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revasserium · 12 hours

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Hello, Rain! Congrats on the 2k followers! 🎉💖 Hope your day is going well!! For the event, may I request Marius and butterfly lovers? ☺️

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14. butterfly lovers

marius von hagen; 5,103 words; fluff, no "y/n", slightly canon-divergent, highschool sweethearts to lovers, marius being the simp he is, mentions of dif socioeconomic backgrounds, verbal bullying from other students

summary: marius does not have many friends at starhigh; you see fit to change that fact.

a/n: this is loosely based on both his "precious mornings" ssr and also his "world of glitz" ssr so vague spoilers for both and you'll understand this more if you kinda sorta know those but otherwise it's just a cute lil fic to feed my marius obsession (ㅅ´ ˘ `)

001. want and need

“I don’t want anything from you.”

Those are the first ever words you say to Marius von Hagen.

It is, by all accounts, a strange kind of meet-cute (if you can even call it that, years later, with his arms curled around your middle, his chin hooked over your shoulder — the pair of you reminiscing on your school days, marveling on the passage of time, how quick things flash by. But back then, time had seemed an infinite thing, ticking solidly through from morning till night, Monday to Friday and onwards), but even then, Marius had an alarming amount of charm and self-awareness, a shockingly prurient view on the world.

Rich and spoiled as he may be, no one could say that he wasn’t brilliant.

“Sorry?” he says, blinking over the stack of notes he’d been going over in the library as you slump down in the seat opposite, tossing your bag onto the table and propping your cheek on your hand.

You shrug, “Just wanted you to know that… I don’t want anything from you. So, yeah,” you repeat, pulling out your own set of notebooks. They’re a bit battered but full of multi-colored tabs that bulge out the sides and top, your textbooks, clearly secondhand. Marius blinks for a second but doesn’t comment, leaning back slightly to look you over.

“Then, senpai…” an easy, self-serving smirk twists the corner of his lips, “why’re you here?”

You pause, fingers hovering over a pink gel pen, your shoulders tensing.

“All the other tables were full.”

It’s a bold-faced lie, but Marius makes a show of turning to look at the tables around you both — sure, they’ve all got one or two people but none are full. You could’ve chosen to sit at any of the other tables, with any of the other students. And yet.

“And,” you add, rather sniffily, “how’d you know I’m not in your year?”

Marius considers his answer — because Payton had presented him with a roster of everyone in his class (with headshots) the week before his first day and asked in that smooth gentle way of his for Marius to “make sure he’s done his homework”, because since then, almost every single person in his grade has tried to come up and introduce themselves, toppling over each other to try and make an impression, to stake their claim on his friendship and by proxy, Pax Group.

Because he wouldn’t have forgotten a face like your’s.

“Cause…. I know all the pretty girls in my year already.” He winks.

Easier to play up the foppish, rich fuckboy facade than admit any of those other things which are infinitely more true, but no less harrowing for a growing teenage boy to try and admit.

Predictably, you roll your eyes and continue on your journey of emptying the entire contents of your schoolbag onto the remaining space of the table.

“Right.” Your tone is disbelieving and Marius feels a thread of intrigue twang in his chest against the initial shock of your blunt appearance. You don’t believe him, and yet you’re still here. You claim that you don’t want anything from him, and yet.

“So? Are you gonna introduce yourself? Seems kinda rude to sit down at someone else��s table and not even tell them your name.” Marius taps the heel of a pen to his cheek, the intrigue slowly festering into curiosity. It itches inside his chest and he finds himself leaning in as you slate him a long, piercing look.

“Fine.” You say, and then you tell him your name — first and last, with no title, no frills, no mention of a family dynasty or some kind of foreign conglomerate empire. In fact, Marius realizes as he runs through his quick mental list of all the who’s who of society, he has no clue who you are or who you might be related to. It’s a difficult thing to achieve at Starhigh. And then he remembers —

“I’m on scholarship,” you say, dropping your eyes back to your now open notebook, twirling your pen once before setting in to scribbling along some sort of complicated looking diagram. Your voice is flat, almost curt, cut short by the implication of those three words.

Scholarship.

Marius knows that the prestigious academy accepts a handful of scholarship students a year, mostly as marketing fodder to pander to the masses — look at us, opening our gold-gilded doors, our marble-foyered halls, peeling back our velvet curtains to accept commoners who are driven enough, who are brilliant enough to shine amongst the ready-born stars.

“Well, guess someone’s gotta keep the test scores up,” Marius says, now entirely taken with the task of watching you take notes. You pause again, glancing up. There’s a spark behind your eyes that makes his heart stutter.

“Ah… so you do know about us.”

Us. You say the word so casually but it still makes Marius flinch inwardly. An “us” infers /precludes a “them” — one group, and the other. Somehow, Marius doesn’t like the thought of you and him being othered from each other so obviously by your respective social circles, even though he knows it’s unavoidable.

“Sure I do — I mean, none of us study hard enough to make the numbers we post every year,” he says, with a stab at casual nonchalance, putting an extra emphasis on his use of “us” just to be a tad more self-deprecating. That should be the tactic here — people like to feel superior, so debasing himself a little from time to time is necessary.

So he tells himself.

You, however, don’t seem to be buying it.

“I’ve seen you in here every afternoon for the past two months.”

Marius leans back, stretching his arms over his head and yawning hugely.

“Nowhere else to be, so…” but even he hears the strained edge to his voice, the flatness that drops at the end of his would-be cheery tone. You hike an imperious eyebrow and Marius feels heat cresting up the back of his neck.

“Nowhere else?” you echo the words back at him, but in your voice, they sound softer, more wistful.

He slumps back forward, making an exaggerated face.

“Yeah, my brother’s busy with the company and my dad’s… off somewhere in Europe doing whatever he does in Europe,” he waves a would-be careless hand and sighs dramatically, “what’s a guy to do with all that time but —” he motions around the gorgeous library reading room with it’s floor to ceiling windows and endless stacks of priceless reference books and first editions.

“But to study,” you finish for him, amusement dangling off the end of your words like a comma, hinged there, waiting for the rest of the sentence, the remainder of the story.

Marius chews on the inside of his cheek and doubles down with a light laugh and another good-natured wink. Meanwhile, he can’t help the way his mind is racing. Why would a scholarship student randomly come up to him in the library, loudly declare that she “doesn’t want anything from him” and then proceed to invade his personal space?

It reminds him, outlandishly, of the story of a man who’d struck gold, and then, terrified that someone would come steal it from him, proceeded to bury it all back with the sign “NO GOLD BURIED HERE” tacked up over the mound of freshly dug earth. The denial so egregious that it rebounds back into confirmation instead.

Were you really trying to get closer to him by telling him to his face that you had no such intentions?

His chases down the line of thought, the speculations spiraling wilder and wilder until your voice snaps him sharply back into focus.

“Oi! Are you okay?”

Marius blinks, jerking back as you click your fingers in front of his face.

“Huh? Oh yeah sorry —”

You cock your head, that strange, knowing spark still flickering behind your eyes.

“Where’d you go off to, hm?”

Marius opens his mouth before shutting it again, shaking his head.

“Just… never mind.”

“You do that a lot, don’t you?” you ask, cocking your head to one side, birdlike.

“Do what?”

“Keep things to yourself.”

And this time, Marius feels himself being caught off-guard — there’s a skip to his already arhythmic heartbeat, a skid in his breath, a click-shuffle-snap in his mind’s eye as he tries to refocus his attention on what you’d just said. And when he does, heat and heat and heat claws its way up his skin, bleeding into his cheeks before he can force it back down.

“I - I don’t know what you mean.” There — that quaver in his voice. He curses himself for it. The vulnerability of it all.

“I’ve seen it, y’know —” you say, sighing as you drop your eyes back onto your notes, now highlighting something in a bright, blinding chartreuse, “the way people flock to you. But I mean, everyone titters over everyone else here, don’t they?”

Marius stares, nearly open-mouthed at the casual, almost bland way you’re laying it all out, as if he weren’t the storm-center around which all of this social grandstanding spins.

“What do they ask you about first? Oh, lemme guess — is it the fact that you’re confirmed to be Pax’s next CEO or whether you like girls with short hair? I guess the short-hair thing is a bit less on the nose, right?”

You flip a page in your notebook and methodically tab it with a pink sticky note.

“What do you want?” the words are out of his mouth before he can stop himself, and Marius realizes too late that he’s staring, wide-eyed and desperate, his heart now pounding inside him like some angry, caged thing, thudding so hard against the back of his throat that he actually feels like it might leap right out of his mouth.

Placidly, you raise your eyes back to look at him, meeting his wild, bewildered gaze with the steady, solid one of your own.

“Like I said… I don’t want anything from you.” Your voice is calm, your words sure.

Disbelief roils inside him like sickness and he swallows hard as he realizes his hands had clenched into white-knuckled fists on the table between you.

“Then why —” his voice isn’t light anymore, instead it's jagged around the edges, raw and torn and bleeding.

He feels naked, exposed, stripped in a way that he hadn’t felt since the first time his father had taken him to visit the family shrine.

You purse your lips and sigh, and this time, you look just as tired as he feels as you slowly start to gather up your things.

“Because… you just looked a bit lonely and I thought you might like some company.”

You tuck your last gel-pen back into your bag before hoisting it onto your shoulder, turning and walking away.

002. oh bully you

“Senpai… you know it was super mean of you to just leave me like that yesterday.”

You jump nearly a foot in the air as Marius drops into the empty desk directly in front of you, straddling the chair back with his legs on either side, crossing his arms over top of your opened textbook and peering up at you from beneath his damnably long lashes.

He bats them at you as you blink down at him, trying to reconcile the sight of him with the space of your classroom — which is not his classroom, because — right, of course, you’re not in the same grade. So, why —

“Oh~ reading even during lunch period? You’re so studious — hey d’you think you can help me with the history homework? I suck at names and dates.”

You stare at him for two whole seconds longer before narrowing your eyes.

“What’re you doing here? This isn’t your classroom.”

Marius pouts, feigning hurt, “But senpai… it’s lunchtime! Didn’t you say you wanted to keep me company yesterday?”

“Yester — “ you break off, understanding finally settling over your confused expression as you soften in your chair. casting him a reproachful look.

“Well you didn’t seem like you wanted the company so I thought —”

“Wha — I never said that! You just caught me off guard! I was just asking what you wanted to do for the rest of the afternoon, but you stormed off. Ah… I thought you were angry with me — you’re not angry with me, are you senpai?”

You let out an exasperated sigh at his antics, but a smile still breaks across your lips.

“Did I say I was angry?”

Marius’s grin widens by degrees.

All around you, people are beginning to stare. What is Marius von Hagen, society’s most elite golden child doing with a no-name scholarship student like you? And acting all chummy when no one had ever seen you two together before? Whispers gather like a rising tide but Marius doesn’t seem to notice as he casually reaches over your textbooks to peer into your bento.

“Whoa! That looks so delicious! Did you make it all yourself? Can I have some? I’ve always wanted to try home-cooked food from someone my age!”

You smack his hand lightly and click your tongue.

“Manners! And if you wait patiently, I’ll let you have half.”

Marius smiles cheekily, looking all too pleased with himself as the whispers and murmurs gather in strength and volume. And by the end of the day, there’s not a soul in school who doesn’t know about the strange new friendship between you and Marius von Hagen.

003. rumors

“Did you hear?”

“Yeah — and with Marius —“

“Everyone says he’s nice but hard to get close to, so how the hell —“

“Maybe it’s some kind of… arrangement?”

“But why would a von Hagen need any kind of arrangement?”

“Dunno, but maybe it’s a charity project?”

“What? Adopt-a-pleb? Ha!”

“I’ve seen them around campus — he’s always following her around —“

“Ugh, so weird! Unless they’re dating? But god, he’s so out of her league it’s not even funny.”

“Hey do you know anyone who knows her?”

“Ew, no! Who would any of us know who knows her? She’s scholarship!”

“Maybe that’s why he’s so into her? Like… y’know those kids who grow up in the desert and have never seen snow?”

“What, like he’s never seen a poor person before?”

“Up close? Have you?”

“Ugh, it’s just so… weird. I bet he’ll lose interest in her by the end of the month. There’s no way they’re actually friends.”

“Yeah, that or… they’re…”

“Oh… that.”

“You don’t think…”

“Well… if she’s really that good… I guess a guy could overlook anything, right?”

004. in place

He has always been quiet when he paints, but there’s something in the thick, churning silence today that makes you pause, looking up from the book of sewing patterns in your lap. The sun’s long since set, and there’s only the two you left in the arts classroom.

Marius frowns as he leans back, a streak of dark blue paint smearing his cheek.

You glance at the canvas, pressing your lips.

“Okay. What’s wrong?”

“Hm?” he sounds distracted as he picks another brush and leans in to carve a thick slab of black through the heart of the already dark and chaotic painting.

“You’re stewing. What’s wrong?”

“How do you know I’m stewing? I’m not stewing,” Marius huffs, tossing the paintbrushes into a can, his lips pursed into a pout as he turns towards you.

You snap your book shut and sigh, “Because. I just do. And you just admitted it.”

“No, I didn’t!”

“Did too — now spill it.”

“I —” Marius lets out another loud sigh before knitting his arms across his chest, turning back toward the canvas and picking up his brushes. He squints at the painting as if it’s done him some grievous personal harm, and then jams his brush into the middle, his strokes going wide and harsh.

“Have you heard the rumors?”

You scoff, “What, about us?”

“Yeah…” his voice drops, and you almost laugh at how childish he sounds before you realize that you’re both still children. You wonder if things will change when you grow up — the thought of it seems so far away. Like this, in the fluorescent brightness of the empty art classroom, the night outside stretches like an uncertain future, unfurling into impenetrable darkness.

“Sure I have,” you say, watching him as he pulls back to examine the dark blob on the canvas.

“You’re not mad?” He doesn’t look at you and you don’t make to look away.

“Why would I be mad?” You open your book again to mark your page before tucking it away in your bag. Marius pauses as you start to pack.

“Because it’s horrible! The things they’re saying — I mean, I’m used to it because I’ve grown up around people like this but you’re —” he cuts himself off as you whip around, eyebrows raised.

“I’m what? Different?”

Marius gapes, scrambling for words that do not come.

You pack up the rest of your things in a terse silence, then you push out of your chair with a loud scrape.

“But y’know, the people who talk behind your back? They’re right where they should be.”

Marius frowns.

Your lips pull into a wide smirk as you shoulder your bag, “Behind you.”

You’re barely out the door before Marius lets out an incredulous laugh and topples back into his chair. He lets a second pass and then he’s launching out of the chair, grabbing his own bag and slinging it over his back.

“Senpai! Wait for me! Hey, you wanna go to that really cute restaurant that just opened last week? It’s got a Michelin Star but I’m sure I can get us seats!”

005. be-friend

“Marius! You’re so funny!”

“Wow, Marius — that’s incredible! You’re so smart!”

Marius laughs, carding a hand through his hair, his expression bright and open and unassuming, but the group of people around him all inch in closer, as sunflowers might strain towards the sun.

“Hey.”

You lean against the doorframe with an amused grin.

Marius looks up, his eyes visibly brightening as he sees you.

“Senpai! I was waiting for you!”

“Bullshit. We’re gonna be late for the show.” You tap at your wrist where a watch might be as Marius bounds out of his chair, shaking off his hoard of simpering admirers.

“W-wait! Marius! We’re all gonna head to the Ace Club later — you know, the super exclusive one? Don’t you wanna come with us?” one of the girls asks hopefully.

Marius turns, smiling as if he doesn’t hear the strained desperation in her voice, the flash of annoyance in her eyes as she looks you over.

“Sorry! Maybe next time — I’ve got a theater date I can’t miss. Bye!”

“You know if you keep calling them dates, people are going to get the wrong idea, right?” you ask breezily, sounding less concerned and more amused.

“So? Let them get the wrong idea.”

You cast him a mischievous grin, “Ah… the prince in love with the pauper. Tale as old as time.”

At this, Marius pouts, “Senpai… so mean to me… and you were the one who wanted to be my friend first.”

You wave him off with a flap of your hands, “Sure, but you’re the one who stuck around.”

“Hmph, maybe after tonight’s show, we’ll go our separate ways then,” Marius makes a show of harumphing and stomping off in front of you as you laugh and jog to catch up, swatting him in the side with your bag.

“So you’re just hanging out with me for the theater perks?”

“Yep! Well, I knew you’d find me out eventually,” Marius smiles, teasing as the pair of you make your way off campus and turn towards the community theater.

After a while, Marius bumps you with his elbow, “You really are super good at costume design… are you sure you don’t wanna —”

“I don’t want a handout, Marius.” Your voice has gone cold and clipped, and Marius bites his lip, shoulders shrugging up as you continue to walk.

“I wasn’t offering one. It’s just… there’s a Pax program for young aspiring artists to study abroad in Europe and…”

“And you’re offering to get me in? That’s literally the definition of a handout.”

“No! I’m just telling you about it. I swear I won’t say a word about your application — if you even apply, that is…” he sounds eager in a way that you haven’t heard in a long time. Not since he’d entered the school fine arts contest under a pseudonym.

You give him a sidelong look before sighing, “I’ll… think about it.”

“Okay! That’s —” he reigns himself in as he skips out in front of you, looking not unlike an over-excited puppy, “that’s… good! Wah — I’m so excited for tonight’s play! Hamlet, right?”

You laugh as you hurry to catch up to him, “Yeah. But it’s not like you haven’t seen it before — didn’t you say that you dad took you to see it in London or something?”

“Yeah, but that’s different.”

“How?”

Marius rolls his eyes, smiling cheekily down at you, but when you catch his eyes you see them go soft, the light in them somehow molten as he looks and looks and looks at you.

“Obviously, because Ophelia’s dress wouldn’t have been made by you!”

006. stay and leave

“I got in!”

Marius blinks at the flat beige of his bedroom ceiling as your voice rings out from across the phone line. The bed beneath him is perfectly made, the silken sheets freshly pressed from this morning.

“A-ah! Congrats, senpai!” he tries to sound like his usual cheery self but he’s not sure how successful it is.

A beat.

“Marius?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

Another beat. Marius shifts, curling onto his side, cradling the phone to his ear as he stares at the halo of light cast by his artisan bedside lamp.

“For… telling me about the program. And… for not pulling any strings on the back end.”

Marius grins, flipping onto his back again, “How’dyou know I didn’t?”

Your laugh comes through the line, soft and sweet.

“Because. I know you.”

Something inside Marius squeezes; he fists his fingers into the soft silk of his nightshirt. Warmth spreads from the base of his spine up through the rest of his body till he’s tingling from his toes to his nose. He wrinkles it, feeling abashed as he scratches at his cheek, even though he knows you can’t see the gesture.

“R-right — so! When do you leave?”

“End of the summer — so…”

“So?”

You sound hesitant in a way that he’s not used to.

“I’ll miss you.”

He almost misses the words, they’re so soft, so quiet that he almost thinks he might’ve imagined them. But he knows your voice almost better than he knows his own, knows the color and shape, the weight and temperature. Knows how it gets pitched when you’re excited, and flat when you get mad. Knows the giddiness that fills it like sweet champagne bubbles when you know something and want to share. Knows the dull coolness of it when you’re done or tired or annoyed.

“Senpai…” Marius presses his cheek ever closer to the face of the phone, “if you keep saying that, I might ask them to rescind your acceptance letter just so you can’t go.”

He smiles, bracing for the sharp bite of your reprimand, but it doesn’t come. Instead, he hears you sigh.

“Just promise you’ll come visit, okay?”

“Sure! I’ll come every weekend if you want! My dad’s old jet’s been sitting in the hanger anyway.”

“Mm, maybe not every weekend.”

“Aw… senpai, I thought you’d want to see me!”

“I do! Just… you know what I mean.”

Marius chuckles, throwing his free arm over his eyes, reveling in the temporary darkness. A strange, hot tightness gathers at the back of his throat as he sighs. He feels the tickle of words on his tongue — and what is it about the nighttime that makes it so much easier to say the things he might never have the courage to in daylight?

“Senpai… if I asked you to stay… what would you say?”

“Hm?”

“If I — I mean… if I told you, right now, that… that I didn’t want you to go…”

You hum as if contemplating his question. Marius squeezes his eyes shut.

“I’d tell you you were being a spoiled brat and very selfish,” you say, but there’s a lightness to your tone that makes Marius smile.

“Well… I’ll never escape allegations of either of those things,” Marius replies.

“And then, I’d tell you that you’re being stupid because — why ask me to stay, when you can just come with me?”

Marius sits up, “Ha?”

“I’ve seen your art, Marius. You’re brilliant. You’d be the first to get in, even without being the next CEO of Pax.”

Marius stares at his own hand, now lying limply in his lap. He’d never considered entering the program himself — it’d be a huge conflict of interest. But… if he didn’t apply as himself then…

“Aren’t you being a little selfish too, senpai? Asking a guy to move across the entire world with you.”

“I never said I wasn’t.”

Marius drags his hand down his face, feeling his heart thudding right beneath this throat, a strong, startling hoofbeat that thrums through him. It beats behind his ears, rushes blood to his fingertips. He squeezes at the bridge of his nose, a recklessness filling him like helium to a balloon and suddenly, he’s weightless as he lets himself fall back onto this too-big mattress.

Later, long after he’s hung up the phone, your voice still echoing in the recesses of his half-asleep mind. He smiles to himself, pressing a palm to his chest to feel the rhythmic, certain beating of his own heart.

That, he thinks, is the girl I’m going to marry someday.

007. want and need (redux)

Years later, long after he kisses you for the first time at the airport in Florence, when you’d come to meet him for his first year in the young artists program, Marius flies you back under the guise of an anniversary trip.

You have a feeling you know what he’s going to do, and he knows you well enough to know that you do too.

Still, when he gets down on one knee, your eyes are gleaming with unshed tears.

“Remember when you told me you didn’t want anything from me the first time we met?” he asks, grinning up at you, a velvet box in the palm of his hands.

“Well… I can’t the same because… the truth is, ever since that first meeting in the library I’ve wanted so many things from you — I wanted to hear you laugh, to watch you when you designed your clothes, to listen to your voice every night on the phone till I fell asleep…”

There are flowers everywhere, and the sunlight is magnificent on Marius’s white tux. He looks like a prince stepped right out of the pages of all your favorite fairy tales; he looks like a daydream. You briefly wonder if this is a dream, but Marius charges on, and amongst all the tittering guests that surround you in the gallery, you’re the only one who notices the slight tremor in Marius’s voice, way his breath is just a tad more shallow than it usually is.

You reach down to pull him up, and you shake your head.

“Y’know, I lied to you — that first time, when I told you I didn’t want anything.” Your voice is scratchy from the tears, but Marius grins.

“Oh? Then… you did want something from me?”

You press your hand to his chest, the steady beat of his heart thudding beneath your palm.

“Yeah. I wanted… this.”

It’s a horrible, cheesy line, but all things considered, you think it feels right.

Marius laughs, leaning forward to press his forehead to yours, cupping your cheeks.

His smile is radiance itself.

“Good… because I want this too,” and he reaches down to open the lid of the tiny velvet box. You barely notice the ring for the feel of it as he slips it around your finger.

“But… I want so much more than that too — I want your everything — your body, your mind, your soul, your life — I want you to spend it with me, because even though you never wanted anything from me… all I’ve ever wanted to do was give my everything to you.”

You swallow, wiping at your eyes with an exasperated laugh.

“Dummy, you’ve always had it,” you hiccup as Marius tips your chin up with a finger, his eyes going soft as he looks over the planes and contours of your face — ever an artist, his gaze always both hungry and admiring. As if he could never get enough, but that won’t ever stop him from trying — from wanting.

“I’ve always been yours,” you say, and time itself is caught in the negative space between your lips.

Marius nods, reaching down to thumb at the solidness of the ring now circling your finger.

“Then… that’s the only thing I’ll ever want or need.”