Title: Sharp Dressed Man
Fandom: The Magnus Archives
Rating: G
Length: 465 words
Content notes: canon-typical bad parenting by Martin's mother
Summary: Before Martin's mum got really sick, back when she still sometimes looked at him without anger or disappointment, he used to do his homework in the living room while she ironed her work blouses and skirts.


Before Martin's mum got really sick, back when she still sometimes looked at him without anger or disappointment, he used to do his homework in the living room while she ironed her work blouses and skirts. She'd have BBC 4 on, or VHS tapes of David Attenborough documentaries -- "Something educational, but not so complicated I can't keep my hands busy," she liked to say. The shush of the iron over fabric, the occasional spit of water, and the loud hiss and gurgle when she stood the iron on end and slipped another neatly pressed blouse onto its hanger were the background noise of his weekends.

When he was eleven, his mum's joints got too bad for her to lift the iron. She was still hanging onto her quality assurance job at the bank like grim death -- "I can work a calculator and a keyboard well enough with my braces, and paper doesn't weigh much," she said -- but Martin could tell going in with wrinkled clothes ate at her pride. So he asked her to show him how to use the iron.

She pressed her lips together and frowned, but in the end one shade of pride won over another, and she spent two hours showing him how to lay the fabric flat, how to work around shoulder seams, how to handle collars and buttonholes. She showed him how to fill the iron from the jug of distilled water -- "Never use tap water; it may be fine to drink, but what limescale and rust do to an iron doesn't bear thinking of," she told him -- and made him press the tip of his pinky to the heated metal so he'd know in his bones to respect it.

Martin nursed his burn along with his pride in a week's worth of smooth, tidy clothes with knife-sharp creases. His mum still lost her job within the year, but until then he knew he was doing what he could to help.

When he left school to find a job, the first thing he did was spend some of their far-too-meager funds on five shirts and three pairs of trousers, the kind men wore to office jobs instead of things like stocking shelves or mopping floors. He needed an office job in order to afford his mum's care and the rent on their house. He already knew he'd need to fake his CV -- nobody hired a teenage dropout -- but the more tangible signs of quality he could add to guide people's assumptions, the better. Good clothes, wrinkle-free with sharp-pressed creases, were a small but easy touch.

He washed and dried his new wardrobe with painstaking care, unfolded the ironing board, opened the liter jug of distilled water, and lifted the old steam iron like a man setting out to war.