#jeanate

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They both know they are operating on stolen time. Riko will be back in the space between heartbeats, steady like clockwork and sharp as a knife.

It doesn’t matter.

Nathaniel and Jean need their hands on each other more than they fear their King. What are threats of violence when it’s all you’ve ever known? Pain is still present, but the novelty faded between a handshake deal and a trip across the sea.

Jean is sitting on his twin bed. Twin bodies and twin flames and hands twinning together. Nathaniel is in his lap, knees pressed into the mattress on either side of Jean’s hips. Their arms are a continuous loop, behind neck and behind back. A closed circuit of electricity zipping between the two of them and nowhere to be released, not yet.

Nathaniel’s mouth is hot and his eyes are closed and he’s drinking in Jean as if he’s been lost in the desert for years. Maybe he has been. Nathaniel and Jean are intimately familiar with denial. Food, sleep, autonomy. None of these things are in their control. Their lips? Their hands? Their grinding, searching hips? Riko cannot touch those, not here.

Jean feels the gaze before he opens his own eyes to see it. Nathaniel is blue blue blue. The ocean he crossed at fourteen, the ever present bruises on his skin, the sky he so rarely gets to see. Every color that isn’t red or black feels like a divine gift.

There is something wet on his cheek.

“Did…did you just lick me?” Jean is flabbergasted. Gobsmacked. At war with the hardness in his pants and the Cheshire grin on his friend. “Disgusting. You are absolutely filthy.”

(the Josten Twins au, part 2)

Nathaniel and Jean understood each other from the moment they met, long before they had a language in common. In each other they saw themselves. A boy with a sibling-shaped gap in his soul. A boy worth only whatever favour the Moriyamas could spare. A boy with no home to his name.

They hated each other.

Jean resented Nathaniel for giving up. Nathaniel loathed Jean for fighting when he didn't have the energy to any longer.

They put each other out of balance, fucked everything up. They were threats.

This hatred lasted mere weeks before Nathaniel got fed up of his rare and precious sleep being disrupted by the quiet sobbing of a broken boy. It shook him straight back to a time he could not afford to remember. He slipped out from under his own, cold covers and padded across the room, resenting how it seemed to stretch into eternity.

Kevin had called him lucky when he got his own room, and Riko told him it was more than he deserved, but Nathaniel disagreed. The space had always felt huge and looming and lonely. He thought it hated him. It seemed to warp and wrap around his emotions like it wanted to choke him. He was certain it would consume him if he didn't sleep with his back pressed tightly against the wall so that he could keep an eye on it.

Then, Jean had moved in, and the room was cavernous between them.

Now, he finally reached the edge of Jean's bed and stood, frozen. Two bleary, watery eyes peeked up at him from under the covers, and Nathaniel expected Jean to lash out at him for interrupting, to scream and shout and throw a pillow at him until he retreated back to his own bed and went back to pretending it was hatred between them and not a soul-deep understanding. He was certain Jean wouldn't tell anyone about this even if he could, so Riko would never learn of his weakness.

But Jean did nothing.

They stared at each other for a long time, unmoving other than the slight shaking in Jean's hand where it gripped the covers under his eyes. Nathaniel breathed, and shoved down the memories of a dead, sobbing boy, a sobbing dead boy, and thought only of his brother, alive and holding him. Each breath unfroze him a little further, until he could jerkily clamber onto the bed and under the covers with Jean.

Jean put up no argument, easily scooching backwards to make space for him, and they stared at each other across the pillow for only a moment before Nathaniel reached across and pulled Jean into him.

His sleep was uneasier than usual, as unused to sharing as he had grown, and with his back to the room, but the lack of sobbing was worth it. Shielding Jean from the world was worth it.

For a little while, the world was small again.

They still didn't like each other. They couldn't, while they were still threats to each other's safety. It wasn't until Riko finally beat Jean into obedience that Nathaniel could allow himself to get close.

He mourned that fire that had lived in him, but it was safer this way, for everyone.

He stood witness as Jean became cold and unfeeling—or tried to—and wished, in the quietest part of himself, that someone had been there to witness his death, too.

By the time they turned sixteen, they knew each other inside and out. They'd given up much more of themselves than they'd ever meant to, and taken nearly as much, and they resented and loved each other for it in equal measure. When Jean had confessed that he liked men as well as women, Nathaniel had cursed him out, slapped him, warned him away from any tendencies that would get him hurt, and then admitted that he was even worse off because he didn't have an attraction to women to fall back on.

Nathaniel and Jean kissed, the summer before they joined the Raven lineup, and got each other off exactly twice before mutually deciding to never try it again. The hazing trial that Riko thought up for them once they did join the Ravens made Nathaniel so sick that he thought he might not like men, after all. He kissed a woman, to at least try it out, and was so disgusted that he never tried again.

The Ultimate Despair of those 2 (3) December weeks at Evermore, in just 2 hours of songs, (brought to you by not me),