Work Text
Everyone but Mariana thinks that Callie is taking them to dinner at one of her favorite places on campus. Callie thinks that Stef might notice something is off when they turn onto the street where the Kemper Art Museum sits, but the rest of them, Lena, Jude, Brandon, Jesus, and Emma don’t seem to notice anything amiss. “I was hoping you would mind stopping in for a second,” Callie says when they reach the building. “There’s an exhibit I really think you’d like.” It’s not opening night – it felt too overwhelming to have them there for that, not when she needed to be completely put together and professional, when the room was full of other people. But now, a few days later, she is impatient to have them see, to feel the pride she knows Lena and Stef will radiate in just a few minutes.They agree, and she drags them quickly through the halls to the room, to her room, where a sign outside the door has her name printed on it. Lena gasps when she sees it, the first to notice. Mariana slips in to turn on the lights while Lena questions her. “You have an exhibit? What? How? When?” Lena’s normal poise and elegance vanish in the face of this shock. “I got the letter at the beginning of March,” Callie tells her, “but I wanted it to be a surprise. The museum does a senior exhibition of five student’s work every year. I just never thought I would be one of them.”“Five?” Jesus says as Lena pulls her into a gentle hug. “That’s impressive.”“Save the hugging until you see the gallery,” Callie tells Lena, pulling away and leading them into the room.“We don’t have to see it to know it’s going to be amazing,” Stef tells her, walking to the room. “You wouldn’t create anything less than amazing.”They walk around the room, which is filled with portraits of students at the university. They are all of students – young and old, from every background possible but all in frame with some recognizable bit of campus making the people in them a definite part of the university. That was the point of her exhibit – that all of them are part of the university, that it wouldn’t be the same with any of them missing. These take up the whole room, except for the one alcove she hadn’t let Mariana help with. Jude is the first to enter it, and then he drags them all too it. Callie has filled the walls with pictures of each of the houses she lived in before the Fosters: the house she grew up in, every foster house she was ever in. There’s even a picture of the juvenile detention center that was her home for six months. There’s no picture of the Fosters’ house though. Instead, interspersed among the pictures of houses are pictures of them. There’s Stef in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, Lena behind her desk at work, Mariana twirling on the beach, Jesus at graduation, Brandon looking off into the distance at the piano, dreaming up a new composition, Jude staring straight into the camera with the biggest smile ever on his adoption day. And in the center of all the pictures is one of all of them, sitting crushed together on the porch.Within a few seconds they are all piling on her, burying her in hugs. Mariana and Jude are both crying. Callie has a brief moment of embarrassment – she doesn’t like the attention, but it passes and in its place is a warm sense of contentment that she hasn’t had in years, maybe not since she was a little girl in her mother’s arms. She feels loved, and cared for, and she doesn’t need anything else.The picture that Emma takes of them isn’t technically perfect in any way. It’s grainy and slightly off-center, and Callie hates the way that they are all surrounded by their own portraits in it. It’s not a picture she would ever take, and if she did she would never show it to anyone. More than anything else, she hates that she is in the center of the picture. She has gotten used to being behind the camera. She likes it better that way.Still, years late, on the first day in her new office at the Art Institute of Chicago, she hangs it on the wall across from her desk where she sees it every time she looks up. Because however much it embarrasses her, as much as she hates staring at herself, it also warms her inside every time she sees it. Overtime she stops seeing all the flaws in the picture, in herself, and instead sees how Stef and Lena’s arms wrap around her, their other arms wrapped around each other behind her, how Mariana is leaning in so close that she’s practically knocking Stef over, the way that Brandon and Jesus are caught mid-shove, each trying to have the best place by her, and Jude, with only half of his face in frame because he’s been caught mid-turn trying to hug her. It’s not really a picture of her after all. It’s a picture of her family and it’s the first time she really saw herself as an integral part of it, not an addendum. That picture is never coming down.