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“You mean you don’t have a minor?”
Jean glanced up from their kitchen table when he heard Marco speak up, blinking in surprise at him. What did Marco mean? Not everyone had minors – at least, most of the people that Jean knew didn’t. It hadn’t even crossed his mind to take a minor while he first started college – he thought that picking up minors was something that people did later on, when they’d stacked up extra classes that could build up to something credible. They were sophomores, him and Marco; why did they need a major now?
Jean’s confusion was obvious as he set his pencil down, turning his attention away from his sketchbook as he raised his head to face Marco where he sat across from him.
“Uh, no, I didn’t even think… Do you have one?”
Marco beamed back at him, the sunlight streaming in through the window above the sink, like it always had a tendency to do at this time of day, making that impossibly wide smile seem even brighter than usual. Oh. Maybe he should’ve kept better track of Marco’s classes; Marco was the one who was good at that, not him. He knew enough about Marco’s hard classes, after listening to him moan about his papers on rhetorical devices, get excited about his latest poem assignment, but… Was he really so unobservant that he’d gone a year without knowing that Marco had a minor? They lived together, now, even, and…
Marco was leaning over the table eagerly, chest against his laptop screen where his latest assignment sat open in Word. He looked as if he was waiting for Jean to ask him the question, barely managing to bite his tongue and keep from blurting it out. He didn’t even seem upset that Jean literally had no idea that Marco was minoring in something. Reaching for the water bottle that rest near his art supplies, Jean took a small sip and tried to play it cool. He wasn’t frazzled by the fact that he had no idea what the hell the guy’s minor was. Not at all.
“So,” he began smoothly, once he’d pulled the water bottle away from his mouth again, “What’s your minor?”
Before he could even really finish the sentence, Marco burst in, almost shouting,
“Dance! I can’t believe you didn’t know, I thought I told you before!”
Jean choked on the next swallow of water, coughing violently. Marco’s look of eager joy quickly transformed into one of concern, shooting up from his chair across their four-person table and rushing to him. Marco wasn’t exactly sure how to deal with someone choking like this (and on water, really), but before he could make a decision on how to help Jean, his roommate held up one hand and but the other to his chest, where he casually punched himself in the sternum a few times. Jean’s face was red with embarrassment, but probably lack of oxygen too, and when he finally recovered enough to say something, he also had a gaze full of Marco. The tanned male had leaned down to look at him with doe-eyed concern, so close to Jean’s face that the freckles that scattered like constellations across his nose were far too prominent.
“Marco – space – please –“
Marco stepped back and Jean gave another weak cough, plunking his head down on the table and wheezing with all of the energy that he had left, which wasn’t much.
“S-sorry, Jean. I didn’t know it would surprise you that much.” Marco’s apologetic voice broke through the post-coughing fit haze. Jean’s eyes opened again, and he realized with a dull shock that Marco looked genuinely upset for making Jean nearly die – well, when you put it that way, he should be, but considering that Marco really had no choice in almost causing Jean to choke, it wasn’t actually his fault. Jean held up a finger as he sucked in a raspy breath, throat a little sore, and he lifted his head to tell Marco it wasn’t his fault when there was another terrible, terrible choking sound.
“J-jean,” Marco stuttered. He raised one hand to cover his mouth as soft peals of laughter began to sound off the walls of the kitchen, and Jean’s jaw dropped as he realized that Marco was laughing at him.
“What’s so funny?” Jean asked, stiffening defensively as tears began to gather in the corner of Marco’s Coca-Cola eyes, the last rays of dusk catching his warm gaze just right. Marco took a few gulping breaths, struggling to get the words at, and then he managed to say,
“Jean, please, your face…”
Jean grumbled at that remark, brows furrowing.
“Hey, I’m the one who almost just died, and you’re making fun of my face?” He asked, but regardless, he reached for his phone, sliding up the lock screen so that he could turn the camera on. He flicked it to the front-facing version and met his own eyes in the reflection. Jean couldn’t help but snort as he realized exactly what Marco was laughing at.
“Well, shit.”
The entire left side of his face that he had pressed to the table in defeat was covered in a mixture of lead and charcoal, and with a groan, Jean realized that he had just smudged out a large majority of his latest drawing. A guilty look at the sketchbook revealed that yes, it was true, and Jean had just ruined the sketch that was supposed to ready for class, say, tomorrow.
He was distracted from his ruined future by the sound of water running. He turned his face towards the kitchen sink, where Marco was running something under water. Before he could ask what it was, however, Marco was already coming back to him, presenting him with a wrung-out washcloth. With a gentle touch and a couple resounding giggles, Marco began to rub the cloth over Jean’s dirtied cheek.
Jean couldn’t help but laugh, despite the fact that he had a sketch to redo within the span of a couple hours before bed because he couldn’t pull another all-nighter, as Marco’s tongue stuck out of the corner of his mouth with concentration. He was utterly focused on cleaning Jean’s face off, even though Jean needed a shower anyways. Raising a hand, Jean reached out to poke at Marco’s protruding tongue. Marco jolted at the touch, and then screwed up his nose, eyes creasing.
“Ick, your fingers taste like lead, Jean.” Marco responded with underlying tones of ‘gross, dude’, before leaning back in to resume rubbing Jean without another word. Jean sighed, knowing that he couldn’t exactly distract Marco from a task once he’d set his mind to it.
Closing his eyes, Jean leaned his head back and mused over the past ten minutes in his head.
So, dance, huh?
---
Marco’s mysterious, hidden minor wasn’t brought up until a few days later when Jean came back to the apartment at an unexpected time. His noon class had been canceled (well, it was more apt to say that his professor had failed to show, and so Jean ditched that after twenty minutes of supposed class-time had passed) and so he came back when he wasn’t supposed to; he knew Marco was supposed to be in the apartment at this time, but then again, it hadn’t really clicked until he’d opened the front door and found Marco standing in the living room.
The couch was pushed back towards the wall and soft classical music played; Jean didn’t know shit about classical, so he had no idea who had written this song, but all he knew was that the floating sound of the violins fit Marco’s movements with frightening ease, that the blooming swell of the piano was synched perfectly with the rise and fall of Marco’s chest. It was only as Jean stood in the doorway for a little while longer and watched Marco’s lips move that he realized the taller male was counting a steady beat out, his right hand raised and clasped gently. The other hand was lower, settled at hip-height for Marco, and although Jean didn’t know much about dancing, he realized that Marco was moving with an imaginary partner, the delicate patterns he was making on the floor incomplete.
In that moment, Jean wondered if Marco had someone to dance with, and it was only as he stepped backwards from the door’s threshold and closed it behind him that he wondered if perhaps, Marco might like to dance with him.
---
Jean had two left feet – he knew that much, from the time he’d finally gotten Mikasa to go to prom with him, and he’d nearly crushed her toes all night without even trying to actually touch the dance floor. So, despite his curiosity and his questions - did Marco really dance alone all the time? Who was his partner in class (because Jean would find them and… Do nothing but be really jealous)? – he said nothing to Marco, and didn’t bring up that time he’d seen him moving around the living room. When Jean had returned home after conveniently hanging out in the library until his class would have actually been over, the couch was back in its proper place, and Marco was out on his own.
Now was one of those times when he was alone and by himself in the apartment, and it was also one of those times when he had too much free time. It was dangerous for Jean to have a lot of time on his hands (and although he technically didn’t have as much as he hoped, considering that he was supposed to be prepping a portfolio and studying color mechanics), and it was that time exactly that brought him to the scary side of YouTube. And by scary, Jean meant dance tutorials, because that was precisely what he found himself watching, glued to the screen as a woman with a lot of hip action and heels that were impossibly high instructed him on how to be the lead in ballroom dancing.
The question here was, would he actually lead? Would Marco lead? Was there a version of ballroom dancing for two guys? Jean had tried to google ‘two men ballroom dancing’ and the results he’d gotten were… Well, frightening, and not exactly fruitful. So he was stuck with this, trying to figure out if Marco was going to be the woman, or if he was going to be the woman.
With the headphones in his ears, he didn’t hear Marco come in, didn’t even realize that the other male was right behind him until he felt a feather-light kiss on the top of his head. Marco was smiling fondly when Jean slammed the laptop closed and whipped around, but he didn’t say a word about the screen, instead moving to the fridge and pulling out a can of sparkling lemonade. He drank so much lemonade that it made Jean’s teeth ache from the pure sugar and acid that his roommate consumed on a daily basis.
Had he seen anything? Jean didn’t know, but Marco didn’t comment on it, so Jean didn’t push his luck and ask any questions about it. Instead, he asked Marco how his day had been, if he’d heard about Reiner blowing up one of the Chemistry labs, and so forth – it seemed like he’d escaped safely, because the videos were never brought up, and Jean gradually forgot about his almost-revealing slip up.
---
As it turned out, Marco had seen. He’d walked into the apartment to see Jean hunched over the keyboard and precariously close to the screen, eyes filled with reflections of a curvaceous woman depicting the steps to ballroom dancing. He wondered why Jean was learning ballroom dancing, but at the same time, motives aside, Marco saw a chance, and he knew how to take it.
A couple days after the YouTube incident, Marco slid into the chair next to Jean at the kitchen table, rather than sitting across from the sandy-haired male in his customary spot on the opposite end of the table.
“Jean, d’you wanna go to Spring Formal with me?” Marco asked with an innocent bat of his stupidly long eyelashes, reaching out to take Jean’s smudged hand with his own. Jean stared at him with his lips parted ridiculously wide, totally taken aback by the question and unsure of how to react exactly. He…
“I don’t dance.” Jean blurted, and Marco rolled his eyes as if Jean had just said that the moon was made out of cheese, or something of that ridiculous level, instead. Jean thought it was a perfectly fine proposition, considering his dancing definitely had not improved, even with a couple more peeks at dance videos (in the privacy of his room, of course, and no longer at the public kitchen table).
It seemed like Marco was prepared for this, however, because with a smothered laugh, Marco stood and pulled on their conjoined hands until Jean stood as well.
“No. Nope. Nuh-uh.” Jean protested as Marco settled a hand on his waist, guiding Jean’s hand to his shoulder. Marco was chuckling again as Jean studied their hands and recognition dawned on his face.
“I am not being the girl.”
“Ssssh. We’re both men. I’m being the lead, not the man.” Marco assured him, but Jean didn’t entirely feel assured by that sentiment, even though it made a little sense. Sensing that Jean was still uncomfortable, Marco shifted his hand off of Jean’s waist to rest on his shoulder, instead.
“Better?” He asked, and Jean furrowed his brows before nodding.
“Not exactly traditional, but close enough. We’ll only be dancing together in the dark, and if they decide to play any slow songs, y’know, but still.” Marco was probably a little nervous about this, Jean could tell – when he started to blabber like this, it was because he had grown anxious about whatever he was doing. He’d probably had to decide for quite a while how to work things out, and now Jean wasn’t exactly being the best student. With a long breath, Jean leaned forward and pressed his forehead against Marco’s.
“Fine. Teach.” Jean mumbled, eyes fluttering closed in the last dying beams of sun.
With a sigh of relief, Marco squeezed their clasped right hands and began to instruct, their footsteps – Marco’s in shoes, Jean’s bare – padding audibly across the tile. No music played, yet Jean listened to the soft lull of Marco’s breath and the rhythm of his words and spoken counts, and decided that music wasn’t exactly necessary.
---
“M-marco! I can’t dance to this!”
Jean flushed, tugging uncomfortably on his pink bowtie. Marco had picked out their outfits for the spring formal; the freckled boy wore a pink vest over a black dress shirt, his bowtie crisp and white, whereas Jean was in a black button-up with the white vest and a pink bowtie. He would’ve preferred if Marco didn’t make him wear pink, but Marco had a thing for pink, and Jean had caved with one well-timed pout.
So, now he was at the dance, half of the kids were drunk (Jean could use a tall glass himself at this point), and they had played a single song with any sort of beat that Marco had taught Jean to dance to. Their lessons had been quick and limited, but somehow, Marco had managed to get Jean to dance at least somewhat decently. It wasn’t great, and he certainly was nowhere near Marco’s level (then again, Jean wasn’t a dance minor, and wouldn’t even pretend to be).
“Then let’s dance to this.”
Jean’s eyes widened at Marco’s declaration, and he shook his head wildly as Marco took his hand. The current song, this , as Marco had called it, was a club song. The beat was heavy, the bass was strong, and the lyrics were filthy. Somehow, Jean’s idiotic roommate, boyfriend - did he mention weird idiot? - wanted to dance to it with a couple of steps, clasped hands, and room between them for one of Marco’s rhetoric novels. No one else in the room had enough room for an ant, let alone a textbook, and Jean knew they would look the fool.
As was typical of Marco, he didn’t seem to care what others thought. Jean found himself being dragged to the edge of the dance floor, and yet and still he shook his head violently.
“Marco,” He whispered, leaning in so that Marco could actually hear him, “This doesn’t have the kind of thing we practiced, I can’t even tell what count to move on, and---“
Marco shushed him with a soft kiss, and Jean blushed even though the likelihood of someone seeing them in the dark ambiance of the hall was incredibly low. Once he’d silenced Jean, he began to count gently, mimicking the rehearsal that they’d been so apt at only yesterday, standing in the dimming light of the kitchen together. Jean still didn’t know how to move properly, and so Marco leaned in a little further, lips brushing Jean’s ear, the melodic timber of his voice soothing and consistent.
Jean took a deep breath, and shifted his head up to meet Marco’s gaze, warm foreheads pressed together even in the stifling heat of the packed dance hall.
“I don’t need music.” Jean reminded himself quietly, “It’s not exactly necessary.”
Marco gave him a curious look before the edges of his eyes wrinkled in a smile, and the two of them began to dance on the edge of the crowd. It was terribly cliché, Jean thought to himself, but the music felt like it faded out, and Jean found himself with a face full of Marco.
Jean smiled and tucked his head down, pressing himself into the crook of Marco’s neck, inhaling the scent of his vanilla cinnamon cologne and the starch that he’d used on that dumb white bowtie.
“So, dance, huh?” He asked, and thought that Marco’s laughter was music enough to him.