The Eye of the Storm
By: Johannes Evans
Tags: Fiction Series, Angels, Fiction, Serial Fiction, Novel

JEAN-PIERRE

When Jean-Pierre woke again, he was overheated with Colm’s arms on him, and he shifted uneasily in his brother’s grip, leaning back and away from him. His stomach growled with hunger, so empty it was making him feel sick, and overtiredness had wrought in him a dull, thudding headache.

“You remember what happened?” Colm asked quietly: his tone was simple, straightforward, not cold but not unnecessarily sweet, either, and Jean-Pierre inhaled, feeling his hands twitch at his sides, but he prevented them from clenching into fists.

The rage was there, that much was true, but it wasn’t the hot, incandescent thing it had been when the bubble had burst earlier that day — it was colder, turned hard and steely where before, it had been molten.

“We went to museum off the witches’ market, that awful art place,” Jean-Pierre said quietly, aware of how wooden his voice sounded, how cold and brittle. His eyes hurt, felt dry and bruised from all his crying, and when he touched his cheeks, he could feel where the skin was still slightly sticky with dried tears. “They have an exhibit not yet open about angels — L’ange du mort, the Schafer painting, is on display there.”

Colm’s expression didn’t change. He was sitting awkwardly on the bed to accommodate the fact that Jean-Pierre was sitting between his legs, because even though he hadn’t wanted Colm’s arms wrapped around him any longer, he didn’t know that he could stand, immediately, not to be touched at all.

Colm’s lips were loosely pursed together, and he looked at Jean-Pierre attentively, revealing no particular emotion.

“You knew he’d find out eventually,” he said finally. “About Rupert.”

Jean-Pierre inhaled very slowly, gritting his teeth a moment. “Yes,” he said. “But he brought me home. I was upset — he comforted me. He asked me… He asked me questions.”

Was that when Aimé had decided he would leave?

Then, or before? Or had it been once Jean-Pierre had fallen asleep?

What was it, precisely? That Jean-Pierre was cracked, broken, a beautiful thing in a state of disrepair? That he had killed? That he would kill again? That he had killed a man he had loved — that he hadn’t meant to, at the time? That he would do the same again?

All of the above?

His hands were trembling, he realised, in a distant sort of way. His skin felt full of broken glass.

“Don’t tell me you’re surprised,” Colm said.

“Why should I be? You wanted him to leave me,” said Jean-Pierre.

“Jean — ”

“You told him to, in so many words,” Jean-Pierre cut through before Colm could go on. “Why else would you tell him about Myrddin? A very funny thing to tell him, too, the one part of the matter that wasn’t my fault, where you left me to rot in a jail cell, didn’t even bother to find me — ”

“Wasn’t your fault?” Colm repeated sharply. “Uh uh, Jean, you don’t get to pull that fucking card on me — I don’t know what you and Myrddin had going on before that shitty assassination attempt, but you fucking knew it wouldn’t be a third time lucky, and you should have expected he wouldn’t just toss you back to the Embassy again.”

“Six years,” Jean-Pierre said. “And you didn’t even look.”

“I was a little fucking busy, Jean,” Colm said, leaning away from Jean-Pierre, and as much as a part of Jean cried out for the loss of contact, another part of him felt a vicious thrill at having made Colm draw away from him. “Taking care of a different baby.”

“Yes, the Nazi baby you picked from the arms of her dead parents,” Jean-Pierre said coolly. “More important than your own brother.”

That cut him, alright. Jean-Pierre watched the change in Colm’s face, the tightening of the muscles there, the way his jaw twitched, his lip curling ever so slightly, the way his brows tilted forward, knitted slightly toward one another.

“You know what you forget?” Colm asked. “S’that I see you like this every fucking time you fly off the handle and need to be drugged to get you down halfway to earth again, ’cause you’re such a fucking menace.”

“I’ve never hurt a soul during an episode,” Jean-Pierre whispered, feeling as though he’d been drenched in ice water, his fingernails cutting so hard as they clenched to his palms that he near drew blood, and Colm laughed, a bitter sound.

“Not yet,” Colm said, faux-sweet, his teeth bared. “But we wouldn’t have those fucking tranqs for you if we didn’t know it might be a problem, would we?”

“I expect it’s nice for you when I take my sedatives, feeling like the intelligent one between us for once,” replied Jean. “Coming from a man so thick in the skull he can barely even make sense of his letters, let alone read a page without someone to hold his hand, I’m sure you’d like me drugged senseless more often.”

Jean-Pierre flinched when Colm moved suddenly, expecting a kick, but Colm was just swinging his legs over to get out of bed, and he moved fast from Asmodeus’ room, his feet making heavy sounds on the landing and then the stair as he went downstairs.

Almost immediately, Jean-Pierre regretted what he’d said, and the sharp sense of victory he’d felt, cutting at Colm, scabbed over into something heavy and sickly instead. Falling to the side, he dropped his cheek to the warmth of the pillow Colm had left behind him, and laid for some time in the silence he had left there too.

The sickly feeling in the pit of his stomach, hunger now mixing with anxiety and shame, bubbled into something closer to nausea, and Jean-Pierre crossed his arms as tightly as he could over his chest, squeezing his hands under his armpits and trying to ignore the crawling thickness of the regret creeping over his skin. He knew he was being cruel, and he knew, too, that biting at Colm wouldn’t bring Aimé back.

He didn’t want to think of Aimé just now.

The blinding terror that accompanied the thought of him was too much.

He felt wholly alone in the world, and although his eyes were dry, he ached to begin crying again, as abandoned as he was — and that was the essence of his life, he thought, one abandonment after another.

Abandoned by God, by the Host; abandoned by Jules and Manolis and Benoit and Bui and Colm and Asmodeus and Rupert and Farhad; abandoned by Aimé, now. And he did deserve it, didn’t he, in one way or another? He was beautiful, an image of perfection, and underneath, he was all cracked, and everyone rather hated him.

His chest ached.

Jean-Pierre didn’t know how long he lay in his place, staring into the middle distance and loathing everything in general, and himself in particular, before he slowly wrapped a blanket around himself and descended the stairs. Each step was a slow thud under his bare feet, and when he nervously poked his head into the living room, Colm was sitting on the sofa beside the lit fire, watching a video on his phone.

“I’m sorry,” Jean-Pierre said quietly, although the word felt like poison on his tongue. “That was cruel of me, and unfounded.”

“Yep,” said Colm, not looking up from his phone.

“It is a damning of my own character, not of yours, that I have mocked your difficulty in reading.”

“It sure fucking is,” agreed Colm.

“I know I am difficult,” whispered Jean-Pierre. “I have always been very grateful, that you love me anyway. You do love me, don’t you?”

Colm inhaled, his chest expanding, and then, he sighed. It was a loud sigh, full of resignation. Still, he did not look up at Jean-Pierre, but he did speak. “Couldn’t stop if I tried, and I’ve fucking tried,” said Colm, and lifted one arm.

Jean-Pierre ran across the room, falling immediately against his brother’s side, and he buried his face against Colm’s breast, letting the other man squeeze him so tightly his bones creaked under the flesh. It was a relief, a desperate one, and Jean-Pierre dragged in a little gasp of air.

“I’m not sorry he left,” Colm murmured against the top of Jean-Pierre’s hair, “but I’m sorry you’re hurting.”

“Do you think he’ll come back?” Jean-Pierre asked in a low murmur.

“I don’t think he should.”

It hurt, though it was not unexpected, and Jean-Pierre fisted his hands in Colm’s jumper again, squeezing tightly at the fabric and feeling its texture under his fingers. “I wouldn’t kill him,” Jean-Pierre said. “I wouldn’t.”

“Doesn’t mean he should come back.”

“Do you think he will?”

“I don’t know,” Colm said lowly. “But if you really loved him, you wouldn’t fucking want him to.”

“Why don’t you leave?” Jean-Pierre asked in the smallest of voices, muffled against Colm’s chest. “If you find me so dreadful?”

“Can’t,” Colm said. “Couldn’t stand to.”

“Would you? If you could?”

“No,” Colm whispered. His thumb tapped the phone screen, pausing the video he’d been feigning to watch. “No, I wouldn’t. Not ever.”

“Because you love me?”

“Because I love you.” Colm wrapped one hand in Jean-Pierre’s hair and squeezed it very slightly, pulling hard on his scalp — the pain was grounding, and not unpleasant — and delivered a strong kiss to the crown of his head. Jean-Pierre’s lips shuddered into the tiniest of smiles, although he knew it didn’t reach his eyes. “You need to eat something, Jean. You won’t feel better ’til you do.”

“I miss De,” he whispered, and Colm hugged him very tightly, nuzzling his nose against Jean-Pierre’s hair.

“I know,” Colm said. “Me too. But he’s not coming home, not yet. Gonna eat?”

“Okay,” Jean-Pierre whispered, and Colm left his phone with him as he got up to cut fruit. Jean-Pierre’s eyes were too dry to start crying again, so he just hugged a pillow close to his chest and stared into the fire.