Chapter Text
The rich smell of vanilla fills the house with a pleasant perfume, and Marius breathes it in with a triumphant smile. He’s finally done it — he’s conquered the kitchen.
Well, he made one cake. A cake that he could technically still mess up, if he doesn’t take it out on time. And he didn’t make it alone. But it still counts, just as a joint success! The fact that he and his boyfriend can share this win just makes it even sweeter.
“What are you even doing?” Luke asks, from where he’s sitting on the counter.
Marius opens his eyes to look at Luke, shining in the bright light of the afternoon, and then at the patches of flour across his front: the result of a fierce flour fight, which Luke definitely lost, in the middle of their joint baking effort. From where Marius is sitting at the kitchen table, Luke is perfectly highlighted by the rays of the sun coming through the window, his tan skin and golden brown hair practically glowing.
“You’re so cute,” Marius says.
Predictably, Luke reddens. He’s blushed easily for as long as Marius has known him, and now that they’re dating, Marius is free to exploit that for his own purposes.
“I’m not even doing anything,” Luke mutters.
“You don’t have to do anything. You’re always cute,” Marius replies, smiling. “Sometimes I just wanna tell you.”
“Is that the only thing you’re doing over there, is ogling me?” Luke snorts. “What have you been looking at?” He nods down.
Marius looks where Luke’s gestured. There’s a piece of paper in front of him, one that he can’t quite read the text of, and he squints. “I...don’t remember, actually.”
“Do you need your glasses?” Luke chuckles, already hopping off the counter to fetch them. “I told you, just keep them on in the house if you don’t want to put in contacts.”
“But that makes my eyes weaker,” Marius protests.
“That is a myth,” Luke says.
“It’s not! I saw a news story about it once.”
Luke shakes his head as he approaches, and holds out Marius’s glasses to him. The simple spectacles pulse with a strange energy, and Marius blinks to clear it from his vision.
“You feel okay?” Luke asks.
“Yeah,” Marius murmurs, reaching for them like he’s moving through mud. “I just...”
Grainy pebbles form under his fingertips as he closes his hand around his glasses. A crunching noise seems to echo as his hand spasms around the broken glass, and he drops the bloody pieces onto the table and the paper in front of him. His hand starts to throb with pain, mild at first, but worse with each beat, beat, beat of his heart.
“Oh fuck— Hold on, I’ll get the first aid kit,” Luke says.
“No!” Misplaced panic fills Marius’s lungs. “Wait, you don’t— Don’t leave! Lu—”
His bloody hand snags Luke’s wrist, and Luke screams with pain. His wrist shatters in Marius’s hand, blood and bone and glass spraying across the white tile floor. The remains of his hand fall to the ground in a messy explosion of pieces.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I didn’t mean to,” Marius sobs, as spiderweb cracks widen across Luke’s skin. Tears are falling down Luke’s face as he hyperventilates, his gasps weak and reedy. “Please, I’m sorry, I—”
Marius wakes with a jolt, his heart going a mile a minute, his breaths too fast to be comfortable. Nausea crashes over him, and he clamps his hands over his mouth. He inhales... and exhales, as slowly as he can manage, until his heartbeat slows with his breathing and the urge to vomit passes. The cold air of the room on his sweaty skin raises goosebumps on his arms.
He’s alone. It’s been months, but he’s still not used to it yet.
Before, Luke would soothe him after a nightmare like this one. He’d offer Marius soft, sleep-slurred words and strong, warm arms; he’d offer a dreamless sleep.
But Luke is not here, because he is dead.
They’d all known he was sick. He couldn’t hide it forever. Spend too much time around anyone and you start to notice when something is wrong, or...when something is always wrong. As if the investigation they’d been doing into NXX couldn’t get any more personal, more weighted.
But in the end, it hadn’t been the sickness that took Luke out. Not entirely.
Luke had learned, after many years and much help, to value his own life. But when push came to shove, he would always defend others — that was just his nature. In the midst of escorting a key witness in their case to safety, he’d taken a bullet to the chest. Marius’s heart had stopped as Luke nearly fell to the ground, but stayed on his feet long enough to escape with the rest of them.
Later, they would learn that his lung had been punctured, and partially collapsed. It was a serious injury, though not necessarily fatal. But Luke was already sick, his body working overtime just to keep him going. He never recovered from the shock.
Marius had visited Luke in the hospital on his last day alive.
He’d visited him every day before, too, for as long as he was allowed to be there. He’d sit by his bed, chatting or in silence; feed him; make sure he didn’t try to get any work done while he was supposed to be recovering. And to his eyes, Luke had been getting better. His breathing was still rattly, but on that last day he was in good spirits, well enough to beg Marius for junk food when he drove over that morning.
Marius had kissed Luke’s cheeks and forehead. He’d shared a bag of sour gummy worms he’d snuck past the nurses. He’d felt for the box in his pocket, the box he’d been scared to pull out for weeks — brushed his thumb across its velvet, imagining the smooth metal inside. But he hadn’t pulled it out; just held Luke’s hand and rubbed the place it would sit on his ring finger.
On his way out, Luke rasped that he should bring French fries the next time he visited: another forbidden snack. Just two hours after Marius closed the door of that room, Luke was gone.
Marius barely remembers the funeral. He remembers seeing the people he cared about — his father, who accompanied him to the venue; the investigation team, who sat with him during the service, their hands reaching out to comfort him. Calloway gave a beautiful elegy, one Marius can’t recall a word of. He remembers walking up to Luke’s body in its casket and thinking that he was wrong, that his lips were never so red, his skin never so pale.
He remembers holding Luke’s ring— crushing it in his hand until the imprint of it remained in his palm— in the end, slipping it onto his own ring finger. He was unwilling to part with the band, useless as it now was. Though Luke had never worn it, it felt like a relic of their love, like a piece of him that Marius couldn’t abandon.
He’d cried. He remembers that, the way that your body remembers the sensations of drowning. There was no way to keep it in, not with the love of his life in a casket. But even in his grief, he couldn’t let anyone see everything, not in public. He couldn’t let the storm of emotions in his gut rise like bile to his placid, tearful mask. Marius swallowed everything, for a different time, a different place.
But days turned to weeks, and weeks to months. The knot under his lungs grew big, pulling tighter and tighter with each passing breath. The anger, the tears: they all disappeared, fading into a gray fog that seemed to envelop Marius. He felt dead. Like he’d been buried with Luke that day, and his body had taken too long to realize.
He only came to terms with it after visiting his studio, a ritual that he’d been loath to abandon even in his mourning. In the aftermath of Luke’s passing, he’d destroyed canvases with ink and acrylic, and sometimes with his hands or stronger, more unyielding instruments. Anything to keep from screaming.
But on that particular night, he’d sat in front of an easel, and felt absolutely nothing but a whistling hollowness. The sight of his paints and palette, his well-loved dirty brushes: it didn’t evoke anything in him. No feeling at all but a heavy exhaustion. He just wanted to go home and curl up in bed. He just wanted to be alone. He just wanted to be gone.
And that specific thought materialized. I don’t want to be alive anymore.
The realization did little to stir him. But he thought of his mother, and how she’d given up her life for his, and felt a little twinge of...something. Self-hatred, maybe. It was too far off to identify. But he’d thought, I’m being ungrateful, aren’t I?
The thought disappeared like smoke, but the feeling, the twinge — it compounded, multiplied. There was nowhere for it to go. So it festered. Marius moved through his life on autopilot, rarely eating and barely seeing and feeling like he was disappearing into thin air. Wondering idly if he’d wake up one day and see nothing when he looked down at his body.
It took weeks for the feeling to congeal into something more concrete, and more dangerous. To morph from a feeling to an action. But it felt right. It felt like the natural progression of things.
There was nothing for him here anymore. In fact, he was making things worse for the people he cared about by being alive. It would be easier if he didn’t have to think, to feel, to do anything. And there was someone waiting for him, just out of reach.
With those thoughts, of course it made sense that he would want to die. And for him to die, he would have to do the deed himself, wouldn’t he?
Marius hadn’t seen the point of leaving a note. There were only so many people he’d consider leaving one for, and they’d understand, he thought.
But the more he considered what he was about to do, the more he worried — the more he thought of the other things he needed to say. Not about himself, but about them, about what they meant to him. And so he wrote a note.
Or, seven notes. Three for the remaining NXX members. One for Payton, one for Vincent. One for his father, and one for his brother. And the “notes” were really more like letters, pages of Marius’s thin handwriting folded up into envelopes and labeled with the names of their recipients. Someone would find them, eventually. They’d get where they needed to go.
His phone vibrates. He stops spinning Luke’s band around his finger and swipes away the scheduled reminder. His phone can stay here — Marius knows where he’s going, and he won’t need to reach anyone there.
It’s time.
He slinks out of the house. It’s late, and Payton has already turned in for the night, so no one stops him on his way to the garage. It’s pouring down rain outside, and the heavy beat of it on the roof is almost soothing as Marius gets in his car and drives away.
He can barely see a foot ahead of him in the storm, even with his headlights at full brightness. But this route is familiar to him, and it doesn’t take him long to arrive at the entrance to a public park, its impressive front entryway hidden by the darkness. He backs into a parking spot, as usual, and follows the walking path at the end of the lot down to the bridge.
In the daytime it’s a beautiful structure: a wood walking path, towering metal supports over the bridge, a warbling stream underneath. The darkness of the storm has twisted it all. Bolted arches loom menacingly over Marius as water rushes loud as blood beneath his feet. Somewhere on this bridge, Marius and Luke’s lovelock is still hanging, battered by the rain.
Marius can barely feel the water, or the clothes and hair sticking to his skin. He walks to the railing. There’s a little space to stand on the other side of the barrier — too small to walk on, but large enough to support Marius for a little bit. He holds on tight, and vaults it.
His feet slip on wet wood when he lands on the other side — panic lances through him. He clutches at the thick railing, all his muscles tensed as he scrambles to regain his footing. But once he manages to pull himself up, the shock receding, he stares out at the blackness of the river and laughs, free and muffled by the rain.
It wouldn’t have mattered if he fell, after all. That’s what he’s here to do. Why not slip like an idiot into his own death? But it means something to Marius to be able to jump, instead of fall. Like he has some agency. Like this is a choice, instead of a predetermined destination.
He is always too much; he is always not enough. He endangers the people closest to him with his mere existence, and he tries and fails to protect them, time and time again. It’s only right that he’s here now. It’s only fair that he does this. It’s only just that he jump.
He can’t see anything beneath him, only hear it — the angry river, and the sound of gnashing teeth in the beat of the rocks over each other. When he breathes, there’s only the rain over his nose and mouth there. His feet shift on the ledge. This is only right. It’s only fair. It’s only just. He closes his eyes, and inhales.
But should that be his last thought? Would it be selfish to imagine, as he falls, the faces of his mother and his partner? To hope for a paradise, or nothing at all? He’s spent so much of his life trying to be selfless, to give, to undo the damage he caused with his birth.
Is this...selfish?
No. No. This is not selfish. This is his last act of giving: giving his life. It’s only right. It’s only fair. It’s only—
“Marius!”
That voice — loud, high, frantic with worry — almost sends him to the water below. But he holds on, tighter, tight enough that he can feel the joints of his fingers complain. It’s not that someone has come here, in this awful storm — though that would’ve been enough to shock him — not that someone has seen him, but that the person who has seen him is familiar, and should not be here. He doesn't want to open his eyes.
“Marius? Marius? Hey, can you look at me?”
He can’t, he can’t, but he does it, anyways. And there— There—
Luke is holding out both hands, slowly approaching like Marius is a caged animal. His face — Marius can see him perfectly, even in the darkness, and the twist of pain in his features tears through Marius’s heart like a serrated blade. Luke doesn't squint in the rain, doesn't seem to be affected by it at all. He’s untouched by the world around him, a snapshot of what he was — like a sweet dream, or a horrible nightmare. He calls again, pleads through the din of the unrelenting downpour, beckoning with his hands. “Marius, I want you to grab on to me. Carefully. And I’ll help pull you over. Okay?”
“Why...” Marius’s voice comes out weak, shaky. Chattering with the cold of the rain, cold he can’t feel. “W-why are you here?”
“For you. Why else?” Luke’s closer now, and his hand closes around Marius’s wrist where he’s still gripping the railing for dear life, and it’s warm, so warm that it breaks through the numbness. “Let’s go home. Please? Let's just go back home.”
So Marius, artlessly, selfishly, clambers back over the railing and collapses onto the bridge with Luke’s help, the adrenaline high finally crashing him into the wood planks. Luke holds onto him so tightly that it burns, and Marius squeezes just as tightly back, tears disappearing in the rain as he prays he won’t wake up from yet another nightmare.
Marius doesn’t remember how he made it back, but when he returns to himself — feels his lungs and ribs and muscle shift as he inhales and exhales, sees and comprehends what’s in front of his open eyes — he’s home. At Luke’s apartment, not his own house. He recognizes Luke’s bathroom even without lifting his heavy head to look around. He becomes conscious of his own actions: he’s in the middle of removing his dripping wet clothes, his heavy shirt dark in his hands. The shower is already running, and hot enough to steam up the mirror and stifle the air.
Marius stands, half-naked, and tries to think of anything from between now and before . He must’ve unlocked the door and disabled Luke’s security system to get inside. He must’ve gotten from the bridge to Luke’s apartment, though he has no idea if he drove or not. He must’ve had a reason to leave in the first place. But Marius can’t remember any details. Everything sits in a dull haze, obscured by rain and his own slow, heavy brain fog.
Stripped, he pushes back the curtain and gets into the shower. He always complained to Luke about showering here instead of at the estate; the shower-head was too short, and the water never got hot enough on cold days or cold enough on hot days. Marius can barely feel the temperature now, even though his skin is pinking, reacting to the heat even when the sensation feels like it’s a million miles away.
He stands there, near-motionless, until the heat of the water breaks through to his nerves and he hisses, the shower suddenly too hot. He fumbles for the knob to turn it down a little, and starts to actually get himself clean.
He knows he still has clothes here, loungewear that he left for the nights when Luke would keep him too late. Exhausted, Marius towels off and changes slowly. He trudges to the bed, habit helping him avoid the wooden platform the mattress sits on.
He falls into bed, heavy. The sheets — indeed, the entire apartment — have been untouched since Luke’s death. And trapped in the fibers is Luke’s scent, comforting and familiar.
Marius’s eyes drift closed. His hand inches towards the other side of the bed, toward a worn indent in the mattress, and a warmth that isn’t there.