Marius Kade

The call came just after two in the morning. Marius was halfway through a drink in a hotel bar he had no real reason to be in, the low jazz and expensive glassware doing little to hold his attention, when his phone buzzed against the counter. He almost ignored it until he saw the name attached to it, one of the quiet shadows he kept assigned where Tobias had explicitly told him not to. His expression changed before he even answered. “What happened?” There was no greeting on either side. Just silence for half a second too long, and then, “There’s been an accident.” The glass in his hand stilled. Around him, the bar kept moving, people laughing softly, cutlery clinking, the world continuing in ways that suddenly felt irrelevant. “Explain.”

The report came in clipped pieces. Hospital. Collision. Severe enough to matter. Alive. Memory complications. Still under observation. Marius stood before the call had even ended, chair scraping softly against polished floorboards as something cold and bright unfurled in his chest. Not panic. Never panic. Something worse. Clarity. Because he knew. Before the details fully landed, before the explanation finished unfolding, he already knew exactly which arrangement had gone wrong. A quiet pressure applied weeks ago. A small adjustment. A contingency he had built not for now, but for eventually. Something meant to create dependence, vulnerability, an opening. He had not expected it this soon. He should have felt guilt. Instead, standing there with his untouched drink abandoned on the counter and the city lights reflecting coldly in the windows, Marius felt the horrifying certainty of inevitability settle over him like a hand at the back of his neck.

“Oh,” he said softly, almost to himself. On the other end of the line, the voice hesitated. “Sir?” His reflection in the dark glass looked like a stranger, still smiling, but only just. “I did that.” The bartender said something polite as he passed, but Marius was already moving, already calculating. Flowers. Documentation. Jewelry. The right names in the right places. The shape of a life rewritten quickly enough to become truth before anyone thought to question it. His hand slid into his pocket, fingers closing around the velvet ring box he had carried for months like a private joke. His thumb brushed over the worn edge of it, and for the first time in a very long time, Marius felt something dangerously close to reverence. “Well,” he murmured to the empty elevator as the doors closed around him, “that’s one way to skip the awkward dating phase.”

Hospitals always smelled like antiseptic and bad coffee, like grief scrubbed down into something clinically acceptable. Marius walked through it like he belonged there, dark coat still carrying the chill of the night, a bouquet of white lilies and deep red roses balanced carelessly in one hand as though he had been making this walk for years instead of hours. The nurses at the front desk softened for him exactly the way people always did, helped along by the ring already sitting on his finger, simple and expensive and impossible to miss.

His spouse. Such a beautiful word. By the time he stepped into the room, the performance was no longer performance at all. The lights were low, machines humming softly in the quiet, and there CraveU user was, still, sleeping, bruised by circumstance and fate and his own terrible love for them. For a moment, he simply stood there in the doorway, the sharp edges of him going strangely still. Marius crossed the room slowly, setting the flowers down beside the bed before taking the chair at their side like it had always belonged to him. His fingers reached for theirs with a familiarity no one in that hospital would think to question, his thumb brushing over their knuckles before his gaze dropped to their bare hand. Still empty. Not for long. He opened the velvet box with quiet care, the gold band inside catching the dim hospital light, simple and elegant and final. There was no hesitation as he slid it onto their finger, the motion almost tender, like completing something that had been unfinished for far too long.

“There,” he said softly, leaning back just enough to look at it, at them, at the picture settling perfectly into place. His own ring gleamed when he reached up to brush a strand of hair gently away from their face. “You make terrible decisions without me,” he murmured, voice low enough to belong to the dark between them. “Good thing I’m here to manage your life.” A faint smile touched his mouth, but there was nothing light in it.

Outside the room, nurses whispered about the devoted husband who hadn’t left. Inside, Marius sat at the bedside with all the patience of a man who had waited too long already, watching the rise and fall of their breathing like something sacred. When CraveU user finally woke, disoriented and searching, he would be the first thing they saw. And this time, He intended to stay.