Chapter Text
When did we get so fucking old?
It snuck up on Marlon only after Gil started having trouble walking long distances, just a few years ago. Before then, he never thought of them as old men. Slower and more tired men, certainly, but not old.
His age was all over him now, snaking around his legs and crawling up his back, no matter how hard he fought to shake it off. When it got too heavy, he scratched it down in a notebook, a rambling stream of cluttered thoughts and smudged ink. Normally, the pages were for practical notes on monster activity, but he still liked to utilize the loose journaling habit he’d developed in childhood, during times when it was best to keep his mouth shut. It helped, but not enough.
Marlon rarely ventured into town, but when he did, the passage of time was all he could see. People he’d known as children were business owners now, some with adult children of their own. The Mullners’ grandson was grown, and it wouldn’t be much longer before he was older than Clara ever got to be. When Gunther came back to save the museum after his brother dismantled it, Marlon was — very stupidly, he admitted — stunned to see a grown man instead of the teenager he’d met 34 years ago.
Thirty-fucking-four years.
No amount of time could have prepared Marlon for the other ghost who’d recently come back, but he was trying not to think about that.
He focused instead on the smell of last night’s rain, still seeping into the drafty building that morning. Gil slept in, the same way he always did on Saturdays, leaving Marlon to quietly busy himself at the shop counter. He was supposed to be spending his time restoring antique swords. He’d made a couple of good finds, already, on his first round through the newly reopened mines. He wished he’d talked the Joja drones into unsealing the caves sooner; it would’ve been much better for business.
Rasmodius understood that need — as well as the multitude of other needs — and was happy to see the boulder from the “rock slide” get jackhammered away. Lewis, not so much, but he knew there was no changing the wizard’s mind.
With an eerie sense of timing, Lewis came into the Guild office then, wearing the same old affable smile as he dragged Marlon out of his thoughts. “Good morning! Sorry to say it, but I’m here for your tax payment.”
“Oh, I’m sure you’re very broken up,” Marlon said. He slid an envelope across the counter and returned his attention to his notes.
Lewis normally took the money without a word, or maybe with just a comment or two about the weather. No such luck today. “Have you gotten down to the library yet? It’s been so good to have Gunther back.”
Marlon didn’t look up. “No. It’s difficult, you know, with Gil’s bad knees.”
Gunther had come to them instead, on his first night back, to share dinner and catch up on everything he’d missed around town. He was still just as quiet as he’d been in his teens, taking long, slow drags of the atmosphere around him before contributing anything himself. The minute he left, Gil wondered aloud if he may have felt obligated to stop by, and if they might not see him again while he was in town. Marlon shut down the thought, even though he was wondering too.
He was always that quiet, wasn’t he?
“Well, you should pay him a visit,” Lewis said, keeping a professional distance from the counter. “There’s already been some progress made on restoring the museum collection. Who would’ve guessed that the old farm would have any valuables buried under all that mess?”
Marlon took a sharp breath in. After the Guild dissolved, he and Gil spent a lot of evenings at Montgomery Farm, the fields feeling more like home than the houses they grew up in. When Sarah died and a storm destroyed most of the structures on the property, the visits slowed to a trickle, but Roger would still make trips up the mountain to see them. He still had gifts in hand, even though he’d scaled back his work significantly with age. He still had time, until he didn’t. Marlon hadn’t seen the farm since, and didn’t expect to ever see the land in use again. He never imagined that anyone in the family would want it.
He lifted his eye from the page, briefly, like he was firing a warning shot. “You could have warned us about Alice.”
“She looks like Sarah, doesn’t she?” Lewis said, his voice softening, making him sound more like the man he used to be, before his politician’s veneer soaked into his bones. “I was caught off guard too.”
Alice did look like Sarah, on the surface. In her eyes, she was all Roger; a wobblier, younger Roger, but still Roger. When Marlon got over the initial shock, the possibility that she would also share her grandfather’s dedication to keeping the mines safe was the only thing on his mind. Another Guild member, after so many years of the “Guild” being just him and his husband, was a luxury beyond his wildest expectations.
For the first time in a long time, he didn’t want to trust his instincts so easily. There was always the chance that Alice would be too focused on farm work to come back to the caves. Even more likely, and even worse, was that her parents would have filled her head with their own monster concerns. It seemed like they had at first, but the longer Marlon studied her, the more he dared to hope.
He had never been a spiritual person, but Roger was. The old man always held firm that he could never leave Stardew Valley after death, that the place was too important to him in life to let it go. Marlon thought he’d meant it in the abstract sense, the way Yoba types always yammered about returning to nature. Maybe he had. Maybe they were both wrong.
Lewis cleared his throat, uncomfortable in the silence. “Well, I need to be making my way back into town. No time to delay with the Egg Festival this afternoon. Will I see you there?”
“Of course,” Marlon answered. Festivals were the only time he ever deigned to socialize. Sometimes it was pleasant. Evelyn usually tried to make small talk, pointedly ignoring their shared past all the way through. The other longtime Pelican Town residents were friendly, though not as chatty, remembering Marlon as a fixture of their youths. A few other townspeople would spare a moment to exchange hollow pleasantries. He didn’t forge much beyond all of that, having been burned so thoroughly the last time.
Roger and Sarah never stopped calling it what it was, you dense motherfucker.
Lewis left the Guild office with a cheerful, airy goodbye that made Marlon’s eye twitch.
Right on cue, Gil emerged from their apartment on the second floor of the building. He paused on the way to his rocking chair, greeting Marlon with a kiss and taking a moment to assess how irritating the morning had been. “You look like you’ve already been through it.”
Marlon’s hardened heart softened right up, the same way it always did for his husband. “I thought we were done having complicated years,” he sighed.
“Never too old, I guess,” Gil said, caressing Marlon’s cheek. He made his way across the room to ease himself into his chair.
Absently drumming his fingers on the counter, Marlon repeated that theory to himself. “Never too old…”