Chapter Text
“Real magic can never be made by offering someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
Even when Alexis dies, he’s considerate of Michael to a fault. It’s funny, he thinks as he watches Noa press his fingers to the pale column of Alexis’s neck, sliding them down as if trying to will a pulse back. The gravity of the situation hasn’t seemed to have sunk into his bones yet, that this is about to change his life in a way that he’s worked from the gutters to prevent. Change as a whole is something Michael thinks that, with enough power of mind, he can simply steer in whatever direction he desires. Nobody - not even God - has proven him otherwise, that he cannot simply change fate by wanting it more than anybody else.
Except Alexis has gone and swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills with, Michael notes in detached amusement, a neat glass of half-drained orange juice. He remembers Alexis buying it last week, gnawing on his lower lip while he scanned the lined refrigerators of the grocery store. He’d said something, something that Michael vaguely wishes he could remember now, probably about his grocery budget that Michael had probably ignored. He did that a lot in the last few weeks before this, treating Alexis like a blur in the corner of his eyes - making sure it was there, present, following, obedient, but never turning further to take a proper look.
“The ambulance is downstairs.” Gesner says, somewhere in the room where Michael can’t see him, the words flat against his tongue.
“He’s too cold for them to do anything. It’s probably been a while.” Noa mutters, lifting his fingers gently and then setting them back down, featherlight, against a curl that has slipped over the bridge of Alexis’s nose. It’s a strange act of intimacy from a man who Michael associates with clinical detachment and cruelty in the name of success. It disgusts him a bit, truly, and he has to twitch back an urge to remove Noa’s hand from anywhere near Alexis’s face.
SIlly, stupid Alexis. He’d known that, despite their fall-out and the subsequent unknotting of their lives, Michael would spend Saturday out of his dorm as he did every weekend. Again, he feels that warm crawl of annoyance up the back of his neck, that Alexis had used Michael’s own predictability against him. It’s like being outplayed, outmaneuvered, and even though Alexis is the clear loser, Michael doesn’t like a point being made against him. But it was true, that he’d taken off in the morning to haunt a bookstore for anything new in psychology he could add to his arsenal. Then he’d take his new book to a cafe, where he’d throw back some shots of espresso and pour over the text, willing it to soak into his brain and apply itself. In the few hours that his routine took, Alexis had stolen into his room and taken the sleeping pills Kaiser kept in the back of his cabinet (prescribed by a doctor who had no idea that Michael refused to relinquish control of his body to even medicine) and downed the whole bottle. Then he’d curled up in his bed, no doubt already drowsy and heavy on his feet, looking almost like a newborn lamb resting its downy head for a moment of sunny sleep.
When Noa finally moves, Michael notices that Alexis is clutching that silly ragged puppy he’s dragged around in his suitcase since childhood. It was a part of vulnerability that, despite Michael’s maneuvering, he’d never been able to fully pry out of Alexis. All he knew was that his parents had been given it at the time of his birth, some cheap gift shop brown puppy plush from an extended relative, and that Alexis had shunned all other toys in favor of it. Michael had tried to poke at that wound, see if he could rile him up by pointing out that it was clearly a pathetic fault, a more laughable failing among the many that made up Alexis’s personality. It was, he’d pointed out, perhaps the only gift that Alexis had received from his family that had no intention behind it to change him, to mold him into the type of son they’d tried to create, that they felt their genetics had failed to produce. But Alexis hadn’t flinched, something he did whenever Michael shared a new sly barb at his person, and merely fondled the soft, worn ear of his toy. He’d forgotten to ever ask about it again, so put off by the lack of response that the fun of prying had immediately died out.
The arrival of EMTs is like a herd of bulls, pushing people out of rooms and lifting Alexis’s limp arms, brushing fingers across his parted mouth, pulling back an eyelid (Michael stares, tries to memorize the fuchsia of his eyes in case he doesn’t get to see them again). They run through their tests with a finality that says they know it’s a lost cause, that Alexis hasn’t been Alexis since probably eleven in the morning, falling into an abyssal state of sleep.
“We’re going to transport him to the hospital.” One of them says, clipped and clinical, omitting the word morgue that hangs onto the end of the sentence. “Do you know if his family will want an autopsy?”
“I’m his legal medical guardian.” Noa answers and it’s then that Michael remembers Ness signing the paperwork, shrugging with a smile as they signed with Bastard and murmuring that his family didn’t want to worry about broken knees or concussions. “There was a note so I don’t think it’s necessary.”
Michael’s ears prick, turning sharply towards his coach whose gaze is still lifted in any direction that isn’t Ness. “There was a note?”
Noa lifts his stare back to him and it’s then that Michael sees him holding it, a piece of notebook paper folded in half and clutched in his fist loosely. And when Michael reaches to grab it from his hands, Noa simply lets him, looking unnervingly impassive about it. He recognizes the notebook paper right away, the clean blue lines of the brand Alexis favors for his journals where he scribbles his daily schedule at the end of every night. The ink is familiar too, a shade of dark purple that Alexis favored to the point of buying his pens in bulk.
If magic exists, it must not want me to find it. I’m sorry that I’ve been a weight and a burden that others had to carry my whole life.
Micha can have my things. Whatever he doesn’t want, throw it away. My parents will do it anyway.
Sorry for the trouble this causes.
Michael laughs, sharp and surprised by it, perhaps even more than anybody else in the room. Of course, of course. It’s so like Alexis, to apologize for the burden of his own death, to feel like his passing is one more chore for everybody. The EMTs shift uncomfortably and Noa crosses the room, speaking in low German, to stop some teammate from ripping Michael’s head clean off his neck. He doesn’t mean to laugh because this is terribly unfunny but he can’t help but feel a little proud of Alexis, the proudest he’s been in ages, for getting the upper hand.
“Idiot.” He means it fondly, the way he always does when he degrades Alexis down to a simple name, but it’s enough to have Mensah launch from the doorway to slam a fist into Michael’s jaw. His teeth clatter with the impact, making the laugh taste like acid and blood, and his ears buzz with static, the yelp of the emergency staff, the din of his teammates. He gets the vague feeling that some of them are trying to pull him away from Mensah’s hands and that others are trying to push him closer, encouraging Mensah to rock the nose straight off his face. It’s only Noa’s hand on his collar, yanking him up on unsteady feet, that breaks up the crowd enough for the others to wrangle Mensah in, who thrashes against Gesner’s hand on his chest.
“You did this and you think it’s funny.” Mensah barks and then, to Michael’s amusement, spits on his shoes. “Hell is too good for you.”
“Enough.” Noa yanks a little harder on Michael’s shirt, as if trying to leash him from whatever words he’s preparing to fling back. “Everybody, back to your rooms and don’t leave the dorms tonight. Michael, stay with me.”
It’s only after the rest have filed out of the room that Michael realizes Noa is not doing him a favor, keeping him from getting jumped again in the privacy of the hall. Noa is doing it because now he has to watch as the EMTs slide their hands under the curve of Alexis’s spine, carefully maneuvering him onto the stretcher as if he’s merely a child that fell asleep in the car. Alexis was grown, lean and slim with muscle, but now he looks unbelievably small - so small that Michael can’t believe they ever used to slam shoulders on the field, that Alexis hadn’t simply broken whenever Michael had shoved him away in annoyance. He only vaguely realizes that now is the time to be cataloguing everything - the dusting of freckles across Alexis’s shoulders, the tiny heart-shaped mole on the inside of his left wrist. By the time they’ve carried him out the door, he feels like he’s already forgotten it all, remembering Alexis in fragments like a Picasso painting. It’s only been seconds but he struggles to recall which ear he wore his silver stud in, which finger was a bit curved from a slammed door incident that never properly healed during childhood.
“Back to your room.” Noa says, releasing the fabric balled up in his fist that has kept Michael stationary, his tone infuriatingly still. No, Noa has not done this as a kindness - he’s done it as a punishment, the pinch to his hand that shakes him out of the stupor. Noa has done it to make him realize, only now in the privacy of Alexis’s tiny bedroom and now that they’re alone in this still life, that it’s too late to memorize what matters.
They bury him with his stuffed puppy, despite how hard Michael had fought to keep it. It’d gone along with Alexis, gripped in his hand even after his muscles had softened into relaxation, and the hospital had refused to give it up until they’d finished preparing the body. Even then, Noa had thwarted him by lying through his teeth, letting them know that Alexis had stated he wanted to be buried with it, and by that point they’d stopped taking Michael’s phone calls. He’d sworn out too many attendants, leading to them simply blocking his number, given that he wasn’t the decision maker for Alexis’s funeral preparations.
So here he is, watching them lower the coffin into inappropriately green and lively grass, stewing with the fact that Alexis is taking the dog with him. It’s true that Michael simply doesn’t like to be denied things he wants but it’s more so that of all the things Alexis owned, that was the one he guarded closest to his heart. Michael had already sorted through his books, fairytales and old Harry Potter tomes whose pages were worn to silk softness, their margins occasionally scribbled in. He’d gone through Alexis’s clothes: the hoodies with their strings eaten by a vengeful washing machine, the plaid scarf he’d bought in France when Michael had commented that it matched his hair, the pair of socks that he refused to throw away despite mending the toe five times over. He’d packed it all up and had it sent to his apartment to fester there, letting it exist in a state where he didn’t have to think about it or cull it down.
But he’d wanted that toy most of all, the only thing Alexis truly treasured enough to find comfort in before a final nap. And now it’s under a shovel of dirt that Noa sprinkles over the grave - looking uncomfortably tight in a suit that was likely meant for red carpets and galas - and then under the pink roses thrown in after it. Michael’s rose is still in his hand, thorns pricking into his thumbs, and he knows that if he wipes his hands, blood will smear starkly over his palm. But he keeps it in his fist, earning him another flurry of dark-lidded glares from his teammates. They’ve been sending them all day, from the church, from the pews, from where they stand next to a freshly cut granite headstone. It’s almost amusingly obvious that they wish he was down there and Ness was up here, breathing in humid air on the type of summer days he loved, eyes crinkled in a smile. But instead, Michael is the one here and alive and wasting space while Ness has been martyred in their eyes.
Alexis’s family is standing closest to the priest, looking buttoned up to their necks in dark clothes. His mother is unflinchingly still, hand steadily holding a tissue that hasn’t been patted against her eyes once. His father rubs at a spot on his glasses, looking as if he’d rather be anywhere but here, running equations through his mind. Alexis’s siblings are similarly mousy, a brother and sister who could switch clothes and look the exact same, visibly annoyed as if Alexis has ratted them out for something and not, to their inconvenience, died. They’re an unattractive family and Michael finds himself wondering, not for the first time, how somebody like Alexis had ended up in a home like that. Perhaps Alexis was right about magic - a changeling situation, a fairy child dumped in a hospital bed and left to wilt in a clan of scientists.
There’s a wake at a local pub that Michael will skip because he doesn’t care to hear the voices die down when he steps through the door, the glances over shoulders as they size him up - the final straw on Alexis’s back and the one he still adored the most even in death. He knows, between mid-kick photos and Ness’s charmingly awkward headshot, that the news has been playing the footage of their last match together. Michael, mouth split into a feral smile, spitting the venom that had poisoned Alexis in the end, the audio muffled by crowd noise. They didn’t need to hear it because they saw it, the way Alexis’s shoulders had curled in, the lost way he’d trailed across the field for the rest of the game as if he couldn’t figure out which way to go. The way that Alexis had filed a motion to dissolve his contract with Bastard Munchen within the week and then, when that had been on hold with the legal team, swallowed all of Michael Kaiser’s sleeping pills.
He passes Alexis’s parents as they intersect, Michael back to his car and them back to their hearse. There’s a lot of things he could say, honed sharp like daggers and carefully calculated to slide cleanly into arteries. He wants them to feel a pain that they think they’re above, the basics of human feeling and guilt they think they’ve outsmarted. It’s like he’s been training for it his whole life, to take a knife to their ideals and their haughtiness and carve up something hideous.
Instead, he watches their eyes glaze over him and sees the judgement, the disgust they think they conceal with pursed lips. He is every bit as useless to them and, as far as they’re concerned, the rest of the world as Alexis was - how silly, to believe they’re better than Michael Kaiser. He doesn’t like to lose his temper because something about it reminds him of his childhood, the way rage used to curl the ends of his hair and warm the tips of his fingers. It took nothing at all to set him off when he was younger and he’d kick, scream, throw punches at walls for hours until all the anger had cooked off. The Michael Kaiser of today has no need for those tantrums anymore but it doesn’t stop the lick of fury that rises when Alexis’s parents raise their chins haughtily at him.
“I’m sorry for your loss.” He murmurs, unfolding the sunglasses tucked into his suit pocket, before fitting Alexis’s family with a dazzling smile. The kind of smile that used to knock Alexis off his feet, that drove crowds wild, that infuriated his father to violence. “It must eat at you that Alexis is the only Ness that will ever be worth the world’s attention.”
It’s a beautiful day for a drive, Michael thinks as he continues to his car, leaving the Ness family with their tight faces and clenched fists and eyes boring holes into his back. He’ll take his car into the countryside, let the wind tangle hair around his face and the sun burn the tips of his ears red. Before the rot had set into their relationship, Michael’s first paycheck purchase had been a car and the two of them had spent their rest day following roads into nowhere and everywhere. Now Michael preferred to spend his time in the city, enjoying the way a person could be both visible and untouchable in a crowd, melting away in plain sight. But back then, the desire to be seen and recognized hadn’t been as choking as it was now - back then, he’d had Alexis, and Alexis had always seen him.
Living without Alexis is infinitely more tiring than Michael could have expected. He won’t say he misses him because Michael doesn’t make a habit of missing things - nostalgia is nonexistent in his life and anything he loses can be purchased again, a carbon copy replacement. But it’s a struggle to quantify this unsettling tension between his shoulders, this unbalancing throb in his head as anything besides simply missing Alexis. It rears up like a dormant disease when Michael finds one of Alexis’s hairs in the bathroom, or a leftover bag of the mint tea he’d love to drink shoved in a kitchen drawer. When he spends hours on the pitch, slamming the ball into the goal until the overhead lights burst on, there’s no incessant buzz of praise from the sidelines. His benched water bottle remains empty after he drains it, his practice jerseys remain in a steadily growing unwashed pile, his towels never laid out waiting for him after a shower. It’s strange that Alexis’s presence is far more noticeable in the loss, the blank spaces - Michael hadn’t been aware of all the things he never had to think about anymore until now.
There’s the physical part too that also lacks the satisfaction he used to get from Alexis. He sleeps with men, women, anybody he decides he wants and it leaves him hungrier than it did before. It’s not as if Alexis was particularly gifted at sex but he had made himself into a perfect partner for Michael, pliable and responsive and desperate for a warm touch. Nobody fits in the way that Alexis had slotted against him, how Michael’s thumbs would meet in the middle of his stomach, how his palm would press perfectly against the hollow of Alexis’s neck. They’d grown up together and then grown into each other, their boyish playfulness fading into something simmering, hot under the skin over the beds and showers and years they shared. All of their bodies are lacking the familiar terrain of Alexis’s bruised knees, his scarred ankle, the soft skin that stretches taut over his hard stomach. They are simply, Michael thinks begrudgingly as he washes the last hook-up’s sweat out of his hair, not Alexis Ness.
He remembers the last time they slept together, the way the stunted tension of their football partnership melted as soon as he got Alexis on the bed. One minute Alexis had been blustering about a fumbled pass, fingers trembling as he undid his shoe laces and then he was putty in Michael’s hands, maneuvered onto the sheets. It’s infinitely frustrating that the details elude him now, dripping water from his hair onto the bathmat - was it Alexis’s ears that used to flush first or the apples of his cheeks? When Michael dragged his fingernails down the expanse of his inner thighs, was it a whimper or a jerk of his hips in response? He used to know Alexis’s body like he knew the field, all the angles unfolding in front of his eyes. Now, as he stands in front of the fogged mirror and exhales sharply through his nose, he can’t even remember what Alexis sounded like.
“Alexis.” Michael watches his reflection mouth the words before he yanks at the mirror’s edge to open the medicine cabinet, to look at the tiny empty nook where his sleeping pills used to be. “Alexis, you idiotic dog. Stupid, stupid brat.”
He goes to bed with his hair still sopping wet, the stubble on his chin left unshaven in a way that will bother him when he wakes up. He’s becoming sloppy now, with his appearance, with his thoughts - Michael Kaiser runs his body and his mind like a machine, every joint tightened to function flawlessly. He hadn’t understood until the last few months just how much Alexis had done to work to keep him running, had tightened bolts and oiled hinges with that self-deprecating smile. Instead, he finds himself trying to remember how to work a device when the person who helped to build it is six feet underground. He knows, beyond his personal life, that his career is also teetering slowly into disrepair. Beyond the fact that his teammates treat him like a loathsome feral animal they’re forced to share space with, Michael finds himself trying to adapt to plays that lack Alexis’s careful engineering. When shots misfire and he stumbles over patches of turf, there’s nobody to whip around and snarl at, no Alexis to adapt to his impulses and make him look like the emperor Michael is.
On his bedside table, he keeps one of Alexis’s books that he’d left the last time he’d stayed over. Michael chooses not to notice the fact that he ends each night, drunk or sober or freshly laid or sweaty from the pitch, leafing through the pages. If there’s a tendril, a breath of Alexis left that he’s searching for, it’s not inside this book - stained and waterwarped, it’s almost certainly something he’d picked up at the secondhand store. Even if the cover didn’t have a sage and a crystal ball, Michael knew it would be about magic. Alexis read magic books like he drank water, desperate and parched. Now Michael knows he was searching for something, anything to soak up the dark corners of his mind, a magic that could fix him. A magic that could make Michael’s attention drift back to him, to make his parents call on the weekends with questions about his day, to make Blue Lock disappear from existence.
Michael stares at it a bit longer before ripping the cover straight off, balling it in his fist until it’s nothing but sweaty pulp.
Alexis Ness is in his bed and Michael allows himself to sink into this dream, relaxed and off guard. It’s the most vivid one he’s ever had and the first time he’s been able to properly pull the feeling of Alexis from his memories since he died. Alexis’s curls are tickling his nose, smelling like that expensive rose shampoo he splurges on, and the small of his back is arched under Michael’s palm. An unnervingly strange dream because he can feel the rise and fall of Alexis’s chest against his own, hear the soft whistle of breath from his lips. As a whole, Michael doesn’t dream, and he’s grateful for that. If he doesn’t dream, he also doesn’t have nightmares, and there’s nothing more that he hates than the idea of being a victim to his own mind. But not only is he dreaming, he’s dreaming something that feels so terrifyingly tangible, that feels like Alexis’s lotion-soft skin under his fingertips.
He opens his eyes and waits for Alexis to melt away from his sight but there he is, cheek smashed against the pillow with a patch of drool. There’s a silver light coming in through the window that hugs the curve of Alexis’s face, makes him look as round and serene as the moon itself. Maybe he wouldn’t mind dreams as much if they were all like this, a haunting of the past that feels solid under his skin, where Alexis lives as soon as he closes his eyes.
“Micha.” Alexis sucks in a breath, his lashes trembling as he opens his eyes. Michael had forgotten that color, despite how hard he’d tried to memorize it at that last moment, and it’s so vivid that it chokes him. The purple-pink of a bruise, of the sky when the sun is almost completely under the horizon, the shade that only existed when Alexis turned his gaze towards him. “Micha, what’s wrong?”
Perhaps the reason he hasn’t been able to recall Alexis is because his brain was stealing away memories, storing them for this moment. It’s so vividly his voice, the scratchy whine he’d speak in if he woke up from a fitful night of sleep - Michael had found it charming, the pout it’d carry before Alexis was awake enough to become self conscious of his tone. He wants to grab Alexis by the jaw and tell him to keep talking, talk about the stars, talk about the paint on the ceiling, talk about all the things Michael used to hope he’d shut up about.
“You don’t look well.” Alexis rolls over, unlatches the right side of his face from the silk pillow cover as he fumbles for his phone on the nightstand. “It’s two in the morning. Are you feeling okay?”
Before he can stop himself, Michael’s hands are on his hips, dragging him back with a bruising grip that makes Alexis whimper. He presses his nose back against his hair, envelopes him into his chest, soaks in the warmth of his body and the sharp juts of his bones and Alexis, Alexis, Alexis.
“Micha.” It’s whimpered like a final plea before Alexis stills in his arms like a trapped animal. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Shut up.” Michael murmurs into his forehead, presses Alexis against him even tighter like he can absorb him into his skin. Alexis wiggles again, a futile effort, before he sags limply. “Say it again. Say my name.”
“Micha? Michael?” Alexis murmurs and then gasps when Michael tries to swallow the words from his mouth, biting hard on his lip till a bead of blood wells up. “That hurts, stop it. Do you want me to - we have practice tomorrow, I could–”
“Lay there and let me hold you.” Michael’s teeth are scraping his jawline, pulling his hair up to follow down the vein of his neck. “Be still. Be good.”
And Alexis is obedient to a fault, allowing Michael to outline the curves of his shoulders with his tongue, press the divot of his back hard with his thumb like he’s trying to bore a hole straight into his body. Michael would if he could, break Alexis open and live inside him, intertwined with the veins that circle his heart. He wants to carve a space for himself so that Alexis can never leave, never live a moment without knowing that Michael is there, a parasite under his skin. He forgot how Alexis’s sweat and skin tasted, the tang of salt from sex and the vanilla soap from his post-practice shower and something that is simply just Ness. His hand slides up, spreads his fingers across the warm expanse of Alexis’s stomach and then presses, harder and harder, as if waiting for him to dissolve into the sheets. Instead, Alexis gasps then coughs, kicking a leg out and catching Michael’s elbow with his foot out of reflex.
“Michael.” Alexis is pushing him away and then, when Michael makes a wounded noise that surprises even himself, pulls him back softly. “You’re hurting me. Just lay back down, I’m not going anywhere.”
Yes, you are, is what Michael wants to say but then Alexis is cupping his face, maneuvering his head so that it rests against his navel. Then there are Alexis’s fingers, always capable and reliable, combing through his hair as if trying to settle a fussy child. He’s not ready for this dream to end but he’s exhausted, his mind overloaded trying to commit this all to memory so that he can draw it out of nowhere when he needs to. Alexis is still talking and Michael is actually trying to listen now but it’s underwater and he’s so tired, even more so because he’s trying to fight off the curtain of sleep that’s falling.
“I’m sorry.” Michael breathes into the dip of Alexis’s belly button before he falls back asleep and Alexis startles, his body stiffening in surprise before it eases into a slouch.
“You say the craziest things in your sleep.” Alexis leans back against the pillow, lets Michael’s hair spill between his fingers like water as he laughs. “I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you say those words.”