Work Text:
“Ooh, these are great!”
Marius looks up from where he’s been sorting through his folder of unfinished sketches. His studio looks like disaster struck, boxes, canvases and supplies piling up on almost every available surface, the only empty spaces left being the paths leading to where he, Luke and Josephine had carved out clearings for themselves to sit and work from.
When he’d first brought up needing to clean his studio, he hadn’t anticipated anyone but Josephine to care. The NXX Team consisted of very busy professionals in high-intensity jobs and Marius hadn’t expected Josephine to offer one of her precious, rare days off to help.
Luke joining had been even more surprising. Sure’ they’ve been working together for what feels like the better part of a year now and yes, if pressed for Marius would trust him with his life (because as easy as it is to forget at times, Luke Pearce is also a professionally trained agent of the National Security Bureau) but he hadn’t really thought to consider them friends before, necessarily.
But as they sort their way through his veritable dragon hoard of art supplies, canvases, and sketchbooks he’d sworn to himself he’d used and then had gone forgotten and knickknacks he’s accrued over the years it feels like perhaps, Josephine and Luke both are his friends.
The silence stretching between them doesn’t feel oppressive or awkward as they work and whenever conversations do well up, they feel natural and light-hearted and earnest.
Perhaps he could get used to this.
As things stand right now, he finds Josephine standing in her little island between the baskets where he stores his loose papers, a medium-sized gift box in her hands. Marius spies the edge of a polaroid picture peeking out from behind its rim.
Luke, looking every bit the curious Golden Retriever Josephine teasingly refers to him as, cranes his neck from where he’s sorting through Marius’ paints (all according to Marius’ specific instructions, of course).
“Huh?” He hears Luke ask.
Josephine looks up, motions for them both to come over. Marius nearly steps on an errant brush twice on the way, only dodging them last minute because he’s made this mistake before earlier this day already. Luke had barely managed to hide his snicker before doing the exact same. Vindication had tasted very good.
What Marius finds in Josephine’s arms is a box of photographs — physical pictures. They’re rare these days, were already uncommon when they were taken, Marius remembers. Why keep loose sheets of photo paper if you could just have it all safely stored on your phone, after all?
But he remembers the box, remembers Giann leaving it with him the day before Marius had boarded his flight to Florence.
“For when you’re my age,” Giann had told him with a wink, “So no peeking!”
He’d completely forgotten about the box between everything going on, had brought it into his studio when he’d first moved in, stuffed it into the corner of a storage cupboard and left it at that. At the time, thinking of Giann alone had already been a little too painful to bear. He has no idea where the lid went, but little does he care.
Marius is not yet twenty-six, but he reckons freshly turned twenty-three is close enough as he scoots closer to Josephine. Maybe it’s time.
Luke effortlessly slots himself into Josephine’s other side, humming curiously as if to ask Marius if he’s fine with sharing whatever she just unearthed.
Marius shrugs, tries to seem nonchalant. He’s not sure he quite succeeds under his friends’ watchful eyes, but what’s done is done.
The first picture he’s greeted with is a candid shot of a teenage Marius looking over his shoulder, the blue of the sky behind him strikingly bright. He’s wearing a band tee that is a little too big on him — at fourteen or fifteen he is still a few centimetres away from his grown height of almost one-ninety. The bunting in the background is in the distinctive colours of a yearly music festival from his childhood days, and the memories hit him suddenly, with the weight of a freight train at full speed.
He can almost feel the heat of the summer sun scorching the back of his neck, hear a band playing on one of the smaller side stages, smell the frying oil from the food truck he knows was parked nearby, tempting him with the idea of warm churros. Giann is perhaps a tad tipsy and his voice rough from singing along at the top of his lungs to the act they last saw, and Marius is filled with electrifying joy as they crowd around one of the standing tables by the food court area of the event.
“That looks like StellisFest,” Luke’s voice next to his points out, dragging Marius back into the present so quickly it leaves him reeling. Giann’s absence is the thing he feels most violently right away, the silhouette of his brother fading until he’s left with the gnawing emptiness that he’s grown so familiar with over the last three years.
He doesn’t hear Josephine’s reply, backing away with some sort of excuse his mind barely registers. His consciousness fully catches up once he’s in the hallway.
StellisFest stopped being held a few years ago after the company behind it fell on hard times. No one knows where Giann is. No matter how vivid the lingering phantoms of the past may be, what’s gone will never be back.
Marius leans against the wall by the door to his studio and tries to breathe it all away.
His heart rate has nearly returned to normal when the door behind him opens, Josephine and Luke both sticking their heads into the hallway.
“Oh, good,” Josephine sighs and files out of the studio. She’s still holding the box of pictures in her arms, though the lid is back now, keeping the memories covered and confined. Luke follows suit, taking his place at Marius’ other side silently.
His handsome expression is riddled with guilt, which makes Marius want to shake him a little. He doesn’t have the energy to deal with a kicked puppy right now, not when he wants to avoid falling apart before his friends.
“I think we should order lunch,” Luke is the first to break the silence eventually. They must make for a funny picture, tall Luke, taller Marius, and short Josephine lined up like a trio of very odd ducks in front of the studio door.
It’s an apology in everything except for exact wording.
“We should,” Josephine agrees, adjusting the box in her arms as if she only realized now, she’s still holding onto it. “We’ve been working hard for hours now.”
Marius takes another moment to breathe before agreeing with a nod.
And if it takes an hour of relative quiet and stealing from Josephine’s and Luke’s orders for him to find the courage to touch the pictures again, neither friend judges. Instead, Luke plays a puzzle game with a faint, catchy melody filling the gaps between them effortlessly and Josephine cleans a stack of Marius’ palettes with what he’d almost be tempted to call enthusiasm, still three odd ducks, only now on the couch in Marius’ studio as he finds the courage to open the box again.
Not all pictures were taken by Giann it quickly turns out. Some are from his engagement dinner, Marius squished between him and Ailine with a smile so big it barely fits onto his face. There are ones of both von Hagen sons and Austin, some of them travel pictures in goofy poses taken by friendly strangers, some unfocused selfies, some just photos of landmarks. Marius recognizes some of those as ones he took himself, remembers how his brother’s praise felt washing over him when he congratulated Marius on a particularly nice shot, on the paintings that made the show the photo of Marius and Austin by the exhibition hall must’ve been taken at, on the shirt Marius painted himself that Giann is wearing in a candid of him and Ailine exchanging loving glances.
The longing for the time when Marius had been able to text his brother when he needed him is suffocating. It’s hard to perform and joke and shrug it off when neither Luke nor Josephine are even watching, difficult to make it seem like he doesn’t care, and it doesn’t hurt when neither of them are searching for signs of Marius cracking.
He’s grateful, but also not quite sure how to act.
As he takes picture after picture in his hands his heart aches for that day at the music festival, blurry as it may be now, years later. He mourns his brother’s loud laugh and how it felt to be pulled into Giann’s side as they both belted along to the sets they witnessed.
Grieving his brother still hurts like cleaning a festering wound with alcohol.
Marius nearly drops the box when he feels Josephine’s head on his shoulder. Her eyes are closed when he frantically looks to her side, her hands still where they’d been wiping the last palette of her stack and oh, he realizes with a start, the music of Luke’s game has stopped somewhere between their after-lunch daze and now.
Instead, following Josephine’s movement like dominos, Luke’s head finds its place on Marius’ other shoulder.
The weight of their bodies against Marius’ own is soothing, a tether holding him gently in the present and the now.
Marius closes the box, places his hands on the lid with a heavy sense of finality.
What’s gone is gone. He will grieve again another day, and another day after that. Until he really knows what happened to his brother, Marius doubts he’ll find peace with the marks of what he’s lost.
But the box is not quite as heavy where it sits on his thighs, and not quite as daunting as it had looked before lunch. On his shoulders, Josephine and Luke sleep peacefully. Around them, his studio is starting to morph into a space that feels like Marius now, rather than the almost-boy that had moved into it three years ago.
Perhaps, when Marius next hears a Paramore song on the radio, he’ll be able to remember a summer day with his brother, festival noise and frying oil and impending sunburn without his heart jumping up into his throat and knocking the breath out of his chest. Maybe he should, as a matter of fact, blare their discography once he’s given his friends another few minutes to rest before he puts them back to work, and maybe he should sing along no matter how tone-deaf he knows he is.
Josephine and Luke sing along. Neither one of them even pause when Marius chokes up, goes silent to fight a losing battle against his tears, filling in the blanks he leaves until he can join them again.
And Marius, tired, aching, feeling so many things at the same time he worries he might burst, wishes he could etch this moment into his soul as well, right next to the memories of Giann and Ailine and his father and his life in the past shining bright.