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Jazz shows up at the apartment the next morning, takes one look at him sitting at the kitchen island as he stares into his increasingly soggy bowl of Frosted Flakes, and says, “You figured it out, didn’t you?”
He drops his spoon into his bowl. “You knew?”
“Of course I did,” she says, leaning over the island. “Doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots, dude.”
“How did you figure it out before I did?”
“You kidding me?” She snorts. “Remember all that shit he said back in New York? ‘There’s this guy I want to be friends with, but he kind of hates me,’ blah blah blah. Sound familiar?”
Malcolm blinks, his eyebrows raising up into his hairline. “Oh my god.”
“Yup.”
“Oh my god.”
“Take your time.”
“He was talking about me.”
“There we go.”
“And you didn’t say anything!” Malcolm shouts, smacking Jazz’s arm. She jumps back with a yelp, rubbing at the skin.
“You would’ve freaked out, dude! Just like you’re doing right now,” she argues. She leans back against the fridge, arms crossed, and smiles. “Also, it was funny.”
“You’re a mischievous little bastard, you know that?”
She shrugs, shifting some of the magnet letters on the fridge to form an inappropriate word. “So are you gonna ask him out now?”
“And why would I do that?” Malcolm says, stirring his dissolved cereal. “Peter still doesn’t know that I’m Clark. Plus we only stopped being enemies, like, a day ago.”
“Wait, really? You finally don’t think he hates you anymore?” She shuffles closer to him, leaning her hip against the kitchen island. “What changed?”
Malcolm blows out a long raspberry, leaning back. “He saw me during an episode.”
Jazz whistles a low note. “Damn.”
“Apparently, that wasn’t the first time.”
“No shit?”
He hums in confirmation. “In fact, he caught me during an episode the first time we met, according to him. I just...don’t remember it.”
There’s a quiet pause before she says, “Things are starting to make a lot of sense.”
Malcolm nods. He knows what she’s feeling, that sudden clarity, everything clicking into place like magnets. “Yeah.”
“Wait, so, how did you two make up after all this time?”
“Well, like I said, he caught me during an episode yesterday. But this time, he—” Malcolm clears his throat, remembering everything Peter did. “Well, he helped me.”
At Jazz’s confused look, Malcolm tells her the whole story. How Peter found him in front of the shop, took one look at his frantic state and immediately insisted he come inside. How Peter sat him down, turned off the lights and gave him one thing to focus on: the music. How he sat with Malcolm until he calmed down, patting the rhythm of the song against their chests.
He refuses to blush as he recounts everything to Jazz, who sits silently through it all. He feels like he’s telling her something far more intimate than just how Peter helped him recover from a bad episode. It feels like something more. He wants to hold parts of it close to his chest, keep the details just for him, but he tells her as much as he can bear.
(He doesn’t tell her what song they listened to. As strange as it probably is to deliberately withhold such a minor part of the story, he wants that for himself. That song is his to keep. His and Peter’s.)
He tells her about Peter’s explanation for it all, this new phrase he never knew of. Sensory overload. An explanation for why he feels this way sometimes, why the world suddenly becomes too much to handle.
“He says different coping mechanisms work for different people, but he’ll help me figure out what works for me,” Malcolm explains. “I really should’ve done more research on this before, but...shit, it just feels good to know that there’s, like, an answer, you know?”
Jazz is silent when he looks at her. She’s looking down at the floor, her arms hugging her torso. Finally, she mutters to her shoes, “All this time, we could’ve been helping you.”
Malcolm deflates. “Jazz... ”
“Just a simple Google search and we could’ve found some answers, and we didn’t even do that much,” she says. “God, I’m so sorry—”
“Jazmine,” Malcolm says, standing from his seat to hold her by the shoulders. “Don’t say that shit, dude, this is on me, too. I could’ve done a lot more to better myself, but I didn’t. None of us ever considered it was a part of my ADHD because none of us knew that was even an option. It’s not your fault, okay? If anything, it’s mine.”
“You didn’t know.”
“No, but I could’ve tried harder. I could’ve tried something other than just shutting myself out or hurting the people around me.” He says, pulling her hand towards him until she wraps her arms around his middle and slumps into the hug. “We know now, yeah? Better late than never. Now that we have some answers, things will start getting better. I’ll be better.”
“Quit saying that like you’re something that needs to be fixed.”
“Quit blaming yourself for all my problems then, doofus.”
Jazz pinches his ear and he snorts a laugh into her hair. She sighs, and he feels her breath on his shoulder. “You know, this doesn’t have to be a bad thing,” she says. “The whole Rebo-being-Peter thing. It could be good.”
“Forgive me for failing to see how this could possibly be anything other than a huge fucking mess.”
“Oh, it’ll be a mess, for sure,” she says. “That doesn’t mean it’s bad, though. It could be a good mess. Like that time Mona tried her hand at cake decorating.”
Malcolm makes a noise in agreement. “The ugliest, most delicious lemon cake I’ve ever had.”
“Exactly. This whole thing with Peter is just an ugly lemon cake. Messy and kinda scary looking, but delicious when you get to the insides.”
“Are you gonna...dissect Peter?”
“If he hurts you, then yes.”
They move over to the couch, shifting together until Jazz is reclined with her legs propped up on the coffee table, and Malcolm has his feet resting in Jazz’s lap. Lady Governor has curled up into a ball on the couch in the gap between Malcolm’s knee and Jazz’s thigh, and Malcolm’s leg twitches when her fur tickles his skin.
“You don’t have to tell him yet,” Jazz says. Malcolm looks at her.
“I don’t?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t think so. You should probably tell him eventually, but I don’t see why it needs to be an urgent matter. Just, you know, try to be friends first.”
“Friends,” he says, a little disbelievingly.
She gives him an unimpressed look. “Yes, friends. You literally said yourself that you want to be friends with him.”
“I know, I know! It’s just—” he makes a defeated noise. “How do I do that?”
“My dude,” she says, reaching over to place a hand on his leg. “You’re already doing it. You’ve already had a bonding moment, and he basically took you on a date, so—”
“It was not a date, it was pity food after he caught me having a breakdown right in front of his store—”
“My point is, you’re already golden, man. Just, I dunno, do some normal friend shit with him to let him know you’re serious about ending all the enemy BS.”
“Normal friend shit?”
“Normal friend shit.”
“Right,” Malcolm says, determined. “Okay. I can do that.”