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When Marius is twelve, he eats lunch alone on the bench that runs along one side of the art room. He doesn’t mind, really. The boarding school takes students of all grades, reception to the senior year of high school, and Marius has been here every day of every year (except Christmas, his grandfather always makes him go home for Christmas).
Dom, the tallest boy in his year, shoves someone out of the way to fill up his drink bottle.
“Hey!” says the boy’s friend, shoving Dom a little.
“Feck erf,” says Dom.
The boy’s friend helps him to his feet. He doesn’t make another move (Dom is notorious for starting fights, and who wants to start off the year by getting detention?), but he scowls at Dom as they walk away.
Later, when they’re changing out of their gym clothes, Dom shoves Marius into a locker on his way past.
No one moves to help him up.
It’s okay. He’s twelve. He’s been helping himself up for a while.
-
When Grantaire is fourteen, he gets detention during his first week of school, for smoking on school grounds (although if he hadn’t talked back to the teacher he probably would have gotten away with a warning).
Whatever, thinks Grantaire, if they kick me out of this school, I can smoke just as well in another.
There’s only one other person in detention, a girl who dyed her hair blue during the holidays and refused to go home to change it. When he tries to make eye contact with her, she looks away, glaring out the window.
Detention drags on. Grantaire gives himself an hour to sketch (a giant cigarette, smoke from the end rising up to make a house), before he sighs as loudly and obnoxiously as possible, and gets out his chemistry homework.
When their time is up, the girl slouches out after him. There’s another girl waiting for her, leaning against the opposite wall. They grin at each other, linking arms and giggling together almost immediately.
There’s no one waiting for Grantaire, but he doesn’t need anyone. It’s only a couple of blocks to walk home anyway.
-
When Marius is seventeen, he spends a lot of his free time in the meadow on the outskirts of the school’s property. It’s behind a grove of trees, so he doubts most of the other boys even really know it’s there.
He pockets extra serves of rolls and fruit during breakfast and has lunch there every day it doesn’t rain. Sometimes he brings a book, or his homework, but usually he’s content just watching the clouds go by. In spring, buttercups seem to burst from everywhere, turning the meadow bright yellow. He’s watching a trail of ants carry one of his breadcrumbs away, when a butterfly lands on the flower nearest to him. Slowly, slowly, he moves his hand, coaxing the butterfly onto it.
It feels like a miracle.
When he gets back to class (late, as usual) his lab partner asks what he’s smiling about, and Marius opens his mouth the tell him, but then –
“No reason.”
He wouldn’t care. But Marius wishes he had someone to tell, someone who wouldn’t roll their eyes when he told them how the movement of the butterfly’s wings had caused a tiny movement of air, and how he’d wondered if there was any truth to them causing hurricanes.
But he’s seventeen, he’s not supposed to care about that. No one else does.
-
When Grantaire is eighteen, he leaves home straight after his graduation ceremony with his guitar, one backpack, one sleeping bag, and enough money from his sister to buy a ticket to the bus station (and that bus station will take him to the airport, which will take him far away from here). He’s already said his goodbyes to his sister, and left a letter to his parents on the kitchen bench by the coffee machine where they’ll be sure to see it eventually.
He busks, and works odd jobs, and generally has enough money to scrape by as he makes his way across Europe. He meets people, and learns little bits of a dozen languages, and never quite gets the hang of time zone changes.
He eats a bread roll so fresh that steam rises from it in the morning air, and his wishes he had someone sitting next to him to share the sunrise with.
He’s managed to pretty much supress that by the time he heads back home. At almost twenty-three, he’s pretty certain he doesn’t need to share with anyone.
-
Marius is twenty-one when he has his first real fight with his grandfather. Up until now, he’d mostly just skirted around any issues that he knew he and his grandfather disagreed with.
His grandfather had been speaking to some old friends, discussing Marius as though he wasn’t even in the room. And it wasn’t even so much that, it was that his grandfather was attributing everything he’d ever done to his superior upbringing, and wasn’t that a joke. If anything, he’d been brought up by teachers and books, not one single person, and certainly not his grandfather.
Even still, Marius probably would have been able to keep everything contained, but then he’d grandfather has started on Marius’ Future, his path from university student, to intern, to lawyer, to politician, and no, that wasn’t what Marius wanted at all. And so Marius had said. Very loudly. And then he’d quickly gone to gather all his things (he was pretty much still packed from the school term anyway), and left for university a week earlier than he’d planned.
He doesn’t find out that his grandfather has managed to get him kicked out of campus housing until he’s in the Dean’s office. The Dean asks, not unkindly, if he has someone he can stay with while he looks for a place.
He says that he does.
It’s not technically a lie. He’s staying with himself.
-
When Grantaire is twenty-three, his parents tell him to leave and not come back.
He’s sitting at the dinner table, listening to as his parents express their disappointment at his sister’s upcoming divorce in great detail, and he thinks about the scholarship letter sitting on his desk upstairs, and he looks over at his sister. Her face is so carefully blank, and he can’t stand it, and anyway, he’s never had very good impulse control.
“I got into an art program!”
It bursts from him, loud and sudden, not at all the way he meant to ease them into the idea.
The ensuring argument with his parents is over three hours long, and gets progressively louder. It’s the first time Grantaire’s parents have ever raised their voices to him, and it’s the longest time he’s held their attention in years.
His sister helps him put his things together the next day, offers him a place to stay.
“Nah, it’s okay.”
He’s been looking at housing flyers all week anyway. Besides, he’s lived with strangers who didn’t even speak the same language as him before. He can deal with calling until he finds a stranger with a free room.
-
When Marius is twenty-one (and a half) he stumbles downstairs in the morning to put on the coffee maker before he has a shower. He slams a hand onto Grantaire’s door on his way past (Grantaire always forgets to set his alarm for Monday morning).
When Grantiare is twenty-four, he makes an extra serve of scrambled eggs, and it’s ready by the time Marius comes downstairs.
Marius tells him about the dream he had last night (“Giant bees, and we were riding them, no, racing them. I think we won.”), and Grantaire adds them to the sketches that cover the tabletop.
Grantaire falls asleep in the car on the way to class, but that’s okay, he knows Marius will wake him up when they get there.