summerdude | What's In An Unknowable Birthday? I Guess We'll Find Out!

As luck would have it, they don't encounter one another in a room at all. Grantaire turns the corner into the hallway where Magnus's search has currently taken him. "Oh, hello!"

"Dude," says Magnus, drawing to a stop and with no small amount of relief. "Help me, Obi-wan-Grantairebi, you're my only ho...pe. Hope."

"That has the sound of a reference to something I have never heard of, but that doesn't matter. What do you need?"

"Okay, my first thing is that you need to look up Star Wars. There's about a million novelizations; the library probably has 'em." Magnus glances around, then tucks into a nearby room, gesturing for Grantaire to follow. "Can you paint without visual references?"

He follows Magnus into the room. "I can, yes. It's easier with them, but without is certainly possible. Do you need something painted?"

"Yeah." Magnus closes the door behind them. He doesn't think Sunny will emerge from the woodwork with opinions, but stranger things have happened, and he wants to hedge his bets. "Sunny's family."

His eyes widen just a bit. "Oh! Yes, certainly. Do you know what they look like?"

"I have, like. Some descriptions and some guesses."

"I'll do my best with them, at the least."

Magnus unloads his pad of construction paper. "Okay," he says. "Um, how should we do this?"

"I think we should go one person at a time. You'll describe them and I'll sketch according to your description, which we can alter as needed until you're happy with each of them, and I can paint based on the sketches."

"Yeah, that sounds good." Magnus glances around the room, which upon closer inspection seems to stocked identically to a storefront of a candy shop that makes saltwater taffy. "Um. Where should we do this?"

"We could go to the café, I suppose. Or my room if you don't mind a mess."

"Dude, I live outside in the woods," says Magnus, who actually does mind a mess, but it's fine as long as it's not his own room or he is, at least, not trying to sleep there. "Either place is good."

"Café, then. For the snacks."

"Heck yeah." Magnus opens the door again. "Lead on."

"But of course!" He heads through the hallways to the café.

When they get there, Magnus grabs a cookie and pulls out a chair, sitting on it backwards so that its back is pressed against his front. Then he leans forward, balancing on two of its legs. "Right," he says. "She remembers her siblings better than her parents."

Grantaire grabs a couple macarons and grabs some pencils where he had stowed them on a bookshelf before sitting. "All right. We should start with them, then."

"Violet's the oldest. She has brown hair that she ties up when she's inventing something."

Grantaire nods, taking a sheet of construction paper and writing 'Violet' in the top corner. "So reasonably long hair, I assume, then?"

Magnus passes over a sheet with his own shoddy attempt at drawing Violet. As with all art he puts a great deal of effort into, it looks a lot like his thirteen-year-old efforts to draw manga characters on his school notes... but it's a start! "It's about down to, um, here," he says, casting his mind over the illustrations he only vaguely remembers from the books and then tapping a spot on his arm. "And she has bangs."

"All right," he says with another nod, beginning to sketch something based on Magnus's drawing, except with a bit more realism.

"The ribbon is... purple, I think? And her eyes are brown."

Thankfully, some of the pencils he had grabbed are colored ones. He promptly shades the appropriate parts.

"Her hair is brown, too. Did I already say that? It's a little wavy but mostly straight."

"Dark brown or lighter brown?"

"Sunny just said brown. Maaaaaybe dark?"

"All right. We'll try dark to start off with."

"And she likes overalls."

He glances up at Magnus, brow furrowed. "Overalls?"

Magnus blinks. "Like," he says, and gestures in a way that -- to someone familiar with them -- would indicate running a hand up and down the straps. "Overalls?"

He shakes his head, clueless. "Do you think you can find some?"

"Galahad wears them all the time?"

Grantaire thinks over what he's seen Galahad wearing that might possibly match Magnus's gestures. "Ah! The denim garment with the straps on the shoulders?"

"Yeah! That guy."

He nods and loosely sketches some, intending to try to have his closet produce some for a better reference later.

"Wispy bangs. Long-ish, enough that the ribbon can hold 'em back."

Grantaire sketches the bangs in lightly. "Keeps them out of her face when needed, then."

"Yeah, you got it." Magnus sighs. "This would be so much easier if I'd ever seen her before."

"That does usually help some," he says with a shrug, "but I think Sunny will appreciate your efforts regardless."

"Yeah! I just hope it's, like, accurate enough," Magnus says, and then grimaces. "Um, I don't mean your work. I mean my understanding of how her family looks."

"The virtue is in the attempt. And I give you full leave to blame any inaccuracies on me regardless."

"No," says Magnus, who has found another situation totally outside of his control that he can twist into a thing that he wants to be perfect for someone he loves (Sunny missing her siblings), and who will be tying himself into knots about this for the foreseeable future. "I won't be blaming you."

"It's hardly a requirement," he says as he sketches. "I just offer the option. In the end, though, it will be as good as we can make it, at least."

"Yeah," with a shaky smile. "Okay. What else do you need to know?"

"What color are her eyes?"

"Brown," Magnus repeats dutifully.

"All right. Do you happen to know any particulars about the shape of her face, or if she has freckles or the like?"

Magnus makes a face. "Not... really? I think... pointy chin?"

"That's fine." He doodles a few face options to the side, considering.

"Um..... What do heart-shaped faces look like?" He's heard the term somewhere.

"A pointed chin, with the forehead being the widest part of the face."

"Um, try that? That sounds right."

He nods. "All right." He sketches in a heart-shaped face.

Magnus squints, trying to remember the illustrations from books he hasn't read in like eleven years. "Maybe a little, um. Narrower in the cheeks?"

He promptly adjusts the sketch accordingly. "Like that?"

Magnus studies it for a moment. "Yeah," he decides. "Yeah, I think that's, like. Probably in the right direction."

"Wonderful. That's a good foundation to work off of, at least." He grabs another sheet of paper. "Klaus next."

"Glasses," says Magnus immediately. "And also brown hair. Short."

"What shape are the glasses?"

"...round, I think?" Magnus says. "Sorry. This is all, like, really vague."

"Vague is better than nothing. If not for vague, it would be a matter of inventing what they might look like wholecloth, which I could certainly do, but the accuracy would suffer."

"Thanks," Magnus says. "I mean, really, thank you. I really appreciate your help with this." (Has Sunny talked to Magnus at length about how Grantaire is sooo helpful? Almost certainly!)

He absently waves his hand, pencil and all. "It's fine. You had a good idea so I'm assisting with it."

"Sunny was right," Magnus adds, with a shit-eating grin. "You're very helpful."

"My reputation is in shambles," he says dryly as he returns to his sketching.

"Oh, probably. She tells everyone about it." So what if most people don't understand that's what she's saying?

"Clearly I should be more difficult to balance it out," he says, not that it actually stops him from working on his sketch.

"Why do you want people think that you're not helpful?" Magnus remembers, as he asks the question, that he also has a rough sketch of Klaus, too, so he starts rummaging for it. "Is it like a pressure-reduction thing?"

"Something like that, I suppose. If people think I'm generally helpful, it's a disappointment when I'm not."

Magnus blinks, considering this, then shakes his head. "Yeah. I don't get it."

He looks up and shoots Magnus a grin. "I am frequently unfathomable."

"No, I mean, like. Everyone gets that one guy can't be helpful all the time in, like, all settings." Unless, of course, the guy in question is Magnus, in which case it's illegal to be unhelpful.

"Possibly. But I still prefer it when the moments I am are a pleasant surprise."

"Well, in that case, I have some bad news for you, dude."

"So I'm learning. My burden to bear, I suppose."

"Well, hey," says Magnus, encouragingly. "Sometimes actually consistency is unpredictable. You know?"

Grantaire lets out a short burst of laughter. "I suppose you're not wrong. The number of people who would have ever predicted I'd attain some consistency is undoubtedly minuscule."

"That's so sad, though," sighs Magnus. "You, like. Get that that's sad, right?"

He shrugs, a wry smile flitting across his face. "Fitting, I suppose." He knows, at least, that he's not from a book titled Les Heureux. "Would you believe me if I said this is an improvement?"

"How so?"

"I assure you that however sad you think it is, I was at least ten times worse in Paris."

"Worse how?"

"I'd tell you to ask Enjolras, but I think there is a chance of misinterpretation there. At home, I could barely help reinforcing my reputation as an annoyance. An amiable one, to be sure, but an annoyance nonetheless. It was really only the amiability that made me not completely intolerable to be around."

"What, were you, like, trying to avoid the mortifying ordeal of being known or something?"

"That's certainly evocative phrasing. No, I just... couldn't help myself, really."

"Why not?"

"I have no idea. I assure you, there are much more important things to think about at any given moment than why I'm being foolish."

"See, me, I hate assholes," Magnus says. "Especially ones with more money than manners and sense. So that's why I was a foolish annoyance to, um. Certain people back home."

"Whereas most of the people I annoyed, I liked."

"Huh."

"Yes, exactly."

"Is it fun? For you? To be annoying?"

"That's not exactly how I'd put it. At least not all the time."

"Then how would you put it?"

"I'm terrible at shutting up."

"Whoa," says Magnus, now with his trademark shit-eating grin. "So you like talking to your friends? Huge if true."

He laughs a little. "To, with, around, over, near, against, for, any conjunction you can conceive of."

"And you call that annoying? Maybe they're just weak."

He shrugs. "Maybe they were. Or maybe I was singular."

"Do you talk a lot less now or something?"

"There isn't generally quite as much going on around me that I have to talk over here."

"...what did you use to try and talk over?"

"Everyone else's conversations. At the same time."

"So are you saying that you're more... heard... here?"

"By virtue of it being quieter here."

"Huh."

"I am well-suited for speaking over six different conversations at once."

"So what you're saying is you're a walking, talking episode of M*A*S*H."

"I'll have to trust your judgment on that because I have no idea what it means."

"They all talk over each other." Surely this is the only context Grantaire needs!

"That sounds right, then." A beat. "Who are they?"

"Oh. I think they're all, like, maybe Vietnam War doctors?" In Magnus's defense, he saw M*A*S*H once, when he was ten. Courtesy of one of his mom's boyfriends.

"All... right. Now...take two steps back and pretend you're explaining this to someone who was born in 1805."

"Okay. You know what war is?"

"Yes, I know what war is. France was at war until I was ten."

"And I bet a bunch of people have told you about tv... do you know about doctors?"

"Yes. We had friends studying to be doctors. ... And you bet a bunch of people have told me about what?"

"TV? Television. Movies? Film? Moving picture shows?"

"Ah, yes! I do think I've heard a bit about those. So that's what this is?"

"Yeah. It's a movie and a TV show about doctors in the Vietnam War. Everyone talks a lot all over each other." It's no longer a funny joke; Magnus has explained it to death.

"In that case, yes. Just like that!"

Magnus considers this, then gives a slow nod. "Impressive."

"Why thank you," he says brightly.

"So your reputation here is super different," Magnus says. "Does that bother you?"

"It's... kind of strange, honestly. Not in an awful way, but... Actually, since you clearly can look at a different angle than I can, what would you say my reputation here is?"

"Helpful. Fun." Magnus runs through everything he knows about Grantaire which, because he's Galahad's best friend, is a good amount, but because he's not given to the rigorous analytical social assessment other residents embrace, is also not very much. "Boyfriends Georg?"

He can't help but look amused. "Boyfriends Georg?"

"It's a reference. To Spiders Georg. It's a meme." He quotes, "'Average person eats three spiders a year' factoid is just a statistical error. Average person eats zero spiders a year. Spiders Georg, who lives in a cave and eats over ten thousand each day, is an outlier and should not have been counted.' So I'm saying, like, Boyfriends Grantaire Lastname, who lives in a weird mansion and has ten thousand boyfriends, is an outlier----"

He laughs. "I like it. Even if it's a bit hyperbolic. Oh, and Grantaire is my last name."

"Huh," says Magnus, thoughtfully. "Okay, Spiders. Good to know."

"That will work. Or wouldn't it be Boyfriends? It's Étienne, though, to be technically accurate."

"Étienne?" Magnus says, and then his eyes grow wider. "Uncle D's mystery Étienne????"

"Oh, am I a mystery now?"

"I just thought Étienne was some guy he knew back home," Magnus admits. "What does it mean?"

"Crown or wreath. Same root as the name Stephen?"

"Your name," says Magnus, with mounting delight, "is Steve?????"

He laughs. "I suppose?"

"Whoa...." It's safe to say Magnus's mind is blown. "You definitely don't have Steve vibes."

"How would you define Steve vibes?"

"Like..." Magnus considers the question seriously. "Steve-y?"

"I am trying to envision what Steve-y would entail. Since it wouldn't be like me, I hypothesize... somber? No tolerance for foolishness?"

"No, that's not it at all. The Steves of the world are like the Eriks of Valhalla, I think." This would make perfect sense to Alex!

"Oh, like the Eriks, of course."

"They're everywhere, and you can usually tell when you're looking at one even though they're almost nothing alike," Magnus nods.

"They just have an Erikesque manner?"

"It's a vibe. And Steves have a Stevesque one."

"But I don't have a Stevesque vibe?"

"Maybe you do but I gotta think about it," Magnus decides. "This took me by surprise. It's not a loud Steve vibe. If you have one."

"Perhaps it's a slightly different shade of a Steve vibe that you're not accustomed to as you haven't met particularly many Étiennes before."

Magnus brightens. "Maybe!" he says, and leans forward. Back to the main task at hand! "So, like, there are these website photo editor thingies from my childhood where you could put in two pictures and see what their baby might look at. Do you think you could guesstimate what Sunny's parents might have looked like based on Violet, Klaus, and Sunny herself? ...she doesn't really remember them anymore, and I don't really remember if it was mentioned in, like. The books."

He frowns. "I could try, but there's no real way to tell what feature may have come from which parent, so it could end up a jumble that looks not at all close to them."

"Yeah, but like..." Magnus makes a face. "We have no way of knowing for sure one way or the other, so... probably it's fine?"

"Maybe so. Still, though, I'd start with just the portraits of Violet and Klaus, and if Sunny wants one of her parents after that, we can go from there."

"She wants one."

He nods. "All right then. I'll do what I can."

"Brown hair, like all their kids. I think her mom was supposed to be, like, really pretty?"

"That stands to reason, of course, to have had a hand in Sunny."

"And I think she wore... dresses...?"

"I'm guessing dresses from Sunny's time and not mine. I'd need to do more research there."

"I don't actually know what time Sunny is from," says Magnus, thoughtfully. "It's very... unspecific."

"That... adds an interesting wrinkle."

"But you could probably just do, like, a dress-shaped dress."

He arches an eyebrow, grabs another sheet of paper, and promptly sketches a dress-shaped dress.

Magnus blinks. "How does that stay on?"

"Buttons in the back. They weren't really loose enough to just fall off."

Magnus nods once, slowly. "Can I have that drawing?" he asks. "I think Alex would get a real kick out of having one of these."

He slides it over. "Certainly. Of course, it's not going to be perfectly accurate, as it's just a sketch to capture the vibe of my time's dresses."

"Yeah, yeah, I know the drill," Magnus says. He squints at Grantaire. "Don't worry," he guesses. "I'll try not to accuse you of being perfect?"

He waves a hand. "That's hyperbolic enough that it's fine. Just don't earnestly accuse me of being perfect."

"Oh, so I can say things as long as I don't mean them?"

"I do have a feeling that this is going to be twisted on me masterfully at some point, but I'm curious enough as to how that I will say yes and observe from there."

"You're not helpful at all," Magnus says, promptly. "You're very unpredictable in your contributions to this place. You're boring."

See, he is an oracle. "I'm unpredictable sometimes!"

"Okay," Magnus says, in excessively conciliatory tones.

He promptly grabs another piece of paper, tears off a corner, and pops it in his mouth.

Magnus cracks up. "Dude, you're gonna have to do a lot better than that," he says. "I hang out with Sunny, like, every single day. She's always putting stuff in her mouth."

"I don't doubt that at all," he says as he chews on the paper, "but things that are predictable for a delightful mademoiselle of Sunny's age might not necessarily be so for an adult."

"I guess it depends on the adult," says Magnus, diplomatically. "And also the broader collection of adults you also know. And also everyone else you spend time with."

"So basically, somehow still utterly unsurprising from me."

"Yeah. You've leaned too hard into being unpredictable, which means that anything that could be surprising won't be."

"Oh, no. Have I been the instrument of my own downfall?"

Magnus gives Grantaire his trademark shit-eating grin. "'Fraid so, buddy."

"Whatever shall I do. Do I need to become dull in order to reset expectations?"

"Or you could embrace the mortifying ordeal of being known."

"That is certainly an option."

Magnus grins at him. "All that aside," he says. "Klaus has a rounder chin and Violet has a more pointy one, I think."

"Thank you very much." He returns to his sketches.

"And he has, like. I think maybe a cowlick?"

Grantaire nods. "Rounder face, cowlick..."

"He likes wearing blue. Navy blue. Jackets and sweaters, with... I think maybe red bow ties?"

"Blue and red. Very nice classic colors."

"He's twelve. Violet is fourteen." They're both so, so young. Obviously Sunny is extremely young, but... Magnus was fourteen when he had to go on the run. He empathizes, that's all.

"I see." Violet is about as much older than Sunny as Grantaire is than his own sister, then. He purses his lips slightly as he continues refining his drawings.

"Um. Klaus likes reading?"

"Do you suppose I should give him a book in the portrait, then?"

"Yeah, I think Sunny would like that. Violet doesn't hold stuff when she's inventing things, it's just the hair ribbon. But the hair ribbon and Klaus's book... they both show off their skills and interests. Like," proudly, "how Sunny's is biting."

Grantaire laughs. "An excellent skill for the discerning young mademoiselle."

"Could you do, like, individual portraits and then one family painting? And in the family painting, you emphasize her teeth?" Magnus hesitates. "Or is that too much?"

Edited 2024-09-15 16:59 (UTC)

"I could do that!" He glances over at Magnus. "Maybe the individual portraits first, though, so if there's anything she thinks should be different, I can change it for the family portrait."

"Yeah," says Magnus, with a happy sort of smile. "That would be great, actually."

"It's resolved, then. How big do you think they should be?"

"Bigger than, like, a sheet of paper. Not so big that they can't fit in, like... a hypothetical wall. Of a hypothetical room. In a hypothetical cottage that might hypothetically have other hypothetical art in it."

He holds up his hands, using his thumbs and index fingers to show off about a 16"x20" area. "Like that, or so?"

Magnus squints, then nods. "Yeah," he says. "I think that would be good." He pauses. "And, like, keep the hypotheticals to yourself, maybe? I need to hypothetically talk to some hypothetically-relevant hypothetical people about it. Hypothetically. For Sunny."

"If, hypothetically, I had anything to talk about, I can't even think about who I'd say it to. Hypothetically."

"Okay. Cool." Magnus nudges Grantaire. "Really, dude. Thanks."

"It's no trouble. I'll do the best I can."

"Is there anything else I can tell you to help?"

"At the moment, I think I have everything I need to make a decent start. If you find out any more information, though, let me know. I can tweak things for quite some time."

"Dude, I hate to say this to you, but: I appreciate you," Magnus says, holding out his hand for a high five.

"Yes, yes, all right." He promptly gives Magnus a high five.

What's In An Unknowable Birthday? I Guess We'll Find Out!

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