do not perceive me, my existence is a falsehood

The mindscape had a sound when things were going wrong.

Not a loud sound. Not dramatic. Just a low, constant hum beneath everything, the way a building sounds when its HVAC is working too hard — present in the absence of other noise, noticeable only when you'd learned to listen for it. Virgil had lived inside that sound for years before anyone noticed he existed, and he knew its register the way you know the specific creak of a floorboard in a house you've lived in long enough.

He was hearing it again.

The difference was that this time it wasn't coming from him.

It started in small increments, the way most things did.

A Tuesday morning. Thomas was spiraling the gentle, circling way — not a crisis, more a slow centrifuge of undone tasks and mounting obligations and the particular guilt of someone who knows what they should be doing and can't make themselves start. His laptop was open. His feet were tucked beneath him on the couch. His eyes had the glazed, soft focus of someone who had been staring at the same paragraph for twenty minutes without reading a word.

Logan appeared first. He always appeared first in situations of logistical distress; it was something Virgil had noticed early and quietly catalogued as one of Logan's most characteristic features — this reflexive orientation toward a problem, the way he arrived like a hand already extended before you'd thought to ask for help. He had his whiteboard. He had neat, bullet-pointed items in dark blue marker. He had the slightly elevated posture that meant he'd already done the mental work and was ready to walk someone through it.

"Thomas," he said, and his voice had the clean, precise quality of someone trying to be a lifeline. "I've organized your pending tasks by urgency and estimated completion time. If we begin the audition preparation now, we can build in a review period before Thursday and still leave space for —"

"Oh, buddy." Patton materialized from the direction of the kitchen, and he had that quality he always had — warm and immediate and filling the room the way heat fills a cold space, displacing everything else without intending to. He was carrying a mug of something that smelled like chocolate, and his eyes were soft with the particular brand of gentle concern that was Patton's most natural expression. "I don't know if a list is quite what Thomas needs right now. Sometimes you have to let yourself feel overwhelmed before you can start fixing things, you know? The feelings are important."

"They are," Logan said, carefully. "I'm not suggesting Thomas suppress his feelings. I'm suggesting that the cognitive load of unstructured anxiety is frequently higher than —"

"Lo." Roman arrived from the other direction with the unconscious ease of someone who had never once considered that a room might not want him in it — which was, Virgil thought sometimes, both Roman's greatest gift and his most significant blind spot. He dropped onto the arm of the couch and turned the full warmth of his attention on Thomas. "Right now our brave creator needs to feel what he feels. You can't put a timetable on the creative soul."

"I wasn't —" Logan paused. Reoriented. "I wasn't attempting to schedule his emotional experience. I was scheduling the tasks that are causing the emotional experience, which is a different —"

"We've got it, Lo." Patton's voice was gentle in the way that felt like a hand on your arm steering you slightly to the side. Not unkind. Just redirecting. "Take a breath. We'll come find you when we're ready for the planning stuff, okay?"

The whiteboard disappeared.

Logan nodded, once, with the precise professionalism of someone filing an objection they know won't be addressed. He took a half-step back into the indeterminate space Sides occupied when they weren't the focus, and his expression did the thing — Virgil had been watching for it, had learned to read it like a weather system — the deliberate smoothing, the careful reorganization of feeling into something that could be stored rather than displayed. He folded his hands behind his back.

"Of course," he said. "I'll be in the library."

No one watched him go.

Virgil, standing in the hallway doorway with his hoodie pulled up and his arms crossed, watched the space Logan had vacated and felt something hot and specific ignite just below his sternum. It wasn't anger, exactly. It was more like the feeling of recognizing something, the way you recognize a pattern in a piece of music you've heard before in a different key.

He knew that exit. He knew the shape of it.

He waited forty-three minutes — he counted, because he knew if he followed immediately he'd do it wrong, he'd come in too hot, and Logan didn't respond well to too hot — before he went to find him.

The library was three floors up and smelled like old paper and the particular dryness of well-kept books. Logan was at the far table, which was his table, the one with the lamp that cast good reading light and the chair with the slightly higher back that meant Logan could sit with the precise upright posture he defaulted to when he was thinking seriously. He had three books open in front of him. He wasn't reading any of them.

He was staring at the middle distance with the specific quality of someone who is very carefully not doing something — not feeling, not reacting, not following the thread that if pulled would unravel whatever composure he was holding together. The pen in his hand wasn't moving.

Virgil dropped into the chair beside him instead of across.

Across felt like a deposition. Beside felt like us, and right now more than anything else he wanted Logan to feel the us of it.

"Hey," he said.

"Hello, Virgil." The voice was even. Functional.

"You okay?"

A pause. "I'm fine."

Virgil let that sit in the air between them for a moment, acknowledging it and not believing it. "How's the nothing-reading going?"

Logan's mouth did a small, unwilling thing that wasn't quite a smile. "The nothing-reading," he said, "is going extremely well. I've accomplished a significant quantity of it."

"Impressive." Virgil leaned back in the chair and looked at the ceiling. The library ceiling was high and vaulted and had the kind of elaborate plasterwork that Logan had probably specified when he'd designed his section of the mindscape, all clean geometric detail. "You want to tell me what's actually going on, or are we doing the thing where you're fine until you're definitely not fine and then it takes another forty minutes for you to admit there was ever anything happening?"

"That is," Logan said, "an uncharitable characterization of my emotional processing."

"It's an accurate characterization."

"...it's an accurate characterization," Logan conceded, with the particular dignity of someone who has decided honesty is more important than winning. He set the pen down carefully, parallel to the edge of the book. "They weren't wrong," he said. "Patton wasn't wrong. Thomas did need to process the anxiety before he could engage productively with solutions. That is a well-documented —"

"Logan."

"—aspect of —"

"Logan." Gently.

A long pause. The lamp hummed.

"I had a very thorough plan," Logan said, quietly. "I'd worked it out before I came upstairs. I knew what needed to happen and in what order, and I knew if we started at two o'clock we would have enough time to —" He stopped. "It doesn't matter."

"It matters," Virgil said. "It matters to me."

Something in Logan's expression shifted — just for a moment, just enough to be visible — the particular flicker of someone who has been told their thing matters and is surprised by the relief it produces. Then it was filed away again, catalogued, stored.

"It was a good plan," Logan said.

"I know it was," Virgil said. "Your plans are always good."

"Then why —" Logan stopped himself. His jaw did the small tightening thing. "Never mind."

"Why don't they listen," Virgil said, and it wasn't a question, and Logan looked at him with something that was very close to being undone before he caught it.

"They do listen," Logan said, carefully. "When the context is appropriate."

"When you're agreeing with someone who was already going to be heard," Virgil said.

Silence.

Logan looked at the books in front of him for a long time.

"That is," he said finally, with quiet precision, "a more accurate characterization."

Virgil nodded. He didn't push, didn't elaborate, didn't move to fix it — just let Logan have the acknowledgment, the simple fact of it sitting between them, real and uncontested. It was something he'd learned slowly and with effort: that sometimes what Logan needed wasn't a solution. Sometimes Logan needed the specific experience of not having to convince someone that the problem was real.

They sat together in the lamplight for a while. Virgil listened to the sound of the mindscape and thought about how the hum had gotten slightly louder, and kept the thought to himself.

For now.

---

Janus came to Virgil on a Thursday morning, which was almost insultingly casual of him.

He appeared in the hallway outside Virgil's room with his hands folded and his expression arranged in the particular studied pleasantness he used when he wanted to look like he wasn't doing anything in particular. Half of his face was the smooth yellow of his natural appearance; the other half had taken on a sort of deliberately neutral blankness that meant he was paying close attention and didn't want Virgil to know it.

"I'm not interested," Virgil said, without looking up from his phone.

"I haven't said anything yet."

"You don't have to. You have a coming to say a thing face."

Janus settled against the opposite wall with the ease of someone who has all the time in the world and is not going to be hurried by someone else's rudeness. "I've simply been observing," he said, in the tone that meant he'd been doing considerably more than observing, "that Logan has been having a difficult time lately."

Virgil's thumbs stopped moving.

"He's fine," he said.

"Mm." Janus's tone was mild, agreeable, entirely unconvinced. "He's been dismissed four times this week in situations where his input was materially relevant to the outcome. On two of those occasions, the decision that was ultimately made would have been improved by the analysis he was attempting to provide. He knows this. He hasn't said so." A pause. "He never says so."

"He doesn't need to say so," Virgil said. "I know it."

"Yes," Janus said. "You know it. And yet it keeps happening."

Virgil put his phone down. "What do you want, Janus?"

Janus tilted his head with the birdlike quality that Virgil had always found deeply irritating. "I want," he said, pleasantly, "for Thomas to function optimally. Logan is central to that. An underutilized, undervalued logic function produces predictable long-term outcomes, and none of them are particularly good for Thomas." He paused. "He is undervalued, Virgil. That's not a manipulation. That's simply a fact."

"Don't," Virgil said.

"He has a standing invitation," Janus continued, as if Virgil hadn't spoken, because Janus had spent centuries perfecting the art of hearing what he wanted to hear and disregarding the rest. "From both Remus and myself. Somewhere that the data gets used. Somewhere that he doesn't have to fight for the floor."

"He's not going anywhere," Virgil said. His voice came out harder than he intended. "Stay away from him."

Janus looked at him for a long, considering moment. Something in his expression went very briefly, very genuinely serious — not the performed sincerity he deployed for effect, but the actual thing, which was rarer and more unsettling.

"You can't protect him by keeping him small," Janus said quietly. "He's already been made small by everyone else. If you love him, Virgil — and I think you do, genuinely, in your particular prickly way — you might consider what it would mean to fight for him instead of simply hovering over him."

He left before Virgil could answer.

Which was, Virgil thought furiously, exactly the kind of thing Janus would do.

He told Logan that evening. He didn't want to — there was a version of him that wanted to handle it quietly, stand between Logan and the whole situation and make it not-Logan's-problem. But that version of him was the same version that had spent too many years deciding what was safe for everyone else without asking, and he was trying to be better than that, and so he sat beside Logan in the library and told him the truth.

Logan listened without interrupting, which was both very Logan and very difficult to read. When Virgil finished, the quiet stretched for long enough that Virgil started to worry about it.

"I see," Logan said finally.

"You can't go over there," Virgil said, and heard immediately how it sounded, and pushed through it anyway because the stakes were too high for him to be graceful. "I know how it feels, Lo. I know what they're offering and I know it feels like being seen, but Janus's version of seeing you is —"

"I haven't said I'm going anywhere." Logan's voice was patient in the way that suggested patience was an active choice he was making rather than a natural state.

"I know. I'm saying it preemptively."

"You say that quite a lot lately." A pause. "Things preemptively."

"Because if I wait until after it's —"

"Virgil." The patience in Logan's voice had a particular quality now, careful and faintly strained. "I am aware of what Janus is. I have always been aware of what Janus is. I'm not — I'm not susceptible to flattery. I'm susceptible to —" He stopped. Looked at his hands. "I'm susceptible to being useful. That's different."

"I know," Virgil said. "That's what scares me."

Something passed across Logan's face. "You think they'd use that."

"I think Janus is very good at making people feel necessary," Virgil said. "That's exactly what he does. He finds the specific thing you're hungry for and he offers it, and it's real, that's what makes it work, it's genuinely real in the moment, and then you've signed onto something that has nothing to do with what you thought you were agreeing to." He leaned forward. "I've been there, Lo. Not in the same way, but I know the shape of it."

Logan was quiet for a long time.

"I said I'd think about it," he said eventually.

"About what?"

"Janus left a note." Logan said it to the table. "This afternoon. While you were with Thomas. He made an argument about — Thomas's long-term wellbeing. About the data I have that isn't being used. He said it exists whether or not anyone consults it." A pause. "He was correct."

"Logan —"

"I said I would think about it." Logan looked up. His eyes were very steady. "Virgil. I can handle a conversation."

"I know you can."

"Do you?" The question was quiet. Not combative. Genuinely asking.

Virgil opened his mouth. Closed it. The honest answer was sitting in his chest, inconvenient and true: I know you can handle a conversation, I'm not sure I can handle watching you have it. He swallowed it.

"Yes," he said, and they both knew it was partially true, and neither of them pushed on it.

What Virgil didn't acknowledge, because it was easier not to, was that Janus had been right about one thing.

He wasn't fighting for Logan. He was fighting around him.

He started showing up at meetings he didn't need to attend. He started steering conversations — subtle redirects, small interruptions, the way you'd adjust the course of water running in a direction you didn't want. When Patton started a gentle lo, maybe later, Virgil was there with a actually, Thomas, what Logan was saying about the risk factors is worth hearing — and it worked, sometimes, they'd look at Logan for a moment, they'd listen for a moment — but he was talking over Logan's silence to make them hear Logan, and somewhere in the architecture of that was a fundamental problem he didn't let himself examine closely.

Logan noticed. Of course Logan noticed.

"You don't have to do that," Logan said one night, after Virgil had spent an entire Thomas-session positioning himself between Logan and the room's tendency to redirect.

"Do what?"

"The —" Logan made a gesture that encompassed the last hour. "The management. The navigating. I can —"

"I know you can," Virgil said. "I just —"

"You just want to make sure it goes right."

"I just —" Virgil stopped. "I don't want them to keep doing this to you."

"Then perhaps," Logan said, carefully, "the person to address that with is them."

A pause.

"Not," Logan continued, with the precision of someone who has thought this through and is delivering it with deliberate gentleness, "the person to manage the interactions around me as if I'm a variable in an equation you're trying to solve."

Virgil looked at him.

"I don't —" He heard the defensiveness in his own voice and pressed through it. "That's not what I'm doing."

Logan looked at him with patient, accurate eyes.

"...I don't want it to be what I'm doing," Virgil said.

"I know," Logan said. "I know you don't."

They stood in the uncomfortable truth of that for a moment.

"I just —" Virgil pulled his sleeves down. "I was where you are. I know what comes next if nothing changes. I was in the dark side for years, Logan, I know what that's like, I know what it does to you, and I look at you and I see —"

"You see yourself," Logan said quietly.

"I see someone I love being made to feel like they don't fit," Virgil said, rougher than he meant to, "and I can't — I can't just —"

"Virgil." Logan's voice was very gentle. "I hear you. I do. But you watching me experience something is not the same as you experiencing it yourself, and the solution to your fear of what might happen to me cannot be —" He paused, searching for the precise word. "Cannot be restructuring every interaction I have. That's not protecting me. That's —"

He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't have to.

Virgil felt the shape of what he wasn't saying and sat with it, quietly terrible.

"Yeah," he said. "Okay. You're right."

He tried to stop. He genuinely tried.

He was, at best, imperfect at it.

---

The meeting that broke it happened on a gray Tuesday afternoon.

Thomas had a real decision in front of him, the kind that required actual weighing rather than emotional processing — a career opportunity had materialized, specific and time-sensitive, and it required him to assess practical reality against creative risk, financial stability against long-term growth, short-term fear against long-term regret. The kind of decision that was, structurally, exactly what a logic function existed for.

Logan had spent four hours preparing.

Virgil knew because he'd been in the library while Logan worked — not intrusively, just present, sitting in the chair beside Logan's table and reading his own book while Logan spread papers and charts across the surface and occasionally talked through a calculation out loud. It was one of their things: Virgil's presence, quiet and consistent, as Logan worked through something complex. Logan thought better when someone was nearby, even though he would die before calling it company — he called it ambient presence and Virgil called it company and Logan gave him the look that meant he was right but wasn't going to say so.

The spreadsheet was good. Virgil had looked at it over Logan's shoulder. Three scenarios, probabilistic outcomes, a sensitivity analysis that had made Virgil's eyes cross slightly but that Logan had walked him through until it made sense. It was thorough and it was precise and it was exactly what Thomas needed to make an informed choice.

They went upstairs together.

Thomas was in the living room with the particular restless quality of someone circling a decision they hadn't made yet, moving between the couch and the window and back, wearing a path in the carpet that didn't exist but felt like it should.

Logan opened his mouth.

Roman got there first.

"Thomas," he said, with the particular expansive energy that Roman brought to big moments, the kind of energy that could fill a room without effort. "This is the question at the heart of everything — are you the kind of person who seizes the moment or are you the kind who waits for the perfect wave? Because I think we all know what kind of person you are, and I think that matters more than any projection —"

"That framing has merit," Logan said carefully, "as a values clarification exercise, but the financial implications of the two scenarios aren't equivalent, and before Thomas makes a decision on the basis of identity, it would be useful to understand what each choice actually —"

"Lo, I think Roman might be onto something really important here," Patton said, and his voice had the warm, earnest quality that it always had, the kind that was difficult to argue with because it came from genuine care. "This really is a values question. What does Thomas want? What does he believe? Those aren't things that show up on a spreadsheet."

"The values question and the practical question are not mutually exclusive," Logan said, and there was something in his voice — a slight elevation, the careful tension of someone holding something in. "I have a spreadsheet that takes both into account. I've mapped out three scenarios that account for different risk tolerances, which means the final decision still rests on Thomas's values, but he'd be making it with full information rather than —"

"Thomas," Roman said, turning the full warmth of his princely attention on their creator, and Logan stopped mid-sentence because Roman was talking now and the room was listening to Roman now. "What does your gut say? Right now. What does it tell you?"

"My gut says I'm absolutely terrified," Thomas said, with the helpless laugh of someone who knows exactly what his gut is saying and is hoping someone will translate it.

"That's Virgil's domain," Patton said fondly.

"Sure," Virgil said, from the corner, and he meant to stop there, he genuinely meant to, but Logan was standing in the middle of the room holding a metaphorical spreadsheet that represented four hours of work and nobody had looked at it, and Virgil's mouth kept moving. "But also, Logan has an actual framework for evaluating the fear versus the risk, and maybe we should —"

"The fear is data," Logan said, and his voice was still measured, still professional, still the carefully modulated register he used when he was being patient with a room that wasn't giving him a lot of reasons to be patient. "It tells us where the stakes are. Virgil is right that it's worth taking seriously. But fear isn't the only data available, and there are three other data points that are equally relevant to —" He paused. Let it go. Tried again. "I have a complete analysis. It takes approximately eight minutes to walk through. If Thomas has eight minutes —"

"We'll look at it later, bud," Patton said, with the gentle certainty of someone who believes this completely.

Logan's whiteboard appeared.

It was the visual component of the spreadsheet, the simplified version — Logan had prepared it because the full spreadsheet was sometimes too dense for a verbal walkthrough, he'd learned to translate it, he'd done that work explicitly because the feedback in the past had been that he was too technical, too inaccessible, so he'd made himself accessible, he'd done the translation work, and the whiteboard had color-coding and clean labels and a structure that was, Virgil thought, legitimately easy to follow.

"Scenario A," Logan said, with the steady voice of someone trying one more time because trying one more time was what you did, "shows that if Thomas takes the opportunity now, the projected outcomes over a twelve-month period include —"

"Lo," Roman said, and he was already turning back to Thomas, already done with this fork in the conversation, "I think what would actually help Thomas right now is to talk through the creative implications, not the numbers. What's the story? What's the possibility? That's what's going to get him unstuck."

"The story," Logan said, and there was a precision to each word that Virgil recognized, the careful placement of someone trying to stay controlled, "is in the data. The possibility is mapped in the scenarios. I've already done the creative analysis. It's in scenario C. If you'd look at —"

"Lo." Patton's voice, gently.

The whiteboard disappeared.

And then — from the direction of the hallway, uninvited and perfectly timed in the way that Janus's interventions were always perfectly timed — his voice came drifting through like smoke finding a gap under a door: "You always have the data, Logan. You always will. The question is simply where the data gets to matter."

Virgil crossed the room so fast he barely registered doing it.

He put himself between Logan and the hallway, and he turned, and he said, low and furious and burning with three weeks of accumulated helpless watching: "Don't. Don't. You don't get to swoop in every single time they do this — you've been waiting, haven't you, you've been waiting for exactly this moment and you don't get to —"

"Virgil —" Logan's voice, from behind him.

"No," Virgil said, and he turned, and his expression was too much, he could feel it, too much intensity too close, but he couldn't find the dial. "No, he doesn't get to use this, he doesn't get to make it seem like he's the answer — every time, Logan, every time something goes wrong in this room he's right there with his — you can't, you can't let him keep doing this, you have to see what he's doing —"

"Virgil." Logan's voice was quiet.

"—because you're good, you're worth so much more than what he's offering, and I can't — I won't just stand here and watch him —"

"Virgil."

Cracked.

Just slightly. Just through the very surface of it. But it cracked.

Virgil stopped.

The room stopped.

And Logan — who kept a cool head, who filed and smoothed and reorganized, who had said I'm functional more times than Virgil could count, who had been patient and professional and excellent through thirty consecutive days of being redirected and dismissed and talked over and managed — Logan was standing in the middle of the room with his hands loose at his sides and his expression unguarded in a way Virgil had only seen three times in all the years he'd known him, and all three of those times something had broken, and this was going to be the fourth.

---

"I don't know," Logan said, "what else to do."

His voice was very even. Very quiet. The precision of it was still there — it was always there, it was Logan, the precision was structural — but it was the precision of load-bearing walls after an earthquake: still standing, barely, and you could see the fractures.

Nobody moved.

Thomas was turned around on the couch, fully present in the way he sometimes wasn't. Patton's hand had stopped mid-gesture. Roman, who had been about to say something, wasn't.

Logan looked at the room and the room looked back at him, and he seemed to be making a decision — the same kind of decision Virgil had watched him make a hundred times at his library table, the weighing, the calculating — except that this one was about whether to keep carrying this alone, and the calculation had just changed.

"I have tried," Logan said, and his voice was still level but it had the quality of something that had been held under water and is now being allowed, very slowly, to surface, "being more organized. I've tried being more patient. I've tried being more emotionally accessible. I've tried — I learned, I actually learned, how to validate feelings before introducing data, because the feedback was that I was too rigid, too cold, too purely rational. I restructured how I communicate. I started acknowledging emotional context. I started — I learned to be vulnerable in these conversations, which does not come naturally to me, and I did it because I thought it would help. I thought if I showed them I understood why feelings mattered, they would start to consider that logic matters too." He paused. The silence held. "And they do consider it. When it's convenient. When it supports a conclusion that was already emotionally compelling. I get listened to when I'm agreeing with someone who was already going to be heard."

Thomas made a small, involuntary sound.

"I've tried simpler language. I've tried longer explanations and shorter ones. I've tried visual aids." The whiteboard flickered into existence briefly, ghost-like, and then disappeared. "I've tried asking questions instead of stating conclusions because the feedback was that I was too didactic. I've tried everything I can identify, and I cannot —" His voice broke, very slightly, on the word, the clean fracture of something that has been under too much pressure for too long. He controlled it back, and that control was the saddest part of it, that even now the instinct was to contain it. "I cannot locate the variable that would change the outcome."

"Logan," Patton said, very quietly, and his voice had no gentle redirect in it, just his name, just the ache of it.

"And now," Logan said, and he looked at Virgil, and Virgil felt the look like a physical thing, "you are here. Every time I turn around. Standing between me and the rest of the room. Answering for me when I've been interrupted. Steering conversations so that I get a moment of being heard that I didn't ask for and didn't earn through my own —" He stopped. His throat moved. "I know it comes from care. I know you. I know that you love me and you're frightened and that your fear is —" he paused, choosing carefully, "not without basis. But you are also not listening to me. You are managing me. You are making decisions about what's safe for me without asking what I've decided. You are placing yourself between me and the things you've decided I need to be protected from, and in doing so you are —" He met Virgil's eyes, and the steadiness of his gaze was devastating. "You are also not listening."

Virgil's chest felt like it had been hollowed out.

"Janus offers to listen," Logan said, and his voice had gone very quiet. "Remus offers to listen. They have agendas — I'm not naive, I'm aware they have agendas — but the offer is genuine in form even if not in substance, and when you spend enough time not being heard, the form of the thing starts to matter." He looked around the room. Thomas. Roman. Patton. Virgil. "I am so exhausted," he said, and it was the simplest thing he'd said and the most devastating for its simplicity. "I'm exhausted from being managed by people who love me and dismissed by people who don't think about me and recruited by people who want to use me. And in none of those three situations is anyone asking what I think. No one is asking what I want. No one is asking whether I'm alright."

He let that sit.

"I have tried everything I know how to do," he said, with the quiet finality of someone arriving at the end of a very long road. "I have been patient and flexible and adaptable and good at this, and I don't know what else there is to try, and I am so —" The voice broke again, and this time he let it break, and the sound of it — the small, controlled fracture of someone who never lets this happen — made Roman look away and Patton press his hand over his mouth. "I am so tired of the sound of my own voice in a room that isn't listening."

Silence.

Not the comfortable kind.

Logan gathered himself with the quiet efficiency of someone who has said what needed to be said and has nothing left to add. He picked up the whiteboard from where it had appeared on the table and tucked it under his arm with deliberate care, like he was collecting something precious.

"I'm going to the library," he said.

His footsteps were even and measured across the room. The door opened and closed with a small, final sound.

---

Nobody moved for a long time.

The living room had the particular quality of a space where something irrevocable has happened — not a catastrophe, but a reckoning. The kind of moment that, afterward, you refer to as before and after.

Thomas was staring at the space where Logan had been with an expression Virgil recognized: the face of someone being shown something they'd known and hadn't let themselves know.

"I do that," Patton said, very quietly. He wasn't looking at anyone. His hands were folded in his lap. "The later, buddy. I do it all the time. I think I'm —" He stopped. "I think I'm so focused on making sure everyone feels okay emotionally that I — when Logan does the logic thing I kind of just... wait for it to be over. Like it's an obstacle instead of a — instead of Logan helping."

"I don't think his feedback matters unless it's complicating a creative decision I've already made," Roman said, low, and the admission came with none of his usual performance. He was looking at the floor. "I think when he agrees with me I remember he's smart, and when he disagrees with me I think he doesn't understand the creative dimension of things. That's — that's not a good pattern."

"I've been doing the same thing," Thomas said. "I think I've been thinking of him as the — the voice that slows things down. Like a pause button. I didn't think about the fact that the pause button has feelings about being a pause button."

Nobody laughed at that. It was too precisely accurate to be funny.

Virgil was still standing where Logan had left him in the middle of the room. He became aware, slowly, that his hands were shaking slightly — not from anything dramatic, just from the accumulated pressure of the last three weeks, the held breath of it finally releasing.

"I have to go," he said.

"Virgil —" Thomas started.

"Not — I'm not leaving. I just have to go to Logan." He turned toward the door. "The rest of this — you should all talk. That's important and you should actually talk about it without me there to manage it. But Logan —" He pushed the door open. "I need to go to Logan."

The library was quiet in the particular way it got late in the day, the afternoon light changing angle and the room going slightly gold. Logan was at his table. He wasn't pretending to read this time. He was sitting very still with his hands flat on the cover of a closed book, looking at them, and his posture had the quality of someone who has spent all their composure and is now just existing inside the absence of it.

Virgil stood in the doorway for a moment.

He had the impulse to say something immediately — to fix, to address, to get the apology out so the air would clear. He recognized the impulse and sat down instead, crossing the room and pulling the chair beside Logan's table and just — being there. Present. Not doing anything with the presence yet. Just making it available.

Logan didn't look at him.

The library breathed around them. Somewhere in the shelves, something shifted softly — the mindscape adjusting, accommodating, the way it did.

"I meant all of it," Logan said, eventually, to his hands.

"I know," Virgil said.

"I wasn't — I want you to know I wasn't performing. I wasn't making a point. I was just —" A pause. "I was simply at the end of what I had."

"I know," Virgil said again. "I could see it. I've been watching you get there for weeks."

"And you —" Logan stopped.

"And I made it worse," Virgil said. "Yeah. I know." He leaned his elbows on the table, not crowding, just close. "I've been sitting with that since you walked out. I thought I was — I kept telling myself I was fighting for you. And I was doing something, and it wasn't fighting for you. It was fighting for my own — it was fighting for the outcome I wanted without asking if it was the outcome you wanted. It was me being scared and calling it protection."

Logan was quiet.

"I was so scared of losing you," Virgil said, and his voice came out rough and honest, "that I turned myself into another version of the problem. I was talking over you in a different direction. I was managing you because I didn't trust you to manage it yourself, which is — that's —" He exhaled. "That's not what I think of you. It's not what I actually believe. I know you're the most capable person in this mindscape. I know you can handle Janus and Roman and Patton and Thomas and all of it. I just got scared, and when I get scared I start trying to control things, and I aimed that at you, and you deserved so much better than that."

Logan looked at him.

His expression was doing something complicated — the careful, precise unpacking of something that had been stored for too long, the way you open a box you've kept sealed and the air inside is different from the air outside.

"You're the first one," Logan said, quietly, "who ever pulled toward me. Before the acknowledgment. When I was still — when I was still the rigid one. The condescending one. You were already —" He stopped. His throat moved. "You saw something worth pulling toward before anyone had decided I was worth the effort of changing direction for."

"You were always worth it," Virgil said, simple and absolute.

Logan looked at him for a long moment, and something in him — in the careful, organized architecture of him — shifted slightly. Not collapsed. Shifted, the way a building shifts in high wind, finding a new equilibrium.

"I'm not going to them," Logan said quietly. "I want you to know that I considered it. I want to be honest about that. The offer was — it was easier than it should have been to consider. Because they were offering the thing that was missing and the thing that was missing was real." He looked at Virgil steadily. "But Janus doesn't want me. He wants the function of me. And that's — I've spent too long being only a function to accept a new context that treats me the same way."

Virgil breathed out slowly. Something in his chest that had been knotted for three weeks loosened a single turn.

"Okay," he said.

"That doesn't mean," Logan continued, carefully, "that what I said upstairs isn't true. It doesn't mean I'm — fixed. It doesn't mean the problem is resolved."

"No," Virgil agreed. "The problem is not resolved."

"You're going to have to trust me," Logan said. "To handle it. With them. I need to be the one who —" He searched for the right shape of the sentence. "I need to be the one who addresses it. Not you addressing it on my behalf. Not you managing the room. Me."

"I know." Virgil looked at the table between them. "I'll be there. But differently. I'll be — present differently. Less between and more beside."

Logan considered that. Accepted it with a small nod.

"And," Virgil said, and his voice dropped slightly, "I need you to tell me when it's bad. I've been reading you for weeks and I got so caught up in the reading that I forgot to ask. So tell me. Even when you're functional. Especially when you're functional."

Logan looked at him.

"I don't always know how," he said, and the honesty of it was very quiet and very large.

"Yeah," Virgil said. "Neither do I. We can be bad at it together."

Something shifted in Logan's face — the slow, reluctant arrival of something that was almost a smile, the kind you get when you've been trying very hard not to feel something and then someone says the exact right wrong thing at the right moment.

"That," Logan said, "is a remarkably low bar."

"I'm a remarkably low-bar kind of guy."

"You are the exact opposite of a low-bar kind of guy. You have extensive standards and you surveil their fulfillment constantly."

"For everything except the emotional communication stuff."

"...for everything except the emotional communication stuff," Logan conceded.

The almost-smile landed. Small and real and carefully his.

Virgil leaned back in the chair and felt the knot in his chest loosen another turn. Not all the way. Nothing was resolved — Thomas and Patton and Roman were upstairs somewhere having what was hopefully a genuine reckoning with themselves, and Janus was somewhere patient and waiting, and Logan was still exhausted, and none of this would be fixed by one honest conversation in the library.

But Logan was here.

Logan was staying.

And Logan was looking at him with the particular expression he reserved for a small number of things — Virgil knew this expression, had memorized it — the expression of someone who is being accurately witnessed, who has not had to prove the thing that needed proving, who has been allowed to simply be without anyone asking them to be otherwise.

"I have you," Virgil said, quietly. "Not — not on you. With you. I have you with me, if that's—"

"Yes," Logan said. Not hesitant. Just quiet and certain. "That's what I want."

They stayed in the library as the light changed and went gold and began to dim, and Virgil didn't talk to fill the space and Logan didn't perform composure to protect himself from the space, and the hum in the mindscape dropped a half-register, and it wasn't gone, but it was less than it had been.

For now, Virgil thought, that was enough.

Upstairs, Thomas looked at Patton and Roman and said, very quietly: "We need to do better. I think we've needed to for a long time."

Roman was quiet for a moment. Then: "I know what I have to do. I'm just — not entirely sure how to do it."

"That's a start," Patton said. He was looking at his hands. "I think that's the honest start."

And in the walls of the mindscape, Janus heard the quiet and was patient. He folded his hands. He waited.

He was exceptionally good at waiting.

For three years, eight months, and — Remus liked to be exact about this, in the one area of his life where he ever bothered — eleven days, Remus had believed he was dating the most boring man in the greater metropolitan area, and had loved him desperately for it.

Logan Reeves worked in "risk assessment and recovery services," which Remus had always pictured as something involving spreadsheets and a lanyard. He left the apartment most mornings in a pressed shirt, came home most evenings smelling like coffee and dry-erase markers, and had opinions about grammar so strong that Remus had once seen him correct a stranger's tattoo. He alphabetized the spice rack. He ironed his socks, which was insane, Remus had told him so on their second date, and Logan had said, precision is not insanity, Remus, it is a moral position, and Remus had fallen so hard and so fast that he'd nearly choked on his drink.

They made an objectively ridiculous couple. Remus wrote splatter-horror novels under three different pen names and kept a jar on his dresser he told people held shark's teeth. Logan color-coded his bookshelf by subject and then alphabetically within subject and had once spent forty minutes explaining the Dewey Decimal System to Remus's cat, who was not listening, and Logan had known the cat wasn't listening, and had done it anyway because he found the ritual satisfying. They should not have worked. They worked immaculately.

"You're the only interesting thing in my apartment," Remus told him once, early on, tangled together on a couch that smelled like whatever candle Remus had lit and forgotten about. "Everything else about you is so normal it's practically a disguise."

"Perhaps I contain multitudes," Logan had said, dry as ever, and Remus had laughed and kissed him and thought nothing more of it, because why would he. Logan was steady. Logan was safe. Logan made him lunch when he forgot to eat during a deadline and read his goriest drafts with genuine, focused interest, red pen in hand, correcting his anatomy — the femoral artery does not spray in that direction if the leg is bent at this angle, Remus, I have told you this three times — with the mild exasperation of an editor, nothing more.

In hindsight — and Remus would spend a great deal of time in hindsight, later, turning every memory over like a coin to check both faces — there had been things. Small things. The go-bag in the closet that Logan called "for emergencies" and never elaborated on. The nights, maybe eight or nine times a year, when Logan left after dinner saying he had "a work thing" and came back past midnight, showered already, hair still damp, moving through the dark apartment with a quiet, careful economy that Remus had always found soothing rather than strange. The fact that Logan flinched, just slightly, at the sound of sirens, in a way that read as concentration rather than fear. The fact that he knew, with total confidence and no apparent source, exactly how long it took a body to go from warm to cold in a given ambient temperature, and had once corrected a true crime podcast out loud, alone, with real irritation, over a detail Remus hadn't even noticed was wrong.

Remus noticed all of it, in the scattered, unbothered way he noticed most things, filed it under Logan is a weird little guy and I love him, and moved on, because that was who Remus was. He collected strangeness the way other people collected stamps. He had never once thought to ask what the strangeness added up to.

He should have. He was, after all, a writer. Add up enough strange details and you get a plot.

---

It was their anniversary — four years, Remus had counted them on a wall calendar in blood-red marker, which Logan had found either horrifying or endearing depending on his mood — and Remus had decided, with the singular focus he brought to exactly two things in his life (writing and Logan), that he was going to surprise him.

The surprise was a cake. Remus could not bake. This did not stop him. He'd spent the better part of the afternoon destroying the kitchen in pursuit of something that vaguely resembled a red velvet layer cake, had gotten flour in his hair and frosting somewhere he still hadn't located, and had texted Logan around six asking when he'd be home, only to get the usual: Work thing. Not sure. Don't wait up. — L

Remus didn't mind. Logan's work things were sacred and boring and Remus had never once begrudged him the mystery of quarterly compliance reviews or whatever it was risk assessment people did at eight p.m. on a Tuesday. He iced the cake badly, ate a third of the frosting straight from the bowl, and decided — because patience had never once been a virtue he possessed — that he would drive to Logan's building and surprise him there instead, cake and all, wobbling dangerously on the passenger seat in a container that did not remotely fit it.

This was, in retrospect, the whole of the plan's failure. Not the cake. The car.

He didn't even make it to Logan's office. He was three blocks out, cutting through the industrial stretch near the old rail yards because his GPS insisted it shaved four minutes off the drive, when he saw Logan's car — Logan's actual, specific, extremely recognizable car, the one with the dented rear bumper from the parking garage incident Remus was still not allowed to bring up — parked crooked and half-hidden behind a chain-link fence outside a shuttered auto body shop that had no business having anyone's car parked outside it at nine at night.

Remus pulled over out of pure nosiness, cake forgotten on the passenger seat, already composing the bit he'd do about catching Logan somewhere weird — risk assessment my ass, you're moonlighting as a mechanic, aren't you, is this the secret, four years and the big reveal is you fix cars on Tuesdays — already grinning at the thought of it, already halfway out of his own car before his brain had finished deciding to move.

The shop door was propped an inch open. Light bled out from somewhere deeper inside, thin and yellow. Remus, who had never in his life been able to leave a propped door unopened, pushed it wider and stepped in, cake speech dying in his throat before he could deliver a word of it.

---

The front room was empty — stripped shelving, a dead vending machine, the particular stillness of a place nobody had used for its stated purpose in a long time. But there was a door in the back standing open, and the light was coming from there, and there were sounds coming from there too — low, murmured, precise, a voice Remus knew as well as his own heartbeat, saying something about staying still, this will be considerably less painful if you cooperate — and Remus, helpless against every instinct that had ever kept him alive, followed it.

The back room had been an old paint bay once, tiled floor sloped toward a drain, harsh fluorescent light buzzing overhead. There was a man zip-tied to a support pillar, bleeding sluggishly from a cut along his forearm, his face gray with the specific exhaustion of someone who has been afraid for a very long time and has run out of the energy to keep being afraid. And there was Logan.

Logan, in shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, a fine dark spatter across his collar. Logan, crouched at a rolling case Remus had never seen before — organized, Remus noted, with the same obsessive order as the spice rack, instruments nested in cut foam, everything with a place — selecting something long and thin with the unhurried consideration of a man choosing a pen for a card. Logan, glancing up at the sound of the door, and going, for one full second, utterly, uncharacteristically still.

Nobody spoke. The zip-tied man made a small, wet sound. The fluorescent light buzzed. Remus stood in the doorway with frosting still under one fingernail and stared at his boyfriend of four years with an expression that was — even Logan, even in that frozen second, could not immediately parse it. Not horror exactly. Not yet. Something closer to a man watching the last page of a book finally resolve a mystery he hadn't consciously known he'd been reading.

"Huh," Remus said, finally, into the silence. "Okay. So that's not compliance work."

"Remus." Logan set the instrument down, slow, careful, both hands visible, the way you'd move around something unpredictable. His voice was even, but Remus — who had spent four years learning every register Logan owned — could hear the calculation running underneath it, fast and cold. "You should not be here."

"No kidding." Remus's eyes moved from Logan to the man on the pillar to the case of gleaming, ordered tools and back to Logan, and something in his chest was doing something complicated and fast that he didn't have a name for yet.

Logan studied him with the flat, assessing look he usually saved for malfunctioning equipment — the look he gave a jammed printer, or a student who'd turned in work with an unforgivable citation error. Calculating angles. Exits. Remus could see him doing it, could see the gears turning behind those speckled lenses, deciding whether this was a five-years-of-shared-groceries-and-a-cat problem or a body-disposal problem. And something about being weighed like that — being looked at like a variable instead of a boyfriend, like a contingency instead of a certainty — sent a hot ugly thrill straight down Remus's spine that he was not remotely equipped to be ashamed of. He never had been equipped to be ashamed of anything. It was possibly his best quality.

"You're not freaking out," Logan said slowly, like it was a data point he didn't have a column for.

"Should I be?" Remus took a step closer instead of back. His boots found a dry patch of concrete without him quite meaning to choose it — some animal part of him already accounting for the room, already cataloguing it the way Logan must have taught him to without either of them noticing. The man on the floor had stopped being relevant to him almost immediately, which probably said something, but Remus had stopped listening to what things said about him years ago, right around the time he'd started keeping a jar of teeth on his dresser that he told people were shark's teeth. They were not shark's teeth. Nobody had ever asked closely enough to find out otherwise, which was, in retrospect, the story of his entire life until this exact moment.

"You've had blood on your knuckles before," Remus went on, closing another foot of distance. "I thought it was, like, a bar fight thing. A 'Logan gets weirdly intense about parking spaces' thing. One time you came home with a split lip and told me you'd walked into a door, and I let you tell me that, because I respected the lie. I write villains for a living, Lo, I know a good cover story when I hear one. I did not know it was covering this."

"It is a professional discretion thing." Logan rose, unhurried, wiping his hands on a rag with the same neat, economical motions he used cleaning his glasses before bed each night — three wipes, always three, always the same corner of the cloth. "I am a licensed bounty hunter. Skip tracing, primarily. The termination clauses are — extralegal, but contractually implied by certain clients who prefer the paperwork end quietly. I did not tell you because you are, forgive the bluntness, incapable of secrecy, and this required several years of it. I did the math. The math said silence."

"Rude," Remus said, delighted, pressing a hand to his chest like he'd been wounded. "Accurate. But rude. You did the math on lying to me?"

"I run projections on everything. You know this about me. You have known this about me since our second date, when I made you fill out a compatibility spreadsheet."

"Best date of my life," Remus said, entirely sincere, and meant it. "I still have that spreadsheet. It's laminated. I show people."

"That's concerning."

"Everything about me is concerning, angel, that's why you keep me."

"I keep you," Logan said, and there — there was the smallest crack in the clinical composure, a flicker underneath the flat delivery, "because you are the only chaotic variable I have ever encountered that I do not wish to eliminate."

Remus's breath caught in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with the smell of the room anymore.

"Logan Reeves," he breathed, "did you just call me your one exception?"

"I called you an anomaly I have chosen not to correct for. Do not make it romantic."

"Too late. It's already the most romantic thing anyone's ever said to me, and I once had a guy propose with a ring he stole off a corpse at a wake."

"That is a deeply upsetting sentence and I would like context later," Logan said, "but not now."

"Why would I leave?" Remus was close enough now to see the flecks on Logan's jaw, close enough that the copper smell was just Logan-smell now, folded into cedar and old paper and the faint chemical tang of the cologne he wore — Remus understood now, with the particular clarity of a man having several epiphanies stacked on top of each other — specifically to mask the cleaning products underneath. Years of it. Years of Logan coming home smelling faintly of bleach and lavender and Remus never once asking why, because why would he, because Logan alphabetized the spice rack and ironed his socks and it had never once occurred to Remus that the compulsive tidiness wasn't a personality quirk. It was tradecraft. "You have been lying to me for years and the lie was this? You've been sneaking off to be hot and competent and murdery and just — not telling me? That's not a red flag, Logan, that's a whole parade. That's a marching band. I want a float."

Something shifted in Logan's face — not quite a smile, Logan didn't really do smiles, they made his jaw ache, he'd told Remus that once very seriously over breakfast — but a small tightening at the corner of his mouth that Remus had learned to read as its own private dialect years ago, back when it had only ever meant you've amused me against my will over a bad pun or a worse pickup line.

"You're deranged," Logan said, and it was not an insult. It had never once, in five years, been an insult, not from him.

"You knew that when you signed the lease with me. You knew that when you found my collection of knives that I told you were 'for aesthetic purposes only' and didn't push. Did you know, even then? Could you smell it on me? Two predators in one studio apartment, that's practically a nature documentary—"

"I did not know," Logan interrupted, with the particular precision of a man correcting an inaccurate premise before it could compound. "I suspected. Your interests were — suggestive. The knife collection. The manner in which you discuss your fiction. The fact that you once described, unprompted and at length, seventeen distinct methods of disposing of a body, three of which were viable and one of which I have since used."

Remus made a small, wounded, ecstatic noise. "Which one."

"Later."

"You're killing me with the pacing, Lo, I need to know—"

"Later, Remus."

"Fine. Fine. God, you're so hot when you're withholding information from me, has anyone ever told you that."

"You. Regularly. It has never once changed my behavior."

Remus reached up, unbothered by the drying red already transferring itself from Logan's sleeve to his own forearm where they'd brushed, and traced one finger along the fine spray across Logan's cheekbone, the way another man might have traced a birthmark, something intimate and known. Logan let him. Logan, who flinched from unexpected touch, who needed three seconds' warning before a hug or he'd go rigid as a board — Logan stood perfectly still and let Remus map the mess on his face like it was a love letter written in a language only the two of them spoke.

"You knew and you married me anyway," Remus murmured. "Common-law. Whatever we are. You knew there was something wrong with the wiring in my head and you picked me anyway, out of every boring normal accountant-brained person in this city, and I have spent five years thinking I was the freak in this relationship."

"You are still the freak in this relationship," Logan said. "I am simply a freak with better paperwork."

Remus laughed — really laughed, head tipping back, delighted and a little wild — and then he reached up and, watching Remus watch him do it, Logan did something Remus hadn't quite predicted even from him. He lifted his own thumb, unhurried, and pressed it — cool, drying, deliberate — to the corner of Remus's mouth. A streak left behind like a signature. Like a claim.

"There," Logan said, very quietly, very evenly, watching the color settle into Remus's skin with the same clinical attention he gave everything, except his pulse — Remus could see it, right at his throat, going faster than clinical attention ever accounted for. "Now you match the room."

Remus made a sound he would later describe, with enormous pride, as unhinged, and closed the last of the distance himself.

The kiss was not clean. It was never going to be clean, not in this room, not with the copper taste already on both their mouths, Logan's hand fisting in the front of Remus's shirt with more force than the moment strictly required — pulling him in like he was afraid of the four minutes of distance that had almost cost him, like the math had briefly failed him and he needed the recalculation done at close range. Remus laughed against his mouth in short broken breaths that weren't quite laughing and weren't quite something else, both hands coming up to frame Logan's jaw, thumbs smearing the mess further instead of wiping it away, because why would he wipe it away, this was the best thing that had ever happened to him, this was five years of half-answers finally resolving into a whole and terrible truth and he wanted to wear it.

"Say something clinical to me," Remus gasped against his mouth. "Say something disgustingly precise, I need it—"

"The carotid," Logan murmured, lips at his jaw now, unhurried even here, even now, "severs cleanly at a forty-degree angle if the blade is sharp enough. Most people use too much force. Force is inefficient. Precision is everything."

"Logan."

"You asked."

"I did, I did, keep going, tell me the — the whole binder, I want the whole—"

"Later," Logan said again, and this time it came out rough, frayed at the edges in a way Remus had heard maybe three times in five years — the night Logan had gotten his first faculty rejection letter and sworn, actually sworn, in a full sentence; the night their cat had gone missing for six hours; and now, here, blood-slicked and breathless in a dead man's warehouse, kissing him like the words were secondary to the need. "Later. Right now I would like you to stop talking."

"Make me," Remus said, grinning against his mouth, and Logan did.

Logan kissed like he did everything — with intent, with total unnerving focus, like Remus was the only variable in the room worth solving for anymore, like the body six feet away had already been filed and closed and forgotten in favor of the one problem Logan had never managed to fully account for in five years of trying. There was blood between them, smeared where Remus dragged his mouth along Logan's jaw and Logan let him, tipped his head back with something that might, on a more expressive man, have been called want, bared his throat the way he never did, not even in bed, not even half-asleep and soft with affection — because this was different, this was seen, fully and finally seen, and Logan Reeves, who ran projections on everything, who alphabetized his spice rack and ironed his socks and had spent five years being loved by a man he was terrified would run the moment he knew the truth, found himself instead being kissed like a discovery. Like a gift someone had been waiting their whole life to unwrap.

"You're not scared of me," Logan said, when they finally broke apart, forehead pressed to Remus's, both of them breathing hard, both of them marked now, matched, a matching set the way Remus had always secretly wanted them to be.

"Scared of you?" Remus's laugh was breathless and wondering. "Logan. My love. My little gremlin accountant of death. I have spent my entire life waiting to find someone who could look at the absolute rot in my head and go, ah yes, that tracks, let me show you mine. You didn't scare me. You completed me. This is the single most romantic thing that has ever happened to me and I include the ring-off-a-corpse guy in that ranking."

"I need you to never bring that man up again."

"No promises."

Logan exhaled something that was almost a laugh, rare as a solar eclipse, and pulled back just far enough to look at him properly — swollen mouth, red-streaked jaw, eyes bright and manic and utterly unbothered by the corpse cooling six feet away — and something in his chest, something he would never have the vocabulary to name even if you gave him a spreadsheet and three hours, settled into place like the last piece of a very long equation.

"You're going to help me move the body," he said.

"Obviously." Remus grinned, wide and red-stained and thrilled down to his marrow, already rolling up his own sleeves with the enthusiasm of a man who'd just been handed the best birthday present of his life eleven months early. "But first —" he kissed him again, filthy and fond and lingering, "—you're telling me everything. Every job. Every little secret little kill count. I want the whole binder, Lo. Color-coded. Tabbed. I want a presentation, with a laser pointer, and I want you to wear the blazer with the elbow patches while you give it."

"That is an oddly specific request."

"I contain multitudes."

Logan pulled a folded tarp from his duffel bag with the same hand still stained red, shaking it out with brisk, practiced efficiency, and passed one corner to Remus without looking up. "Fine," he said. "I will prepare a presentation. Color-coded. But you're carrying the ankles."

"Why is it always the ankles—"

"Because you drop them. Every hypothetical scenario, every film we have ever watched together, you insist you'd drop the ankles, and I have decided to test that hypothesis in controlled conditions."

Remus stared at him, tarp corner in hand, heart absolutely galloping, and thought — not for the first time, but with a clarity he'd never quite reached before tonight — that he had never loved anyone the way he loved this ridiculous, meticulous, quietly monstrous man.

"I love you so much I could throw up," he said.

"Please don't. It would compromise the scene."

"Later, then."

"Later," Logan agreed, and together, in the copper-sweet dark, they got to work.

---

They ate the cake at two in the morning, sitting on the kitchen floor because neither of them had the energy to reach the table, Logan showered and changed and smelling of the same lavender-bleach combination Remus would never again mistake for just good hygiene, Remus still faintly pink-knuckled from the cleanup, both of them exhausted in the specific, companionable way of people who had just done a very large project together and done it well.

"So," Remus said, through a mouthful of frosting, "binder. I want the whole binder. Every job. I want a presentation."

"That is an unreasonable request at two a.m."

"Everything about me is unreasonable, that's why you love me."

Logan considered this, forkful of cake halfway to his mouth, and something in his face — tired, soft, entirely unguarded in a way Remus had waited four years to see without knowing he'd been waiting — settled into something like peace.

"Saturday," he said. "I will prepare a presentation."

"Wear the blazer with the elbow patches."

"That is an oddly specific request."