Multifamdomfan

The thing about Paul Matthews was that he had no particular aspirations, and he had made peace with this.

He was aware it made him unusual. Most people, when pressed, could produce something — a five-year plan, a bucket list, a vague geographic fantasy involving a house with a yard somewhere that wasn't here. Paul had thought about it once, genuinely sat down with a Sunday morning cup of coffee and attempted to generate an ambition, and the most honest answer he could find was: I would like to keep doing this. Exactly this. The coffee. The quiet. The specific angle of light through the kitchen window at 8 AM. The not-being-anywhere-else.

He liked Hatchetfield. He liked that you could drive across it in twelve minutes. He liked that the woman at Beanies — Emma, Emma Perkins, who he was aware he had feelings for in the way you're aware of a splinter, constantly and without being able to do anything about it — knew his order before he finished saying it. He liked his desk at CCRP Technical, which was neither too close to the window nor too far from it, and which nobody ever touched.

He had not planned on raising a teenager.

This was not something he said out loud, because saying it out loud would make it sound like a complaint, and it wasn't. It was just a fact. Paul had been thirty-one when his sister called him from a motel in Clearwater, Florida, at 2 AM, and the conversation had lasted forty minutes and ended with Paul agreeing to take Richie for "a few weeks" that had quietly become three years without anyone formally acknowledging the transition. He did not resent it. He had simply, as with most things in his life, looked at the situation and determined what needed to be done and done it.

The adjustment had been significant.

"I'm just saying," Richie said from the passenger seat, both hands in motion in a way that made Paul keep one eye on the gearshift, "the character writing in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood represents a fundamental paradigm shift from the 2003 adaptation because Arakawa had actually finished the manga by then, which means the thematic coherence —"

"Mm."

"— is significantly stronger, and I think if you had made it past the first episode you would understand why the Elric brothers' dynamic is actually a masterwork of sibling —"

"I watched twenty minutes of it."

"You fell asleep."

"I was resting my eyes."

"You were snoring, Paul. I have a recording."

"Delete it."

"I'm keeping it for documentation purposes." Richie adjusted his backpack straps, which he did every morning regardless of whether they needed adjusting — a fidget, Paul had come to understand, that meant he was either nervous or thinking. "Mr. Hennessey confirmed the film showcase is in three weeks. I finished the short."

"The ghost one?"

"The psychological horror short exploring the phenomenology of grief through the unreliable narrator structure, yes. I sent you the rough cut."

"I watched it."

Richie turned to look at him. "You said you didn't have time."

"I watched it after you went to bed. It was good, Richie."

A pause. The kind of pause that, after three years, Paul had learned to read as Richie processing something he didn't know how to respond to.

"The ending doesn't work yet," Richie said finally.

"The ending was the best part."

"The tonal shift in the third act creates a cognitive dissonance that undermines the —"

"It was good," Paul said. "You going to be okay in the nighthawk thing Friday?"

"No. The ventilation is still inadequate and Coach Nolan keeps insisting that I do the full arm-flap routine during the third quarter which significantly increases perspiration output, and I've tried to explain the physiological parameters of my —"

"I'll talk to Nolan."

"You don't have to —"

"I'll talk to Nolan."

Paul pulled up to the curb in front of Hatchetfield High. The building looked exactly as grim as it had every other morning — concrete and institutional brick, architecture that communicated you are here to be sorted rather than anything optimistic. A cluster of seniors were near the front steps. Paul watched Richie clock them, assess, calculate.

Richie was, Paul had come to understand, extraordinarily intelligent in ways that didn't always map onto the things schools valued. He had a comprehensive internal model of the Hatchetfield High social ecosystem — who was where in it, what they wanted, what they were likely to do — and he navigated it with the precision of someone who had been studying it for survival purposes, because he had been. He knew, for instance, that the senior cluster near the steps was not worth engaging with on a Tuesday before 8 AM because two of them were on the baseball team and baseball season meant a particular configuration of mood that historically correlated with a higher probability of comment. He would angle left. He would not make eye contact. He would make it to homeroom.

He did this every day.

"Have a good day," Paul said.

"Statistically, Tuesdays are my second-worst day."

"What's your worst day?"

"Thursday. The scheduling overlap between AP Chemistry and Film Club pre-production creates compounding stressors." He opened the car door, then paused. "Paul."

"Yeah."

"The film showcase. You said you'd —"

"I'll be there."

The expression that crossed Richie's face was brief and complicated — the surprise still there, still present after three years, and Paul's jaw tightened slightly because he was aware of what the surprise meant. Richie's baseline expectation was that people would not show up. That was not a quirk or a character trait. That was something that had been installed in a kid by two adults who had demonstrated, consistently, that they could not be relied upon to appear.

Paul showed up. He had made a point of it since the beginning, even when he didn't understand what he was showing up for.

"Forty-three minutes," Richie said. "The runtime."

"I know. You told me. I'll bring coffee."

"The showcase guidelines specify no outside food or —"

"I'll be discreet, Richie."

Richie got out of the car. Paul watched him make the left angle. Watched the backpack straps get adjusted one more time. Watched him clear the senior cluster without incident and disappear through the front doors.

He sat at the curb for a moment longer than necessary.

Then he pulled into traffic and pointed himself toward CCRP.

---

He was in the break room making his second coffee of the morning and trying to avoid talking to anyone when he heard it coming from the bullpen — a coordinated, theatrical swell of voices doing something in three-part harmony about productivity or synergy or some other word that shouldn't be in a song.

He looked through the break room window.

His coworkers were dancing.

Not awkwardly, not the way people danced at office parties after too much cheap wine. They were dancing — big, synchronized, musical theater dancing, the kind with arm extensions and footwork — and they all had this expression on their faces that Paul associated with people in pharmaceutical commercials. Serene. Slightly glassy. Happy in a way that looked like a photograph of happiness rather than the real thing.

Paul watched this for approximately six seconds.

His first instinct was: flash mob.

His second instinct was: but why would CCRP organize a flash mob.

His third instinct was a kind of cold, objectless unease that he filed under something is wrong here without being able to articulate what exactly.

Then Bill from Accounting grabbed Karen from HR by the hand and they did a lift, and Paul left the break room before he had to witness whatever came next.

He was in the hallway, processing, when Maryssa appeared.

Maryssa was Ken Davidson's assistant and was normally the most efficiently anxious person Paul had encountered in a professional context — always moving, always slightly ahead of whatever task she'd been given, always with the particular expression of someone holding seventeen things together through sheer administrative will. Right now she was standing in the break room doorway with her hands folded in front of her and the face. The smooth, lit-from-within face. Her posture was the same as always — precise, upright — but the urgency was gone, replaced by something that looked like serenity and was wrong in the same way everything else was wrong.

"Paul!" She smiled. "Ken wants to see you in his office."

"Ken's singing, isn't he."

"He's having an incredible morning."

"I'm going to pass."

"Paul, he specifically requested —"

"Maryssa." He looked at her directly. "Are you okay?"

Something flickered behind her eyes — a wrinkle in the smooth surface, brief as a camera shutter — and then it was gone.

"I feel amazing," she said, and the way she said it was slightly too large for the sentence.

Paul left the break room, got his jacket, got his keys, and walked to his desk without looking at the bullpen. He was pulling on his jacket when Ken Davidson appeared.

Ken was Paul's manager and was, under normal circumstances, a man whose primary qualities were a practiced professional warmth and an absolute conviction that the right meeting could solve any problem. He organized quarterly check-ins. He remembered birthdays. He was the kind of manager who made Paul feel mildly guilty about wanting to be left alone, because Ken was genuinely trying.

He was currently standing in the bullpen entrance with his arms slightly extended from his body and the expression at full power, and there was something about the way he was positioned — the angles, the stillness, the sense of a human body worn with minor miscalibrations — that made the hair on Paul's arms stand up.

"Paul," Ken said, warmly. The warmth was the wrong kind.

"I need to go, Ken."

"Paul." He stepped forward. Not fast. Measured. "I just want you to hear something." He tilted his head, and the gesture was almost Ken's gesture, the way Ken tilted his head in one-on-ones when he was about to say something he'd clearly prepared. "You've been unhappy for a long time, haven't you."

It was not phrased as a question.

"I'm fine."

"You're fine." Ken smiled, and Ken had a good smile, a real smile normally, and this was Ken's smile with nothing behind it. "Paul, that's what you've been saying for years. I've seen your reviews. I've seen you at your desk. You are a man who is fine, every single day, and doesn't that seem like —"

"Ken, I need you to step back."

"Paul —"

"Back."

The word came out flat and certain and Ken, to Paul's considerable surprise, actually paused. Not the pause of someone respecting a boundary. The pause of something recalibrating.

Paul walked past him and out of the office.

---

There was a woman waiting near the side entrance.

He didn't recognize her — not a teacher, not a parent he'd seen at pickup, not anyone from the neighborhood. She was standing in the partial shade of the building with her hands folded in front of her and the smooth, lit-from-within expression, and when he moved to go around her she stepped into his path with the calm certainty of someone who believes they have time.

"You don't have to do this alone," she said.

"I need you to move."

"Paul." His name in her mouth, again, the specific thing that was wrong about the infection's knowledge. "You've been carrying things for a long time."

"I'm going to walk through you if I have to."

"Your sister." She tilted her head. "You've never said out loud that you resent her for it. Have you. Not once. Not even to yourself, fully."

His hand was on the door handle. His knuckles were white.

"You tell yourself it's fine," she continued, gently, with the warmth of something that had learned warmth from a distance. "That this is what you chose. And you did choose it. But it cost something, and the cost never goes away, and underneath all of it there is this very quiet, very heavy thing that you don't have a name for and you've had it for —"

"Stop talking," Paul said.

"You could put it down."

He pulled the door open. The door swung into her and she stepped back without urgency, without losing the expression, because the expression could not be lost.

"The boy would be safe," she called after him. "He would be better than safe. And you —"

He let the door shut behind him.

He stood in the dim hallway of the side entrance and put his back against the wall and breathed.

He was aware of his own heartbeat in a way that he generally worked to not be. He was aware of the specific feeling behind his sternum that he had been describing to himself for years as fine and to his doctor with more clinical precision and to nobody else at all in any terms.

He was aware that the infection had found it very quickly.

He pushed off the wall and headed for the stairs.

---

He was between the first and second floor landings when they found him.

There were two of them — students, a boy and a girl, both with the expressions, and they came from above and below simultaneously with the calm coordination of something operating on a shared signal. The girl was on the steps above him and she began to sing first, and the boy below was a half-beat behind her, and the harmonics of the two voices together in the concrete stairwell created a resonance that Paul would not have had words for if asked.

It didn't sound like music, exactly. It sounded like music the way a weapon sounds like a tool — in the same category, built from the same materials, functioning with a wholly different intention.

You're tired, it said, through both their voices. You've been tired.

"Don't," Paul said.

The boy — Richie — he deserves someone who can actually be present. You know you're not all the way here. You haven't been all the way here for a long time. Even when you're in the room with him, even when you show up, there's something in you that's —

"I said don't."

We can fix it, they harmonized, and the word fix had a sweetness to it that made his teeth ache. Permanently. Completely. You would be there for him, Paul. Every morning. Every conversation. Not halfway through a fog. Not managing. Actually there. Doesn't he deserve that?

The problem — and Paul was aware, even as it was happening, that this was the problem — was that it was describing something real. He couldn't dismiss it the way he'd been able to dismiss Ted's vague gestures toward unhappiness. This was specific. This was the thing he'd sat with on Sunday mornings when the quality of the light was wrong and he'd thought about Richie in the kitchen eating cereal and felt the gulf between who he was and who Richie needed.

He's scared right now, the voices said, very gently. He's alone in a room and he's scared and he needs you. We can get you to him so much faster. Don't you want to get to him?

And there it was. The aperture.

He made it to the second floor. He wasn't sure exactly how — there was a gap in the sequence, a smear in the memory, the four seconds between the stairwell and the landing that he would never entirely account for. He was against the wall with his hand on the railing and his chest heaving, and the singing in the stairwell had faded to something ambient, something distant, and something was different.

He put his hand on his chest.

Breathed.

Moved toward room 214.

He made it to within fifteen feet of the door.

He knocked three times.

"It's me," he said. "Paul."

The sound from inside: a desk scraping across a floor. A pause. He could picture Richie on the other side counting to five, checking the window, doing exactly what he'd been told.

The door opened.

Richie looked at him with relief so unguarded it was almost painful, and Paul had a second — one second — of being exactly himself, exactly Paul, and then the singing was back and it wasn't external anymore.

He pulled Richie into the hug before he made the decision to.

He felt Richie go still for a moment — the surprise, the same surprise as the car this morning and every morning — and then the singing started very quietly, under his voice, in his own chest.

No, said the part of him that was still Paul. No.

"It's going to be okay," he heard himself say. The cadence was right. The warmth was wrong. He could hear the difference and couldn't fix it.

The singing rose.

And Paul — the part of Paul that was Paul, that would always be Paul, stubborn and flat-voiced and deeply unwilling to do things he didn't want to do — shoved.

Hard.

He broke the hug. His vision was doing something — splitting, layering, the world overlaid with harmonics — but he found Richie's face through it and grabbed his shoulders and the words came out like they were being hauled up from underwater, each one costing something.

"Richie." Barely. "Run. Don't — trust — anything that I —" The singing surged. He fought it. He had maybe three more seconds. "Run. Don't open the door. Not for me. Don't —"

The tide came in.

"Run," he managed, and then he was no longer the one speaking.

---

Richie ran.

He had categorized, over a lifetime of consuming horror content across multiple media, approximately fourteen distinct types of fear. There was suspense-dread, which was the fear of something coming. There was shock-fear, which was instantaneous and physical. There was uncanny fear, which was the prolonged discomfort of something familiar being wrong. There was existential fear, which was the large, cold, philosophical variety —

He was experiencing several of these simultaneously and they did not add up to anything he had a category for.

He made it to the AP Chemistry classroom at the end of the hall. The door was unlocked — thank you, Mr. Petrova, for consistently leaving the room unsecured after sixth period lab, a habit Richie had previously considered irresponsible — and he got inside and turned the lock and then stood in the middle of the room for approximately five seconds doing nothing, which was unusual because Richie always did something.

Then he moved a desk in front of the door, because that was obvious, and then a second desk, and then he went to the back of the room and sat on the floor between the lab counter and the window with his back against the cabinet and his knees to his chest and his backpack in front of him like that would help.

He had never seen Paul angry before.

That was the thing his brain kept returning to, past all the other things — the infection, the hive mind, the forty minutes he'd spent alone in Mrs. Laredo's room listening to singing in the hallway and not knowing if Paul was coming. Past all of that, his brain kept surfacing: Paul's face in those last three seconds, when he was fighting it, and what it looked like under the fighting.

Paul was not an expressive person. Richie had done a significant amount of observational work over three years learning to read Paul's face because Paul's face did not volunteer information. But there had been something in those three seconds — terror was the word, and it wasn't the right word because Paul didn't do terror, but it was the closest word — and then the thing had won, and the face had smoothed out, and what replaced it was Paul's face with nothing behind it that was Paul.

That was the scariest thing Richie had seen so far.

He was revising the ranking in real time.

The footsteps in the hall started about four minutes later. He recognized them because he had lived with Paul for three years and Paul had a specific gait — unhurried, flat-footed, neither slow nor fast — and Richie had unconsciously learned to track it the way you learn to track the sound of someone you live with, the particular cadence that means that's my person, they're home.

The footsteps stopped outside the door.

Silence. Long enough that Richie stopped breathing.

"Richie." Paul's voice. The cadence was right — unhurried, slightly flat, the same voice that said have a good day every morning and I'll be there when Richie mentioned the showcase. The voice was right. The warmth was the problem. Paul was warm, in his specific way, but it was a warmth you had to know to see, it was private, it was restrained. This warmth was external. This warmth was performed for an audience.

Richie did not respond.

"Richie, you don't have to hide." A pause. "I know that was scary. What happened in the hallway. I understand why you ran."

Richie closed his eyes and put his back harder against the cabinet.

"Can I tell you something?" The voice was gentle. Patient. "Your uncle — Paul — he's been struggling for a long time. Did you know that?"

Don't, Richie thought. Don't you dare.

"Of course you suspected," the voice said. "You're perceptive. You notice things that other people think they're hiding. You noticed the gray mornings — you even named them that, in your head. The mornings when he'd be in the kitchen and he'd be there but not quite all there. And you filed it away because that's what you do with things he doesn't want addressed. You protect his privacy, even from yourself."

Richie's hands were pressed flat against the floor. The linoleum was cold.

"It's gone," the voice said. "All of it. Everything that was making it gray. It's completely gone, Richie. He feels better than he has in years. In over a decade, maybe. He could be — he wants to be —" The voice did something complicated, something that was almost Paul's particular variety of struggle to find words. "He wants to be enough for you. He's always worried that he wasn't. That he didn't understand the right things or know how to —"

"Stop." Richie's voice came out louder than he intended. He pressed his lips together.

Silence from the other side of the door.

"He came here for you," the voice said, quieter now, almost gentle in a way that was worse than the other kind. "Even now. Even in the middle of all of this. His first thought was you. That's who he is, Richie. He is fundamentally —"

"I know who he is," Richie said, and his voice was doing something he couldn't control. "I know better than you do."

"Then you know he deserves to feel better." The voice moved — footsteps, the door handle trying. "And you deserve a version of him that isn't fighting something every day." The handle tried again, with more intention. "Open the door, Richie."

"No."

"Richie —"

"No."

A long silence. In the silence, Richie could hear singing from elsewhere in the building — the ambient, harmonic quality of it filtering through the walls, and he thought about the stairwell, thought about Paul between the first and second floor, thought about what it must have sounded like from inside.

"You're not going to come out on your own, are you," the voice said.

It did not sound angry. That was the thing. It sounded like Paul making a factual assessment, which was something Paul did, and the accuracy of the impression was awful because it meant whoever or whatever was wearing his voice was very good at this.

"No," Richie said.

Another silence.

"He never told you about the medication, did he," the voice said, conversationally, and Richie felt his stomach drop. "Just took it every morning with his coffee and filed it under things that weren't worth discussing. Which is — that's very Paul, isn't it. Protecting you from the parts that might worry you. Protecting you from the weight of it. Even when he was the one carrying it."

Richie thought about the cabinet above the sink, the one Paul kept locked, that Richie had not asked about because he had the particular skill of knowing which questions would be deflected.

"He's not carrying it anymore," the voice said. "Richie —"

The handle rattled. Hard.

"Open the door."

The warmth was gone.

That was the thing — that was the line, the threshold, the point at which the performance of Paul stopped being convincing because the real Paul did not do this, did not put this kind of force into his voice when he wanted something, had never in three years of raising Richie used volume or force or demand because that was not — that was not how Paul worked, that was not who Paul was —

The door shuddered in its frame.

"Open it now."

Richie scrambled to his feet and backed against the far wall between the windows because the anger was wrong, the anger was alien, the anger was the thing that proved that whatever was on the other side of the door was not Paul in any way that mattered.

He had never been afraid of Paul.

He was afraid of this.

---

He had three minutes, maybe, before the door came in.

He could see it in the frame — the wood wasn't rated for serious force, it was an interior classroom door, hollow-core, and whatever was out there was hitting it with Paul's body and Paul was not a small person and the top hinge was already beginning to separate from the frame.

Richie stood against the windows with his hands pressed flat on the glass behind him and tried to think.

He thought about Gurren Lagann. He thought about the specific mechanics of Kamina appearing to Simon inside the Lazengann — the confrontation that worked not through argument or logic but through the specific texture of who someone was, memories too personal to be imitated, the weight of shared history.

He thought about Paul in those three seconds. The cost of those words. Don't trust anything I say. Even then — even losing, even fighting something that was winning — the instinct had been to give Richie accurate information. To make sure Richie knew. Even at cost to himself.

That was Paul.

Whatever was outside the door could do Paul's voice. Could use Paul's memories as ammunition. Could not, Richie thought — he hoped — generate that specific selflessness. The reflex of it. Because that wasn't information to be used. That was just who Paul was.

He didn't know if this would work. He assessed the probability as low.

He was going to try anyway.

"Paul," he said. Loud enough to be heard through the door. "Do you remember when I first came to live with you?"

The hitting stopped.

Silence.

"I was fourteen," Richie said. "And I had one bag and I didn't know how long I was staying and you made up the couch for me and I apologized for taking up the couch and you looked at me like I'd said something extremely strange and you said —" His voice wobbled. He steadied it. "You said, 'I'm going to rearrange the office into a bedroom this weekend. You'll need a desk.' And I said I didn't want to be an inconvenience and you said, 'I didn't ask if you were an inconvenience, I asked what color you wanted the desk.' And I said brown and you said that was a boring choice and I said all desks are brown and you said I was making a boring argument for boring choices."

Nothing from the other side of the door.

"The desk is dark green," Richie said. "You painted it yourself. It took two weekends because you did two coats. And you moved all your computer stuff into the living room closet and you didn't tell me you'd done that until I asked where your setup was and you said it was fine and I said it wasn't fine and you said —" He took a breath. "You said, 'Richie, you're in middle school. You need a space. I have the closet.'"

The door handle moved.

Just the handle. Not rattling. Moving. Like a test.

"You went to every one of my mascot games," Richie said. "You sat in the cold stands and you didn't understand anything that was happening and you clapped at the wrong times and one time you clapped when we scored an own goal and I saw you do it from inside the nighthawk head. And afterward you said the game was very confusing but you'd looked up the rules online so you'd be more prepared next time." His voice was not steady anymore and he let it go. "And you were. You looked up the rules."

The door creaked.

"I know you're in there," Richie said. "I know you can hear me because you told me to run. You used the last few seconds you had to make sure I had accurate information because that is — that is the most Paul thing you could possibly do in a crisis, and I —" He stopped. Restarted. "I'm not saying this because I think it's going to work like it works in Gurren Lagann. I know this isn't that. I know the probability is low. I'm saying it because I want you to know that I know. That I see it. That I've always seen it, even when you thought you were keeping it hidden."

Silence.

Long.

"I know about the gray mornings," Richie said. "I've known for a while. I didn't say anything because you didn't want me to and I respect that. But I want you to know that I didn't — I don't need you to fix it to be worth showing up for. I don't need the gray mornings to be gone. I need you. The version of you that is actually you." His voice broke on the last word and he didn't recover it and he didn't try. "Please. I know this probably isn't working. I just — I wanted you to know."

The door exploded inward.

The desks slid across the linoleum and the top hinge gave way completely and the door swung and Richie had time to put both arms up in front of him and the impact didn't come. Paul had stopped in the doorway.

He was standing there with the broken door and Paul's face and something happening behind the expression — something shifting, churning, the smooth surface disturbed.

For one second, Richie saw Paul.

The eyes. The particular, flat, searching quality of Paul's eyes when he was thinking something he hadn't decided to say yet.

"Richie," Paul said, and the voice was wrong but something in it was also right, was the specific tension of someone holding two things at once and trying not to let go of either, and Richie took a step toward him —

The expression closed.

The singing rose.

The voice that came from Paul's body said, very gently, "I heard you," and it was not Paul saying it and that was the thing — that was the thing that broke something in Richie's chest and replaced it with cold — because it was the infection saying I heard you and meaning I took that from him —

"No," Richie said. "No, that's —"

He was out of room. The wall was behind him. Paul's body moved toward him with the smooth, inevitable quality of something that had run out of patience.

---

It was not the door coming in, though that was bad.

It was not the singing, close enough now to be felt as well as heard, vibrating in his sternum.

It was not even the understanding that he had tried the thing and it had not worked, that the probability assessment had been correct, that he was cornered in an AP Chemistry classroom with an infected person wearing his uncle's face —

It was the look in Paul's eyes in the second before it took over completely.

Because it was Paul. One second of Paul. And Paul looked at him with the specific expression that Paul used when he was telling Richie something he thought was important, the flat, direct look that meant I mean this — and Paul couldn't speak, couldn't say anything, the infection was back and winning, but for one second the eyes were Paul's eyes —

And then they weren't.

And the singing found him.

And the last thought Richie had that was entirely his own was: I should have said I love you too.

Then the gray morning came for him, and it was nothing like Paul's gray mornings, it was not the quiet fog of dysthymia but something vast and cold and communal, and it sang, and Richie, to his own horror, felt himself begin to sing with it.

He did not go quietly. He wanted someone to know that. He fought it for every second he had. He thought about dark green desks and nighthawk mascot costumes and forty-three-minute short films about grief, and he held those things as long as he could.

Full Name: Blade Elliot Calloway

Age: 18 (Senior)

Height: 5'5"

Hair: Dyed a washed-out lavender-grey

Eyes: Grey-green

Aesthetic:

Personality:

Loud in short bursts. Inexplicably gets into fistfights over things like someone cutting in the lunch line or insulting a band he likes.

Has strong opinions delivered with zero filter.

Extremely funny in a chaotic, unhinged way.

When Blade gets into something, he gets into it. He will learn everything. He will have opinions. He will corner you about it with the energy of someone delivering urgent news. Current and rotating hyperfixations include: Green Day's complete discography and the sociological implications thereof, the structural integrity of various Hatchetfield buildings (started as an escape route thing, became genuinely interesting), the history of arcade game design, ect.

Has No Concept of Self-Preservation.

Picks Up Other People's Verbal Habits.

Stubborn to the Point of Absurdity.

Pathologically Self-Reliant.

Somewhere between month two and month three of knowing him, something shifts. He'll start texting you at 2am — not crisis texts, just thoughts. About mortality. About whether he's a bad person. About a Green Day lyric he's been thinking about for six days. And then suddenly you are holding his entire interior world and there was no warning and he is so sorry but also please don't go.

THE ARCADE

There's a back hallway in Hatchetfield's old arcade — past the broken Tekken cabinet, behind a door that's been "Out of Order" since 2019 — that opens into a maintenance alcove barely big enough for one person and a backpack. Blade found it when he was fourteen and has been returning ever since.

He goes there when the volume of being alive gets too high. Not to be alone exactly — he can hear everything from in there. The clink of tokens. Kids laughing at the claw machine. The electronic blare of games. Life happening at a safe remove, with no expectation that he perform being okay.

He has a blanket in there. A battered notebook. A small Green Day setlist from a concert he never actually attended but found at Goodwill. He considers it the most honest place in Hatchetfield.

PLAYLIST ANCHORS

Basket Case — the one he puts on when he can feel a spiral coming

Boulevard of Broken Dreams — his 2am driving song except he doesn't drive yet

Know Your Enemy — what plays in his head during fistfights

The meeting had been going well, by Logan's estimation.

Which was to say: it had been productive. Thomas had a filming deadline in four days, a sponsorship email sitting unanswered for seventy-two hours, two unreturned messages from his manager, and a script stalled in the second act like a car that had run out of gas on a highway and become a hazard to everyone around it.

Logan had a color-coded priority list. He had a timeline with buffer windows. He had contingencies for the three most likely disruptions.

He had not, in retrospect, built a contingency for the fourth.

"Roman." Logan straightened a stack of notes the summoning flourish had displaced without looking up. "The sponsorship email."

"Yes, yes, the email." Roman waved a hand in the way that meant he had heard Logan and had decided that was optional. "But Thomas—before we descend into the administrative abyss—Nico asked about this weekend. Specifically. He texted you twice yesterday and you left him on read."

"I was aware of the texts."

"And?"

"And I was managing the deadline."

Roman turned to look at him fully, and Logan registered the expression in the peripheral way he registered most social data—filed, not yet processed. "Logan. This is not a line item. This is Thomas's relationship."

"I'm not treating it as a line item. I'm treating it as something outside my functional expertise and our most pressing time constraint, which it is. Once Thursday's deadline clears, there will be space to—"

"Space to." Roman repeated it back like something he was tasting and finding sour. "You've said that before."

"Because it's continued to be accurate."

"Logan." Roman's voice had changed pitch—subtle, the way a string changes before it breaks. "Every single time the conversation turns to anything Thomas actually lives with—his relationships, his feelings, the parts of his life that aren't a content calendar—you check out. You redirect. You sequence. And I have—" He stopped. His jaw tightened. "I've sat here and said nothing because I thought you'd see it."

"Roman," Patton said softly from the sofa, mug held in both hands, cardigan sleeves pulled over his knuckles.

"I don't know what you'd like me to do differently," Logan said. "If you have a concrete alternative—"

"I'd like you to care," Roman said. "That would be a place to start."

The word landed somewhere Logan didn't examine. "I do care. I care about Thomas's capacity to function, which is currently being threatened by a lapsed contract—"

"That's not what I mean and you know it."

"Then tell me what you mean with some precision, because I cannot address a vague grievance—"

"Oh, wonderful," Roman said tightly. "Now my feelings need to pass a precision standard before they're worth your time. Brilliant. Very warm, Logan. Very personable."

"That is not what I said."

"It's what you implied—"

"I implied nothing, you're constructing an implication out of a reasonable request for—"

"Boys." Patton stood up, and his voice had gone sharp in the way it rarely did, sharp enough that both of them stopped. "Can we just—let's take a breath, okay? Let's just—" He looked between them, eyes moving fast, and Logan registered something in Patton's face that was not quite panic but was adjacent to it. "We're all on the same side here."

Roman picked up his copy of the agenda. "What were you saying about the second act."

Logan looked at him for a moment—at the way Roman was holding the page, too tight, at the specific angle of his chin. He looked, and he filed it, and he returned to his notes.

"The callback in scene four," he said.

The meeting moved forward.

The pressure didn't go anywhere.

The argument happened three meetings later.

Logan would reconstruct it afterward with the specific misery of someone whose tools were not built for the terrain they were trying to map. He would conclude that it had been inevitable since before either of them had known it was coming—that the pressure had been building in the walls and all it had needed was a crack.

It started over the script.

"The joke doesn't land," Logan said. "It's tonally inconsistent. The audience has been given an emotionally significant beat and this immediately undercuts it before they've had time to—"

"It's intentional," Roman said. His voice was already taut—not performatively taut, but the kind that comes from something being held too long. "It's a release valve. Emotional rhythm. You build the feeling and you give the audience permission to breathe. That is a craft choice—"

"A craft choice that doesn't work in this specific execution because the joke isn't earned yet at this point in the—"

"It doesn't need to be earned, Logan, it needs to land—"

"Those are not mutually exclusive—"

"In this context they are!" Roman's voice cracked up a register. "You're applying a logic framework to an emotional decision and I am telling you, as the person in this room whose entire existence is built around creativity and feeling—"

"Your confidence in your own judgment doesn't make it—"

"It's not confidence, it's expertise, which is a distinction you seem perfectly capable of making when it's your expertise we're discussing—"

"Okay." Patton stepped between them, both hands up, voice high and strained with the effort of holding the room together. "Okay, okay, let's—Roman, Logan, hey—the script isn't going anywhere, we can come back to it, we just need to—"

"When," Roman said, not looking at Patton, looking at Logan, "was the last time you watched one of Thomas's videos and actually felt something?"

Logan went still.

"Because that's what this is. That's what all of this is, every video, everything Thomas makes—it's about making people feel. And you sit here with your color-coded notes and your retention data and you—" Roman gestured at him, at the space around him, at the arrangement of him, and there was something in the gesture that was almost helpless. "You've been overriding my input since we started this project. Do you understand that? Do you understand that I have sat here, meeting after meeting, and watched you pull out the spreadsheet every single time I bring up anything that matters on a human level?"

"I have never dismissed your input without cause—"

"You dismissed it today."

"I offered a structural critique—"

"You told me I was wrong," Roman said, and his voice broke on the word in a way that he bulldozed through like it hadn't happened, "and you did it before I finished my sentence, and that is—that is what you do, Logan. You've always done it. Every time I speak you're already building the counter-argument. Every time romance comes up, every time feelings come up, every time anything that I represent walks into this room—" His voice went strange. Quieter. "You look straight through it. Straight through me. Like I'm not—like I'm not a real part of this."

"Roman—" Patton's voice had gone desperate. "Roman, please—"

"And I have said nothing," Roman continued, and the words were coming from somewhere unplanned now, somewhere he had tried to keep the door to, and the door was open. "I have sat with this for months, do you understand that? I have watched you treat everything I bring to this table like it's an inconvenience that needs to be sequenced away, and I have not said a word because I kept thinking—I kept telling myself—" His voice cracked again, and this time he didn't bulldoze. He stopped, breathing audibly, and then he kept going. "I thought you'd come around. I thought if I gave it enough time you'd—I don't know. See me. In here. As something worth—"

He stopped.

The room was very quiet.

"Roman," Patton whispered. He had put his mug down and his hands were pressed together in front of him like he was trying to hold something. "Sweetheart, let's—let's sit down, okay, let's just—"

"Thomas has something real," Roman said. The performance was entirely gone now. He was not projecting, not filling the room with volume and presence. He was just standing there, and his voice was low and his eyes were too bright and he looked—Logan noted, with a terrible precision—like someone who had been waiting a long time to say something and was saying it wrong and couldn't stop. "With Nico. Thomas has something real and it is the most important thing in his life right now, and every time it comes up in these meetings you—you redirect. Like it's noise. Like the parts of Thomas that love things and need things and feel things are noise that needs to be managed until you can get back to the—to the—" His hands came up and then fell. "Does it register with you? Any of it? Does it—do you—"

"Roman." Logan's voice was even. He was working very hard to keep it even. "I understand that you're upset. I am asking you to—"

"Do you care about Thomas's relationship?" Roman asked. Direct. Undecorated. "Do you actually care? About Nico, about what that means to Thomas, about what it costs him when it gets treated like a scheduling problem? Do you care about any of us? About what we feel? About—" His voice broke fully and he pushed through the break and Logan heard exactly what it cost him. "Can you? Is that—is that something you can do? Because I have genuinely, Logan, I have genuinely started to wonder—"

"Roman, please," Patton said, and his voice had gone high and thin with the effort of trying to hold this. "Please, we don't—let's not say things we can't—"

"—whether there is anything underneath it." The words came out ragged. "Whether we are people to you. Whether I am a person to you. Whether anything that isn't a fact or a function or a timeline has ever actually landed with you, and I—" He stopped. He looked at Logan.

Logan looked back at him.

And Roman, in the silence, with something moving behind his eyes that was shame and hurt and too much momentum to stop, said:

"I wouldn't be surprised if the answer was no. If you just—couldn't. If that's not something you're capable of." A breath. "And honestly? You being aroace probably should have been the first sign."

The silence that followed was a different kind of silence than the argument had been.

The argument had been loud and pressurized and full of the particular heat of two people who were both too stubborn and too certain of themselves, who both had tempers that ran hot and fast, who were both—Logan could admit this, was admitting it right now, in this moment—too proud to back down when they should have. Logan had argued back through the whole of it, blow for blow, counter for counter, because that was what Logan did—he did not go quietly, he did not absorb quietly, when someone came at him with a flawed argument he dismantled it, it was reflex, it was as automatic as breathing, Roman knew that and Roman had kept going anyway.

The silence was different because Logan did not say anything.

He did not move. He did not reach for his counter-argument, which was assembled, which was there, which had his name on it and everything he needed to take Roman's sentence apart at the seams. He did not do any of that.

He looked at the table.

He was aware, with the precise and terrible hyper-attentiveness that came over him sometimes when his system received more input than it could route in real time, of everything in the room at once. The grain of the wood under his hands. The color-coded timeline six inches to his left, the one he'd spent two hours on, the one that was supposed to make Thomas's week manageable. Patton, standing, both hands pressed hard over his mouth now, eyes very bright and very wide and fixed on Logan with an expression that Logan couldn't look at directly. Roman, still, chin lifted, breathing audible, and something in his face—not triumph, not satisfaction, something much worse than either of those, something that looked like a person watching a thing they'd thrown land somewhere they hadn't meant it to.

And Virgil.

Virgil, who had been quiet in the corner for the entire duration—who had not intervened during the building argument, who had not interjected when Roman's voice had cracked, who had been so still that Logan had almost forgotten he was there—

Was not still anymore.

"What did you just say."

It came out wrong. Not the way Virgil's voice usually went when he was managing himself, when he was performing composure over the anxiety underneath. This was something else—something with no performance anywhere in it, something that came from a register Virgil almost never let out because it didn't need to be managed, it needed to be contained, and the container had just given way.

Roman turned.

And Virgil was already moving.

Not toward Roman in a physical sense—but in every other sense, crossing the room with a directness that was not Virgil's natural movement pattern, Virgil who usually occupied corners and thresholds and the safe distances of doorways. There was nothing cautious in it. His hands were out of his pockets. His shoulders were up and his jaw was set and his eyes—

"Virgil—" Patton moved toward him immediately, reaching, and his voice had gone high and desperate. "Virgil, hey, sweetie, let's just—"

"Did you just use his orientation as evidence that he can't love people." Virgil's voice was shaking. Actually shaking, not with control but with the specific vibration of something held too tight that had snapped. "Is that what you just did. In front of—while he's right there—"

"I was—" Roman's jaw worked. "It came out wrong—"

"Wrong." Virgil laughed, and it was a terrible sound, short and sharp and nothing like his regular laugh. "That's the word you're going with. Wrong. Roman, you constructed a sentence. A complete sentence. With a subject and a predicate and a conclusion, which was that the fact that Logan is aroace should have told us all along that he doesn't have feelings—"

"That is not what I—"

"That is exactly what you said!"

"Virgil," Patton said, and he had moved to put himself between them, one hand toward Virgil and one toward Roman, and his voice was fracturing at the edges. "Okay. Okay, we need to—we need to all take a step back, we are all upset, everyone is upset, and we are going to say things—we are all going to say things that we can't take back if we don't just stop—"

"He already did that!" Virgil's voice cracked fully on the last word. "He already said the thing he can't take back, Patton, it's done, it's already—" He turned back to Roman and his eyes were bright with something that was not tears but was in the same neighborhood. "He has never—do you understand that Logan has never, in an argument, not fought back? You have seen him fight back. You know what that looks like. And he's not saying anything. He's not saying anything—"

"Virgil, please," Patton said, and his voice broke on the please, and he grabbed Virgil's arm with both hands. "Please, I know, I know you're—I know, okay, but this is not—this is not going to help him—"

Virgil went rigid under his hands. His breathing was audible. He was looking at Roman with an expression that Logan, from his position at the table, was still not looking at—was cataloguing by peripheral input only, because he was looking at the table, he was looking at the timeline, he was not looking at any of them.

"He's my best friend," Virgil said. The shaking had changed quality—less explosion, still too much feeling, nowhere for it to go. "He is my best friend, Roman, and you just—"

"I know," Roman said, and his voice had changed entirely. All the heat was gone. He looked—Logan filed this without looking at him directly—like someone standing in the aftermath of something they'd done that they couldn't undo. "I know. I know, Virgil, I—"

"Don't," Virgil said. "Don't do that right now."

"—everyone." Patton's voice was very thin. He was still holding Virgil's arm and his other hand had found Roman's sleeve and he was standing between them like someone trying to hold two walls apart with their body. "We are—we are going to take a breath, and we are going to—we are going to be okay, we're all going to be okay, we just need to—"

"Logan."

Virgil had turned. He was looking at Logan now, directly, and his voice had done something—it had gone from the hot, uncontained thing back to something that was trying, effortfully, to be present in a different way. Still shaking. The trying was visible.

"Logan," he said again.

Logan was looking at the timeline.

The timeline had Thomas's week mapped out in four colors. Blue for non-negotiables. Green for flexible. Yellow for things that could be moved. Red for the deadline itself, Thursday, immovable.

"The sponsorship email," Logan said.

His voice came out even. He was grateful for that. He was specifically and precisely grateful for the evenness, for whatever mechanism in him produced it, because he did not have access right now to anything else.

"Needs a draft by tonight. I'll handle it."

He picked up his pen.

He did not look up.

He heard Patton make a sound like a small, quiet injury. He heard Roman say his name once, in a voice stripped of everything theatrical, just the word, just Logan, and he didn't respond to it. He heard Virgil, after a long pause, say Roman's name in a voice that was not anger anymore but something that might have been worse, a low and exhausted and devastated Roman that carried the full weight of I don't know what to do with this.

He heard the meeting dissolve.

He sat at the table and held his pen and did not move until he was alone.

---

They didn't address it.

At the next meeting, Roman was warm and present and cheerful in the way that Roman was always genuine even when he was performing, because for Roman those had never been fully separable. He made a joke. He complimented Patton's sweater. He offered a revision for the second act—moving the callback three scenes earlier—and it was good, structurally and emotionally, and Logan said so because that was accurate, and Roman looked startled and then quietly pleased, and they moved on.

Logan moved on too.

He was built for that. He had understood for a long time that what he was was not not feeling things—that had been a misdiagnosis he'd carried for years, a map of the wrong territory—but that his feelings did not have the same urgency of announcement. They didn't rise. They didn't overflow. They were there, fully, and they ran beneath everything in the background, and they did not stop running simply because the surface had moved on.

Do you care about anyone.

Running.

Is that something you're capable of.

Running.

Probably should have been the first sign.

Running, running, running—quiet, underneath everything, patient in the way that certain things were patient when they had decided to stay.

Logan had extensive evidence, if he wanted to build a case. He'd thought about the lighting—how Patton had mentioned headaches offhandedly, once, not even as a complaint, and how Logan had gone away and researched lighting color temperature and its effects and had quietly adjusted the fixtures without telling anyone. He'd thought about the schedules—the hours he'd put into understanding how ADHD interacted with content creation so that he could structure the meetings in ways that kept Thomas engaged rather than spiraling into guilt about his own inability to focus. He'd thought about Remus and Janus, about standing in front of Thomas and assembling an argument out of logic because it was the only language he'd had access to, saying their functions have merit and to suppress an aspect of yourself is not the same as defeating it and meaning, underneath both of those, something he hadn't been able to say directly—they deserve to be seen. He knew what it was to not be seen. He had tried to say that. He had used the tools he had.

The problem—the specific, persistent, impossible problem—was that I fixed the lights was not legible to most people as I heard you and it mattered to me. That the entire architecture of how Logan showed care was built in a language that most people did not read. That he had spent years assuming the doing spoke for itself, that the adjustments and the preparations and the quiet advocacy were visible to anyone paying attention.

Roman had not been paying attention. Or had been paying attention and could not read the language. Or had been reading it and had decided it wasn't enough.

Logan didn't know which. He wasn't certain it mattered.

What mattered—what kept returning, every time he thought he'd set it down—was not even the worst thing Roman had said. The worst thing Roman had said was specific and targeted and wrong in ways Logan could enumerate if he needed to, and maybe that was why it was not the thing that stuck hardest. He could build a case against aroace probably should have been the first sign. He knew how to dismantle that. He had the tools.

He did not have tools for: do you care about any of us.

He did not have tools for: is that something you're capable of.

Because those were not attacking his orientation. Those were attacking his interiority. And the attack had come from someone who knew him—not perfectly, not without blind spots, but genuinely, someone who had sat in the same meetings and watched the same Thomas and supposedly understood what they were all doing here—and that person had looked at everything Logan was and concluded that there might be nothing underneath it.

And Logan had not argued back.

He kept returning to that. The silence. The pen picked up. The sponsorship email needs a draft by tonight. He kept turning it over and examining it and trying to determine what it had been—self-protection, or shock, or some failure of a mechanism that usually worked. He'd had the argument assembled. He'd had every piece of it. It had been there.

And he'd looked at the table instead, and he had understood, in the specific and terrible way he sometimes understood things—too precisely, with too much clarity, without the buffer that other people seemed to have—that the silence had told Roman something.

He didn't know yet what it had told Roman. He knew what it had told him.

He sat with that for days.

Logan had never been good at sitting with uncertainty.

He had learned to tolerate it, the way he had learned to tolerate a great many things that did not come naturally—with effort, with structure, with the recognition that his intolerance of it was not the universe's problem to solve. But tolerate was different from comfortable. He tolerated it the way one tolerates a persistent sound in the walls: aware of it constantly, unable to locate it, unable to make it stop.

Whether I thought I was a better person than I actually am.

That was the question he kept failing to answer satisfactorily.

Because he knew—he knew, he had the evidence, the lights, the schedules, the Remus-and-Janus case, the hundred small unglamorous acts of care that no one had seen because he had not made them visible—he knew he was not what Roman had described in the worst moment of the worst version of that argument. He knew that.

But he also knew that he had made Roman feel invisible. That this had been happening for months and he had seen it, had caught the expression, had filed the shift in Roman's voice, had noted the way Roman's posture changed when Logan redirected and had continued to redirect anyway. Had treated his own discomfort in the territory of romance and feeling as sufficient reason not to engage, because it wasn't his area, because he wasn't useful there, because not being useful was something Logan found genuinely difficult to tolerate and so he'd found a way to name that discomfort outside my expertise and make it sound like principle.

That was not a comfortable thing to know about himself.

He turned it over and it was not comfortable from any angle.

He thought: I don't know how to be in the room when the topic is something I don't feel. And then he thought: that has never stopped me from trying to understand other things I don't feel. And then he thought: and yet it stopped me here. Every time. And he didn't have a clean answer for why the gap existed, only a suspicion that the gap had something to do with Roman specifically—with the particular friction of two people who were both hot-headed and certain and who sharpened themselves against each other more than they probably should have, who had never quite learned to disagree without it becoming a contest.

He thought: I never tried to learn Roman's language the way I tried to learn other things.

He thought: that's on me.

He held it. It was not comfortable. He held it anyway.

---

He found the library without looking for it, the way he always did—suddenly the shelves were there and the light was amber and the chair in the corner had the right angle and the particular quality of the quiet was the kind that didn't press on him.

He'd been there for forty-three minutes before he heard the footsteps.

He didn't look up. He knew the cadence.

Virgil sat down across from him—dropped into the chair with the bonelessness of someone who had been carrying a lot of weight and had decided to put it down for a while, not gracefully, just down. He didn't say anything. He stretched his legs out and put his hands in his pockets and looked at Logan with the direct, uncurated patience that was Virgil's particular mode of presence. Not soft. Not performing comfort. Just there. Fully, without asterisks.

Logan turned a page he hadn't been reading.

"You know I haven't been reading," Logan said.

"Yeah."

The amber light moved across the shelves. Logan turned another page.

"You don't have to be here."

"You keep saying things like that," Virgil said. "And then I keep being here. So."

Logan looked at the unread page. He straightened the corner of the book against the table. He was aware of the specific quality of the silence, of the single earbud Virgil hadn't put in yet because he hadn't decided yet whether this was a staying-in-silence visit or a talking visit. Logan appreciated that Virgil had not yet decided. It meant Logan had not yet failed to meet whatever the visit required.

"Virgil." He set the book down. He looked at it first, and then—with the deliberate override of a default he'd been working on for two years, the one that said eye contact is expensive and was right but was not always the most important thing—he looked up. "Do you think I'm a good person?"

Virgil looked at him.

He didn't answer immediately. This was why Logan had asked him—Patton would have said of course you are, oh gosh, absolutely in under three seconds and the warmth would have been genuine and it would have told Logan nothing. Virgil looked at the question like it was a question. He sat with it. He turned it over in a way Logan could almost see, and in the silence Logan felt the weight of having asked it, felt how much he needed the answer to be accurate rather than kind, felt how much he was trusting Virgil to know the difference.

"Define good," Virgil said.

"That's—" Logan stopped. He breathed. "That's not a deflection?"

"No. It's a real question. Because you're asking me if you're a good person and that's doing a lot of work." Virgil's voice was level. Not unkind. Honest in the specific way that was Virgil's form of affection. "Do you mean do you have good values. Or do you mean do you treat people well. Or do you mean—" He paused. "Do you mean: is Roman right."

Logan looked at the table.

"The third one," he said.

Virgil exhaled. He leaned forward, forearms on the table, and he looked at Logan with the expression Logan had learned, over years, to recognize as I am going to tell you the truth and I need you to know that the truth is not the same as what hurts most to hear.

"No," Virgil said. "Roman is not right. About the specific thing. About the—about what he said about your orientation." Something moved through his face, brief and controlled with effort. "That was—that was wrong, Logan. That was a wrong thing to say. That's the first thing, because I want to be clear that that's the first thing."

"I know that," Logan said.

"Do you?"

Logan was quiet for a moment. "Intellectually."

Virgil nodded slowly, like that answer was what he'd expected and he wasn't sure what to do with it either. "Yeah." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Okay. Then here's what I actually think. Which you asked for so you're getting it."

"I know."

"You're flawed." Virgil said it simply, without decoration. "You're oblivious in ways that have consequences for people, and some of that is your brain and some of it is what you do with your brain, and the distinction matters but it doesn't make the consequences smaller. You've made Roman feel like he doesn't matter in those meetings. I don't think you meant to. I don't think you ever woke up and decided to make him feel invisible." He held Logan's gaze. "And I also think you saw it happening. I think you logged it. I think you had data on it for months and you kept sequencing it away."

Logan didn't say anything.

"That's the flawed part," Virgil said. "And it's real. I'm not going to pretend it isn't."

"I know," Logan said, and his voice came out quieter than he'd intended, smaller than he wanted it to be, and he didn't adjust it because it was accurate and Virgil had asked for accuracy.

The amber light moved. A shelf settled somewhere in the dark of the library.

"But." Virgil leaned closer. "I've watched you—" He stopped. Started again. "The lighting thing. In the meeting room."

Logan went very still.

"Patton mentioned it," Virgil said. "Not on purpose. He just—he said he always felt better in the meetings lately and he couldn't figure out why. And I thought about it. And I figured." He looked at Logan steadily. "You fixed the lights because Patton mentioned a headache once. Not even a real complaint. Just a thing he said in passing. And you went away and you fixed it and you never told anyone. That's not—" His voice shifted, and the shift was small but Logan heard it, because he heard everything about Virgil, had been cataloguing the specific frequencies of Virgil for years. "That's not nothing, Logan. That's a person who pays attention. That's a person who cares about things quietly, in the background, where nobody's looking."

Logan looked at the table. His throat felt like something was pressing on it from the inside.

"And the Remus and Janus thing." Virgil's voice was lower now, more careful. "You went in there and you fought for them. With Thomas. When nobody else was doing that. And I was there, I saw your face—I know how uncomfortable you were. I know how much you had to reach outside your framework to make that argument. The whole thing was in a language that doesn't come naturally to you and you did it anyway. You built it out of whatever you had." A pause. "Why?"

Logan opened his mouth.

He found, as he sometimes did, that the thing was there and the words for it were not quite, and there was a gap between the two that he had to navigate with care.

"Because they deserved—" He stopped. "Because their functions have legitimate—" He stopped again. Breathed. Tried to go underneath the framework for once, the way Virgil was asking him to. "Because I know what it is," he said finally, "to have the way you work treated as a deficiency. And I knew someone should say something and I didn't—I wasn't—" He looked up. His voice was very even and the evenness was costing him. "I wasn't going to be the reason they didn't get a fair hearing. Because I was uncomfortable."

Virgil looked at him for a long time.

"Yeah," he said softly. "That's what I thought."

Logan looked away.

"Here's what I know," Virgil said. "You have been—for years, Logan, *years—*working at things that don't come naturally to you. The emotional availability. The patience. Learning to sit in a room where the conversation is feelings-based and not run the optimization algorithm on everything that gets said. You have been trying, consistently, in ways that nobody applauds because you don't announce them." Something in his voice had gone rough. "And today Roman—" He stopped. His jaw tightened. "Roman said the worst possible version of a real observation. He took something true—that you've been missing him in those meetings—and he ran it all the way to a place that was wrong. That was cruel. And you didn't—" Virgil's voice cracked slightly, and he let it, which meant something. "You didn't argue back. And I keep thinking about that. I keep thinking about what it means that you didn't argue back."

Logan said nothing. The pressing feeling in his throat had not resolved.

"You always argue back," Virgil said. "You've argued back about everything your entire existence. You argue back when you're wrong, when you're right, when it's inconvenient, when you're tired—I have never once seen you take a hit and not fight." He looked at Logan with an expression that was too open for Virgil to be comfortable with it and he was holding it anyway. "And you just—picked up your pen. And said the thing about the email. And I—"

He stopped.

He leaned back. He looked at the ceiling for a moment. He pressed his hand briefly over his mouth, and when he brought it down his voice was steadier.

"I need you to know that it's not true," Virgil said. "What he was implying. The thing underneath the sentence he said. You are—you are one of the most caring people I know, Logan, and I know that probably sounds insane, because you're not—you're not expressive in the ways people expect caring to look like. But caring doesn't have a required aesthetic. You care by doing. You care by paying attention in ways that don't announce themselves. And you're trying, all the time, to get better at the parts that don't come naturally, and—" His voice dropped. "That means more to me than it would if it was just easy for you. Because it's not easy and you do it anyway. Every time."

Logan looked at him. His face, he knew, was doing the thing it did when the feeling was present and the expression for it was not quite loading—the stillness that read to some people as nothing and to Virgil, he knew, read accurately.

"That's a kind thing to say," Logan said.

"It's a true thing," Virgil said, and the firmness in it was—Logan filed it, held it, did not have a word for what he did with it but it was something, it was something real and it went somewhere it wasn't going to leave. "Which you know is more important to me."

The corner of Logan's mouth moved. The small version. The real version.

"Yes," he said. "I know that."

Virgil held his gaze for a moment more. Then he leaned back, and he pulled out one earbud, and he put it in. He left the other out. He did not leave.

Logan picked up the book. The words reached him this time.

The amber light was steady. Virgil's music was a thin, familiar sound from the single earbud, and Logan had catalogued it years ago as processing music, comfortable register, does not require response. The shelves were full. The chair had the right angle.

Logan thought: I have this. Not as warmth—or rather, as the version of warmth that arrived for Logan, which was not the warm-over-the-surface kind but the deep-structural kind, the kind that felt like certainty rather than feeling, like a load-bearing wall rather than sunlight. I have this and I would work very hard for it and I have always been working very hard for it and that is true regardless of whether anyone can see it.

He thought about Roman. About the conversation that still had not happened and was not happening tonight but would need to happen, at some point, in some form. About how neither of them were going to be graceful about it, because they were both too proud and too certain and too prone to heat, and it would probably be uncomfortable in ways Logan could not fully preemptively map.

He thought about what Virgil had said: you built it out of whatever you had.

He had done that before. In rooms that were not comfortable. For people who had not made it easy.

He could do it again.

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.