Sunday morning finds Gilbert on his couch with Francis's yearbook and a nasty hangover. Yawning ferociously he flips open the book and curls up as he turns to the first page.
The first few pages are all lowerclassmen, and Gilbert smiles when he spots a younger Ludwig staring blankly out at him, blond hair slicked back and mouth set. He still looks just the same. He spots the Italian brothers toward the end of their class, one smiling and looking generally adorable and the other scowling at the camera. Gilbert doesn't remember ever having gone to school with either of them, but they'd traveled in different circles. He can maybe recall a few words about them from Ludwig, but mostly he remembers pushing Lovino around three months ago.
He skips the next class and goes to find his own. Francis on the second page, all charming smile and smart blue eyes with his light hair tied back; Gilbert's a couple pictures over. He'd looked partcularly good that morning, and he'd made the photographer take three pictures just in case he'd blinked in one of them. Antonio is the next page over. He'd still had longer hair then, and Gilbert can remember helping him style it the night prior even though caring about the way one's hair looks is decidedly not awesome. It is a very Francis thing to do, and Gilbert hadn't wanted another Francis. Still doesn't.
Where Roderich's picture was is a solid black square, drawn in Sharpie and scribbled over in pink highlighter for good measure. Gilbert grits his teeth, folds his arms tightly over his chest. And it's a stupid thing, getting worked up over something that happened in high school when it's been years, but it still puts him on edge because he knows the whole thing was his fault. But — but he'll never admit that, and maybe that's why Liz didn't stick around. Didn't even look back.
And Liz's picture is scribbled out, too, and if Gilbert looks close enough he can see where he'd written "WHORE" and scratched it out an instant later (Francis had gotten annoyed with him over that, had emasculated him for marking up his yearbook, especially on Roderich because at the time Francis had rather admired him for whatever reason). Gilbert frowns and tries to rub out the ink on Liz's face; he very nearly rips the page trying to do it. But of course the ink's still there because permanent marker is, as it turns out, actually very permanent. He closes his eyes and slams the book shut, tilts his head back and remembers school and Elizavéta before Roderich.
Or he begins to, but before he can let himself indulge in that he rises abruptly to his feet and storms into the kitchen for a cup of coffee because he can't do this whole remembering thing — not quite yet, anyway. Instead he grabs his artpad and his set of paints, pulls on a light jacket, and heads outside (and Arthur finally comes out of hiding with a worse hangover than Gilbert; hadn't come out earlier for fear he'd scare Gilbert to death, or on the other hand be teased in some way about his conduct the night prior. He sits down on the chair with a cup of tea and flips on the television, not knowing Gilbert all that well but thinking that he looks a tiny bit lonely and for some reason that distracts him from the morning news).
When Gilbert arrives at the park he finds that there's someone already occupying his usual bench, someone with long brown hair and downcast eyes, with a cup of hot chocolate in one hand and his cellphone in the other. Sighing, he wordlessly sits beside him and turns his head. The man looks up.
"Oh," he says, blinking a little bit dumbly. Gilbert senses he may have torn him from a daydream of some sort. Francis would have liked to put that expression he's wearing to paper. "Oh. Hello there, I. Hey, um. Wait. You're… Gilbert, aren't you? Gilbert Beilschmidt?" Gilbert nods and opens his mouth to ask how he knows him, but the man continues: "Raivis told me about you. He met you here a while ago, you remember? I'm Toris."
Gilbert does remember, very vaguely. "Oh, you're… You wanted to, ah, commission me or something, right?"
"Yeah, I — " Toris breaks off and digs into his pockets, eventually pulling out a piece of paper which he promptly turns over to Gilbert to look at.
It takes Gilbert a second to realize, so worn and torn is the paper in his hands, that he's holding a photograph. He looks closer; there's a house, a big, old-looking house surrounded by untamed grass. There's a little boy there, violet eyes sparkling as he smiles, caught in the middle of tending to a small bed of sunflowers (and those sunflowers died a week later, but they still exist on photographs). And there's a story behind this photograph, and Gilbert doesn't usually care about this sort of thing but it's sort of touching, in a way. The sort of thing Antonio would write a song about. But it's all so faded, so charred looking. Gilbert glances up at Toris, his question unspoken.
"There was a fire," Toris explains. "It isn't my picture — it's my friend's, he's there." Toris points to the sunny-eyed boy in the photograph. "His flat caught fire last month, and so did his photo album. Most of them burned, but he managed to save this one. Well, sort of. But now this is the last thing he has from his home in Russia, so I was wondering if… if you could maybe paint it?"
"Uh." Gilbert looks from Toris to the photograph, and back again. "I mean, I…"
"I can pay you, of course I plan to," Toris says quickly.
Gilbert waves him away. "No, no, shut up. We'll talk about that later. 'Course I'll do it! And it'll be awesome, I promise. A masterpiece!" He grins, and Toris does too because Gilbert is infectuous and it feels good to smile with him.
"Thank you," Toris says quickly, and the way he says it one would think Gilbert just donated his heart to the bloke. "Really, just. Thank you."
"Ah, it's — don't worry it," Gbert mutters, voice brusque. He can feel his face pinkening a little, because the way Toris is looking at him now is a little bit embarrassing. "Christ, relax. I'm not a saint or anything.
"I know."
Gilbert smiles the whole way home. He hadn't gotten any painting done, but that doesn't even matter. It's kind of nice, doing good things for people that aren't him. Gilbert commits the feeling to memory. This is what normal is, he thinks. It's his second taste of it in two months.
