Let's Go To Sleep

:D

(edit) - w/o chromatic aberration to make some parts more readable

It wasn’t just about the scar, either. The clear and damning evidence of torture, a calculated and possessive torture to boot, was only the most obvious sign. The fact that it had taken them this long to notice it was embarrassing, but to be fair to Remus, he’d been preoccupied noticing a whole lot of the other signs. 

The littler, less obtrusive ones, like the way he retired to his room at the same time every night, even though the Prince of Paranoia had eased up on his guard dog duties to the point that none of them would have blinked twice at Patton taking a midnight walk or grabbing a glass of water. The way he had quietly and discreetly taken over all the household chores that Janus loathed the most, and seemed almost uncomfortable at the idea of sitting down and relaxing with them on the rare days that they weren’t out in the city. The way he lived in an undecorated guest room in borrowed clothing and with not a single pair of civilian shoes to his name, like a prisoner, without a qualm.  

Remus knew what it looked like when someone tried to make themself smaller in the hopes of avoiding bad attention. It had never worked for him– he was the type to drag the attention in regardless, revel in the looks and shouts even if they were full of hatred– but he’d seen it enough that it was easy to recognize the picture Patton painted with all these quiet habits.

What was harder to puzzle out was why. 

Lightshow had been a solid, towering bastion of a villain, reciting his monologues and launching his attacks without hesitation. What array of memories could have been taken away to uncover Patton, like the soft, chewy core to a particularly sanctimonious-flavored Tootsie Pop?

… Or maybe, the real question was: what exactly had been done to Patton to force him into the role of Lightshow? And most importantly, who had done it, and how quickly could Remus get his hands on them? 

“The previous incidents have been subtle. Without Lightshow’s presence as an indicator, I haven’t been able to narrow down when or where our opponent has been striking, not amidst all the other criminal activity that occurs daily,” Janus admitted as his expression darkened into something thunderous. “It wasn’t my highest priority, before. It most certainly will be now.”

Remus grinned in satisfaction, the edges of his mouth splitting further than humanly possible. Having the full force of Janus’s attention lock onto one goal was a surefire way to get a proper lead on this guy, and he was looking forward to hunting the fucker down. 

Normally, he’d be too antsy to sit around while Janus did all his fancy info-gathering and investigating, but luckily he had the perfect task to occupy himself for the duration: retail therapy!

“I’ll leave all the boring stuff to you, Janabanana,” he announced with a sloppy salute. “And in the meantime, the rest of us will go shopping!” 

Sure enough, that was enough to drag Janus’s attention away from the meticulous plotting he was about to sink into and get forever lost in, bog-style. His head snapped up to glare narrowly at Remus. “Not with my wallet, you won’t.” 

“Don’t be so cold-blooded, snakeboy,” Remus shot back brightly, “it’s for a good cause. Glowbug needs a real wardrobe, as much as I’m sure you like seeing him in our pajamas.”

“You—!” Janus smacked Remus’s arm, ignoring the meaty thwack of it detaching and tumbling onto the floor between them. Truly, Remus’s genius comedic gags were wasted in this household. 

“I’ll sue you for libel,” Janus finally managed, which meant he was flustered enough to resort to legalese, and thus Remus automatically won the banter. “Put those eyebrows away before I tell Virgil who ate the last of his special edition Halloween poptarts and he shaves them off in your sleep again.” 

Remus obediently stopped wiggling his eyebrows. 

After a brief pause to sigh extensively and pretend to massage away a headache he absolutely didn’t have, Janus conceded. “Clothes only. Do not bring back any more exotic animals or repossessed organ coolers, I cannot emphasize enough how troublesome the paperwork gets.” 

“I don’t choose to find the kidneys, the kidneys find me,” Remus intoned solemnly, before snatching one of Janus’s wallets off his desk and hightailing it out of his bedroom. “No promises!” 

Janus flicked his fingers, telekinetically hurling Remus’s abandoned arm out the door after him. “Bring home a box of my usual tea or I’ll change the locks while you’re out!”

“Don’t threaten me with a good time!” Remus called back over his shoulder, and then proceeded to skid directly into Virgil’s door at the end of the hall. The thud of impact was loud enough to rattle windows, because he was a professional. 

When this move garnered no immediate results, he dragged his phone out of his pocket and spammed the group chat with the same extremely low quality gif from Mean Girls, about 37 times. 

After a truly apathetic amount of time had passed, their resident emo pulled the door open, looking as ghoulish as ever. He glanced down at Remus, who was crumpled in a heap upon his doorstep, and then stepped over him to walk down the hall. “No.”

“Gasp!” Remus pointed his detached arm at Virgil in not-so-silent accusation. “Party foul! Nobody can deny the power of Regina George’s summons to shop!” 

Virgil didn’t even turn to look. “You won’t catch me in pink on Wednesday, either.” 

Patton, bless his little heart, had already poked his head out of his own doorway shortly after the original wall-shaking thump of impact, and now visibly brightened at the approach. “Oh, are you guys going shopping?” 

There it was. As always, he assumed that any outdoor ventures were off-limits, because they’d never clarified that he wasn’t actually a prisoner in so many words. They hadn’t really thought that they’d needed to, that investigating the circumstances of his past and providing him a home in the present was enough to show him that he was someone they wanted to protect, not trap.

Even if his teammates, suspicious creatures that they were, were still watching out for some larger plot, it didn’t change the fact that Patton had wormed his way into their hearts like an alien parasite nestling into an astronaut’s chest cavity. 

Besides, even if they had rescued a less charming and pun-oriented individual, they wouldn’t have sentenced them to indeterminate confinement in one of their safehouses. Patton was effectively a civilian at the moment, their shared history of superpowered murder matches set aside, and didn’t pose a threat to anything but the potted plant he kept overwatering. For civilians, there were official channels one could reach out to for aiding those suffering from superpower aftereffects, multiple organizations that would provide resources and housing to a victim of mind manipulation. This much should have been part of the general knowledge that Glowbug still had, but instead, he walked around like one wrong step would get him locked into a medieval torture device and slowly disemboweled. 

Despite his cheerful demeanor, it was obvious that Patton always expected the worst, and even more concerningly, he seemed to accept it as his due without complaint or protest. Remus couldn’t even be irritated about the misunderstanding, because it had become abundantly clear that someone had used torture to rewire Glowbug’s brain into a minefield, and brains did what they had to survive when it came to that kind of thing. 

Patton didn’t have to make himself small to survive anymore. Not here. The three of them just had to make sure he understood that, too.

Thus decided, Remus made meaningful eye contact with Virgil, attempting to convey his very subtle and lowkey plan: namely, to convince Patton of their affection and his permanence in their household by drowning him in material possessions. 

Blissfully unaware of his own role in Remus’s machinations, Patton tilted his head slightly, blinking curiously. Really, who could resist that face?

As expected, Virgil folded like a soggy piece of bread in the face of their combined psychological pressure. “Alright, fine. But I’m driving.” 

—

Virgil drove exceedingly carefully for someone with that strong of a death grip on the steering wheel, which meant that Remus had plenty of time and attention to dedicate to reassuring Patton that everything was fine.

Which was good, because Patton took a lot of reassuring. He’d practically had to be coaxed out of the apartment in the first place, and the whole drive there was filled with increasingly antsy questions.

By the time they reached the mall’s parking lot, Remus was half-convinced that he should have brought Janus along after all, if only so that Patton would finally be sure that they weren’t sneaking out under his nose. 

“Are you sure—,” Glowbug started, and Remus began to wonder if picking him up and shaking him would help the words sink in faster.

“Relax,” Virgil finally cut in, grimacing as though even just the word tasted hypocritical in his mouth. “We’re going shopping for clothes so you don’t have to wear dusty hand-me-downs all the time.”

“You really don’t have to go to all this trouble,” Patton tried weakly. “I don’t have any money—,”

“Money, schmoney!” Remus flapped a hand casually. “We do this all the time, Deedee’s got us covered.”

“It’s part of the contract between us and the city. We have a monthly stipend for victim care,” Virgil elaborated, adjusting his hood around his shoulders as Remus gallantly opened the passenger-side door for Patton to climb out. “It would just go to waste if we didn’t use it for stuff like this.” 

Patton stared at the mostly-vacant parking lot as though the ground was covered in poisonous vipers. “What if it’s not safe?” 

Virgil turned to scan the parking lot as though the mall was going to come to life and eat them, because he was twitchy about questions like that. Remus knew exactly what sort of ‘unsafe’ circumstances Glowbug was worried about, and leaned down to meet his gaze. 

“We’ll be right beside you,” he promised, grinning wholeheartedly. “There’s probably not a more secure place in the whole city than wedged between the two of us, no matter what kind of power someone’s packing.” 

Remus had run the gamut of having unstable powers himself, he was more than familiar with the terror of not being able to trust in oneself. So, this was his promise: if Patton somehow snapped right back to the supervillain they used to battle so often, the two of them would make sure he couldn’t hurt any civilians. 

Patton swallowed thickly, and Remus didn’t miss the way his hand twitched up to graze a spot just under his collarbones, as though seeking reassurance. 

(He’d noticed the locket the previous night, though he wasn’t sure Patton had noticed him notice it. It certainly hadn’t come up before in any of the conversations they’d had about Patton’s missing memories, but Remus had picked up on several little motions like this, ones that seemed habitual and well-worn. Like he was brushing a hand over a treasured gift. 

Remus hadn’t asked, not yet. But he had a feeling that once Patton was ready to go seeking out more answers about his past, that locket would be the first place to look.) 

“Okay,” Patton managed after a few more moments. “Do I still get to keep the hand-me-downs? I’m pretty loon-y about those duck pajamas.” 

“You bet my bottom you can!” Remus answered, extending an elbow for Patton to hold onto as they made their way to the main entrance. 

“I don’t think a loon is a kind of duck,” Virgil contributed, because he was a hater. 

“You’re probably right,” Patton said. “I guess when it comes to identifying birds… I ran outta duck.” 

Remus cheered obnoxiously, and then course-corrected when Virgil started veering a little too close to the Hot Topic. “Let’s put a quack in our finances!” 

“Or we could not do that,” Patton laughed nervously, but the longer they went without earning a second glance from the other patrons around them, the more he began to relax. 

Remus was killing this whole ‘re-socializing your supervillain’ thing. He should write a book.

He let Virgil take over once they actually reached a department store, because his idea of fashionable and/or comfortable was often deeply contradictory to the general public’s, and they were trying to find clothes that Patton could wear outside without getting gawked at. So, not really Remus’s area of expertise.

After an extensive period of offering Patton different fabric types and then different types of tops and bottoms (of the clothing kind), and scrutinizing his reactions with the sort of focused intensity one might perform open heart surgery with, Virgil successfully narrowed their options down to a pretty solid selection of outfits. There was also a surplus of graphic tees, because Patton kept smiling at the jokes on them and then they mysteriously ended up stuffed in the shopping cart the moment he looked away. 

Through a brief series of glances and hand motions usually used in the field, the two of them mutually decided that Virgil would go buy the clothes on his lonesome, thus ensuring Patton wouldn’t have to witness whatever ridiculous number Macy’s was charging for pants in this day and age. 

While Virgil departed for the checkout, Remus steered Patton towards the furniture section with plenty of promises that it was only to take a little look-see, they weren’t going to buy anything else today, really! 

(He wasn’t lying, of course. Furnishing Patton’s room would just have to be a tomorrow project. Hooray for technical truths!) 

The trip had been going swimmingly, to the point that Glowbug was finally chattering on with his usual level of confidence, so Remus probably should have expected that it wouldn’t last. 

As it was, he only had a heartbeat to notice the sudden reddish tinge to all the lights before the skylight above exploded into a billion razor-sharp glass shards. 

Remus shoved Patton under the sturdiest-looking desk in reach with a yelp, and paid for his moment of inattention by getting nearly bowled over by the charge of a mechanical knight, all of its deceivingly delicate-looking plating painted a bright, firetruck red. 

His brother always had had the worst sense of timing. 

Remus twisted his body in half just in time to avoid being decapitated by a swing of the contruct’s gleaming broadsword, and retaliated by kicking it in the groin, hard enough to knock it into the perfume display across the aisle. Someone screamed shrilly nearby. 

If you don’t piss off right now I’m telling mom about our eighth birthday party, Remus thought very intently in the general direction of the automatons descending dramatically through the ceiling. Absolutely nothing about the scene changed, which meant that twin telepathy really was a scam, and Remus wanted a refund. 

“Stay put, Glowbug, Umbra will be here in a snap,” he promised, certain that Virgil had heard the cacophony and was on his way. “I need to go re-enact that one scene from the Old Testament, you know, the one with the rock. It’ll only take me a minute!” 

Flashing Patton a thumbs up, he spun around and punched the head right off of another automaton, stomping on the chest of it until it caved in, utterly ruining the intricate latticework. It began to self-repair immediately, one of the bitchier enchantments Roman had managed to work into his craft, but Remus was quick enough to yank the glowing crystal out of its torso and return the construct to inert metal. He tucked the energy source into a pocket so Roman couldn’t salvage it from the remains later, just to add a little insult to injury. 

(Roman had tried making them self-destruct when removed at one point, but that charming quirk had quickly been redacted after a battle where Remus had destroyed twenty-three constructs in one go by lobbing a freshly-removed energy crystal directly at the biggest group and starting a chain reaction. These days, his brother knew better than to offer grenade-adjacent opportunities on a platter.)

He heard Patton trying to say something to him, concern evident in his tone, but the words were drowned out by another nearby scream, and a quick once-over of the store showed that the place was being swarmed by medieval warriors and mythical beasts, all of them made from that shining red metal. 

“Just hang on!” There wasn’t any time for conversation, not with this many civilians in imminent danger and no Janus at hand to help with evac. “I’ll be back in two shakes of a duck’s tail, Glowbug, I swear!” 

Patton nodded from under the desk, face still crinkled with worry, and Remus checked one last time that there weren’t any other constructs nearby before he sprinted off, snatching the black cylindrical handle from his belt and flicking its switch as he went. The energy weapon buzzed into its usual form, a morning star made of neon green light, and he immediately swung it full force at the chimera lunging at him. 

Remus bared his teeth in a grin, relishing the earsplitting crunch of mangled machinery, and pressed on towards the next opponent. 

The escape room had taken Virgil eleven days to build.

Logan had solved it in forty-seven minutes.

Virgil hadn't said anything about that. He'd watched Logan move through each station with that particular focused silence he got when something had genuinely engaged him—the slight forward lean, the way his fingers stilled instead of fidgeting, the small exhale through his nose that meant I see it—and Virgil had told himself that was enough. That was the point. Logan had been engaged. Logan had been happy.

He'd been telling himself that for six weeks, and he almost believed it.

The problem with designing a puzzle for someone significantly smarter than you was that you didn't know what you didn't know.

Virgil knew this about himself. He wasn't being self-deprecating, or not only being self-deprecating—it was a structural problem, a real one, the kind you couldn't willpower your way out of. He couldn't gauge the difficulty of a clue he'd invented because he already knew the answer. Every pathway through the room had felt satisfying to him while he was building it. Every cipher felt clever. Every misdirection felt earned. He'd stood in the middle of his own construction on day ten and thought: this is good, the way you think something is good right before someone proves that it isn't.

And then Logan had solved it in forty-seven minutes and said, with complete sincerity, Virgil, this was genuinely impressive, and Virgil had felt the compliment and the failure land at the same time, side by side, like they were roommates who'd stopped speaking.

The problem was that Logan was not a liar. Logan was constitutionally, structurally, sometimes inconveniently incapable of uncomplicated dishonesty, which meant genuinely impressive was not a mercy and not a kindness. It was true. It was exactly as true as forty-seven minutes, because both of them could be true at once: the thing could be impressive and also not be enough. The thing could be built with love and also fall short. Logan had meant every word and Virgil had failed anyway, and those two facts sat next to each other in his chest like a splinter he kept forgetting about until he moved wrong.

Now it was the third week of February and he was sitting cross-legged on his bedroom floor surrounded by index cards and a spreadsheet he'd printed out—he'd printed a spreadsheet, he'd used the printer, like a person who had their life together—and he'd crossed out fourteen different puzzle concepts in the last four days and started three different research spirals he'd abandoned when they got too ambitious and spent forty minutes last Tuesday reading about the Enigma machine before remembering that the Enigma machine had required a physical hardware component and he was one person who did not own a physical hardware component.

His handwriting on the rejected cards was getting more aggressive. He could track his mood through the afternoon by the pressure of his pen.

Too easy.

Way too easy.

Logan would do this in his sleep.

LITERALLY TOO EASY VIRGIL. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU. NEXT.

He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes until he saw static. The static was almost comfortable. The static didn't have seventeen crossed-out index cards.

The thing was—and this was the part he couldn't say out loud to anyone, the part he hadn't said out loud even to himself until recently—he needed this one to be good. Not good like nice effort. Not good like I can see you tried or the construction was impressive. Actually, structurally, technically, genuinely good. Good in a way Logan couldn't politely inflate. Good in a way that bypassed the particular mechanism Logan had—the one that took whatever was offered and decided quietly to be grateful for it, regardless of whether the thing deserved gratitude.

Because Logan didn't—

Logan didn't get things. Not the way other people got things. Roman got sonnets and standing ovations and meaningful reviews of his performances, got his name said with particular emphasis that meant you specifically. Patton got warm cookies left outside his door, got remembered fondness and easy physical affection from people who loved him and showed it constantly and obviously. But Logan got told things. Logan got informed. Logan got actually, that's an interesting point before the conversation moved on to something else, got Roman remembering to compliment his tie twice a month like he'd set a calendar reminder, got Patton hugging him at measured intervals that Patton probably thought were spontaneous and Logan almost certainly tracked without admitting he tracked them.

And Logan received all of it with a kind of careful gratitude that Virgil recognized. He recognized it because he'd practiced it himself, in mirrors, in conversations, in the three years before he'd started letting himself want things. The gratitude of someone who had learned not to expect much and had gotten good enough at it that it looked like contentment if you didn't know what you were looking for.

Virgil knew what he was looking for. He'd spent enough time looking.

He crumpled an index card. Threw it at the wall. Picked up another.

The first puzzle—the Christmas one—had started as something small. Smaller than small. He'd bought the newspaper on impulse, mostly because he'd panicked in the stationery aisle and it was the cheapest thing in arm's reach, and he'd carried it back to his room in a bag while his heart was doing the irregular thing it did when he'd made a commitment he couldn't take back. He was going to give Logan a newspaper. He was going to hand a person a newspaper and call it a gift and hope Logan's face did the polite thing and not the real thing.

And then he'd stayed up until three in the morning with a red pen, circling letters, building something out of nothing, because he couldn't do it. He couldn't hand Logan a newspaper. He couldn't watch Logan do the gracious thing. He'd circled letters until a message appeared, and then he'd written the message out and stared at it and thought: okay, but what does he do with the message? And then he'd been up until five.

The escape room had come later. Assembled in the space behind his bookshelf over eleven days of quiet construction while Logan was in the library wing, while everyone else was doing the things they did and Virgil was in his room learning what a Playfair cipher was. He'd looked up how substitution ciphers differed from transposition ciphers. He'd made a chart. He'd written a chart by hand about cipher systems, which was something that had happened, in reality, in the physical world. He'd written the math problem in the fourth chamber and checked it three times and then stayed awake worried he'd made an error and checked it a fourth time at two in the morning on a Thursday.

He'd done the research. He'd done all of it. He'd done it because the idea of Logan standing in a room he'd built and finding it wanting—not saying it was wanting, not complaining, just quietly adjusting his expectations downward the way he'd clearly already spent a long time adjusting them—was something Virgil couldn't make peace with. So he'd learned cipher systems. He'd checked his math four times. He'd built something by hand for eleven days and stood back and looked at it and thought: I hope it's enough. And then Logan had gone in, and Virgil had watched through a gap in the bookcase, and Logan's face—

Logan's face had done the thing. The real thing. The thing that happened when Logan was genuinely surprised by something, which was different from the thing he did when he was pleasantly startled and different again from the thing he did when he was amused. This was the focused, slightly-stunned look of someone who had expected a newspaper and had instead walked into a room that someone had spent eleven days building specifically for them, and Virgil had thought, okay, with a feeling in his chest he didn't have a better word for. Okay. That's what I'm supposed to do. That's the thing I can do for him.

He just needed to actually do it again. Better. With more of it. With something that cost Logan more than forty-seven minutes.

He picked up a fresh index card. Stared at it.

Multi-room? he wrote. Then: too ambitious, you are one person who does not have a construction crew.

He crossed that out.

Different cipher types layered—each solution feeds the next?

He stared at that one. Didn't cross it out immediately.

Cipher feeding into a spatial problem? Logical deduction component?

He circled the layered cipher idea. His pen hovered.

He didn't hear Logan come in, which meant Logan had been standing in the doorway for an indeterminate amount of time before Virgil looked up and saw him, which was embarrassing on several levels and also fairly typical of the way Logan moved through spaces he wasn't sure he was welcome in.

"Your door was open," Logan said, with the slightly cautious tone he used when he wasn't sure if his presence was an imposition. The tone that said: I can go.

"Yeah." Virgil looked at the spread of index cards and printouts around him, made a brief assessment of how much was readable from the door, and decided it didn't matter. Logan had probably already read most of it. "What's up?"

Logan's eyes moved across the floor with the particular quality of someone trying not to visibly inventory the situation. "Are those—" He stopped. The corner of his mouth did something careful. "Are you planning?"

"I'm catastrophizing with organizational aids."

"Mm." Logan was quiet for a moment. He read the card closest to the door—Virgil watched him do it—and his expression did the processing thing, the thing where something was happening behind his eyes and his face was just the controlled surface. "May I come in?"

Virgil gestured broadly at the room.

Logan stepped over a printout with precise, considerate footsteps and sat down on the edge of the bed, which put him close enough that Virgil could see him reading the index cards he hadn't yet crumpled. His hands were settled on his knees. His expression was doing the thing it did when he was processing something that required him to not have an expression—neutral in a way that was too deliberate to be natural.

The silence stretched. Outside, a cloud moved across the February light, and the room dimmed slightly and brightened again.

"You don't have to make another one," Logan said finally.

"I know."

"I mean that non-reproachfully. I want to be precise about that—I'm not suggesting I don't want one, I'm not applying any pressure, I simply—" Logan paused in the particular way he paused when he was revising mid-sentence. "I don't want you to be in distress on my behalf. That's contrary to the purpose."

Virgil looked at him. "That's not what the distress is about."

"No?"

"The distress is about me." He picked up the LITERALLY TOO EASY VIRGIL card and turned it over in his hands. "I want it to be actually hard. I want you to have to work for it. Not work like—not work like you worked through the first one." He stopped. Restarted. "You solved it in forty-seven minutes, Logan."

A pause.

"I'm aware of the time," Logan said.

"Is that—" Virgil set the card down. "Tell me honestly. In the context of escape rooms as a format. Is forty-seven minutes fast?"

Logan looked at the middle distance. This was a tell. Logan only looked at the middle distance when he was deciding how honest to be.

"The format is designed to be completed in sixty minutes by a group of three to five participants," he said finally. "With collaborative problem-solving distributed across multiple people. For a solo solver—"

"Logan."

"—the standard adjustment would suggest—"

"Logan."

A pause.

"Yes," Logan said. "Forty-seven minutes is fast."

The room was quiet for a moment.

"Okay," Virgil said.

"The construction was—"

"I know. I know what you said." He picked up the layered cipher card and put it back down. "I'm not—I'm not spiraling about it, I promise. I'm trying to fix it. I'm trying to understand what I did wrong so I can build something that you actually have to—" He stopped. His hands were doing the thing, the restless thing. He pressed his palm flat against the floor. "I want to give you something that takes something from you. That's all. I just don't know what that looks like yet."

Logan was quiet for a long moment. Long enough that Virgil looked up.

"You researched cipher systems," Logan said. "For the first one."

Virgil blinked. "What?"

"The Playfair variant in the second station. I recognized it because I've read about Playfair ciphers, but you—you wouldn't have encountered one incidentally. You had to look that up." He paused. "The math problem. In the third chamber. You wrote it out correctly. The structural logic held. You have consistently described mathematics as—and I'm quoting—'an act of hostility committed against the humanities.'"

"I stand by that characterization."

"And yet."

Virgil said nothing.

"You wrote the math problem correctly," Logan repeated. "Which means you didn't estimate or approximate or pull something from memory. You checked it. Probably multiple times."

"Four," Virgil said flatly. "Don't make it weird."

"I'm not—" Logan stopped. When he started again, his voice was doing the careful, measured thing it did when he was handling something he didn't want to drop. "You despise sustained effort."

"Bold of you."

"It's observational. You find meticulous work deeply aversive—you've said so, explicitly, on multiple occasions, in different contexts. You find it more aversive than most people because for you it coexists with the persistent suspicion that the effort will be insufficient anyway, which makes the whole enterprise feel both costly and futile simultaneously." He paused. "I'm not saying anything you haven't articulated to me. I'm simply—noting that you undertook it anyway."

"I know what I did," Virgil said.

"Eleven days."

"I know how long it took."

"Self-directed research into subjects you find tedious. Meticulous construction in a space you were keeping hidden. Mathematical verification repeated until you were confident it was correct." Logan's voice had gone very quiet. Not soft, exactly—Logan's voice didn't go soft—but something in the texture of it had changed, something that was usually armored and was now, fractionally, not. "Because you wanted me to have a problem worth solving."

The room was quiet.

Virgil was looking at the floor. There was a scuff on one of the index cards where he'd accidentally stepped on it earlier. He looked at that.

"Don't make it into a bigger thing than it is," he said.

"I'm not inflating it." A pause. "I want to be clear about that. I'm not—this isn't rhetorical generosity. I'm trying to tell you that I understand what it cost, and that the cost is—" Logan stopped. Started again, with the precise, careful quality of someone choosing each word individually. "More often than I would prefer to admit, I find myself uncertain whether I matter to people in any way that isn't functional."

Virgil looked up.

Logan's expression was level. Controlled. His hands were still on his knees with the particular deliberate stillness of someone who had made a decision and was keeping it. "I'm useful," he continued. "I'm accurate. I provide information and perspective and analysis that other people don't. That has value. I know it has value." He paused. "But useful and valued are not the same thing, and there are—there are days when I am not certain which one applies. Whether people would want me specifically, or whether they would want whatever function I perform and I happen to come with it."

Virgil didn't say anything. He didn't trust himself to say anything yet.

"The newspaper," Logan said. His voice had dropped slightly. "When you handed it to me—I thought. That's what I thought. I held it and I thought: he bought a newspaper. And I was already—" He stopped. Something in his face shifted, not much, just enough. Just slightly at the edges. "I was already deciding to be fine with it. I was already running the process. He thought of you. He made an effort to include you in something. That's sufficient. Be grateful for the gesture, it was well-intentioned." A pause. "I'm very practiced at that. Adjusting downward. Deciding things are enough."

"Yeah," Virgil said quietly. "I know."

"And then I found the circled letter." Logan's hands shifted slightly on his knees. "Just the first one. Before I understood what it was. I found the first circled letter and I looked at it and something in the calculation changed, and then I found the second one, and by the time I found enough of them to understand that there was a pattern—" He stopped.

Waited.

"I had to sit down," he said. "In the hallway. I had to sit down on the floor because—because it was a real thing. It was constructed. Someone had made something. Not purchased, not assembled from pre-existing components, not offered in a spirit of general goodwill. Sat down and built something specific. For me. Because they thought about what I would want and then made it." His voice was precise and even and underneath it was something that didn't have armor. "That had not—I don't think that had happened before. Not like that."

Virgil looked at him for a long moment.

He thought about Logan sitting on the floor in the hallway. Logan, who sat in chairs with deliberate upright posture, who considered cross-legged floors insufficiently ergonomic, sitting on the floor because his legs had done what legs did when they stopped cooperating. He thought about Logan running the process—it's sufficient, be grateful, adjust downward—and the process failing for once because the evidence didn't support the conclusion.

"I'm still going to make a better one," Virgil said.

Something shifted in Logan's expression. Barely. "I know."

"It's going to actually challenge you this time. Like—actually. I want it to take you at least three hours."

"That's a significant target."

"I know it's a significant target. That's why I have a spreadsheet." He gestured at the printout closest to Logan's foot. "I've been doing research. I've been reading about cryptographic layering and spatial logic puzzles and there's this thing called a meta-puzzle where multiple solutions combine to produce a final answer, and I think—I think if I can figure out how to build one of those without having a background in puzzle design or mathematics or anything useful—"

"A meta-puzzle," Logan said, and something in his voice had shifted into the register it went when he was genuinely interested in something. "You're designing toward convergent solutions."

"I don't know what that means but yes."

"Multiple puzzle strands that resolve independently but whose solutions must be synthesized to produce the final answer. The difficulty isn't in any individual element but in the synthesis step." He paused. "That's—that's significantly harder to design than a linear sequence."

"Yes," Virgil said. "I'm aware. That's the problem." He held up the index card with the layered cipher note. "This is the only idea I haven't crossed out."

Logan looked at it. His expression was doing the focused thing now, the one where something had caught his attention and he was running it through whatever process he ran things through. "If you layered cipher types such that each solution yields not a final answer but a component—a word, a number, a symbol—which must then be arranged or decoded in a secondary step—"

"That's what I was trying to figure out. But I don't know enough about cipher design to know if that's—if I can make all three solutions yield components that combine into something without it being obvious."

"What kind of final answer were you envisioning?"

Virgil looked at him. "I'm not—Logan, I'm not going to tell you what the answer is."

"Of course not. I meant—thematic category. Numeric, alphabetic, symbolic. The type of answer would affect cipher selection."

"Oh." He thought about it. "Alphabetic. A phrase."

Logan nodded slowly. He was looking at the middle distance again, but this time it didn't look like the honesty-calculation thing. It looked like the thing he did when his brain was running faster than conversation. "You'd want ciphers with different surface textures—something visual, something mathematical, something—spatial, perhaps. A grid element. So the experience of solving each one feels distinct even when the underlying logic is—"

"I'm writing this down," Virgil said, and grabbed a fresh index card.

"—is unified by the meta-structure. The solver doesn't realize they're collecting components until—" Logan stopped himself. Looked at Virgil. "I'm helping you design my own puzzle."

"Yeah, and I'm going to let you," Virgil said without looking up from the card. "Because I need to understand what kind of hard looks like and then I'm going to go off and actually do it myself and you're going to forget this conversation happened."

A pause.

"I'm not certain I can deliberately forget a conversation."

"Try harder."

"Virgil—"

"Logan." He finished writing, looked up. "I need your brain for like ten more minutes and then I need you to walk out of here and not think about it. Can you do that?"

Logan looked at him for a moment. The expression on his face was doing several things at once, and Virgil recognized the components because he'd gotten good at reading them: the processing thing, and underneath it something quieter, something that looked like—

"You're doing it again," Logan said.

Virgil blinked. "Doing what?"

"The thing where you—" Logan paused, finding the words with the deliberate precision he brought to things that mattered. "You require something from me, and you have a legitimate claim to require it, and you're apologizing for requiring it. You're framing it as an imposition. I need your brain for ten minutes, as though ten minutes of my attention is a finite resource you're drawing down."

"I mean—"

"You built an escape room," Logan said, and his voice was very quiet. "You researched cipher systems and checked your mathematics four times and spent eleven days constructing something behind your bookshelf because you wanted me to have a real problem to solve. You are designing a meta-puzzle from first principles without formal training because you want the next one to be better." He paused. "Asking me to describe what makes a cipher feel distinct is not an imposition. It is the smallest possible return on an investment I have no equivalent way to repay, and I would like—" His voice did the careful thing. "I would like you to ask me for things when you need them. I'm asking you to do that."

Virgil stared at him for a moment.

"You're so weird," he said finally.

"You built me an escape room."

"Yeah." He looked back down at the index card. "I did."

He could feel Logan looking at him. After a moment, he heard the quiet sound of Logan reaching into his jacket and producing the small book he kept there—Virgil didn't know how he always had a book, it was a Logan thing, it existed in the same category as the tie and the particular way he took notes—and the soft sound of pages turning.

"The visual cipher," Logan said, not looking up. "A pigpen variant tends to read as pleasingly unfamiliar even to people with cryptography knowledge. The grid structure is recognizable in retrospect but not immediately."

Virgil wrote that down.

"For the mathematical element, you'd want something that involves a genuine logical deduction rather than pure calculation. Calculation is fast. Deduction requires—it requires sitting with the problem. Backtracking. Forming and abandoning hypotheses."

"How do I build something like that."

"A constrained logic puzzle. Something with several possible valid-seeming solutions and a single actual valid solution derivable only by testing all of them."

"That sounds like it could take a while."

"That's rather the point, isn't it."

Virgil looked up.

Logan was looking at his book, or appeared to be looking at his book, but his expression had the quality of someone who knew they were being looked at and was choosing not to acknowledge it. The corner of his mouth was doing the fractional thing again.

"Three hours," Virgil said. "Minimum."

"I'll endeavor not to be insulted by anything less."

"I'm going to be so annoyed if you do it faster."

"Then design it harder."

"I am designing it harder, that's what the spreadsheet is for—"

"Then we're in agreement." Logan turned a page. "Take whatever time you need."

"Don't be—" Virgil pointed at him. "Don't be gracious about the timeline, I'll spiral."

"Fine. Hurry up. I want my puzzle." A pause, precisely timed. "The current pace of progress is somewhat lacking."

"Oh my god."

"Several weeks have elapsed—"

"I will put a decoy puzzle in it that leads to nothing and you will have to live with that."

"You would never. You'd lose sleep over it."

Virgil opened his mouth. Closed it. "I would lose sleep over it," he admitted, with deep resentment.

"I know," Logan said, in a tone that was not unkind.

Virgil looked at him for a moment. Then he looked back at his index cards—the ones crossed out, the ones that weren't, the ones that were almost becoming something—and uncapped his pen.

Outside, the February light was doing the low thing it did in the late afternoon, coming sideways through the curtains in the way that made the room look like a different kind of place. Virgil wrote something on a card. Read it. Didn't cross it out. Wrote something else.

Logan turned a page. Didn't leave.

The silence between them was the particular kind that didn't need filling—not the silence of two people who had run out of things to say but the silence of two people who had said the things and were now doing what came after. Virgil built. Logan read. Every so often one of them would say something: a question about cipher structure, an answer, a brief technical tangent that ended with Virgil writing something down and Logan pretending he hadn't just helped.

He had two uncrossed cards. Then three. Then four.

At some point Logan said, very quietly and apparently to his book: "The phrase. If you want it to mean something—"

"Logan."

"I'm simply noting—"

"I know what I'm doing," Virgil said. He was looking at a card. "I know what I want it to say."

A pause.

"Alright," Logan said.

The room was quiet.

Virgil wrote something on the card—not a cipher concept, not a structural element, but the thing itself, the core of it, the answer at the center of the thing he was building—and set it face-down on the floor next to him. It would stay there, face-down, until he needed it. Until he was building toward something specific.

Which was, he thought, the whole point. You had to know what you were building toward. You had to start with the answer and work backward, construct the path that led there, make each step cost something so the arrival meant something.

He picked up a fresh card.

It was going to take a while. It was going to cost him something.

Logan's thumb moved along the edge of a page, a small unconscious gesture, the kind people made when they were comfortable somewhere.

There was a chorus of yelps, a few quiet thuds, and then blessed, blessed silence. Thomas ground the heel of his hands against his eyes, dearly wishing it would last. But the guilt was already creeping up on him, and he dropped his hands with a sigh.

"Listen guys, I'm really sorry about…uh, wait. Where'd you all go?" Because the room in front of him was now empty of his Sides. Blinking in bewilderment, Thomas made a raising motion at the blinds. "Patton?" Patton did not appear. Oh god, he hadn't meant to drive them all off! What if they all hated him now, just because he couldn't keep his temper under control? What if—

His frantic thoughts were cut off by the sound of something whirring, followed by the sight of something rather large flying right toward his face. Before he could do more than flinch back and yelp, the thing had collided with his forehead. It didn't hurt, but it was a solid thunk that had Thomas stagger backwards in surprise. The whirring noise abruptly stopped, a voice yelped, and Thomas fumbled to catch the thing as it dropped rapidly out of the air.

He stared down in astonishment at a rather dizzy looking Virgil. Or, he thought it was Virgil? The patchwork jacket was the same, the purple tinged hair was there. But a large pair of beetle wings were fluttering against Thomas's hand, coming out of the anxious one's back, and there was what looked like a horn? helmet? Thomas couldn't quite decide what was on Virgil's face. And most importantly Virgil was three inches tall and sitting in Thomas's hand.

"Uh," said Thomas, intellectually.

"This is most disconcerting," said Thomas's intellect, reproachfully. Thomas's eyes were dragged over to Logan's usual spot in front of the kitchen, then inevitably down to the floor where the infinitesimal side was now sprawled. Though sprawled was a generous term for it. Because he too was tiny. And were those pinchers on his face? And—

"I will headbutt you again if you keep working me up," Virgil groaned from his hands. "And I did not like it the first time. Thomas please."

A hysterical giggle came out of Thomas's mouth. "Well you can understand this is a bit weird? What happened?" To his credit, there was no screaming. Seriously, he was giving himself huge kudos for that one, considering how his crisises usually went.

"It appears we have been transformed into hybrid forms of the class Insecta," Logan said, straightening his glasses as he rose up on four spindly legs. Two more long arms were curved in front of him folded over on themselves. Above that was the rest of Logan's torso, looking fairly normal with his black polo and immaculate tie. "I myself appear to have some of the features of the order Mantodea. Judging by the unusual pink coloring, I seem to have the thorax and abdomen of a hymenopu coronatus, or known more colloquially as the orchid mantis, including the raptorial forelegs." He didn't look particularly pleased about this.

"You look like a bug centaur!" came Remus's voice from behind the TV.

"I suppose I could have put it that way as well," Logan said sourly as he crossed his human arms. On his face the pair of mandibles clicked together restlessly.

Thomas braced himself as he walked over to the TV. Even though he knew it was a terrible idea, he couldn't help his curiosity as he leaned over the back of it.

To his credit, he only flinched a little when a small form launched itself at his face. To less of his credit, once all the legs that were clinging to him registered in his brain he immediately shrieked and staggered backward. The only thing preventing him from ripping Remus (it had to be Remus, please let it be Remus that was somehow the lesser of evils here) right off was his hindbrain screaming at him that he still had Virgil in his cupped hands. He knew he must look a fool staggering around hollering with his hands cupped carefully in front of him and Remus cackling with laughter on his face.

"Unhand Thomas, you impertinent invertebrate!!" There was a blur of iridescent wings, a flash of blue, and Thomas was blinking at his now clear vision.

Roman was hovering a few feet away, wings a blur as he kept him and his brother afloat. Remus was still giggling as he dangled, his long, multi-segmented body twisting and curling with abandon. It seemed to be giving Roman some trouble as they wobbled in the air. Thomas curled his hands up to his chest as he watched the odd procession with wide eyes.

Finally, Roman unceremoniously dumped Remus on the relative stability of the coffee table, landing lighting beside the still squirming bundle a moment later. Roman's normal red accents had been changed to a brilliant blue that shimmered in the light. Actually, a lot of Roman was shimming in iridescent colors, tiny rainbows dancing across his form. On his back he had a pair of double wings that spread wide to either side of him. His eyes though….

"Can you even see?" Thomas asked with morbid curiosity. Rather than their normal brown with white sclera and black irises, Roman's eyes were solid with a riot of color, mostly blue and green with a hint of purple and red here and there. Thomas fancied he could even make out some of the tiny facets.

"What I can see is that we have a problem!" Roman lamented, one hand going to his hip while the other pointed right at Thomas. "A minuscule miscalculation of pocket-sized proportions!"

"So it's a small problem?" Remus grinned up at Roman. "There are pills that can help with that you know. No shame!"

The noise Roman made didn't have any words to it, but somehow perfectly conveyed the meaning of how dare you?

"Your distracted focus from the problem at hand is detrimental to our situation, Thomas," Logan said. He was walking straight up the table leg and making quick work of it. In short order he was standing beside Roman. Well, more like looming over Roman. While Roman had kept more human proportions, the mantis body let Logan tower over the other diminutive side.

"How did you get over here?" Thomas asked in bewilderment.

Logan gave him a flat look. "I walked."

Remus had finally stopped writhing around, and was now stretched out admiring his new body. Much like Logan his upper half remained mostly himself, while his lower half had legs. Far too many legs. Legs that were attached to a long, red, segmented body. Legs that were moving very quickly over the coffee table and—wait. What?

"Remus!" Thomas protested as the skittery side launch himself off the table, onto the floor, and under the couch. He was fast holy shit. It made Thomas's hindbrain scream danger danger danger!

It was about that time he became aware of a nearly constant sound thrumming from his hands still clutched against his chest. They were nearly vibrating from the irate side still cradled inside them. He could feel wings buzz ticklishly against his skin, small hands and feet as small points of contact and pressure. It took him a moment to realize that the near constant sound was not just the flapping of wings, but a steady stream of hisses. Whoops.

Quickly, he opened his hands to the view of an extremely unhappy looking Virgil, who fell over at the sudden jostling.

"Sorry Virgil!"

He supposed he deserved the double fingers he got in return. Virgil made no move to get back up from where he was sprawled on his back.

Letting that be for a moment, Thomas looked around for the others. Glancing over at his covered window, he didn't spot Patton right away. When he leaned over a bit more he could just barely see a curled up bundle of black and yellow. "Janus? You okay buddy?"

"Oh I'm just peachy," was the sarcastic response. Okay, not too bad off if he was still able to sass. But there was something…off? Thomas squinted, still cognizant of the anxious side cupped in his hands. Black, yellow, and red? That didn't seem normal.

"Is…did your hat change color?" Thomas asked, blinking rapidly as he realized what he was looking at.

"No," Janus said, adjusting his red hat with his red gloves. Behind him his cape suddenly flared out. Only it wasn't a cape, it was wings, and they buzzed and lifted him briefly from the ground before dropping him back down to stagger and catch himself.

Thomas nodded slowly. "Right. Okay then. I, uh, think I need to sit down."

"Imagine the crunch," Remus piped up from somewhere behind Thomas.

"I think I need to stand here and never move again," Thomas amended.

Thomas flinched back as Roman suddenly buzzed right in front of his face, iridescent wings a blur of motion, strange, faceted eyes fixed—probably—on Thomas's face. "Thomas, I demand you change us back immediately! I am not a disgusting creepy crawling pest!"

"Seeing as you are not crawling nor are Anisoptera considered pests, and 'disgusting' and 'creepy' are both subjective to a person's personal options," Logan said, only to be cut off by Roman performing an aerial full body flip in front of him.

"Silence you mantis of emotional meagerness! Besides, you can't be enjoying this."

Logan gave a decisive nod. "It certainly makes no logical sense. Many of us are of a species not native to this continent. The combination of human biology to insect biology would not work, the different cardio vascular systems, the endo- versus exo-skelletons—"

Janus's sudden shriek cut Logan off, and had Thomas twisting around to see what was happening.

"Remus! Put me down this instant!"

So that's where Remus had gone. He now had Janus slung over his shoulder as he zipped back across the floor, ignoring the flailing limbs from his passenger. It was kind of fascinating watching him maneuver up the table leg, climbing around it in a circular fashion until he hoisted the both of them over the top.

"Look!" Remus said, depositing Janus on the table next to Logan. "He's been de-snakified!"

Thomas blinked as he took in Janus's appearance at a closer distance. It was true; the snake scales on his face were now absent, the eyes now solid black. And even though it was still Thomas's face, the same face that all the others wore, it look…well, wrong to see Janus like this. Thomas didn't really want to look too far into why that was. (…He probably would later, wouldn't he? Well shit.)

Janus was starting to fidget under Thomas's mildly zoned out stare. "You will have to excuse me for not taking the time to put on my makeup. I was certainly expecting something like this to happen today," he said cattily.

"What?" Thomas said, shaking himself out of his mental tangent. "No! That's not it at all Janus. I just…is everything okay? It didn't like, hurt or anything?"

"Oh I see you're worried about him and not my diminutive dimensions," Roman pouted. He landed next to Logan with a huff.

Janus chose to ignore the comment, though he did send a mildly irritated look at Roman for it. "Oh it was most distressing. Ten out of ten, would recommend."

Thomas let out a little huff at their dramatics. "Well," he said with a small, relieved smile, "I'm glad you're okay." To his astonishment, Janus's whole chest began to glow. "Uh—"

"It's nothing!" Janus hissed, crossing his arms over his still illuminated chest. It didn't have the same impact without the snake-like sibilants.

"What a cop out," Remus complained. "It should have been your butt that glowed!"

"No part of me should be glowing!" Janus snarled back. He looked rather like a scandalized housewife protecting his modesty.

"Indeed! If anyone should be the light of this Jiminy Cricket soiree, it should be me!" Roman said as he stepped forward. "And yet here we are, the world turned topsy turvy and and very nervy!" He summoned his sword, which looked honestly like a tiny needle more than the katana it was supposed to be. "Look at what they've done to my darling!"

"Don't get your wings in a twist," Virgil grumbled from Thomas's hands. "This isn't a dragon you can slay."

"You seem to have gotten the hang of flying pretty quick though, right Roman? It can't be all that bad," Thomas offered his distressed creativity.

"Ha! As if I haven't spent many an idyllic adventure exploring the vast skies of the imagination with the wind beneath my wings and a song in my heart!"

"Ask me how many times he ate shit trying to land," Remus said at normal volume, one hand at his mouth in an aside to Janus. Virgil would deny to his dying day the snort of laughter he let out.

Roman glared, or Thomas thought Roman glared because with the faceted eyes it was really not that easy to tell, though he still had eyelids so what did that do to his vision, and Thomas's thoughts were getting off track again. Anyway Roman glared, but didn't deign to respond to his brother's vexing comments. "The point is that while I am quite familiar with the myriad of changes one can experience in a fantastical fantasy funtime, it's a frustrating failure of vexing verticality!"

Before Roman could work himself into a tirade, Thomas's last side finally made an appearance.

"Hey! Hey Logan! We match!" came Patton's peppy voice.

Patton seemed to have spent his time climbing up the vertical blinds, and now launched himself into the air. As the little pink ball of fluff fluttered in his direction, Thomas tipped Virgil into one hand (ignoring the indignant swearing) and reached out with his free hand to catch his insectified morality.

"Woah, hey there! I didn't know this was a no fly zone," Patton chuckled as he slid into Thomas's palm. While he was correct that his coloring was similar to Logan, Patton appeared instead to have beautifully pink and yellow moth wings. His entire torso was swallowed up by the fuzz, a pair of feathery antennae waving from his hair.

"Ohmygoshyou'resoffluffy!" Thomas breathed in delight. His eyes were alight as he carefully held his hand still, Patton clinging happily to his fingers.

"I know!" Patton said happily. "It's like wearing a fuzzy sweater! Oh!" he gasped. "I bet I'm even better at hugging like this! Virgil!"

"No!" was the immediate protest.

Patton slumped in disappointment. "Aww…."

"As much as I'm sure we're all dying for a hug," Janus drawled, studying his gloved fingers with deliberate nonchalance, "I think time might be better spent figuring out how to change us back." Patton turned a sparkling look on Janus, who pretended not to see it.

"No, what you're going to do first is put me down," Virgil snarled from where he was clutching at Thomas's thumb as if that was the only thing keeping him stable. With how much Thomas had been shuffling him around, that might be true. Quickly Thomas leaned forward to carefully deposit his anxiety on the table, Roman flitted forward to steady Virgil as he staggered onto solid ground. Patton took the opportunity to hop off as well. Thomas tried not to voice the protest he felt at losing the little fluffball.

Logan shifted his stance a bit restlessly. "The more troublesome thing is that we are unable to sink out like this," he said with a grimace. "I'm not sure what that means for our metaphysical existence, but I'd rather you not test that theory by going where we cannot follow."

"Alright lord of the scaremongering," Roman said with a roll of his eyes.

"Wait, you guys can't leave?" Thomas ignored the pitch his voice reached as the panic set in. "Does that mean you're stuck like this forever? Can other people see you like this? Do I have to invest in terrarium? How much is that gonna cost—"

"Stop," Virgil growled warningly. Instead of the normal multi-layered duet that normally happened when Thomas got so stressed out, Virgil's voice was layered with insectoid clicks. He was just as quick to slap a hand over his mouth to suppress the sensation however.

It did cause Thomas to pause, though, and he took a few deep breaths. "Right. Right, so. First thing's first. No one is hurt, right? Just to double check?"

"Not yet!" Remus said cheerfully. "I can change that though! Anyone want to see how deadly centipede venom is?"

"We're not doing that again," Janus sighed.

"Spoilsport," Remus pouted.

Again? Thomas mouthed to himself, then did a full body shake to relax. "Putting that aside to deal with never. Then second thing is, uh…what…to even do?" He honestly had no idea where to start. "I could try thinking really hard about putting you guys back to normal?"

"While normally I wouldn't condone such a ridiculous proposition, considering it was your high emotional state and outburst that seems to have been the catalyst for this little change, you should," here Logan pulled out his note cards, so at least that was still working, "just do it, I believe is the term."

"No, strike that one from the record," Roman said, snatching the card from Logan's hand. "Outdated and corporate nonsense! But Logan has a point. Try using that beautiful head of yours to get us out of this situation!"

First Thomas tried just imagining his sides were standing there as normal. They all stared back up at him, silently judging. Then he tried closing his eyes so he wouldn't see them as bugs. When he cracked his eyes open, they were still there. Still small. Still staring. Then he closed his eyes again and really really tried—

"This isn't working," Virgil snapped.

Thomas opened his eyes as he nodded his head in resignation. He had to agree, all he could think about right now was how they were all bugs now and he wasn't ready for this kind of responsibility!

"Oh, but I'm sure if he wishes really hard up on a star it will work next time," Janus scoffed.

Patton leaned into Janus's side, headbutting the no longer scaled side of his face in protest. "Bee nice, Janus."

"Did you just—" Roman groaned loudly. "No, he is going to be insufferable about this, isn't he?" He draped himself dramatically over Virgil's shoulders. Virgil just rolled his eyes and shrugged the other side off. He didn't step away, though.

"What we need to do is research this phenomenon," Logan said.

"I don't think the internet is going to save us this time," Thomas said somewhat regretfully.

Logan raised an eyebrow at him. "Have you tried?" he challenged.

Thomas stuttered a bit at that. "I mean, no, but like. What would I even look for? 'My imaginary friend changed shape, how do I turn him back?'"

Logan moved lightning fast to slap a hand over Roman's mouth. "While we could stand here and argue about our existence as imaginary or not for hours, I think that is a fine place to start." Logan's hand remained unmoving even as Roman made furious noises at being silenced so abruptly, his wings buzzing against Logan's side. "While the experience likely does not hold up in a one to one comparison, it's human nature to invent solutions to problems by applying similar knowledge or techniques to them. There is what's known as cognative transfer, which is the ability—"

In an impressively flexible move, Roman managed to wiggle around and slap his own hand across Logan's mouth to shut him up. The two sides glared at each other in stalemate. Roman's wings were near vibrating, and Logan's raptorial arms were starting to reach out, and Thomas was really not looking forward to breaking them up without hurting either of them. They were so small, so easy to just accidentally squeeze too hard—shut up, Remus.

"There is something super important that I simply must make everyone aware of!" Patton cried loudly, bringing everyone's attention immediately to him. "I wasn't able to say anything about it before, but it's not something I can just let go by without comment."

Startled, Roman and Logan released each other to stare at Patton, and Thomas gave a little sigh of relief. One crisis averted.

Patton turned sparkling eyes on Virgil. "You made a dragonfly pun earlier! I am so proud," he squealed, hands under his chin in excitement.

"I'm out," Virgil said, turning on his heel and walking away. "I am so gone. What the fuck…"

"Aww no, wait! Virge!" Patton protested through his own giggles. Virgil did not wait, though he did stop when he got to the other end of the table. It looked like he either didn't want to or didn't know how to get down from there.

"Alright," Thomas said slowly, rubbing his hands together. When did this become his life? He was gonna say third grade. That sounded about right. "I'm just gonna…gonna go, look some things up. On the computer." He stared down at his sides. His sides stared back with varying levels of irritation. Thomas gestured awkwardly over his shoulder, sidling away. "You all, uh, make yourselves comfortable?"

"Just go!" they chorus.

Thomas went.

~*~*~*~*~*~