“Why?”

“To make sure you finish! Also thought this is a good opportunity to tell you why I’m doing this! You said you wanted to know and it’s gonna take a while, so…”

Logan sighed again but picked up the fork Remus had placed in its proper place next to the plate, motioning for him to continue.

“Very well. Do explain yourself.”

“Chance to ramble? I will take it!” Remus grinned at Logan, who looked a bit more reprehensive but didn’t protest. Instead, he started eating his salad, though his eyes remained on Remus for the most part. Before starting his explanation, Remus took a moment to appreciate how Logan’s lips closed around his fork. He really hoped he’d get an opportunity to taste those lips for himself. Only with consent, of course.

‘Focus on the issue now, fantasize about the hot nerd later!’ he reminded himself.

“You see, I have a brother, a twin, actually,” Remus began, leaning back in his seat. “He’s a bit of a dumbass but has a good heart, y’know? We’re both the creative types, though I mostly work with sculptures, art, and pottery – I teach a late-night class actually! Doesn’t pay well, but it’s fun for the most part – while he’s more of a writer. He’s also a perfectionist, which I am most definitely not, I let my hands wander and see where they get me!” Remus winked at Logan but either the other didn’t understand his innuendo or had a great poker face. ‘Uhhh, you should invite him to play strip poker with you! That’d be fun!’ He tabledesked that idea for later, he should probably ask him on a more normal date first and see where that’ll lead him.

“Aaaaaaanyway,” Remus continued, “my brother decided he wanted to write a play and then perform it in our local theater where he works. His boss basically green-lit the whole thing after Ro-bro gave him the pitch but had some guidelines. Nothing major, but enough that my brother felt the pressure.”

Remus could see Logan watching him intently – those deep green eyes were so hot – while he slowly chewed his food. He seemed the observant type, but even if he wasn’t, it was hard to miss the shift in tone. Remus couldn’t tell this story without being somber, it was a time he didn’t like revisiting.

“Roman threw himself into his work. It was fun at first, see him talk about it so passionately, what his plans for the characters were, the twists and turns and how he could see it performed on stage already. His boyfriend at the time was also super supportive, the both of us rubber ducking him constantly.” A wry smile played on Remus’ lips. He took a deep breath before continuing.

“But writing’s fucking hard if you didn’t know. The words can be perfectly aligned in your head but once you put them to paper they look mangled, like rotting corpses you clumsily stitched together and suddenly the eyes aren’t on the same height and one arm’s longer than the other and you forgot a nipple and maybe even a spleen, so how are you supposed to create a functioning monster?!”

“I understand your point, Remus,” Logan cut in before he could get even more lost in the rather gruesome picture he was figuratively painting. “I assume your brother struggled with the writing process once he got started.”

“Yeah, he did. Like a lot. And when he can’t get what’s in his head on the page the way he wants it to be, he gets frustrated and that leads to him struggling with the words even more and it’s a vicious circle. He started spending more and more time at his desk. When he wasn’t working, he was writing. Or attempting to write. He started losing sleep. I often had to drag him to meals. He cancelled plans or didn’t show up at all because he forgot all about them. It was really worrying.

“And it really put his boyfriend on edge. Like the dude’s been a friend of mine before he got together with my brother and anxiety is like half of his personality. So having plans cancelled on him constantly and his boyfriend not taking care of himself properly led to some problems.”

Remus’ had to make a conscious effort to relax his hands after they curled into fists. To be honest, he still hadn’t entirely forgiven Roman for how he treated Virgil during the last legs of their relationship. It hadn’t been fair to the Emo and while his brother had admitted to his faults, Remus just couldn’t get Virgil’s red-rimmed eyes out of his mind. ‘You should revisit that idea about dunking his head in the toilet bowl’ his head suggested and Remus waved the idea off. Roman would wiggle too much.

“It came to a head eventually and the guy broke up with him. Which sucked because I liked him, but because of his anxiety he needed a clean break, so he asked me not to contact him either for a while. Which turned out to be never, but that was more my fault than his I guess.”

Logan raised an eyebrow. (Remus wondered how often he worked on those; they were immaculately symmetrical.)

“What do you mean by more your fault?” he asked.

“Well, like I said, I was friends with the guy so I knew that he would have trouble reaching out to me first. I should’ve contacted him after the situation settled somewhat, but I didn’t.”

“Why?”

Remus chuckled but it was a dry and sad sound.

“I… always had the feeling that he was kinda afraid of me. I know I come on strong, and I have intrusive thoughts and keeping them in my head is hard, so I usually blurt them out or use them for my art and he… well, it often triggered his anxiety. I didn’t really want to contact him and have him feel like he needed to talk to me again.”

Virgil had been a good sport about it most of the time but even before he started dating Roman, he had visited Remus in his art studio less and less. He took great care to censor his words in front of him, too, but it sucked that he couldn’t discuss things with Virgil freely anymore. It was like he had to be constantly on guard around the man and it only got worse during Roman’s breakdown.

Remus missed Virgil, but he figured he was better off without him in his life. At least Janus still contacted him once in a while, so he knew he was doing well enough. It was a small comfort.

Logan had put his fork aside and was watching Remus with his piercing green eyes. He felt like a bug underneath a microscope and that shouldn’t have had him as hot and bothered as it did. Well, not literally bothered – don’t get him wrong, the dude was hot and being examined by him so intently was a nice bonus, but Remus needed more than that to actually get physically excited.

It would lead to new fantasies however; he was sure of that.

“I get the impression that that conclusion is based on a cognitive distortion,” Logan commented eventually. Remus just blinked at him. “In other words, I think you are jumping to a conclusion. If that man was your friend for as long as you are implying, then I am sure he would appreciate you contacting him again.”

“You stopped eating,” Remus said instead of answering and after a few moments of simply staring at each other (‘Staring contest! Staring contest! How long would it take for their eyes to dry out?), Logan relented with a sigh and picked his fork back up.

“Very well, I will not meddle in your personal affairs. Unlike other people, I respect such boundaries.”

Remus cackled at the obvious jab at his intrusion and as he calmed down, he could see a small smile on Logan’s lips, though he tried to hide it behind the next bite of his meal.

“Well, back to the story: my brother got dumped. Which I had hoped would be a wake-up call for him to quit the bullshit and realize how bad he’s gotten. But instead he doubled down. Every waking minute he had that wasn’t spend at work, he was writing the script – or more accurately, he tried writing it. More and more often I would hear him shouting at his laptop about how nothing was going like he wanted it to, how it needed to be perfect, how he would show everyone that he could do it.

“I tried to get him to eat and sleep, but it would only end up in yelling matches. We both don’t have great tempers and more than once I stormed off and didn’t return until like a day later. I don’t think he left his desk in those days…”

Remus sighed, remembering the sorry state of his brother, hunched over his laptop with bags under his eyes that reminded him so much of Virgil that Remus was almost glad that Roman was hardly going to the bathroom so he wouldn’t catch his own reflection in the mirror.

It had been an absolute trainwreck.

“Eventually, my brother collapsed during one of our fights. Passed out on the spot. I barely managed to catch him before he would’ve hit his head on the ground. He woke up only moments after and tried to convince me that it was just a dizzy-spell and that it wasn’t anything to worry about, but I had enough. I carried him off to the hospital right then and there.”

Roman had fought him the entire way, cursing at him and demanding to be brought back home. He almost fainted again in the car since he worked himself up so much. Remus had thought about pulling into the oncoming traffic and putting them both out of their misery – the stress had made his intrusive thoughts so much worse.

“I got him to cooperate by saying that if nothing was wrong, the doctor would just let him go home and I’d leave him alone afterwards if that was the case. He still complained though. Then he was diagnosed with severe malnutrition and anemia. He had to stay there for a few days.”

“And did he do so without complaint?”

Remus had almost forgotten Logan was there. Almost. He looked back at the other – after he had apparently just stared at the wall for the last few minutes – to see that he had finished his plate.

Good.

“Yeah. I’m not entirely sure what happened since I wasn’t allowed to be there when they took his vitals and shit but apparently one of the nurses laid into him about proper self-care and that he could’ve killed himself. I think only then he truly registered how bad it’s gotten.”

“I see…” Logan looked thoughtfully at his empty plate and Remus just watched him until he spoke up again. “And what happened after? Did your brother finish the play?”

“He did. Took a long break from it though. Went to therapy. He’s doing well now, has a sleep and eating schedule and goes to the gym on the regular. It’s kind of annoying how toned he’s getting. Jan sure appreciates it though.” Remus wiggled his eyebrows, but once again Logan doesn’t react to his implications.

“What about the performance?”

“What performance?”

“Of the play. You said that your brother was ensured that he could perform the play at his place of employment.”

“Oh! He didn’t go through with it.”

Logan blinked at him, surprised.

“What do you mean ‘he didn’t go through with it’? Doesn’t that make the entire ordeal worthless?”

“It wasn’t worthless,” Remus said softly, feeling like this might be the point where he can get through to Logan. “Roman learned a lot from it. So did I, to be honest. The entire thing helped my brother to grow as a person. Yeah, he finished the play, but he had to rewrite around half of it since what he wrote during his mania was either awful, extremely personal, and or sometimes even harmful. And even after all that editing, he still found it too close to his heart to publish. He says that maybe sometime down the line, when he’s healed more, then he'd put it on, but not right now.”

“I… think I understand. Still, I cannot shake the belief that it means his struggles were for naught.”

“I know where you’re coming from, but productivity isn’t all we live for. Learning from our struggles and teaching that to those who come after us is what I think we’re supposed to do.”

“That is quite the profound way to see the world.”

Remus shrugged and leaned back in his chair.

“Maybe. It’s at least what led to me coming in through that door and forcing you to take care of yourself. Which reminds me, you should be going to bed.” He got up and pulled at Logan’s arm.

“Sleep?! It’s the middle of the day!” the other protested, but Remus remained insistent and led him over to the freshly made, plush bed.

“Yeah, but that hardly matters when you’ve been up for who knows how many hours. Your eyebags make you look like a raccoon. Oh, maybe I should’ve gotten you your dinner out of the garbage bins outside!”

Finally, he managed to push Logan onto the bed who looked at him with trepidation.

“I cannot go to sleep, I need to finish my work,” he insisted.

“Pish-posh, I bet you can barely remember what you’ve been writing for the past few hours anyway. Get some rest and then look over what you wrote again, I’m sure you’ll want to make some changes. Sleep-deprived brains rarely put out the work in a quality you want.” Remus pushed at his shoulders until Logan was lying down and then covered him with a blanket.

“Fine,” the other sighed. “But I need to set an alarm. I have a deadline.”

“How about I’m gonna come by when my shift ends in—” Remus glanced at his wristwatch—  “about four hours? I’ll help you sort through those books, too, since I kinda just put them together willy-nilly.”

“I guess that’s acceptable.”

It seemed that lying down had a quick effect on Logan as he let out a long yawn and snuggled deeper into the comforting warmth. Remus smiled, proud to see him follow his advice and relax.

“Then see you in a few, Lolo! Sleep tight and don’t let the bed bugs bite!”

“If they do, I’ll sue you.”

Remus grinned as he listened to Logan’s half-asleep mumble before he gathered up his used dishes and silently tiptoed out of the room.