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The air around him hangs heavily against his skin, dust and a grease smudge on his face. The heat and particles in the air work their way underneath his clothes, lapping at his sensitive skin, causing his mind to run a marathon. The only source of light in the workshop is the meager amount coming from the bench light and the minute flame at the end of the welding torch. In front of him, one of his projects lay, but at the speed his mind is going, he can’t remember what he was doing or how to hold a torch in his hand steadily.
After going on a hostage extraction that they almost failed, IQ and Sledge had been severely hurt, leaving the two unconscious in a clinical unit in Spain. According to Thermite (Marius had watched in fear as Thermite’s lips moved, not having the courage to look into his eyes), an explosion was set off in the room next to the one IQ and Sledge were above, which ended up causing a huge portion of the upstairs level to cave in. They had fallen through the floor, leaving Sledge with internal bleeding and a broken leg and IQ with a fractured arm and concussion. The two, due to their inflictions, couldn’t be transported back to the UK yet while Thermite, Buck, and Twitch returned solemnly.
IQ’s three German boys, now all worried, depressed, and desperate for good news, were left with the rest of the horrible day to push through. Bandit snarled at everyone that tried to comfort him, but in reality he, although he wouldn’t admit it, was terrified. In addition to that, everyone knew it was extremely bad when the good natured joker that Blitz usually was didn’t even attempt to lighten the mood and wasn't in the mood for socializing. In the end, this left Marius, who doesn’t do very well on his own after things such as this, to stay in the workshop and try to take his mind off everything.
It didn’t help.
He tried stimming, tried using the silence of the workshop to his advantage, tired tinkering on a malfunctioning ADS, but none of it managed to take his mind off of Monika and Seamus. Nobody, especially Jäger, could deal with having to have a hauntingly empty bedroom down the hall and bunk below him.
His gloved hands grip the handle of the torch tightly, the tremors increasing. His breathing labored and mind running in circles, he slams the torch down onto the bench, shaking the bench light and diminishing the flame. The Magpie he was working on sits in front of him, apart and abandoned, in the little light.
He rips off his gloves, throws them over his work, and tries to run his hand through his hair. As he touches his sweaty locks, he withdraws his hands, shakes them in distaste, and blinks repeatedly, trying to hold back the upcoming tears.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Everything feels displaced, uneven, wrong . His chest fills up with what feels like cement, choking him, leaving Marius confused and on the edge of absolutely losing it.
He has the urge to sob but he doesn’t know why.
“Marius?”
Said man lets out a choked noise at the displaced sound.
“Sorry if I scared you.”
“You are as sneaky as the Brazilian woman, and yet you’re big,” Marius rasps, anger flaring at being snuck up on.
“I’m going to ignore that. You’re shaking.”
In the corner of his eye, he sees the other move around the benches and appear by his side, questioning himself on touching the melting Marius. Finally, Fuze settles with keeping his strong hands hovering around Marius’s hunched figure.
“What’s going on?” Jäger can't even begin to understand how to answer that question. “Marius?” Fuze curses in his home language.
It’s too late. He’s already crying.
Is it frustration? Confusion? He doesn’t know.
The other doesn’t know either.
If Marius were in his right mind (but his mind was never right , as so many have pointed out), and not on the edge of losing it, he would actually be weary of Shuhrat’s judgement, unlike with almost everyone else. Marius would have feared Shuhrat thinking he’s acting like the fucking child he apparently is, just having a tantrum over something trivial like not being able to get a fucking piece of candy from the local store. Shuhrat would never understand (mostly because he doesn’t know) that no, he’s not crying over ‘figurative candy’ (Marius has never been good with figurative language either), but over….
He doesn’t know.
How can he be sure when his head’s now on his arms, mind shattering in shards of porcelain? His eyes are puffy and red, his body wetly heaving and shaking like he’s in negative degrees weather.
Anything Shuhrat is saying is lost to in the workshop’s air. He can’t even hear anything, not the clatter of the box of nails and pieces of ADS he knocks off the bench, not even his cries, not when everything feels so wrong.
Wrong, uneven, incorrect, disturbed, inexact-
If only Monika were here.
He has no idea how long he sat there, unsure of reality, unaware of what he was breaking down over. Slowly, he returns from his sobbing state and blackened mind. All he knows is that something's different. He doesn’t know it’s almost been an hour, a unit of time pushing farther into the night he shouldn’t be in.
Marius then notices that something is on him and flinches, trying to knock it off. It’s hugging his back and wrapping around his arms, capturing him in some warm and unknown shape. It’s unbearably warm, but he doesn’t realize that.
He does eventually figure out it’s a jacket. Fuze’s jacket.
“Marius?”
He finally hears the other man in the room again after many futile attempts to get Marius’s attention during his breakdown. They look at each other, sitting a few feet away on their own stools. On the table, Marius’s numb fingers drum repetitively, unknowingly, the tapping calming.
The two of them, on any other normal (well, whatever it is Marius considers normal) day, would sometimes make food in the canteen, work in the workshop, or just talk every once in a while during training. Marius definitely considers Fuze to be close, someone he trusts.
The amount of casual talk rather than topics that interest Marius is pretty low between them, but even though the meaning behind those smiles are unclear, Marius believes that those mean something good at the very least. Hopefully he’s right, seeing as the only other people who get such a pretty feature from the seemingly phlegmatic Uzbek are his Spetsnaz comrades.
Marius’s mind and body do two different things, as he knows, so when he feels something else towards Shuhrat rather than what he thinks , Marius isn’t exactly surprised.
The other’s jacket that is currently wrapped around him also makes him hope that Fuze really does like him, and is not pitying him. He’d learned from Dominic, pity is a shitty concept.
“Are you alright?” Shuhrat asks just slow enough for Marius to comprehend without much thought. The answer, however, is harder to conjure.
The German looks down at the cemented floor, oblivious and still a bit shaky, but it seems that Fuze’s being here is somehow… calming? His mind, like an anachronistic computer (it would take him forever to understand that simile if he were to hear it), processes the question gradually. Why is it so hard to understand feelings?
Because that’s just how he was 'programmed'.
After a while, which probably makes Fuze feel like he didn’t hear him, Marius answers with a small, “Ja.” The word feels extremely wrong on his tongue and it makes him grimace.
Fuze, with those bright brown eyes, stares at him for a while. Marius isn’t sure if it’s meant to be cold or not, especially when he repeats Marius’s answer with some odd tone. Then, “Try again, do’stim….”
It’s like he’s standing at a fork in the road (not that he would think of it like that) where he has no idea which way he should go. Marius wouldn’t even be able to know where which road led to, due to his mind wiping the white printed words off of the road signs.
Jäger blinks owlishly at Shuhrat before scowling.
Could you imagine having a child that refused to look you in the eyes, refused to speak, refused to love you like a normal child should?
His uncle loved him regardless, but that still didn’t keep him and his uncle from hearing the whispers, even if they didn’t register at first to the young Marius.
Schande über ein solches Kind.
Scheiße
Fuze’s jacket presses against him, overheating him, but he can’t move to take it off. The pressure, in a way, keeps him grounded.
“No?” Marius says, still unsure. The Uzbek sighs, looking away.
“Did what you just” he uselessly flops his hand around in the air, clearly the answer on how to deal with this situation unbeknownst to him, “have to do with the mission?”
Why is it so hard to answer? Why is everything so wrong? He knows this answer, at least.
Eventually, Marius nods, thinking of Monika and Seamus, their lives being broadcasted on medical screens in Spain.
“And why did you do that?” Jäger doesn’t realize that, if they were here, the other Spetz would have scolded Fuze. Tachanka would’ve smacked him lightly upside the head. Fuze visibly cringes after questioning, but the German is left confused at the question.
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
“I’m just worried.”
“Over dramatic,” he scoffs. Marius watches Shuhrat’s eyes fall onto Marius’ own hands, his bushy eyebrows raising as the fingers of the German’s right hand orderly drum against the bench surface. He follows the Uzbek’s gaze, only to find that the underside of his hands are red and three fading puncture marks sit in each palm.
During his meltdown, he had curled his hands into fists, his nails biting into the skin, and then hit himself in his improperly working head repeatedly. In fear, Fuze had given him space after getting the jacket on him, not attempting to stop him. Jäger didn’t need to know that, though.
Growing up, he usually threw his head against the closest surface, scratched himself, bit himself, and did many other things when melting down, his uncle unable to stop him. No matter how much his uncle and therapists tried to help him, Marius never entirely dropped the coping mechanism of leaving self made imprints on his skin. Now though, whenever he breaks down, he at least has Elias, Dominic, and Monika to stop him.
After joining the GSG9 and befriending Bandit (if you could call it that), who at the time hated him on and off, Jäger was able to keep his meltdowns at bay, but soon enough, Dom had experienced one. Marius would like to say it brought them closer together, but with Bandit, Marius has no idea.
The look on Dom’s face when he watched Marius cry and hurt himself, as far as Marius can remember, was, well, terrified . Fortunately, Dom did his best to help him from there and forth. He did, however, threaten Jäger with electric shocks if he were to hurt himself again. It didn’t help.
Dominic had passed all this information onto Elias and Monika once they joined them, and from there, whenever Marius has a meltdown, they’re there to keep him safe.
That is, until they have their own demons to deal with.
Marius, slouching forward on his stool, blinks down at his hands, curling his fingers inward and putting his nails in place with the red nail marks. “It happens.”
“I’ve never seen you do this before.” Fuze crosses his arms and narrows his eyes at Jäger, and with how much Monika did ( does ) it when she thinks him and his German brothers do something troublesome, he recognizes it as suspicion.
“I do it… every once in a while. Habits, you know.”
Fuze grunts. “Do you think I’m that stupid?” It’s rhetorical, but that’s unknown to the German.
Marius shakes his head, rubbing his hands over his pants. The jacket, which has the cuffs rubbing against his wrists annoyingly, however, is making him a bit too hot in the stuffy workshop. He still doesn’t take it off.
“Marius,” The Spetz says, maybe in a bored way? It only confuses Marius all the more. Then, when he moves to get up from his stool and take a step, the Uzbek barks at him to stop.
Only then does Marius notice the nails and ADS scrap scattered around his feet.
“Watch where you step, we don’t need you getting hurt at this hour. Doc isn’t awake for once .”
“I don’t need your babying, Shuhrat,” Marius scoffs, eyeing the nails his feet were close to stepping on. The pieces of iron, sharpened, pointed, and ridged, some standing up and some on their sides, illuminate the little light from the lamp. They look up at him, somewhat daring him to step. He doesn’t though. Marius stands, staring at them, waiting.
“Marius, you’re an intelligent man, so why do you act as if you’re not?” Has his voice risen?
“Maybe that’s just the way I am,” the German mumbles. “Why are you here again? You should be sleeping.”
“I could ask you the same thing, but, to answer you, someone has to make sure you don’t kill yourself on accident. Like now.” Shuhrat’s tone can be compared to the one Dominic has when he says something sarcastic, which Jäger is sure to be used to. Surely, the other must be annoyed.
Marius finally moves, avoiding the nails below his vulnerable feet. He grabs the toppled over box and starts to pick the iron points up, but as he does, he can feel Shuhrat’s eyes on him.
Soon enough, the other is crouching down next to him, doing the same. In silence, together, they collect the nails.
It's a constant occurrence.
Once all the nails are finally put back into the box, the cut wires and metal from the Magpie put into a spare box, Marius stands and puts it onto a shelf. Then, disregarding Shuhrat’s obviously watching eyes, he heads over to his bench and cleans up. When finished, he grabs his phone, and then reaches out for the lamp. As he does, Shuhrat turns on the room lights, momentarily blinding them both, before Jäger turns off the lamp light.
After they both leave the room, the Spetz turns off the room’s light again, and walks down the dark halls with the German.
“You don’t have to do this every time,” Marius whispers, feeling babied, relating back to the many times the other has found him, either asleep or working on his projects late at night in the workshop. Never before, however, has he seen Marius during his meltdowns.
“Ha,” comes the tired response.
They walk the rest of the way to the GSG9 quarters in silence. As they walk into the common room, Shuhrat pauses. “Marius.”
Said man turns back and looks at his silhouette in the dark. “What?”
“They’ll be alright. They’re strong.”
Marius looks at the floor. “Hopefully. Sorry.”
“Yaxshi. My jacket?”
“Oh, ja.” He had forgotten about it, but now that it’s been brought back to conscious thought, he properly feels the overbearing warmth it’s giving him. He starts to shrug it off, his mind focusing too much on how much weight he’s losing, when he hears the other shuffle towards him.
Marius stops what he’s doing, one arm still in a sleeve, before he tries to flinch away from a hand on his chin, but to no avail, it holds. Then, as the hand maneuvers and tilts his head, there are lips on his own.
It’s soft and warm, causing something in him to light up like a firefly in a mason jar, but it doesn’t last long enough. A few seconds after they connect, Shuhrat pulls back a few inches, soft breath blowing against Marius’s face.
“Good night, sevgi.”
As Jäger is left amazed and confused, the rest of the jacket is gently tugged off of him, leaving him feeling too light, and then the other is quick to leave the room, to leave the German alone in the dark, dumbly wondering and sensitive.