Remy makes a sharp protest when he sees the weapon. For a blink Remus forgets where he is: the hum in the air sounds just like the noise Virgil made when Remus had first brought up getting another gun, the hesitation, and the uncomfortable churning of distrust, because Remus had proven he’d only ever made bad decisions with one. For a blink, Remus can feel the dizziness of blood loss, taste the Thai food that Janus picked out for him, smell the bleach wafting up from the carpet that Virgil cleaned without complaint. For a blink, the library situation hadn’t happened, nothing had been planned yet, and Remus still has a chance to tell Janus they should leave the state, the country, the planet instead.

Then he hears the distant crash of thunder and every horrible thing comes back to him like a swandive into a concrete sidewalk. 

His ribs howl like they’d really had been obliterated by a dozen gunshots, but when Remus checks himself over the only blood on his hands are from his torn knuckles and the officer’s beaten face. He catches a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror, and wipes away the trails of blood on his chin and his upper lip, before smoothing out his mustache. The rain loosened the usual curls of his hair, plastering them to his skull until his silhouette looks flat, and bland, and not-like-Remus. His knee jostles the multi-tool he has stuck in the ignition as he peels off his soaking jacket to throw it into the collection in the back.

“I’m not saying I disagree—” Remy starts.

“Where’s the nearest coffee,” Remus asks.

“It’s just not a good look—”

“I will drive us to a police station.”

Remy has the list of nearest Starbucks locations memorized, which makes about as much sense as everything else the teenager has said and done in the past several hours, so Remus just accepts it, puts the car in drive, and drives along the shoulder for a bit before there’s a big enough gap to merge back into the normal traffic. 

The windshield wipers scrap across the glass in front of them. The tires rumble against the road. Cold water drips down Remus’s neck into the collar of his shirt. Remy purses his lips, fingers hovering dangerously over his phone, in the middle of a message with far too many emojis in it already and the car contains the same type of still-silence that Remus hates with every fiber of his being.

He’s twenty one and driving a car, but the radio is playing the same song that Mom had on in the kitchen while she was making dinner and Remus was realizing that snowglobes are filled with antifreeze. He’s twenty one and sitting next to the most talkative, fearless teenager in the entire galaxy, but his chest is aching from holding in his laugh the way that he did seconds after he realized that killing his brother is the easiest thing in the world. He’s twenty one and soaked to the bone in the not-fun way, but Remy’s not-staring at him and the weight of his gaze hangs around his throat like a noose before the chair gives out under him.

“Fucking fuck,” Remus hisses. “Fine.”

He yanks the weathered wet wallet from his back pocket and throws it into Remy’s lap.

“Score!” Remy says, immediately abandoning the quiet disapproval for his normal… whatever, and Remus finally feels like he can breathe again. 

“Fucker.” 

Remy doesn’t react because he’s too busy turning on his phone flashlight, and Remus thinks very hard about taking the phone and throwing it into the back with all the other miscellaneous items, just to see Remy dive suicidally after it. The kid adjusts the rhinestone sunglasses, and whistles lowly as he counts out the damp one dollar bills then stuffs them into his pocket like they were worth millions instead. 

Janus would have liked him. Janus would have liked this kid so much. Remus grinds his teeth together and focuses on the tail lights of the car in front of him, and imagines being so blind that he never once saw Janus’s grin when he counted hundred dollar bills in the lamp light of another random hotel room. Janus would have loved this kid so much and Remus doesn’t know if he can appreciate Remy enough to make up for the appreciation dead men can’t give him. 

“Pryce Seymour Bolivar,” Remy reads off the license, holding the card less than an inch from his face so he could scrutinize the thumbprint picture in the small light without taking off the glasses. “Oh gross, I remember him. He went to school with Logan. Sorta. He was a senior on the wrestling team when Logan was in freshman year. Prom got cancelled early that year and everyone said it was his fault.”

The passenger side of the car lights up as Remy takes a picture of the license, with a sharp mocking grin. Then the teenager slides the card back into the sleeve it was in and picks through the rest of the wallet with the intensity of a vulture picking apart a carcass, in search of more items to ravage.

Rain patters through the open back window, and into the collection of items. The cool air dances up Remus’s bare arms and leaves gooseflesh in its wake. The digital clock on the dashboard reads off a time that is nowhere close to early morning, but it smells like 3AM, anyway. His head pounds, and his ears ring from gunshots that never fired and he hopes that the coffee he’ll be getting is filled with rat poisoning.

Remus’s knees are still coated with the bloody mud he’d created, with rivets of the rain water still dripping down his legs and into his socks and when he wriggles his toes there’s a faint squishy impression left. He must have knelt in the mud over the officer when he’d started pulling possibly useful items off him but Remus realizes with lightning-struck clarity that he can’t even remember what the policeman looked like. Had his eyes been blue? Brown? Had he been clean shaven or working on a patchy goatee? He must have only been a few years older than Remus himself, but Remus can’t imagine making it to twenty two, when twenty one is trying to kill him so fucking bad.

Officer Bolivar died in a ditch and the last thing he saw was likely Remus’s fist slamming into him. Had he even had time to scream? Had he said anything? Was Remus so fucked up that he couldn’t even recall the last words of a man who had first approached the car with the intention to help?

And then, did it even matter anyway?

Remy pauses in the middle of liberating a frozen yogurt gift card from one of the pockets to sing several lines with the radio, before pointing to Remus for the duet switch off. 

“How can you not know this one?” Remy complains, taking a picture of the gift card and sending it to a friend before slipping it into his own pocket. “Literally number two on the billboard right now. All the radios are playing it! It's supposed to be the theme song for prom this year! Which is probably the only good decision that Prom Committee has made so far. Like, girl, someone get Amber out of the chair; she’s only got bad takes. And Tastes. She still thinks the Cool Lime Refresher was good.”

Police cars sweep through the rain going the opposite direction, flashing lights and sirens blaring and all the signs pointing to an early start to a shitty rest of their nights. Remus hedges that Remy didn’t even notice it at all; The teenager raises his phone briefly at the perfect angle to cut off Remus’s vision to his right side mirror and takes a selfie while flicking the middle finger at the camera and then adds about nine paragraphs of text to cover up the whole picture.

Remus’s knuckles glisten in the ambient light and he’d say everything is fine, but at this point he’s not sure anything has ever been fine in his entire fucking life.

He reaches a hand out and turns the music off entirely.

“Hey, I was listening to that—”

“What was that about you not being real?”

Remy quirks an eyebrow, and leans back in his seat. His phone twirls, the screen flickering with dozens of the lights and videos and conversations and Remus is generally certain the phone light he didn’t turn off just blinded the driver in the next lane. His hand sweeps the air in a profound, philosophical way and Remus just knows he’s going to hate the rest of this conversation. 

“Is anything real?”

“The number of your bones you’re going to break when I crash this car,” Remus suggests.

“That’s, like, the least real thing, babes.”

“It’s really fucking not,” Remus says. “Try again, but this time you try making sense.”

Remy laughs. “Girl, what? I did make sense. I’m so sorry that you don’t like my answer. I’m not real! I cannot get any clearer than this, babes. Hey, do you always get nosebleeds when you use your power? My friend Gene wants to know. Also, are you and Basilisk in a closed relationship or are you interested in a third? Not me, my other friend, Edith—”

--The steering wheel lurches in Remus’s hands, and the wheels screech as he slams on the gas pedal. The speedometer jumps, and flips, and shatters as the front of the car deepthroats the guardrail. The air bag explodes, and Remus’s head rockets so sharply back that he doesn’t even feel his death, too busy hearing every atom in the air split with thunderous applause. Remy gasps beside him, one lens of his sunglasses shattered, and his face is already swelling from the broken fragments of his cheek bone where his phone collided--

--The steering wheel lurches in Remus’s hands, and the wheels scream as he slams on the gas pedal. The front end of the car crumbles like a paper towel, a billion shards of glass slice through the air, and every alarm the car has sing together in a chorus. Remus is dead and gone before Remy even figures out what happened, before Remy can begin to panic, before Remy realizes that dying is something he’s very capable of, and that he wanted to do so much more with his life. Remus is dead and Remy is bleeding out and Remy’s phone is playing a video with dancing cats and--

--The steering wheel lurches in Remus’s hands--

--”Fuck!” Remus swears as his vision blots out entirely for a second. The wheel lurches in his hands, but he wrestles it back under control from himself. The wheels skids dangerously against the slick road, jumping into the air and then sliding against the asphalt, like a series of persistent hiccups. The guardrail blinks in and out of Remus’s spotted vision.

Blood clogs his nose and for a horrible second Remus can’t breathe or see and all he can hear is the sound of metal twisting against the metal violently. He wheezes for air through his battered lungs and by the time he remembers he’s still driving a car, they’re well past the strip that Remus tried to kill them on.

Remus’s entire body feels like TV static, like one twitch will disconnect him completely, like one wrong inhale and he’ll lose what little he’s got left to lose. The back of his eyelids are running a Rorschach test on his brain and every inkblot is another blood stained airbag and metal rods protruding through organs.

“O-kay.” Remy slowly lets go of the door handle he braced himself on, watching him warily. “I’ll tell her you’re not looking for a third.”

Remus almost laughs, he really almost does. It sounds so stupid, so incredibly understated. He’s not looking for a third. No, Remus isn’t looking for another person to add to their dynamic; no, he’s not looking to shake up his relationship with the addition of another body; no, he isn’t looking for anyone at all! Janus is currently imitating swiss cheese because a hundred strangers were more important to him than his own life and there was nothing that Remus could have done to stop it and no, Remus is not looking because there’s nothing left to look for. 

“Mother of fucking fuckers. Why didn’t you teleport out of here when the police showed up?” Remus asks, dabbing his face again to see just how bad of a nosebleed it was this time. He can’t tell the difference between his blood and the blood from Officer Bolivar that he’d done a piss-poor job of wiping off his hands; it’s all just weepy, dark ink on his trembling fingers and he’s having a hard time remembering why the distinction should mean anything anyway.

“Why would I have wanted to?” Remy asks. “This is the most fun I’ve had since the start of the school year! Gunfights, superheroes, super villains, the police—this is like every cool action movie ever. My friends are eating this up right now, for real, for real. They think you’re the coolest, ever. Except Zeke. But who cares what Zeke thinks? He thinks watching the paint dry is a form of higher art. Speaking of art, I want your autograph. What are you charging for one?”

Remus’s stomach clenches and twists and wrings itself through his intestines. His head rings with familiar words because there was a future that Remus is haunted by, the way he’s haunted by everything, and in that future Remy was chasing after Roman’s stupid fucking autograph.

Bile sits heavy at the base of his esophagus, like a guest politely knocking at the door waiting to be let in. He doesn’t know what he did to change this, not really: he didn’t try to change anything. Why was Remy asking for his autograph? What had Remus changed that made this the current future?

Had he changed things when he moved too far away from Janus in the library? When he grabbed Remy in a half-thought out idea, had that been the moment that fate had decided Janus needed to die? Had that choice, Remus’s choice, led to Janus’s death by ten thousand gunshots?

“—I’d rather hang out with you than spend the night at my high school. I spend enough time wandering around those halls. It’s boring as fuck, you know? Hey, smile!”

Remus slaps away the phone on instinct. He swallows down the vomit that’s knocking politely again and tries to focus on anything other than the sound of Janus’s laughter in his head.

“Why are your only two choices a world-class terrorist or your shitty high school? Just teleport somewhere else. You’ve got friends. Or fucking followers. Whatever the shit you call those people you keep sending pictures to. Zeke. Edith.”

Remy laughs and takes another picture. Remus snatches at the device, nails sliding over the screen, but the wheel twitches under his fingers and blood welds up in the back of his throat. His hand snaps back to the wheel, straightening out the curve, and keeping them firmly between the lines like law-abiding, sanity appreciating, death-acknowledging citizens.

“I’m going to fuck your mom,” Remus swears instead.

“You’d have to get in line behind all my friends for that!” Remy flips the camera and does a cheesy smile that feels as fake as all of Remus’s bones are. “Anyway, I told you already, that’s not how my power works. It’s like… a video game, right? You play for a bit, save your game, close it out, and then come back to the same place later. Same thing! I can only teleport to the last geographical place I left my “save point”, which, by the way, only sets when I sleep.”

“When you sleep….wait, shouldn’t that be your bed, then? You sleep in a bed, right?” 

“Ew, stop sounding like Logan,” the teenager says. “Why would I make that my bed? That’s so boring and it doesn’t help me sneak out when my parents are being paranoid. Unlike lame people, I don’t have to sleep anymore, so I can leave my escape point wherever I want for whenever I want to use it!”

“And you chose your highschool?” Remus asks.

“Okay, look, my parents think cars are deathtraps, won’t let me get one even if I did pass my driver’s. Logan had to shell out for his entirely and he’s so much of a bitch that he won’t drive me to school in the morning. Do you know how embarrassing it is to have to ride the bus at my age? I just use it in the morning to get to school and it knocks me out for an hour. I wake up just in time to scribble down the homework! Brilliant, right?”

“It knocks you out?”

“Sleeping, oh my god,” Remy clarifies, as if Remus is overreacting, and maybe Remus is. But Remy didn’t have to fucking carry a ice cold corpse out of a highschool building and into a residential neighborhood whilst arguing with himself on whether said corpse needed a hospital or a morgue and why it should be his problem at all. Remus steals a glance at him as Remy puts his feet up on the dash again, getting comfortable with his phone in one hand and the stolen wallet in the other.

As far as not-real hallucinations Remus has experienced, Remy Ackroyd makes top-cut for the most realistic one. 

“Over the summer I had it set to inside the full pipe at the skate park.” Remy continues. “Then I almost got brained by one of my friends doing a trick through the spot I materialized in. After that they got some paint and did a whole ass outline of my napping pose so they’d know where not to skate. It looked like one of those chalk outlines from The Naked Gun. But one of my friends started working at this pastry shop that has a break room for employees in the back and she told me I could use it for when I want to sneak out over break.”

Remy sounds pleased with himself, but the content of his words tighten around Remus’s skin like the soaking T-shirt he’s wearing right now and tries to burrow into his bones. The wheel itches underneath his fingers, squirming under the suffocating grip Remus has on it, and each bump on the road threatens to toss his heart right up his esophagus into his mouth. 

“Does everyone know about your fucking power?”

Remus almost misses it: with the combination of the opposing headlights and the sunglasses and Remus only seeing it out of the corner of his eye, catching the way that Remy’s amusement shudders like a window curtain being brushed from behind is a miracle. Remus pries his eyes off the tonalism-esque road to fully look at the teenager, but by that time he’s smiling buoyantly again, as if nothing has ever bothered him before or ever will.

“‘Course! I show it off all the time! Everyone thinks it’s funny,” Remy says suddenly remembering the radio, and reaching out to turn the music back on. “I mean, wouldn’t you? Didn't you? You can see the future! That’s gotta be insane. The bullshit I would do if I could see the future…. I could make a fortune selling test answers! Starbucks daily, and—oh! I could finance my own roadtrip. Take all my friends out to taste every coffee from West Coast to East and I’d film the whole thing. Become the most popular youtuber ever! Hey, why didn’t you do that?” 

Ten thousand raindrops splatter on the windshield, and the air conditioning in the car rattles, and several of the pills from the Advil bottle in the backseat settle into place, and there’s a Glock 17 sitting underneath Remus’s jacket in the backseat. The reflective lights marking the lanes wink at him coyly as Remus tries his best not to think about the feeling of Remy’s brain matter dripping off his hands because Remus killed him in a future that nearly happened.

“Because no one ever believed me,” Remus heard himself saying very distantly. Like his own voice is one the DJ’s on a lonely radio station channel that has no listeners. Someone else’s problem, someone else’s pain, someone else’s tragedy, someone else’s cosmic joke of a life. Someone else who is not hearing the roar of blood in his ears or feeling the curl of anger tighten in the abdomen waiting to burst like an appendix.

Remy frowns. “That’s kinda insane. How could they not believe you? You could like… show them.“

“Kid.”

“I just mean at some point they should have—”

“No.”

“It’s so easy! How many fingers are behind my back or I know what you’re going to say or here’s the winning numbers for the lotto—”

“It didn’t fucking work!” Remus snarls, finally.

Remy goes quiet, fingers stalling on the radio dial leaving it at a low buzzing commercial for a local car dealership that sounds exactly like the static in Remus’s head had when he was in eighth grade and realized that all the friends that enjoyed the benefits of his powers, were Roman’s friends first and thought of him as a barely-tolerable party entertainment. 

It’s not all their faults; Remus played into it, he knows. Fourteen and stupid mean that he thought if he could keep them laughing or joking that they’d forget about the rumors of the nine different drugs Remus had to swallow that morning, even if it meant that he was the butt of the joke. Show off the tricks, amuse and wow them, do anything they could ask and never tell them you saw their death three minutes ago— he didn’t realize they’d come up with their own mundane explanations for his knowledge until it was far too late to convince them otherwise, and then he didn’t all too hard because what did they matter? He’d had Roman, and Roman had known he had a power.

Roman must have known. Should have known. Why the fuck hadn’t he—??

((“You’re sick Remus.”))

Remus sucks in a sharp breath, and then brushes a shaky, damp hand over his face.

“It didn’t work,” he repeats, loosening his death-grip on the steering wheel. “No one has ever believed me.”

The harder he’d fought to be believed the stronger their denial was, as if it was a game that was more fun when Remus was begging on the ground. Lucky guesses, mirrors, cold reads; he’d gotten called a con artist at least a decade before he’d ever made it to actual crimes. Remus gave up, it hadn’t mattered, it wasn’t going to change anything anyway.

Maybe Remus had always been destined to be a villain, since that seemed to be the pill easier to swallow for everyone else.

“Alright, alright, I get it. Not gonna ask anymore,” Remy says, settling on a rap station, and leaning back in his chair. The glow from his phone turns on not seconds later, highlighting his face dramatically. “After Starbies, what do you want to eat? Burgers? Chicken? Pizza, sushi—oh there’s a cute little barbeque place I know down this bit, pricey as all hell and they make you buy your fries separately, but it's almost worth it. We grabbed some once last time I snuck out after curfew and I almost—”

“Are you actually going to eat any of this?” Remus asks. “Or do not-real people have hallucination burgers to eat as well?”

“You wish I was a hallucination. I’d be the cutest one you’ve ever had,” Remy laughs. “Nah, girl, I am famished and I eat normal food—Not being real means I don’t have to eat, but I enjoy eating because food is good, you know? Oh, should we do steak? You’re old enough to get alcohol, right? Steak and some of that really good expensive wine! Like classy rich people!” 

“Who is paying here?”

There weren't exactly a billion reasons for Remus to have packed his pockets with cash; most of his money is bundled in his bags at the no-questions motel which apparently he’s not visiting immediately because he’s going to get his hostage Starbucks and dinner. If pressed he might find a few dollars somewhere in his pockets, slipped there by Janus a million years ago, and the mere thought of Janus’s slim fingers padding Remus’s pockets with cash for just-in-case brings forth an emotion so strong that Remus can’t breathe at all. 

Remy doesn’t look bothered or concerned for anything as he double taps some video he’s watching to let the entire internet know that he liked it before he scrolls away and never sees it again. He holds up the officer’s wallet and waves it. 

“Officer Bolivar, I guess,” he says in a tone that is beginning to remind Remus why he never got along with anyone in high school or after. “But don’t you also have money, Mr. Oracle? You’re a supervillain and you can see the future. Just go rob a place and I’ll wait in the car or whatever. I’m thinking salted caramel cold brew, cookie crumble topping, and caramel drizzle, extra whip. You?”

“You know I killed that guy back there, right? He’s dead.”

“He’s not. I told you, Logan made it so no one dies.”

Remus honestly can’t remember if that is something Remy has said; he was too busy trying to figure out the fucking not-real comment. Cold water drips down his neck again, sharp and piercing and god-awful. He tries to take a steadying breath but the nausea jumps on his uvula and pulls hard.

“Logan can’t control fucking death.” Remus says, because he’s an expert in all the ways that people stop breathing after you punch them enough. “He wasn’t even anywhere near us!”

The teenager snorts. “Trust me, that does not matter in the slightest.”

Remus takes another look at him. “And why would that be? His fucking power?”

Remy groans. “Can we not talk about Logan? Please? I’m so tired of talking about Logan. He’s literally the worst, you know? Let’s talk about why you even care if Officer Bolivar is dead. Like, he’s the police. You hate the police. That’s, like, the whole villain thing, you know?”

The air conditioning rattles and the chilled air bites against Remus’s damp skin. Remus gets the very distinct feeling that Remy is not at all worried that Remus might kill him too, nor the moral implications of what killing someone might mean. 

“He can be the police and still be a fucking living being, too,” Remus snaps. “I don’t go around just fucking killing people. Is that what you think I do? You think that I like murdering people because I’m some sick freak that needs to be medicated and locked up? Is that why didn’t teleport away? You were hoping I was going to kill someone?! Are you trying to get me to kill you too?” 

“Yeesh, crashout much?” Remy says. “Even if you kill me it won’t matter. I’m not real and I won’t die.”

“Do you have blood?” 

Remy frowns. “Yeah?”

“Do you feel pain?”

“Oh, come on, don’t start this. You were cool for, like, five seconds—”

“Congrats, you’re a real, living being!” Remus snarls.

“Look, okay, you can think of me as, like, Logan’s imaginary friend from his childhood.” Remy says with a disgusted sneer. “Ew. Why did you make me say that? But you’ve seen what Logan’s power can do. It's the same with this: Logan talked a bit too much, per usual, and then to cover up that he accidentally made a whole-ass person, he told everyone I was his brother. And now I have to go to calc classes!”

Remus tears his eyes off the road and looks at Remy, feeling every vertebrae crack as he does so. “Are you trying to tell me Logan is your dad?”

“Ew, no!” Remy says closing out the app, and setting his phone to sleep. He claps his hands and meets Remus’s gaze head on. “Gross. It’s fine if you don’t get it, alright? We don’t have to talk about it or Logan. It doesn’t matter.”

“It absolutely fucking does!”

“I can see you’re going to have a little breakdown now and since I failed my driver’s twice that’s not gonna fly, babes. So I’m going to let you in on the secret, m’kay? Logan controls everything. He’s basically a god. And if you thought that gods couldn’t be bitchasses, you thought wrong. Me and you and everyone we come across? Can’t die. Logan won’t let us. So that officer? Totally chill.”

A trail of rain water drips down Remus’s neck. He doesn’t need to look away from the road to know that Remy truly, honestly believes it. He doesn’t need to look away from the road to remember four, Five, SIX gun shots in his body, the surprise on Remy’s face when he was drenched in blood, the pulsating scrapes on his current knuckles from punching the officer until he was sure that the guy was not going to breathe again, much less get up.

“Same thing with the library; nobody’s dead. Hurt, traumatized, arrested, but not dead. Which is crazy because the photos of the mess are all over the place and it looked like shit. I mean, it was shit before, but now it's like super shit. Renovations are going to have to rebuild the entire thing brick by brick. Thank fuck I can teleport, right? Can you imagine if we had to lay there waiting to be unburied covered in mortar or whatever? Gross.”

There’s a noise that fumbles through the car like a sledgehammer into the front window of a new street boutique. Remus jolts until he realizes that’s his own laugh, choked between the gasps for sanity and breath and a few seconds. 

“No casualties?” Remus repeats. “You really believe there were no—fucking—casualities? I watched Janus die on Live TV!”

Remy rolls his eyes, but Remus can’t be sure when he was trying really fucking hard not to tear the steering wheel off the column and slam it into Remy upwards of fourteen times. 

“It's all over TikTok,” Remy says, reactively unlocking his phone and pulling open the tab he has for the app. “There’s not a lot of footage because of that guy with the scream power fucked audio bits—so cool, by the way, I’d tap that. Fangs are so on my list—But a whole bunch of people are talking about those guys with the white lotus uniforms apparently tying up Basilisk after he’d been shot up and he woke up in the middle of it for a half second before one of those guys sedated him. Accounts are getting banned left and right for posting about it so, of course, everyone wants to talk about it.”

Remy taps his phone to his lips and then points it at Remus, accusatory. “We seriously need to make you a TikTok. You’d love it. You’ve got a bunch of people already cosplaying you and making fanart—oh, you’re going to take the next exit. Off the ramp it’s like two lights and then, boom, on the left. This one has a drive thru and everything.”

“What?” Remus asks.

“Starbucks,” Remy says, with an undercurrent of uh duh so loud that Remus's throat hurts from holding back his scream. “Don’t tell me you forgot? Babes, it’s been five minutes. You’re a supervillain—”

“People fucking died,” Remus roars.

“Oh my god, fine!” The teenager stretches in his seat, almost yawning. “He always does this. Kinda insufferable, actually. But basically, Logan manipulates reality or whatever so that none of this has any lasting consequence. So your boyfriend-sex friend-whatever miraculously survived his Pietro Maximoff cosplay, anyone who was in the library probably found a nice alcove to lay in while emergency services dug them out— even Officer Bolivar is gonna make it to the hospital and then they’re gonna find out he’s got a bunch of bruises, but nothing life threatening and then he’s gonna get worker’s comp or an award for getting injured in the line of duty and it might even turn out that he had, like, some early stage of a horrible disease that they caught now because of whatever injury it is, so it turns into a net positive, actually.”

Remus swaps lanes until there’s a decent gap between him and the car in front of him and he doesn’t have to worry about rear ending a Toyota hybrid that’s scared of the rain, while the world around him actively tries to implode. He thinks for a second about how it would feel to drive right off the road into the nearest tree. The impact wouldn’t even shock him anymore; the collision, the airbag, the death—it would feel like a fucking homecoming. Something right in the web of wrong that the teenager is putting together.

The guardrail wasn’t enough, Remus thinks. Deepthroating the guardrail from a minute ago was not a good enough death and he needs something stronger and deadlier and more permanent—

“Are you.” Remus says slowly, carefully, like he’s handling face-melting acid that reacts with vibrations in the air. “Are you telling me that Logan can rewrite the laws of reality? At any point he chooses?”

“That was the exit,” Remy grimaces with his whole body watching Remus drive right by it. “And don’t tell him I told you. He’s sooooo annoying about it.”

“Is that why you said you don't think anything matters? Because he can rewrite reality on a whim? You think he made you up?”

“Logan doesn’t do anything on a whim. He’s too fucking anal. But yeah. If Logan doesn’t like it, he’ll just change it, retroactively.”

The wet asphalt of the highway is playing tricks on Remus. The lights are blinding and the car’s air conditioner rattles the same way that his bones had been rattling directly after his phone call to his mother, directly in the middle of him thinking off all the ways he could kill himself, directly before Logan, who doesn’t do things on a whim, reached out and tapped Remus’s shoulder to see if he was alright and instead somehow got to see the vision of his death, on a whim. 

Part of him doesn’t want to believe it: reality isn’t something that can just “be changed”, and dead people don’t just wake up.

But the larger, louder, logical side of Remus knows better. He’s known for a while now that reality is in a constant flux, and that the truth of today (or this hour, this minute, this second, breath, blink, thought—) could be wrong in the next; with a power like his, Remus can see all the possibilities available to him in any given instant and he can choose which path to take. That’s just reality manipulation in another, far-less-sexy dress.

“Look, you don’t have anything to worry about,” Remy continues, while Remus is feeling the phantom radiator grille of a semi truck slamming into his face from a future that didn’t happen and Remus knows instantly that whatever he’s about to say is something he needs to be worried about now. “It's not like Logan can talk you out of existence. You’re trending on Twitter. Everyone knows you and has opinions and the way you’re handling everything so far means that people aren’t going to forget about you for a while, which means Logan can’t do anything about you! He can’t touch you or your cool ass power.”

Remus remembers standing in the crowd amidst a riot, the scent of tear gas burning the oxygen with a vengeance and through suffocating breaths seeing Zeal, Roman’s stupid partner raise a hand and steal the power right out of another person. He remembers the deep, sudden horror that overtook him, the dizzying swirl of panic that came when Zeal set his eyes on Janus. 

That had been bad enough; one person with the ability to remove superpowers asked for or not. And Remy was talking blithely like Logan’s ability to do the same was the same boring concept as rain in Seattle.

Remy traces the fingerprint scanner with his thumb, letting his phone wink in and out of sleep as it senses the pressure. The headlights of the opposing cars drag across Remy’s glasses, lasers of white light that distract and obscure whatever he’s not saying and whatever Remus hasn’t put together in the gnarled, knotted cluster of conversation ends Remy has dodged out of finishing.

Remus’s hand tightens on the steering wheel again and he begs his lungs to cooperate. He is not seventeen years old anymore, lost and afraid and realizing that everything he built his life around would prefer if he weren’t part of it at all. He’s not about to shatter like a snowglobe, or splatter like a raindrop, or fizzle like a hairdryer falling into a full bathtub.

None of it matters. None of this matters. 

“Waffle House,” Remus says, finally. He drags his hand through his damp bangs again and brushes them as far back as his curls will allow. “There’s a Waffle House around here, right? Take us to a Waffle House and then you are going to show me what videos of Janus being alive you have.”

Remy perks up again, a smile breaking through the solemn seriousness that overtook him. “That’s Basilisk, right? I have a bunch of good comps saved! I’ll get you totally up to speed! But also, babes, you’re in the wrong part of the country if you want grease flavored playdough.”

“See, for that? For that we aren’t even going to stop at Starbucks,” Remus says. “Find a fucking Denny’s.”

“Okay, wait, wait, wait—hang on, I take it back! I’m sorry! I’m really sorry! Please don’t make me drink shit coffee at a Denny’s. I’ll pay for everything! Just let me have my starbies. Please!”

Remus glances at him out of the corner of his eye, ignoring the burn of the opposing headlights breaking cutting into his retinas between the wiper movements. It's on the tip of Remus’s tongue to ignore him; fuckass dramatic teenagers who believe they’re indestructible and that their brothers would remove them from reality and also that Starbucks is the only correct type of coffee.

But then.

“Is...is this a power thing,” Remus asks, loosening his grip on the wheel to stretch out his fingers and watching the rain splatters converge greedily on the recently cleared windshield. “If you don’t get your brand coffee, is it going to hurt you?”

Remy’s head tilts, the tinge of panic melting slightly for an unsure, one-step-up-from-pity expression that Remus doesn’t have the emotional range to handle right now or ever. “Uh. No. But you’re in the part of this country that has actual taste and choosing to drink anything other than Starbies is disgusting and embarrassing and I will not allow myself to be seen with it.”

“No one is going to see us,” Remus says. “If you stop posting photos of us for thirty fucking seconds.”

Remy laughs and something in Remus’s chest loosens and tightens at the same time.

Remus breathes out and focuses on driving again, eying the bloody mess of his knuckles in the opposing traffic’s spontaneous headlights. They sting like road burns, dull throbs until he twitches and his nerves remember to scream at him. The blood drips down his fingers like an itch, and Remus is glad he doesn’t care about leaving evidence; the fee for getting blood out of leather has got to be an upcharge at most carwashes, right?

He takes the next exit and Remy tells him the entire anthology of every popular kid from his high school class, and Remus hears none of it. 

Remy does not believe he’s real. Remus’s body remembers the way that Remy wriggled against him at the library when Remus first grabbed him as a hostage. He remembers the chaos and the panic. He remembers the high pitched tone and then rapid heartbeat and how Logan screamed when Remy hit the ground in that one future. How could someone who can control death, control reality, retroactively, still be so scared to see someone who isn’t even real die in front of them? 

If Logan could take away super power with his voice, why hadn’t he done it to Remus at the start when he had everything to lose and waning patience for the production?

By the time they pull into the empty drive thru for the Starbucks, Remus head is pounding louder than then radio music, and he’s no closer to figuring out which wrong things he would have fixed if he were suddenly thrown back in time to the moment he realized that Logan was in the library too. 

The urge to ask Janus boils in his gut, burning like an inferno in the space between his breaths.

It takes him a moment to get the window rolled down once they’re at the speaker, another to search the menu for something that doesn’t sound like it’s going to coalesce in his digestive tract like thousands of kidney stones. When he comes up with nothing, Remy wastes no time, unbuckling and practically climbing into Remus’s lap to clearly rattle off two orders complicated beyond reason to the worker. Remus believes for a moment that he just makes up several words entirely, but the voice at the other end just sighs and tells them to pull up to the next window.

“You know that was not what you told me earlier right?” Remus asks.

“I changed my mind! Don’t worry, you’re gonna love it!” Remy declares flashing the brightest and boldest smile Remus has seen on him so far. And Remus cannot believe that he’s not real, not when he’s so fucking alive, right here, right now. The teenager flicks down his glasses as Remus stops the car at the window and The Starbucks Employee does a double take at them.

From her expression, it's very clear she’s been keeping up with the news and knows very much who is driving the car. He’s been gawked at before, but the element of her knowing him… it itches in a way that he hadn’t thought it would when he was blurting out all his family drama for everyone to hear. It’s not pity or horror, but a slurry mixture of both that slides down Remus’s throat, leaving a strong aftertaste that he can’t figure out if he likes or not.

“Hey Maria!” Remy says flashing a peace sign, one hand lowering his sunglasses. “How’s work?”

Maria the Starbucks Employee stares at Remy and then to the screen detailing Remy’s atrocious order and then back at Remus, a certified terrorist, most wanted man in the country.

“Like my most recent post, I won’t call my manager over,” she says.

“Done,” Remy says, “I’ll tag DJ in it too!”

“You’re a bitch,” she says without hesitation. “$18.42.”

“Can you add a gift card for fifty bucks? No, make it a hundred!” Remy glances up at Remus, with a smug grin, waving Officer Pryce Bolivar’s credit card. “I am a good supervillain, yet? I am, aren’t I? The fucking best!”

--”Absolutely not,” Remus says.--

--”Are you fucking stupid,” Remus says.--

--”Are you trying to get Logan to kill me?”--

--”Did you know that your brain runs hotter than your normal body temperature? About two degrees warmer! Isn’t that neat, kid? Now, I know this because there was a distinct temperature difference between your body and your brain matter when I cracked open your skull on the floor of your calculus classroom after your teleporting power left you completely unconscious at the mercy of a sick freak like me! You wanna be a supervillain, kid? You really want to see what supervillains do? I can show you, right here, right now—”-- 

“O-oh my god!” Maria the Starbucks Employee shouts, nearly dropping the drinks she’d returned with. She scrambles to righten the drinks before she pours them directly into Remus’s lap. Remus debates slamming his head into the steering wheel; the amount of blood coming out of his face would be the same, probably.

“Awesome,” Remy says, sticking his phone up to take a couple pictures.

“Ackroyd!” Maria the Starbucks Employee shouts throwing a wad of napkins at Remus. “Knock it off! You can’t just take pictures of people when they’re bleeding! That’s, like, against the law!”

“Supervillain!” Remy says in a singsong voice, and Remus is too busy swallowing down a massive amount of blood to argue effectively. He presses the napkins to his face and tilts his head back and tries not to think any thoughts at all.

“Uh, Whoa….”

Remus glances at him sharply. “What?”

Remy moves his phone away quickly, hitting the power button as quick as he can. “Nothing. It’s nothing. Anyway…Coffees?”

The bright light in Remy’s eyes is like staring at oncoming traffic’s headlights, leaving Remus blinking away darkened blots and breathlessly waiting for the pain that isn’t coming. It’s hard to remember that when Remus woke up in that classroom, Remy was colder than ice, considering that the same kid was brushing up against him radiating warmth like an open flame. He smiles at Remus like he wants Remus to be in on the joke he’s telling.

How the fuck can he believe he’s not real?

Maria the Starbucks Employee, hesitates like she’s afraid he’ll start spitting up blood again. But when he stares at her for another beat without having a violent allergic reaction, she hands over two identical ice coffee drinks that smell sweet enough to make Remus’s stomach turn over. 

“Don’t forget the post!” she warns, as Remus shifts the car into drive and pulls out without checking to see if there were any other cars around. 

The teenager leverages the seat back, and puts his shoes on the dashboard again. He cranks the music in the car and takes a picture of himself and his monstrous drink to post on the internet for everyone to see. He points in the direction that Remus needs to drive, and Remus does because he hardly believes that Maria the Starbucks Employee is paid enough in Instagram likes or currency to not call the police on them. 

It’s about five minutes before Remus is pulling into a parking spot at a local 24 hour diner, which is notably Not A Denny’s or a Waffle House. The rain is still steadily coming down, and while Remy bolts towards the doors, protectively holding his coffee, Remus wavers for a half minute, eyeing his jacket in the back seat. 

It’s already damp and wouldn’t do much more against the rain, but Remus didn’t feel right just leaving it behind: too bare, too exposed, too much like Maria the Starbucks employee had seen exactly what Roman had told everyone they’d see when they looked at him. The other black sweatshirt jacket from the car’s original owner wouldn’t have the same feel and just thinking about wearing made Remus’s skin itch, in all the ways he generally tried to avoid having his skin itch.

The sky rumbles and Remus’s eyes trace the clever stitching on the sleeve of his jacket that Virgil had done in purple and gold thread. A gift from Janus mended by Virgil’s careful hands, and neither of them ever asking for anything in return. Underneath it, just visible in the auburn glow of the parking lot lights is the handle of the late Officer Bolivar’s gun.

Remus clenches the fabric in his hand, breathing in painfully. He left Virgil and Janus in a firefight where they were vastly outnumbered, a firefight that he basically instigated, a firefight they’d agreed to avoid at all costs because they couldn’t win without casualties, and now here he was, playing babysitter to a teenager that doesn’t believe in death anymore than he believes in consequences, after having beat a police officer to death-but-maybe-not-really because reality is as flexible as playdough. 

He watched Janus die, but Remy said he’d made it out alive, just arrested. Remus counted each bullet as they slammed into Janus, but Remy said he had video proof of Janus waking up. In that huge crowd of people there hadn’t been an escape for them, but Remy was saying those were witnesses that were talking online about what happened; thousands of people couldn’t have seen wrong, thousands of people couldn’t all keep up the same lie.

A building came down, but Logan can change reality if on a whim—

When he closes his eyes he can still see the look on Janus’s face when he died the first time, the second, the third, the thirtieth; he can see the shock and the terror and the regret as the light in his eyes disappears entirely. He can hear the catch of Janus’s breath as he realizes it's the end of him in this lifetime and can feel the endless greed that Janus has for living as it bleeds out of him, drip by drip by drip. 

Janus and Virgil needed him, now more than ever. And here was Remus, sightseeing, like he hadn’t been listening when Janus said that getting caught by the FBE was the worst outcome. Every second that Remus spent messing around here was one where Janus and Virgil might be getting tortured, or experimented on, or brainwashed, or actually killed for real this time, or, or, or—.

If it were Remus who got caught, it would have been okay. Alright? He would have been okay. There’s nothing that anyone can do to him that he hasn’t already tried a thousand and three times before. He’s burned up, bled out, breathed out, jumped off, jumped in, run down, tried and tested and tempted. He’s tasted every flavor of pain, and then gotten up to get more because he’s always been a masochist at heart. 

There’s nothing anyone can do to him that matters. Nothing about that matters.

Remus’s mouth tastes like blood and rainwater and his stomach acids. He picks up the gun and weighs it in his hand. It’s cool to the touch, and his fingers rest comfortably around the handle as if it were made for him more than the officer he took it from. He breathes in and remembers the reverberation of each shot he’d taken at Roman eons ago, remembers the giddy thrill of seeing his brother leap and dance in terror, remembers the trumpeting thud of his heartbeat when it jammed just in time to save Roman’s face from being obliterated. 

He remembers how Virgil and Janus looked at him afterwards, when Remus told them he wanted a gun, needed a gun to work this effectively, and Janus talked him into fake suicide bomb instead.

But now…. Now the idea of what to do with a gun comes as naturally as breathing. Ahead of him is likely a mostly empty diner, with people who are probably very attached to their lives, and Remus can see the future. A single phone call could get the TV stations here in probably five minutes, and the police here in half that. 

He’s already a horrible, irredeemable super villain; at this point, taking a bunch of hostages and demanding Janus and Virgil be released to him is just Remus following the stereotype, isn’t it? They wouldn’t believe him at first, though, because he’s already acted out this play under Janus’s direction. He’d need to add something else to the story, something to show how much this isn’t a bluff, something to show that this is Remus’s plan instead of Janus’s.

The ice in the coffee Remy ordered for him settles and Remus thinks about how much the media loves dead children.

Right in the head, Remus thinks. Faster than when Remus shattered his skull on the calculus classroom floor. He’d be too busy looking at his phone to notice Remus putting the barrel to the back of his head.

Remus has already killed someone today and Remy doesn’t believe he can die! Remus would… he’d be doing him a service, showing him that he can. After all those times that Remus has seen him dead, shot, on the floor in a puddle of coffee, pulling the trigger himself shouldn’t be hard at all. 

And maybe, just maybe, part of Remus wants desperately to see Logan prove he really can bring people back to life from a million miles away. 

There’s a knock on the driver’s side window, and Remus jerks sharply just as Remy pulls open the door and lets in a rush of water. “Girl, I know you were not about to ditch me! At this shitty diner I picked out for you, might I remind you?! The disrespect—”

No overlay version! + a little anxceit doodle from Happy Little Stars specifically