhing like some live thing. But the rest of the team is getting a little overwhelmed with practice lately so it’s an easy lie.
Shane laughs too and claps him on the shoulder. “All good, man.”
Thankfully, Jean is saved from conversation by their professor entering the lecture hall and starting to talk. He turns his attention to his notebook and starts trying to take notes. ‘Trying’ being the critical word in that sentence.
His mind is running a mile a minute and every time it trips over its own feet it gets up and runs faster, every moment of reprieve when he can catch onto a sentence on the projector is filled with dread and quickly followed by more thoughts. He can’t stop them. He taps his pen at the same frequency that his leg bounces but it does nothing but make Shane side-eye him.
What else has he forgotten?
What if he’s forgotten something really important?
At first it’s more innocuous, he runs through his mental list of assignments and exams, then a few potential upcoming events–move nights or birthdays or when their next game is–, then his thoughts turn somewhere dark. What if he’s done something terrible and forgotten?
What if he’s killed someone and forgotten about it?
A leap from forgetting his homework, for sure, but his brain lights up at that thought and the claws around his brain sink in. That’s it. He’s killed someone and forgotten.
The rational part of his brain tells him that he couldn’t have just forgotten that he killed someone, he wouldn’t forget something like that but his brain is stuck on the maybe. Maybe he did.
He just– he takes a shaky breath in through his nose and blows it out through his mouth as slowly as he can, trying to soothe the jackrabbit pounding in his chest. He just needs to check.
He drops his pen like it’s a hot coal and stands up hurriedly.
“Bathroom,” he mutters to Shane and takes off before he can get a response.
The steps up to the back of the hall feel like he’s climbing a mountain and not half of a single lecture hall from the middle row, like it’ll never end. But it does and he pushes his way out into the corridor.
Looking around wildly, he flits his head back and forth until he catches sight of the blue arrow on the wall pointing in the direction of the bathrooms.
On shaky legs he makes his trek, hurrying down the corridors until he finds the men’s room and hides in the furthermost stall, making sure to slot the lock behind him. He runs a trembling hand through his hair and with his other pulls out his phone.
Googling on his phone is never as easy as he wants it to be, so clunky and near-impossible to get through more often than not, but he has to now. He doesn’t have a choice. He has to make sure that he hasn’t killed anyone and he can’t exactly ask anyone around him without getting the police called.
He doesn’t want to go to jail.
He mistypes a few letters of his google search and has to backspace them and tediously type it out again but he manages. Recent murders in LA.
He is overwhelmed by the results when the searches load. He could scroll forever and never find an end. Something in him is still logical and tells him that LA is a big place and of course there were murders.
So he types out another search, this time limiting it to just the nearby area, and is not comforted.
His chest is burning with quick and shallow breaths. Starved of oxygen as Jean continues to hyperventilate.
Reading through the articles that the search pulls up does not soothe his worrying. He reads through an article about a shooting. Okay he couldn’t have done that, he’s never fired a gun in his life, he doesn’t know how. But he finds another about a stabbing and he can vividly see himself standing over the body of a woman who was stabbed twenty-seven times in the torso and left in the street in the dead of night to be discovered by a passerby and die from her injuries in hospital. Or a student of a nearby university who was strangled two nights ago in his home. Jean can feel the weight of the cord in his hands.
He clenches his fists so quickly he almost drops his phone.
Breathing is near impossible now, he can’t seem to get any air in his lungs, ribcage squeezed by the invisible vice grip of his newfound guilt because he killed these people and forgot.
He’s killed people and come home at night and gone to bed and woken up a blank slate, having forgotten all about it. He’s done these things and forgotten. He’s a murderer and he is so good at it that he forgot about it and lived his life guilt-free until now.
His eyes fog and burn as tears come hard and fast.
He is shaking and crying, gripping his shirt over his heart as it beats too fast for Jean to keep up when someone knocks on the stall. He hadn’t even heard them come in.
“Jean?” comes Shane’s voice.
Jean tries to speak but the only thing that comes out is a strangled sort of choking noise.
“Are you okay?” Shane asks. “You’ve been gone awhile and I thought you were pooping and I was totally cool leaving you to do that but you took off like a bat out of hell and when you gotta go you gotta go but I just thought I’d check and I don’t think you’re okay in there.”
Jean’s head is spinning. “I’m okay,” he says because he can’t tell Shane that he’s a murderer. His voice is strained and breaks as he speaks because he’s a terrible excuse for a murderer who can’t even handle the reality of what he’s done.
“I don’t think you are,” Shane replies.
“I’m okay,” he repeats. “Just go away, Shane.”
Shane stands firm. “No. You’re not okay and I’m here for you. We’re a team, remember?”
Jean doesn’t dignify him with a response.
“Do you want me to get someone?” Shane asks.
“No.”
Shane keeps talking, much to Jean’s dismay. He’s still crying and hiccuping and he can’t breathe. He closes the lid of the toilet and sits down to save his jelly legs from holding his weight. “Do you want me to text Jeremy?”
Jeremy.
Jean’s temporary relief at the idea of Jeremy coming to save him is short-lived. He can’t have Jeremy see him like this, he can’t face the captain of the sunshine court when he’s done these things.
“No,” he says as firmly as he can.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Just tell me something, man,” Shane says. “I’m getting worried.”
“I think–” he chokes on his words. “I think I killed someone and forgot.”
The truth burns. Like he’s just spewed up fire and it burned its way up his oesophagus and out of his mouth. Third degree, probably.
Shane doesn’t say anything for a long while and Jean wonders if he’s finally realised he is crazy.
But when he speaks his voice is just as firm as it was before Jean said what he did. “I don’t think you have.”
“I have,” he gasps. “I definitely have, I just forgot, why can’t I remember?”
“Jean,” Shane says, “I don’t think you’ve killed anyone and I don’t think you could have forgotten if you did.”
Jean can see now under the gap at the bottom of the stall, that Shane is leaning up against the door. The laces on one of his trainers is undone.
“But what if I have?” Jean asks, his voice small, scared, like the child he never got to be.
Shane pauses for a moment before replying, “just think about it realistically. You never go anywhere alone, Jean. When would you have slipped away to kill someone.”
“I–” Jean starts, the words dying in his throat. “I don’t know.”
“Exactly, and if you were in a state to kill someone and immediately forget, wouldn’t someone have noticed you and told the police? Wouldn’t one of your roommates have seen you come home with blood on your clothes or something?”
It makes sense, of course it does, because Jean’s brain is illogical at the best of times.
He breathes a little easier as he sits with the logic, even if he doesn’t fully believe it. The tears have stopped now and he wipes the remaining ones away with the back of his hand.
They sit in silence for a while but Shane’s reasoning provides a wall in his mind that interrupts the looping thoughts, keeping the circuit from being complete so that the electrical charge dies out with nowhere to fire to.
“Are you feeling better now?” Shane asks.
Jean nods and then remembers Shane can’t see him. “Yeah…”
“And did you murder someone and forget?”
Some part of him still wants to say yes. “No.”
Shane must check his watch because the next thing he says is “Class won’t be over for a while yet but we could just head to the library instead. Do you want me to collect your things and meet you here?”
Jean nods again. “Please.”
“Okay,” Shane says. “Hang tight.”
And then he’s gone and Jean still has a white-knuckle grip on his phone.
-
Jean curls in on himself, phone in hand, the screen blurry through his tears.
His thoughts are back, this time too strong to ignore and his every attempt to sway them is a failure as Jeremy fails to pick up his calls.
To: Jeremy
(11:57pm) You: Jeremy please pick up the phone.
(11:57pm) You: I’m really worried. Please just talk to me.
(11:57pm) You: Jeremy.
(11:58pm) You: Jeremy, please.
He sighs a shaky, uneven breath and calls Jeremy again, pressing his phone over his ear. It rings for a few moments before clicking and Jeremy’s chipper tone filters through the small speaker.
“Hiya, Jeremy here, I can’t come to the phone right now, please leave a message!”
Jean sighs and hangs up the call. He’s already left so many voicemails. He has tearfully begged Jeremy to pick up his calls more than once, he wishes he wasn’t but he’s so scared.
His brain won’t stop with the barrage of thoughts, of Jeremy dying, this time taking his own life. He’s at his mother’s house, far from where Jean can check on him and make sure he’s safe and Jean’s brain is treating him to the highlight reel of all the ways Jeremy could have killed himself, his certainty only reinforced by every missed call and unread text.
A few more tears escape and Jean rakes a frustrated hand over his face to wipe them away. The skin around his eyes is already rubbed raw.
Jeremy with his wrists slit, wrist to elbow. Jeremy with a stomach full of pills, white and oval. Jeremy and a bottle of drain cleaner, chemical and burning. Jeremy swinging from the ceiling, will it give way?
Jean squeezes his eyes shut and tries to force the thoughts out of his mind, he counts up and down in French, to twenty five and back, breathing heavily. He loops five times before he opens his eyes to his defeat. His phone is still on in his hand, screen bright and void of a reply.
So he rings him again, phone pressed to his ear, a prayer on his lips. He’s never been religious, never had much faith in anything, but he needs all the luck he can get.
“Hiya, Jeremy here, I can’t–”
He hangs up.
Biting his lip brings him nothing but the taste of metal from his ripped and bleeding lips. He’s already worried them to carnage.
To: Jeremy
(12:01am) You: Jeremy, I can’t handle this.
(12:01am) You: Please pick up the phone or just text me.
(12:01am) You: Let me know you’re okay.
He stares at the screen, his grip firm on his phone and watches the tiny clock in the corner tick the minutes by. 12:04am. Nothing.
He sets the phone down and pulls his knees up to his chest, tucking an arm around it, digging his fingers into his bare legs. He’s trying to be rational, so badly, trying to say that Jeremy is just sleeping, that it’s fine, that he’s fine, but Jean’s mind won’t waver.
He’s killed himself.
He’s killed himself and Jean could have stopped him if only he’d known.
Jeremy had seemed fine when he left practice, smiling wide and bright and laughing with Nabil in the parking lot. But he had to go home to his family and Jean knows how much that destroys his spark, snuffs him out underfoot as if his joy could start a forest fire. Maybe they’d just smothered him to nothing and this is what comes of it.
He calls Jeremy.
Voicemail.
He calls again.
Voicemail.
And again.
Voicemail.
Again.
Voicemail.
Jean can’t breathe. His chest hurts, it screams for air but his every attempt comes fast and shallow and he can’t get any in his lungs.
Against his will he makes a sort of choked or strangled cry, he sounds like a wounded animal. A final utterance before he stops struggling and falls still. He feels like he’s dying too.
He’s too busy crying for his dead friend that he doesn’t even hear the sounds of activity deeper in the apartment. Until his door slides open and he looks up to see Cat and Laila hovering in the doorway, looking sleep-addled but mostly worried.
“Jean?” Cat asks. “Are you okay?”
“I–” he chokes. “Jeremy won’t pick up.”
“Well maybe he’s asleep,” Laila says. “You can talk to us for now, we’re not the same but we can try.”
“No. No, you don’t get it. Jeremy’s not picking up and I think he’s k–” Jean’s words fail him “–hurt himself.”
That sends the pair quickly further into the room, Cat coming to sit next to Jean. She rubs her hand between Jean’s shoulder blades and Laila is already fishing out her own phone. “Laila is going to call him and we’ll get all this sorted, okay?”
He takes a shuddering breath even as his lungs squeeze and leans into Cat’s touch. He’s so tired of crying but he can’t stop. The two of them watch Laila pace, her phone to her ear.
Her eyebrows furrow when she ultimately meets Jeremy’s voicemail.
She drops the phone to her chest height and quickly types out a message to Jeremy. That he won’t reply to. Because Jean has tried that so many times.
A pause, the only noise between them being Jean’s strained breaths. Then Laila is calling again.
“He’s not going to pick up,” Jean agonises. “He’s dead.”
Laila holds up a hand to silence him as Cat makes a distressed noise.
Somehow her call connects because she starts speaking. “Hi William. I hate to call you this late but can I ask you to check on Jeremy for me?”
A few beats of silence, Laila with the fakest smile on her face Jean had ever seen but she kept her tone pleasant to match it.
“I know he’s probably asleep but I really really would appreciate it if you could wake him up, I’ve been trying to get ahold of him for ages and it’s urgent,” she says.
Laila covers the phone with her hand, pulling it away from her ear and turning to Jean and Cat. Jean who is less panicky and more morose now and Cat who is still dutifully rubbing his back although now her leg is bouncing anxiously. “He’s going to go check on him.” She zeroes in on Jean. “It’s going to be okay.”
At this point Jean thinks he’s progressed to a sickening sort of acceptance, fully expecting William to go up to Jeremy’s bedroom and find him dead in bed. Just like Jean always feared he would have to do personally. At least this way Jean wouldn’t have to see him dead.
Laila paces a bit more with the phone over her ear until she stops dead in her tracks.
Jean tenses in anticipation. Jeremy is dead. That’s what he expects the next words out of Laila’s mouth to be.
“Jeremy Knox I am going to string you up on the balcony by your underwear, why is your phone on silent?”
Jean perks up, watching Laila carefully.
“I don’t care how tired you are, you have to keep your phone on. Jean is freaking out– yeah, ‘whoops’ is right, he thinks you’re dead.”
Laila takes a few steps towards Jean before pressing the phone to Jean’s ear. He doesn’t move to take it.
“Jean?” comes Jeremy’s voice through the speaker. Not the same overly-chipper tone as his voicemail message, sharp and worried. “Jean, I’m here.”
Jean gasps out a broken sob. “Jeremy?”
“I’m here,” Jeremy promises again.
“Are you okay?” Jean asks, his hand finally coming up to hold the phone to his ear.
“I’m okay.”
“Did you hurt yourself?”
“What? No. Jean, no. I just fell asleep, that’s all.”
“I just–” Jean’s eyes burn as more tears collect in his eyes. “I thought you killed yourself, and then you wouldn’t pick up, and I was so scared.”
“It’s okay, Jean. I’m okay.”
“Okay.”
“Are you going to be alright if I hang up?”
Jean swallows thickly. “I don’t know.”
“Then I’m coming over. Hand me back to Laila and just wait for me, okay?”
I would wait for you forever, Jean wants to say. “Okay.” He holds the phone out and Laila takes it.
Laila talks to Jeremy for maybe a minute before she hangs up and turns back to Jean. She looks like she’s about to say something but as soon as she catches sight of Jean with his red eyes and wet cheeks and ragged breath, she softens. “Are you okay, Jean?”
Jean shakes his head, words too far out of reach.
She sits on the bed on his other side and pulls Jean into a sideways hug, her arms strong around him.
Without Jeremy’s voice the thoughts come back.
The colour of Jeremy’s blood soaking into his bedsheets. A pile of pills in the palm of his hand. Poison on his lips. A noose around his neck. Swinging.
Once again he can’t breathe. Laila just holds him tight and Cat returns to rubbing his back.
“He’s okay,” Laila promises.
They stay like that for a while before the front door to the apartment opens and closes too heavily to be missed. There’s hurried footsteps and Laila peels away from Jean, allowing him to look up at the doorway and Jeremy in his shorts and tank top and nothing else, hair still ruffled from sleep.
“Jean,” he breathes his name like it’s all he knows.
Jean just cries.
He’s dead. The thoughts whisper. This isn’t real. They yell.
Suddenly there’s arms around him, not Laila’s this time, bigger, stronger. He’s real. He’s alive and he’s here and he’s real.
Jean clings back like his life depends on it.
Jeremy presses them so close together that Jean can feel the thrum of Jeremy’s pulse, still he brings up a hand to lay it over his heart and just feel it.
“I’m okay,” Jeremy promises. He would never lie to Jean.
“I was so scared,” Jean breathes, just loud enough for Jeremy to hear him. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you dead.”
Jeremy pulls back a little, just enough to look into Jean’s eyes with his honeyed brown. “Do you think about that a lot?”
He’s remembering the other night, when Jean couldn’t sleep and kept coming back. He’s putting the puzzle pieces together so it’s too late for Jean to back out.
He nods. “Always.”
Jeremy groans and pulls him tight again. “While I’m flattered you care so much about me, I don’t want you to suffer like this.” Jean can feel the rumble of his voice in his chest. It bleeds into his bones.
“I don’t know how to make it stop,” he finally says. A mountainous admittance.
“Do you think you should talk to your therapist about this?” Jeremy asks, voice soaked in worry.
Jean is just so relieved that Jeremy is alive and he’s here that he will agree to anything Jeremy says. So he nods and bites his ruined lip.
“Will you?”
Jean lets out the calmest breath he’s had in over an hour. “I think so.”
Jeremy’s hold tightens and it tells Jean everything he can’t say out loud.
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thinking abt william and dallas today… employees of the wilshires because everyone has to make a living right? a good job with good pay, but there are children in this house. children who are treated like props and not people. so they do their best to inject their love for the kids into that icy house. french lessons, horse shaped pancakes on the first day of school. do u think they were allowed to go to noah’s funeral? do u think they dread the day jeremy moves out because all the love will leave with him???
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computer. northern downpour. loud enough to kill.
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thinking about how my parents did everything in their power to hide 9/11 from me as a child to the point of taking away my TV and preventing me from going outside so when we went to a 1-year anniversary church service about it in 2002 i thought the pastor was recounting the story from scripture and was like wtf how did i not notice there were planes in bible times that's crazy and then i went and pissed all over the church bathroom floor to test if i had free will
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guy who’s terrible at sucking dick but he had a bad childhood so you have to grade on a curve because otherwise you’d make him sad and he’s already had a hard enough life
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hell is the talking type
fandom: all for the game title from: hozier - dinner & diatribes word count: 5.4k !!warnings: canon-typical self harm, mentions of suicide!! AO3
Jean sighs and pulls back his covers and prepares for another trek down the hall.
Usually his mind isn’t so persistent but tonight it won't stop looping on one thought. That Jeremy is dead in his bed.
So Jean has to check.
He’s already checked twice in the past hour, two times more before that. Each time he found Jeremy breathing deeply and sound asleep. Yet every time he gets back to his room and settles in bed the thought comes crawling back like a wild animal he fed one time. Maybe the checking is feeding it, maybe as long as he checks it will come back for more from him.
He looks over to his alarm clock that bears the angry red of 2:46am at him and he dreads morning practice. The start of a new week and Jean is going to spend it sleep deprived because he spent the entire night making sure Jeremy was alive.
The thing is, he knows that it only snowballs if he keeps checking, no matter how much he checks it won’t stop until he does. And he tries stopping, he really does, he makes it twenty minutes before he’s clawing at his neck and working the skin raw and stinging because Jeremy is dead and it’s all Jean’s fault.
So he has to get up now, wounds fresh on his neck and his own mind poised against him. He has to make sure Jeremy is alive, to affirm that his brain is lying to him because he couldn’t live with himself if Jeremy was dead right now and he just slept the night away. He couldn’t do that to Jeremy.
The world outside of his room is cold. His room probably only heated so well by his constant hyperventilating and his own raised body temperature.
He’s still breathing heavy as he closes his door to just a crack, he can see his alarm clock from here, a minute has passed since he last looked, the numbers are no less red or angry.
Jeremy’s room is technically the spare room because he’s only there on the weekends but it’s Jeremy’s room for all intents and purposes, aside from like a few boxes of random flatpack furniture Laila bought that they haven’t gotten around to building yet.
Jeremy sleeps with the door opened wide enough for Jabberwocky to come in and out. Jean can’t fathom why he would want to share his bed with the creature but Jeremy insists on it. Something about bonding.
“I have to do what I can to surpass you as his favourite,” Jeremy had said. “It’s no fair, you don’t even have to try.”
Jean gently eases the door open wider and cringes as it creaks loudly. He would have to talk to Laila about getting the hinges oiled for his nighttime breakdowns to not disturb anyone.
Jeremy doesn’t stir.
So Jean stands in his doorway for a minute or so, just listening to Jeremy breathe. Which he is doing so that’s one point for Jean and none for his brain. Jeremy is alive and his brain was wrong so now he can go back to bed, satisfied that Jeremy is okay.
He shuts the door back to its small gap from before and he pads back down the hallway to his room. He sits in his bed with his legs folded under him and pulls the blankets into his lap as he takes a few deep breaths.
His heart is still pounding.
It doesn’t take long for the thought to come slithering back, underneath his door and into the room where it drips venom and whispers “he’s dead, y’know?”
Jean’s breath catches in his throat.
Again.
There’s always an again.
He closes his eyes firmly and counts to one hundred in French, then back to zero. Opening his eyes doesn’t help. At some point he’d gripped his own wrist and dug his fingers in, trying to use the pain as a distraction but as he loosens his hold he is only left with crescent shaped dents in the skin.
The thought is still there, it waited for him but it knows he can hear it when it tells him that Jeremy is dead, over and over again.
He presses his hands firmly over his ears and counts again. Zero comes and the thought is still there. Burning now.
So he gets up.
He makes his way back out into the hall and back to Jeremy’s door where it squeaks again and Jean holds his breath. Jeremy doesn’t move.
But he’s breathing, Jean can hear him breathing.
It lasts for thirty seconds before Jeremy speaks. “Jean, what are you doing?”
Jean stills at that, he didn’t realise Jeremy was awake. How long had he not been sleeping? How many times has he heard Jean come and check on him?
“Nothing,” he says lamely.
“Then why do you keep coming back?” Jeremy asks, voice muffled by his pillow, his words slurred by sleep.
Jean wants to flee back to his room and act like none of this ever happened but he knows better than that, that Jeremy would follow him. “I’m just making sure you’re okay.”
“I’m okay,” Jeremy says.
“Okay.”
Jean closes the door maybe a bit too far for Jabberwocky to get out but he goes back to bed, burrows under the covers with his back to the room and counts to a hundred and back in every language he knows until he falls asleep.
-
It’s not graceful. Jeremy trips over his own feet and falls like the world’s worst swan dive as he hits the ground hard. Jean watches it happen. But before he can step out to check on him Xavier is already pulling him to his feet and Laila is sending the ball in his direction with a belated “Jean!”
Jean snaps into focus and sweeps his racquet out to catch the ball before he takes it a few steps and turns it flying through the air at one of the strikers, one of the double d’s, they both turn when Jean calls out “Derek”.
Once the ball is gone and he doesn’t have easy access to the distraction it offers, he casts a sidelong glance at Jeremy who is bouncing on his feet and calling for the ball that has traded racquets with the opposing team. His team.
He looks fine. Jean notes this. There is no reason for the prickling of skin on the back of his neck or the tightness in his throat behind its guard.
But Jean has never known his mind to take the most reasonable path.
His intrusive thoughts come back, always monstrous, always terrifying.
He hit his head, one says.
He’s got a brain bleed, another fills in.
He’s going to die, the third finishes.
Jean swallows thickly and tries to ignore them, gritting his teeth and turning his attention back to the game, but they aren’t that easily dismissed.
They loop.
He’s going to die. He’s going to die. He’s going to die.
Do something Jean!
Jean takes a shaky breath and runs his gloved knuckles along where his broken ribs used to be, digging there, hoping to elicit some sort of pain that will snap him out of this. He watches Jeremy run and play like there’s nothing wrong but his brain is screaming at him that it is all a farce and Jeremy is going to die.
“Jean!” someone yells and Jean snaps his attention back to the game, not realising he had been standing around gripping his racquet tight enough to hurt his hands and staring after Jeremy for so long that his team was noticing.
So he zeroes in on the ball and takes off in its direction, marking his striker, Ashton, who is half a court away.
He misses the way Laila tries to catch his eye.
He tries to lose himself in the game but the thought is always there and he finds himself looking to Jeremy more often than not.
But I didn’t see him hit his head, he tries to reason with his thoughts.
That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, they bite back.
His mouth is dry. He tries to swallow against it and just comes up with the sensation of scraping.
Dropping one hand from his racquet he taps against the base of his throat guard. It doesn’t help to distract him but at least it’s something to do with his hands.
I’m overreacting, he thinks this time, hoping that it’s enough to get his thoughts to back down in the slightest.
They rise to the challenge. He’s going to die. And Jean can’t argue with that.
Maybe his fixation with something bad happening to Jeremy is something to think about or ask Dobson about when he next has an appointment but Jean can’t seem to rationalise that any part of this is understandable. He’s just so scared that something bad is going to happen, that it’s already happened and he’s just the last to know.
There’s some unstoppable force out there that is trying to take Jeremy from him and these thoughts know that. Maybe they’re not trying to ruin Jean’s life, maybe they’re trying to help him. Sleepless nights and panic attacks at red herrings, but something is going to happen. It has to. It’s the only way any of this will be worth it. If he can keep Jeremy safe.
He earns himself a frustrated huff from Laila when Ashton scores a goal and Jean is metres behind him because he was heeding to his thoughts and desperately chasing Jeremy with his eyes again.
But the rest of the game passes mostly without incident but the thoughts do not leave Jean alone.
“Dude, are you okay?” Jeremy asks Jean before the backliner can duck into the showers, hand over his hammering heart. Maybe he can feel it, but Jean can’t find anything in his expression other than concern.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just, you’re our ex-Raven and you missed a lot of things during practice. That’s not like you, are you good?” Jeremy still has his hand on Jean, still stopping him from escaping even as Jean takes a half-step back, his touch follows him.
“Yeah,” Jean offers. “I’m okay.”
The pinch of Jeremy’s brow tells him he doesn’t believe him. “You’d tell me if you weren’t, right?”
This comes only two days after their last interaction on the heels of Jean’s irrational brain, that one shared in the darkness of the very early morning and without Jeremy looking up at him intently with those big brown eyes.
So Jean lies, “Of course.”
Jeremy purses his lips, not quite believing him but swallowing the lie. His eyes track all over Jean’s face, looking for a crack, anything to reach into and pull the facade apart and uncover what really lies underneath. But Jean is too good at this game and his mask is smooth.
Ultimately, he gives in. He pats over Jean’s collar and pulls his hand back. Jean wants to ask him if his head hurts. “Okay, I’ll talk to you soon.”
Jeremy flashes him one of his smiles he reserves for the camera, one that is only half-genuine and half for show.
-
“Did you forget the homework, too?” Shane asks, wide-eyed.
They’re in their business lecture and Jean hadn’t even known there was homework. Some part of his mind had just bundled it up and thrown it away, deeming the information unimportant and unnecessary.
Jean swallows and his throat is dry but he tries to laugh it off. He can already feel the thoughts creeping up his neck and wrapping their talons around his brain, squeezing, slicing. “Yeah, I guess I’ve been a bit preoccupied with training.”
It’s not true. He’s been too busy at war with his own brain to sleep and he only eats when Cat forces him to because he just feels sick all the time, his guts twisting and writhing like some live thing. But the rest of the team is getting a little overwhelmed with practice lately so it’s an easy lie.
Shane laughs too and claps him on the shoulder. “All good, man.”
Thankfully, Jean is saved from conversation by their professor entering the lecture hall and starting to talk. He turns his attention to his notebook and starts trying to take notes. ‘Trying’ being the critical word in that sentence.
His mind is running a mile a minute and every time it trips over its own feet it gets up and runs faster, every moment of reprieve when he can catch onto a sentence on the projector is filled with dread and quickly followed by more thoughts. He can’t stop them. He taps his pen at the same frequency that his leg bounces but it does nothing but make Shane side-eye him.
What else has he forgotten?
What if he’s forgotten something really important?
At first it’s more innocuous, he runs through his mental list of assignments and exams, then a few potential upcoming events–move nights or birthdays or when their next game is–, then his thoughts turn somewhere dark. What if he’s done something terrible and forgotten?
What if he’s killed someone and forgotten about it?
A leap from forgetting his homework, for sure, but his brain lights up at that thought and the claws around his brain sink in. That’s it. He’s killed someone and forgotten.
The rational part of his brain tells him that he couldn’t have just forgotten that he killed someone, he wouldn’t forget something like that but his brain is stuck on the maybe. Maybe he did.
He just– he takes a shaky breath in through his nose and blows it out through his mouth as slowly as he can, trying to soothe the jackrabbit pounding in his chest. He just needs to check.
He drops his pen like it’s a hot coal and stands up hurriedly.
“Bathroom,” he mutters to Shane and takes off before he can get a response.
The steps up to the back of the hall feel like he’s climbing a mountain and not half of a single lecture hall from the middle row, like it’ll never end. But it does and he pushes his way out into the corridor.
Looking around wildly, he flits his head back and forth until he catches sight of the blue arrow on the wall pointing in the direction of the bathrooms.
On shaky legs he makes his trek, hurrying down the corridors until he finds the men’s room and hides in the furthermost stall, making sure to slot the lock behind him. He runs a trembling hand through his hair and with his other pulls out his phone.
Googling on his phone is never as easy as he wants it to be, so clunky and near-impossible to get through more often than not, but he has to now. He doesn’t have a choice. He has to make sure that he hasn’t killed anyone and he can’t exactly ask anyone around him without getting the police called.
He doesn’t want to go to jail.
He mistypes a few letters of his google search and has to backspace them and tediously type it out again but he manages. Recent murders in LA.
He is overwhelmed by the results when the searches load. He could scroll forever and never find an end. Something in him is still logical and tells him that LA is a big place and of course there were murders.
So he types out another search, this time limiting it to just the nearby area, and is not comforted.
His chest is burning with quick and shallow breaths. Starved of oxygen as Jean continues to hyperventilate.
Reading through the articles that the search pulls up does not soothe his worrying. He reads through an article about a shooting. Okay he couldn’t have done that, he’s never fired a gun in his life, he doesn’t know how. But he finds another about a stabbing and he can vividly see himself standing over the body of a woman who was stabbed twenty-seven times in the torso and left in the street in the dead of night to be discovered by a passerby and die from her injuries in hospital. Or a student of a nearby university who was strangled two nights ago in his home. Jean can feel the weight of the cord in his hands.
He clenches his fists so quickly he almost drops his phone.
Breathing is near impossible now, he can’t seem to get any air in his lungs, ribcage squeezed by the invisible vice grip of his newfound guilt because he killed these people and forgot.
He’s killed people and come home at night and gone to bed and woken up a blank slate, having forgotten all about it. He’s done these things and forgotten. He’s a murderer and he is so good at it that he forgot about it and lived his life guilt-free until now.
His eyes fog and burn as tears come hard and fast.
He is shaking and crying, gripping his shirt over his heart as it beats too fast for Jean to keep up when someone knocks on the stall. He hadn’t even heard them come in.
“Jean?” comes Shane’s voice.
Jean tries to speak but the only thing that comes out is a strangled sort of choking noise.
“Are you okay?” Shane asks. “You’ve been gone awhile and I thought you were pooping and I was totally cool leaving you to do that but you took off like a bat out of hell and when you gotta go you gotta go but I just thought I’d check and I don’t think you’re okay in there.”
Jean’s head is spinning. “I’m okay,” he says because he can’t tell Shane that he’s a murderer. His voice is strained and breaks as he speaks because he’s a terrible excuse for a murderer who can’t even handle the reality of what he’s done.
“I don’t think you are,” Shane replies.
“I’m okay,” he repeats. “Just go away, Shane.”
Shane stands firm. “No. You’re not okay and I’m here for you. We’re a team, remember?”
Jean doesn’t dignify him with a response.
“Do you want me to get someone?” Shane asks.
“No.”
Shane keeps talking, much to Jean’s dismay. He’s still crying and hiccuping and he can’t breathe. He closes the lid of the toilet and sits down to save his jelly legs from holding his weight. “Do you want me to text Jeremy?”
Jeremy.
Jean’s temporary relief at the idea of Jeremy coming to save him is short-lived. He can’t have Jeremy see him like this, he can’t face the captain of the sunshine court when he’s done these things.
“No,” he says as firmly as he can.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Just tell me something, man,” Shane says. “I’m getting worried.”
“I think–” he chokes on his words. “I think I killed someone and forgot.”
The truth burns. Like he’s just spewed up fire and it burned its way up his oesophagus and out of his mouth. Third degree, probably.
Shane doesn’t say anything for a long while and Jean wonders if he’s finally realised he is crazy.
But when he speaks his voice is just as firm as it was before Jean said what he did. “I don’t think you have.”
“I have,” he gasps. “I definitely have, I just forgot, why can’t I remember?”
“Jean,” Shane says, “I don’t think you’ve killed anyone and I don’t think you could have forgotten if you did.”
Jean can see now under the gap at the bottom of the stall, that Shane is leaning up against the door. The laces on one of his trainers is undone.
“But what if I have?” Jean asks, his voice small, scared, like the child he never got to be.
Shane pauses for a moment before replying, “just think about it realistically. You never go anywhere alone, Jean. When would you have slipped away to kill someone.”
“I–” Jean starts, the words dying in his throat. “I don’t know.”
“Exactly, and if you were in a state to kill someone and immediately forget, wouldn’t someone have noticed you and told the police? Wouldn’t one of your roommates have seen you come home with blood on your clothes or something?”
It makes sense, of course it does, because Jean’s brain is illogical at the best of times.
He breathes a little easier as he sits with the logic, even if he doesn’t fully believe it. The tears have stopped now and he wipes the remaining ones away with the back of his hand.
They sit in silence for a while but Shane’s reasoning provides a wall in his mind that interrupts the looping thoughts, keeping the circuit from being complete so that the electrical charge dies out with nowhere to fire to.
“Are you feeling better now?” Shane asks.
Jean nods and then remembers Shane can’t see him. “Yeah…”
“And did you murder someone and forget?”
Some part of him still wants to say yes. “No.”
Shane must check his watch because the next thing he says is “Class won’t be over for a while yet but we could just head to the library instead. Do you want me to collect your things and meet you here?”
Jean nods again. “Please.”
“Okay,” Shane says. “Hang tight.”
And then he’s gone and Jean still has a white-knuckle grip on his phone.
-
Jean curls in on himself, phone in hand, the screen blurry through his tears.
His thoughts are back, this time too strong to ignore and his every attempt to sway them is a failure as Jeremy fails to pick up his calls.
To: Jeremy
(11:57pm) You: Jeremy please pick up the phone.
(11:57pm) You: I’m really worried. Please just talk to me.
(11:57pm) You: Jeremy.
(11:58pm) You: Jeremy, please.
He sighs a shaky, uneven breath and calls Jeremy again, pressing his phone over his ear. It rings for a few moments before clicking and Jeremy’s chipper tone filters through the small speaker.
“Hiya, Jeremy here, I can’t come to the phone right now, please leave a message!”
Jean sighs and hangs up the call. He’s already left so many voicemails. He has tearfully begged Jeremy to pick up his calls more than once, he wishes he wasn’t but he’s so scared.
His brain won’t stop with the barrage of thoughts, of Jeremy dying, this time taking his own life. He’s at his mother’s house, far from where Jean can check on him and make sure he’s safe and Jean’s brain is treating him to the highlight reel of all the ways Jeremy could have killed himself, his certainty only reinforced by every missed call and unread text.
A few more tears escape and Jean rakes a frustrated hand over his face to wipe them away. The skin around his eyes is already rubbed raw.
Jeremy with his wrists slit, wrist to elbow. Jeremy with a stomach full of pills, white and oval. Jeremy and a bottle of drain cleaner, chemical and burning. Jeremy swinging from the ceiling, will it give way?
Jean squeezes his eyes shut and tries to force the thoughts out of his mind, he counts up and down in French, to twenty five and back, breathing heavily. He loops five times before he opens his eyes to his defeat. His phone is still on in his hand, screen bright and void of a reply.
So he rings him again, phone pressed to his ear, a prayer on his lips. He’s never been religious, never had much faith in anything, but he needs all the luck he can get.
“Hiya, Jeremy here, I can’t–”
He hangs up.
Biting his lip brings him nothing but the taste of metal from his ripped and bleeding lips. He’s already worried them to carnage.
To: Jeremy
(12:01am) You: Jeremy, I can’t handle this.
(12:01am) You: Please pick up the phone or just text me.
(12:01am) You: Let me know you’re okay.
He stares at the screen, his grip firm on his phone and watches the tiny clock in the corner tick the minutes by. 12:04am. Nothing.
He sets the phone down and pulls his knees up to his chest, tucking an arm around it, digging his fingers into his bare legs. He’s trying to be rational, so badly, trying to say that Jeremy is just sleeping, that it’s fine, that he’s fine, but Jean’s mind won’t waver.
He’s killed himself.
He’s killed himself and Jean could have stopped him if only he’d known.
Jeremy had seemed fine when he left practice, smiling wide and bright and laughing with Nabil in the parking lot. But he had to go home to his family and Jean knows how much that destroys his spark, snuffs him out underfoot as if his joy could start a forest fire. Maybe they’d just smothered him to nothing and this is what comes of it.
He calls Jeremy.
Voicemail.
He calls again.
Voicemail.
And again.
Voicemail.
Again.
Voicemail.
Jean can’t breathe. His chest hurts, it screams for air but his every attempt comes fast and shallow and he can’t get any in his lungs.
Against his will he makes a sort of choked or strangled cry, he sounds like a wounded animal. A final utterance before he stops struggling and falls still. He feels like he’s dying too.
He’s too busy crying for his dead friend that he doesn’t even hear the sounds of activity deeper in the apartment. Until his door slides open and he looks up to see Cat and Laila hovering in the doorway, looking sleep-addled but mostly worried.
“Jean?” Cat asks. “Are you okay?”
“I–” he chokes. “Jeremy won’t pick up.”
“Well maybe he’s asleep,” Laila says. “You can talk to us for now, we’re not the same but we can try.”
“No. No, you don’t get it. Jeremy’s not picking up and I think he’s k–” Jean’s words fail him “–hurt himself.”
That sends the pair quickly further into the room, Cat coming to sit next to Jean. She rubs her hand between Jean’s shoulder blades and Laila is already fishing out her own phone. “Laila is going to call him and we’ll get all this sorted, okay?”
He takes a shuddering breath even as his lungs squeeze and leans into Cat’s touch. He’s so tired of crying but he can’t stop. The two of them watch Laila pace, her phone to her ear.
Her eyebrows furrow when she ultimately meets Jeremy’s voicemail.
She drops the phone to her chest height and quickly types out a message to Jeremy. That he won’t reply to. Because Jean has tried that so many times.
A pause, the only noise between them being Jean’s strained breaths. Then Laila is calling again.
“He’s not going to pick up,” Jean agonises. “He’s dead.”
Laila holds up a hand to silence him as Cat makes a distressed noise.
Somehow her call connects because she starts speaking. “Hi William. I hate to call you this late but can I ask you to check on Jeremy for me?”
A few beats of silence, Laila with the fakest smile on her face Jean had ever seen but she kept her tone pleasant to match it.
“I know he’s probably asleep but I really really would appreciate it if you could wake him up, I’ve been trying to get ahold of him for ages and it’s urgent,” she says.
Laila covers the phone with her hand, pulling it away from her ear and turning to Jean and Cat. Jean who is less panicky and more morose now and Cat who is still dutifully rubbing his back although now her leg is bouncing anxiously. “He’s going to go check on him.” She zeroes in on Jean. “It’s going to be okay.”
At this point Jean thinks he’s progressed to a sickening sort of acceptance, fully expecting William to go up to Jeremy’s bedroom and find him dead in bed. Just like Jean always feared he would have to do personally. At least this way Jean wouldn’t have to see him dead.
Laila paces a bit more with the phone over her ear until she stops dead in her tracks.
Jean tenses in anticipation. Jeremy is dead. That’s what he expects the next words out of Laila’s mouth to be.
“Jeremy Knox I am going to string you up on the balcony by your underwear, why is your phone on silent?”
Jean perks up, watching Laila carefully.
“I don’t care how tired you are, you have to keep your phone on. Jean is freaking out– yeah, ‘whoops’ is right, he thinks you’re dead.”
Laila takes a few steps towards Jean before pressing the phone to Jean’s ear. He doesn’t move to take it.
“Jean?” comes Jeremy’s voice through the speaker. Not the same overly-chipper tone as his voicemail message, sharp and worried. “Jean, I’m here.”
Jean gasps out a broken sob. “Jeremy?”
“I’m here,” Jeremy promises again.
“Are you okay?” Jean asks, his hand finally coming up to hold the phone to his ear.
“I’m okay.”
“Did you hurt yourself?”
“What? No. Jean, no. I just fell asleep, that’s all.”
“I just–” Jean’s eyes burn as more tears collect in his eyes. “I thought you killed yourself, and then you wouldn’t pick up, and I was so scared.”
“It’s okay, Jean. I’m okay.”
“Okay.”
“Are you going to be alright if I hang up?”
Jean swallows thickly. “I don’t know.”
“Then I’m coming over. Hand me back to Laila and just wait for me, okay?”
I would wait for you forever, Jean wants to say. “Okay.” He holds the phone out and Laila takes it.
Laila talks to Jeremy for maybe a minute before she hangs up and turns back to Jean. She looks like she’s about to say something but as soon as she catches sight of Jean with his red eyes and wet cheeks and ragged breath, she softens. “Are you okay, Jean?”
Jean shakes his head, words too far out of reach.
She sits on the bed on his other side and pulls Jean into a sideways hug, her arms strong around him.
Without Jeremy’s voice the thoughts come back.
The colour of Jeremy’s blood soaking into his bedsheets. A pile of pills in the palm of his hand. Poison on his lips. A noose around his neck. Swinging.
Once again he can’t breathe. Laila just holds him tight and Cat returns to rubbing his back.
“He’s okay,” Laila promises.
They stay like that for a while before the front door to the apartment opens and closes too heavily to be missed. There’s hurried footsteps and Laila peels away from Jean, allowing him to look up at the doorway and Jeremy in his shorts and tank top and nothing else, hair still ruffled from sleep.
“Jean,” he breathes his name like it’s all he knows.
Jean just cries.
He’s dead. The thoughts whisper. This isn’t real. They yell.
Suddenly there’s arms around him, not Laila’s this time, bigger, stronger. He’s real. He’s alive and he’s here and he’s real.
Jean clings back like his life depends on it.
Jeremy presses them so close together that Jean can feel the thrum of Jeremy’s pulse, still he brings up a hand to lay it over his heart and just feel it.
“I’m okay,” Jeremy promises. He would never lie to Jean.
“I was so scared,” Jean breathes, just loud enough for Jeremy to hear him. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you dead.”
Jeremy pulls back a little, just enough to look into Jean’s eyes with his honeyed brown. “Do you think about that a lot?”
He’s remembering the other night, when Jean couldn’t sleep and kept coming back. He’s putting the puzzle pieces together so it’s too late for Jean to back out.
He nods. “Always.”
Jeremy groans and pulls him tight again. “While I’m flattered you care so much about me, I don’t want you to suffer like this.” Jean can feel the rumble of his voice in his chest. It bleeds into his bones.
“I don’t know how to make it stop,” he finally says. A mountainous admittance.
“Do you think you should talk to your therapist about this?” Jeremy asks, voice soaked in worry.
Jean is just so relieved that Jeremy is alive and he’s here that he will agree to anything Jeremy says. So he nods and bites his ruined lip.
“Will you?”
Jean lets out the calmest breath he’s had in over an hour. “I think so.”
Jeremy’s hold tightens and it tells Jean everything he can’t say out loud.
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hell is the talking type
fandom: all for the game title from: hozier - dinner & diatribes word count: 5.4k !!warnings: canon-typical self harm, mentions of suicide!! AO3
Jean sighs and pulls back his covers and prepares for another trek down the hall.
Usually his mind isn’t so persistent but tonight it won't stop looping on one thought. That Jeremy is dead in his bed.
So Jean has to check.
He’s already checked twice in the past hour, two times more before that. Each time he found Jeremy breathing deeply and sound asleep. Yet every time he gets back to his room and settles in bed the thought comes crawling back like a wild animal he fed one time. Maybe the checking is feeding it, maybe as long as he checks it will come back for more from him.
He looks over to his alarm clock that bears the angry red of 2:46am at him and he dreads morning practice. The start of a new week and Jean is going to spend it sleep deprived because he spent the entire night making sure Jeremy was alive.
The thing is, he knows that it only snowballs if he keeps checking, no matter how much he checks it won’t stop until he does. And he tries stopping, he really does, he makes it twenty minutes before he’s clawing at his neck and working the skin raw and stinging because Jeremy is dead and it’s all Jean’s fault.
So he has to get up now, wounds fresh on his neck and his own mind poised against him. He has to make sure Jeremy is alive, to affirm that his brain is lying to him because he couldn’t live with himself if Jeremy was dead right now and he just slept the night away. He couldn’t do that to Jeremy.
The world outside of his room is cold. His room probably only heated so well by his constant hyperventilating and his own raised body temperature.
He’s still breathing heavy as he closes his door to just a crack, he can see his alarm clock from here, a minute has passed since he last looked, the numbers are no less red or angry.
Jeremy’s room is technically the spare room because he’s only there on the weekends but it’s Jeremy’s room for all intents and purposes, aside from like a few boxes of random flatpack furniture Laila bought that they haven’t gotten around to building yet.
Jeremy sleeps with the door opened wide enough for Jabberwocky to come in and out. Jean can’t fathom why he would want to share his bed with the creature but Jeremy insists on it. Something about bonding.
“I have to do what I can to surpass you as his favourite,” Jeremy had said. “It’s no fair, you don’t even have to try.”
Jean gently eases the door open wider and cringes as it creaks loudly. He would have to talk to Laila about getting the hinges oiled for his nighttime breakdowns to not disturb anyone.
Jeremy doesn’t stir.
So Jean stands in his doorway for a minute or so, just listening to Jeremy breathe. Which he is doing so that’s one point for Jean and none for his brain. Jeremy is alive and his brain was wrong so now he can go back to bed, satisfied that Jeremy is okay.
He shuts the door back to its small gap from before and he pads back down the hallway to his room. He sits in his bed with his legs folded under him and pulls the blankets into his lap as he takes a few deep breaths.
His heart is still pounding.
It doesn’t take long for the thought to come slithering back, underneath his door and into the room where it drips venom and whispers “he’s dead, y’know?”
Jean’s breath catches in his throat.
Again.
There’s always an again.
He closes his eyes firmly and counts to one hundred in French, then back to zero. Opening his eyes doesn’t help. At some point he’d gripped his own wrist and dug his fingers in, trying to use the pain as a distraction but as he loosens his hold he is only left with crescent shaped dents in the skin.
The thought is still there, it waited for him but it knows he can hear it when it tells him that Jeremy is dead, over and over again.
He presses his hands firmly over his ears and counts again. Zero comes and the thought is still there. Burning now.
So he gets up.
He makes his way back out into the hall and back to Jeremy’s door where it squeaks again and Jean holds his breath. Jeremy doesn’t move.
But he’s breathing, Jean can hear him breathing.
It lasts for thirty seconds before Jeremy speaks. “Jean, what are you doing?”
Jean stills at that, he didn’t realise Jeremy was awake. How long had he not been sleeping? How many times has he heard Jean come and check on him?
“Nothing,” he says lamely.
“Then why do you keep coming back?” Jeremy asks, voice muffled by his pillow, his words slurred by sleep.
Jean wants to flee back to his room and act like none of this ever happened but he knows better than that, that Jeremy would follow him. “I’m just making sure you’re okay.”
“I’m okay,” Jeremy says.
“Okay.”
Jean closes the door maybe a bit too far for Jabberwocky to get out but he goes back to bed, burrows under the covers with his back to the room and counts to a hundred and back in every language he knows until he falls asleep.
-
It’s not graceful. Jeremy trips over his own feet and falls like the world’s worst swan dive as he hits the ground hard. Jean watches it happen. But before he can step out to check on him Xavier is already pulling him to his feet and Laila is sending the ball in his direction with a belated “Jean!”
Jean snaps into focus and sweeps his racquet out to catch the ball before he takes it a few steps and turns it flying through the air at one of the strikers, one of the double d’s, they both turn when Jean calls out “Derek”.
Once the ball is gone and he doesn’t have easy access to the distraction it offers, he casts a sidelong glance at Jeremy who is bouncing on his feet and calling for the ball that has traded racquets with the opposing team. His team.
He looks fine. Jean notes this. There is no reason for the prickling of skin on the back of his neck or the tightness in his throat behind its guard.
But Jean has never known his mind to take the most reasonable path.
His intrusive thoughts come back, always monstrous, always terrifying.
He hit his head, one says.
He’s got a brain bleed, another fills in.
He’s going to die, the third finishes.
Jean swallows thickly and tries to ignore them, gritting his teeth and turning his attention back to the game, but they aren’t that easily dismissed.
They loop.
He’s going to die. He’s going to die. He’s going to die.
Do something Jean!
Jean takes a shaky breath and runs his gloved knuckles along where his broken ribs used to be, digging there, hoping to elicit some sort of pain that will snap him out of this. He watches Jeremy run and play like there’s nothing wrong but his brain is screaming at him that it is all a farce and Jeremy is going to die.
“Jean!” someone yells and Jean snaps his attention back to the game, not realising he had been standing around gripping his racquet tight enough to hurt his hands and staring after Jeremy for so long that his team was noticing.
So he zeroes in on the ball and takes off in its direction, marking his striker, Ashton, who is half a court away.
He misses the way Laila tries to catch his eye.
He tries to lose himself in the game but the thought is always there and he finds himself looking to Jeremy more often than not.
But I didn’t see him hit his head, he tries to reason with his thoughts.
That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, they bite back.
His mouth is dry. He tries to swallow against it and just comes up with the sensation of scraping.
Dropping one hand from his racquet he taps against the base of his throat guard. It doesn’t help to distract him but at least it’s something to do with his hands.
I’m overreacting, he thinks this time, hoping that it’s enough to get his thoughts to back down in the slightest.
They rise to the challenge. He’s going to die. And Jean can’t argue with that.
Maybe his fixation with something bad happening to Jeremy is something to think about or ask Dobson about when he next has an appointment but Jean can’t seem to rationalise that any part of this is understandable. He’s just so scared that something bad is going to happen, that it’s already happened and he’s just the last to know.
There’s some unstoppable force out there that is trying to take Jeremy from him and these thoughts know that. Maybe they’re not trying to ruin Jean’s life, maybe they’re trying to help him. Sleepless nights and panic attacks at red herrings, but something is going to happen. It has to. It’s the only way any of this will be worth it. If he can keep Jeremy safe.
He earns himself a frustrated huff from Laila when Ashton scores a goal and Jean is metres behind him because he was heeding to his thoughts and desperately chasing Jeremy with his eyes again.
But the rest of the game passes mostly without incident but the thoughts do not leave Jean alone.
“Dude, are you okay?” Jeremy asks Jean before the backliner can duck into the showers, hand over his hammering heart. Maybe he can feel it, but Jean can’t find anything in his expression other than concern.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just, you’re our ex-Raven and you missed a lot of things during practice. That’s not like you, are you good?” Jeremy still has his hand on Jean, still stopping him from escaping even as Jean takes a half-step back, his touch follows him.
“Yeah,” Jean offers. “I’m okay.”
The pinch of Jeremy’s brow tells him he doesn’t believe him. “You’d tell me if you weren’t, right?”
This comes only two days after their last interaction on the heels of Jean’s irrational brain, that one shared in the darkness of the very early morning and without Jeremy looking up at him intently with those big brown eyes.
So Jean lies, “Of course.”
Jeremy purses his lips, not quite believing him but swallowing the lie. His eyes track all over Jean’s face, looking for a crack, anything to reach into and pull the facade apart and uncover what really lies underneath. But Jean is too good at this game and his mask is smooth.
Ultimately, he gives in. He pats over Jean’s collar and pulls his hand back. Jean wants to ask him if his head hurts. “Okay, I’ll talk to you soon.”
Jeremy flashes him one of his smiles he reserves for the camera, one that is only half-genuine and half for show.
-
“Did you forget the homework, too?” Shane asks, wide-eyed.
They’re in their business lecture and Jean hadn’t even known there was homework. Some part of his mind had just bundled it up and thrown it away, deeming the information unimportant and unnecessary.
Jean swallows and his throat is dry but he tries to laugh it off. He can already feel the thoughts creeping up his neck and wrapping their talons around his brain, squeezing, slicing. “Yeah, I guess I’ve been a bit preoccupied with training.”
It’s not true. He’s been too busy at war with his own brain to sleep and he only eats when Cat forces him to because he just feels sick all the time, his guts twisting and writhing like some live thing. But the rest of the team is getting a little overwhelmed with practice lately so it’s an easy lie.
Shane laughs too and claps him on the shoulder. “All good, man.”
Thankfully, Jean is saved from conversation by their professor entering the lecture hall and starting to talk. He turns his attention to his notebook and starts trying to take notes. ‘Trying’ being the critical word in that sentence.
His mind is running a mile a minute and every time it trips over its own feet it gets up and runs faster, every moment of reprieve when he can catch onto a sentence on the projector is filled with dread and quickly followed by more thoughts. He can’t stop them. He taps his pen at the same frequency that his leg bounces but it does nothing but make Shane side-eye him.
What else has he forgotten?
What if he’s forgotten something really important?
At first it’s more innocuous, he runs through his mental list of assignments and exams, then a few potential upcoming events–move nights or birthdays or when their next game is–, then his thoughts turn somewhere dark. What if he’s done something terrible and forgotten?
What if he’s killed someone and forgotten about it?
A leap from forgetting his homework, for sure, but his brain lights up at that thought and the claws around his brain sink in. That’s it. He’s killed someone and forgotten.
The rational part of his brain tells him that he couldn’t have just forgotten that he killed someone, he wouldn’t forget something like that but his brain is stuck on the maybe. Maybe he did.
He just– he takes a shaky breath in through his nose and blows it out through his mouth as slowly as he can, trying to soothe the jackrabbit pounding in his chest. He just needs to check.
He drops his pen like it’s a hot coal and stands up hurriedly.
“Bathroom,” he mutters to Shane and takes off before he can get a response.
The steps up to the back of the hall feel like he’s climbing a mountain and not half of a single lecture hall from the middle row, like it’ll never end. But it does and he pushes his way out into the corridor.
Looking around wildly, he flits his head back and forth until he catches sight of the blue arrow on the wall pointing in the direction of the bathrooms.
On shaky legs he makes his trek, hurrying down the corridors until he finds the men’s room and hides in the furthermost stall, making sure to slot the lock behind him. He runs a trembling hand through his hair and with his other pulls out his phone.
Googling on his phone is never as easy as he wants it to be, so clunky and near-impossible to get through more often than not, but he has to now. He doesn’t have a choice. He has to make sure that he hasn’t killed anyone and he can’t exactly ask anyone around him without getting the police called.
He doesn’t want to go to jail.
He mistypes a few letters of his google search and has to backspace them and tediously type it out again but he manages. Recent murders in LA.
He is overwhelmed by the results when the searches load. He could scroll forever and never find an end. Something in him is still logical and tells him that LA is a big place and of course there were murders.
So he types out another search, this time limiting it to just the nearby area, and is not comforted.
His chest is burning with quick and shallow breaths. Starved of oxygen as Jean continues to hyperventilate.
Reading through the articles that the search pulls up does not soothe his worrying. He reads through an article about a shooting. Okay he couldn’t have done that, he’s never fired a gun in his life, he doesn’t know how. But he finds another about a stabbing and he can vividly see himself standing over the body of a woman who was stabbed twenty-seven times in the torso and left in the street in the dead of night to be discovered by a passerby and die from her injuries in hospital. Or a student of a nearby university who was strangled two nights ago in his home. Jean can feel the weight of the cord in his hands.
He clenches his fists so quickly he almost drops his phone.
Breathing is near impossible now, he can’t seem to get any air in his lungs, ribcage squeezed by the invisible vice grip of his newfound guilt because he killed these people and forgot.
He’s killed people and come home at night and gone to bed and woken up a blank slate, having forgotten all about it. He’s done these things and forgotten. He’s a murderer and he is so good at it that he forgot about it and lived his life guilt-free until now.
His eyes fog and burn as tears come hard and fast.
He is shaking and crying, gripping his shirt over his heart as it beats too fast for Jean to keep up when someone knocks on the stall. He hadn’t even heard them come in.
“Jean?” comes Shane’s voice.
Jean tries to speak but the only thing that comes out is a strangled sort of choking noise.
“Are you okay?” Shane asks. “You’ve been gone awhile and I thought you were pooping and I was totally cool leaving you to do that but you took off like a bat out of hell and when you gotta go you gotta go but I just thought I’d check and I don’t think you’re okay in there.”
Jean’s head is spinning. “I’m okay,” he says because he can’t tell Shane that he’s a murderer. His voice is strained and breaks as he speaks because he’s a terrible excuse for a murderer who can’t even handle the reality of what he’s done.
“I don’t think you are,” Shane replies.
“I’m okay,” he repeats. “Just go away, Shane.”
Shane stands firm. “No. You’re not okay and I’m here for you. We’re a team, remember?”
Jean doesn’t dignify him with a response.
“Do you want me to get someone?” Shane asks.
“No.”
Shane keeps talking, much to Jean’s dismay. He’s still crying and hiccuping and he can’t breathe. He closes the lid of the toilet and sits down to save his jelly legs from holding his weight. “Do you want me to text Jeremy?”
Jeremy.
Jean’s temporary relief at the idea of Jeremy coming to save him is short-lived. He can’t have Jeremy see him like this, he can’t face the captain of the sunshine court when he’s done these things.
“No,” he says as firmly as he can.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Just tell me something, man,” Shane says. “I’m getting worried.”
“I think–” he chokes on his words. “I think I killed someone and forgot.”
The truth burns. Like he’s just spewed up fire and it burned its way up his oesophagus and out of his mouth. Third degree, probably.
Shane doesn’t say anything for a long while and Jean wonders if he’s finally realised he is crazy.
But when he speaks his voice is just as firm as it was before Jean said what he did. “I don’t think you have.”
“I have,” he gasps. “I definitely have, I just forgot, why can’t I remember?”
“Jean,” Shane says, “I don’t think you’ve killed anyone and I don’t think you could have forgotten if you did.”
Jean can see now under the gap at the bottom of the stall, that Shane is leaning up against the door. The laces on one of his trainers is undone.
“But what if I have?” Jean asks, his voice small, scared, like the child he never got to be.
Shane pauses for a moment before replying, “just think about it realistically. You never go anywhere alone, Jean. When would you have slipped away to kill someone.”
“I–” Jean starts, the words dying in his throat. “I don’t know.”
“Exactly, and if you were in a state to kill someone and immediately forget, wouldn’t someone have noticed you and told the police? Wouldn’t one of your roommates have seen you come home with blood on your clothes or something?”
It makes sense, of course it does, because Jean’s brain is illogical at the best of times.
He breathes a little easier as he sits with the logic, even if he doesn’t fully believe it. The tears have stopped now and he wipes the remaining ones away with the back of his hand.
They sit in silence for a while but Shane’s reasoning provides a wall in his mind that interrupts the looping thoughts, keeping the circuit from being complete so that the electrical charge dies out with nowhere to fire to.
“Are you feeling better now?” Shane asks.
Jean nods and then remembers Shane can’t see him. “Yeah…”
“And did you murder someone and forget?”
Some part of him still wants to say yes. “No.”
Shane must check his watch because the next thing he says is “Class won’t be over for a while yet but we could just head to the library instead. Do you want me to collect your things and meet you here?”
Jean nods again. “Please.”
“Okay,” Shane says. “Hang tight.”
And then he’s gone and Jean still has a white-knuckle grip on his phone.
-
Jean curls in on himself, phone in hand, the screen blurry through his tears.
His thoughts are back, this time too strong to ignore and his every attempt to sway them is a failure as Jeremy fails to pick up his calls.
To: Jeremy
(11:57pm) You: Jeremy please pick up the phone.
(11:57pm) You: I’m really worried. Please just talk to me.
(11:57pm) You: Jeremy.
(11:58pm) You: Jeremy, please.
He sighs a shaky, uneven breath and calls Jeremy again, pressing his phone over his ear. It rings for a few moments before clicking and Jeremy’s chipper tone filters through the small speaker.
“Hiya, Jeremy here, I can’t come to the phone right now, please leave a message!”
Jean sighs and hangs up the call. He’s already left so many voicemails. He has tearfully begged Jeremy to pick up his calls more than once, he wishes he wasn’t but he’s so scared.
His brain won’t stop with the barrage of thoughts, of Jeremy dying, this time taking his own life. He’s at his mother’s house, far from where Jean can check on him and make sure he’s safe and Jean’s brain is treating him to the highlight reel of all the ways Jeremy could have killed himself, his certainty only reinforced by every missed call and unread text.
A few more tears escape and Jean rakes a frustrated hand over his face to wipe them away. The skin around his eyes is already rubbed raw.
Jeremy with his wrists slit, wrist to elbow. Jeremy with a stomach full of pills, white and oval. Jeremy and a bottle of drain cleaner, chemical and burning. Jeremy swinging from the ceiling, will it give way?
Jean squeezes his eyes shut and tries to force the thoughts out of his mind, he counts up and down in French, to twenty five and back, breathing heavily. He loops five times before he opens his eyes to his defeat. His phone is still on in his hand, screen bright and void of a reply.
So he rings him again, phone pressed to his ear, a prayer on his lips. He’s never been religious, never had much faith in anything, but he needs all the luck he can get.
“Hiya, Jeremy here, I can’t–”
He hangs up.
Biting his lip brings him nothing but the taste of metal from his ripped and bleeding lips. He’s already worried them to carnage.
To: Jeremy
(12:01am) You: Jeremy, I can’t handle this.
(12:01am) You: Please pick up the phone or just text me.
(12:01am) You: Let me know you’re okay.
He stares at the screen, his grip firm on his phone and watches the tiny clock in the corner tick the minutes by. 12:04am. Nothing.
He sets the phone down and pulls his knees up to his chest, tucking an arm around it, digging his fingers into his bare legs. He’s trying to be rational, so badly, trying to say that Jeremy is just sleeping, that it’s fine, that he’s fine, but Jean’s mind won’t waver.
He’s killed himself.
He’s killed himself and Jean could have stopped him if only he’d known.
Jeremy had seemed fine when he left practice, smiling wide and bright and laughing with Nabil in the parking lot. But he had to go home to his family and Jean knows how much that destroys his spark, snuffs him out underfoot as if his joy could start a forest fire. Maybe they’d just smothered him to nothing and this is what comes of it.
He calls Jeremy.
Voicemail.
He calls again.
Voicemail.
And again.
Voicemail.
Again.
Voicemail.
Jean can’t breathe. His chest hurts, it screams for air but his every attempt comes fast and shallow and he can’t get any in his lungs.
Against his will he makes a sort of choked or strangled cry, he sounds like a wounded animal. A final utterance before he stops struggling and falls still. He feels like he’s dying too.
He’s too busy crying for his dead friend that he doesn’t even hear the sounds of activity deeper in the apartment. Until his door slides open and he looks up to see Cat and Laila hovering in the doorway, looking sleep-addled but mostly worried.
“Jean?” Cat asks. “Are you okay?”
“I–” he chokes. “Jeremy won’t pick up.”
“Well maybe he’s asleep,” Laila says. “You can talk to us for now, we’re not the same but we can try.”
“No. No, you don’t get it. Jeremy’s not picking up and I think he’s k–” Jean’s words fail him “–hurt himself.”
That sends the pair quickly further into the room, Cat coming to sit next to Jean. She rubs her hand between Jean’s shoulder blades and Laila is already fishing out her own phone. “Laila is going to call him and we’ll get all this sorted, okay?”
He takes a shuddering breath even as his lungs squeeze and leans into Cat’s touch. He’s so tired of crying but he can’t stop. The two of them watch Laila pace, her phone to her ear.
Her eyebrows furrow when she ultimately meets Jeremy’s voicemail.
She drops the phone to her chest height and quickly types out a message to Jeremy. That he won’t reply to. Because Jean has tried that so many times.
A pause, the only noise between them being Jean’s strained breaths. Then Laila is calling again.
“He’s not going to pick up,” Jean agonises. “He’s dead.”
Laila holds up a hand to silence him as Cat makes a distressed noise.
Somehow her call connects because she starts speaking. “Hi William. I hate to call you this late but can I ask you to check on Jeremy for me?”
A few beats of silence, Laila with the fakest smile on her face Jean had ever seen but she kept her tone pleasant to match it.
“I know he’s probably asleep but I really really would appreciate it if you could wake him up, I’ve been trying to get ahold of him for ages and it’s urgent,” she says.
Laila covers the phone with her hand, pulling it away from her ear and turning to Jean and Cat. Jean who is less panicky and more morose now and Cat who is still dutifully rubbing his back although now her leg is bouncing anxiously. “He’s going to go check on him.” She zeroes in on Jean. “It’s going to be okay.”
At this point Jean thinks he’s progressed to a sickening sort of acceptance, fully expecting William to go up to Jeremy’s bedroom and find him dead in bed. Just like Jean always feared he would have to do personally. At least this way Jean wouldn’t have to see him dead.
Laila paces a bit more with the phone over her ear until she stops dead in her tracks.
Jean tenses in anticipation. Jeremy is dead. That’s what he expects the next words out of Laila’s mouth to be.
“Jeremy Knox I am going to string you up on the balcony by your underwear, why is your phone on silent?”
Jean perks up, watching Laila carefully.
“I don’t care how tired you are, you have to keep your phone on. Jean is freaking out– yeah, ‘whoops’ is right, he thinks you’re dead.”
Laila takes a few steps towards Jean before pressing the phone to Jean’s ear. He doesn’t move to take it.
“Jean?” comes Jeremy’s voice through the speaker. Not the same overly-chipper tone as his voicemail message, sharp and worried. “Jean, I’m here.”
Jean gasps out a broken sob. “Jeremy?”
“I’m here,” Jeremy promises again.
“Are you okay?” Jean asks, his hand finally coming up to hold the phone to his ear.
“I’m okay.”
“Did you hurt yourself?”
“What? No. Jean, no. I just fell asleep, that’s all.”
“I just–” Jean’s eyes burn as more tears collect in his eyes. “I thought you killed yourself, and then you wouldn’t pick up, and I was so scared.”
“It’s okay, Jean. I’m okay.”
“Okay.”
“Are you going to be alright if I hang up?”
Jean swallows thickly. “I don’t know.”
“Then I’m coming over. Hand me back to Laila and just wait for me, okay?”
I would wait for you forever, Jean wants to say. “Okay.” He holds the phone out and Laila takes it.
Laila talks to Jeremy for maybe a minute before she hangs up and turns back to Jean. She looks like she’s about to say something but as soon as she catches sight of Jean with his red eyes and wet cheeks and ragged breath, she softens. “Are you okay, Jean?”
Jean shakes his head, words too far out of reach.
She sits on the bed on his other side and pulls Jean into a sideways hug, her arms strong around him.
Without Jeremy’s voice the thoughts come back.
The colour of Jeremy’s blood soaking into his bedsheets. A pile of pills in the palm of his hand. Poison on his lips. A noose around his neck. Swinging.
Once again he can’t breathe. Laila just holds him tight and Cat returns to rubbing his back.
“He’s okay,” Laila promises.
They stay like that for a while before the front door to the apartment opens and closes too heavily to be missed. There’s hurried footsteps and Laila peels away from Jean, allowing him to look up at the doorway and Jeremy in his shorts and tank top and nothing else, hair still ruffled from sleep.
“Jean,” he breathes his name like it’s all he knows.
Jean just cries.
He’s dead. The thoughts whisper. This isn’t real. They yell.
Suddenly there’s arms around him, not Laila’s this time, bigger, stronger. He’s real. He’s alive and he’s here and he’s real.
Jean clings back like his life depends on it.
Jeremy presses them so close together that Jean can feel the thrum of Jeremy’s pulse, still he brings up a hand to lay it over his heart and just feel it.
“I’m okay,” Jeremy promises. He would never lie to Jean.
“I was so scared,” Jean breathes, just loud enough for Jeremy to hear him. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you dead.”
Jeremy pulls back a little, just enough to look into Jean’s eyes with his honeyed brown. “Do you think about that a lot?”
He’s remembering the other night, when Jean couldn’t sleep and kept coming back. He’s putting the puzzle pieces together so it’s too late for Jean to back out.
He nods. “Always.”
Jeremy groans and pulls him tight again. “While I’m flattered you care so much about me, I don’t want you to suffer like this.” Jean can feel the rumble of his voice in his chest. It bleeds into his bones.
“I don’t know how to make it stop,” he finally says. A mountainous admittance.
“Do you think you should talk to your therapist about this?” Jeremy asks, voice soaked in worry.
Jean is just so relieved that Jeremy is alive and he’s here that he will agree to anything Jeremy says. So he nods and bites his ruined lip.
“Will you?”
Jean lets out the calmest breath he’s had in over an hour. “I think so.”
Jeremy’s hold tightens and it tells Jean everything he can’t say out loud.
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My mom. She died last month in Galveston. Before she passed, she told me Harlan Buckley was my father.
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Savannah Brown, from a poem titled "Unmute me unmute me unmute me!," featured in Closer Baby Closer: Poems
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WILLS FUTURE BOYFRIEND IS EVIL !!! YIPPEE 😁😁😁
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cheers to more tsc 🥂
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hell is the talking type
fandom: all for the game title from: hozier - dinner & diatribes word count: 5.4k !!warnings: canon-typical self harm, mentions of suicide!! AO3
Jean sighs and pulls back his covers and prepares for another trek down the hall.
Usually his mind isn’t so persistent but tonight it won't stop looping on one thought. That Jeremy is dead in his bed.
So Jean has to check.
He’s already checked twice in the past hour, two times more before that. Each time he found Jeremy breathing deeply and sound asleep. Yet every time he gets back to his room and settles in bed the thought comes crawling back like a wild animal he fed one time. Maybe the checking is feeding it, maybe as long as he checks it will come back for more from him.
He looks over to his alarm clock that bears the angry red of 2:46am at him and he dreads morning practice. The start of a new week and Jean is going to spend it sleep deprived because he spent the entire night making sure Jeremy was alive.
The thing is, he knows that it only snowballs if he keeps checking, no matter how much he checks it won’t stop until he does. And he tries stopping, he really does, he makes it twenty minutes before he’s clawing at his neck and working the skin raw and stinging because Jeremy is dead and it’s all Jean’s fault.
So he has to get up now, wounds fresh on his neck and his own mind poised against him. He has to make sure Jeremy is alive, to affirm that his brain is lying to him because he couldn’t live with himself if Jeremy was dead right now and he just slept the night away. He couldn’t do that to Jeremy.
The world outside of his room is cold. His room probably only heated so well by his constant hyperventilating and his own raised body temperature.
He’s still breathing heavy as he closes his door to just a crack, he can see his alarm clock from here, a minute has passed since he last looked, the numbers are no less red or angry.
Jeremy’s room is technically the spare room because he’s only there on the weekends but it’s Jeremy’s room for all intents and purposes, aside from like a few boxes of random flatpack furniture Laila bought that they haven’t gotten around to building yet.
Jeremy sleeps with the door opened wide enough for Jabberwocky to come in and out. Jean can’t fathom why he would want to share his bed with the creature but Jeremy insists on it. Something about bonding.
“I have to do what I can to surpass you as his favourite,” Jeremy had said. “It’s no fair, you don’t even have to try.”
Jean gently eases the door open wider and cringes as it creaks loudly. He would have to talk to Laila about getting the hinges oiled for his nighttime breakdowns to not disturb anyone.
Jeremy doesn’t stir.
So Jean stands in his doorway for a minute or so, just listening to Jeremy breathe. Which he is doing so that’s one point for Jean and none for his brain. Jeremy is alive and his brain was wrong so now he can go back to bed, satisfied that Jeremy is okay.
He shuts the door back to its small gap from before and he pads back down the hallway to his room. He sits in his bed with his legs folded under him and pulls the blankets into his lap as he takes a few deep breaths.
His heart is still pounding.
It doesn’t take long for the thought to come slithering back, underneath his door and into the room where it drips venom and whispers “he’s dead, y’know?”
Jean’s breath catches in his throat.
Again.
There’s always an again.
He closes his eyes firmly and counts to one hundred in French, then back to zero. Opening his eyes doesn’t help. At some point he’d gripped his own wrist and dug his fingers in, trying to use the pain as a distraction but as he loosens his hold he is only left with crescent shaped dents in the skin.
The thought is still there, it waited for him but it knows he can hear it when it tells him that Jeremy is dead, over and over again.
He presses his hands firmly over his ears and counts again. Zero comes and the thought is still there. Burning now.
So he gets up.
He makes his way back out into the hall and back to Jeremy’s door where it squeaks again and Jean holds his breath. Jeremy doesn’t move.
But he’s breathing, Jean can hear him breathing.
It lasts for thirty seconds before Jeremy speaks. “Jean, what are you doing?”
Jean stills at that, he didn’t realise Jeremy was awake. How long had he not been sleeping? How many times has he heard Jean come and check on him?
“Nothing,” he says lamely.
“Then why do you keep coming back?” Jeremy asks, voice muffled by his pillow, his words slurred by sleep.
Jean wants to flee back to his room and act like none of this ever happened but he knows better than that, that Jeremy would follow him. “I’m just making sure you’re okay.”
“I’m okay,” Jeremy says.
“Okay.”
Jean closes the door maybe a bit too far for Jabberwocky to get out but he goes back to bed, burrows under the covers with his back to the room and counts to a hundred and back in every language he knows until he falls asleep.
-
It’s not graceful. Jeremy trips over his own feet and falls like the world’s worst swan dive as he hits the ground hard. Jean watches it happen. But before he can step out to check on him Xavier is already pulling him to his feet and Laila is sending the ball in his direction with a belated “Jean!”
Jean snaps into focus and sweeps his racquet out to catch the ball before he takes it a few steps and turns it flying through the air at one of the strikers, one of the double d’s, they both turn when Jean calls out “Derek”.
Once the ball is gone and he doesn’t have easy access to the distraction it offers, he casts a sidelong glance at Jeremy who is bouncing on his feet and calling for the ball that has traded racquets with the opposing team. His team.
He looks fine. Jean notes this. There is no reason for the prickling of skin on the back of his neck or the tightness in his throat behind its guard.
But Jean has never known his mind to take the most reasonable path.
His intrusive thoughts come back, always monstrous, always terrifying.
He hit his head, one says.
He’s got a brain bleed, another fills in.
He’s going to die, the third finishes.
Jean swallows thickly and tries to ignore them, gritting his teeth and turning his attention back to the game, but they aren’t that easily dismissed.
They loop.
He’s going to die. He’s going to die. He’s going to die.
Do something Jean!
Jean takes a shaky breath and runs his gloved knuckles along where his broken ribs used to be, digging there, hoping to elicit some sort of pain that will snap him out of this. He watches Jeremy run and play like there’s nothing wrong but his brain is screaming at him that it is all a farce and Jeremy is going to die.
“Jean!” someone yells and Jean snaps his attention back to the game, not realising he had been standing around gripping his racquet tight enough to hurt his hands and staring after Jeremy for so long that his team was noticing.
So he zeroes in on the ball and takes off in its direction, marking his striker, Ashton, who is half a court away.
He misses the way Laila tries to catch his eye.
He tries to lose himself in the game but the thought is always there and he finds himself looking to Jeremy more often than not.
But I didn’t see him hit his head, he tries to reason with his thoughts.
That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, they bite back.
His mouth is dry. He tries to swallow against it and just comes up with the sensation of scraping.
Dropping one hand from his racquet he taps against the base of his throat guard. It doesn’t help to distract him but at least it’s something to do with his hands.
I’m overreacting, he thinks this time, hoping that it’s enough to get his thoughts to back down in the slightest.
They rise to the challenge. He’s going to die. And Jean can’t argue with that.
Maybe his fixation with something bad happening to Jeremy is something to think about or ask Dobson about when he next has an appointment but Jean can’t seem to rationalise that any part of this is understandable. He’s just so scared that something bad is going to happen, that it’s already happened and he’s just the last to know.
There’s some unstoppable force out there that is trying to take Jeremy from him and these thoughts know that. Maybe they’re not trying to ruin Jean’s life, maybe they’re trying to help him. Sleepless nights and panic attacks at red herrings, but something is going to happen. It has to. It’s the only way any of this will be worth it. If he can keep Jeremy safe.
He earns himself a frustrated huff from Laila when Ashton scores a goal and Jean is metres behind him because he was heeding to his thoughts and desperately chasing Jeremy with his eyes again.
But the rest of the game passes mostly without incident but the thoughts do not leave Jean alone.
“Dude, are you okay?” Jeremy asks Jean before the backliner can duck into the showers, hand over his hammering heart. Maybe he can feel it, but Jean can’t find anything in his expression other than concern.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just, you’re our ex-Raven and you missed a lot of things during practice. That’s not like you, are you good?” Jeremy still has his hand on Jean, still stopping him from escaping even as Jean takes a half-step back, his touch follows him.
“Yeah,” Jean offers. “I’m okay.”
The pinch of Jeremy’s brow tells him he doesn’t believe him. “You’d tell me if you weren’t, right?”
This comes only two days after their last interaction on the heels of Jean’s irrational brain, that one shared in the darkness of the very early morning and without Jeremy looking up at him intently with those big brown eyes.
So Jean lies, “Of course.”
Jeremy purses his lips, not quite believing him but swallowing the lie. His eyes track all over Jean’s face, looking for a crack, anything to reach into and pull the facade apart and uncover what really lies underneath. But Jean is too good at this game and his mask is smooth.
Ultimately, he gives in. He pats over Jean’s collar and pulls his hand back. Jean wants to ask him if his head hurts. “Okay, I’ll talk to you soon.”
Jeremy flashes him one of his smiles he reserves for the camera, one that is only half-genuine and half for show.
-
“Did you forget the homework, too?” Shane asks, wide-eyed.
They’re in their business lecture and Jean hadn’t even known there was homework. Some part of his mind had just bundled it up and thrown it away, deeming the information unimportant and unnecessary.
Jean swallows and his throat is dry but he tries to laugh it off. He can already feel the thoughts creeping up his neck and wrapping their talons around his brain, squeezing, slicing. “Yeah, I guess I’ve been a bit preoccupied with training.”
It’s not true. He’s been too busy at war with his own brain to sleep and he only eats when Cat forces him to because he just feels sick all the time, his guts twisting and writhing like some live thing. But the rest of the team is getting a little overwhelmed with practice lately so it’s an easy lie.
Shane laughs too and claps him on the shoulder. “All good, man.”
Thankfully, Jean is saved from conversation by their professor entering the lecture hall and starting to talk. He turns his attention to his notebook and starts trying to take notes. ‘Trying’ being the critical word in that sentence.
His mind is running a mile a minute and every time it trips over its own feet it gets up and runs faster, every moment of reprieve when he can catch onto a sentence on the projector is filled with dread and quickly followed by more thoughts. He can’t stop them. He taps his pen at the same frequency that his leg bounces but it does nothing but make Shane side-eye him.
What else has he forgotten?
What if he’s forgotten something really important?
At first it’s more innocuous, he runs through his mental list of assignments and exams, then a few potential upcoming events–move nights or birthdays or when their next game is–, then his thoughts turn somewhere dark. What if he’s done something terrible and forgotten?
What if he’s killed someone and forgotten about it?
A leap from forgetting his homework, for sure, but his brain lights up at that thought and the claws around his brain sink in. That’s it. He’s killed someone and forgotten.
The rational part of his brain tells him that he couldn’t have just forgotten that he killed someone, he wouldn’t forget something like that but his brain is stuck on the maybe. Maybe he did.
He just– he takes a shaky breath in through his nose and blows it out through his mouth as slowly as he can, trying to soothe the jackrabbit pounding in his chest. He just needs to check.
He drops his pen like it’s a hot coal and stands up hurriedly.
“Bathroom,” he mutters to Shane and takes off before he can get a response.
The steps up to the back of the hall feel like he’s climbing a mountain and not half of a single lecture hall from the middle row, like it’ll never end. But it does and he pushes his way out into the corridor.
Looking around wildly, he flits his head back and forth until he catches sight of the blue arrow on the wall pointing in the direction of the bathrooms.
On shaky legs he makes his trek, hurrying down the corridors until he finds the men’s room and hides in the furthermost stall, making sure to slot the lock behind him. He runs a trembling hand through his hair and with his other pulls out his phone.
Googling on his phone is never as easy as he wants it to be, so clunky and near-impossible to get through more often than not, but he has to now. He doesn’t have a choice. He has to make sure that he hasn’t killed anyone and he can’t exactly ask anyone around him without getting the police called.
He doesn’t want to go to jail.
He mistypes a few letters of his google search and has to backspace them and tediously type it out again but he manages. Recent murders in LA.
He is overwhelmed by the results when the searches load. He could scroll forever and never find an end. Something in him is still logical and tells him that LA is a big place and of course there were murders.
So he types out another search, this time limiting it to just the nearby area, and is not comforted.
His chest is burning with quick and shallow breaths. Starved of oxygen as Jean continues to hyperventilate.
Reading through the articles that the search pulls up does not soothe his worrying. He reads through an article about a shooting. Okay he couldn’t have done that, he’s never fired a gun in his life, he doesn’t know how. But he finds another about a stabbing and he can vividly see himself standing over the body of a woman who was stabbed twenty-seven times in the torso and left in the street in the dead of night to be discovered by a passerby and die from her injuries in hospital. Or a student of a nearby university who was strangled two nights ago in his home. Jean can feel the weight of the cord in his hands.
He clenches his fists so quickly he almost drops his phone.
Breathing is near impossible now, he can’t seem to get any air in his lungs, ribcage squeezed by the invisible vice grip of his newfound guilt because he killed these people and forgot.
He’s killed people and come home at night and gone to bed and woken up a blank slate, having forgotten all about it. He’s done these things and forgotten. He’s a murderer and he is so good at it that he forgot about it and lived his life guilt-free until now.
His eyes fog and burn as tears come hard and fast.
He is shaking and crying, gripping his shirt over his heart as it beats too fast for Jean to keep up when someone knocks on the stall. He hadn’t even heard them come in.
“Jean?” comes Shane’s voice.
Jean tries to speak but the only thing that comes out is a strangled sort of choking noise.
“Are you okay?” Shane asks. “You’ve been gone awhile and I thought you were pooping and I was totally cool leaving you to do that but you took off like a bat out of hell and when you gotta go you gotta go but I just thought I’d check and I don’t think you’re okay in there.”
Jean’s head is spinning. “I’m okay,” he says because he can’t tell Shane that he’s a murderer. His voice is strained and breaks as he speaks because he’s a terrible excuse for a murderer who can’t even handle the reality of what he’s done.
“I don’t think you are,” Shane replies.
“I’m okay,” he repeats. “Just go away, Shane.”
Shane stands firm. “No. You’re not okay and I’m here for you. We’re a team, remember?”
Jean doesn’t dignify him with a response.
“Do you want me to get someone?” Shane asks.
“No.”
Shane keeps talking, much to Jean’s dismay. He’s still crying and hiccuping and he can’t breathe. He closes the lid of the toilet and sits down to save his jelly legs from holding his weight. “Do you want me to text Jeremy?”
Jeremy.
Jean’s temporary relief at the idea of Jeremy coming to save him is short-lived. He can’t have Jeremy see him like this, he can’t face the captain of the sunshine court when he’s done these things.
“No,” he says as firmly as he can.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Just tell me something, man,” Shane says. “I’m getting worried.”
“I think–” he chokes on his words. “I think I killed someone and forgot.”
The truth burns. Like he’s just spewed up fire and it burned its way up his oesophagus and out of his mouth. Third degree, probably.
Shane doesn’t say anything for a long while and Jean wonders if he’s finally realised he is crazy.
But when he speaks his voice is just as firm as it was before Jean said what he did. “I don’t think you have.”
“I have,” he gasps. “I definitely have, I just forgot, why can’t I remember?”
“Jean,” Shane says, “I don’t think you’ve killed anyone and I don’t think you could have forgotten if you did.”
Jean can see now under the gap at the bottom of the stall, that Shane is leaning up against the door. The laces on one of his trainers is undone.
“But what if I have?” Jean asks, his voice small, scared, like the child he never got to be.
Shane pauses for a moment before replying, “just think about it realistically. You never go anywhere alone, Jean. When would you have slipped away to kill someone.”
“I–” Jean starts, the words dying in his throat. “I don’t know.”
“Exactly, and if you were in a state to kill someone and immediately forget, wouldn’t someone have noticed you and told the police? Wouldn’t one of your roommates have seen you come home with blood on your clothes or something?”
It makes sense, of course it does, because Jean’s brain is illogical at the best of times.
He breathes a little easier as he sits with the logic, even if he doesn’t fully believe it. The tears have stopped now and he wipes the remaining ones away with the back of his hand.
They sit in silence for a while but Shane’s reasoning provides a wall in his mind that interrupts the looping thoughts, keeping the circuit from being complete so that the electrical charge dies out with nowhere to fire to.
“Are you feeling better now?” Shane asks.
Jean nods and then remembers Shane can’t see him. “Yeah…”
“And did you murder someone and forget?”
Some part of him still wants to say yes. “No.”
Shane must check his watch because the next thing he says is “Class won’t be over for a while yet but we could just head to the library instead. Do you want me to collect your things and meet you here?”
Jean nods again. “Please.”
“Okay,” Shane says. “Hang tight.”
And then he’s gone and Jean still has a white-knuckle grip on his phone.
-
Jean curls in on himself, phone in hand, the screen blurry through his tears.
His thoughts are back, this time too strong to ignore and his every attempt to sway them is a failure as Jeremy fails to pick up his calls.
To: Jeremy
(11:57pm) You: Jeremy please pick up the phone.
(11:57pm) You: I’m really worried. Please just talk to me.
(11:57pm) You: Jeremy.
(11:58pm) You: Jeremy, please.
He sighs a shaky, uneven breath and calls Jeremy again, pressing his phone over his ear. It rings for a few moments before clicking and Jeremy’s chipper tone filters through the small speaker.
“Hiya, Jeremy here, I can’t come to the phone right now, please leave a message!”
Jean sighs and hangs up the call. He’s already left so many voicemails. He has tearfully begged Jeremy to pick up his calls more than once, he wishes he wasn’t but he’s so scared.
His brain won’t stop with the barrage of thoughts, of Jeremy dying, this time taking his own life. He’s at his mother’s house, far from where Jean can check on him and make sure he’s safe and Jean’s brain is treating him to the highlight reel of all the ways Jeremy could have killed himself, his certainty only reinforced by every missed call and unread text.
A few more tears escape and Jean rakes a frustrated hand over his face to wipe them away. The skin around his eyes is already rubbed raw.
Jeremy with his wrists slit, wrist to elbow. Jeremy with a stomach full of pills, white and oval. Jeremy and a bottle of drain cleaner, chemical and burning. Jeremy swinging from the ceiling, will it give way?
Jean squeezes his eyes shut and tries to force the thoughts out of his mind, he counts up and down in French, to twenty five and back, breathing heavily. He loops five times before he opens his eyes to his defeat. His phone is still on in his hand, screen bright and void of a reply.
So he rings him again, phone pressed to his ear, a prayer on his lips. He’s never been religious, never had much faith in anything, but he needs all the luck he can get.
“Hiya, Jeremy here, I can’t–”
He hangs up.
Biting his lip brings him nothing but the taste of metal from his ripped and bleeding lips. He’s already worried them to carnage.
To: Jeremy
(12:01am) You: Jeremy, I can’t handle this.
(12:01am) You: Please pick up the phone or just text me.
(12:01am) You: Let me know you’re okay.
He stares at the screen, his grip firm on his phone and watches the tiny clock in the corner tick the minutes by. 12:04am. Nothing.
He sets the phone down and pulls his knees up to his chest, tucking an arm around it, digging his fingers into his bare legs. He’s trying to be rational, so badly, trying to say that Jeremy is just sleeping, that it’s fine, that he’s fine, but Jean’s mind won’t waver.
He’s killed himself.
He’s killed himself and Jean could have stopped him if only he’d known.
Jeremy had seemed fine when he left practice, smiling wide and bright and laughing with Nabil in the parking lot. But he had to go home to his family and Jean knows how much that destroys his spark, snuffs him out underfoot as if his joy could start a forest fire. Maybe they’d just smothered him to nothing and this is what comes of it.
He calls Jeremy.
Voicemail.
He calls again.
Voicemail.
And again.
Voicemail.
Again.
Voicemail.
Jean can’t breathe. His chest hurts, it screams for air but his every attempt comes fast and shallow and he can’t get any in his lungs.
Against his will he makes a sort of choked or strangled cry, he sounds like a wounded animal. A final utterance before he stops struggling and falls still. He feels like he’s dying too.
He’s too busy crying for his dead friend that he doesn’t even hear the sounds of activity deeper in the apartment. Until his door slides open and he looks up to see Cat and Laila hovering in the doorway, looking sleep-addled but mostly worried.
“Jean?” Cat asks. “Are you okay?”
“I–” he chokes. “Jeremy won’t pick up.”
“Well maybe he’s asleep,” Laila says. “You can talk to us for now, we’re not the same but we can try.”
“No. No, you don’t get it. Jeremy’s not picking up and I think he’s k–” Jean’s words fail him “–hurt himself.”
That sends the pair quickly further into the room, Cat coming to sit next to Jean. She rubs her hand between Jean’s shoulder blades and Laila is already fishing out her own phone. “Laila is going to call him and we’ll get all this sorted, okay?”
He takes a shuddering breath even as his lungs squeeze and leans into Cat’s touch. He’s so tired of crying but he can’t stop. The two of them watch Laila pace, her phone to her ear.
Her eyebrows furrow when she ultimately meets Jeremy’s voicemail.
She drops the phone to her chest height and quickly types out a message to Jeremy. That he won’t reply to. Because Jean has tried that so many times.
A pause, the only noise between them being Jean’s strained breaths. Then Laila is calling again.
“He’s not going to pick up,” Jean agonises. “He’s dead.”
Laila holds up a hand to silence him as Cat makes a distressed noise.
Somehow her call connects because she starts speaking. “Hi William. I hate to call you this late but can I ask you to check on Jeremy for me?”
A few beats of silence, Laila with the fakest smile on her face Jean had ever seen but she kept her tone pleasant to match it.
“I know he’s probably asleep but I really really would appreciate it if you could wake him up, I’ve been trying to get ahold of him for ages and it’s urgent,” she says.
Laila covers the phone with her hand, pulling it away from her ear and turning to Jean and Cat. Jean who is less panicky and more morose now and Cat who is still dutifully rubbing his back although now her leg is bouncing anxiously. “He’s going to go check on him.” She zeroes in on Jean. “It’s going to be okay.”
At this point Jean thinks he’s progressed to a sickening sort of acceptance, fully expecting William to go up to Jeremy’s bedroom and find him dead in bed. Just like Jean always feared he would have to do personally. At least this way Jean wouldn’t have to see him dead.
Laila paces a bit more with the phone over her ear until she stops dead in her tracks.
Jean tenses in anticipation. Jeremy is dead. That’s what he expects the next words out of Laila’s mouth to be.
“Jeremy Knox I am going to string you up on the balcony by your underwear, why is your phone on silent?”
Jean perks up, watching Laila carefully.
“I don’t care how tired you are, you have to keep your phone on. Jean is freaking out– yeah, ‘whoops’ is right, he thinks you’re dead.”
Laila takes a few steps towards Jean before pressing the phone to Jean’s ear. He doesn’t move to take it.
“Jean?” comes Jeremy’s voice through the speaker. Not the same overly-chipper tone as his voicemail message, sharp and worried. “Jean, I’m here.”
Jean gasps out a broken sob. “Jeremy?”
“I’m here,” Jeremy promises again.
“Are you okay?” Jean asks, his hand finally coming up to hold the phone to his ear.
“I’m okay.”
“Did you hurt yourself?”
“What? No. Jean, no. I just fell asleep, that’s all.”
“I just–” Jean’s eyes burn as more tears collect in his eyes. “I thought you killed yourself, and then you wouldn’t pick up, and I was so scared.”
“It’s okay, Jean. I’m okay.”
“Okay.”
“Are you going to be alright if I hang up?”
Jean swallows thickly. “I don’t know.”
“Then I’m coming over. Hand me back to Laila and just wait for me, okay?”
I would wait for you forever, Jean wants to say. “Okay.” He holds the phone out and Laila takes it.
Laila talks to Jeremy for maybe a minute before she hangs up and turns back to Jean. She looks like she’s about to say something but as soon as she catches sight of Jean with his red eyes and wet cheeks and ragged breath, she softens. “Are you okay, Jean?”
Jean shakes his head, words too far out of reach.
She sits on the bed on his other side and pulls Jean into a sideways hug, her arms strong around him.
Without Jeremy’s voice the thoughts come back.
The colour of Jeremy’s blood soaking into his bedsheets. A pile of pills in the palm of his hand. Poison on his lips. A noose around his neck. Swinging.
Once again he can’t breathe. Laila just holds him tight and Cat returns to rubbing his back.
“He’s okay,” Laila promises.
They stay like that for a while before the front door to the apartment opens and closes too heavily to be missed. There’s hurried footsteps and Laila peels away from Jean, allowing him to look up at the doorway and Jeremy in his shorts and tank top and nothing else, hair still ruffled from sleep.
“Jean,” he breathes his name like it’s all he knows.
Jean just cries.
He’s dead. The thoughts whisper. This isn’t real. They yell.
Suddenly there’s arms around him, not Laila’s this time, bigger, stronger. He’s real. He’s alive and he’s here and he’s real.
Jean clings back like his life depends on it.
Jeremy presses them so close together that Jean can feel the thrum of Jeremy’s pulse, still he brings up a hand to lay it over his heart and just feel it.
“I’m okay,” Jeremy promises. He would never lie to Jean.
“I was so scared,” Jean breathes, just loud enough for Jeremy to hear him. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you dead.”
Jeremy pulls back a little, just enough to look into Jean’s eyes with his honeyed brown. “Do you think about that a lot?”
He’s remembering the other night, when Jean couldn’t sleep and kept coming back. He’s putting the puzzle pieces together so it’s too late for Jean to back out.
He nods. “Always.”
Jeremy groans and pulls him tight again. “While I’m flattered you care so much about me, I don’t want you to suffer like this.” Jean can feel the rumble of his voice in his chest. It bleeds into his bones.
“I don’t know how to make it stop,” he finally says. A mountainous admittance.
“Do you think you should talk to your therapist about this?” Jeremy asks, voice soaked in worry.
Jean is just so relieved that Jeremy is alive and he’s here that he will agree to anything Jeremy says. So he nods and bites his ruined lip.
“Will you?”
Jean lets out the calmest breath he’s had in over an hour. “I think so.”
Jeremy’s hold tightens and it tells Jean everything he can’t say out loud.
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