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It’s almost midnight when Jack sees him.
There’s a figure on the bridge, and Jack may be half asleep, but he’s not stupid enough to miss that they’re standing on the other side of the railings, looking ready to fall into the water below. Jack’s pulse hammers and he rushes forward as quickly, yet as quietly, as he can.
The last thing he needs to do is startle the person and make them fall.
As he’s crossing over, feet a handful of steps away from the reinforced concrete of the bridge, the clouds shift, moonlight illuminating the person. Jack freezes in place, eyes widening and heart rabbiting in his chest.
The person – the boy – is tall, easily taller than Jack, the edge of his jawline still softened with baby fat, and he has honey-brown curls that sit in riotous waves down the nape of his neck. They’re dappled with flakes of momentarily ceased snow. Jack feels like he’s swallowed his tongue, feels like he’s gotten himself into some shit and is now seeing his worst nightmares come true. Because the figure looks familiar.
It looks like Luke.
And it’s not. Jack knows it’s not. He’d seen the photos and videos of Luke at practice that morning, laughing and smiling like he hadn’t just been out on LTIR, shoulder injury mere moments away from requiring surgical intervention. He’d gotten the texts from the boys back home, all affirming that Luke was okay, was putting his all into practice, even staying out on the ice last.
But it feels real. It’s sick to admit, and maybe Jack’s more fucked in the head than he thought, but he can almost picture it. Luke flying out to Italy, seeing all the shit Jack and Quinn are getting up to, all the stuff they’re doing without him.
(Seeing all of the people talking about Jack and Quinn like they’re a solid duo, like Luke isn’t their sorely needed third, like they both aren’t burning up with missing him.)
Seeing it all and doing something about it.
Luke’s tried it before, twenty-one and reckless and tipsy off of pink gin. Blabbering about how he’s useless and they’re all better off without him. They’d all rammed together in Jack’s single bed after that, too afraid to be alone in case Luke did something again, or someone else decided they wanted to be stupid. Quinn hadn’t even told Vancouver he was flying out. Just up and disappeared in the middle of the night.
All three of them were antsy and testy for a while afterwards, embarrassed to put a name to what Luke had gone through. Afraid that if they did, it might come back, and Jack wasn’t sure he could go through it again. Couldn’t face the idea of losing one of his brothers, of being the brother that was lost.
Jack swallows and blinks the boy into focus again. He’s trembling – cold or scared, Jack can’t tell, but he assumes it’s probably both – and so Jack starts walking again. He lets his steps ring out this time, lets the boys know he’s there.
And Jack will give the boy credit. He doesn’t move for the entirety of Jack’s walk, just stays on the wrong side of the bridge, fingers white knuckling at the railing. Jack leans his back against it, elbow inches from the boy’s outstretched hand.
“What’s your name?” Jack asks. It’s the only thing he can think to say, and he’s not really expecting a response, or a proper one, at least. It’s a surprise, then, when he gets one.
“E-Edward. Most people call me Eddie, though,” the boy stutters. His teeth are chattering and Jack knows now that it’s more fear than anything else. The whites of Eddie’s eyes are violently visible. He whispers, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“You should climb back over,” Jack offers. Eddie shakes his head and Jack can’t help the jolt that shoots through him. He’s seeing Luke again, superimposing his brother over this younger guy, this kid, really, and it’s jarring. It’s so otherworldly and Jack needs to help this boy before he leans over the railing himself, vomiting his guts into the water.
“Why’d you come help me? You don’t… you don’t know me,” Eddie bites out. Jack frowns at that. Is humanity really that brutal now? Jack shifts, resting his hips against the railing instead of his back, blinking visions of Luke from his eyes when he sees the curve of Eddie’s nose.
“I’ll be honest… you reminded me of my brother. Still do. You kinda look like him from some angles,” Jack says. Eddie turns to face him then, and the eyes are too green to be Luke’s, but Jack still sees him anyway. Knows that he’s just filling in the details with his brother’s because the guilt has been gnawing at him for a while, concern rising like a tidal wave in his chest, and he’s sure he’s close to drowning.
Which would be almost funny if Jack wasn’t actively talking someone away from doing it properly.
“Your brother?” Eddie questions, lip quavering. Jack hums, thinking about the final moments with Luke in the airport, the casual snark Luke had jabbered with, an easy deflection that Jack knew how to see through more times than not. Quinn hadn’t said anything when Jack teared up on the plane, just held his brother close and reassured him that Luke was stubborn, that he’d be fine and Jack couldn’t beat himself up about it.
“Yeah. My younger brother. He’s, um, well, he’s at home. Me and my older brother are competing and he…” Jack trails off. Can’t voice the words lest the guilt start pouring out of him, something acidic and biting and sickening. He feels so guilty, and it’s all for a decision that was never going to be his to make.
“He didn’t make the cut?” Eddie fills in. Jack looks up at him and nods, mouth pressed in a tight line. He should be here. Luke should be donning the Team USA kit, rocking a number that isn’t 43 because Quinn’s already snagged it, but still proudly repping his name. Their family name.
And he’s not.
“He wasn’t called up, no. Besides, he’s still recovering from injury, so he wouldn’t have been able to come anyways,” Jack sighs. Eddie frowns then before he’s shifting around. Still standing on the other side of the bridge, teetering over the water, but he’s facing Jack now, stomach pressed against the railing.
“Seems like you love him a lot,” Eddie says. Jack huffs playfully at that, shooting Eddie a teasing smile. Eddie smiles back before he sighs and it’s wearier than it has any right to be. Jack can practically hear Luke’s tone in it, and he has to pinch his thigh, swallow down the wave of bile in his throat.
“The best younger brother I could ever ask for,” Jack says. It makes Eddie frown further and before Jack can ask what’s wrong, Eddie’s collapsing into a fit of tears, the railing slipping through his fingers. Jack panics and darts forward, tucking his arms under Eddie’s armpits and drag, drag, dragging him up an over until they’re both on the bridge properly.
Eddie collapses to his knees, probably bruised from Jack’s hasty rescue attempt, and continues to sob. Something kicks into gear in Jack’s brain and before he can even think it through, he’s shrugging off his jacket, laying the white material over Eddie’s shoulders before he’s sitting next to him. Their knees nudge together, and it’s so familiar. So familial.
“Talk to me, Eddie, what’s goin’ on?” Jack says. This was far from how he anticipated his night going, but Jack can’t just leave someone to die. Especially not someone who looks younger than his younger brother, someone who Jack can barely see as the right age even now. Luke’s always younger in Jack’s head.
“Just… I… sometimes I feel like, no, I know I’m the family disappointment,” Eddie hiccups. “Like… Would my whole family be better off without me? If I never existed, would they be better off? Happier? Richer? I can’t see why they wouldn’t be.” Eddie’s voice cracks, tears lining his eyes when he peers up at Jack.
And oh. Jack’s heard this before, the same cracking inflection, the same whispered confessions. It’s Luke, it’s all Luke, and Jack… god, he wishes Quinn were here, wishes Quinn could work his oldest brother magic on this poor boy.
“Has your family ever said this to you?” Jack questions. Eddie sniffles and shakes his head. Just like Jack thought. “You should speak to them, you know? I know it’s like… scary, but um… my brother nearly ended his life when he was twenty-one, and it was scarier than anything else. I could never live my life if I lost one of my brothers…” Jack confesses.
“I don’t think my older brothers would agree,” Eddie mutters, and it’s almost bitter. Jack wonders if that’s how Luke talks about him and Quinn sometimes, and has to mentally rein himself in. This isn’t Luke in front of him, no matter how much of him he sees in Eddie.
“Again, have they said that to you?” Jack asks. He rests his hand on Eddie’s back, underneath the coat he’d draped over him. He gently soothes it up and down as Eddie coughs out a sob, over and over until he can speak again.
“No, but… why wouldn’t they be? I haven’t done half of the shit they were doing at my age. It’s like… I’m just useless. I’m seventeen and I’ve done nothing with my life,” Eddie admits and it’s like whiplash. Jack has assumed Eddie was young, younger than Luke at least, but seventeen? That’s barely anything.
“Eddie… you’re only seventeen, of course you barely have a life. It’s only really just started for you. How old are your brothers?” Jack says.
“Twenty-one, and twenty-three,” Eddie admits. He reaches a hand up to pick at the dry skin on his mouth, and Jack gently plucks his fingers away, holding both of Eddie’s hands with his own. They’re ice cold. This kid is so young, and Jack needs him to understand that. Needs him to know that there is still life to come for him.
It’s almost terrifying how familiar this feels. Jack knows that him and Quinn have had a bunch of these conversations with Luke before, sprawled out on the cold kitchen floor as Luke sobbed and sobbed over his life being ruined at sixteen. Jack can’t even remember what he was doing at sixteen, but he remembers being eighteen and having to tell his brother that sixteen is nothing, that there’s a whole lot of years left.
He remembers being twenty-three, having to hold his brother steady over the toilet as he vomited up pill after pill.
“Eddie, you’re a kid. A teenager, technically, but still a kid. Your brothers are adults. Of course their lives are supposedly better than yours – they get to live them without an adult’s permission. Other than their own, that is,” Jack explains. Eddie laughs softly and it’s like Jack’s brain is tormenting him because he hears Luke.
Again.
“Are you going to give me the ‘it gets better’ talk?” Eddie asks, and Jack would feel offended if he couldn’t see the edges of a smile on Eddie’s face. “Because I’m sure it does, but that doesn’t make it any easier to get through all of this shit.”
“It doesn’t make it easier, no,” Jack says, “but it’s important to try. You can’t deny yourself the future you want because the present is a shitty place to be. Anything can happen, and if you tear the exploration of that anything away from yourself, it will hurt a lot more people than just you.”
“I just… I don’t know if I can tell anyone what I’m feeling, you know?” Eddie says. Jack smiles in spite of himself because hasn’t the kid realised that he’s currently doing exactly that? When Jack says as much, Eddie’s cheeks pinken, and he ducks his head. “Oh…”
“Exactly. And I’m a stranger to you. Your family will probably be more understanding and, I don’t know, you might find someone in it who feels the same way, or pretty darn similar,” Jack says. He swallows down the feelings in his gut, the way attempting called to him the second he realised it was calling to Luke.
Like calls to like, or some shit, Jack supposes.
“Thank you,” Eddie whispers. He sniffles and wipes his nose on his hoodie sleeve before he shrugs off Jack’s coat and hands it out to him. Jack pulls him into a quick side hug before he takes the jacket, letting it hang limply between his fingers. Eddie sighs. “I should probably head home.”
“Do you live far?” Jack asks. Eddie shakes his head and gestures to the nearby village. Jack smiles again and places the jacket back over Eddie’s shoulders. “Keep it. Now come on, I’ll walk you back.”
~
By the time Jack returns to the Team USA lodgings, he’s shivering, fingertips mottled in shades of blue and purple, and snowflakes dot his hair. He almost sighs in relief as the warmth of the building graces his skin, but he’s still frozen inside, still thinking about Eddie and Luke and the way his skin prickles with guilt.
Jack bypasses all the other rooms, people he’s assisted in games, and people who have assisted him, until he stands in front of the room next to his. It’s Quinn’s room, and Jack knocks on the door, firm but quiet.
It opens seconds later and Quinn takes all of one look at Jack before he’s dragging him into the room, crossing to his suitcase and procuring a spare set of clothes. They’re similar in build, not lanky like Luke’s gotten to be, but the gesture still makes something in Jack crumble.
And he breaks.
Quinn’s there in seconds, because of course he is. He takes Jack into his arms, lets him sob against his chest, doesn’t ask for an explanation because he knows Jack won’t give one until he’s ready, and in a roundabout way, this only makes him miss Luke more.
When Jack’s calm, when his lungs doesn’t feel bolted half-shut, he pulls away, mutters an apology, and sinks onto the edge of Quinn’s bed. Quinn follows him. “Don’t say sorry. Is everything okay? Why are you so cold?”
Jack spills, tells him everything. The walk to clear his head, the worry he felt over Luke’s injury and if he was faking being okay for the sake of returning to the Devils, the way he’d helped Edward, and the way Eddie had reminded him so much, too much, of Luke. Jack starts crying again multiple times, unable to stop the tears from spilling.
“I couldn’t stop myself from imagining that it was Luke there instead. I can’t stop imagining it. I think there’s something wrong with me,” Jack hiccups. Quinn shushes him, pulls him into a hug that almost perfectly mirrors the way Jack had hugged Eddie earlier.
“There’s nothing wrong with you, Jack, you’re just afraid,” Quinn says, and it sounds so true when he speaks. Like he knows the strands of Jack’s soul, inside and out, and he probably does. There’s no way the three of them aren’t soulmates, not with the way they’re tethered together as strongly as possible. “You wanna call Luke?”
“I don’t know… I think I might cry if I see even one curl out of place,” Jack huffs. Quinn laughs at that, and Jack offers up a wetter contribution to the sound. Exhaustion is seeping into his bones now, leaving him spent and weary and, of course, that’s when Jack remembers his promise to see Nico. “Fuck.”
“Hm?” Quinn questions. He’s deftly untangling the knots of Jack’s hair, wiping the melted snow along his hoodie until the fabric is darker in one growing spot.
“I forgot I promised to see Nico tonight,” Jack mutters. Nico had lost, annoyingly, eliminated from the competition before Jack could play against him. He was most likely heading home in the next few days, back to Devils practice, back to the brother Jack had left behind. Another sob chokes out of him before he can stop it, and he leans into his brother’s embrace again. “I feel like I’m such a shit person.”
“If you seriously think Nico won’t understand, you must not actually be dating him,” Quinn says with a fond huff. Jack whines and swats at his Quinn’s thigh before he sighs and pulls away properly, standing on unsteady feet. “Speak to him when you wake up. You’ll have a clearer head then.”
“Okay, you’re right,” Jack says before he yawns. He’s so tired, he doesn’t even want to shuffle one foot down the hallway into his bedroom. It feels like too much. “I should probably head back.”
“You can crash here if you want,” Quinn offers. “Been a while since we had a proper sleepover like when we were kids, after all.” And he doesn’t say it, but they both know when the last time had been. Luke, those pills, that ambulance. Jack shivers. He doesn’t want to be alone right now.
“Are you sure we’ll even fit?” He jokes, accepting the clothes Quinn offers him. They both change in companionable silence before Quinn answers him. The way Jack prefers it. Weird habit they have, he supposes. Jack really doesn’t like talking whilst changing, and wonders if he got that from Quinn. Knows Luke got it from him, after all.
“We haven’t got a gaggle of limbs jabbing into us, so I think we’ll be fine,” Quinn says. Jack knows it’s said in jest, meant to make him laugh, but it doesn’t. Jack just feels bad instead. There is no Luke, his absence like a void.
“Quinn…”
“Don’t. Luke wouldn’t want you getting upset that he’s missing out. Besides, he’s not a cuddler, remember? Not unless he’s got Nemo in his arms,” Quinn says.
And really, he’s not wrong. Jack remembers their many one bed sleepovers, Jack and Quinn resting normally against the pillows whilst Luke took up the bottom half, body contorted into whatever letter of the alphabet he’d chosen to become that night. Touch avoidance, or something similar.
Jack huffs out a breath of laughter at the memories, and finally acquiesces, slipping under the sheets. It’s close, knees knocking together, but Jack doesn’t mind, always been the clingiest of the three.
It’s silent and Jack wills himself to sleep, knows he’s tired, but something bites at him, something sticky and violent. “Quinn?” Jack asks. He receives a half-asleep hum in response, and he grinds his together as he tries to figure out how to word his thoughts. If he should word his thoughts. Before he can truly make a decision, however, it blurts out of him. “Do you think he hates us?”
“What? No. Why would… Luke doesn’t hate us, Jack,” Quinn says. Jack huffs, twisting until he can bury his face in the small stretch of pillow he’s temporarily calling his own. “You should follow your own advice sometimes, you know?”
“Shut up,” Jack grumbles, even though it’s true. Especially because it’s true. He sighs and plucks his face from the fabric. Quinn’s smiling at him, reassuring and steady even though Jack’s a disgruntled mess. “Are you sure though?”
“Text him and ask him if you don’t believe me,” Quinn says and yeah, it sounds stupid when Quinn says that, so Jack lays down again, lets his face sink into his stolen half of Quinn’s pillow and wills himself to sleep.
It’s only with the steady reassurance of Quinn’s breathing that Jack finally drifts off.