Chapter Text
Marius is four years old. He doesn't talk yet. His mother shrugs and calls him a "late bloomer" when anyone brings it up.
He doesn't talk until he's five, and when he finally does start he's speaking in full sentences in just a few months.
Then his mother dies and his father leaves, and Marius stops speaking for a year, even though his grandfather yells at him for it.
+
Marius is six years old, and his grandfather and aunt tell him to be still, hold his hands down when he tries to flap them or clap them, hold onto his shoulders when he tries to rock back and forth, grab him when he tries to spin or pace. He cries and cries, and then he stops crying and realizes that if he wants the touching to stop, he has to hide the way he moves, no matter how happy it makes him feel.
He starts playing with his hands all the time, rubbing them together and twisting his fingers. (Stop fidgeting, grandfather says.)
Sometimes he forgets himself and flaps or rocks in public (don't you know that's inappropriate, Marius?), but he stops as soon as he notices, holds himself as rigidly as possible, barely breathing.
"Be still," he mutters to himself. "Be still, Marius," he says, just like his grandfather does.
+
Marius is nine years old and often talks to himself. It's nice, singing little songs (the ones mama and papa used to sing) and reciting facts and even just saying soothing words over and over again.
He reads poetry and doesn't understand it but he thinks it's beautiful anyway, and he recites lines to anyone who'll listen.
So, to himself.
No one else will listen.
Marius doesn't have friends.
His teacher says his social skills need work, says maybe he should try playing with the other children, but the other children scare him. He doesn't know how to talk to them and besides, they don't like him. They call him a freak.
His grandfather sits him down one day and tells him that to be successful in the future he has to get over this…this shyness. He's going to have to stop chattering away to himself.
"It makes you seem like there's something wrong with you," grandfather says, and for the first time Marius is afraid that there is something wrong with him, there is.
+
Marius is eleven and every Saturday he writes to his father because his grandfather tells him that's what sons do. Marius writes about whatever he wants, like the Napoleonic Wars and judicial systems, politics and poetry. Things he doesn't talk about anymore because people tell him they're boring even though Marius knows they're really the most interesting things in the world.
He always ends his letters with I miss you.
Father never writes back. Grandfather says it's because he doesn't love Marius, and it makes sense.
Marius even figures out why father doesn't love him, after a time: because he is different in a way he can't understand or place.
Because he's defective.
Marius knows.
(He hates his father, a little, and feels guilty about it because he's pretty sure that's not how sons are supposed to feel.)
+
Marius is twelve and he's screaming like he's wanted to scream all day, hands pressed over his ears, rocking back and forth, desperately trying to block out the sound of construction one house over.
Tears spill over his cheeks and he stops screaming and starts humming one of the songs his mother used to sing.
His grandfather grabs his shoulders, shakes him, and the touch hurts so much it takes Marius's already hitching breath away. He wants to say don't touch me but he can't. He can't say anything.
The world blurs away and Marius closes his eyes and hums.
+
Marius is fourteen and he's decided that the most interesting thing in the world is linguistics, now. He loves the very idea--the study of language, there's nothing cooler, even though he's still interested in the Battle of Waterloo and Napoleon and the few other things he's found that are, quite honestly, more enchanting than just about everything else.
He tells his grandfather's friends all about linguistics during a dinner party, gives an impromptu lecture on semantics because one of them asks him what it is he likes and he just blurts it all out, even though he knows that the things he likes are boring to everyone else, but he's so excited and doesn't know how somebody couldn't find at least this interesting.
His grandfather says, "Marius, honestly," which is what he says when he wants Marius to shut up but doesn't want to actually say shut up, and Marius stops talking immediately. His aunt hisses be still, because he hadn't realized he was starting to flap his hands in the way he does when he's happy.
Marius is still.
+
At some point that he cannot place, breathing becomes difficult. In the morning, he can barely transition from that place between sleep and awake, and so he's never really fully conscious.
Going to school feels almost impossible, but his grandfather makes him go, and at least schoolwork occupies his mind.
Marius often finds himself running his hands through his hair in distress and hiding in bathroom stalls to cry and rock back and forth when he's at school, as a feeling that defies classification tries to suffocate him, covering him like cling wrap.
He gets straight A's because there's nothing else to do.
The other students push him down in the halls and laugh at him for reasons he can't figure out and he runs home every day after school so they won't catch him and beat him up.
At night, he rocks himself to sleep, singing under his breath, tears on his cheeks and a heaviness in his chest that he cannot place.
+
Marius is fifteen and babysitting is the easiest thing he's ever done. Children are simpler to understand than adults, their facial expressions more open; their joy, their sadness easier to comprehend. They listen to what he has to say. He helps them with their homework and they want him to teach them things. He loves it. For the first time in a long time he loves doing something.
He wants to be a teacher.
When he says this to his grandfather, he's laughed at.
"Don't be ridiculous," grandfather says. "You'll make much better money as a lawyer."
"So?" Marius asks.
"So you're going to be a lawyer, Marius. Like me, and my father before me. Like your mother."
Marius wants to argue, but he doesn't. The words won't come out.
One of his teachers taught him some sign language when he was a child, and he still remembers every sign he learned. He wishes he could sign now instead of talking, wishes he could say it is my decision not yours with his hands instead of his voice, but he knows his grandfather would only yell, and wouldn't understand anyway.
(Use your words, everyone but that teacher, that one teacher--and God, he wants to be like her--used to tell him. Use your words.)
Marius doesn't think he'll be much of a lawyer.
Maybe he'll be a professor.
Maybe that.
+
Marius is sixteen (he skipped a couple of grades, here and there, and it never quite occurred to him that he'd end up in college so early because of it, though it probably should have), studying Pre-Law, still living at home.
He spends his time at college being invisible, and he's fine with that.
He doesn't want to be visible like he was when he was a child.
He is a star student because he spends all his time studying, just like in high school, but he still struggles when people speak to him, with what to do when they say "hello". When he says "hello" back it sounds strange, delayed. It's an echo. He has full conversations made up purely of sentences he's heard and then practiced in front of the mirror.
He's not so good at pragmatics.
When he's alone in his room, Marius reads and rocks back and forth, talks to himself in ways he only does by accident in public, flaps or claps his hands when he's happy or when he's reading something particularly interesting to feel the happiness surge through his hands, his body, and does all the things he can't do in public because they're inappropriate.
He knows he's a freak, knows he doesn't fit in and never will. He's resigned himself to that.
But then he goes to law school, and everything changes.