a fresh start would be good for you, renee had whispered in his ear as she tucked secrets between his scars. a new university on the other side of the country after it hadn’t worked out with the trojans stateside. a new university without an exy team, without publicity, without pressure. jean’s been here two weeks now, and can already sense the otherness of it, thanks to all of his newfound free time. he hasn’t stopped running, hasn’t stopped spending hours shooting puck into net when he cannot trick his body into sleeping, but he has stopped being ignorant to the world outside of the sport that almost killed him.

hence, there’s some kind of wrongness at belgrave university. wrongness not too dissimilar to riko moriyama and his hell-reign. there are ravens here, if not by name, by nature. it rattles deep in his bones.

basic mind-mapping led to two names that seemed ever-present in reports of strangeness, two names identified commonplace; vera stone and hamish blake. of the two, hamish’s felt the least intimidating. he’d seen vera around the campus, and knew there was raven in her too. so hamish it was, the one jean approached fearlessly in the late afternoon, knocking on his t.a. office door. 

   ‘ there’s a cult here, isn’t there? ’     about as unforgiving as a forest-fire, those words, all tact lost to impatience. a fresh start would be good for him, renee had said. but what if this fresh start was simply a repeated cycle?    ‘ don’t lie to me. too many people have died, and i know a thing or two about power structures. enough to see there’s one here. maybe even two. i can’t figure out if you and vera are working together. ’

- ̗̀  @apocaelypse​ : hamish duke  ̖́ -   /  sc.