A/n: yes there will be more parts dw ;)

The first stop the class went to on their Rome trip, was the National Roman Museum. Where each pair was given a worksheet to fill out, having to find the listed artefacts, and fill out the questions using the information on the plaques. They had all morning, and had to meet back at the lobby by midday. Each pair had gone off on their own to go around the museum as they pleased, doing the worksheet in whatever order they wanted.

Aside from filling out the worksheet, the class was also having fun recreating the poses of the statues for pictures, looking for their favourite artworks, the history nerd geeking out over the ancient artefacts. Adrien and Luka were making good progress, half the sheet being done already.

While most of the excavations from the famous mount Vesuvius eruption were in Pompeii, some were on display in the museum they currently stood in. It was a bittersweet feeling, looking at the stone forms of what once was a person, thousands of years ago just trying to get by only to have mountains of ash come down on them. There were two of those victims, on display in a glass case, their bodies melted together in a tight embrace, a final hug in their last moments forever captured by the ash molten rock that consumed them.

The plaque told the boys there wasn't a way of knowing if the two were family, friends, or lovers, or even what their birth sex was, their bodies too moulded together to tell. But the embrace was seen to the world as loving, and so the general consensus was that these victims were likely lovers.

"Can you even imagine it? Knowing there was no escape. Even if you ran you'd not be able to outrun it? So you just... hold onto each other..." Adrien muttered, looking down at the petrified in stone lovers.

"...I couldn't. Not the fear at least, but wanting your final moments to be with someone you love? Yeah... that's how I'd want to go" Luka replied.

"I wonder if their families died too, or if they were some of the people that did actually make it out on the ships that left the day before"

"You wouldn't even be able to come back and look for a body, they'd be completely buried in stone once the lava cooled..."

It was a bit of a morbid topic, but hard not to think about when the victims were right in front of you. But both boys could agree, that spending your final moments with the person you loved most would be the most peaceful way to go.

"This is getting depressing, let's go to the next one" Luka said.

"Yeah if I think about this too much, I'll start crying" Adrien chuckled.

Looking down at the worksheet, their next question was about a statue in the next hall over, so off they went. Weaving through the crowds and into the big room full of marble and bronze statues of emperors, gods and heroes. Some in perfect condition, some missing a few fingers or a nose from the age. But the common factor was how intricate they all were, how amazingly they captured the human form even with the limited technology at the time.

Adrien stopped at a statue, not the one they were looking for but one that caught his eye because he recognised it from pictures in textbooks.

Crouching Venus Doidalsa. 77AD

"Oh hey I've seen this in textbooks" Luka said, noticing the statue Adrien was looking up at.

"Yeah me too, even with the damage it still looks so realistic" he replied.

One thing in particular Adrien noticed was the body shape of the goddess. The model in him tended to notice the shape of peoples bodies, not so much in a skinny vs bigger way, more in a 'what clothes would compliment this shape' way. Just something he'd picked up from years in the fashion industry, learning how to dress models to being out their features no matter their size.

Venus was softer, fuller, wider hips and with natural stomach rolls from her crouched position. Back in Greco Roman times, that type of figure was seen as beauty, as it meant you were well fed even times of scarce food.

"Nice to see a model without photoshop for once..." Adrien said, snarky in tone.

"All this talk of natural beauty but no actually showing natural beauty, the Romans had the right idea. Makeup was for highlighting what they already had, and the body as it was wasn't anything to be ashamed of" Luka agreed.

"My dads photographers would have told her to suck it in-"

"And she'd turn them into shrimp or something in return, you don't diss the goddess of love and beauty" Luka snickered.

Adrien chuckled too, that you definitely didn't. If the goddess of beauty herself was all natural then she'd absolutely not like the state of the modelling industry right now, Adrien knew that for sure.

"For the record, you look way better in person. Without all the photoshop" Luka spoke up.

Adrien was silent a moment, processing those words. He got told he was pretty all the time, he was a model. But it was always in comment sections under the photoshopped pictures of him. Or on set when he was in pounds of makeup and gelled back hair. Never when he was just in a hoodie and jeans with bare skin and un-brushed waves.

"T-thanks" Adrien replied, his cheeks dusted pink.

"Honestly completely smooth and clear skin looks uncanny to me. Kinda creepy. Like dude skin as texture, we're humans not polished stone" Luka added.

"Thank you! Oh my god someone gets it. That airbrush effect that alway gets edited in? It creeps me out a little, it looks TOO perfect, like that's no even a person that's an AI generated person" Adrien replied.

Adrien had always found Luka pretty, even with his damaged hair from box dye and baggy eyes. The slight scarring on his cheeks from pre-teen acne that never really went away even after the acne itself did. The dents in his ears where piercings would go when he'd taken them out and his chipped nail polish. He looked human, worn and lived in. And that was always beautiful to Adrien.

And Luka had always found Adrien beautiful not for the designer clothes or photoshopped billboard ads. But his natural waves that always got gelled down on the runway, his skin may be clear from all the products he had to use but no amount of them could get rid of the natural texture. His dimples when he smiled, the hands with a few missing acrylic nails after the latest runway show was over and they began to fall off.

Both boys found each other beautiful in their natural forms, the same kind of beauty that crouching Venus represented. The human form, used as a reference for the divine.

"Damn we keep getting distracted, what are we meant to be looking for?" Adrien said, snapping back into focus.

Luka looked down at the worksheet, reading it again.

"Uhhhh bust of Emperor Caligula" he replied.

"Isn't he the one who tried to fight the ocean? It was he the one who set lions on his party guests?"

"I think both? I dunno the Roman's were a bit whack from all that lead in their pipes"

Heading off to find the information for their next worksheet question, Adrien glanced back at Venus for a moment, and then back at Luka.

He couldn't help but wonder... if Venus were a man, would he look like Luka? Because he felt like the picture definition of beauty in its natural form, was Luka Couffiane.