Work Text:
Jerome Clarke was many things: a charmer, a cynic, a schemer with a grin sharp as a blade - but no one, not even Jerome himself, could quite untangle what lay beneath all of that.
Clever, without a doubt. Slippery? Most likely. A joker with a fast mouth and the kind of smile that made you second-guess whether you were in on the joke or the target of it - absolutely. But underneath all of that, behind the smirk and easy charm, there wasn’t certainty or confidence. Not really. No, there was a wall. And not a neat, tidy one by any means. Not the kind you build carefully, piece by piece.
No, this wall was a wreck - fractured, uneven, mismatched bricks mortared together by fear and necessity. A lifetime's worth of patch jobs and panic driven reinforcements. Something raised fast, often, and without plan. It was high and crumbling and ugly, but Jerome clung to it all the same. Because it kept people out. Because it had to.
Because if anyone ever got inside, really saw behind it, they'd find the hollow places. The pieces that didn't quite add up. The exhaustion carved deep behind his eyes.
He was fifteen, and he was tired, already too old in the ways that mattered. Not in the way his peers joked about. Not from schoolwork or late nights or the antics he always managed to get himself roped into. He was tired in a quieter, meaner way. The kind of tiredness that settled into your bones like damp.
But it wasn't just tiredness. It was the ache of keeping up the lie of being fine. The scaffolding he'd built around himself - jokes, dodges, sarcasm, charm - was delicate and shaky, and he knew if anyone leaned on it too hard, it would collapse. So he kept his hands busy and his mouth busier. If you made people laugh, they never paused long enough to ask the wrong questions. Never probed about you about your home life - or lack thereof.
There wasn't much of a home for him to go back to really. His dad was in prison. Not a secret, but not something people liked to mention. Even Poppy didn't say much about it anymore, and she was the only one besides Jerome who really could. It sat between them like a bruise you stopped touching, but never really healed.
Their mum - if you could call her that - existed only in the most technical sense. A name on a birth certificate. A signature on a few custody forms, maybe. She didn't call. Didn't write. She had just disappeared in the way people do when they never wanted to be responsible in the first place.
After that, there had been other homes. Other adults. A rotating door of 'temporary arrangements' and 'interim guardians'. People who meant well until they didn't, and houses that always felt like they belonged to someone else.
Now, Poppy lived with their uncle and Jerome didn't. Not anymore.
Their uncle had drawn the line years ago, said something about 'bad influence' and 'discipline', 'too much like his father' and how Jerome needed something stricter. He hadn't fought it. He was good at pretending these things didn't matter.
These days, when he wasn't at school, Jerome stayed elsewhere. With a different arrangement. With a family friend whose name kept showing up in social services paperwork but rarely in conversation. Another temporary roof. Another borrowed room. He kept his bag packed year-round, just in case.
Poppy had her bed and her routines. Jerome had his packed suitcase.
The Clarke family was less a family and more a set of legal circumstances. It was a scholarship with his name on it and no one to attend the parent-teacher evenings. It was Poppy somewhere else, safer, and Jerome learning not to be bitter about it.
Anubis House, strange as it was, was the closest thing to consistency he'd had in a while. He'd only gotten in because of the Legacy Scholarship - a rare bit of good fortune he had snatched like a lifeline. His father had gone to this school, once upon a time, before everything went wrong. It didn't matter that his father's name was now more a cautionary tale than a source of pride. The scholarship committee liked legacy applicants, and Jerome had learned exactly how to sell a story.
He'd dressed sharp for the interview, smiled in all the right places and talked about turning over a new leaf. He didn't mention the nights he'd spent sleeping on couches or the homes where the locks had worked both ways.
And they'd let him in.
He'd won his way in on charm, and bluff, and just enough polish to hide the truth. And when he stepped through the gates of that old school, he promised himself that he wouldn’t mess this up.
So he played the part.
He had figured out early that people didn't ask questions if you made them laugh. So Jerome became funny, distractingly so. He told jokes. Made friends. Kept his hands in his pockets and his lies close to his chest. Because that's how you stayed safe. That's how you survived.
People assumed he had a home somewhere, that he'd go back to it over the holidays, and he never corrected them. He just let them believe he had a mum who sent letters and a bedroom somewhere with posters on the walls.
They didn't ask why he never had anyone come to parents evening. Didn't ask who signed his school forms. Didn't ask who he called when he was sick. He liked it that way, silence was safer.
But still, sometimes, in the quiet - when his phone didn't buzz and no one noticed when he had gone missing - he wondered what it would be like to have someone expect him. To have someone miss him. To have someone care that he existed when the school bell stopped ringing.
He'd built his identity around being untouchable. Unshakeable. But all that really meant was that no one noticed when he started to fall apart.
Jerome smoked when no one was watching.
It had become a ritual of sorts for him - slipping out the back steps behind Anubis House, past the rusted drain pipe that had long since detached from the gutter and avoiding the exact bricks he knew would creak.
His first cigarette had been stolen - ages ago now, from an older foster brother's threadbare denim jacket - and the habit had stuck. Half out of defiance, half because it made the gnawing tension in his stomach settle; if only just a little.
He was always careful. Jerome Clarke was a lot of things, but stupid wasn't one of them. He knew Victor's routines better than he knew his own timetable. He never lit up too close to curfew, never let the scent cling to his uniform. The blazer came off first, then the tie, both folded and tucked under the stone ledge of the old garden wall. The pouch itself lived inside a rusting tin, which in turn lived beneath a loose floorboard behind the boiler.
Not even Alfie knew, and Alfie knew everything.
That was the thing about Alfie Lewis though: he never needed the full story. He accepted Jerome exactly as he came, without demands or explanations. The two of them were a team in a way no one else in the house could ever quite understand; they were brothers in every sense that counted. Alfie was sunshine embodied, scattered and bright, impossibly loyal and entirely himself. He could make Jerome laugh even on the days he didn't want to exist.
Sometimes Jerome watched him from across the common room, laughing too loudly at a joke no one else got, and thought - god, what would I do without you?
It wasn't a thought Jerome frequently liked to dwell on. Alfie was the one fixed point amongst Jerome's chaos. The one person who hadn't left, or judged, or demanded anything in return from him. And Jerome, for all his pretense, didn't know how to need people.
But Alfie, Alfie he needed.
Fabian on the other hand, well he didn't know quite what to do with Fabian.
That was the truth of the matter. Fabian was too precise, too watchful - he didn't just look at people, he studied them. Like they were essays he could underline, chapters he could break apart or riddle's he could solve. And Jerome, Jerome hated how seen he felt under that gaze. Hated the quiet way Fabian would tilt his head when Jerome said something flippant, as if he was measuring the weight of the lie behind the smile. It was unnerving, being known like that.
Because Jerome's whole persona - every quip, every grin, every carefully-timed laugh - was armour. An act polished to brilliance. He lived in performance, wore confidence like a quilt stitched together from panic and practiced charm. And yet, somehow, Fabian always looked past it. Past the deflection and the jokes. Like he saw the seams, like he knew exactly where each crack lay.
They weren't together. Not really. Whatever it was they had going on, it was easier not to define it. It came in fits and starts - moments that flickered like a faulty bulb. A look too long, a hand brushing his in the kitchen past in the dark, Fabian's mouth on his behind the library shelves one week and a pointed avoidance in the hallway the next.
Jerome never asked for it. He didn’t plan for it. It just sort of happened.
It happened when it was late, and Fabian returned from some Sibuna ordeal he wasn't allowed to talk about pale and shaking, with that wide-eyed look like he'd seen too much again. And Jerome would shift over in bed, lifting the covers wordlessly. No questions, just warmth, and closeness, and the echo of something almost tender.
It happened when Jerome was angry - furious at everything and nothing - and Fabian stood there, all calm reason and frustrating logic. So Jerome kissed him, hard, like a dare. Sometimes it was gentler. Sometimes it wasn't. Sometimes, though he'd never say it aloud, he kissed him just because he wanted to. Because even though it was complicated and secret and inconsistent, Fabian was there. And that was far more than Jerome was usually used to.
And Fabian never stopped him.
But he never really chose him, either. That was the part that stung. Not the secrecy, Jerome could handle secrets; he was practically made of them. It was the inconsistency. The way Fabian always seemed to drift back to Nina - to comfort, to obligation. To the neat, carefully drawn life he kept so tightly contained in journals and puzzles and whispered meetings with his friends in locked rooms. He would give Jerome his mouth, sometimes his body, occasionally his silence - but never all of himself.
Never the part that mattered.
And Jerome, who had spent most of his life being someone's temporary solution, didn't ask for more, didn't demand to be chosen. He just accepted it. Took what he was given, and folded himself smaller to fit the little space he was allowed to occupy. He let himself become Fabian's dirty secret, because it was better than being nothing at all.
Then of course there was Renee Zeldman. Rufus Zeno.
The kind of name that stuck to the back of your teeth, and the man himself was no better; cold-eyed, soft-voiced, with a presence that made Jerome's skin itch. Jerome didn't regret much in life. It was too short, too unpredictable to waste time on guilt. Regret required the luxury of thinking things could have gone differently - and that was never a luxury Jerome had been able to indulge in. But getting involved with Rufus, that was something that would haunt him for the rest of his days.
It had started with curiosity. With greed perhaps, or desperation. He had been a kid with too many secrets, too much trauma to unpack and not enough power. Rufus had offered something tempting - knowledge, control, a sense of importance. But it had all come with a price and Jerome had watched it escalate far beyond what he could contain, until it spiraled into real fear. Real danger.
He still remembered the exact moment he realized Rufus was willing to kill them. Not threaten. Not manipulate. Kill.
It had been chaos and not the sort that faded with the adrenaline, the kind that etched itself into muscle memory. He still remembered how it felt when Rufus cornered them like it was yesterday. How time seemed to stutter, how cold the air went. Rufus had smiled as if he were a magician about to reveal the final twist of a magic trick and not a man attempting to murder six teenagers on school property. The worst part wasn't even the fear. It was the way Rufus had looked at them - not as people, but as means to an end. Like they were props in his grand design, pawns to be moved and discarded at will.
After that, Jerome never quite managed to stop looking over his shoulder. He never said anything, of course, didn't tell any of the others how Rufus haunted his dreams. He didn't talk about the weight that settled in his stomach any time the house creaked the wrong way or the lights flickered in the corridors. Because what was there to say?
He didn't know everything. But he knew enough.
Enough to keep his ears open. Enough to hover near the edges of conversations not meant for him. Enough to slip behind curtains and into alcoves, catching whispers of names - Osirian, Senkhara, Chosen One - tossed about like characters in a play he hadn't been cast in. He wasn't in Sibuna, but he circled the edges like a satellite caught in an uneasy orbit.
He had tried, once, to nudge his way in. Made a few jokes, dropped a few hints. Patricia told him to mind his own business. Alfie looked uncomfortable. Fabian went quiet.
So he backed off, but he kept listening. Jerome had always been good at eavesdropping. At piecing together what people didn't say.
It stung, sometimes, not to be trusted but then again, Jerome didn't exactly make himself trustworthy. He lied for fun. Scammed people. Played both sides when it suited him.
Fabian told him things, occasionally. Only when it was late at night and the silence was too heavy, when Fabian's hands still shook from whatever puzzle of curse Sibuna had gotten themselves wrapped up in this time. Jerome never got the full picture - just fragments, puzzle pieces handed over reluctantly, like confessions half formed. Jerome was certain Nina would have blown a fuse if she ever found out about it.
But he was smart. He put things together. There were relics, curses, ancient secrets embedded into the very foundations of the house. There were people willing to hurt others - them - to get what they wanted. And Jerome wasn't good at pretending those things didn't matter. Not when Alfie and Fabian were involved, not when Mara might be caught in the crossfire.
Jerome didn't have much, but he was protective of what he did have. That was what he hated the most - the knowing, and the not knowing. The waiting. The helplessness.
Jerome didn't do fear. Not publicly, not when people could see it. His fear had long been hidden behind layers of jokes and deflection. But Rufus Zeno made his skin crawl in a way even Jerome's perfectly polished bravado couldn't hide. The first time Rufus had looked at him, he had felt something in his spine lock up, like a primal instinct screaming at him to run.
He knew that look. Knew what it meant to be powerless in front of someone who knew more than you did, who held all the cards. He had lived it growing up. With judges who cared little for the lives they were damning, with adults who made threats in soft voices, with social workers who smiled with pity in their eyes. Rufus had all of that rolled into one: the calculation, the cruelty, and the certainty that no one would stop him.
So Jerome learnt to be careful. He listened, took notes in silence. He mapped escape routes in his head, counted footsteps. He knew where the floor creaked in the boys corridor and by the stairs, and he knew exactly which windows they could squeeze through.
They thought he wasn't paying attention but Jerome always paid attention. Always. He didn't want to be part of their secret society, not really. He didn't want to fiddle with ancient artifacts or solve cursed riddles. He just wanted to know. To protect the people he gave a damn about. To be useful, if not included.
But being a trickster came naturally to him, a truth-teller? Less so.
One night, months into the term, Jerome had found himself sat cross legged on the floor of Fabian's room - that he now had to himself ever since Mick left them for Australia. The window was cracked open beside him, smoke curling lazily from between his fingers, escaping into the chill night air. The tip of his cigarette glowed faintly in the dark, a pulse of orange light that briefly lit his countenance before fading just as fast.
Across from him, Fabian hunched over his desk, shoulders stiff with his pen in hand but entirely unmoving. Papers were scattered around him, covering any sign of the oak beneath entirely, with notes, symbols and diagrams Jerome couldn't even begin to decipher. Sibuna things. Things Jerome wasn't supposed to know about.
"You know they're going to kill you." Fabian spoke without looking up.
"So will all the ancient death traps you lot keep poking at." Jerome replied nonchalantly, with a practiced ease, "At least this one smells like tobacco rather than doom. You know where you stand with good old fashioned tobacco."
Fabian glanced over his shoulder, a half smile tugging at the corners of his mouth despite himself, "You're impossible."
"And yet." Jerome murmured, blowing smoke toward the ceiling definitely, "Here you are."
Fabian didn't reply. But he didn't prompt Jerome to leave, either.
The silence stretched and Jerome simply let it. He was good at this kind of silence - the heavy, complicated sort. The kind that built like pressure behind his ribs and made him wish for the distraction of anything else, he knew it well. He watched the smoke rise and disappear, his half formed thoughts crawling over themselves in circles.
He hadn't been sleeping much lately, not since the letters started.
Mara had helped him write the first one. He hadn't meant for her or anyone to find out about his dad. But Mara was tenacious, and too clever by half. She had been digging into school records for a student council project when she stumbled across his scholarship paperwork. The Legacy Fund. Full ride. Special circumstances.
She asked, casually, at first. Something about what legacy meant in this case. Jerome had brushed it off. Said something flippant, probably. Something along the lines of "Guess I've got a charming last name."
But Mara didn't laugh, nor did she let it go.
And eventually, quietly, he told her. About his dad. About the prison. Just the bare facts, like he was reading them off of the court documents. No inflection, no emotion. And then, just as quickly, he waved it off. "It's ancient history now. Doesn't matter anyway."
But it mattered to her. She looked at him in that moment, through all the false pretenses and bravado and instead of the pity he expected, she had simply said "You should write to him."
Jerome had scoffed. "Why would I do that?"
Mara shrugged as if it were easy. "Because maybe he's still your dad. Because maybe he's waiting for you to reach out first. And because maybe you're not as done with it as you think."
He hated how much it got under his skin. Hated even more to think that she might be right. Still, he didn't say yes, not immediately. Not for several days. But the idea stuck, it festered at the back of his mind. Wouldn't leave him alone.
And one evening, without warning, he'd shown up at her door with a blank piece of paper and a pen and said, flatly. "You wanted me to write something, so help me."
Mara didn't say I told you so. She didn't gloat, she just nodded and moved aside to let him in. She sat beside him for well over an hour, gently nudging him through drafts, helping him figure out what to say to the man who hadn't said anything to him in nearly a decade. She didn't rush him. Didn't try to write it for him. Just sat there, steady and calm, offering the occasional prompt when he faltered.
The letter was short. Awkward. A few stilted lines about Poppy, about school and how he'd gotten a scholarship. He didn't sign it with love, just his name. But it was something. And sending it - actually sealing the envelope and posting it - left him raw in a way he hadn't anticipated.
His father had written back.
The letters were clumsy, sparse and mostly factual. How the food was. What book he had been reading. That he was proud of Jerome for getting into the school even if it was on a legacy scholarship. That he was sorry. Jerome hadn't written back to that last one yet. Nor had he visited, he couldn't, not yet. The idea of seeing him behind glass after all these years made something twist in his stomach.
He took another drag and his throat burned, he couldn't tell whether it was the cigarette or the emotion responsible.
Fabian still wasn't saying anything. Still not asking. He never asked, but that was part of the problem wasn't it? He never asked about the letters. About the time he spent with Mara. About the fact Jerome's hands sometimes shook when he got post.
And maybe that was why Jerome said it, finally asked what he had spent so long internalising, why he cracked the silence wide open.
"Do you even like me?"
Fabian's pen froze and his shoulders went altogether more rigid
"What?" He asked, like he hadn't heard Jerome right the first time.
Jerome cocked his head slightly, putting on a voice too casual to be genuine. "I mean, do you? Or is this just some weird, twisted routine for you? You get something from me, I get something from you, we pretend it doesn't happen until it does again, and then we go back to pretending. Rinse. Repeat."
Fabian stared at him, eyes wide in the dim light. He opened his mouth as if to speak but closed it again before anything could come out. For once he had nothing, nothing at all.
Jerome gave a bitter laugh. "That's what I thought."
He stubbed out his cigarette butt against the window ledge with a bit more force than necessary and stood, the motion as abrupt as it was restless and his fingers twitched at his sides as if looking for something to do.
"Jerome, wait-" Fabian stood too, knocking a few pages off the desk in his haste. "I do. I do like you."
Jerome turned to face him although it hurt to do so, folding his arms against his chest as though they could protect him from his raging emotions.
"But you don't want to." He said, voice low and gravely. "Not really. Not like this. You want to be normal. With Nina and Sibuna. With people who make sense, who don't come with baggage and a prison visitation form waiting on their bedside table."
"That's not fair-"
"It is." Jerome cut in, sharper now. "It's fair because you always chose what's safe. And I'm not safe, I never have been. I'm chaos with a smile. I'm the guy who scams year 7s, the one who steals cigarettes from a foster brother's jacket and calls it survival. You-" He broke off, huffing out a straggled breath. "You like me, but you keep me behind glass like you're scared of what I'll do to you."
Fabian looked wrecked. "Jerome-"
But Jerome was tired, and his smile crooked, only a fracture more than an expression. "It's fine." He said softly now, "You don't have to explain. I get it. I wouldn't pick me either."
Then he walked out. He didn't slam the door, didn't make a scene. He just vanished, without so much as another word.
Like muscle memory, he slipped out the back steps behind the house, past the rusted drain pipe, over the bricks he knew would creak and sat on the stone ledge of the old garden wall. He lost track of time after a while, chain-smoking and staring into nothing. He felt hollowed out, exhausted in the way even sleep couldn't fix.
He wasn't sure how long he had been there when he heard footsteps - soft, hesitant. Alfie.
"Hey." Alfie said. He didn't ask to sit - not that he ever did - but he sat beside Jerome all the same.
Jerome didn't reply, nor did he acknowledge that Alfie was even there; he simply continued staring into nothingness. A few beats of silence passed and then, without warning, Alfie reached over, plucking the cigarette neatly from Jerome's hand, snatching the lighter from his other.
Jerome blinked, startled out of his trance. "Hey-"
"These things'll kill you, you know." He said flippantly. It was the same thing Fabian had said earlier. Jerome's stomach twisted at the thought, but he kept his face carefully blank.
"I am aware." Jerome said dryly, with the faintest snort of amusement; though the words came out rough, like he hadn't used his voice in hours.
Alfie tucked the lighter into his pocket, and flicked the cigarette away into the bushes. He didn't offer a lecture, just leaned back on his elbows and stared up at the stars for a while like this was any other evening. Like nothing was wrong. But something was and Alfie could feel it humming off of Jerome's skin like static.
"Want to talk about it?" Alfie asked eventually, glancing over.
Jerome only shook his head once, but it was firm enough for Alfie to get the message. "No."
"Want me to sit here and not talk about it?" He tried again.
A drawn out pause followed before Jerome finally relented, "Yeah."
"Cool." Alfie said and that was that.
They sat there, side by side in the dark, shoulders barely brushing, surrounded by the soft noises of the sleeping house and the distant noises of nocturnal animals in the hedges. Alfie stayed quiet. He didn't fidget, didn't fill the silence with his usual babble or jokes. He just existed beside him, solid and present, a tether in the way only Alfie could be.
Jerome hadn't cried, he wouldn't. But something deep inside him ached, like a dam just beginning to crack. He didn’t want to think about Fabian, or the letters from his dad still hidden in his drawer - or what it meant that he'd let someone in only to watch them walk away all over again.
He didn’t want to think about the fact that for all his cleverness and charm, he never seemed to be the one anyone picked in the end; too many sharp edges and missing pieces for a happy ending.
But Alfie didn’t leave, Alfie stayed. And for tonight, that was enough.
When Jerome finally spoke again, his voice was hoarse from smoke and disuse, and the sky was starting to lighten at the edges with the first scant traces of dawn. "I don’t get it." He mused, "I never ask for much. I never expect anything. And still, people look at me like I'm a nuisance, like I'm going to ruin everything."
Alfie was quiet for a moment, contemplating Jerome's words, before he replied. "That's because you never give anyone a chance to see past all the fake stuff."
Jerome blinked at him. It was moments like this that reminded him that despite their reputations, it was really Alfie who was the clever one; Alfie who seemed to understand things Jerome hadn’t even worked out about himself.
"I mean, you joke all the time." Alfie continued, "You always act like you don't care, but you do. I know you do. It's just - people can't read minds, dude."
Jerome let out a soft, humourless laugh. "You make it sound so easy."
"I'm not saying it is. But maybe, if you let someone actually see you for once, you wouldn't have to keep proving that you're more than they think." Alfie explained as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, but then again maybe it was and Jerome was just too highly strung to realise it.
Jerome dropped his head into his hands. "I let Fabian see me." The words escaped him before he even had a chance to properly think them through, "And look how that turned out."
Alfie didn't press for details. Didn't need to. Jerome was sure Alfie knew more than he was letting on, but Alfie never pried, not when Jerome was involved.
The next few days passed in what Jerome could only describe as a blur. He kept his head down, kept his hands busy - he sold his old homework to year 8s, he helped Mara with student council logistics he didn't really care about, and he cracked the odd joke that didn't quite reach his eyes.
Fabian avoided him. Or maybe he avoided Fabian. Either way, the space between them stretched wider than the lawn outside the Frobisher library. It wasn't an unfamiliar ache, that distance. Jerome knew how to walk through life with it strapped to his back, but it stung all the same. Especially when he saw the way Nina looked at Fabian: like he was safe, like he was hers, like he wasn't already full of contradictions and unspoken truths.
Jerome didn't want ownership, he just wanted honesty. And that, he knew, was asking too much.
Then the dreams started again.
They weren't always the same, but Rufus was in most of them. Sometimes standing at the foot of his bed, his piercing eyes going right into Jerome's soul. Sometimes he was dragging him through endless stone tunnels. Sometimes they were more like images - Fabian lying still on the floor, Alfie calling his name from somewhere far away, a hand reaching for his throat.
Each time he woke gasping and his heart racing, cold sweat slicking his back. He didn't scream, Jerome hadn't screamed since he was ten. But he couldn't get back to sleep either.
And so he slipped out the back steps behind the house, past the rusted drain pipe, over the bricks he knew would creak and sat on the stone ledge of the old garden wall and he smoked - again and again.
On the fourth night, he found himself in the library. Not looking for books so much as he was solitude. The house had felt too loud in its quietness - too many memories hanging in the air, too many ghosts of things said and unsaid. His room had grown stifling, the walls pressing in like accusations, his mattress unfamiliar beneath a body that hadn't rested properly in days. He needed somewhere else. Somewhere untouched by the dreams that kept dragging him back into shadowy corridors, into Rufus' stare, into the memory of Fabian turning away.
He sank down between two towering shelves, legs folded to his chest, back pressed against the wall and he exhaled slowly - deliberately.
"What are you doing here?"
The voice startled him - not because it was loud, but because it wasn't. It was soft, hesitant, familiar in a way that made something twist in his gut.
Jerome didn't look up. "What does it look like?"
Fabian stepped out from behind a shelf, shadowed by the low light, his hair mussed and eyes heavy with something Jerome couldn't name. Guilt, maybe, or exhaustion or even both. Then again, perhaps Jerome was just projecting.
"I was looking for-" Fabian faltered over his words. "Well, I couldn't sleep."
Jerome hummed noncommittally. Sibuna stuff probably, things that didn't concern him. Things that always seemed to steal Fabian away. But still, Fabian lingered.
The silence they settled into was tense and brittle, unwilling to move even an inch. Jerome found himself staring at the floor, at the worn patches in the carpet between his shoes. He didn't know why he spoke next. Maybe he was too tired to keep holding the words in. Maybe the stillness simply made him reckless.
"You didn't choose me."
"I know." Was all the reply Jerome received.
Fabian stood there like someone unraveled - arms crossed like he didn't know what else to do with them, mouth pressed into a thin line. His face was drawn, dark circles etched under his eyes, and his hair stuck up at the back like he'd run his hands through it far too many times. He looked every bit as tired as Jerome felt. And that - that did something to him. Twisted the ache a little deeper. Because if Fabian was tired too, maybe they weren't as finished as it had felt.
"I never asked you to." Jerome admitted, almost apologetically. "But still, I thought maybe-"
He didn't finish his sentence, couldn't. He didn't want to hear the confession fall flat between them.
Fabian shifted slightly, his gaze dropping and for a second, Jerome thought he might walk away again - disappear like he always did when things got too close, too complicated. But instead, Fabian moved closer. Walked a few steps forward and slowly sank down onto the carpet opposite him, folding his long legs under himself with the stiff awkwardness Jerome had grown so fond of. He didn't speak for a moment, like he was measuring the weight of his own voice.
"I was scared."
Jerome just blinked, the answer landed heavier than he had expected. Fabian had caught him off guard and he felt exposed like a deer in headlights.
"Of what?" The shake in his voice betrayed him. "Me?"
He wanted to run, everything inside him screamed to get up and leave. The moment felt all too raw, too real, and Jerome Clarke didn't do vulnerable - not like this. He remembered, very suddenly, why he hated these moments. Why it was easier to be wanted in the dark, with mouths and hands and no words. Why he didn't do this.
"No. Of what it would mean if I let myself want something that wasn't expected." Fabian's voice came quiet, barely above a whisper, as if saying it too loud might make it real. His words hovered in the space between them as his fingers twitched where they rested on his knees, digging into the fabric of his pyjama bottoms.
Jerome blinked and his breath caught in his throat.
"I've only ever been what people don't expect." He said at last, the admission cut more than he had meant it to. It wasn't said with any semblance of pride or bitterness - just resignation. A truth he had long learned to live with.
People never expected much of him. Or if they did, they expected the worst. He had spent years trying to be palatable in some way, shifting into whatever version of himself people would tolerate for long enough to keep them from leaving. And when they left anyway - well, at least it wasn't a surprise.
Fabian's shoulders curled inward slightly. He wasn't looking at Jerome anymore. "I know." He said again, and this time the words were laced with something heavier - remorse, maybe, regret. Or grief for what he hadn't allowed himself to see until it was too late.
The silence that fell next was different than before. It wasn't hostile nor thick with things unsaid. It was heavy, yes - but it was a shared heaviness. A weary sort of honesty settling between them like dust. They were - in that moment - simply two boys sitting cross-legged in the shadows of a silent library, weighed down by all the things they'd never meant to feel and all the ways they had both failed to say them.
"I don't know what this is." Fabian said eventually, his voice cracking just slightly at the edges. "I don't know what I'm doing."
Jerome could have laughed. There was something strangely comforting in hearing Fabian Rutter, of all people, admit that he didn’t have the answer to something.
But he didn't laugh. Instead he nodded - slow and measured. "Me neither." He murmured, "But I'm tired of pretending it's nothing."
Fabian inhaled slowly. "So am I."
They didn’t reach for each other. Didn't lean in or kiss or collapse into anything soft. There were no dramatic declarations, or any sort of sudden catharsis. Just the quiet shift of air around them - the kind of silence that wasn't empty, but waiting. Patient and willing.
Then, after a moment, Fabian moved.
Tentatively - almost as if he wasn't sure he had the right - he reached out, and laid his hand gently on Jerome's knee. His touch was as light as a feather, like a question without a mark.
Jerome didn't flinch, he didn't lean into it, but he didn't move away either. He simply sat there, feeling the heat of Fabian's hand seep through the fabric of his trousers and into the quiet place beneath his skin.
"I'm sorry." Fabian said.
Jerome closed his eyes and his voice, when it came, was low and frayed. "Yeah." He said, "Me too."
He didn't tell Alfie. He didn't need to. Alfie just knew in the quiet, uncanny way best friends sometimes did. There was no interrogation or demand for an explanation Jerome wasn't ready to give. Just Alfie's voice echoing down the corridor one breaktime calling, "I'm starving. Let's raid the corner shop and give ourselves sugar-induced comas, yeah?"
Jerome hadn't even questioned it. They cut across the green and spent far too long wandering the aisles debating whether it was morally acceptable to buy five types of fizzy laces and nothing else. Alfie made a terrible case for dip dabs, Jerome countered with jelly snakes - and somewhere in the middle of that argument, something loosened in his chest.
They ended up sprawled on the school field beneath a half-hearted sun, the grass slightly damp and the sweets strewn between them. They didn't talk about anything real - just swapped ridiculous impressions of Victor, debated whether aliens were real, and recounted the time they had convinced the younger years that the school lake was haunted by a Victorian ghost named Mildred.
Jerome laughed more that afternoon than he had in weeks. Genuine, open laughter - the kind that didn't feel like a performance.
Later that night, when they sat on their respective beds Alfie asked it softly. Not like someone prying, but like someone who’d been holding the question gently in his palm for days. "You okay?"
Jerome didn't look up at first. He was fiddling with the hem of his sleeve, the fabric worn thin between his fingers. But the words came anyway.
"No." He admitted, "But I'm getting there."
And that was the truth. Jerome still smoked. He still lied sometimes, reflexively, the way a person might check their pockets to make sure nothing had been stolen. He still woke in the early hours, soaked in sweat, pulse hammering from dreams he didn't want to remember. Rufus' voice echoing in the dark, Fabian or Alfie's name torn from his throat in a shout he never quite let out.
But he also stopped hiding so much. He told Mara, genuinely, that she was the smartest person he knew. She had blinked at him in surprise, her pen paused mid-sentence, and then smiled that soft, rare Mara smile that made him feel like he wasn't a lost cause.
He visited his dad.
It wasn't cinematic or tearful. Just a nervous morning and a long train ride, and Mara's hand on his shoulder at the gate. The visit was strange and awkward and hollow in places, but it was something.
He told Alfie he loved him one afternoon whilst they were building a house of cards from stolen sugar packets from a café in town.
"Love you, you absolute weirdo." He'd muttered, then added, "No homo," with the smirk of someone who still wasn't sure how to say that and mean it without flinching.
Alfie just rolled his eyes. "Yeah, yeah. Love you too, freak."
He stopped kissing Fabian in shadowed corners, in stolen moments behind closed doors. And slowly - quietly - started seeing him in the light. Not necessarily always romantic, not labelled. But real. A choice this time, not a secret.
He didn't need to be in Sibuna. He didn't need to be in anything, really. He just wanted to be seen.
And - for once - he was starting to let people see him. Not just the misfit. Not just the con artist or the cautionary tale. Not even the angry boy with a cigarette and a chip on his shoulder.
Just Jerome Clarke.
Still figuring it out. Still fumbling through it, some days worse than others. But, for the first time in what felt like a long, long while, he was trying.
And that, maybe, was enough.