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So, Jeremy knows he doesn't have it the worst. He's seen the burns on Gavin’s wrist, red and angry and so unlike Michael who put them there, Michael, who just got too excited too quickly and didn't even realize. But he realizes now, and so does Gavin, and Jeremy can feel the new way Michael tempers excitement with guilt, and how Gavin hesitates sometimes, remembers how much it fucking hurt, before he touches Michael.
He's seen Trevor, too, Trevor, who doesn't realize things are moving until someone tells him and he groans and focuses on getting it to stop. And sometimes it does stop, just like that, and he can go back to what he's doing. But sometimes it takes too long and he gets frustrated which means his focus gets clouded and things are moving faster and hitting walls harder and he's yelling at himself and only stops when something thwacks into someone and they yelp and everything drains out of him. Everything falls to the floor and he starts throwing away the broken things and putting away the okay things and he's cold and tired and guilty.
So yeah. Jeremy doesn't have it the worst, but it is a lot sometimes. He can't be faulted for saying that. There are just so many people feeling so many things all the time. He can narrow it down sometimes, sure. He can focus on one person and let them drown everything out, but even then it's weird trying to pick apart what's his and what's theirs while still being an active participant in their conversation. But most of the time, that's not even what happens. Most of the time, he feels like an Easter egg that's been dunked into every cup of dye there is, colors like grey blue worry and neon orange excitement and lily purple sadness soaking into his pores and cracks until he's a dark muddy something, an ugly indecipherable amalgamation of everything. But it's getting better. He's getting better. They all are.
Trevor’s a big part of that. Well. Trevor’s a big part of it and Jeremy getting better. He's a smaller cog in the they, just because they is a lot of them and Ray still has a tendency to flicker out of view while Gavin still accidentally goes places he shouldn't, Lindsay’s headaches are still persistent and Trevor himself struggles more than he’ll tell anyone and Michael-Michael still slips up and there are still red welts on his friends. But on an individual level, a Jeremy level, Trevor’s helping.
Not that he'd tell Trevor that. Not that Jeremy tells anyone much of anything about anything that has to do with his...thing. It's not that he doesn't want to, it's just that he can't.
He feels like he runs out of words a lot. He read somewhere that the average person knows twenty thousand words, but he feels like he's just working with twenty. No thousand. Maybe twenty five, if he's lucky. It's hard to explain anything, to lay out intangible concepts mixed with more intangible concepts and make them understandable, but he's figuring out how to explain it to himself. Colors are turning out to be a pretty reliable system. Color coding emotions makes them easier to recognize for whatever reason, helps Jeremy find the line where his own navy blue calm is trying to mix with someone else's old banana yellow tired to make a new jarring puke green of confusion as Jeremy tries to balance what he's feeling. Colors let him compartmentalize and separate.
Happiness is brown. Not a murky, seven-paintbrushes-one-cup-of-water brown that comes out looking like shit, but a warm brown where you can feel the oranges and yellows underneath it, the brightness and warmth, even if they're not so easy to see. Jeremy thinks it's-it might be the same brown of Trevor’s eyes. Which is, come on. He literally feels people's emotions. He's gone to a wedding and almost passed out when he walked past the groom, and even he has to admit that happy being the color of Trevor is a bit much. He wants to kick his own ass, but the colors are what they are, so he accepts it and keeps quiet-partly because he doesn't feel like he has the words to explain everything correctly, partly because the words he does have are about how Trevor’s the color of his happiness. Fucking hell.
He's keeping quiet about a lot of things. That's only one of about a thousand conversations he doesn't know how to have with Trevor, up there with “how much narration of your feelings are you okay with before it gets weird because it's hard not to say things when I'm picking up on things and want to know what's going on because you're my friend” and “I feel like I'm invading your privacy because I'm pretty sure there are some feelings you don't want me to know about and here I am, picking them up”, or “Your feelings slot into mine and make nicer colors and don't make my brain feel like it's being hijacked”, to name a few. It's amazing the two of them talk at all, with everything Jeremy has to remember not to say.
But they do talk, because of course they do, because they're damn near inseparable. They both have other friends, sure, have no problem hanging out in a big group-well, they have no problem with it in theory. In practice, Jeremy gets hit with waves of everything, because everyone is annoyed with someone or nervous around someone or likes someone and Jesus it's a room full of teenagers, this is the definition of over stimulation, and Jeremy can't think until he’s sorted through everything to find the hum that's Trevor, letting his quiet hum and its different pulsing shades wash out the roar of everything else.
The point is, they're functional. Not codependent. They have other friends they love, they just also choose to sit together close enough to bump knees and get pointed looks from Lindsay. They're close. It happens. What also happens: Jeremy is something akin to head over heels.
It's not like he did it on purpose. Trevor’s always there, and even when he's in a mood that drastically opposes Jeremy’s, it doesn't feel entirely wrong. It just… Slots in, and Jeremy gets it, and he can help. He does help. Trevor being angry doesn't make Jeremy involuntarily grit his teeth like he does when everyone else is pissed, he just recognizes it and tucks it away and helps in a way only he can, which is. It's actually kind of incredible. It feels like he has an almost complete manual to Trevor Collins, cross referenced between what Jeremy, Trevor’s friend, knows and what Jeremy, the empath who's getting every feeling pinged to him, knows. It's great, except. Except the manual is missing a couple of pages and sometimes Jeremy’s stomach swoops and he can't tell if it's him or Trevor. Sometimes they'll be looking at each other and there's a thrill that works its way through Jeremy-no, Trevor-no, both of them, and Jeremy thinks something is going to happen, knows something is going to happen, but then Trevor breaks their gaze.
It's… A thing. What he feels for Trevor is a thing. What Trevor feels is also a thing, but a more confusing, probably Jeremy getting his wires crossed thing. Because what are the odds? Trevor gets...weird, sometimes, when they're too close together or looking too long, and there's always a spike of agitation that scares Jeremy back into reality where it's not something, it's just coincidence and that spike is Trevor being uncomfortable with how Jeremy’s not even fucking trying to hide his thing he has for Trevor. He is trying, though. It's just hard sometimes, because sometimes, he thinks maybe the way Trevor looks at him is what he hopes it is and not what he's sure it is. But the spikes keep happening, and Jeremy keeps shoving everything down-his nervousness, Trevor's, his butterflies, Trevor’s, which are probably from someone he's thinking about who's not Jeremy, and it occurs to Jeremy at some point that they can't keep doing this. That one of them is going to say something about what's right in front of them.
It's Trevor.
They're hanging out, just the two of them, and Trevor is restless. Antsy. Which is making Jeremy nervous in turn, but he's not saying anything, just keeps casting looks over at Trevor.
Trevor’s antsiness keeps growing, and Jeremy keeps looking but not saying anything until Trevor snaps at him.
“What, do you feel sorry for me?”
Not rage, but something close. Trevor's pissed and it's slotting in but Jeremy doesn't know what to do with it.
“Why would I feel sorry for you?”
Trevor laughs, but it's not a good laugh, and Jeremy feels more nauseous than Trevor already does.
“Can we not do this?”
“Sure?”
“No, not this. Not the conversation. Just the part where you pretend you have no clue what's going on like you've been pretending for-I don't even know how long for. Maybe you picked it up before me.”
Jeremy's heart falls through the floor.
“Look, man, I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to make you uncomfortable-”
“Why the hell are you like this?” Trevor's frustrated and Jeremy’s dimly aware that this is how he loses his best friend.
“Seriously, why? I'm the one who's been beaming out how much I like you into your head, and you're apologizing for making me uncomfortable. Fuck.”
Jeremy takes an amazingly short amount of time to process this before he's clarifying, because he has to clarify, he needs to know that he heard what he heard.
“What?”
Trevor's irritation becomes more palpable.
“Come on. You're gonna make me do the whole repeating it thing?”
“You like me.”
Jeremy's speaking slow, so there's no mistaking what he said, and Trevor rolls his eyes.
“Yes, I like you, let's move on to how you-”
“Shut up for two seconds, okay?”
Trevor frowns and Jeremy gets a surge of anger pinged at him, but he stops talking.
“I...Look, there’s a possibility I have feelings for you? And that I thought this fight was about how you had picked up on that and hated that and I’m just now finding out that it’s because you think the exact opposite happened.”
Trevor's eyes widen and everything has less of an edge, his expression, his flares of irritation. Agitation slips into surprise which is slowly, very slowly, building into something better. Something that may or may not end up being glee.
“You asshole. You had a thing for me and knew how I felt-I’m not buying the claim that you didn’t-and didn't say anything. What the fuck, man?”
“I didn't know how you felt. How was I supposed to know!”
“Because you already knew! Because you probably knew before I did and you definitely knew when I had like, like, all the stereotypical cliche shit going on in my head that is definitely, unmistakably, a crush!”
“It's not like that!”
“Really. How do I feel right now?”
And Jeremy knows, could probably give a psychic a run for their money with how precisely he can pin down what Trevor’s feeling and why and how that relates to Trevor’s thoughts.
“You're not as pissed as you sound. You're not pissed at all, actually, it's more… Annoyed. And exasperated. But you're glad too, and a little relieved, and happy, definitely happy, and-there's exasperation again.”
“You can basically read my mind and you're telling me you had no fucking clue about how I felt. Feel.”
“It wasn't like that,” Jeremy protests, only partially out of stubbornness.
“I mean, I haven't always been able to do that. Pick apart everything and figure out where it came from. Plus, these emotions all make sense! I get these! You're annoyed this conversation took this long, exasperated because you think I'm lying. When Ryan says something nice to Ray and he's suddenly invisible and it feels like he's having a heart attack in his stomach, that makes sense! I connected dot one to dot two! It's not like you, like having to connect two hundred dots blindfolded.”
Trevor's expression softens, or maybe only he softens. Whatever. Jeremy feels it. He shifts his feet and stares at the floor.
“That didn't make sense to you? Me getting nervous and excited and basically pining over you didn't make sense even though you were feeling it from me all the time, especially when it was just us. What, did you not believe it?”
Jeremy shifts on his feet again and doesn't say anything. Trevor sighs, but he's not sad. Fond.
“I can't believe I'm the brains in this relationship when you can damn near read minds.”
And Trevor’s not wrong on either account, because Jeremy knows he's excited, enough to cover the jangle of his nerves, and that he's determined, and he's taking enough steps across the room to be half an inch away from Jeremy.
“We have to work on that. Seriously.”
And if Jeremy didn't understand what was going on before, the way Trevor is pressed up against him and his heart is pounding too quickly gives him about a two second warning before Trevor removes any semblance of space between them and puts his hands on Jeremy’s shoulders and all Jeremy sees is brown brown brown with its orange and yellow swirling underneath it and it's all he feels, too, Trevor’s happiness and his own forming one solid mass that doesn't seem like it'll ever go away before Trevor leans in and does what he should have done ages ago.
It's a little hard, with everything, to notice something that's not Trevor, but when they break apart the room’s a mess and Jeremy laughs and grabs Trevor’s hand that's still blue enough to be weird.
“What? What?”
Trevor asks, more curious than anything, but there's worry creeping into his tone, blue the color of his hands at the edges of his happiness.
“Nothing. You didn't do anything. I mean, you did something, but your kissing was up to par.”
“Up to par?”
But Trevor doesn't have time to be offended by that, because Jeremy points him in the direction of, well, everything, and Trevor groans. He's embarrassed, but not enough to put a damper on things, just enough for Jeremy to be able to tease him about this now and forever. Now and forever. That should be way too big for what they are, which is a whopping one conversation and one kiss into dating (probably? Jeremy's pretty sure. Like 75% sure that's the plan. 80% sure Trevor likes him), but. Now and forever. It sounds nice. It sounds like both of them staying happy and happy staying a brown that Jeremy isn't going to get tired of looking at.