Invictus

Team Work

Magnus arrived early on Monday and parked his bike in front of his shop, rummaging in his pockets to find his keys.

His morning went by like it always did. He opened the shop and turned on the lights. He then walked to the break room to put the coffee machine on. By the time the jar was filled with the brown liquid, cramming the room with its rich smell, Simon, Clary and Maia had arrived. He drank his coffee and conversed with them like he always did, laughing at Clary’s tale of how hard her taxi driver had stared at her on her drive back to her place on Saturday night because Simon kept texting her ridiculous pictures of various drawings he wanted her to tattoo him since Magnus was “being fucking reasonable for once in his life”.

When coffee had been drunk and laughter had been shared, Simon handed out their schedule for the day and Magnus’ first appointment arrived soon after. He only had two customers that morning, but there were both requiring long and meticulous work, so he barely had the time to catch a break.

Simon got him a sandwich from Wanda’s bakery for lunch - accompanied with a note that said “you can pay me back later, kochanie, or you can just stop wearing a shirt, I can accept that as payment as well”. Magnus chuckled through a mouthful and walked to the front desk, where Simon was extremely busy playing solitaire on the computer.

“Don’t you have work to do?” he asked, but it held no real guile. “I don’t pay you to play cards.”

“Nope,” Simon replied, the word popping out of his mouth. “You pay me to take your messages, and I’ve got one.”

Intrigued, Magnus leaned on the counter and snapped his fingers in front of Simon’s eyes to divert his attention from the screen.

“Alec came by,” Simon said, and Magnus’ eyes darkened instantly.

“Good for him.”

“He said to tell you he was sorry and that he really wanted to talk to you,” Simon added despite Magnus’ disinterested expression.

“I don’t care,” Magnus replied coldly.

“He also left this for you,” Simon said, producing a yellow rose out of nowhere.

“They’re the ideal flowers for an apology,” Alec had told him once. “They stand for innocence. It’s like saying ‘I’m sorry if I hurt you, I didn’t mean to’, but they also mean you value the person’s friendship, so it can work for both.”

Magnus clenched his teeth and plucked the flower out of Simon’s hand. “What an ass,” he grumbled under his breath, but walked away with the flower between his fingers anyway. “I’ll be in the break room until my next customer shows up.”

Once in the break room, his routine came back easily. He shrugged his shirt off and threw it carelessly on one of the brown-leathered sofas in the room, pushing the coffee table against the wall with his foot. Then, he laid the mat he kept in one of the cupboards on the ground, before sitting down. He closed his eyes and took a series of gentle rounds of breath, letting his whole body relax gradually.

It was something else his mother had taught him when he had learned the art with her. Being a tattoo artist meant he could spent hours bending over and his back suffered from it. To cope with the inevitable ache, Barbara practiced yoga everyday, and just like her passion for inking, she had passed it on to Magnus.

He extended his legs in front of him and bended to touch his nose to his knees. Then, he let his body do the rest, following a routine that he now knew by heart, a succession of poses he had long mastered that always managed to get him rid of the tension in his shoulders and in his lower back.