everymonstrousthing | (no subject)

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marcus

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It still feels odd, somehow - to have people outside of his little knot of people who matter. To have friends. The twins are old enough now that Inej feels more confident at home alone so Kaz is back to spending slightly more time at the club. It's a quiet night, someone he trusts on the bar, so he texts Marcus and asks him if he wouldn't like a drink and a catch up.

It still feels baffling to actually care, but here they are.

He settles in the office with a bottle and two glasses and waits for his friend to arrive.

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"Maybe," Marcus says, having never thought of it like that before. What Kaz says makes sense. Marcus is still God's weapon, still the gun being held by a much larger hand, and he still does his work whenever he's called, but he feels as though he's less necessary here than he'd once been.

That doesn't hurt as much now as it might have once.

"And maybe I'm different, too," he admits. "Older, for one."

"Aren't we all?" says Kaz, who had half never expected to live to be this age, to be a husband and a father, to have ended up with the life that, maybe, Kazimir Reitvald had been denied. "Well, I'm happy for you."

"Thank you," he says, then grins. "Well, maybe we ought not to count our chickens. He hasn't said yes yet."

Only because Marcus hasn't asked. All things considered, the conversation they'd had, the way they seem to fit together, he doesn't imagine Dan saying no, suddenly he doesn't want to marry Marcus.

"You wouldn't be thinking like this, with that look on your face, if you didn't think he was going to say yet," says Kaz, both eyebrows raised. "And you know it."

"You're right," Marcus agrees. "But maybe I'm a bit of a pessimist at heart."

And maybe, even if he doesn't want to admit it, there's still a part of him that doesn't believe he deserves something good. That some awful event will occur and everything will be undone and he'll find himself exactly where he started more than a year ago.

"You must be," says Kaz, draining his glass. "You've ended up friends with me." He reaches for the bottle and pours himself another finger of liquor, offering the bottle to Marcus once he's done.

"Truly, how did such a thing occur?" he asks, amused, before he pours himself another drink. Dan won't mind and Marcus has no intention of coming home drunk. It's just nice to share a drink with a friend.

"I was such a light-hearted man before I met you," he teases.

"I'm sure," says Kaz, and a smile actually twitches the corners of his mouth. "It's terrible, being family to my children. We ruined your life."

"Oh, especially your children," Marcus agrees. "Terrible, the both of them. Don't know how I do it, utterly adoring them. It takes a lot out of me, you know."

He's no one's father. Rather, he's Sabrina's, or as close as he thinks either of them are capable of and he loves every moment of it. But he'll never have a baby, never raise a toddler. He's perfectly comfortable with that.

"It's hard to be someone's Opa, I bet," says Kaz, and he's definitely smirking now as he stretches out his legs and takes a swallow of his drink. Kaz never really expected to have family outside of Inej. It's still dizzying sometimes.

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