Thank you to everyone who reviewed this chapter that I couldn't reply to, and thanks again to everyone I did reply to. This fic was meant to be an exaggerated slice-of-life and I'm glad you're all liking that. Please excuse this chapter being so late, I had a lot of things going on.
Exam season madness
The pre exam period had arrived and the anxious energy in the apartment had never been higher. Ludwig barely saw either of his roommates save for when they left their rooms for a bowl of instant noodles or another cup of coffee, a rarity for the outgoing duo by any standards. In fact Ludwig was beginning to feel concerned for both of them; while neither Feliks nor Francis had many exams to sit, they both had essays and assignments due, which they seemed quite stressed out over. Sighing, Ludwig carefully tidied his physics formula sheets and got up from the kitchen table, resolving to make lunch – after all, they could all do with a proper meal. The fridge was decently stocked and Ludwig hummed as he threw out a few items past their use by date before gathering the ingredients he needed. Feliciano had recently taught him a few different ways to make pasta, and he figured it would be the simplest thing to make at the moment. As enough spaghetti for three boiled in a pot, Ludwig chopped up the vegetables in preparation for the sauce, they were out of meat, but the tin of lentils he'd found would have to do. Straining the cooked spaghetti, Ludwig decided to inform his housemates that lunch would soon be ready before he made the sauce. He knocked on Francis' door first but received no answer. Francis' room had been declared off limits to everyone else and Ludwig usually obeyed rules and wishes, but right now he decided making sure the other two ate healthily was more important.
'Francis?' he called as he twisted the knob and slowly pushed the door open, freezing as the smell and sight of the room hit him.
Francis had set up an easel in the middle of the room, and various tubes of paint were strewn around the floor, which explained the decidedly chemical stench of the room. What could not be explained was why Francis was staring at his canvas, mouth open and emitting a low pitched scream.
'Uh okay,' Ludwig said as his eyes darted from Francis to the canvas, to the empty cereal bowl sitting on the desk, to the dirty jar of paintbrushes, to the tubes on the carpet, and back to Francis. 'I was just letting you know that lunch will be ready in about half an hour.'
Francis didn't appear to hear him.
'I'll, umm, leave you to it then,' Ludwig pulled the door shut as carefully as he'd opened it and decided to try his luck with Feliks.
The door to the room he shared with Feliks was slightly ajar, but that wasn't what was amiss, what was odd however, was the lack of loud music emitting from behind the door.
'Feliks?' Ludwig pushed at the door with the tips of his fingers, wondering if the roommate in question was taking a nap.
He was almost right. Feliks laid on the floor beside his bed, surrounded by a sea of fabric scraps, staring vacantly at the ceiling, a pair of fabric scissors grasped limply in his right hand. Behind him, an impressively sequined dress sat semi completed on a mannequin.
'Feliks?' Ludwig called again. 'Are you alright there?'
Feliks seemed to snap out of his trance, dropping the scissors in order to prop himself upright. Then his face contorted into an expression of pain, and too late, Ludwig noticed the dropped box that had spilled pins all over the fabric scraps. Feliks glared at Ludwig and began screeching in a language that definitely wasn't English. Ludwig decided it might be time for him to get back to cooking.
'Umm, I'll just go finish making lunch then,' he said quickly, shutting the door completely as he left.
Eventually the smell of cooking pasta sauce drew the two arts students out of their rooms.
'Mmm, smells good, Ludwig,' Feliks made no sign of having any recollection of their encounter only half an hour ago, aside from occasionally rubbing the small of his back where the pin must have stuck.
'Want me to help out with plating?' Francis asked, in his way of showing he was thankful for the fresh food.
Ludwig and Feliks glanced at his paint stained hands, then at each other.
'I'll do it!' Feliks blurted, rapidly opening the cupboard door the plates were behind.
'Francis, you might want to go wash your hands,' Ludwig suggested as Feliks handed him the plates.
Francis disappeared back into his room and reappeared just as Ludwig finished setting up the table with Feliks' help, hands reeking of turpentine.
'Francis, go wash your hands,' Ludwig groaned as Francis tried to sit down.
'But I just did,' Francis protested.
'I think he meant with water, not turps,' Feliks added helpfully.
'Oh,'
'Don't forget to use soap as well,' Feliks called after him as he made for the bathroom.
'Are you guys alright?' Ludwig asked halfway through the meal, which the other two appeared to be enjoying.
'Completely fine,' Feliks replied noncommittally, waving his hand at Ludwig.
'Same here,' Francis said in a similar tone, concentrating his attention on twirling up a single strand of spaghetti.
'Are you sure?' Ludwig pressed on. 'Because Francis, you were screaming at your canvas when I opened your door, and Feliks, you were lying on the floor staring at the ceiling.'
'He was probably having an "existential crisis" as he waited for the paint to dry,' Feliks snorted with less bite than usual.
'Are you saying you weren't having one in that pigsty you call a workspace as well?' Francis retorted, with more tiredness than acerbity in his tone.
'Hey, I knocked over a box of pins and didn't want to pick it up,'
'Well paint can take a long time to dry,'
'Fair enough,' Feliks spoke as he finished eating and got up to put his plate into the sink, leaving Ludwig baffled at how that hadn't escalated into an argument.
Although he also had exams coming up, Gilbert somehow found the time to call. Granted the calls were a lot shorter than usual and Gilbert was frequently distracted.
'Okay I've got to go soon, I've have a study date to be at in about ten,' Gilbert sighed and Ludwig swore he heard a whispered "I wish it was an actual date" but didn't press the topic. 'But I suggest you try studying with your flatmates. Look, I get that the three of you have completely different subjects, but I study with Arthur a lot, and he's a Lit major. My point is, studying with other people cuts down stress, and from the sounds of what you've been telling me, that's what everyone over on your side needs.'
'Thanks Gilbert, that sounds like a good point. I'll give it a try.'
'When have I ever failed you, little bro?'
Having three people all working at the kitchen table was definitely a little too crowded for comfort, especially as there was respectively a dressmaker's mannequin and easel on either end of the table, but Ludwig was determined to make his brother's suggestion work. Ludwig sat at the middle of the table, pouring over his physics textbook, physics was both his first exam and the one he was the least prepared for. Feliks sat to his right with an array of needles strewn in front of him, humming cheerful sounding tunes as he sewed sequin after sequin onto satiny pale pink fabric with a look of intense concentration on his face, occasionally getting up to hold drape the fabric against the mannequin. On Ludwig's other side, Francis stood in front of his easel, muttering to himself as he added touches of colour to various parts of the canvas. Next to him on the table were a jar of brushes and two mugs; one filled with coffee and the other with water to wash the brushes in.
As space limited as this arrangement was, Ludwig could at least be glad that this allowed him to prevent his roommates from unconsciously doing things that would cause themselves harm.
'Francis,' Ludwig warned as he saw Francis reach for the wrong mug. 'That's your paint water.'
'Ah right, thanks,' Francis muttered distractedly and he put down and picked up the same mug again, eyes never leaving his canvas.
'Francis!' Feliks joined in with a slight eye roll this time, and Francis finally took a look at what he was doing and picked up the right mug.
'Thank you,' he said, looking genuinely grateful after taking a sip.
Ludwig nodded absently and continued reading, hearing Feliks make a noise of acknowledgment from beside him.
Not long afterward Feliks hissed as he pricked his finger, dropping the needle and the fabric he'd been working on to the floor. Ludwig looked over at him in concern, but Feliks merely waved him off, sucking at the droplet of blood that appeared on his index finger. Moments later, just as Ludwig had refocused his attention on a particularly difficult to understand paragraph, Feliks picked up his dropped work and screeched.
'Son of a bitch!'
'Are you okay? I'm not sure if the neighbours heard you.' Francis quipped, paintbrush held poised in hand as he looked over at Feliks.
'The thread fell out and now I'll have to rethread the damn needle,' Feliks growled with frustration, pushing his hair out of his face and rubbing at his eyes.
Francis shrugged and turned away, and Ludwig was about to do the same before he noticed how dangerously close Feliks was holding the needle to his face as he attempted to rethread it. Face scrunched up in angered determination, Feliks held the needle less than an inch away from his eye, tip tilted towards his his.
'Feliks,' Ludwig began, than flinched as Feliks dropped his arms furiously, almost grazing his own face with the needle as he did so.
'What?' snapped Feliks, evidently annoyed at Ludwig's interruption.
'You were holding that needle too close to your eyes. If you want to see the eye more clearly, maybe it would help to thread it by the window?'
Feliks admitted that it was good advice, but grumbled about having to get up all the way to the kitchen window and back.
Everything went smoothly for the next while or so, with the occasional interruption from Francis asking Feliks for his opinion on the painting's colour composition: "It has to be perfect, okay", or from Feliks questioning either of the other two on whether his sequins were sewn on straight: "I can't tell anymore, my eyes are tired". Either way, their working pattern had fallen into a comfortable lull, so Ludwig was surprised when his name was called out as he was reading a rather confound confounding page of his textbook.
'Ludwig... Ludwig.' Ludwig blinked as Francis waved a hand in front of his face. 'You've been staring at that same page for almost fifteen minutes. Are you alright?'
'Yeah, at first I just thought all the pages looked the same, but then I noticed you hadn't turned a page in about ten minutes,' Feliks added, snapping a thread off with his teeth before trimming down the end neatly with a pair of scissors.
'This paragraph just doesn't make any sense,' Ludwig vented, jabbing at the line that was frustrating him, before realising neither of his art student flatmates could help him with this. 'Don't worry, I'm sure I'll figure it out soon.'
Francis peered over his shoulder, craning his neck so he wouldn't have to change his position in front of the easel.
'… "The fact that any two inertial reference frames do not agree on which events are simultaneous will cause the measurement of length to be different in different reference frames"… I have no idea what any of that means.'
Ludwig stared at the page again as he realised what the problem had been.
'Oh, I kept missing the end of that sentence and merging it with the next… Thanks Francis.'
'No problem,' Francis chuckled. 'Maybe you should take a breather and walk around the next time something doesn't make sense. I do that when I can't figure out what my art theory book is trying to tell me.'
'Same, but with history,' Feliks' voice was muffled from the pins he was holding in his mouth as he meticulously pinned the latest piece of sequin covered fabric onto the mannequin.
'Careful you don't swallow any of those,' Ludwig commented, frowning before deciding it might be time to move on to doing another practice exam.
'So how'd it go?' Gilbert asked later that night on the phone.
Ludwig closed the door to his room behind him, prying a needle from a sleeping Feliks' hand as he answered.
'Pretty well actually,' he said as he set the needle down on the desk. 'Thanks for the advice, Gil.'
'Yeah, I'm the best,' Gilbert spoke amidst a yawn.
'I know,' Ludwig replied with a laugh. 'I'm guessing you're about to go to sleep?'
'Yeah, I'd love to talk more, but I have an exam tomorrow morning and I've been up since six today studying. I actually accidentally woke Arthur up and he called me crazy before going back to sleep. Just cos he only has essays to hand in…' his words trailed off into another yawn.
'Good luck with that exam then, my first one's in three days. Goodnight, Gil.'
'Good luck to you too. Night, Lutzi.'
Ludwig was fairly confident with his performance in his first two, and had just short of a week to prepare for his next two. His housemates however, were not doing so well. Francis had a day to finish his "masterpiece" as and hand it in with an essay on his techniques and use of colours and was spending his time between adding minute details to his painting and typing furiously on his laptop, flicking through a texting and copying down choice phrases all the while. Feliks had had to set his dressmaking project aside for the history exam he sat the previous day, and now seemed extremely frazzled, misplacing pins, thread and even entire pieces of fabric all around the apartment.
'That's it!' Ludwig heard Feliks announce and looked up just in time to see Feliks throwing a pin cushion to the ground. 'I going to have to use the sewing machine,'
Ludwig was going to ask Feliks why he hadn't just used the machine from the start, then realised the answer and Feliks hauled a clunky, worse for wear looking sewing machine from his room.
'It's old, but it's still usable,' Feliks huffed as he noticed Ludwig eyeing the machine, sounding more like he was trying to convince himself than anyone else.
If the parts that came loose as Feliks set up the machine wasn't a concern, then the whirring noise when it started up definitely was. Feliks ignored the noise and fed a piece of spare of fabric into the machine, which turned the whirring into a screech as Ludwig watched with horror and Francis looked away from his essay in concern. The fabric tore and Feliks cursed as he adjusted some settings and hit the side of the sewing machine multiple times until it ran without ripping anymore fabric. Feliks then began to work on the actual fabric of his dress, readjusting the setting in intervals so close to each other that Ludwig was worried that Feliks would ruin his own hard work.
At lunch Ludwig offered to try and the sewing machine for Feliks, for the sake of everyone's peace of mind. Feliks squinted at him for a few moments with evident distrust, then sighed as he remembered Ludwig was an engineering major.
'Fine, but be careful.'
After leaving his plate in the sink, Feliks scurried into his room in search of the instruction manual for the sewing machine. Ludwig took this opportunity to make a closer inspection of the machine without Feliks breathing down his neck. Having gotten used to these incidences, Ludwig didn't even flinch as Francis sidled up behind him before speaking.
'I'd really be careful if I were you,' he advised. 'There's a high possibility Feliks will murder you with a pair of rusty scissors if you mess this up for him.'
Ludwig didn't doubt that, but he also had little doubt in his abilities in tinkering with simple machinery; having fixed things for his parents since he was in his early teens.
'I'm sure it won't come to that,' he assured Francis.
'Come to what?' asked Feliks suspiciously, returning from his room with a small booklet in hand.
'Oh nothing,' Francis waved an elegant hand. 'Ludwig is quite right about me being overly worried about my assessments.' With that he winked at Ludwig and hissed "good luck" before returning to his essay.
Over the next hour, Ludwig studied the mechanical diagrams in the instruction manual, before retrieving the toolbox he'd brought from home and dismantling parts of the machinery with expertise. Feliks paced anxiously around him, filling the space with nervous energy. Nevertheless Ludwig ignored him to the best of his ability, concentrating on the job at hand. Clean the rust of that knob. Tighten that screw. Straighten out that bent lever. Some oil would make it run smoother, but not too much or it would soil the threads. Make sure everything looks like it should on the diagram. When he was satisfied with his work, Ludwig handed the machine back to Feliks, who immediately turned it on. The old sewing machine spluttered to life with a loud clank, and Ludwig's stomach dropped as Feliks glared at him and Francis shot him a sympathetic look that he caught in the corner of his eye. Without breaking eye contact Feliks stepped onto the foot pedal, looking pleasantly surprised as the needle moved up down through the scrap fabric without a hitch and much sound. He used the machine down the entire length of the fabric, looking more and more impressed as the stitches continued to appearing smoothly without any need for him to make constant adjustments.
'Thanks Ludwig, I'm definitely going to finishing the assignment soon now. Sorry I doubted you.'
From besides his laptop Francis snorted. Feliks shot him a dirty look, which Francis ignored in favour of making a show of consulting his textbook. Ludwig shook his head but smiled at their antics, picking up his notes from where he'd left them. In just over a week, the exam period would be over, and that, Ludwig thought, would be a relief for all of them.
