Chapter 512: Ten More Minutes

The car dropped them two blocks out, the way it always did for events with this much security, and by the time Franz and Arianne reached the carpet the flashes had already found them twice. Daryll met them at the second checkpoint, said something into his earpiece about photographers wanting the couple shot before the solo ones, and disappeared the moment his job for that particular minute was finished.

A reporter with a handheld microphone caught him three steps later, asking how it felt to be nominated for his first film role after years of television, and whether it was true he was expecting a big night. Franz gave her the answer he’d given a dozen reporters that same week, warm and short and entirely beside the actual point. "I’m glad to be here with good people." Nothing about the accident. Nothing about the six months nobody outside his own family had been allowed to ask about directly. Arianne stood beside him through all of it, her hand in his, offering nothing more than a practiced smile that gave the cameras exactly as much as they were owed and not a word more.

Their seats were four rows back from the stage, close enough that Franz could see the rehearsed calm on every other nominee’s face in the row ahead of him. Vincent and Amanda sat directly behind, Amanda already dabbing at her eyes over nothing yet worth crying about. Arianne sat beside him in a dress the color of the inside of an oyster shell, the same eternity band on her hand that had been on it for years now, matching the one on his.

The last time Franz had worn a tuxedo to something like this, he’d already been married to her, if only the two of them and a small handful of people had known it at the time. The twins had been the only children in either of their lives back then, Lexx not yet a plan they’d said out loud to anyone.

He’d won for a medical drama nobody had expected much from, a television thing called The Second Cut, and he’d stood at a podium like this one and said her name in front of a room that hadn’t fully understood yet what she was to him. He’d added something else that night too, something he still hadn’t entirely forgiven himself for saying so carelessly in public — that he’d loved her since he was eight years old, delivered vague enough that half the room decided it was a figure of speech.

Back to his seat after, with no cameras left pointed at either of them, he’d told her the rest of it plainly. I love you. I’ve loved you my whole life. She’d held on to him longer than the moment strictly required, and he remembered that better than he remembered the trophy. Two children later, a coma he’d nearly not woken from, a full retirement he’d finally made official instead of only talked about, and they’d ended up back in a room exactly like this one anyway, matching bands still on both their hands, the same orchestra somewhere warming up for the same kind of applause.

"Are you going to be sick?" Arianne asked, not looking away from the stage.

"I’m considering it."

"Anton told half the reception you were winning. Loudly."

"Anton’s wrong as often as he’s right."

"He’s not wrong about this one. He directed it." She glanced down at her phone, screen dimmed low against the dark of the theater. "Aunt Estella says Louis is asleep. Lexx has renamed himself in charge of the remote controls again, and Leo wants it on record that if you win, you’re required to thank the movie itself and not only the people who made it."

"Thank the movie."

"His words. He says it deserves credit too."

Franz laughed under his breath, low enough not to draw attention from the row ahead, and something in his chest that had been coiled since the red carpet loosened enough to let air back into it properly. He didn’t get the chance to answer. The category came up, a presenter he half recognized reading names off a card in the particular cadence built for cameras, and Franz heard his own name — his only name, the one on every poster and every interview and the one the room had spent the last thirty seconds convincing itself was about to win — read out over a swell of orchestral music that meant the decision had already been made somewhere he hadn’t been present for.

He didn’t remember standing up so much as he remembered Arianne’s hand letting go of his, timed exactly, the way she did most things, like she’d already decided how long to hold on and when to release him so he’d have both hands free for the walk. The aisle felt longer than it looked from a seated angle. He took the stairs without stumbling, and the trophy’s weight settled into his palm heavier than it ever looked on television.

The room went silent enough for him to hear his own pulse before he spoke.

"Thank you. Give me a second, I didn’t actually write anything down." That got the easy laugh a room like this one always gave a nominee who admitted he’d come unprepared. "This part scared me more than anything I’ve played. A man who doesn’t get to explain himself to anyone watching him, grief that doesn’t resolve into a lesson by the end of the story. I wasn’t sure I could do it justice. There were a few months this year I wasn’t sure I’d get the chance to finish finding out."

He let that sit exactly as long as it needed to and no longer.

"Anton believed in this character’s harder edges before I did, and pushed the part somewhere rougher than I’d have gone alone. Every person in this cast made a scene better than it read on the page walking onto set that morning. That’s the whole job, when it’s working. Somebody hands you an impossible part, and a room full of people spend months making it possible together. Twelve years, and this was the best room I’ve ever stood in."

He found her in the fourth row without searching for her, the way he always could.

"I stood on a stage like this one once before and said something vague about loving someone since I was eight years old, and let the room decide what that meant. I’m still not explaining it tonight either. She already knows." He looked down at the trophy, then back up. "This is the bonus. The real one already happened months ago, at home, and it didn’t need an envelope to make it real. This is my last one — I’ve meant that for a while, not only as a line for tonight. Thank you for the years. All of them."

He left the stage to applause loud enough to follow him halfway down the aisle, and found his seat again before it had fully died down, trophy balanced on his knee, Arianne’s hand already finding his without either of them reaching first.

"You didn’t stumble on the stairs," she said.

"I was concentrating extremely hard on not stumbling on the stairs." 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

"It showed. A little." Her mouth moved, not quite the smile she saved for cameras, something closer to the one she only let him see. "You said this was the last one."

"I meant it."

"Good." She said it plainly, the way she said things she’d already decided didn’t need debating. "I liked the headline better than the bonus anyway."

"I forgot to thank the movie."

"Leo’s going to notice. He keeps a running list now, apparently." She glanced at the trophy on his knee, then back up at him. "You have time to fix it before the after-party interviews. I’d start rehearsing an apology to a film that can’t hear you."

"Between Storms," Franz said, with what he hoped passed for real solemnity, "I’m sorry. You did all the work. I only stood in front of the camera."

"Better. Leo will accept that."

The ceremony ran another forty minutes past his category, and by the time the credits rolled and the room broke into its slow, glittering exit toward the after-party, Anton had already found them in the crush of the aisle, gripping Franz’s shoulder hard enough to leave an ache and talking over three other conversations at once about the festival cut and the reshoot week and how none of it would have landed without him. Franz thanked him and meant it, though he’d have been hard-pressed to repeat a single word of it five minutes later.

Vincent and Amanda were waiting for them a few steps further on. His mother didn’t say anything at all, only took his face in both hands the way she had since he was small enough for it to be the whole of a conversation, and his father settled for a hand on the back of his neck and a single "Proud of you, son," delivered in the same tone Vincent used for board approvals, which was as close to overcome as Vincent Rochefort ever let himself get in public.

"They’ll want a photo of both of us," Arianne said, once his parents had been pulled away by someone with a clipboard. "Together, holding it, looking appropriately thrilled."

"I am appropriately thrilled."

"You look like a man doing math." She reached up and fixed the same half-inch of bow tie she’d already fixed once tonight, an excuse more than a correction, and Franz let her take it anyway. "Ten more minutes for the photo. Then home."

"Ten minutes," he agreed, and thought that if this was the last time he stood in a room like this one, it was exactly the kind of last time worth having.