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Guitar strings reverberate under Luka’s gentle plucking, a quick improvised harmony to the lilting voice of his band’s main vocalist. He sits reclined on a wooden box, legs kicked up against the walls and hoodie slipping down over his shoulders. Practice ran overtime today as it often does, but his bandmates are happy to spend the rest of the evening in the studio even after the end of practice, humming made up tunes and setting them to ridiculous lyrics, getting into meaningless and increasingly ridiculous arguments, leaping up onto more boxes and knocking over kickstands with dramatic gestures. Luka luxuriates in the chaos, in the exaggerated expressions on his friends’ faces, and breathes.
His eyes slip shut as his fingers ghost across his guitar, letting the notes come easy even as his fingers trip over themselves, even as the mellow harmony stumbles over a harsh note now and then. Luka isn’t here to be perfect. He’s not performing, just existing in his music, with these people he likes. He lets this thought settle in his mind: it steps across the planes of his brain, light, a little off balance, not quite at home yet. But the idea is comfortable; it knows the way around the space, peeks into cabinets and traces its way across bookshelves, thumbs through notebooks left on the coffee table. It turns the music up, and here Luka’s playing shifts, easy and light and open, a little colder now but just as kind, and dances in the rooms of his heart.
Someone throws balled up paper at Luka while he's playing. He strums a riff, lets the reverberations rumble through his guitar as he flicks the paper back and goes seamlessly back to playing. The paper ball bounces off of someone else’s head, and there is a war suddenly waged around him, fierce and fiery until a surrender comes in the form of remembered sandwiches. Yes, he likes these people.
Some part of Luka wishes he could join in the banter that whips back and forth across the room, filled with wrongness and instantaneous ideas, birthed and bandied about, the flag of an argumentative hill that someone climbs and makes his stand on, falls and carries forward, unconcerned with the toppling of this tiny kingdom, jumping from truth to not-quite-right to new idea like none of it matters. No, Luka is cool, collected. He doesn't speak except to topics he feels vastly comfortable with, ones he's danced with in his heart through long lonely nights enough to know the steps in his sleep. He doesn't stumble, and he doesn't fight. He speaks when the words sit so comfortable on his tongue like a second skin over his heart. His bandmates just speak, and let what words tumble through dance uncoordinated jigs in this public space. Luka prefers to make sense, prefers to know his heart intimately, prefers to keep his ideas like clay bases to be molded into art strengthened under his attention and care before he sends them into the world vulnerable to criticism and cruelty.
In the chaotic calm that settles in plastic knife swordfights and the tapped-out rhythm on a drum kit pushed to a corner, the door slams open to wobbly legs under a stack of cake boxes as high as the doorway. Luka jumps to his feet, guitar crashing down with a protest of discordant notes, and rushes to the door, nearly trips into this new person in his rush. His bandmates startle, and stare. This is not the Luka they know, no. This is new, something worth watching. Luka takes the stack of cakeboxes and thus appears Marinette, black hair gleaming in the low lights, eyes bright in the midst of her uninhibited joy.
“Luka!” She hardly waits for him to set the boxes down before she leaps upon him, lets her trust carry her safely into his arms. Luka stumbles backwards, trips over the paper ball from earlier, crashes towards the wall. Marinette is cradled in his arms, pulled tight to his chest, and he twists as he falls to keep her upright, keep her sheltered from the pain. The force hits him, travels up his back in waves, and he grunts, steadies her again.
Marinette is important.
She’s clinging to him, talking into the crook of his neck (and his body remembers this, even if his heart is pounding like the first time he got to know her), nuzzling into his skin with her legs wrapped around his waist. He hitches her up, steady, secure, and carries her to the couch so she can be comfortable. Marinette doesn’t let go, just shimmies and squirms until she’s comfortable. She settles into his side, tucks his arm over her shoulder, and stops talking just long enough to shoot him a fond look, peeking through her bangs and long lashes.
Luka flushes red and sinks into the couch, tries to hide his face in her hair. Marinette brushes her fingers across his arm, taps across his biceps for his attention, please! and his attention shifts to her, riveted.
She’s talking, asking questions, asking about him, more than how are you because she knows to ask better questions. How do you sound like today? Did practice feel good? Is your brain screaming at you today or is it calm? He answers hesitantly, awkwardly, tripping over his own words. He stutters. He didn’t used to be like this. No, but Marinette is important, and his words are puppies: clumsy and uncoordinated in the face of their excitement.
Someone across the room gasps, tumbles into a snicker.
“Oh, this is new.”
Luka is bright red and stammering. He never stammers: he pauses, rolls words around his tongue and knocks them into his teeth, but he does. Not. Stammer. Marinette doesn’t seem to notice, getting up to bring cookies from the boxes and samples of cakes on plates he hadn’t seen her bring. She feeds each one to him like a prayer at the altar of his lips, and he is helpless in the power of a goddess to do anything but swallow, stutter compliments as sacrifice to her divinity. Luka is nothing but a mere mortal on the ground beneath a queen made of magic, and yet she is here, feeding him. He cannot even begin to fathom, and what little sense is left coherent and untouched in his mind snaps.
His hands are clenching and unclenching by his sides, nails digging crescents into callous-hardened palms, because he's not sure if it's okay to touch her but his brain is too short circuited to figure out how to ask. Marinette is flitting around him, brushing fingers across his arm, leaning her head onto his shoulder, bumping hips, and then caressing his cheek. She’s so, so tactile, in love with the way he responds to her touches, leaning into her like a kitten begging for attention. And his fingers spasm and his breath catches, but not once does he take her touches as permission to touch her back. Not that he could figure out how to even if he did have her permission, he thinks wryly, in the last corner of his mind unaffected by her presence.
Some part of him is aware of the spectacle he’s made of himself, juxtaposed to his own character, or at least the person he plays in the presence of his bandmates. They’re his friends, and he likes them, yes, but the gates to his heart are locked tight, boundaries like walls around his affection. He doesn't stumble, and he doesn't fight. But he's strict about his boundaries. They've never met anyone who makes his walls crash down and open and gaping wide the way Marinette does.
Marinette, to whom he hands not only his guitar but his favorite picks. Marinette, who runs her fingers through his hair as he leans into her touch. Marinette, with whom he dances, follows like a soul on a string, addicted to the taste of her kindness and the sweetness she carries in her palms.
It’s not that Marinette is breaking his boundaries. Luka has taken every vulnerable part of himself hidden behind the boundaries he gatekeeps so fervently, and offered them on a platter for her perusal, for her picking. And she chooses all of him. Marinette has waited at every gate, patient, until Luka pressed the keys to her skin and pulled the gates open for her to step through. And they haven't seen each other in a year, and he's... forgotten. Forgotten the way his body reacts to her, clumsy and ridiculous and... oh, he loves her so much.
Luka knows who he is. Luka knows who he is, spends hours every day finding and fighting the tidal waves of emotions that crash into his shores and slip away too far to reach, spends his time in his head and in his heart. He thinks he would like to spend some time in hers, instead. He wants to know her, dance with the feelings she invites into the space in her chest, let his waves tumble and roil with hers.
Luka knows who he isn’t, too. He isn’t a wall, unchanging, inflexible. Every person knows Luka differently. His bandmates will tease him tonight, and tomorrow and the rest of the week, too. That’s alright. They haven’t met this Luka yet, the person he becomes with Marinette. But neither is he lines in the sand, worn away by the relentless pounding of the waves or the whisper of the wind. Who he is with every person he cherishes is a part of him just as honest and true as the whole of him. No part of him is erased or drawn in to please, to appease.
No, Luka is gates. Layers and doors and sections, sometimes bigger, sometimes less important. Each gate is different, and at every one he stands gatekeeper. Luka is gates, and Marinette is the keys to every single one.