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“God, how blind can you be?”

That would be such a great line for a kevjean confession if Jean ever told Kevin abt his crush on him in the nest.

Ty, have a great day :))

You’re a genius!!! Here’s Kevin being Oblivious and Confused while Jean admits how he’s always felt about him :))

“Can I ask you something?” Kevin lay in Jeremy’s bed, on top of the covers, with arms outstretched and his feet dangling off the edge. “But you can’t get defensive, because I’m not the one who’s wondering.”

“Now I am obligated to be defensive.” Jean was sitting on his back up against the wall on his own bed, scribbling notes in a notebook for an assignment due far too soon. Kevin had texted him earlier that morning saying that he was in town, and with Jeremy at home because it was a weekday, alongside the schoolwork Jean had started to fall behind on, the best way for the two to catch up was to invite Kevin over. “Ask, then.”

“Are you…” Kevin sat himself up to look at Jean before he continued. “Are you and Renee a thing?”

“No.” Jean laughed. “She has not told you this?”

“We aren’t that close,” Kevin shook his head. “She likes you, you know.”

Jean could feel himself blushing, but hoped his newfound tan covered the colour that spread across his cheeks. “I know. We’ve spoken about it.”

“You’ve spoken about it,” Kevin repeated as if saying it again would make it make more sense. “I thought you liked her.”

“It would never work.” Jean said. “She saved my life. It would always be hanging over the two of us.”

“Okay, sure, but…” Kevin moved to get a better view of Jean while they spoke. “You do like her?”

Jean read his face with a gentle smile, shutting his notebook and putting it to one side. “What is this about?”

His friend squinted his eyes, perhaps hoping he could get his point across telepathically without having to say it out loud. He glanced towards the door and laughed. “So you like Renee.”

“I will always love her for what she has done,” Jean said with a shrug. “But no, not so much anymore. We’re good friends.”

“Point being,” Kevin nodded with an over exaggerated, enthusiastic bob of his head. “You’re into women.”

Jean felt his face fall, as if Kevin had forgotten his name, or forgotten which position he played in. He scoffed, half a laugh and half disbelief, “You can’t be serious.”

“Am I right?”

“Kevin, you can’t be serious.” Jean echoed, and Kevin furrowed his eyebrows as if he had any right to be confused. “Where has this come from?”

“A friend of a friend wants to know,” Kevin brushed that off, and continued his staring stand-off with Jean. “Why would I not be serious?”

Jean gestured around himself, not even able to come up with a simple answer to his question. Jean was never bothered about the labelling of his sexuality, but had been bothered by its display. At least, publically, he thought, which just translated to not in front of Riko. Not Kevin, never Kevin. Kevin had known, or so he thought, about his infatuations and fleeting glances at the men he thought were handsome. Kevin had known about himself, and how it made Jean feel every time he heard the sweet sound of his native tongue falling from his lips.

“You…” Nothing felt good enough, and Jean laughed at the absurdity of it all. “You know it’s not just women, Kevin.”

Kevin blinked. “Do I?”

“Those foxes have rotted your brain,” Jean switched to French, ever so slightly startling Kevin out of his confused daze. “I knew you had moved on from the nest, but I did not think you would have forgotten so much about me.”

“Well, in my defense,” Kevin responded in his learned language, and Jean melted a little bit more inside. “Jeremy asked you if you were into men, and you never answered him, so he assumed he’d read you wrong.”

“Jeremy?” Jean spat in a failed whisper. “What does Jeremy have to do with this?”

Kevin became even more confused. “Who else would it have anything to do with?”

“Don’t play stupid,” Jean shifted his position to sit closer to the edge of the bed. “You know it has everything to do with you.”

“Me?” He said in English, as if wary he’d gotten the translation wrong. He continued in French. “Okay, there must be a miscommunication here.” He switched back to English then, as he started to stumble over his French, suddenly self conscious that he was not speaking correctly. “I’m lost, Jean.”

“I have always been open with you,” Jean said. “I have never hidden from you my interests in men and women. Why would you pretend not to know that?”

Kevin open and closed his mouth a few times, his hands outstretched, waiting for the answer to fall into them. “I didn’t know that.”

Jean shut his eyes to process what Kevin was saying. Perhaps Jean had simply given his intelligence far too much credit, and he had not been as clear to Kevin as he’d imagined he’d been. He thought that impossible, with their shared glances on a lonely night, with their comfort of each other when Riko wasn’t looking. “Some of them you like,” Jean quoted something he’d said to him before. “You said this about the Trojans. If you were not talking about the striker, then who were you talking about?”

“Like, as in,” Kevin’s smile was more genuine than awkward, apparently finding some amusement out of the confusion. “A fan of. You like someone. They interest you. You’re as much of a Jeremy fan as I am. I didn’t think you were into him.”

“And you were not.” Jean didn’t pose it as a question, more of a statement, an answer for himself.

“He’s not bad to look at, don’t get me wrong,” Kevin laughed at the thought. “But not like that. He’s just a really good friend.”

Jean pinched his nose and squeezed his eyes shut. He heard Kevin’s movement and felt the weight on the bed next to him as he sat down. When Jean opened his eyes, he had to look away, far too intoxicatingly reminded of his buried thoughts about Kevin.

“Jean,” Kevin pulled his attention back to him, and Jean forced himself to look into his eyes. “Why did you say it has everything to do with me?”

“God,” Jean clicked his tongue in pity, either for himself for being so stupid to think Kevin knew, or at Kevin for not noticing. “How blind can you be?”

“You had a crush on me.” Kevin’s voice was neutral. “You never told me.”

Jean sighed with a hesitant smile. “I thought I did.”

It felt like an age before Kevin decided to respond. It felt like the season had passed, like a year in Raven time had gone by, before he spoke. It was hard to ignore the blush that crept across his lightly freckled cheeks, as Jean found himself fixated on the chess piece on his cheekbone. They were too close, now, and he could feel himself burning up with the shame of it all.

“I didn’t know.” It was simple, not enough, but perhaps the best he could do. “For how long?”

Jean couldn’t help the twitch that spread up his face, “You are the one interested in history, not me.”

“Humor me.”

“For as long as I have known you, Kevin Day.” His eyebrows raised in surprise at that answer. Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t that.

“Oh,” was all he could say. He couldn’t find a smile that would sit comfortably on his face, and Jean wasn’t sure whether his fidgeting was discomfort or not.

“I never expected anything to come from it,” he attempted to clear the air. “I assumed you knew and simply decided not to address it. Looking back, it’s best you didn’t know, then, I think.”

“You don’t have to say that.” Kevin’s voice was low as he racked his brain for evidence to support Jean’s truth. “I wish you’d told me.”

“To feed your ego?” Jean laughed. “To make a straight man feel better to know he is desirable from either side?”

“You don’t have to say that, either.” Kevin spoke in French like it were a secret. “I’m with Thea now, sure, but,” he struggled. “I’m not exactly, you know… strict about it. It’s just easier this way.”

The only thing Jean could do was look at him.

The only thing he could bear to think was all the times he’d whispered in Jean’s ear, and Jean had to hide the shiver that travelled down his spine at the heat of the words thats he spoke. He thought of Kevin’s hands around his waist as he forced him into position on the court, a quick touch, an order to be better, a demand to be where he needed him to be. Then there was the blood, and the spit running down his chin, black hair stuck to sweat and tears as he cried please, Jean. Take him away from here. He thought of exposed bone and blood trickling through the cracks on the locker room floor, or a cracked skull against a door frame when he found Riko afterwards. There was the note, a single sloppy word, poorly written by a hand that had never wrote before. Sorry. The paper had been marked with Kevin’s blood, and it would be the last thing he would hear from him for months.

Kevin had stopped Jean’s hands before he noticed them travelling up his own throat.

“For the record, there is only one reason why nothing would have come from it,” Kevin meant it as a comfort, and Jean felt his heart break a little bit more. “But it’s the same reason it never would have worked.”

Jean was not naive, either. He was smart enough to know there was no universe in which any sort of relationship with Kevin would have been realistic. He was a beautiful face during a time that was rarely beautiful, a face that patched him up when he was black and blue, a face that smiled and joked at him when all he wanted was an end to the suffering. “I know.” Jean said, acutely aware that Kevin had not let go of his hands, even as they rested between them on the bed. “You will always be my first love, but I am smart enough to know that is meaningless now.”

“Maybe so,” Kevin looked at their hands. “But it could have been fun.”

“Fun, he says,” Jean scoffed, and Kevin laughed one of his genuine laughs, the tension in the room dissipating with the sound of his joy. Jean pulled his hand away from Kevin’s, to cover his face. He could feel himself blushing at the thoughts of what fun could have meant. “And what would you have done, asked the king to leave your room for an hour?”

It was Kevin’s turn to blush then, as he laughed again. Jean tried to push down the resurfacing feelings as he wondered what he could’ve possibly been imagining. “We would have found a way.” His laugh died off with a wistful sigh. “Somehow.”

“Somehow.” Jean agreed.

Kevin let the silence hang for just a moment before he gently reached up to touch Jean’s tattoo, then letting his hands fall back to his sides. “Maybe in another life.”

Jean swallowed and let out a soft exhale. “Maybe.”

They spent far too long just looking at each other, imagining what could have happened in that other life, wondering how it could’ve been different. Kevin eventually got back to the point of his conversation, and after laughing about how Jean has a thing for strikers, and how Kevin had never actually had a crush on Jeremy, Jean ignored his study for the flowing conversations he’d missed so badly. It was true that Kevin had been his first love, and he would be lying to himself if he said it would ever go away, but they had been each other’s only friend for so long. It was a long overdue catch-up without the threat of violence for laughing too loud, or sitting too close together. He didn’t pretend not to notice the way Kevin’s eyes flicked to his lips every now and again, or how quickly he would look away when he caught himself doing so. It was difficult to ignore how his cheeks turned rosy then, and even more so difficult to ignore how much he’d forgotten how beautiful Kevin really was.

For just a single, simple moment Jean wondered what it would be like to kiss him. That was a thought that had not crossed his mind for a very, very long time. Jean pictured a timeline in which they were both able to give it a shot without immeasurable guilt, or shame, or fear over the court of public opinion. He found himself being reminded over and over again that Kevin had finally said it himself that his sexuality was a fluid thing. There were more reasons that not to write it off as a wrong place, wrong time kind of issue, but even with the stomach churning, butterfly inducing thought of Jeremy Knox and his callused hands, it was certain that Kevin would always be his greatest what-if.

It was a pity that they would both continue on with their lives not knowing what could have been, but perhaps for the best; they were both at points in their lives where, for the first time ever, they were happy. They were not constantly glancing over their shoulders waiting for a threat.

Maybe in another life, Jean told himself. Maybe in some other world.

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