Final Days pt. 1

Over time, M's family became Jean's, and Jean became an honorary son. This was his first real family. The one he had on Earth had been... broken. It was only him and his parents, but neither of his parents were ever really there. Not for him, at least. 

His father was dead, and his mother was too immature to do anything for him. It was not that she couldn't do anything but that she never looked past her other desires. Before his father died, they had been married. But when they had Jean, his mother immediately divorced him and sued for child support.

But after his father died, her money dried up. She tried to con another man the same way, but nobody would marry her because she had Jean already, so she took it out on him by physically and verbally destroying him. And when he cried, she cussed at him until he stopped. There was never any remorse in her eyes for anything she did.

When her attempts at finding someone else to pay for her spoiled habits failed, she turned to social media to try to gain a following, but her narcissistic personality and ungrateful attitude showed through the screen and drove away the few people she could find to give her money.

Eventually, when everything was gone, she whored herself out to whoever would pay to avoid the responsibility of a regular job. She always drank a little, but after that point, it grew worse and worse until sobriety was a rarity. Then, when that wasn't enough, she got high. She fell further and further into self-destruction until she overdosed when Jean was 17.

He cried at her funeral but not because he missed or ever loved her. He cried because he yearned for the parents he never had; he yearned for the mother she could have been and because she separated him from the only one he felt ever loved him, his father. She separated them however she could because she wanted to feel control, and this was the best she could do to control others, to make his father beg to see Jean, only to do everything she could to deny him.

She used Jean as an excuse to get his father to give her money, but she used it all for herself. It was all spent on vanity and fun, while Jean was an accessory to her glamor. He was her genius son she raised all by herself. She raised a prodigy all by her lonesome! She was the best mother among all her friends! She was always the best everywhere she had ever been!

No, she wasn't. Intelligence is almost entirely genetic, and while social circumstances, such as how one was raised, schooling, and more can influence it, it primarily influences the knowledge one has, not their intellect. Geniuses are not primarily the product of their parents' efforts, but their potential. 

Great individuals must be both made and born. After they are born with workable potential, they must make themselves into someone worthy of greatness. Others can help, but the bulk of the effort must be their own. Jean was born to be great, but he never was. He amassed knowledge for himself but only for himself. Without knowing it, he fit the self-serving shoes of his mother perfectly.

In the end, all his education and personal achievements were wasted when he died. Or it would have been wasted if that had been the end. Here, he had a second chance to make proper use of his given tools. But just because a person has a second chance does not mean that they will make anything of it.

Gradually, being with this new family, Jean was healing. He began to laugh with them, participate in their games, began training with the boys physically, advanced by leaps and bounds magically, and started to learn more about the world.

Eventually, he began to think that staying here forever wouldn't be so bad. It was a heaven, and he understood why M loved his family so much. They were the music of life. They drew spiritual sustenance from one another's very presence. They were rough on one another, but familial love still abounded between them.

But one day, M announced that he would be leaving the next day to the University to pick up some materials and find some information that he'd been meaning to find for a while. 

"Our lessons will be put on hold, then?" Jean questioned.

"Yeah, until I get back, at least. Until then, you can go through my lab and find whatever research you want to study. You know where it is, right?"

"Of course he doesn't. I've been a part of it since I was born, and even I don't know where anything is," Li teased. "Your lab is so messy you could ask Shao..." he pointed to one of the maids "... to organize it, and it'd take at least a year to find where you put the achronotic diagrams," he laughed.

Gao played off of that, saying, "Forget his lab, if you gave him a number line, he'd have it out of order in a day, and you could spend a week looking through it and never find a three again, and all the numbers using it are missing somehow."

The rest all took turns taking jabs at him for how messy it was before M retorted, "Hey, I have an order. I know where it all is."

"Knowing where it is doesn't mean it's in an order," Lin said.

"Of course it does. The achronotic diagrams are between the second black desk and the wall on the left side of the room with a bunch of other diagrams towards the bottom of the desk stuck between my notes on synchronous audial forces and voids' natures."

"And why is it behind the desk?" Jean asked. "I'm just saying, desks have drawers for a reason. Even if it's messy, at least put it somewhere it should be." His words were met with well-meaning mirth at M's expense.

They finished the dinner some time later. M had been the object of everyone's entertainment until they left, but he didn't mind at all. He laughed with them most of the time. And the next day, he left by sky, using his magic to fly as quickly as he could. 

He didn't like being away from home because who knew what could happen while he was gone, so he tried to minimize the window of danger as much as he could. It would still take two weeks, but that was the best he could do. A few hours after he left, Jean was in the study, snooping around because he was still curious about the family and M's business dealings. 

But as soon as he opened M's grand desk's center drawer, Lin turned the corner, asking, "Watcha doing?" A mischievous smile was plastered across her face as she watched Jean's expression turn from curiosity to panicked nervousness.

As Jean melded with this family, Lin had slowly come to accept him. Her caution after his third hell gradually melted away as she saw that he wasn't the imminent danger he appeared to be before. He was a little odd and didn't entirely fit in, but he was ultimately charming, witty, and an out-of-pocket riot when he was around people he was comfortable with.

"Umm... w—well... I'm curious. I was just looking around to see if any of his research is in here because his lab is such a mess, and I wouldn't be able to find anything in there, you know?" He wasn't, really, he was just trying to find a plausible excuse.

"Are you sure about that? You know there isn't anything in here. Nothing written down, at least. The crystals and diagrams on the walls are... almost everything magical here." She strode over to M's chair that Jean had commandeered in his absence.

"Almost? What do you mean?"

"Uh, never mind. It's not important." A seed of suspicion and hope sprouted in Jean's heart, though he wouldn't act on it because it was only a hint of it and he didn't want to jeopardize anything else. "But if you wanted to see what Dad's up to, you could have just asked. I know what's going on here."

"You do? Wait, what do you mean what's going on here?"

"I mean I know everything. Just about, at least. I help Li manage our finances, organize and talk to the hired help, know what the boys go out to do, normally, and yeah. I know just about everything. Here, let me show you. Scoot over." She moved her hands to shoo him to the side of M's prodigious chair.

Luckily, or unluckily, Jean had been losing weight recently, as he was eating less than the others during meals because he normally focused on his studies and not on physical training. He was still large and muscled, but he'd become slightly slimmer than before, and as he shifted to the side, Lin sat on the unoccupied portion, right up against him.