Multifamdomfan

The coral rose sat on the kitchen counter for three days before Patton moved it.

He'd set it there when Janus left — carefully, the way you set down something you aren't sure how to hold. He'd stood looking at it for a moment, at the particular warmth of its color, that soft in-between shade that wasn't quite pink and wasn't quite orange, and he'd thought: it's beautiful. And then he'd thought: I know what it means. And then he'd thought, very deliberately: I'm not going to think about what it means.

He hadn't looked it up. He'd told himself he didn't need to. He'd been telling himself that for three days.

On the third day, while Janus was visiting Logan to discuss something about Thomas's work schedule — Patton could hear the low murmur of their voices through the mindscape walls, Janus's precise cadences and Logan's careful responses — Patton had sat down at the kitchen table with his phone and typed: coral rose meaning.

He'd read the result twice. Then he'd put his phone face-down on the table and sat very still for a while.

Desire. Excitement. Happiness. Romantic interest. I am eager to see where this goes.

After a while he'd gotten up and found a vase — the small ceramic one with the blue painted flowers, the one Patton liked best — and filled it with water and put the rose in it and carried it to the windowsill. It caught the afternoon light immediately, glowing softly, and Patton thought it really is beautiful and then went to the kitchen to start dinner and didn't look at it again.

He had smiled at Janus, when Janus had given it to him.

Janus had come to the door of the common room with his hat at its usual angle and his cape swept just so, and he'd been holding the rose with an ease that Patton recognized as deliberately cultivated — Janus held things the way he said things, with a practiced naturalness designed to make it look like it had cost him nothing. He'd extended it and said, "I saw this and thought of you," and then stopped, and something had moved behind his expression — something complicated and very briefly, almost imperceptibly open — before settling back into the smooth unreadable arrangement that Janus wore the way other people wore faces.

"Oh, Janus!" Patton had said, and he'd meant it, the warmth of it real and immediate. "It's gorgeous. What a pretty color."

"It's coral," Janus said. Precisely. Like the word mattered.

"I love it. Thank you so much, buddy." Patton had smiled, full and genuine, and taken the rose, and watched Janus's eye — the gold one, the one with the vertical pupil — go very still for just a moment, a fraction of a second, before Janus tipped his hat and said of course, darling in the particular dry register that meant he was performing ease and had it almost perfect.

Almost.

Patton had seen the almost. He'd filed it carefully away under don't think about this and started talking about dinner.

Three days later he moved the rose to the windowsill. He watered it every morning. He didn't look at it directly. He thought about it constantly.

He was very, very good at not thinking about things.

---

Janus didn't visit for eleven days.

Patton counted. He didn't mean to — or he told himself he didn't mean to, which was a small precise lie in the tradition of all the other small precise lies he'd been telling himself lately. He was simply aware of the days passing. He was attuned to Thomas's emotional rhythms, that was all, and Thomas had been quieter lately, more introverted, working through something slow and private, and it made sense that Janus's input would be less in demand during that kind of period. It wasn't strange.

He repotted some plants. He made elaborate recipes he found in books. He had a long conversation with Logan about the philosophy of care ethics that he genuinely enjoyed and only thought about Janus twice. He texted Roman a string of puns that Roman claimed to find offensive and responded to with worse ones. He reorganized the mug cabinet.

On the ninth day, Virgil came by and they watched a movie together — something comfort and familiar — and halfway through, Virgil looked at him sideways and said, "You're doing the thing."

"What thing?" Patton said, not looking away from the screen.

"The thing where you're fine," Virgil said, making the word sound like a medical diagnosis.

"I am fine."

"Sure," Virgil said, and pulled his hoodie sleeves down over his hands, and didn't push it, because Virgil was good at not pushing, which was something Patton had always appreciated and right now found mildly infuriating.

"I'm fine," Patton said again, and the movie kept playing.

On the twelfth day he heard footsteps.

He knew them immediately — he would have known them anywhere at this point, the particular rhythm of dress shoes on hardwood, confident and measured and slightly deliberate, the walk of someone who had decided a long time ago that every movement would be a performance and had committed to it so completely that it had become simply the way they moved. Patton's hands stilled on the dish he was drying.

Don't make it weird, he told himself. Just be normal. You're friends. This is fine. You're fine.

Janus appeared in the doorway of the kitchen.

He looked — Patton did the thing he'd been doing lately, which was noticing, cataloguing, gathering details like a person storing up against a winter — he looked exactly as he always did. The hat at its particular angle, the cape, the gloves. The scales along the left side of his jaw iridescent in the kitchen light. The scar that pulled at his mouth. The gold eye moving across the room with that quality of attention that was not warm and not cold but something more specific, something that saw things clearly and decided, each time, how much of that clarity to reveal.

It stopped on Patton.

For a moment neither of them said anything.

"Patton," Janus said. The word contained nothing but itself.

"Hey, Jan." Patton put the dish down. He was smiling — of course he was smiling, he was always smiling, that was the thing about him, the smile was real even when it was also a kind of armor. "I feel like it's been forever. Do you want some cocoa? I was about to make some."

"I don't want cocoa."

"I have that chamomile I got last month, the one with the—"

"I don't want tea."

Patton's hands found the edge of the counter. He held on to it without meaning to. "Okay," he said. "Okay, that's totally fine. Did you need to talk about Thomas? Because he's been in a bit of a—"

"I came to retrieve something I left here." Janus's voice was even, smooth, a closed door. "A book."

"Oh." Patton let go of the counter. "Right, yes. Brideshead, you mean — I know right where it is."

He was grateful for the task. He crossed to the bookshelf and found it immediately, spine flush with the edge of the shelf the way Janus had placed it, because Janus placed things exactly where he wanted them and they stayed there. He brought it back.

He held it out. Janus took it. Their hands didn't touch. Patton had been precise about that.

"Thank you," Janus said.

Two words. They sounded like something else.

He turned toward the door.

"Janus."

It came out before Patton had thought about it, before he'd constructed the sentence, before he'd decided whether it was wise. Janus paused. He didn't turn around. Patton looked at the back of his hat, the line of his shoulders, the way one gloved hand had gone completely still against the cover of the book.

The kitchen was very quiet.

"I put the rose on the windowsill," Patton said. "The one you gave me. It looks really pretty there, the light hits it in the afternoon and it just—" He stopped. His voice had done something unsteady. He made it steady again. "It's really beautiful, Janus. Thank you."

Silence. Long enough that Patton started to hear his own heartbeat.

"How lovely," Janus said.

His voice was perfectly smooth. Perfectly even. Absolutely nothing in it, which meant, Patton knew — had come to know, had learned how to read the specific grammar of Janus's evenness — everything.

He walked out.

Patton stood in the kitchen with the empty counter and the mug he'd never made and the rose on the windowsill behind him, and listened to the footsteps until he couldn't hear them anymore.

---

The problem was that Patton remembered everything.

That was the thing about feelings, about these kinds of feelings — they recruited your whole memory to their cause. Every small true thing became evidence. Evidence of what he already knew and had been refusing to look at directly, the way you don't look at the sun.

He remembered the first time Janus had told him something real.

They'd been arguing — still in the era when arguing was mostly what they did, when every conversation was a negotiation and the negotiating was exhausting and somehow also, in retrospect, the beginning of something — and Patton had said, frustrated and sharper than he usually let himself be, "You always lie. That's all you do. I don't even know if you're capable of just saying something true."

And Janus had stopped.

He'd looked at Patton for a long moment, and the performance had gone out of his face — not gone entirely, because with Janus it never went entirely, but shifted, receded enough that Patton could see the edge of something underneath.

"Telling the truth," Janus had said, slowly, "does not come naturally to me. I want to be precise about that distinction. It isn't that I'm incapable of it. It's that it requires effort, in the way that doing something against your instinct always requires effort. I have to want the true thing more than I want the easier thing, and then I have to choose it." A pause. "I'm choosing it now, for whatever that's worth to you."

Patton had opened his mouth. Closed it. Said, finally, "What's the true thing?"

"That I'm tired," Janus said. "Of being the one Thomas uses to justify not taking care of himself. I want Thomas to be a good person as much as you do. I simply believe that 'good person' includes 'person who rests occasionally without guilt.' That's the actual disagreement. Not morality versus selfishness. Just — different ideas about what a sustainable life looks like."

The argument had ended differently than Patton expected. It had ended with them both sitting on the kitchen floor — not planned, just the natural result of the conversation losing its structure — with Patton making concessions he'd been resisting for months and Janus actually listening, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his hat pushed back, and something building between them that was going to be either friendship or trouble.

It had turned out to be both.

He remembered the wine.

Janus had arrived one evening with a bottle of red and two glasses — presented without comment, set on the counter, uncorked with the ease of long practice — and Patton had said "I don't really drink wine" and Janus had said "You don't have to" and poured himself a glass and settled into the kitchen chair like he was planning to stay.

He'd stayed for four hours.

They'd talked about Thomas, at first, the way they usually did. Then about the other sides — carefully, diplomatically, testing which topics were safe. Then somehow, through a sequence of logical steps that Patton could no longer reconstruct, about the nature of performance, about whether it was possible to perform something long enough that it became true, about the difference between a mask and a face.

"The scales," Patton had said, quietly, toward the end. He'd been wanting to ask for a long time and had been afraid to. "Did it hurt? When they — when you changed?"

Janus had been quiet for a moment. His finger moved around the rim of his glass.

"Yes," he said.

"I'm sorry," Patton said. "I'm really sorry, Janus. You didn't deserve—"

"Thomas was a child," Janus said. "He'd just learned the story of the garden. You know how children learn things — completely, all the way, with their whole bodies. He learned that lies came from something serpentine and monstrous and cast out of grace, and he was afraid, and the fear changed me." A pause. "I'm not angry at him. I spent a long time being angry. It didn't accomplish anything." Another pause. "The eye was the worst part, actually. The scales I could ignore, mostly. But the eye—"

"Janus."

"It's fine," he said, and his voice was entirely level. "It was a long time ago."

"It's not fine," Patton said, with a gentleness that brooked no argument. "You don't have to pretend it's fine with me."

The gold eye had moved to him then. Held on him for a moment with an expression Patton couldn't fully name — something careful and something aching and something that was almost, almost want, the want not for anything dramatic but simply for this, for a person looking at you and saying you don't have to pretend.

"No," Janus said finally, softly. "I suppose I don't."

They'd sat with that for a while, the wine and the quiet and the smallness of the true thing between them.

That was the night Patton had started to understand that he was in trouble.

He remembered the dark.

Logan had been recalibrating something in the mindscape's foundational systems — Patton never fully understood the technical details, that was more Logan's domain, and Roman's, the architecture of the place — and he'd been in the middle of a sentence when the lights simply went out.

Complete darkness. Total and immediate.

Patton had started to say "Oh, that must be Logan—" and then there was a hand on his arm.

Not a gentle hand. Fingers pressing hard through his cardigan, gripping with the sudden involuntary strength of pure instinct. And a sound — small, cut off almost immediately, but there — a sharp intake of breath that had no performance in it at all.

Patton went very still.

"Hey," he said. Soft. The voice he used when one of the other sides was having a hard time, the one that came from somewhere deep and automatic and genuinely caring. "Hey, it's okay. I'm right here."

Nothing from Janus. But he didn't let go.

"I've got you," Patton said. "Okay? I'm not going anywhere. It's just a temporary thing, Logan will fix it." He paused, thinking. "Actually, knowing Logan, he'll fix it in about forty-five seconds while silently judging whoever designed the original system."

The grip on his arm didn't loosen, but something in the quality of the tension shifted slightly.

"I was thinking about making soup tomorrow," Patton said, because he knew how to do this, knew that the key was something warm and present and continuous. "That potato leek one you said was adequate, which I've decided to interpret as the highest praise you're capable of giving food—"

"It was adequate," Janus said. Low, slightly unsteady, still mostly even. "I stand by that assessment."

"High praise," Patton confirmed. "Truly, truly high praise. I'm going to put it on a sign. 'Adequate' — Jan."

A breath in the dark that was almost, almost a laugh.

The lights came back on.

Janus released his arm. Immediately, completely, the way you release something you weren't meant to be holding. He straightened, adjusted his hat — the gesture of reassembly that Patton had come to recognize — and said, in a voice of perfect composure, "Logan's timing, as always, impeccable."

"Right?" Patton agreed, like nothing had happened.

He didn't look at the marks on his arm. He didn't bring it up then or ever. He carried it with him, quietly, one more small true thing added to the accumulating weight.

He remembered the jazz.

Janus had arrived one evening with a small record player under his arm — appeared in the doorway with it like it was nothing, like he just happened to have it, set it on the counter and produced a record from somewhere in the layers of his cape with the practiced ease of a stage magician and put it on without explanation.

Soft trumpet, slow piano. The song moved through the room like water.

Janus had stood and listened with his eye half-closed and his hand around a glass of wine and his whole face in an arrangement that Patton didn't see often — not performing, not guarded, not composing himself, just listening. Just present, in the music, quietly.

"You love this," Patton said. Not a question.

"I enjoy it," Janus said.

"That's not what I said."

The gold eye opened. Looked at him. "Yes," Janus said after a moment. "I love it."

They'd listened for a while. Another song started, something with a little more swing to it, and Patton had said, because it was true and he felt like saying true things in that moment, "Dance with me."

He'd expected deflection. A raised eyebrow and a remark about the impracticality or sentimentality or some combination of both.

Janus had looked at him for a long, quiet moment. Then he'd set his glass down and held out his hand.

They danced badly by any technical standard and it didn't matter at all. Janus's hand at his back, careful and sure. Patton's hand on his shoulder. The music moving them in the kitchen, slow and warm, and Janus's eye had been soft in the low light — the gold of it was warm when the light was warm, Patton had noticed that, had catalogued it the way he catalogued everything now — and they didn't talk, just moved, and Patton had thought:

Oh. Oh, I'm already in this. I've been in this for a while.

He hadn't said anything. He'd kept dancing. He'd held the knowledge in his chest like something he hadn't figured out what to do with yet.

---

He sat on the kitchen floor.

Not dramatically — his legs had simply, quietly stopped doing their job, and the floor had come up to meet him, and he'd let it. His back was against the cabinets. His knees were pulled up. Above him, on the counter, the empty mug he'd never filled.

He could still hear, somehow, the rhythm of Janus's footsteps leaving. Already gone, already receding, already becoming the particular quality of silence that a space has after someone has recently left it and taken something with them.

Coral, Patton thought.

Desire. Excitement. Happiness. I am eager to see where this goes.

He'd known. He'd known when Janus handed him the rose, he'd known in the precise moment that Janus had said "It's coral" with that extra weight on the word, the weight that meant I chose this specifically, I want you to understand that I chose this specifically. He'd known and he'd smiled and said "Thank you, buddy" and watched something very small and carefully constructed move through Janus's expression.

He'd said buddy.

Patton pressed his palms flat on the kitchen floor and breathed.

There was a version of this where he could explain it as — as not knowing, as missing the signal, as being genuinely unaware. That would be simpler. That would let him off more cleanly.

But Patton was Morality. And the thing about being Morality was that you could feel with a painful clarity exactly when you were deceiving yourself. The lie was never invisible to him. It just sometimes felt necessary, felt like the only scaffolding holding something up that would collapse without it, and so you built the lie and you lived inside it and you told yourself it was the responsible choice, the careful choice, the choice that hurt no one.

Except it had hurt Janus.

He'd watched it happen and told himself he was imagining it, and he hadn't been imagining it.

You are Deceit, Patton thought, not unkindly but with precision, thinking of Janus. You know when someone is lying to themselves. You have always known.

Janus had known, in the moment Patton said buddy, exactly what Patton was doing. He'd taken it, absorbed it, tucked it away in that part of him that was very practiced at absorbing things that hurt and not showing the hurt and continuing to function. He'd said of course, darling and moved on.

And now he'd come back for a book and left again, and his voice at the end had been how lovely, perfectly smooth, perfectly even, the voice of someone who has made a decision and is holding it.

The decision, Patton understood, was to take it as rejection.

The thing Patton had never quite let himself fully trace — the shape of what Janus had come from, what Janus had survived — pressed itself to the surface now.

He thought about Thomas as a young child in a Catholic household, learning the story of the garden, learning with the completeness that children learn things, learning it in his body and his soul, and the fear of that story changing something in the mindscape, changing Janus, and Janus having no say in it, waking up different — no, not waking up, becoming, gradually, the scales appearing and the eye changing and the left side of his mouth splitting open to leave that scar that pulled at his face forever and hurt, had hurt, Janus had told him once, quietly — and then finding himself classified as a dark side because of changes that had been done to him.

He thought about Virgil.

Janus had mentioned Virgil only once, obliquely, in the way he mentioned things that mattered. He'd said, "We thought we were something like a family, for a while. The dark sides. Virgil, Remus, myself. Children find family wherever they can." A pause. "Then Virgil left." Another pause. "I understood it. That didn't make it not a loss."

He'd said it with the complete evenness of someone who had processed something painful by pressing it very flat and keeping it there, and Patton had understood, underneath the evenness, what that loss had cost.

Virgil had gotten out. Virgil had been accepted, eventually, by the light sides, after years of being feared and avoided and misunderstood. And that was good — Patton was glad, genuinely, that Virgil had found his place. But it meant Janus and Remus had been left behind, and then Remus had his own chaos to inhabit, and Janus had been alone, playing the villain because it was the role available and he was extraordinarily good at committing to a role.

He'd played it with such dedication. The theatrics, the capes, the villain laugh that was genuinely impressive, the elaborate moral arguments delivered with one eyebrow raised and a quality of condescension that had, at the time, infuriated Patton and now, with distance, seemed like the most elaborate possible armor. If they were going to cast you as the villain, you could at least be a spectacular one. If you were going to be the part of Thomas he didn't want, you could at least be that fully.

And then slowly, slowly, with the grinding patience of someone who had learned not to expect things to come quickly or easily, Janus had built something with Patton. Had allowed himself to have preferences and share them and be known in small ways, and had received, in return, Patton's genuine attention, Patton's actual care, Patton's growing warmth — and somewhere in there had made the mistake of hoping.

Patton knew when that mistake had been made. He'd watched it happen. He'd participated in it, which was the unbearable part.

Every time he'd learned something new. Every time he'd remembered it, brought it back up, showed Janus that the things Janus shared were being held. Every time he'd been gentle with Janus's fears and careful with Janus's history and present for Janus's quiet moments. He'd been building something without acknowledging what he was building, and Janus had been watching him build it and, against all his better instincts, allowing himself to believe in it.

The coral rose was the result of hope. Very specific, very carefully chosen hope.

---

Here was the thing Patton kept running into, the wall underneath the wall:

He'd grown up with Thomas in the Catholic church.

Not grown up, exactly — he was a side, not a person with a childhood, but he was made of Thomas's personhood, and Thomas's personhood included all the years of mass and confession and the particular weight of a faith that gave with one hand and took with the other. He knew what Thomas had been taught. He'd been taught it too, in his own way, in the way that something absorbed becomes part of the structure of you.

It had taken so long. He didn't like to think about how long. The years of Thomas understanding himself and Patton struggling behind him, struggling to hold Thomas's truth and his love for Thomas and the things he'd been shaped by all in the same hands at the same time, struggling to stop feeling like something had to be wrong even when everything in him said nothing was wrong, nothing was wrong, Thomas was—

Thomas was who he was. And Thomas was good. And the feelings that Thomas had, the love Thomas was capable of, the joy of it — none of that was something to be ashamed of, none of it contradicted any goodness, Patton knew that. He'd gotten to knowing it. He'd done the work.

Mostly.

He'd done most of the work.

He sat on the kitchen floor and was honest with himself, in the way he only sometimes managed to be, and admitted that there were parts of the work he'd been putting off.

Because here was the thing: it was one thing to love Thomas and accept Thomas and believe completely that Thomas deserved to be loved in full. It was another thing — a different thing, a harder thing, a thing that lived in a different part of the architecture of him — to look at his own feelings and apply the same acceptance.

He hadn't been ready for this. He hadn't been prepared for the particular direction his feelings had gone, the specific person they'd attached to, the way wanting Janus felt different from anything theoretical he might have been able to make peace with in the abstract. Because it was real, and specific, and it was him, and the voice in him that still carried the old weight said—

It said various things. Patton had gotten good at not listening to it. He'd gotten good at arguing back. He knew the arguments, had made them for Thomas's sake a hundred times, could recite them fluently.

For himself, they kept slipping.

That was the shameful part. The part he'd been sitting with, pressing down, plastering over with smiles and the word buddy and the deliberate choice to see the rose as something it wasn't, because if he didn't see it, he didn't have to respond to it, and if he didn't respond to it, he didn't have to stand in front of this particular fear and ask himself what he was actually choosing.

He was choosing the fear. He knew that.

He knew that and he hated it and he didn't know what to do with the knowing.

And here was the thing about Janus — the thing that made Patton press his fist to his sternum and breathe — was that Janus had been through this too.

Janus had been the part of Thomas that masked the truth of Thomas, back when it needed masking. Back when Thomas had been still practicing, still inside the community that had shaped him, Janus had been the one holding the things Thomas couldn't yet hold, the one keeping Thomas safe in the ways that didn't look like safety from outside. He'd understood, viscerally, why Thomas had needed to hide. He'd helped Thomas hide.

And then Thomas had come out. And it had been hard and beautiful and terrifying in the ways those things always are, and somewhere in that process — quietly, privately, without fanfare — Janus had done his own version of the same reckoning.

He'd come to peace with it. Janus, who had been changed without his consent by Thomas's fear of serpents and lies, who had been cast as a villain, who had been left alone in the dark sections of Thomas's mind — Janus had looked at his own feelings and chosen to accept them.

He'd given Patton a coral rose.

And Patton had said buddy.

---

Patton got up off the kitchen floor eventually.

He made the cocoa he'd offered Janus. He drank it standing at the counter, looking at the rose on the windowsill. It was beginning to fully bloom now — the petals had opened further, the color deepening slightly at the center — and it was heartbreakingly beautiful and Patton stood with his mug and looked at it and thought about Janus choosing it.

Not just choosing to give a flower. Choosing that one, that color, with that meaning. Going to the trouble of a language precise enough to say what he wanted to say without making himself fully vulnerable, because Janus had spent a long time learning that full vulnerability was dangerous. Not a red rose — too obvious, too much, too exposed. Not pink — too soft, too uncertain. Coral. Specific. Calibrated. I want you to understand that I want this, and I want you to have to choose whether to acknowledge it.

Janus had given him an out, Patton realized. Had built the out directly into the gesture. Because Janus knew Patton — knew him well enough to understand that Patton might need a door, might need the option to say I see this as a friendly gift and have that be a thing that could technically be said without anyone having to lose face. He'd made the rose deniable, which was itself a kind of care, which was the kind of care Janus gave when he was trying not to let it be visible that he was giving care.

Patton set his mug down. It made a quiet sound on the counter.

"I know," he said, to the rose, to the empty kitchen, to no one at all. "I know, I know, I know."

He went to bed.

He lay in the dark — Janus couldn't stand the dark, Patton thought, and immediately hated himself for the thought — and stared at the ceiling.

He could go to Janus. He knew where Janus's room was in the mindscape. He could knock on the door and say — something. Some arrangement of true words. He'd been lying to himself and Janus knew it and he could just say I know what the rose meant, I know what you meant, I was afraid and I'm sorry, can we—

Can we what?

Could he promise anything? Could he say I'm ready for this when he didn't know if he was? Could he offer Janus something real, or would he just be holding out another deniable gesture, something that felt like a beginning but had a retreat already built in?

Janus deserved better than a beginning with a built-in retreat.

Janus deserved—

Patton turned over in bed. Pressed his face into the pillow.

Tomorrow, he thought. Maybe tomorrow I'll have figured out what to say.

---

The rose bloomed for another nine days.

Patton watched it happen. He watched it every day, or he didn't watch it exactly, but he was always aware of it, the way you're aware of something you should address and haven't addressed — a low constant pressure at the edge of attention. He watered it carefully. He watched the petals deepen and then, slowly, at the edges, begin to pale.

He and Janus had three more brief interactions. Once in the hallway — Janus on his way somewhere, Patton coming from the kitchen, a pause, a polite exchange about something Thomas-related, nothing wrong in it anywhere and nothing right in it either. Once in the common area when all the sides were together — Janus in his chair, Patton across the room, the conversation general and comfortable on the surface and Patton unable to stop tracking the small things, the way Janus held his cup, the quality of his attention when he thought no one was watching him, the moment Janus laughed at something Roman said and the real laugh was briefly audible underneath the performance laugh, warm and a little reluctant, the laugh of someone who had not intended to find something funny.

Once in the kitchen, late, just the two of them.

Patton had been making tea. Janus had come in for water — he'd been up late, apparently, the way he sometimes was, some private nocturnal pattern that Patton had noticed without commenting on — and they'd stood in the kitchen together in the particular quiet of late night in the mindscape and not quite talked.

"How've you been?" Patton asked.

"Functional," Janus said.

"That's not really an answer."

"It answered your question precisely." Janus filled his glass, his back to Patton. "How have you been?"

Patton thought about the kitchen floor. The mug he hadn't made. The eleven days. The rose going slowly pale on the windowsill.

"Functional," he said.

Something in the set of Janus's shoulders. Not a change, exactly. Just a quality of stillness that went from one kind to another.

"Good night, Patton," he said.

"Good night, Janus."

He left without turning around. Patton stood with his tea and listened to the footsteps until they were gone, and then the kitchen was just a kitchen, and the tea went cold while he stood there.

The last petal fell on a Thursday.

Patton came into the kitchen in the morning and there it was on the windowsill, detached, coral-pink, slightly curled at the edges. The rose itself was still in the vase, stripped now, mostly just stem and the fading memory of petals, and it should have looked sad — it did look sad — but there was something in the fallen petal that was worse, this specific small thing that had let go.

He picked it up. Held it in his palm.

It was still faintly the color it had been. Still, if you held it in the right light, the soft warm coral of desire and happiness and I am eager to see where this goes.

He stood at the window for a long time.

He thought: I could still go. It's not too late. I could walk to his room and knock and say the thing.

He thought: What would I say? What could I possibly say that would be worth what it would cost him to hear it from me now, after this?

He thought about Janus hearing the lie in him and absorbing it, the way Janus absorbed things. The practiced efficiency of it. The terrible familiarity. Being changed without your consent. Being cast as the thing he didn't want. Virgil leaving. Janus had built a whole life around surviving the things that were done to him, and he'd opened a door, small and carefully constructed, and Patton had closed it, and now—

Now Janus was across the mindscape with his lights on, because his lights were always on, because he was afraid of the dark, and Patton was here, and the distance between them felt enormous and also exactly as far as Patton had put it.

I did this, Patton thought. Not dramatically. Just clearly, the way Morality sometimes made things clear in a way that couldn't be softened.

The petal had dried to almost nothing in his palm.

He closed his hand around it.

He didn't go to Janus.

He stood at the window with the empty vase beside him and the morning light coming in and the terrible ordinary texture of a choice he had made, was still making, might keep making, and he felt the weight of it settle into him like something permanent.

He stayed very still.

He didn't cry. He stood there and felt it, all of it, the love and the fear and the shame at the fear and the grief underneath all of it, and he let it be what it was without trying to name it something smaller.

Outside, the mindscape did what it did. Existed. Continued.

The rose on the windowsill stood bare in its vase.

Across the mindscape, in a room where the lights burned through the night without exception — not dramatic, just necessary, just a thing that was true about him — Janus sat in the chair he preferred, the dark green one, with a glass of red wine he'd been making last for an hour and a Gene Wilder film he'd seen enough times to have the lines memorized.

He wasn't watching it. He was looking at the middle distance in the way he'd gotten very good at, the look that appeared contemplative and was mostly just waiting for the feeling to finish doing what it was doing.

He'd known. He'd known before Patton took the rose what Patton would do with it. He was Deceit. He could hear the gap between what a person said and what they meant, could feel it the way other people felt weather, and he'd heard it in Patton's voice and seen it in the way Patton had smiled — the smile fully real, he'd never doubted that, Patton's warmth was always real, that was the thing that made it hardest — and he'd known.

He'd given the rose anyway.

That was the part he was still working on forgiving himself for. Knowing and doing it anyway because— because Patton had danced with him in the kitchen to Chet Baker, and had remembered that he hated overhead lighting that buzzed, and had held his arm in the dark and talked about soup until he could breathe again, and had looked at him, consistently, like he was something worth looking at, and Janus had— he had—

He'd hoped.

He was very good at not hoping. He'd had a great deal of practice. And then somehow, somehow Patton had—

On screen, Gene Wilder turned around in the tunnel, and his eyes said something words couldn't.

Janus looked at his wine glass.

He'd been used to this. The body that changed without his input. The role assigned and assumed. Virgil leaving. The long years of being the part of Thomas that Thomas didn't like, the part that lived in the dark corners and came out when summoned and got put away again. He was used to it.

He'd thought—

He hadn't thought anything. He'd hoped. There was a difference, and the difference was the problem, because thinking could be controlled and hope was considerably harder to reason with.

He took a sip of wine. Very calm. Very fine.

He was used to this.

The thing about being psychic was that it had excellent branding and absolutely terrible practical applications.

People heard psychic and they pictured crystal balls, velvet curtains, a mysterious woman named Madame Something pressing her fingertips to her temples and whispering I see a tall, dark stranger. They pictured power. Drama. A certain romantic mystique that smelled faintly of incense and possibility.

What they did not picture was a seven-year-old boy in a Cincinnati suburb who could not go to the grocery store without bursting into tears because the woman in the cereal aisle was thinking very loudly about her divorce, and he could not explain why he knew that, and the man by the deli counter was furious about something that had happened in 1987 and had apparently never resolved it, and the teenager near the freezer section was so profoundly, achingly lonely that it sat in Emile's chest like a stone for three days afterward.

He couldn't go to the grocery store. He couldn't go to birthday parties — too many children with too many feelings, all of them vivid and unfiltered the way children's feelings tended to be, pressing against him from every direction. He couldn't go to school, eventually. The school had tried. His parents had tried. Everyone had tried, and Emile had tried hardest of all, sitting in classrooms with his hands pressed flat on his desk and his eyes very wide and his brain absolutely overwhelmed by the combined emotional output of twenty-three eight-year-olds who had not yet learned to moderate anything.

His parents were not cruel about it. This was important. They were loving people in the particular exhausted way of people who are doing their very best with a problem that has no manual, no support group, no established protocol — people who kept showing up even when they didn't know what showing up was supposed to look like. They bought him books. They bought him art supplies. They hired tutors who came one at a time, which was manageable, mostly, except for the one who was going through a breakup and radiated misery like a space heater radiates warmth, and they replaced her quickly when Emile explained, haltingly, that he knew things about her personal life that he really shouldn't.

And they bought him, eventually, a television. With an extensive cable package. And a VHS player, and later a DVD player when those became the thing. And later still, a laptop with a decent internet connection and access to more streaming services than any one person needed.

Because television was safe. The characters couldn't think at him. Their emotions were contained within the screen, expressed but not transmitted — he could watch someone cry without feeling it in his own sternum. Stories always, always resolved. Problems that had no solutions in real life got solutions on screen, or at least got shaped into something with edges you could hold, something with a beginning and a middle and an end, something that meant something instead of just happening.

Cartoons especially. Cartoons were entirely his.

By the time Emile was ten he had watched Cardcaptors with a devotion that bordered on religious, and had strong opinions about the emotional intelligence of its storytelling that he could not fully articulate yet but felt deeply. He loved the way Sakura faced every scary thing with a determined I think I can do this — he thought about that a lot, in his room, in his quiet house. He also had a perhaps excessive attachment to The Powerpuff Girls, not because of the action, but because three small people kept choosing to help even when it was hard, and he found that genuinely moving in a way he couldn't explain to anyone.

By twelve he had discovered Invader Zim and experienced the particular delight of something that was strange and loud and entirely uninterested in being anything other than exactly what it was, which felt personally relevant. He had also, quietly and with great feeling, fallen in love with Courage the Cowardly Dog — not despite the fact that it was frightening sometimes, but because it was a show about a creature who was scared of nearly everything and kept showing up anyway, for the people he loved, and Emile thought that was maybe the bravest thing he'd ever seen depicted anywhere.

He discovered Avatar: The Last Airbender and Steven Universe as an adult, watching them on his laptop during graduate school in the hours when the library was quiet and he needed something that felt true, and they became part of him in the particular way that things do when you find them exactly when you need them. He kept small figures from both on his office shelf, acquired at conventions he'd attended with noise-canceling headphones and a great deal of careful preparation, because some things were worth the effort.

By seventeen, sitting in his bedroom with its walls covered in character art and its shelves lined with small figurines, he had made a decision that surprised exactly no one who knew him: he wanted to help people. The way stories helped him. By giving feelings a container. By helping people find the edges of things that felt formless and overwhelming. By sitting with someone in the hard part and not flinching away from it.

He became a therapist. It took years and a great deal of work and a graduate program that was, at times, genuinely difficult when his classmates' stress and competitiveness leaked through his filters on bad days — but he did it, because Emile Picani had found, over the years, that the things worth doing were usually the ones that cost something.

He wore bright colors because the world was hard enough and he wanted his office to feel like somewhere good. He had coral walls and a cream couch and soft lighting and a shelf full of small figures arranged in an order that meant something to him and probably looked random to everyone else. He kept a box of tissues on the table by the client's chair and a small succulent on the windowsill named Gerald, who had been with him since graduate school and had achieved, in Emile's estimation, something close to immortality through sheer stubbornness.

He was good at his job. His clients tended to stay, and to improve, and occasionally to send him cards at the holidays with notes inside that made him hold them for a long time after reading.

He had also, over the years, gotten much better at the psychic thing — not eliminating it, which had never been possible, but filtering. Layering. He thought of it like learning to wear the right coat for the weather: he could not stop the cold, but he could dress for it. Strong emotions still broke through. Vivid imaginations pressed warmly against his edges, the way sunlight pressed through curtains. But he could exist in the world now. He could have a practice and a life and a favorite coffee shop and a gym membership he used with moderate regularity and everything that added up to a person being fine, actually, and glad.

The point was: Emile Picani was, by most measures, doing quite well.

And then Thomas Sanders started leaving things behind when he left.

---

The first time it happened, Emile thought he was getting a migraine.

He was finishing up his session notes — Thomas had been in earlier, lovely anxious Thomas who had the most spectacular imaginative frequency Emile had ever encountered professionally, a warmth and vividness that pressed gently against Emile's filters like someone leaning on a door without quite opening it — when he looked up from his clipboard and noticed that his chair by the window had an occupant.

A young man. Or. Something shaped like a young man, rendered in the vivid particular way of things that had originated in a very specific imagination. Oversized sunglasses, dark and enormous, the kind of sunglasses that communicated I am not answering questions. A black leather jacket over a fitted white shirt. Black jeans. A messenger bag slouched on the floor beside the chair with the boneless ease of a cat. And in one hand, an iced coffee — the large size, in a cup from a coffee shop that was definitely not in this building and possibly not in this neighborhood — which he was sipping with the slow, meditative patience of someone who had nowhere to be and had feelings about that being a virtue.

He was also extraordinarily good-looking, in the sleek, curated way of someone who had put careful thought into appearing effortless.

Emile looked at him. The young man, apparently unaware that he had an audience, reached out with his free hand and plucked a small ceramic figure from the shelf — Steven Universe, the first one, acquired at a convention seven years ago — and turned it over in his fingers with the loose, proprietary curiosity of someone who felt entitled to examine things.

Emile, entirely on reflex, said, "Please be careful with that one, it has sentimental value and the paint has already chipped once."

The quality of the silence that followed was remarkable.

The young man went very still. Not startled — or rather, startled but immediately suppressing it, which was its own interesting data point. Slowly, with the controlled deliberateness of someone buying time to assess a situation, he turned his head toward Emile. The sunglasses were impenetrable. His mouth had done something complicated.

"...Come again?" he said.

His voice was something. Smooth and a little lazy, with an edge under it like something expensive that also happened to be extremely sharp.

Emile put his clipboard down. "The ceramic figure you're holding. Steven Universe. I got it at a convention in 2017 and the paint on his star chipped about a year ago, so if you could—" He paused. Reconsidered. "Sorry. You look like you're processing something. Take a moment."

"I'm processing," the young man said carefully, "the fact that you can see me."

"Yes," Emile agreed.

"People," the young man said, with an emphasis that suggested a broad category of experience behind the word, "don't usually see me."

"I'm a little unusual," Emile said, in the same mild tone he might use to note that he preferred his coffee with oat milk.

The young man set Steven Universe down. He set him down in the wrong place — two spots to the left, disrupting the acquisition order — and Emile noted this and did not say anything, because there were more important things happening.

"How long," the young man said, "have you been able to see me."

"Since you sat down. About twenty minutes ago." Emile tilted his head. "You came in right after Thomas left, which suggests you arrived with him and stayed when he went. You're one of his — you originated with him, I can feel the resonance. But you're distinct enough that I don't think you'd appreciate being described as a part of him."

The sunglasses came down, just a fraction, and Emile got a glimpse of dark eyes that were doing several calculations at once.

"Okay," the young man said. "First of all, you're right, I'm not a part of him, and I would genuinely like you to never phrase it that way again. Second of all." A pause. "You can feel resonance?"

"I'm psychic," Emile said. "It comes up." He extended a hand across the desk. "Emile Picani. I'm Thomas's therapist. You are?"

The young man stared at the hand. Then, with the air of someone deciding this was somehow beneath them but doing it anyway, reached out and shook it, once, briefly.

"Remy," he said. "And before you even start — yes, I know. Very funny. Sleep goes by Remy. I've heard every joke that exists and I find none of them creative at this point."

"I wasn't going to make a joke," Emile said, genuinely. "I was going to say it's a lovely name. It suits you." He picked up his clipboard. "You can stay if you want. I won't tell Thomas — I imagine he doesn't know you're here."

"Thomas thinks I'm at a day party."

"And instead you're in a therapy office."

"It looked comfortable from the outside," Remy said, with a dignity that was almost magnificent in how unearned it was. "I was tired."

"You are, literally, the embodiment of sleep."

"Yes, and?" Remy resettled in the chair, crossing his legs at the ankle, reclaiming his iced coffee from where he'd set it on the arm. "Tired people need places to rest. This looked like a place. I don't see the issue."

Emile looked at him for a moment — this strange, sharp, vivid creature who had simply materialized in his office like he'd decided it was his — and felt something in the frequency of him that was very interesting. Not Thomas's warmth, not Thomas's particular anxious brightness. Something else. Something that had its own texture.

"The issue is not," Emile agreed, and moved his ceramic Steven two spots to the right, back into his proper place, and went back to his notes.

Remy noticed. Emile saw him notice. Remy said nothing about it, which felt, somehow, like a point in his favor.

Fifteen minutes later, Remy was asleep in the chair with his sunglasses pushed up into his hair and his iced coffee balanced on his knee at an angle that made Emile's professional risk-assessment instincts faintly anxious. He looked, asleep, very different from awake — younger, somehow. Less performed. The sharp edges smoothed out by unconsciousness into something that was, quietly, quite sweet.

Emile reached over without getting up and gently repositioned the coffee cup into a more stable position.

Then he went back to his notes, because that was his job, and some things you just filed and didn't examine too closely yet.

---

Remy came back the following Thursday.

He arrived twenty minutes after Thomas left, dropped into the chair by the window like he owned it, and said, without preamble, "Your waiting room has the most boring magazines I have ever seen in my life. Architectural Digest from 2019? Who is that for? Who is coming in here and thinking, yes, I'd love to spend fifteen minutes looking at expensive kitchens?"

"Several of my clients find it soothing," Emile said, looking up from his notes with the particular expression of someone who is genuinely pleased to see another person, which was the expression Emile wore approximately whenever another person was present. "Hello, Remy. How was the day party?"

"I didn't go to the day party, I came here instead."

"I know. I meant last week."

Remy paused. "Adequate," he said finally. "The DJ peaked early and then couldn't sustain it." He set his coffee — today's was something elaborate with layers, brown at the bottom going to a pale cream at the top — on the arm of the chair and surveyed the office with the considering expression of a returning regular. "You moved the lamp."

Emile blinked. "I did. The angle was leaving a glare on my clipboard in the afternoon." He looked at Remy properly. "You noticed that."

"I notice things." Remy said it like it was unremarkable. "The plant's looking better."

"Gerald. Yes, I repotted him last weekend." Emile beamed, because Gerald's improved health was genuinely good news and he saw no reason to be moderate about it. "He was getting root-bound, which apparently I should have caught earlier — the nursery was very gentle about telling me I'd been neglectful but I could tell — and now he has a new pot that's terracotta, which apparently breathes better? I've been learning about succulent care. There's a lot to know."

Remy was looking at him with an expression that was doing something it was trying not to do. "You named your succulent Gerald."

"He needed a name. All living things need names." Emile said this with complete sincerity. "I also had a fish in graduate school named Professor Bubbles, but he passed. It was a difficult time."

"Professor Bubbles," Remy repeated.

"He had a very distinguished bearing." Emile closed his notebook. "You don't have to stay if you don't want to. But if you're going to stay, there's an extra throw blanket on the coatrack — I noticed last week you kept pulling the collar of your jacket up."

Remy looked at the coatrack. Then at Emile. Then back at the coatrack, where a soft grey blanket was folded over the hook in a way that was clearly intentional.

"You put that there for me," Remy said flatly.

"I run warm," Emile said. "It was taking up space in the cabinet."

"It was not taking up space in the cabinet."

"I don't see how you'd know that."

Remy looked at him for a long moment with the expression of someone being offered something and trying to figure out if there was a catch. Then he got up, pulled the blanket off the hook with studied nonchalance, returned to his chair, and wrapped it around his shoulders in a way that he clearly believed looked casual.

"Fine," he said. "Whatever."

"Wonderful," said Emile warmly, and picked his crossword up.

"What is that?"

"A crossword. I do them in my between-session hour."

"That's the most aggressively therapist thing I've ever heard in my life."

Emile considered this. "I also knit, sometimes. When my hands need something to do." He held up the crossword. "This is faster. Eleven across is giving me trouble — classical composer known for nocturnes, five letters."

"Chopin," Remy said immediately.

Emile looked at him over the crossword.

Remy shrugged with great dignity. "What. I've been to a lot of late-night concerts. You pick things up."

"Chopin fits," Emile said, delighted, writing it in. "Thank you! I was so stuck on that — I kept thinking Liszt but that's five letters with an unusual Z and it just wasn't sitting right—"

"You're welcome," Remy said, in a tone that was trying very hard to be bored and not quite achieving it. "You know you could just look it up."

"Looking it up isn't the point." Emile frowned thoughtfully at the puzzle. "It's the working-out that matters. It's about staying comfortable with not knowing for a little while and trusting that you'll find your way to the answer. Professionally speaking I find it useful to practice that."

Remy stared at him. "Did you just make doing a crossword into a therapy metaphor?"

"...I do that sometimes."

"You're a lot," Remy informed him. "Like. A truly remarkable amount."

"I've been told," Emile agreed cheerfully. "Fifteen down is—"

"I'm not doing your crossword with you."

"You answered eleven across."

"That was involuntary."

They sat in comfortable quiet for a while. Emile worked his crossword. Remy drank his coffee and looked out the window and occasionally — very occasionally, in a way he would certainly deny — glanced at Emile with an expression that he did not quite manage to make neutral in time.

Emile noticed. Emile was psychic and also, frankly, just observant. He filed it.

---

It was the sixth or seventh Thursday — Emile had lost precise count, which was itself information — when Remy looked up from his coffee and said, with the air of someone who had been composing this for a while, "Can I say something without you being weird about it?"

"Almost certainly not," Emile said pleasantly. "But say it anyway."

Remy pointed at him. "That client. The one who comes in on Thursdays before me. Expensive cologne. Talks about his wife."

Emile went very still in the professional way. "I can't discuss my clients."

"I'm not asking you to discuss him. I'm telling you about him. There's a difference." Remy set his coffee down. "He runs your sessions. Every time. You let him go seven, eight, nine minutes over and then you apologize for going over like you did something wrong, when you spent the last fifteen minutes of the session trying to get a word in."

"The walls—"

"Are extremely thin, yes, we've established this." Remy was sitting forward now, the blanket falling off one shoulder, and there was something sharp and focused in his face that was very different from his usual languor. "You wait too long. You're waiting until he's practically yelling before you redirect him, and by then he's already gotten all the momentum. If you stepped in at like minute three or four, when he pauses to check you're still listening — he always pauses right there — you'd catch him before he winds up."

The office was quiet.

"That's," Emile started, and then stopped, because his first instinct was to explain his clinical reasoning and his second instinct, which arrived slightly after, was to actually listen to what had just been said to him. He sat back. He considered it. "That's very specific."

"I have a lot of free time in this office."

"You've been paying attention to my work."

"I pay attention," Remy said, almost defensively, "to things that interest me."

Emile looked at him.

"Don't," Remy said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to say something in a soft voice that would have made me feel a feeling. Don't."

Emile pressed his lips together against a smile. "Minute three or four," he said instead. "When he pauses to check in."

"He goes up at the end of the sentence slightly. Like a question, kind of. That's the beat."

"And that's when he's actually open."

"That's when he's actually open," Remy confirmed. "After that he's just running the bit."

Emile thought about this for what was probably a longer time than was comfortable, because he was genuinely thinking about it. Remy waited, which was interesting — Remy did not usually wait for much. He sat there with his iced coffee and his displaced blanket and waited for Emile to finish thinking, and that was its own kind of data.

"I'm going to try it Tuesday," Emile said.

"Obviously," Remy said. "I'm right."

"You might be."

"I am." He resettled in the chair, recovering his composure like a cat recovering its dignity after a minor fall. "You're a brilliant person who is extremely kind to everyone including people who don't deserve it as much as they're getting and you let that make you too soft in the room. You can be kind and run the room. They're not opposites."

Emile was quiet for a moment. "Remy," he said gently.

"Don't."

"That was a very thoughtful thing to say."

"I was criticizing you, technically."

"You were," Emile agreed, and smiled at him with the full warmth of it, which was considerable. "Thank you."

Remy made a sound that was not quite a scoff and not quite anything else and looked very determinedly out the window, and the tip of his ears were, Emile noted privately, a little pink.

He tried it on Tuesday. He caught the pause at minute three. He redirected, gently, clearly, earlier than he'd ever done it, and the session took a completely different shape — more productive, more honest, less performative — and his client left looking, for the first time in months, like someone who'd actually gotten somewhere.

Emile sat in his office afterward and thought about Remy, which was not a new thing but felt like it had become a different thing.

---

The thing about feelings, in Emile's professional experience, was that people rarely fell into them. They accumulated. Small things, one at a time, that individually explained themselves away and collectively built into something undeniable.

There was the crossword thing, which had started as Remy's involuntary helpfulness on eleven across and had gradually, over the following weeks, become a full collaborative exercise that Remy would absolutely deny was collaborative. ("You have a question. I know the answer. I'm not doing a crossword, I'm just — stop writing that one down, that doesn't fit, it's six letters not five—")

There was the coffee thing. Remy always arrived with something from a coffee shop — never the same one, always different, always elaborate — and one Thursday he arrived with two. He held one out to Emile without making eye contact and said "They gave me the wrong order and I didn't feel like going back" in a tone that would have been more convincing if Emile hadn't been able to faintly sense that this was not entirely true, and the coffee was oat milk exactly the way Emile had mentioned preferring once, in passing, three weeks before.

Emile said "Thank you, Remy, this is so kind," in his most sincere voice, and watched Remy do the ear-thing again, and said nothing further, and privately felt something warm take up residence in his chest in a way that was starting to become inconvenient.

There was the incident with the difficult client — not the cologne one, a different one, a woman who was going through something genuinely hard and who had, on one Tuesday, raised her voice at Emile in a way that was not appropriate even for how much pain she was in, and Emile had been gentle about redirecting it because he always was, and afterward Remy had been in the office and had looked at him with something fierce and quietly protective in his expression and said, "Are you okay?" in a voice entirely stripped of its usual performance.

"I'm fine," Emile had said, genuinely surprised. "That's not the first time that's happened, and she's in a lot of pain—"

"She yelled at you."

"It wasn't really at me, it was—"

"She raised her voice at you in your own office," Remy said, "and you sat there being kind about it. Which, yes, professional. I get it. I'm just saying." He pointed his coffee cup at Emile. "You're allowed to also acknowledge when something isn't okay."

Emile looked at him for a moment. "It shook me a little," he admitted. "I don't love when sessions go there."

"Obviously you don't. You're a human—" Remy paused. "You're a person. It's okay if it shook you."

"Thank you, Remy."

"I'm not being nice, I'm just stating facts."

"Right," Emile agreed, warmly, and did not press it further, and watched something soften in Remy's expression when he thought Emile wasn't looking.

And there was the thing Emile noticed about Remy — what he'd described to himself as the sunglasses principle — where the sunglasses, which were clearly armor as much as accessory, came off in this office. Or rather: they didn't come fully off, but they migrated. They slid down his nose. They got pushed up into his hair. They ended up in his hand while he talked about something he was actually interested in. The full shield was only deployed if Remy said something that landed somewhere real, at which point they went straight back onto his face with the decisive speed of a drawbridge going up, and Emile had learned to simply wait that out, because they came back down eventually.

This was, Emile reflected, on one Thursday when the light was coming in golden and late through the window and Remy was in the middle of a very passionate account of a concert he'd been to the previous night — "Emile, the lighting design alone was worth the ticket price, I'm talking about a person who understood that lighting is emotional architecture—" with his sunglasses pushed all the way up into his hair and his hands moving and his whole face open and alive with it —

This was a person who was very careful about being seen. And who had, somehow, in this office, without apparently intending to, let himself be seen quite a lot.

"—and the bass drop at the end of the third track was genuinely one of the best things I've experienced in recent memory, I'm not being hyperbolic, babe, this was art—"

"I believe you," Emile said, and meant it, and the warmth in his chest had been there for so long now that he'd stopped pretending it was something else.

---

It was a rainy Thursday — properly rainy, the kind that made the office feel like its own small country, separate from everything — when Remy came in and was different.

Not dramatically different. Someone who didn't know him wouldn't have clocked it. But Emile knew him, now, the specific frequency of him, and the thing that was different was that Remy was quieter. The usual opening commentary — on the waiting room, on his commute, on something he'd witnessed that had either impressed or offended him, usually both — didn't arrive. He sat down. He pulled the blanket around himself — he always went straight for it now without the performance of pretending it was incidental — and he looked out at the rain with something in his face that was too still to be comfortable.

Emile finished writing his note and set the clipboard down and said, very gently, "Hi."

"Hey," Remy said, to the rain.

"You don't have to talk."

"I know."

They sat with it for a while. Remy's coffee sat untouched on the arm of the chair, which was unprecedented. Outside, the rain did what rain does in October, which is commit.

Eventually Remy said, not quite looking at him: "Does it bother you that I'm not real?"

Emile was quiet for a moment. Not because he didn't know the answer, but because the question deserved more than a quick one.

"What does 'real' mean," he said finally, "in this context specifically? Because you're here. I can see you and hear you and you have opinions about DJs and you drink iced coffee in October for reasons that remain your business and you notice when I move the lamp. You've meaningfully changed how I run sessions. You brought me coffee with oat milk." He tilted his head. "In what sense are you proposing you're not real?"

"I started in someone's imagination."

"Lots of things start in imaginations," Emile said. "Stories. Music. Most of the things I care most about started in someone's imagination." He paused. "I also started in someone's imagination, technically. Theologically speaking. Depending on your framework."

Remy was quiet.

"The plant is real because it grows," Emile said. "Gerald is real because he grows. You're here every week and you change and you surprise me and you—" He stopped. Recalibrated. Decided, in the particular way that he had been a therapist too long to ignore the moment when the honest thing was the right thing, to say it clearly. "I look forward to Thursdays in a way that is almost entirely about you. That feels like real to me."

The rain. The golden lamp. The blanket. Remy had gone very still in the way that meant something had landed.

"You can't say things like that," he said, finally.

"I just did."

"Emile." He turned, and the sunglasses were in his hand — not on his face, not in his hair, just held in his fingers, and his eyes were very open and doing things that he wasn't quite managing to control. "I'm not—"

"You're distinct," Emile said firmly. "You're your own entity, who told me very clearly the first day we met that you don't appreciate being defined by where you came from. I took you at your word then and I'm taking you at your word now." He folded his hands. "I'm going to tell you something, and I would like you to actually listen before you deflect, because you deflect faster than anyone I've ever met professionally or personally, and I'm quite fast at noticing it now."

Remy closed his mouth.

"I care about you," Emile said. Simply. "I have for a while. Specifically and particularly — not as an extension of Thomas, not as an interesting phenomenon, not as something to be managed or understood professionally. You. The way you went straight for my favorite figure the very first day like some kind of targeted instinct. The way you notice every small change in this room. The way you say you're not helping with the crossword and then solve half of it. The way you brought me coffee with oat milk from a specific place after I mentioned it once, and then told me it was the wrong order, which was so unnecessary as a cover story that it was almost sweet." He let that land. "You told me once that you pay attention to things you find interesting. You have been paying a very specific kind of attention to me for months, and I think you know what I'm telling you, and I think you've known for a while, and I'm saying it out loud because someone should."

The silence was enormous.

Remy was looking at him. Sunglasses in his hand. Absolutely nothing managed about his expression.

"You're infuriating," Remy said, but his voice had done something entirely different from what he'd intended it to do, and they both knew it.

"You've mentioned," Emile said, gentle and steady, the way he was when someone was at the real part of something. "You're allowed to say it back."

"I don't—" Remy stopped. Looked at the ceiling, the particular eye-roll of someone buying a few seconds. "I don't do this. This." He gestured between them. "I'm not a—" He stopped again.

"You've been coming back to this office," Emile said quietly, "every week for four months. You notice everything about it. You brought me coffee. You told me when something went wrong in a session and you were protective about it, Remy, which you covered with statistics but I noticed. You ask Gerald how he's doing." He waited. "You don't have to be something specific. You just have to tell me what's true."

Remy set the sunglasses down on the arm of the chair. He didn't put them back on.

"You're really annoying," he said. "You know that? Normal people don't just say things. Normal people dance around it for like eight months and then someone sends a risky text at midnight—"

"I'm not particularly normal," Emile offered.

"Obviously." Remy looked at him, properly, with nothing in the way. "You're like. The least normal person I've ever met. You named a fish Professor Bubbles and you organize your ceramic figures by emotional significance and you turned a crossword into a feelings metaphor and you just sit there being—" He stopped. His mouth did something complicated. "Being really good. To a lot of people who don't notice how much it costs you. Including me. I notice. I just don't usually—"

"You don't usually say things that might matter," Emile said.

"...Yeah."

"But you're working on it."

"I'm working on it," Remy agreed, quietly, like it was a promise rather than a concession.

Emile smiled, and it was the fullest version of his smile, the warm completely unguarded one that he didn't ration, and he watched something in Remy go soft at the sight of it the way things go soft when they've been waiting for exactly that.

"So," Remy said, after a moment. "Hypothetically. If I wanted to take you somewhere." He affected a studied nonchalance that was thoroughly compromised by the fact that his voice was doing something careful and a little careful. "Somewhere that was not this office. Somewhere loud, probably. Late. Because I function better late."

"I know you do," Emile said.

"And crowded, possibly."

"I have gotten much better at crowds." He tilted his head. "I like the right kind of crowd."

"What's the right kind."

"The kind where everyone is there because they want to be. The kind that feels alive." Emile looked at him steadily. "The kind that sounds like something that matters."

Remy held his gaze for a long moment. Then he reached out and very deliberately picked up his iced coffee and took a long, slow sip, and settled deeper into the chair with the specific proprietary ease of someone who has decided, conclusively, that this is where they belong.

"Okay," he said, and it was soft in a way he would probably never let himself say it again without more armor on, and so it mattered, in exactly the way things matter when they're said the one true time. "Okay, yeah." He reached down and picked his sunglasses up and turned them over in his fingers. Didn't put them on. "I know a place. It has good lighting and the DJ actually knows what she's doing and you'll probably end up wanting to talk to everyone there, which is fine, you can do that, I'll survie."

"I'll try to restrain myself," Emile said, which they both understood to mean I will absolutely talk to everyone and you'll watch with an expression of fond exasperation and pretend to be embarrassed.

"You won't," Remy said, which meant I know and I don't actually mind.

Outside, the rain was tapering to something gentler. Gerald caught a thin beam of gold light on the windowsill. The crossword on Emile's desk had fourteen unsolved clues remaining, which was fine, because there was no particular rush, and some things were better worked out slowly.

"For what it's worth," Emile said, after a moment, warm and certain in the way he was about things that were simply true, "I'm glad you decided to stay that first day. Even though it was because the office looked comfortable and you were tired."

"It's a very comfortable office," Remy said, with great dignity.

"It is," Emile agreed. "I decorated it very carefully."

"I know. I noticed." He didn't look at Emile when he said the next part, but he said it, which was the whole thing, really. "I noticed everything about it. Pretty much right away."