#Remus and Roman are good Brothers

[greenninjagal-blog]

Dead Men Break No Codes pt1

I've been playing too many escape rooms recently. Fic be upon ye :D

Summary: Rookie Fbi agent, Roman is a certified genius who's time to shine is right now, while a serial killer's taken up taunting the police with puzzles leading them to the bodies of their victims! Someone should probably warn him about being so good at his job.

Word Count: 12020

Quick Taglist: @chelsvans @coyboi300 @dante-reblogs @dwbh888 @glitchybinaa @faithfulcat111 @felicianoromano @harrypotternerdprincess @holliberries @jemthebookworm @killerfangirl3 @mrbubbajones @musical-nerd18 @nonasficcollection @stricken-with-clairvoyancy @the-sunshine-dims @themagicheartmailman @themultishipperchild @thenaiads @treasureofpriam @vianadraws @welovelogansanders

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Chapter One: Odd Man Out

The letter found at the latest crime scene isn’t directly addressed to Roman but based on the entire crime scene team’s reaction, it might as well have been.

Roman had barely held onto the card for more than a few minutes, just enough that he could gage the type of paper, the ink color, the number of pages, the smell—all the nitty gritty details that might help them solve the riddles before someone else died—before he sent it off to the labs for further testing. Roman’s notes along with photos of each of the three pages of the banal opinions were displayed through a projector on the wall of the conference room they were in so everyone could see them, but the longer Roman stared at it all, the more he thought that he might have been going slightly stir crazy.

“I stand by what I said,” Virgil says from the corner where he’s strangling a stress ball to the point of it disintegrating in his hands. “Someone needs to get this guy a fucking hobby. Who even uses the word “effulgent” anymore?”

“I think murdering people is his hobby,” Roman comments as he scribbles through yet another code breaking attempt that led nowhere and provided nothing but a hatred for the English alphabet.

It’s obvious there's some type of code in it: previous crime scenes and puzzles aside, no one uses the words Verisimilitude and Brummagem without it being intentional, and certainly not the guy who’s killed ten people in the past three weeks. There are underlined words that spell out "your year of creation is key" and bolded words that read out “From Capitals to Rome” and all of it was tied together with a stunning, swooping bit of calligraphy that's left him with a headache after staring at it so long. Perfect punctuation, no extra doodles or dots: the letter itself talks scathingly about modern adaptations of Sherlock Holmes and detectives and what it means to be a genius in a world that doesn’t appreciate geniuses. Roman’s done the math: thirty-three sentences, averaging ten words across all of them, no direct address, but signed off with a cute “Plex”.

Which was short for “Perplex” because their serial killer thought they were clever.

If Roman had come across this guy in any other situation, he might have grown a grudging respect for him. Might have asked him out for drinks, even! Some of the puzzles that they’d come across are downright dazzling and ingenious and challenging and reminded Roman of his childhood so much they were nostalgic. If Roman ignored the code and read the letter as it was, he was left with a strangely twisted form of sick sympathy: he’d been a genius in a small town where everyone knew everyone else and trying to connect with people there had been like trying to squeeze himself into a pair of shoes he’d outgrown when he was four.

He’d been bored by schoolwork, already outpacing the teachers, too curious to wait until the next class to find answers which left him ahead of his peers. There weren’t thrilling enough mystery books in the library and every movie had ended in the most predictable way ever. He’d received the scorn of his own friends when he breezed through assignments that they struggled with at the same rate he’d received their adoration in any sort of academic competition or group project. Reading the letter in front of him, which was, at its core, someone else’s observations when they rang that close to Roman’s own internal laments, left him with a sour taste in his mouth.

What a horrible thing,—Roman thinks throwing his pen across the room to where the trashcan had been at one point and reaching for another— to have found more fucking kindship with a murderer than with the rest of his team.

He’d only been with this FBI team for a few months, and Roman’s ability to deftly stick his foot in his mouth had already put him at odds with most of the people he was supposed to be working with. The habit of thinking far too fast wasn’t a new thing for Roman to be dealing with, but Roman still forgot that not everyone was aware of just how fast he thought until he was blurting out a harmless comment he forgot could be taken as an insult.

His team leader—a man by the name of Logan Ackroyd—had bluntly told Roman that if he couldn’t keep his mouth in line there wouldn’t be a place for him on the team come the next week and Roman almost quit on the spot to avoid having to go through the utter embarrassment of being fired for his inability to play well with others, when he’d gotten multiple recommendations from high profile FBI agents who’d guaranteed Logan that Roman lived up to the rumors.

Logan had told him that he didn’t bother accepting fresh academy graduates usually, but the sheer volume of letters from colleagues had won Roman a chance to prove he was good enough to stay on permanently. And after six months, Roman is still standing with that Damocles sword over his head, with no sign of Logan changing his mind.

Logan’s right hand, Patton Hart, assures him that Logan means well, even if he doesn’t say it in so many (or any) words.

Patton radiates the gentle air of a tired, but well-meaning father although Roman’s never heard of him having any children and sometimes his existence is all that keeps Roman from crying the moment he home. He’s never been afraid to cut Logan off in the middle of a lecture or remind everyone they’re supposed to be fighting the serial killers not each other…as long as he’s paying attention.

Roman’s no stranger to getting caught up in his thoughts, but Patton is exactly like those cats who meow at dark corners when there’s nothing there; his crystal blue eyes soften with a distant gaze, seeing something that no one else can see for so long that once an actual gunfight broke out around them and Patton didn’t notice at all. Each conversation with Patton left Roman feeling as though he was being seen through instead of being looked at, but that was a small price to pay since Patton won’t take his words the wrong way no matter what he says.

In comparison, Virgil Storm is the person that Roman clashes with the most. Roman had been through enough Psych classes to hazard a guess that Virgil takes Roman’s entire existence as a threat to his own position: Roman is younger, prettier, healthier, smarter, and he had come with heralds of recommendation letters from the FBI academy professors. The only thing Virgil has over him is two years of field experiences that never quite seem to be enough for him to feel secure. Thus, every time Roman disagreed with him, Virgil had bitten back like it was a personal attack. Roman had nearly been written up twice because of their arguments when Virgil got to walk away with barely even a glance.

Janus Ekans, the last member of the team, is approachable in the same way that a live grenade was approachable: he’s a press liaison who sweet-talked reporters and consoled victims and made children laugh with funny faces while the adults talked, and then he turned around threatened to cut Roman’s brakes if he hummed another bar of the catchy pop song that was stuck in his head.

((Jokes on him though, the catchy pop song that had been stuck in his head had been the key to the code for the fourth victim.))

Janus’s brand of kindness always came with strings attached, or a manipulative ulterior motive. Roman had learned a healthy dose of skepticism of early morning coffees and a casual offer of finishing a report for him; the result was not worth having to sit through another workplace conduct seminar for Janus.

But for all of the conflicts with them, Roman wants to be part of this team, wants to be part of this mission, wants to know them and be known by them. It’s just… hard. Roman’s used to the feeling of distance between him and other people, compared it idly to a glass wall that he couldn’t figure out how to break, but something about how Janus and Virgil toast shots at the bar after a case, or how Patton always knows what to say to someone, or how Logan always predicts accurately what route an escaping suspect will take—something about how Roman got shot on his last case with them and woke up to find that the rest of his team had been taking turns watching over him so he wouldn’t wake up alone and it made Roman burn with the desire to be better for them.

And well…since Roman hasn’t been any good at the talkingpart of it, he figured that being a stellar coworker might be a better angle to go for.

((Remus laughed so hard at the idea on a call last month while Roman was working through his physical therapy exercises that Roman had hung up on him.))

It’s been….an attempt. Roman hasn’t exactly had the time to focus on it with the current case going on.

The police had called for help after the very first body, which was rare. Logan had explained on the way to the crime scene that there had been a letter sent to the local police that contained a grid of numbers and a warning that someone would get hurt if the police didn’t solve it in twenty-four hours. An identical copy had appeared at the crime scene, which had linked the two events together in a way that local police didn’t get paid enough for.

Logan had told Roman to focus on photographing details of the scene, but Roman had frozen the moment that his viewfinder had focused on the note, his mind recognizing the pattern from the billions he’d created in middle school.

Roman and Virgil had both spoken the same address at the same time: Roman because he had solved the cipher in the letter after reading it the first time, and Virgil because he’d pulled a long piece of paper with the address written on it out of the victims strangled throat with a pair of tweezers.

The address had ended up being an empty building with a “For Lease” sign in the window a few blocks away, and their arrival had revealed nothing except for another puzzle with a pinned note asking if they were going to actually try this time.

Roman had solved the next one, before Janus had even finished reading it and they had arrived at the next location before the next kidnapped victim had even been aware she’d been kidnapped, dazed and drugged and barely able to tell them her name. The murderer hadn’t been there, and Logan had ordered an evacuation with a posted discrete perimeter, with the hope that they could catch the murderer when they returned to kill their victim, but all ten officers hadn’t reported seeing anyone.

Instead, three days after that, the next letter had been delivered to the precinct via mailman who had no clue where the envelope had come from and hadn’t thought too much of it before making his next delivery. The killer seemed to have taken Roman’s quick solving as an offense or a challenge considering each of the puzzles had gotten harder and harder with the deadlines steady as ever. Roman had run up the clock trying to solve them fast enough to get his team to the scene before the victims were too injured to be saved, forget getting them in time to catch the perpetrator. The last woman had coded in the ambulance on the way to the hospital from her sustained injuries and still they hadn’t gotten any more of an idea who this killer was.

Brown hair, blond hair, long and groomed, a buzz cut, bearded, scarred, mole, green eyes, brown eyes, black eyes—every person that Roman managed to save had a different, conflicting description to offer. Every abduction had happened conveniently on corners were there weren’t cameras and none of the victims seemed to have anything in common: they were mostly young women with two cases of being young men, of various ethnicities and social classes, from all seven nearby counties. Had a gun, had a bat, didn’t see anything before the attack, was drugged, was knocked unconscious—even the corpses that they had recovered didn’t have any more information: there was no sign of fighting back, and every method of death was arbitrarily chosen as if the killer was spinning a wheel to decide how the next victim was going to go out.

Virgil, Patton, and Janus’s working profile was: “knows the area well”, “knows the police and FBI really well”, “easily overlooked”, and “desperate to prove they’re smarter than everyone else”.

Any event hosting riddles, puzzles, or trivia had received a visit from the FBI, but most had never seen anyone sweep the games as outrageously as the profile suggested nor had they had any unhappy customers that had caused a scene as much as a disgruntled, embarrassed genius like this would have. The narrow list of names all had accountable alibis and the team had been shoved back to square one until the next puzzle had appeared.

((They shared a music type, and a fondness for certain poets. Roman wouldn’t have solved half of the puzzles as fast if he hadn’t dabbled into the same extracurriculars of photography and art appreciation. He’d babbled to Virgil about the history of jigsaw puzzles when he put together a fifty-piece puzzle with nineteen pieces missing just so he could use the picture to identify the wharf area where they would find the next victim.))

It had felt like, at first, Roman had been assigned a task that would help, something that he excelled at that would do something to alleviate the stress of the situation and help people. While he’d gone through the programs and passed his tests with flying colors, Roman is still the youngest on the FBI team and his experience with catching serial killers is a laughable compared to the others—but after the third puzzle where Roman’s bizarre wealth of knowledge and prompt, problem-solving processes came in clutch, Logan had assigned the puzzles as Roman’s main task and refocused Janus, Patton, and Virgil on profiling the killer and victims and the area.

Roman thinks there’s a bit more to it as well, but Logan hadn’t deigned to share it with him and Roman just can’t afford to devote any of his brain to things other than finding codes at this point.

He hadn’t actually been back to his apartment in a week. He’d slept in this very room with blankets Virgil had dragged from his car, eaten take-out food grabbed by Patton, forced to shower by Janus with his bag of emergency toiletries until Logan had made the trip to Roman’s to pick up new clothes for his extended stay.

Roman was certain there were rules against all of this, policies and whatnot for the amount of overtime he was pulling and the clearly unhealthy sleep schedule and eating regime, but every time he closed his eyes, he remembered that first crime scene and the bulge of paper being delicately pulled from the strangled throat of a dead woman who deserved better and—

Even if it means his bed is gathering dust, even if he can’t remember what he last watched on TV, even if it means that he’ll been able to charge rent to the new life forms growing out of his fridge when this is over. He’d give up everything just to make sure that no other victims died without hope of being saved. All nine of the people he hadn’t gotten to save in time deserved at least to have their killer stopped.

That being said, the only member of his team keeping pace with his puzzle solving work still is Logan: Patton had run to the lab to check on the results of fingerprints (there hadn’t been any on the letters before, but Patton is an optimist at heart); Janus went to talk to one of the victims family after a call stating they thought they remembered something from the night before the victim went missing, and Virgil had tried his hardest for the first three hours before Roman had to break it to him for the nth time that Roman had already tried the codebreaking technique he was suggesting. He’s nearly jittery with the eager to have something to punch by now.

Logan is sitting primly in the seat across from Roman, his dark eyes tracing the calligraphy of the words looking for patterns that Roman hasn’t already tracked down and tried.

The digital clock at the head of the table is steadily counting down, and every time Roman blinks he sees the bloodied crime scene again: the lifeless eyes, the clinically broken bones, the bruises and the gashes and he thinks of the new missing girl who might be suffering the same fate if Roman doesn’t figure this out.

"There's thicker ink on the word Capital," Logan says, drawing Roman’s attention back to the first page of the letter. Roman had noted it briefly on his fourth review, even written down a list of capitals in the states and used the date of their establishments, their "year of creation" to identify words in the letter but nothing had come of it. Roman had moved off from it hours ago hoping that something else in the letter would circle back to it with more directions on what it meant.

"Let’s return to the concept that it refers to the capital letters," Logan says.

"Which spell out nothing, forward or backward or anagrammed," Virgil says from his chair in the corner towards the back of the room where he’d insisted he was sitting to get a better look at the “whole picture.”

"And we tried all possible Caesar shifts?” Logan says.

"I’ve run them through every Caesar shift 1 through 26. Then I tried the established years of all capitals in the States." Roman says combing through his papers to find his work. "It came up with nothing. So, I tossed them through a Trimethius Tableau, which also got me nothing, so then I tried the Trimethius Tableau with a key word, and uhm…”

Roman trails off as he scrambles through the stack of papers next to him and then gives up and offers the entire stack to Logan.

“You tried it with the word Capital?” Logan says.

“I tried it with every word that appears in the letter,” Roman says. “I didn’t bother writing down half of them so please don’t ask for proof. When that didn’t work, I tried all the Capitals from the entire world and then I tried the missing woman’s name first and last, the killers self-proclaimed name, and the spelled-out number of all our individual ages including the victim’s and the age range that the profile suggests for the killer and Sherlock Holmes. Nothing.”

Logan accepts the papers to analyze it himself or double check the numbers and letters, which Roman would find offensive if he had the energy to feel anything other than dread and defeat. Theres a girl’s life on the line and Roman’s matched wits with a piece of paper and failed at the only thing he’s been good at recently. The clock hits hour twenty-two on the killer’s timetable and Roman feels a burn in his eyes as he rubs them so hard he witnesses undiscovered colors on the back of his eyelids.

“Patton just texted,” Virgil said, waving his phone. “The ink is Speedball India Ink which you can get at any art supply but it’s for those fancy calligraphy pens. The techs think the nib was a… Bruase Steno, whatever the fuck that means.”

“Beginner’s nib,” Roman says, tiredly. “It holds a lot of ink in it, pretty sturdy, and good for downstrokes. Allows for a bigger font size than some others.”

“Is there anything you don’t know about?” Virgil says blandly. “He also says the paper from one of those Canson Mix Media sketchbooks you can buy at basically any retail store. I doubt by now that has any bearing on anything, but I figured I pass it along.”

Logan and Roman both nod to show they heard it. Roman predicted as much in his notes, although he’d been more of the idea the nib was a Nikko G based on the size of the font. It’s been a while since he had the time to work on his calligraphy, since Remus “borrowed” his pen set last year.

“I checked for a Rail Fence and a Playfair," Roman says. “Tried both Horizontal and Vertical Two-Squares.”

“I mapped out all of the ‘I’s in the letter to see if they spelled out something in dot-only morse code,” Virgil says.

“Did they?” Logan asks with the tone of a very tired parent.

“No, but you’re welcome that I at least tried it.”

Roman tunes out Logan’s responding sigh-and-lecture bit. There’s a girl missing probably already fighting for her life against injuries that had killed ten others before. Roman could be the only spot of hope for her, and he’s staring at the word ‘Mélange’, wondering if “year of creation” refers to the year that the word first came to use.

Janus had sniffed distastefully at the letter when he’d first read it, claiming that the murderer’s vocabulary was just another attempt to show them that he was smarter than all of them. Janus, who’d studied language profiling and had two papers published on the topic, had begrudgingly affirmed that all the words were being used in a sensible way.

Roman twirls his pen between his fingers reading over his notes again.

He’d been so sure on his second read of the letter that Sherlock Holmes was going to be part of the answer. “Your year of creation” had sounded so much like a bid for the year of publication, which had meant he only needed to figure out what media form it was based on. “From Capitals to Rome” hadn’t spurred anything exciting in his memory: he didn’t recall any of Author Canon Doyle’s original writings putting Holmes in Rome, although he’d jolted down a few books he knew of by other authors, and none of the TV show or movies had been filmed in the iconic city.

If it meant the distance between a capital and Rome, well, London was the only place that Roman was confident in writing down, but 1873km didn’t even match up with any other years and certainly nothing further in the letter that would give an address.

But then Rome could refer to a Caesar Cipher, like Logan had said. Which had inspired a whole other rabbit hole of possibilities and Roman had fallen down it with much less fun than Alice.

Why use words that no one else does conversationally? Roman, as a certified genius, already struggles with having those around him keep up with a conversation so throwing in uncommon words was a waste of breath or, in this case, paper. So why is their killer risking the message of the letter not being understood? Is it really just to prove that this mystery killer was smarter than them? Or is the meaning of the letter as of little value to the killer as the lives of the victims they were snuffing out?

Roman had studied killers with a superiority complex. Most of them could have continued killing for decades and never been caught if they hadn’t felt compelled to have others be aware of how much smarter they were.

But then Roman stares at this letter talking about Sherlock Holmes and he doesn’t see someone who was overconfident and riding the high of the chase. They’re creative and clever enough that each of his letters are multitasking: sharing (supposedly inconsequential) knowledge about himself as well as acting as a code to lead them to where the missing girl is. But Roman’s decently sure that Logan’s already figured that one out. After all, how much help is the fact that the killer likes Sherlock Holmes going to be in finding out their real identity?

It isn’t Roman’s task to profile the serial killer. It’s not his problem and it shouldn’t be his worry and Roman doesn’t have the time to focus on the undertone of loneliness and isolation when there’s a girl’s life on the line.

“I see things here are going admirably,” Janus says as he flounces into the room. He’s dressed in black dress pants and a pale-yellow button down that looks tasteful and elegant. His usual grace accompanies his movements as he drops into a vacant chair and helps himself to a coffee cup that someone left on the table hours ago. He has a ring on his fourth finger, although he’d confessed in a drunken stupor after their first case that he’d never even kissed a prospective partner. ((And then the following day Janus had cornered Roman in the station bathroom and told him that if he told anyone about that Roman’s body would never be recovered, but whatever. Drama Queen.))

“Have you cracked the code yet? Solved all our problems?” Janus asks.

“Oh, yes,” Virgil answers him. “We were waiting for you to get back in order to figure out world hunger, though.”

“Eat the Rich,” the man wearing a $900 suit says without a trace of hesitation.

“Did the victim’s sister give you anything?” Logan asks, pushing away Roman’s stack of failed attempts.

Janus clicks his tongue. “I’m going to assume you remember that the sister told us previously that she’d been communicating to her sister via SnapChat the night she disappeared. She said that she saw someone in the background of the pictures that she didn’t think too much of it at the time, but now she’s wondering if it was our killer stalking his victim through the store. I made a pit stop to the grocery store and took another look through their footage, and found the person in question—black hoodie, black face mask—but it was just another shopper. According to timestamps, he checked out before our victim and went straight to his car and left.”

“Presumably to go home,” Virgil extrapolates, extremely helpfully.

“And we suspect that the killer grabbed her before she got to her car,” Logan hums affirmatively. Which Roman guessed was about as close as he got to announcing his approval.

Janus picks up one of Roman’s papers and scans it with faked interest. “So? How is Encyclopedia Brown doing? Has he come up for air in the past hour?”

“Do you even know what an encyclopedia is?” Roman asks, distractedly.

“Of course,” Janus says. “I found reading them to be quite riveting in my childhood. Didn’t you?”

“I was more of a phonebook, yellow pages type of kid,” Roman says.

“What’s a phone book?” Virgil cuts in.

“It’s a phone directory with the phone numbers of everyone in a certain area. The yellow pages were reserved for businesses, listed by category rather than alphabetical. Why don’t you know that?” Logan says. Then he frowned and turned back to Roman. “Why were you reading those as a child?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know, old man.”

"I turned 49 this year, Roman," Logan says blandly.

Roman had a really good response to that, he did. Something snippety about how Logan acted like a professor double his age, or asking how his birthday party of birdwatchers went, or if he's picked out an adult day care he wants to be sent to once he reaches the big five-oh. Just for the sick pleasure of seeing Logan physically leave the room to go print out the official papers to fire Roman on the spot.

"What’s going on at 15 Maple Street?"

Virgil startles like a cat, nearly flipping out of his chair at the voice right behind him.

Remus—dressed in a biker jacket, spiked boots, and gunmetal piercings—grins with all his teeth unflinching even when Virgil’s fist brushes by his cheek in an aborted attempt at throat-punching Roman's twin brother.

“Is it some kind of orgy? Y’all gonna invite me?” he asks, raising a Slurpee cup to his mouth and taking a sip.

“Who the fuck?!” Virgil says, snapping his neck to look at Roman as if he thought Roman had gotten up put on a fake mustache and then tried to jump scare him. “Wh-wha…?”

When they were younger, Roman had described Remus as his funhouse mirror reflection: they shared the same nose, the same face structure, the same dark brown eyes and the same untamable brown hair; but where their appearances had been identical inverses of each other—Remus’s cowlick rolled to the left and Roman’s went to the right—their personalities had a drastic split. Remus is also a certified genius, same as Roman, but where Roman had gotten banned from the local escape rooms for solving them in under five minutes, Remus had gotten banned from them for brute forcing answers until something clicked.

If Remus had to break something to get the answer, he was having fun. Replay-ability was never a thought in his mind growing up and turned their childhood home’s game closet into a graveyard. He talked faster than he thought, often blurting out answers or questions or impulsive thoughts before someone else had finished talking.

Nine-year-old Roman had loathed most of these things about Remus, but it had only taken a year for Roman to realize that in their small town, Remus was the only one who could possibly keep up with his wits. Remus had been the one to tell him to take up the codebreaking classes hosted by an ex-FBI agent who had ended up being so impressed with Roman that the man had sponsored him through all his subsequent courses and written him three recommendation letters personally to Logan to get him his current job.

The job had taken Roman nine states away, but Remus and him had kept near weekly calls where Remus offered him feedback on Roman’s newest attempt at writing a novel, and Roman play tested the clues for puzzles in Remus’s escape room games.

Near weekly had turned into a stretch of silence though, when cases came up. Remus had just told him to call him whenever the cases were over instead of stressing over finding time to talk. His schedule was always more flexible.

But it shouldn’t have been flexible enough for Remus to be standing in the FBI headquarters.

“Remus,” Roman says, standing before Virgil decides to enact his shapeshifting alien emergency plan. “What are you doing here?”

“Learn to pick up your phone sometime, asshole,” Remus says, flicking his neon yellow visitor badge to the left of Virgil’s body for everyone to see. “If I had known that you were going to leave me at an airport for three fucking hours, I would have just canceled my flight and spent my vacation mapping out the sewers back home.”

“Vacation?” Roman repeats. “OH FUCK! What day is it?!”

Roman dives for his phone, only realizing when he frantically taps the screen that it’s dead and probably has been dead for a while. Remus rolls his eyes flicking a lazy salute at Logan and Janus and welcoming himself into the room.

“Name’s Remus,” Remus says, “I’m this dipshit’s twin brother. Currently single, but I charge five for a hand job if you want one.”

“Charming,” Janus says, running a finger around the rim off his coffee cup.

“You mentioned Maple Street.” Logan says. “Ignoring that you are not supposed to be in here and this is confidential work, where did you come up with that?”

"I mean, I assumed it’s a Maple Street," Remus says. "Every state has a Maple Street, right? I stopped doing the conversion at the P."

“Elaborate.”

“Buy me dinner first, Daddy,” Remus says and Janus chokes on his coffee so hard it almost comes out of his nose and Roman can feel his employee termination paperwork being drafted up mentally in Logan’s mind.

Still Remus shrugs, waves a hand towards the projector, and obliges. “The letter is about Sherlock Holmes, right? Its pretentious as all shit so the writer is only going to care about the original Arthor Canon Doyle characterizations. “The year of your creation” is a snob’s way of saying publishing date. So, you’re looking for a Sherlock Holmes book and you’re going to care about the year it originally came out. Still with me? I can walk you back if you got lost, old timer.”

“Remus,” Roman says, which sounds remarkably like please shut up before you get me fired.

“Damn, you got boring in FBI school. Fine. You care about ciphers, right? There’s only four from the original books that actually appear, even though Holmes is said to be a gifted codebreaker. This ain’t the Dancing Man code, and it’s not the flashing lights from Red Circle. Your other two options are The Book Code from Valley of Fear in which you’d be fucked six ways to Saturday with an unlubed corkscrew and not in a way that you’d enjoy or—”

Virgil makes a sharp disgusted noise form the back of the room, and Remus grins with satisfaction at getting a reaction out of him. He tilts his head back to look the agents, mouth open to make things as bad as he can.

“Wait! Gloria Scott,” Roman says catching on to what he did. “Fuck! You’re right! It’s Gloria Scott. But not whole words. Did you go by letters?”

Remus tsks and swirls his drink. “You’re a genius, Ro. You tell me.”

“That’s why it says to go ‘From the Capitals!’”

“Tell me you didn’t think it meant actual capitals. Did you list them all out? I’m disowning you.”

“Get bent,” Roman says on instinct as he scribbles out the letters of importance.

“Get laid.”

“I have. Jealous? And then a Caesar with 1-8-9-3?”

“Did you know that off the top of your head? Fucking nerd.”

“That’s an E, V, I—”

“It’s faster to start it from the end,” Remus sings.

“Did they screw up on the eighth sentence or am I doing math wrong?”

“I told you go from the end.”

“I don’t like going backwards!”

“It’s already backwards, bitch.”

“Dick.”

“Geek. You used to be good at this. Why is it taking you so long?”

“Shut up. Did you get Mom gaudy heels she wanted for her birthday?”

“The ones with the cat faces on them? Fuck no! I got her a candle like I do every year.”

“Son of the year award.”

“They were over a hundred fucking dollars! —That’s an F, dumbass, not a G.— And I can gift her a whole litter of cats for that amount!”

“Agreed. I’ll get the accessories; you get the cats?”

“Deal. I want naming rights.”

“PG-13 rated at the max. Mom will kill us otherwise. So, it was a mistake on the eighth sentence.”

“Yeah! A goddamn embarrassment. This is already a cringe ass attempt to seem good at encoding—”

A humming uhhhh? cuts through the rest of Remus’s statement and Roman is relieved to see Remus also does a mental reset as he remembers where they are. Namely, standing in the conference room in the FBI headquarters shooting comments back and forth at each other in front of Roman’s team.

Virgil is staring at both of them, head on a swivel that leaves him looking hopelessly horrified, as if he just watched them give birth. The last time Roman saw Virgil look so nauseated, he’d gotten a major concussion after being jumped by three gang members in the back of warehouse they had thought a bioterrorist was renting.

There had been a bubbling excitement in Roman’s chest that felt right in the way that all his conversations with Remus always feel so right. He didn’t have to slow down or reword or even watch his wording because it was Remus and Remus always knew exactly how to take anything Roman said. Twin Telepathy and all that.

But the moment he sees the utter bafflement on Logan and Janus’s faces that part of him shrivels up and dies, an embarrassed, awful death.

Virgil, however, finds his voice before Roman can apologize. “Hardy Boys! Wanna explain that in English? Where are you getting Maple Street from?”

“Fifteen Maple Street,” Roman corrects. “Come to Fifteen Maple Street, Detective.”

“Do-tective,” Remus says. “I’ve met kids with better spelling!”

Roman doesn’t outright elbow him in the side but it’s a close thing. “Doesn’t matter. The point is, I know where that is. Its two blocks from my—”

“Is the Gloria Scott referring to The Adventures of the Gloria Scott?” Janus cuts him off sharply and Roman blinks. Remus frowns and takes another sip of his Slurpee, until the resulting slorpppp nearly drowns out Roman’s response if Roman hadn’t reached out and snapped it out of his hand.

“Yeah,” Roman says. “Published in 1893. It’s the short story where Holmes claims to have first realized that his deduction hobby could be used professionally. The code in it—spoilers—is that every third word is taken and spells out its own sentence. But in this case ‘From Capitals’ is referring to the third word of the sentence instead of every third word. Then if you take the first letter of each of the word and put it in a Caesar shift, with the first one being a one-shift, the second letter being an eight-shift, then nine-shift, then three, then back to one….”

Roman holds up the paper where he wrote down the final product. “And then you read it backwards.”

The Conference room is slightly too quiet for Roman’s taste, but his hands are shaking with nerves he didn’t know he had. The clock in the corner still reads an hour and thirty minutes and Roman feels like he’s taken his first actual breath for the first time in years.

"Did you do that in your head?" Logan says, looking at Remus. "As you walked in here?"

“Well, not really,” Remus says, casually swinging his badge around one of his fingers. “I’m not wearing my glasses, so I didn’t see it until I got halfway across the floor. And I had to look up the year of publish for it because I’m not the type of freak who knows years like that.”

Roman flips him the bird under the table where Logan won’t see it.

"Holy shit,” Virgil says. “You both are fucking insane. Actually, fucking insane. How did you even think to do that?”

Remus laughs. "That’s just a party trick. We used more advanced ciphers when selling test answers in seventh grade."

"There was no "we" in that!" Roman says quickly. "I was not involved in that!"

Remus glances at the papers next to Virgil raising an eyebrow at the penmanship. "Did you try to map out the dots over the I's like it’s a dot only morse code? That’s so cute!"

Virgil crumples his paper into a ball and throws it across the room. "Can I punch him for real this time? I’m going to punch him."

Roman doesn’t bother explain that comments like that just fuel Remus on. The bullies in their small town had learned to leave both of them alone, because Remus laughed when they broke his arm. Remus liked the sharp taste of pain and the metallic smell of blood and the way that his vision blurred and blacked out.

Instead, Roman reaches for his jacket. “Come on. There’s still two hours on the clock. We can beat rush out traffic and make it there in ten minutes!”

“No,” Logan says and Roman mentally stumbles over a chair and then down a flight of stairs. “I want you to stay here. If for some reason this location ends up being wrong, I want you and your brother both to be here already looking for another answer. Do not argue with me on this.”

Roman’s voice dies a little in his throat, shriveling up and itching like a cough that he doesn’t want to admit to having. Logan doesn’t even grace him with an actual full glance, as if Roman’s compliance is expected just as much as his acceptance. Janus and Virgil share a look that Roman can’t quite read, although from the pursing of Virgil’s lips something about Logan’s decision doesn’t sit right with him.

Janus, however, looks relieved before he can school his features into a neutral expression.

“I’m certain this is the location,” Roman says tentatively. “Sir.”

“I do not like placing all of my figurative eggs in one figurative basket,” Logan says, already halfway out the door. “Safety is my priority. Virgil, Janus: with me.”

Both of the other two agents scramble after Logan; Virgil not even bothering to put his jacket back on as he bolts out the door and Janus clicking his tongue in that way that speaks of his loathing for being told what to do.

Roman drops his coat back on the chair and flops back down. Remus frowns at the doors for a second longer, but Roman can’t imagine what he’s thinking—or if it’s anything different from what Roman himself has already thought about this FBI gig.

Roman can appreciate how Logan is looking at the bigger picture, covering all his bases, leaving little room for the killer to add to their kill count, but at the end of the day those words still sound a lot more like “You’re still not good enough, Roman, and I’m still considering if you deserve a place with this team.”

***

“You’re seriously still not going to tell him?” Virgil hisses as soon as the elevator doors close. “He deserves to know at this point! We’re seven incidents into this!”

“There’s actually only been six that can’t simple coincidence,” Janus corrects, even though that is not the fucking point that Virgil meant and he knows it. Six is still Six-Too-Fucking-Many and the fact that Janus is even making the argument has Virgil’s skin crawling. He meets Virgil’s eyes in the reflection of the stainless-steel elevator wall and Virgil sneers at him while Janus raises an elegant middle finger.

Logan, although he must have seen it, doesn’t bother to reprimand either of them. He stares at the ticking digital screen detailing the floors as they race towards the garage and keeps his face in a stern neutral expression. Virgil isn’t trained in micro expressions, so the fact that he notices the crease in the corner of Logan’s lip is probably very telling for how stressed he is about all of this.

“Call Patton. I want him to meet us at the location with whatever police he has contact with. No sirens. If this killer is there, I don’t want to alert him anymore than we already have.”

“You’re changing the topic,” Virgil says. “Sir.”

“Agent Storm. As of right now, his best use is solving the puzzles where we can keep an eye on him. He doesn’t need to know; it will only cause him to panic, and we cannot afford that at this stage. He’s too… instrumental.”

Instrumental. Virgil almost laughs at Logan’s fucking audacity. Instrumental.

“Are you going to tell his brother?” Janus says, boredly, scrolling through his phone for Patton’s number. “Twin brother. Did anyone know he was a twin? I didn’t and I believe I’m offended.”

Virgil did know. Although knowing is an entirely different beast from seeing Roman’s face with a mustache and his body with a grunge aesthetic and his voice with a proficiency for the absolute worse strings of words in the human language. He almost looked like Roman-in-a-Halloween-Costume, expect for the part where he opened his mouth. But the worst part of it was how when Remus and Roman had been standing next to each other shooting back and forth completely at ease, Virgil had felt as though he was seeing doubles and neither version of his friend was the right one.

Something about Roman so easily relaxed into the conversation, a lightness to his words, a brightness to his eyes—something about how Roman looked comfortable as if a huge burden had been lifted from his shoulders when his twin had shown up….

It threw him off and Virgil doesn’t think he’s found his balance again yet. And the whole “Unspoken Agreement” was not helping matters at-fucking-all.

“I want a background check on him, emphasis on his whereabouts in the past three weeks. If he’s not involved, then I’ll consider reading him in. Although, there’s a high probability he already suspects it,” Logan says. “You were not subtle about cutting Roman off at all.”

Janus feigns an offended scoff, as he puts his phone to his ear and the line starts ringing. “I didn’t see you saying anything.”

Virgil digs his nails into the strap of his bag. “If Roman were a civilian, you wouldn’t be treating him like this. You know you wouldn’t. You would have read him in and—”

“Virgil,” Logan says sharply.

“How long are you going to keep punishing him for something that wasn’t his fault?!”

Logan’s hand snaps out and he knocks the safety switch into activation. The elevator jerks to a stop so suddenly that Janus fumbles his phone, and Virgil has to grab the railing to keep himself steady. When he looks up again Logan’s eyes are trained on him with a fury that Virgil’s never seen before.

Still, he forces himself to raise his chin in defiance, meeting that gaze head on even with his brain shrieking at him to backdown.

“Do not accuse me of confusing the safety of my agents for a petty grudge,” Logan says. “I will have your badge, Virgil. My reluctance to tell him comes from the need to have our smartest agent focused on these deranged puzzles instead of whether or not the rest of us are capable of doing out jobs, not from my irritation over being blackmailed into taking him onto my team. He will do his job, and you will do yours and when this is over, I will personally debrief him. Am I clear?”

Virgil’s jaw creaks from how tightly he’s clenching his jaw, but he nods.

For a second, barely a blink, Logan’s expression softens again. “Thank you, Virgil, for being concerned about him. I know you don’t appreciate withholding information from your teammates.”

It’s hard to feel like he’s doing anything good when they all saw how Roman’s face dropped earlier. Logan turns back to the doors and flips the safety switch again, allowing the elevator to continue its descent. Virgil lets out the quietest breath he can manage, but based on Janus’s uneasy glance back at him, it wasn’t quiet enough.

“Well! I guess that means that Roman solved the letter!” Patton’s voice chirps from the phone in Janus’s hand.

“Yes,” Logan says loud enough for Patton to hear him. “Janus will fill you in.”

“Aye-Aye Captain!”

The elevator dings and the mechanical voice reads out the basement floor, but Logan doesn’t wait for it to finish speaking. He’s already shoving his way out of the elevator to the BMW registered to their team, with all the confidence and authority of someone who would leave them both behind if Virgil and Janus didn’t rush after him.

Virgil turns to Janus, but Janus is greeting Patton with his particular brand of waspish backhanded compliments that Patton likes to laugh at. He pretends he doesn’t see Virgil’s look at all, stubbornly facing forward marching after Logan. His voice bounces off the underground parking lot concrete, updating their other senior agent on the details and plan and the request for a background check as if Virgil’s very real concerns about Roman was just another instance of him blowing the situation out of proportion. Virgil lets out a shaky breath as the elevator doors roll close behind him.

“He can handle it. He’s Roman. Of course, he can handle it,” he repeats as a mantra and hitches his bag over his shoulder.

Despite that, Virgil sends a soft, silent prayer to whatever might be out there watching, that they aren’t running into as much of a trap as it feels like they are.

***

When the call comes Roman nearly lunges across the table to accept it.

Remus is, per usual, a very interesting and ambitious conversation partner: he does not and has not ever required an actual person to respond to him. Roman tested it once when they were younger and he wanted to have a whole ten minutes of silence—put a hoodie over a pile of clothes while Remus is speed running a video game, gradually stop answering with more than a few hums, and then dip out. It had been hours later when Remus woke him by jumping on his bed in revenge.

That’s not to say that Roman isn’t thrilled to talk with him! But Roman is the type of person who would rather catch up with his brother’s endless thrilling tales of research and experimentation in the comfort of his own home, take out on the coffee table and a stream of true crime YouTube episodes on his TV in the background. Roman had been excited to ask him about where he’d gotten his inspirations for his 1920’s speakeasy parlor escape room because Remus had never really dipped into history themes when he could have haunted houses and murder movies instead.

The oppressive atmosphere in the FBI headquarters, with empty conference room chairs, stacks of papers to recycled, and a projector showing the ramblings of serial killer, paled in comparison to the thought of Roman’s crappy couch and greasy pizza from across town.

And now small part of Roman is worried that maybe they did miss something in the letter. As certain as he is about this, there is a part of him that keeps whispering Logan’s right to hold you back, you failed, you were helpless until Remus showed up—

So, when the call comes, Roman is nearly vaulting the table to answer it via the conference call.

“You would have told me just to shut up!” Remus says with no real heat.

Roman doesn’t bother responding to him. He’s sure that Remus already knows what Roman was thinking anyway; it wasn’t like Remus was a fan of a conference rooms after the amount of time he spent in them with Mom and Dad on either side of him as his teachers tried to explain that just because Remus was bored out of his mind in their classes, it didn’t mean he had the right to start dismantling desks or doodling on the walls with sharpies or designing paper airplanes with precision that most aviators couldn’t claim.

“Roman Sanders, speaking,” Roman says, as soon as he hits the answer button. “Remus is in the room.”

“Are you or your brother familiar with one Andy Clupeidae?” Logan’s voice says.

“Uh,” Roman glances towards Remus but he also just shrugs chewing on his straw. “Not that I’m aware of, sir. Would you like me to start a background search on them?”

“Not necessary, I already have Janus on it.”

“Weird ass fucking last name,” Remus comments. “I would have remembered it. What’s their deal? Or are you on Tinder? If he’s got a picture of him holding a fish up, you can guarantee that he’s been lying about length sizes for a whi—”

“It’s the name of a man that we just apprehended in the middle of strangling the victim,” Logan says, dry tone scathing even through the phone speaker. Remus has the rare decency to cringe slightly. “I trust that you can keep that information to yourself, Remus.”

“We got him?” Roman says, hope swelling in his chest like a balloon throttling his voice box. “Like—we actually caught him? Red handed and everything?!”

“We have a suspect in custody,” Logan says. “There are…a few things that don’t settle correctly into the profile. But when we arrived, he was already inside the building, hands on the throat of the victim, and he had in his possession a letter that contains what appears to be the next puzzle for you to solve. The victim is already on the way to the hospital with Janus on standby for when she regains lucidity. Patton will be taking the letter to the labs, and while Virgil and I get ready for the interrogation.”

Roman swears the air tastes ridiculously sweet, too sweet, in a way that’s making it hard to breathe. Remus is staring at him worriedly, but all Roman can think is we did it, we got him, we stopped him.

“There are still several things that need to happen before we can declare this case closed,” Logan warns. “I’ll see you both in half an hour.”

Roman nods although Logan definitely can’t see him. He’d probably be embarrassed if Logan could see him and his stupid dopey grin.

“And Roman? Remus? …you both did a good job.”

Roman doesn’t even hear the telltale click of the call ending. He’s too busy covering his mouth and trying not to scream at the top of his lung. Pure relief washes through him, rushing through his trembling fingers and weak knees until he’s nearly lightheaded with elation.

“Are you okay?” Remus asks steadying Roman with a hand on his arm. “Are you going to orgasm right now?”

“Shut up,” Roman says with half the amount of annoyance he means. He gets a grip of a nearby chair to ground himself and takes a deep breath to refocus. The hope in his chest tastes like a victory, like he’s done something great, even though all he’s done is his job.

Remus is still staring at him suspiciously and no amount of Roman’s smile is reassuring him apparently. His eyes are lined with that brand of eyeliner that he’s been using since they were tweens, making his hickory eyes even darker than usual, and more worried than he’s ever been. He makes one suspicious sweeping look around the room, as if checking for someone else despite the fact it’s been just the two of them for a while now, then he leans in to say something.

But before he can get it out, the conference phone rings again.

“Hardy Boys!” Virgil’s voice calls through the speaker, a little distorted. Roman grimaces at it, tapping his pen on the table a few times.

“Hey, Dark and Stormy,” Roman says, “Heard you caught the guy!”

“Is there anything you don’t know about?” Virgil says blandly.

“Well, I was going to congratulate you, and offer to buy drinks, but if you’re going to be an asshole about it….” Roman says.

Virgil might have responded but there’s a crackling on the line that cuts over whatever thing he’s going to say. Remus fake-gags out of the corner of Roman’s eye.

“Whatever,” Roman says. “Logan called just a minute ago and told me the news.”

“He also says—you’re welcome—to go home—”

“What the fuck type of phone service do you have?” Remus asks. “Dial up? How do you have any type of phone sex with this shit going on?”

“—I’m going to punch him."

Remus grins delightedly. “We’re gonna need to decide a safe word—”

Roman immediately bats the back of his head and Remus yelps, ducking away from the receiver and rubbing the spot that Roman hit with a pout. Roman sends him scowl, and Remus sticks his tongue out and mouths something that looks like its was a joke, dickwad! And Roman returns it with an appropriate middle finger.

“Hardy Boys!” Virgil’s voice says again, and Roman drums his pen on the table.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m sorry about Remus. Please don’t complain to HR again. I don’t want to be written up for this one—”

Remus shoves Roman out of the way to get closer to the speaker again. “Who cares about that! Did Lead Agent DILF actually say it’s cool if Roman and I cut out of here? Cause if so, go ahead and tell him to approve Roman for a week vacation, too, because if you don’t, you’ll have to file for kidnapping. I have a list of places I’m going to make Roman take me to and it requires a minimum of three days off.”

“Remus!” Roman says. “You can’t just—"

“Someone needs to get this guy a fucking hobby— you’re welcome—to go home—”

“Alright, bye, Virgin!” Remus shouts and hits the end call button. He throws most of his weight back in the chair, stretching out his spine and arms in a wild chaotic movement that Roman couldn’t help but fondly roll his eyes at. He’s sure that the Virgin comment will come up again, likely in the form of a summons to the HR to talk about workplace harassment, regardless of the fact that it wasn’t Roman who said it, but all in all he can’t really be all that worried about it at the moment.

Roman sighs out, rubbing his aching neck.

“That was weird right?” Roman says. “You thought that was weird, too?”

Remus yawns so loud that his jaw cracks. “Who cares? I want pizza on your dime, and shitty ghost hunter videos on your TV. Your job is boring as fuck! Come on, I’ll drive! You can micronap in the passenger seat.”

“With you at the wheel? No chance,” Roman says, but he fishes his keys from his jacket and tosses them towards Remus anyway. Remus grins with all his teeth, the exact way that everyone would expect someone who frames all of their speeding tickets to smile. Roman yawns and waves for Remus to follow him towards the office desks where Roman’s stuff would be, pausing only long enough to switch off the projector and the clock and the lights.

Admittedly Roman doesn’t remember a lot of what happens after that. The adrenaline crash comes down pretty hard on him and the exhaustion swirls around him, the moment they get to the lobby and Remus chats up the receptionist and returns his visitor’s badge and compliments her hair. Roman focuses more on keeping his duffle over his shoulder and standing upright as this goes on.

He didn’t recall Logan bringing him all that much stuff from his apartment: he’d scribbled out a list of clothes that he liked and tried his best not to cringe too much at the idea of his superior officer seeing his uncleaned apartment.

Even when Remus was coming over, Roman made an effort to take out the trash and have the sheets in his guest room cleaned and fill the pantry with healthier snacks. Roman had put off doing the cleaning for a few days after he and Remus had confirmed the date, but then the case had come up and Roman had literally forgotten what month it was.

But he wasn’t too concerned with Remus making fun of him. The way that Remus was already side eyeing him and chatting away about the details of their hometown and his trip to visit Mom and Dad last weekend was telling Roman that Remus guessed just how tired Roman was at the moment.

The drive is a blur at best. As far as Roman remembers Remus obeyed the laws and parked legally. They argued over music for a few minutes, and then argued over if Remus could have made a light that he stopped for because Roman yelled at him. Then, on the way into Roman’s apartment building their argument turns into which YouTube ghost hunter series to watch while they ate dinner.

“Race ya!” Remus shouts, as he hits the platform for Roman’s level.

“Remus!” Roman hisses, “Wait, Remus!” He slings his bag over his shoulder and rushes the last few steps and catches the door before it closes but by then Remus is already charging down the hall.

“Remus people can hear into the hallway! Remus!”

“You’re just mad because you owe me ice cream now!” Remus calls and then proceeds to knock on Roman’s door several times over as if Roman is going to magically open it from the other side when he’s slowly trudging his way over.

“What was the point of running all the way down here just to have to wait for me to open the door?” Roman huffs. “You have a key anyway!”

“Had a key,” Remus shrugs, pressing as close as physically possible to Roman as he jiggles his key through the lock until it relents. “I don’t anymore!”

 Roman lets Remus push through the door the moment it’s open, rolling his eyes. “Down a sewer grate, off the metro platform, confiscated by the TSA, or forgot it in that dumpster fire you call an apartment?”

“Got knocked overboard on a ferry ride I took a couple months ago! Right along with my house key and my mailbox key. The process to get a new one of both of those was a bitch and a half, by the way. Would not recommend.”

"Wait," Roman says, flicking on the lights to his apartment. It feels a bit like defeat doing it after Remus has made himself at home on the couch with his disgusting shoes up on Roman’s upholstery. But Roman finds himself a bit too tired to care about all the cleaning he has to do. "If you lost the keys to my apartment, what did you do with your bag? I know you didn’t come here empty handed— Please tell me you didn’t pick the locks; I have to pay out of pocket for those repairs."

But even as he says it Roman frowns at the lock. There are signs of tampering: a few scratches on the outside cylinder casing of the deadbolt that are too thick to be from Roman’s own key and exhaustion. But Remus almost sounds surprised by the idea, as if this was the first time, he’d ever thought of breaking into a place he may or may not have half permission to be in and even if it weren’t, Roman’s only mostly whining about the repairs because Remus’s lockpicking skills have been at a master level since they were in middle school.

"I just stood outside your place and hit the buzzers until someone just opened the door,” Remus says stretching out on the couch and cracking his neck with a poppoppop. “And then when I got to your apartment, I just knocked, and your wacko roommate let me in."

Roman laughs sardonically as he closes the door behind himself and tosses his bag at the shoe rack he needs to reorganize later. He’s untying his laces when he realizes that Remus hasn’t congratulated himself on his witty joke and told him the actual truth about how he got in. He glances up at his twin and catches the minimal silhouette of Remus plucking at something from Roman’s mess of a coffee table.

"Remus….I don’t have a roommate."

"Well, she wasn’t your fucking girlfriend, you gay fuck," Remus says. “Hey, what are you doing with one of these? You always said that you hated the way your recorded voice sounds.”

“Huh?”

In response Remus waves whatever it was that he picked up and experimentally clicks a button on the side of it.

“—I’m going to punch him,” Virgil’s unmistakable voice crackles out into the otherwise silent apartment.

Remus’s head snaps to the side looking at the recording in his hand with wild eyes and he scrambles back to his feet. Roman’s heart is pounding in his throat, his blood is rushing in his ears, and a whole lot of things are making sense in a way that Roman really, really did not like them making sense.

“Wha….What did you say that my roommate looked like?” Roman says. “Remus, what did she look like?”

"I don’t know! I wasn’t paying attention! I was pissed off that I had to pay for an uber and demanded to know where you were! She said you were at work and that you would be back soon. I tossed my bag in here and nearly knocked over the laundry she was folding…. My bag’s gone. Fuck, that had my favorite jeans in there. And my Switch!”

“Remus,” Roman says, trying to swallow back the panic in his throat.

“She was wearing your sweatpants,” he says. “Motherfucker, she was wearing your sweatpants and eating one of those personal tubs of Cherry Garcia ice cream that only you like while folding laundry... and she smelled like bleach. A lot of bleach.”

The walls of Roman’s apartment suddenly seem to be closing in on them both.

"Out," Roman says, strangled and pleading and reaching for his sidearm. "Out of my apartment! Wait outside and use my phone to call Logan and tell him everything. I’m going to see what else she touched—"

“Your phone’s dead dumbass andI am not going to leave you alone in this apartment where a serial killer might have been hiding out!” Remus says and it sounds remarkably like he’s also panicking. Roman doesn’t think he’s ever actually seen Remus panic; Remus had always been a little too excited about his own lack of self-preservation, and there hadn’t ever been a situation that Remus hadn’t been able to handle and Roman decides that right here, right now, is a horrible time for him to learn to be scared.

Roman’s mouth opens to say something brilliant and focused, something that would make the dozens of FBI instructors he had proud of how calm he could be and how rational he could think, something that would convince Remus to listen to him and go outside away from possible dangers, something that would slow the rapidly building tidal wave of fear in his chest.

What comes out is a partial scream as one of the shadows in his apartment lunges at Remus from behind and slams solidly against his skull. Remus’s eyes go wide, then unfocused, and then his entire body drops like a concrete block in a pool.

Roman jolts towards him, but the sight of the person standing there stops him short: a young woman in black leggings and a pink Princess Peach T-shirt that Roman recognizes from his own closet, and Roman’s high school letterman over her shoulders. There’s Ruger LCP in her manicured hand, barrel pointed right down at Remus’s unmoving head, and she wedges her boot heel directly on his back, like a cat showing off the baby bird it’s killed.

Except the baby bird is Remus’s twin brother and Roman might be next.

He can’t think straight, can’t think at all; every time he tries to remember what protocol is for this, his brain takes a detour to how Remus crumpled like a soda can. Roman can’t tear his eyes from the gun at his twin’s head, not even to look at the intruder enough to memorize her features to tell someone if he makes it out of this. Remus is still as stone, as concrete, as a corpse and Roman can’t even tell if he’s still breathing, or if Roman’s already lost the person who’d always had his back in everything.

“I didn’t think you would be so quiet,” the killer says. Her tone is soft and warm and all the things that serial killers shouldn’t be. Oh, is that why all the victims had been younger and smaller? So that she could get control of them easily if they fought back? “Are you just so happy to see me? Surprised?”

"But….Andy Clupeidae," Roman says, voice trembling, his hand hovering over his gun holster, still not close enough to draw before she would get a chance to fire. "Clupeidae…. Fuck, that’s—That’s a family of fish, right? That’s why it sounded familiar.”

“Sardines, shads, and…herrings," the murderer says, wistfully proud of Roman. "The fact that he was wearing red today was just luck. Isn’t that funny?"

Roman chokes on his urge to laugh because it’s not and his wheezing, twisted, cramped lungs are fighting off hysteria. For someone who was a genius, who thought faster than most people could imagine, who passed every test the FBI threw at him with perfection, Roman can’t remember what he’s supposed to do.

He’s not even sure of what he can do.

His phone hesitates in back pocket, long dead, and as far as he knows no one would even think to check on them tonight. Even if he yelled for help, what would his neighbors do? Call the police? Come running to save him? Get murdered by the person in front of him who’s taken ten other lives like it was a game? Even if Roman ran, what would she do? Chase him? Or just kill Remus and make Roman live out the worst version of his life that he can imagine?

“I’ve been waiting for a long time to meet you, Roman,” the killer says, before he can get a handle of any of his thoughts. “Your team is so annoying, don’t you think? Every time I thought I would have gotten to talk to you alone, one of them always appeared….and then that awful man Logan Ackroyd made you stay at your office! I knew if I tried to visit you there, they wouldn’t understand! They would convince you I was wrong just like how everyone has always said I was wrong and bad!

“So, I stayed here, waiting for you the whole time…thinking you would be able to sneak back here and meet me like you’re supposed to! But your terrible team couldn’t even let you do that!”

((“Is the Gloria Scott referring to The Adventures of the Gloria Scott?” Janus cuts him off right before he says where he lives.))

((“No,” Logan said, “I want you to stay here.”))

((The look that Virgil and Janus shared before they left.))

“They knew.” Roman swallows hard. “They fucking knew and didn’t tell me—”

“It’s okay! I know it wasn’t your fault….” She says mistaking his horror for some other emotion Roman doesn’t even think he can fake. “I realized they just needed a reason to let you come home to me! You did so good solving my code! Even after this bitch showed up and started making fun of you and it!” She presses her boot down on Remus’s spine and Roman jerks reflectively forward before he can stop himself.

“Remus wasn’t—he didn’t—!” Roman stutters. “He wasn’t doing it maliciously! He’s just like that! Okay? You don’t have to hurt him!”

His eyes flick up to her face, hoping that maybe if Roman stops looking at him, Remus will shake off the hit to the head the same way he shook off water after Roman shoved him into the pool when they were kids: miraculously unhurt and smug in his movements, you really thought that could get me to shut up? HA!

“Don’t worry, you don’t have to defend him anymore. You’re never going to have to worry about anyone not taking you seriously ever again. I won’t let them, my detective.” She smiles at him, softly, so softly, as if she really believes she’s doing him a kindness.

Roman takes a step backwards, his back bumping against the closed door. The killer crowds forward, humming happily. “I’m so, so happy to finally meet someone just like me, Detective,” she says. “We’re going to be so happy together. Just you wait.”

[Chapter 2]

[spoondoodles]

Do you see my vision yet?

[ts-sides-head-canon]

I'm here again with a not angsty thing because part of me feels bad for sending in angst on a non angst day, and I was planning to anyway. Continuing the whole AU parents, and thing this time, I'm going for Remus and Roman's parents. I've already told you their names, Arthur and Venus, so now Imma tell you about them!

Both the twins' parents are famous, Arthur is a movie star and Venus is a famous pop singer, and it's clear to see how the two had the kids they had. Both of them have always loved the stage, and yet the twins, as well as their eldest son Romulus, always take priority over interviews and such.

Arthur is quite noble and chivalrous, doing things like holding the door for his family and making sure everyone gets the best gifts on special occasions! Though he's also quite protective of his family, especially Roman, he generally tries to be respectful either way. Arthur is also generally suave and charming. He always layers on the charm when his wife is already flustered because the twins had to get it from somewhere. Generally, father-son bonding time is spent with weapons practice, and Arthur will also take nighttime strolls with his sons to help them sort out their thoughts.

Venus is the more passionate out of the two, and she's also the most empathetic. She always knows how best to talk to her sons, and she knows how to calm them down as well. She's quite easily flustered, a trait which was passed on to the twins. She tends towards giving people the benefit of the doubt and isn't as protective as her husband. Venus is also where the creative twins got their creativeivity, often coming up with new stories, worlds, creatures, and characters. Most mother-son bonding time takes the form of some sort of craft, either that or fashion and shopping of some sort.

Both Arthur and Venus are incredibly loving and proud of their sons. They're also the gods of compromise. They can always settle a twin argument no matter what.

Hope you like Remus and Roman's parents! Hope you like them, and I'll see the other thing if it gets there. Now I gotta go! Farewell for now!

Hey, no worries, I saw the ask and knew that I probably wouldn't be able to answer it today. The post was mainly so you knew it wasn't deleted ^^

Also I love these hcs you're sending in! Remus and Roman deserve nice parents fr fr

[typically-untypical]

The Fall of Roman

AU: Canon-ish

CW: Cussing, self-depreciation, minor fight scene

WC: 1631

Date: February 8th 2023

This should have been like any other day; Remus should have woken up, ready to cause chaos and sow the seeds of violence but as he stretched out his neck, something was wrong. He looked down at his usually black outfit, tilting his head to the side as he took in its now grey coloring. The realization hit him all at once as he scrambled out of bed, turning around like a dog chasing its tail as he looked for his emblem. Eventually, he was able to twist the lower half of his body and see that in fact, his emblem had changed. Its usual horror and exuberance were missing, replaced with a muted version, something he expected more from Roman.

"Roman," Remus breathed out, rolling his eyes as he made his way out of his room, waving his hand to change his outfit, but it was spiffy, completely not something he normally would like to wear. "Gross, I'm turning into some prissy hero or something." He said quietly, frowning down at his outfit. Was Roman just in one of his moods or was something else going on here? Remus frowned, making his way to his brother's room. Though his steps were hurried he didn't bother moving about the quick way. It couldn't be that big of a deal with the changes being as subtle as they were, then again, the fact that there were any changes at all was problematic. 

"Remus, where are you going this early in the morning?" Janus asked, looking at him from the kitchen, but Remus didn't stop.

"Light side's."

"Try not to cause too much of a mess."

"No promises."

Remus burst into the common area and immediately knew he should have been more concerned. The room was completely shrouded in shadows, an eerie quiet echoing through the space. On any other day, this would please him, he would be overjoyed with the horror movie vibe, but there was a stirring in his soul, a change trying to force itself upon him. He felt the need to be the hero, to fix the problem to save the day. "Stupid fucking brother, making me be all noble or some shit, I'm going to make him regret this." Remus stalked towards his brother's room where the darkness was heaviest, he summoned his morning star, only to find it was a broadsword instead. "Oh for fucks sake." Remus rolled his eyes, making his way into the room anyway, shaving open the door. He wasn't sure where the other light sides were and honestly, he didn't really care, they weren't his problem. Even if he never wanted to play the hero, Remus also didn't think he was the villain. He didn't mind when he was thrust into that role but he had his own uses, his own purposes and his intentions were to make everyone question their normal. His purpose wasn't to destroy his brother. He also wasn't happy making sure his brother was okay, but he could play the good guy for once. 

Stepping into what should have been a pleasant field filled with flowers. Remus had left in alone whenever he snuck in, mostly because it reminded him of the grass fields they would draw when they were kids, and didn't have much talent. He would never admit how much he loved that field with its stupid basic flowers, but now it was just ash. The green field was a mix of yellow and black, burned from above by something that breathed fire though there were no fires currently remained. How long had Roman been here destroying the things he had worked to build?

As he continued to walk forward, Remus saw houses destroyed, towers toppled and in the distance a castle that certainly belonged more on his side of the imagination than in Roman's. His brother didn't seem to even enjoy or revel in the idea of being a villain, everything was in disrepair. "You are so dramatic." Despite his words, he could feel the worry running through him as he powered through the decay, each step seeming to change his outfit into something more befitting a prince. No, he wasn't the prince, or the hero in this story, the best he was willing to be was the villain that saved the hero, the one who had always been supportive just from the shadows.

"What are you doing here Remus?" His voice was tired, and Roman was sitting on an obsidian throne, clad in black and red. 

"Unfortunately if you are going to play the destitute villain I'm being forced to play the hero, and I'm not about that life."

"No one asked you to play the hero," Roman sounded so defeated, and Remus hated that that sound would ever enter his brother's voice, so he began walking towards his twin, gesturing to his outfit before sitting on the arm rest of his brother's throne.

"Look, we both know that you were always sorted to be the hero and I was sorted to be the villain, and I'm content with that. So, why don't you tell me what has you so wrapped up in your own mind that you've destroyed everything you've built."

For a long time, Roman was silent, almost as if he was trying to stop Remus from being involved, but the more chaotic of the two twins was actually the better at playing the silent game, so he sat and waited until Roman finally broke.

"Remus, get out!" He shouted now, standing from his throne with a sword in his hand. "You have always been happy to play your part, happy to do whatever whims you pleased or fancied, I'm not like that, I didn't have that luxury. I have to fit into a mold!" He swung his sword at his brother but it was lackluster at best. 

Remus was able to easily perry his brother's onslaught of attacks, not moving to reciprocate. Roman had so much frustration built up in him and he so rarely allowed himself to let it out. Sure Roman would insult his favorite movies or even people, and sure he would come up with nicknames but none of that was him really letting loose, really telling off everyone who had hurt him, or just screaming out his pains.

"You don't understand the pressure I'm under to constantly be perfect, to constantly live up to impossible standards of originality and cleverness. You can just exist and that's enough!" Through the anger Remus could see the tears, that was where he would make his move. Waiting for Roman to leave him an opening, Remus charged forward, dropping his weapon as he tackled Roman, clinging to him in a forceful hug. For a moment, Roman was stunned, then came the anger and the yelling.

"Let go of me! Get off!"

Then finally the resignation and the tears, and Remus began to gently rub Roman's back.

"I can't do this. I'm no good at being good, every decision I make is wrong and I don't know what to do anymore."

The brokenness in Roman's voice was awful, and Remus just held his brother, rocking back and forth on his feet. There was a wave that passed between them and he watched as both his sleeves and Roman's began to mute out to the color of ash, a soft grey. So many people thought ash meant death, but it could also mean growth and rebirth. Roman would rise above this, because that's what a hero did.

"You've just hit a stumbling block Ro, you are going through so much shit and don't know how to handle it all, and that's fine, because it's you, you're going to get through it."

"How can you be so certain?" Roman asked, voice shaking. "How can you be sure that I can rise above all of the quagmire and treachery?" He looked down at his own outfits. "How am I going to escape the shades of grey?"

Remus shrugged. "No idea, but I know you can figure it out because that's just who you are. You are Thomas' creativity, builder of the mindscape, creator of the imagination."

"More like destroyer."

Remus frown, gently leading Roman out of the throne room and towards a spire where they could see the kingdom better. It was hard to look at the scene, at the destruction wrought by his brother's hands.

"You aren't the first creator to go postal on your creations, and you won't be the last, hell I do it pretty regularly, but that doesn't matter." 

Roman was sniffling, and Remus continued to hold him, continued to be a support, "Because you remember it, and you can rebuild."

"But... what if I can't? What if I can't take on that position anymore, king, prince, hero? What if they are all lost to me?"

Remus shrugged. "It doesn't matter, because no matter what, I'll be right here by your side. I'll stay with you until the title of "King", "Prince", "Hero", or whatever other bullshit you want to call yourself feels right. I don't care if not a single one of those other idiots stands by your side. I'm your brother, and I'm an asshole, but you will always have me. The world could turn boring and peaceful, all the problems could be solved leaving nothing entertaining to do, and I will still be by your side, because like it or not, that's what siblings do."

Roman wiped his tears away on his white sleeve, standing tall with his shoulders back as he stretched out his hands, ready to create again. "Your motivational speeches need some work." Roman laughed, and his voice still wavered. There were still tears in his eyes.

Nevertheless, with his brother by his side, he persisted.

Tag List: @simplestoryteller @fantasticfangirl21 @joylessnightsky @melaniidarling

[oldkamelle]

I've done this as well but it's such a low ball thing to draw only Remus with the chipped/missing tooth when depicting the creativitwins as kids. They've both broken their teeth. Remus while biting away at a steak like a mad dog and Roman hitting the wall when trying to show how fast he actually is for real.

[fangirltothefullest]

Oh maybe I'm silly but I just realized... Roman was not present for the discussion of intrusive or negative thoughts not being horrible. He was missing from the part of the conversation where they realize Remus is kind of annoying but isn't something Bad or Scary.

Then hes present for Thomas telling Logan he's REALLY cool, and then he told Thomas he had a brother who was everything he didn't want to be and NOBODY told him that's not how it works. Nobody told Roman about this cathartic moment.

Roman still thinks he needs to be what Remus isn't.

And then they go to the wedding and he's miserable and he feels like it was his fault everyone was miserable because he sentenced them and it didn't work out and now he's miserable because his dreams are dashed so Roman can't win either way so he turns to Patton because he needs SOMEONE to tell him he did a good job even if everything sucks.

And then he's told Patton didn't know what was good, that he's hurting Thomas with this decision and Roman MADE that decision.... Roman feels responsible and upset.

And then they sort of gaslight poor Roman because THEY have context and he DOESN'T.........

No wonder he's so upset....

Knowing everything means we have all the context but Roman didn't and Janus distracted them from just asking Lee and Mary-Lee which was why he DELIBERATELY pushed Logan aside because Logan would have absolutely agreed with roman's plan to just TALK to them.

[thegoldenduckie]

Hey guys wanna see my silly angel demon au

I thought itd be a lot of fun to make the light sides demons and dark sides angels

More art and rambling under the cut! Id love it if you looked!

Ok im gonna ramble! Shoutout to @not-sure-what-im-feeling for contributing a lot of ideas and support to this au🫶

Roman Logan and Patton are demons

Virgil Janus and Remus are angels

Roman and Remus are brothers (ofc)

Roman used to be an angel but he fell and is now a fallen angel

The fall hurt :(

Roman then befriends Logan and Patton (or rather patton befriends him and logan warms up to roman)

Janus is a seraphim, and a pretty high ranking angel

Virgils role as an angel is to “deal with” and kill demons

Virgil and roman used to be good friends in heaven, but after romans fall virgil lost all respect for him and tried moving on from whatever friendship they had because hes a demon now and virgil assumes hes a bad guy

Roman still thinks fondly of his friendship with virgil :)

Remus really misses his brother

Theres probably more but i forget rn, if youre curious about anything please ask me id love to talk about this au🙏🙏

[sandersontheside]

AU concept: Remus King is a best-selling but reclusive horror novelist. His twin brother Roman is a struggling actor. When Remus' publisher pressures him to make public appearances to promote his newest book, despite his insistence that he wants to stay out of the public eye, they hatch a scheme. Roman will pose as his brother for all book signings, public speaking appearances, and various other events, and will be paid Remus' fee for those appearances, plus a little extra. Roman doesn't particularly want to pretend to be his brother, but he hasn't had a real acting job in months and a man's gotta eat. Besides, he's known Remus their entire lives, he could play the part in his sleep. What could possibly go wrong? 

(Spoiler alert: a lot.)

Virgil Rayne is Remus King's biggest fan, who comes to a signing, over the moon to finally meet the man behind his favorite stories. Only to have a panic attack in line and be forced to leave before he can meet his hero. Or so he thinks. Because while hiding in the bathroom trying to calm down, who should walk in but the author himself, who proceeds to be surprisingly good at talking Virgil down. Once Virgil calms down, it feels kind of awkward to ask for an autograph, but thankfully Remus offers before he can ask. 

Remus even scribbles his number in the book next to his very poetic message to Virgil.

It takes Virgil a few days to get over his anxiety and text, but he ultimately does because how could he pass up the opportunity to be friends with his favorite author?? So they start texting. A lot. And who knew Remus loved Disney movies? Or did theatre in high school? Or sings Taylor Swift in the shower? Or makes silly puns that Virgil can't help but laugh at? Or has a soft, dreamy, romantic side? Remus King is nothing like Virgil imagined he would be, but it doesn’t matter because before he knows it, Virgil has fallen hard. And sometimes it kinda seems like the feeling is mutual? Remus is certainly flirty, but it's hard to tell if that actually means anything.

And, oh God, Roman is so, so, so fucked. Because Virgil has pretty purple hair and dark mysterious eyes and a cute laugh, and short circuited his brain so much when they first met that he didn’t even think before writing his number down. Roman is now totally head over heels for Virgil Rayne.

Virgil, who thinks he’s his brother.  

(Remus is laughing his ass off at this whole sorry situation)

[priniya]

requests guidelines ⭐️

hello everyone! after a year (and a half?) i’ve finally got to myself to show all the things i could write for. it’s gonna be updated regularly as soon as i obsess over something new.

so . . .

i’m not sure if i’m a good person to write smut so… request if u want, but might take a long time before i post it! (i haven’t really written anything smut related so that might be bad)

please, if you request something, write a small blurb of what you’ll like to read!

i mainly write for a female reader with she/her pronouns and all that, but i’m up for gender neutral as well if you feel like it :)

i might add sth here if i think of it, but the most important part is who do i write for. bold stands for my favs, italics is like… second fav, i guess!

✩ harry potter — slytherin boys (theodore nott, mattheo riddle, lorenzo berkshire, draco malfoy + pansy parkinson and daphne greengrass), marauders (james potter, sirius black, remus lupin, regulus black, evan rosier, barty crouch jr.), golden era (harry potter, ron weasley, cedric diggory, weasley twins, ginny weasley).

✩ percy jackson — greek demigods (percy jackson, leo valdez, annabeth chase, luke castellan, grover underwood, hood brothers, clarisse la rue, piper mclean), roman demigods (frank zhang, jason grace, hazel lavasque).

✩ books — the inheritance games (jameson hawthorne, grayson hawthorne, xander hawthorne, avery kylie grambs, thea laughlin), a good girl’s guide to murder (pippa fitz-amobi, ravi singh), hockey boyfriends (nate hawkins, garret graham, john logan, dean di laurenti, john tucker, hunter davenport, henry turner, russ callaghan)

✩ miscellaneous series — jenny han universes (conrad fisher, peter kavinsky, kitty song covey, cam cameron, steven conklin, minho), criminal minds (spencer reid, aaron hotchner, jennifer jareau, derek morgan), outer banks (jj maybank, pope heyward, rafe cameron), my life with the walter boys (alex walter, cole walter, isaac garcia, kailey)

✩ anime — haikyuu (kageyama, tsukishima, osamu, atsumu, suna, oikawa, bokuto, akaashi, kuroo, kenma, semi + the rest😭).

✩ people i don’t know how to classify — zuko + sokka, steve harrington, matthew gray gubler, drew starkey, louis partridge, timothee chalamet, peter parker, nct members.

if you don’t see someone, just ask! there’s a high chance i just forgot about them xx

[let-roman-bite-someone]

i know i've said this before but i'm so tired of people acting like Patton is the general embodiment of morality. as if he is the personification of the legal justice system and everything he does must be good and fair™.

folks, Patton is Thomas's morality. remember what Virgil said in the Q&A episode?

this applies to all of the sides. every single one of them.

Remus wouldn't be the same for everyone, different people have different types of intrusive thoughts. Logan wouldn't be the same for everyone, different people have had different levels of education, different forms of intelligence and different applications of logic.

but the funny thing is, i never see people criticize the other sides for being too representative of their title. they don't reprimand Virgil for making Thomas anxious because that's his job. they don't bash Roman for being a perfectionist. but for some reason, people expect Patton to be a saint who does no wrong.

it's emphasized so clearly in multiple episodes that the sides are the result of Thomas's upbringing specifically. Patton is simply the moral code that Thomas's parents and on a larger scale, society, had taught him.

“Patton was so accepting of Virgil but he couldn't accept Remus or Janus!”

yeah. because it's easier to deal with anxiety than it is to deal with intrusive thoughts. don't get me wrong, anxiety is definitely a serious issue. but Thomas's anxiety never went directly against his morals, if anything, Virgil's perspective aligned very much with Patton's. being anxious about say embarrassing yourself in public or not getting your work done in time is not as morally concerning as having thoughts about murdering your brother.

but Thomas, like many of us, grew up with no one to tell him what intrusive thoughts are or how to deal with them. when Patton was chastising Thomas for having these thoughts, that's just Thomas beating himself up over something he can't control.

the same goes for Janus. Patton had a hard time accepting Janus because Thomas had learned to always be selfless since when he was younger, and Janus was challenging that point of view. when Patton was pushing Thomas to be selfless, that's just Thomas pushing himself and feeling guilty at the thought of focusing on his own needs.

i feel like people think that Patton is actually Thomas's father figure or something. i understand if he reminds you of someone toxic in your life and it can be uncomfortable to watch. but while it's good to relate to the media you are consuming, it's also important to view things in context.

Patton is not a person, he's not an individual who has the freewill to do what he wants. he is only Thomas's morality and what his morals are heavily depends on what Thomas was taught and how he was raised.

Patton cannot control the morals that Thomas had learned. he can only try to implement them in Thomas's life and unless Thomas himself decides to unlearn some of the unhealthy ideals that he has internalized, Patton cannot go against his nature. he can only do what he has been programmed to do, with the knowledge that he has.

[halfhissandwich]

This is what your favorite sanders sides ship says about you. (This isn’t serious, lol)

Karrot Kings: Your priority is keeping things wholesome, uncontroversial and most likely canon.

Thomas x any side: You will NOT explain how it works, you just make the fanart and have fun with it.

Nico x any side: You like Karrot Kings, but a bit less healthy.

DRLAMP: You will scramble to explain that Roman and Remus are platonic. It’s okay, buddy, we know.

Logicality: You’ve been in the fandom for a long time.

Logince: Your ideal relationship dynamic is not enemies to lovers. It’s enemies AND lovers.

Analogical: Your ideal relationship dynamic is two people with common sense being put up with everyone else’s nonsense.

Loceit: The same joke as analogical, plus alcohol.

Intrulogical: You’re a firm believer in the power of triggering your boyfriend’s anger issues for funsies.

Royality; Your ideal relationship dynamic is best friends to lovers engaged in wacky hijinks.

Moxiety: You want good things for Virgil.

Moceit; Your ideal relationship dynamic is two dads realizing that instead of fighting for custody, they could just get married.

Intruality: Your ideal relationship dynamic is “hi daddy x oh my god how did you get in my house”

Prinxiety: You enjoy the dynamic of two boyfriends talking crap about their enemies.

Roceit: You like the idea of prinxiety, but you like angst even more.

Remrom: You think that since they’re all the same person anyway, it’s not as weird if they call each other brother. It’s still weird. Go take a shower and reflect.

Anxceit: Your ideal relationship dynamic is stalking your ex.

Dukexiety: Your ideal relationship dynamic is stalking.

Dukeceit: Your ideal relationship dynamic is best friends to lovers engaged in wacky hijinks, but like in an Disney villain way.

Loyality (L x P x Ro): You wanted to ship all the light sides, or you shipped Royality and wanted them to annoy Logan.

Analogince (L x V x Ro): You’re a firm believer in the power of two boyfriends with common sense babysitting their boyfriend who lacks common sense.

Royaliceit (Ro x P x J): You don’t understand why all the ship wars exist when Janus has two hands. Technically six.

Intruloceit (Re x L x J): You want Logan to join the dark sides.

Intruloceitxiety (Re x V x J x L): You want Logan to join the dark sides, but you want him to hesitate.

Intrumoceit (Re x J x P); You like the idea of Intruloceit, but you like Patton even more.

Intruanxceit (Re x V x J): You either wanted to ship the dark sides or you’re just… really sad.

Royalixiety (P x V x Ro): Your interest in shipping Loyality is outweighed by you wanting good things for Virgil.

Logicaliceit (J x P x L): You REALLY want good things for Patton.

(Might add to this later by request lol)

[inthenameofallthingsholy]

SO THE LATEST SANDER ASIDES

Being a multishipper watching this video was like eating to much chocolate istg i feel sick but in a good way oml I needed to take a lap around the room

Janus and Remus acting like a married couple!!!

Janus getting Patton an adorable gift!!!

Roman and Virgil agreeing on their distrust of Janus and Remus and acting like an opposing married couple like their Remus and Janus’s Inlaws which since Rem and Rom are brother they sortof ARE INLAWS!!!

Virgil fucking GROWLING at Janus insulting Roman!!!!!

Virgil’s thoughtful grift to Logan!!! (I ship them more as platonic besties but i wouldn’t be unhappy if they were canon)

N I C O A P P E A R A N C E

Thomas nearly telling Nico how he feels!!!!! And from just a basic plot standpoint: JANUS AND REMUS ENCOURAGING LOGAN TO TAP INTO HIS RAGE!!!!

[spoondoodles]

I HAVE BEEN CONVINCED OF THE LOGINCE AGENDA

[nb-octopus-writes]

once you’re in the hive, the other bees assume you’re supposed to be there

[Masterpost]

Chapter 4: Second Morning

wordcount: 1.9K

~~~~

The next morning, Virgil wakes not to birdsong, but to the sound of his alarm.

Blech, mornings. Morning jobs are evil and should be abolished.

Virgil reaches for his phone, but it isn't on the nightstand where it's supposed to be. The nightstand isn't on the floor where it's supposed to be. Virgil reaches out further, searching, and overbalances.

He falls.

This is going to hurt.

Virgil lands, and the floor is a lot closer than it's supposed to be, and also a lot cleaner. The wind is still knocked out of him, but he didn’t land on anything but carpet. It's carpet that was recently vacuumed, even, judging by the lack of dusty smell.

Too many things are not how they are supposed to be. Virgil opens his eyes and looks around.

This isn't his bedroom.

The alarm is still going off. Virgil spots his phone on the floor near him, and he turns off the alarm.

This isn't his bedroom. Virgil yawns. He'd been sleeping on a couch, but it wasn't his couch, either.

Oh, yeah. He'd fallen asleep at Remus's brother's house again. Oops.

…

He has work.

He hadn't meant to still be here right now. He's supposed to be in his own bed, in his own tiny apartment, sleepily snoozing his alarm. Not here.

He'll have to figure out a different bus route. Does the bus even go by here? He's pulling up the bus schedule when his phone informs him that it has been way too long since he plugged it in, and fucking dies.

“Fuck,” Virgil whispers, with feeling, and then again, a little louder, “Fuck!”

He scrambles off the floor, trying to think. An adrenaline spike does wonders for chasing the sleep-fog out of his brain, but it doesn't usher in logic.

Deep breath. Okay. What does he need?

He needs to get to work on time.

Breathe.

What are his obstacles, and what can he do about them?

Problem: He's not home to catch the bus. Solution: Catch the bus from here. Problem: He doesn't know if the bus goes by here or which one or when or what connections he'd need to make. Solution: Look it up. Problem: His phone is dead. Solution: Plug it in. Problem: No charger. Solution: …

Solution: …

Solution: Ask for fucking help.

Virgil spins and leaves the room. They might not have a charger that'll fit his phone, and it would take too long to get it to a level where he can actually look anything up anyway, but they can at least tell him if there's a bus stop nearby. They might even be willing to look up connections for him.

Luckily for Virgil, his hosts are all in the dining room when he bursts in.

“Good morning,” Calico says, already looking concerned. “What's wrong?”

“Is there a bus?” Virgil asks.

“A what?”

“A bus,” Virgil repeats. “A bus, does a bus go by here? I have work, I'm going to be late, and I can't look up the bus schedule because my phone is dead!”

“Hey, hey, it's okay,” Calico says soothingly, and Virgil wants to scream because it is not okay, he's going to be late for work. He doesn't scream, because that would not be helpful and Calico is just trying to be nice, but he wants to. “Roman can drive you. Right, Roman?”

“Absolutely,” says Princey, whose name is apparently Roman, and gets up. “I'll get my keys.”

Calico portions out some omelette from the pan in the middle of the table, and gives it to Virgil. “Here, eat,” he insists. “You slept through dinner, you shouldn't miss breakfast too.”

Virgil scarfs it mechanically. If Princey is going to drive him, he probably has enough time to eat, but the lingering edges of panic tell him not to waste any time savoring the flavors.

“Do you have any things you need to gather before you go?” Nerdbot asks. Virgil shakes his head.

Well. “My pool noodles I guess,” he says. He probably shouldn't just leave those here for them to clean up. Nerdbot nods and leaves the table as well.

Roman comes back as Virgil finishes the plate of omelette. “Ready to go?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

Nerdbot hands Virgil the pool noodles, and Calico hands him a buttered bagel. “Eat it on the way,” he says. Princey leads Virgil out to the garage, and they get in his car.

It's red, and fancy-shaped, with a swoopy silhouette instead of what Virgil considers the car default.

Roman hands Virgil his phone once he's buckled, open to the map app, and starts to back out of the garage.

Virgil hesitates. “Can we stop at my place first?” he asks. “I could really use a change of clothes.” He'd really rather not go to work in a Halloween costume he's been wearing for over thirty-six hours.

“Sure,” Princey says. “Which way?”

Virgil puts in his address, and the phone gives him directions. “Left,” he says, the tight band of anxiety finally loosing from around his lungs. It's not entirely gone yet, and won't be until he clocks in, but he's doing better. Princey pulls out of the driveway, and they're off.

Soon, they're pulling up in front of Virgil’s apartment. He'd managed to eat the bagel and navigate at the same time, and they've arrived a bit before Virgil is usually out the door. He really might make it to work on time.

“I'll wait here while you run up and get changed,” Roman says, and Virgil nods. He shifts the pool noodles so he's holding them with the same arm as the phone, and uses his other hand to open the car door.

He dashes up the stairs, unlocks his door at the speed of fright, and dumps his armload on his bed. Virgil strips quickly, and grabs his apron and the first set of clean clothes he sees. He wishes there was time for a shower, but there really isn't. Even if there was, he isn't about to make Princey wait that long for him.

He smears some black eyeshadow on to hide the tired bags under his eyes, grabs his necessities from his previous pockets, and he's back out the door.

“Very fast,” Princey compliments as Virgil rejoins him. “I saw a bus go by.”

“Yeah, that was my usual ride to work,” Virgil says, buckling up. “We can take a more direct route and beat them there. Head out the way you came in, and then take a right at the light.”

They do, in fact, beat the bus there. Virgil heaves a sigh of relief.

“Thanks, man,” he says. “I owe you my life. Do you want some coffee? I can give you my employee discount.”

Roman smiles at him. “I would love some coffee,” he says, and turns off the engine.

There aren't any other customers in line when they go in, just Jayden behind the register.

“Morning, Sunshine,” he greets. Virgil rolls his eyes and comes round to clock in.

“Oh my gosh I love your hair,” Roman enthuses. “That is absolutely gorgeous, did you do it yourself?”

Jay's hair is gorgeous. It's mostly dyed in deep shades of blue, with a few streaks of greens and purples and the natural black. He has it in at least fifty slender box braids, which today are tied back in a loose plait running down his back. 

“Oh, no, my friends and I had a styling party,” he answers, which is the short version of the truth he uses for casual conversation with customers—especially white customers. Virgil happens to know that said styling party had been stretched out over more than a week, working their hair in increments so as not to damage it. Virgil had been invited to a few of the sessions, and is responsible for several of Jayden's braids, and some of the color.

“That is a fabulous idea; I should arrange one the next time I dye my hair,” Princey exclaims. “I've been planning to do it in every color of the rainbow!”

“Nice,” Virgil says. Princey's ear-length hair is currently what appears to be a natural brown, with reddish tips. “Stripes running front to back or side to side?”

“You know, I hadn't considered that part,” Princey says, and Virgil laughs. “What do you think?”

Virgil shrugs, and Jay considers Roman.

“Front to back, with the red on top and purple over your ears,” he says. “Perhaps with the red a bit off-center so the stripes are different sizes. That way if it’s not perfect it'll look intentional.”

Roman grins. “I like you,” he declares. “Do you want to come to my styling party?”

Jayden grins back. “Let me know when you plan it and I'll check my calendar.”

“Have you ever dyed your hair?” Roman asks Virgil, whose hair is in fact currently dyed.

“Uh, yeah,” he says, then admits, “I'm actually blond.”

“You're blond!?” Princey cries. “Oh, that is unfair, Gerard Gay! Please trade with me, I beg of you!”

“Why?” Virgil asks.

“Because then I wouldn't have to bleach!” Roman says. “I could redye my hair as soon as the roots grew out, rather than having to wait until enough has grown that I can bleach it without touching the last dye job!”

“Well, unfortunately I don't know how to trade hair colors,” Virgil says. “I think it's genetic.”

Roman groans dramatically, slumping against the counter. “The world is against me,” he complains into the glass. “You wouldn't even miss it, you dye it black! Brown is as easy to make black as blond! Easier, probably!”

Virgil reaches over and pats him sarcastically on the shoulder. “There, there,” he says. “Would coffee make you feel better?” That is why they'd come in here, after all.

“No,” Roman says grumpily, but he straightens and looks at the menu.

“Give him my discount,” Virgil says to Jayden while Roman decides. Jay flashes him a thumbs-up.

“Are the chocolate croissants good?” Roman asks.

“Not as good as what you're served at home, but yeah.”

“Hmmm.” He considers a bit longer, then orders a croissant and, with a decent amount of dithering over flavors, three coffees to go.

Jayden tells him the total and Roman pays, dropping his change and some extra bills into the tip jar. Virgil passes him the croissant, and he eats it while Virgil finishes making the coffee.

“You want a carrier for these?” Virgil asks, already putting them in one. Roman's only got two hands, after all.

“Probably best,” Roman agrees, and Virgil slides the coffee over to him. “Do you need a ride home after work?”

“Nah, I'll take the bus,” Virgil reassures him.

“Alright, if you're sure. See you later!” Princey balances the coffees in one hand so he can wave with the other, and he's off.

“So,” Jay says once the door closes behind him. “Where'd you get the suave edition of your trash rat?”

“Two-for-one special,” Virgil says. “Met him at a Halloween party Remus dragged me to.”

“Well, keep him.” Jayden nods toward the door. “Man just tipped us double what I charged him.”

~~~~

Chapter 5: The Most Accidental of Thefts

[padfootscoldleathers]

ladies, gents, bents, non-conformants!

welcome welcome one and all to me posting about my fic and welcome to my mailbox if you want to send me stuff you'd like to see in the fic (i will consider them even if they dont make it to the fic)

this is a band au for the marauders era BUT the original marauders are not the band. let me explain.

Band: Sirius, Peter, Marlene, Dorcas (no band name yet so shoot your shot if you want to)

the marauders era characters have a LOT of different roles here. Regulus and Pandora are dancers, Mary and Peter grew up together & met Remus in highschool in America and did music but now Mary and Remus are somewhat duo singers. (i made Remus southern you'll get why in the fic) Alice is kind of an enigma but we'll get to know her. I'll show you all her colours i promise. Evan manages Mary and Remus and has such a goofy big brother personality. MINERVA the queen that she is, is basically the band's mother/manager. fluffy black brothers!! oh, and andromeda is dead.

i know what you're thinking "where the fuck is james?? lily?? barty??" hehe WELL you're not gonna like this. lily is the villain here and not in a good way. it was a VERY toxic marylily and lily is the Casual girl (chappell roan) ANYWAAAY you're gonna see a LOT of that BUT she does have her redemption arc. i think. maybe.

barty broke up with sirius 2 months before the beginning of the fic (which starts on their american tour at the last couple concerts) they grew up together, its very bittersweet, might give you heartburn. AGAIN redemption arc, they do have a heart-to-heart.

and uhh james is a very happy very sudden very scandalous surprise

ch. 1

this fic in short is the band through their last leg of the american tour when mary flies out early and sirius asks her to join them for the rest of the tour and the european tour in a couple months. mary and sirius hold each other up through harsh breakups and slowly find new love. the marauders era do a lot of dumb shit make a lot of memories. exes come back and get dragged out, maybe-soulmates enter their lives and life happens all at once. but theyre still just kids and they have a lot of laughs

don't worry guys, every couple shall get their minute of fame

basically the journey (and reflective of a couple of characters) of their life together. they find love, they find FRIENDSHIP, they find beauty in the little things, they find laughter and peace and passion. this entire fic for me was to discover all the little things, the day to day things that makes life what it is: beautiful. it's filled with jokes and family and bittersweet memories. its those moments you want to remember when you're old in your rocking chair or young on a porch swing. its all the little bright places.

ships & sexualities (let me cook)

alice - aroace bi

peter - aroace bi

mary - lesbian

pandora - pansexual

remus - bisexual

sirius - the gayest man to ever gay

regulus - transmasc gay

james - demispec pansexual

dorcas - lesbian

marlene - demisexual lesbian

lily - "not a lesbian"

barty - aroallo, gay

evan - transmasc bisexual

mary x pandora = bitterhope/pandamary/ rosemary (my roman empire)

peter x alice = palice (most beautiful qpr to ever qpr in the marauders era)

sirius x remus = wolfstar

regulus x james = sunseeker

dorcas x marlene = dorlene (they need something cooler)

evan x barty = rosekiller (gonna happen eventually though i kinda just dunno how)

i'm going to post in snips on this blog until i figure out the ao3 tags etc. main blog: @morallyundefined

@moonyswarmsweaters @sspadfoot @thingthatoncewastruee @babygirlsteddie @probs-reading

@labyrinthhofmymind @percabeth-trash @drunktayloratthevmas @cheekyboybeth

@starving-marauder-lover @yourlocalbadgerscales @taleofapart-timepoet @mirrs-ball

@tea-blankets-andstars @where-is-vivian @amberlink @wastingawayinmyroom @ashes-to-ashesxx

@equippedtolove @moon-girl88 @starregulus @siriusly-insane @jamespotterbbg

[a-small-batch-of-dragons]

Gross

Fic Idea (no pressure obviously) Thomas struggling with his self image and ego, and in response Roman ends shapeshifting all the time, fluctuating between the masculine beauty standard (lean, muscular, hairless) and what society considers “ugly” (pudgy, hairy). And based on how he looks, Roman will interact with the others or hide away – anon

hihi!! had this random idea for a sanders sides fic- something along the lines of- a while after Remus and Roman split, Remus comes back (when the dark sides start to get more involved) and confesses that he hoped Roman was doing better after he joined the light sides? that all he wanted was for his brother to be happy, away from the darkness for once? angst sadness ykyk :)) – can-you-hear-me-axhilles

hi, so I just read your wings series and I was wondering if we could have something with Remus and his tentacles? Like maybe him thinking they are ugly or something, I’m not really sure. Maybe Roman has animal characteristics too and they’re “prettier” or “better” so he gets insecure? Mainly focused on these two but I don’t mind if it’s all of them together. No pressure to write this tho! – anon

I’ve been reading your Sanders Sides stuff for the longest time and I was wondering if I could get some Roman angst with a side of creativitwins? – meandmacats

Read on Ao3

Warnings: non-consensual body modification, self-esteem issues, self-hatred

Pairings: gen

Word Count: 5481

Or, five times Remus helped Roman out when Thomas's self-esteem issues change his nature, and one time Roman helps Remus.

 

”Remus?”

Remus looks up from his knitting to see Patton standing over him. “What’s good, Pat-Pat?”

“I’m, what’re you doing?”

“Oh, I’m knitting this patchwork sweater out of hair.”

“Oh…how cool.” Patton gives himself a shake. “Anyway, I was wondering if you’ve seen Roman? He was supposed to come down for lunch but he never showed.”

“Like, at all, at all?”

“Yeah. Neither hair nor hide! Or—well, I guess he did do the hide since he’s hiding from us, and you’re the hair!”

“Ah, Pat-Pat, never stop with the dad jokes. You’ll make all of us go into pun-withdrawal.” Remus carefully sets aside the needles and bounces to his feet. “I’ll go look for him, see if he needs to be pried out of the dragon’s gullet again.”

“Oh, thanks so much, Remus, I really—wait, ‘again?’”

“Gotta blast!”

Honestly, it’s not like Roro is known for missing deadlines, that’s Remus’s thing. Especially when it comes to things like meals and remembering to eat—well, Ro’s not exactly the pinnacle of healthy practices when he get absorbed in his work, but he’s better at it than some people give him credit for. Which means he’s either deep in the middle of something he’s keeping to himself, he’s asleep because the time zones in the Imagination are all kinds of wackadoo, or he really does need to be rescued.

Which isn’t Remus’s thing, come on, Ro, you’re ruining his reputation.

By the time he gets to the Imagination, he’s already pulling out his acid-proof gloves and sharpening his Morningstar. He stops dead, however, when he sees the doors are still locked from last night. That’s weird. Maybe Ro just used his personal gate instead of the main one? But that just takes him right to his little workshop area, that’s not anywhere near where the dragons are…

He’s about to go for his gateway when he hears a quiet noise coming from Roman’s door. Frowning, he turns. Roman’s door is only a few feet away. He glances up and down the hall to make sure none of the resident sneaks are nearby—Janus and Virgil—and knocks on the door.

“Uh, busy!”

“Ro, it’s me.”

“Oh. Did you, um, did you need something?”

“You weren’t at lunch. Pat-Pat’s getting worried.”

He hears a muffled curse and the door glimmers slightly. That’s Roman’s cue that he can sink in. He stows the acid gloves and the Morningstar and sinks in, expecting Roman at his desk or on the floor puzzling over some bit of a story he can’t quite get right, but instead he sees an empty room.

“Where are you?”

“Bathroom.”

Remus pops his head through the door and blinks. “Whoa.”

”Yeah, yeah,” Roman mumbles, already reaching for the bandages curled up on the counter, “you don’t have to say it.”

”That looks—“

“I said you don’t have to say it.”

Remus slams his mouth shut, but he can’t stop staring at the acne. Throbbing red pimples that look like they’re causing Roman pain every time he so much as breathes, bigger whiteheads that have already started to ooze, blackheads that litter every inch of skin that isn’t already covered, some of which look like they’re almost on top of each other…

Roman turns his back on him and hunches his shoulders. “What do you want, Re?”

“I, uh…well, now I want to help.”

Roman laughs. It’s not funny. “There isn’t any helping this. Not until Thomas feels better.”

“Whoa. Back up. What?”

“This.” He waves a hand at his face. “This is a thing, remember?”

“Oh. Oh, right, fuck.”

“Yeah.”

Remus scrubs a hand over his face. “Can I help make it less painful while it’s going on?”

There’s a pause. Then Roman’s head turns slightly. “Would you?”

“Shit, yeah,. Roro. You’ve helped me with stuff more times than I can count on my fingers and toes, let me help you.” He gets a small huff that might be an actual that-was-kind-of-funny-I’m-feeling-better laugh. “Yeah?”

“…yeah, okay.”

“Wonder-bats! Okay, I think I still have that stuff from when we had those sores from the poison experiments…where did I put that?”

“Did you leave it in your room or my room?”

”We cleaned up here, so it should be…aha!” He takes a big plastic case from under the sink. “Go sit your perky butt on the edge of the tub, I’ll be right there.”

“…thanks, Remus.”

“What’re brothers for?”

2.

The very first time it had happened, it had been well before Thomas had learned what it was to be attractive.

Remus had found Roman crying in his room, curled up under all the blankets he could find with tissues covering the floor.

“Ro-bro? What happened? Do I need to fight someone for you?”

“It won’t come off!”

“What won’t come off?”

Roman had peered out from under the blanket cocoon and Remus’s mouth had dropped open when he saw the words FREAK and LOSER written all across Roman’s face in permanent marker.

“Who did that? Was it Virgil? I’ll fight him!”

“No,” Roman had sniffled, “it wasn’t—wasn’t Virgil. It wasn’t any of them.”

“Did you do it? That’s more my kinda thing, isn’t it?”

“No!” Roman had wailed. “I didn’t do it! Someone—someone hurt Thomas!”

“Someone hurt Thomas? But nothing happened! We didn’t get into any fights!”

“Not like that! They were just mean. They were really mean and they said he looked ugly and they called him a f-freak and a loser and—and—“

Remus had scurried forward and wrapped his brother in a hug as he broke down in tears. “You’re not a freak or a loser, Roro. Neither is Thomas. They were wrong, you know that, right?”

”Then why won’t it come off?”

Sure enough, up close, Remus had seen the red and raw skin where Roman had scrubbed it with whatever he could find to make the words go away. Bits were even coming off on the blanket as Roman rubbed his cheek against it.

”Hey, hey, stop that. You’re hurting yourself.”

“I don’t care.”

“I care! I don’t like seeing my brother hurt!” Remus had given him a shake. “You don’t have to hurt yourself more on top of this, okay? Come on, come into the bathroom, I’ll help you.”

“Y-you will?”

“Yeah, Roro, come on.”

The twins had gone to the bathroom where towels and washcloths were still strewn around from Roman’s previous attempts. Remus had made Roman sit on the stool and reached for the soap, getting one of the washcloth more suds than cloth and trying to wipe off the words.

“That tastes so bad.”

“So keep your mouth shut.”

“But you keep wiping it over my mouth!”

“No, I’m wiping it over your cheek, which is next to your mouth. And you talking isn’t making it any better, so shush.”

Roman had grumbled silently until Remus accidentally went too roughly over one of the sore spots and Roman yelped.

“Ow!”

“Sorry, I’m sorry,. I didn’t mean to.”

“Wash it off! Wash it off!”

“Okay, okay! Come here!”

They had stumbled over to the sink and Remus practically shoved Roman’s head under the tap. He had spluttered and flailed out, splashing Remus.

”Hey! Don’t splash me!”

“I’ll splash you all I want!”

“No, you won’t!”

“Yeah, I will!”

It had…devolved from there.

The bathroom had been sopping wet by the end of it, not a towel nor tile had been spared from the twin’s water war. Their clothes were just as soaked, their hair dripping like they’d just walked through a hurricane. The sink and the bathtub still ran as if nothing were wrong and the detachable shower head in Remus’s hand sprayed as merrily as ever.

”Whoa, hey!”

“What?”

“It’s gone!”

Roman had run to the mirror, touching his face. Sure enough, the words had vanished.

”It is gone!”

”You’re welcome,” and he had taken a big bow with the shower head still spraying everywhere, “I think that means I win.”

“Whoa, wait, no, it doesn’t.”

“Yes, it does.”

”No!”

“Yes!”

It took a while longer for the war to end and even longer for the bathroom to dry.

3.

Someone says Thomas eats too much junk food and Roman can’t stop dripping oil.

Remus finds him sitting on his bathroom floor, the drain in the shower covered with a towel. He’s sitting on towels too, towels soaked and heavy with oil as Roman’s tears fight to get out from his eyes and through the slick covering his skin.

“The others are worried,” he says quietly, lingering in the doorway, “they want to know what’s wrong.”

Roman doesn’t say anything. Remus peers a little closer and sees the telltale sheen over his mouth too. Even just thinking about how it must feel to have that much oil on his lips makes Remus shudder. He summons a washcloth from his own stash and a bottle of soap.

“Just like old times,” he says as he crouches down in front of him, “I’m gonna wash off the oil on your face, okay?”

Roman manages a small nod and Remus gets to work. Normally when he’s washing oil off stuff, he scrubs at it like he’s trying to grind it with sandpaper and the soap foams up around his wrist. But this is Roman, not some metal piece of equipment, so he goes as gently as he can without suffocating him with soap or making no progress at all. He has to stop a few times when Roman lets out a pained noise or winces at the rasp of the cloth, just holding a blotting sheet there to soak up the oil as best he can while he waits for him to settle. He makes a note to work on the heavy duty blotters in case something like this ever happens again.

At last, when Roman looks like he’s about to cry for a very different reason, the space around his lips and nose is clear enough for him to gasp out a few words.

“Sorry, thank you, sorry—“

”Shh-shh, Roro, you don’t need to apologize. Just tell me what you need.”

”’S so gross.”

“I know, I know. I’m sorry. I’m right here.”

Roman lets out a frustrated whine and Remus quickly pulls out his phone.

“If you tell me what Thomas needs to stop thinking about I can get Lolo on it.”

“No, then he’ll—“

“I’m not gonna tell him what’s wrong with you, okay? I’m just gonna prod them into getting Thomathy’s brain on the right track away from whatever-the-fuck-this-is-station.”

More oil starts to build up and he shoves his phone in his pocket, working on washing it away again. His presence seems to have calmed Roman down a bit; the oil comes in smaller waves this time, concentrated more around the naturally oily parts of his face rather than every inch of his skin. When he’s cleaned off the areas around his nose and mouth, he goes and starts moving to the rest of his head.

“Junk food,” Roman mumbles, as if saying it too loud would make the oil return with a vengeance, “saying bad stuff ‘bout Thomas…unhealthy…gross…”

Remus whips out his phone and sends a text to Logan about food not having a moral weight and how eating something was always better than eating nothing. He gets a text back a few seconds later that just says on it.

“Lolo cavalry is assembled, he’s going.” He tucks the phone away and keeps washing Roman off. “And I’m gonna stay right here until we get all this oil off you, okay? We can even do your thirteen-step skin care routine once it’s gone.”

“It’s not thirteen steps.”

“Whatever you wanna tell me, Roro, at least you’re not as bad as Snakey.”

It’s the first time Roman manages to laugh that day, and Remus makes sure it isn’t the last.

4.

When Patton and Logan have near simultaneous nervous breakdowns after someone calls Thomas lazy, Remus makes sure Virgil’s wrapped around the Mindscape’s padre and Janus has Logan in his little snake den before he goes off in search of Roman.

The Imagination door is covered in cobwebs that retreat as he approaches, a few spiders waving hello as they disappear. He runs his hand over the keyhole, checking to see if it’s just an affectation, or if Roman really hasn’t been using it. He knows he has, is the thing; Roman’s had more projects on the go this month than he’s ever had before and if it weren’t for Janus and Logan dragging him out of it to make sure he didn’t completely lose touch with the Mindscape, he bets his left barnacle that Roman would’ve been living there too just so he wouldn’t miss an opportunity to keep working. And sure enough, the keyhole glows red as soon as his fingers brush it and he carefully pushes the door open.

He walks into the most statistically average middle class sitcom home he’s ever seen. Needless to say, he hates it.

”Ro? Are you here?”

There’s a faint noise coming from what he guesses is the direction of the living room and listen, as little time as he has to spend in this painfully mediocre place, the better. Seriously, he can feel the whispers of white picket fences and PTA meetings lingering ominously over his shoulder with every second he walks through these beige walls. Snatches of TV dialogue becomes audible as he makes his way through the house.

He comes to a stop.

He tilts his head.

There’s certainly a person in the living room, but it doesn’t really look like Roman. They look like every Sunday cartoon about a husband and wife where it’s terribly misogynistic and heteronormative, recliner out, bag of chips in lap, staring vacantly at the TV. It’s only the fact that they’re crying at the paid advertising programs and that Remus would recognize his brother anywhere that he knows it’s Roman.

He sits down on the plastic covered couch and tries not to look at the soulless photos of smiling families perched on the dusty mantle. Roman doesn’t look away from the screen but the hand nearest Remus twitches slightly.

“Hey,” he calls, and Roman’s head turns a little, “hey, Roro. I’m here. It’s gonna be okay. You’re gonna be okay.”

The TV blares something about a crockpot that cooks fancier meals than a normal crock pot.

“I know how shitty it is when people accuse you of being lazy. Especially when they’re just complaining that they haven’t seen anything from you.” He shuffles and the couch squeaks. “And we all know how hard you’re working. How hard Thomas is working.”

Roman’s eyes flick to his. Remus smiles and takes his hand, giving it an encouraging squeeze.

“Giving yourself a break isn’t being lazy. Having a hard time doing things isn’t lazy. Not being able to work on something because it’s just covered in the fucking ooze isn’t being lazy. You aren’t being lazy, okay? You wouldn’t even be lazy if you decided you didn’t want to work on any projects for the next year.”

The TV glitches out. Static fills the room and it actually feels like Remus can breathe. He squeezes Roman’s hand again and shifts closer. Roman stares at him with wide eyes.

”I mean it, Roro. You’re not—I know we’ve gone over this and I’ll keep giving you crowbars for as long as you need them—“

The smallest smile appears on Roman’s face.

“—but you’re not—your worth isn’t in what products or content you can make. You know i love you because you’re my brother, because you’re funny and clever and ridiculous and there’s no one I’d rather make stuff with. You could decide that you don’t want anything to do with Thomas’s career anymore—“

Roman makes a devastated noise.

“Calm down, calm down, I know that’s not true, I’m just spouting a wild hypothetical, okay? If you decided to do that and I made sure it was really you and you hadn’t lost some sort of bet, then yeah, I’d still want you to be my brother. We’d still do stuff. I don’t give a shit what everyone else thinks.”

”…promise?”

Remus could sob with relief at actually hearing Roman’s voice come out, and he grins so wide his cheeks start to hurt. “I promise, Roro, I promise. You’re not lazy, you’re resting, and even if you were, I wouldn’t care.”

‘’M not trying to be lazy. It’s—I’m just—“

“Shh, shh, Roro, it’s okay,” The bag of chips falls to the ground and catches fire as Remus tugs his brother into his arms. “I’m right here. You’re doing so good, okay? Thomas is too.”

Remus doesn’t burn the house down because he’s had too many lectures from Janus about that, but he does get a big cartoon wrecking ball to smash the whole thing into smithereens.

He does burn the recliner though. And the plastic-covered couch. They deserved it.

5.

The latex gloves snap on as Roman sits on the edge of the tub with a grunt. He picks up the rest of the kit and sets it on the stool.

”Do you know what it’s about this time?”

“Someone said something about how immature Thomas is being about criticism and how he can’t take care of things, something like that.”

“Why did it manifest as acne, then?”

”I don’t know, maybe something about how teenagers who are hormonal and don’t really know how to take care of their skin get acne?”

Remus snorts. “Do people still not understand that acne happens and can happen to anyone regardless of age?”

‘Apparently not.”

“Well, they can go lick the Kraken’s crack.”

“Ew, Remus.”

“Just trying to keep the mood light.” He picks up one of the cotton swabs and a paper towel and leans down. “I’m gonna try and clean up some of the wet stuff first, okay? Then we can actually get onto some relief.”

“You’re not gonna pop any of them, are you?”

“I don’t think so. At least not right now.”

”Because I really don’t want this to scar.”

Remus hums, carefully running the swab over a particularly inflamed part of his cheek. “Can you give me a pain rating?”

”Like a 6? It’s not that bad but it’s not a pain I’m used to it’s…freaking me out.”

“Understandable, have a nice day. If it ever gets too much, let me know and we’ll switch to a cool pack, okay?”

Roman hums as Remus goes to work. A pile of discarded swabs and other trash accumulates at Remus’s elbow as he works patiently around the various, uh, ‘zones.’ They have to stop a few times when it gets to a point where Roman’s whole face just aches, waiting for it to subside enough that Remus can keep going.

“There are a couple down here that look like they’re ready to go, do you want me to just get ‘em out?”

”Be careful.”

“Sure, yeah. If it starts to hurt lemme know and I’ll back off right away.”

He gets a few of them, a few more putting up too much of a fight so he leaves them be. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Roman heroically stop two or three whimpers before he lightly jabs him in the stomach and tells him to knock that posturing shit off, he doesn’t need it here.

“…thanks, Re.”

“I told you, it hurts too much, I stop.”

“I know.” He shifts on the tub. “I think it’s just…hard to remember.”

Remus frowns, glancing up at him. Roman fiddles with the hem of his prince costume.

“You know…with the others?”

”No. I don’t know, Ro.”

“They don’t—they’re—they want Princey, Prince Roman. Not…the rest of this.” He waves his hand to indicate the cotton carnage. “So it’s hard to…”

He trails off when he sees the expression on Remus’s face.

“What?”

”You mean they don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“That this—“ he waves at Roman— “happens to you. Any of it.”

“I mean, they know I’m the Ego and it makes sense that I get hurt when Thomas feels bad, but—“

”But not how much.” Roman won’t meet his gaze. “Fuck, Ro.”

“…it’s complicated.”

“Shit, no, I’m not—look at me, Ro. I’m not mad at you. I’m just—this wasn’t what I’d hoped.”

Roman frowns. “What do you mean, what you hoped?”

Remus sighs. This is turning into way more of a conversation than he’d ever anticipated. Glancing around, he picks up the cold pack and hands to to Roman before taking a seat on the counter. His legs swing and kick at the cabinets with a quiet thunk-thunk, thunk-thunk.

“When the Split happened, and we went to the Dark Sides, I…dunno, I guess I thought it would be…better.”

“Because we were separated?”

“What? No, no, because I had the stuff like Deceit and Anxiety with me, so they couldn’t make any of this stuff worse—not that they would,” he says when Roman opens his mouth to protest, and wow, have they come a long way, “but just ‘cause…well, yeah. You had Logic and Morality, who were—doesn’t that make sense? That they would be able to help?”

Roman sighs. He picks at the edge of the ice pack. “It’s not that simple.”

“Then explain it to me.”

“Logan’s thing is object impermanence, you know that.” Remus winces in sympathy. “But having someone tell you something isn’t real when you can feel it and it is real, to you, that’s not…that’s not helpful. It’s better if he just goes right to Thomas than coming to me.”

“And Patton?”

Roman lets out a humorless huff. “Thomas is feeling bad and Patton is Thomas’s feelings. How do you think that normally goes?”

…yeah, probably not great.

“It’s not all bad,” he continues, softer now, “they’re at least good when I tell them I don’t want to be disturbed. They don’t ask questions if I tell them I don’t want to talk about it.”

“That feels suspiciously like the bare minimum.” Roman shrugs. “I know I literally just said the opposite, but do Janus and Virgil…?”

“They’re both better at comforting the others. It’s okay, Re, I have you. I really only want you when it’s…bad like this.”

“Me? Why?”

“You get it.”

Remus chuckles, getting back up and picking up the next tool. “That simple, huh?”

“Sometimes it’s just that simple.”

”Aw, I love you too, Roro. You’re the specialist baby brother any Side could ever ask for.”

“You—what the hell do you mean, ‘baby brother?’”

“You’re the baby brother.”

“I am not.”

“Are too.”

“Am not.”

“Are too. Now hush so I don’t accidentally poke your eye out.”

“I’m gonna get you back for this.”

“Oh, I’m so scared about that. Now hold still, Roro, let’s get this out of the way so you can feel better.”

“…love you.”

“I love you too.”

+1.

The Imagination is upset. Roman feels it the second he steps foot through the door and forgoes his normal prince costume for a rougher tunic and boots, strapping his sword to his hip and an emergency pack to his back. The wind blows frigid and punishing over the grass as he starts down the trail, squinting through the dust clouds whipping up around him. The clouds frown around the edges of the tree line, darkening to a stormy black near the edge of the coast. As he nears the black cliffs, rocks crumble beneath him and tumble into a churning sea.

He edges carefully around the craggy rock face, keeping his movements light and careful. Spray whips him in the face as thunder rolls in the distance. The chill near rips his fingers from their precarious handholds. He grits his teeth and keeps going, even as the wind howl so loudly his ears near split from the pain.

There, a little ways down the cliff, is a small cove. He inches his way around the edge of the bluff and drops onto a larger path leading him along the coast. There isn’t any sand here, only rough and unyielding stone. Froth and foam given them gleaming white teeth as the waves churn furiously around the mouth of the sea. He follows the path down, down towards he massive cracks in the sheer rock face, one eye on the black water below him. Despite being so close to the shore, there’s no sign of a bottom and he doesn’t want to risk how deep it is. There’s no telling what current might rip him into the open ocean if he falls in.

The cove is shaped like a spear’s point, the crack in the cliff at its very point as though some massive weapon had shattered the rocks themselves. As Roman nears it, the shadow at the base of the path slowly grows more and more defined, until he realizes that it’s a path through the cliff. The cove is an inlet leading into a hidden sea cave with a vast black lake in its center. Roman peers up at the glistening wet walls, hand on the wall as the wind whistles angrily by.

The water moves. He looks down. Something massive slips just underneath the surface, sending ripples to the shore. He crouches down and sees a huge shape getting closer and closer to the surface. An eye the size of a dining table glares up at him through the water and long arms with rows and rows of hooks reach up toward him.

“Ollie, it’s me. It’s Roman.”

The Kraken pause. The hooked arms retreat and he pokes his head up, letting out a mournful burble. Roman reaches over and taps the water. One of his other arms comes up and Roman pets soothingly along the skin.

“What’s the matter, buddy? What’s going on?”

Ollie burbles again and Roman suddenly realizes why the hooked arms were the ones to reach for him. Beneath the surface, the Kraken’s arms form a cradle of sorts, holding something close to the Kraken’s massive body. As the water shifts and ripples, the thing comes closer and closer to surface, slowly moving to reveal its precious cargo.

And there, nestled in the Kraken’s grip, covered in his own writhing tentacles, is Remus.

“Oh, Re,” Roman murmurs as his brother twitches and whimpers, “what happened? Who did this?”

Ollie burbles again, holding him out, and Roman balances on the edge of the shoreline and stretches to hold on. The Kraken lifts him up and into the cradle too, letting him touch Remus’s frigid skin and shake him awake.

“Re? Re, wake up, it’s okay, I’m here to help.”

The tentacles writhe as Remus stirs, blinking through a pained haze up at Roman. “…Ro?”

“Hey, Re, it’s me. It’s okay, you’re gonna be okay. What happened?”

“Thoughts got too loud.” A tentacle leaves a thick trail of slime across his arm and he shudders. “Sorry.”

“What could you have to be sorry for?”

“‘S gross.”

“You stop that,” Roman chides gently, running his fingers through Remus’s wet hair, “I don’t care if something’s gross, I care if it’s hurting you.”

Remus whimpers, clutching at one of Ollie’s arms. The Kraken squeaks back, trying in vain to warm him up, but there’s only so much he can do in this freezing cave. Roman glances around and bites his lip.

“Does it feel better in the water? Is that why you came down here?”

“Yeah. Ollie came and f-found me.”

Roman pats the worried Kraken. “What do we need to do? Is it like caring for Ollie’s arms?”

“N-no. Like helping the jelly—jellyfish with the twisted—twisted ones.”

He’ll bet just about anything that this frigid water isn’t helping Remus do that, and it’s not like Ollie has opposable thumbs. He goes to slide into the water himself but Ollie chirps in alarm, hoisting them higher.

“What’re you doing?”

“I’m trying to help.“

Remus shakes his head, more slime trailing across his shivering body. “Too cold for you.”

“Well, then it’s definitely too cold for you. Can we get you somewhere warmer?” Remus curls up a little more. “What about that pool near the glowstone trees?”

“That’s all the way on your side.”

“Ollie can take you. I’ll meet you over there.” Remus stays quiet. Roman leans down and brushes the wet hair from his eyes. “What else is bothering you, Re?”

Two of the tentacles glob onto Roman and start leaving trails of slime across his tunic. Remus whimpers and reaches out a hand to yank them away. It’s no use; the roiling mass just keeps smearing slime onto Roman as they try to pull him closer, no matter how hard Remus shoves them away.

Oh.

Oh.

“Re, you’re not too gross. You’re not going to ruin anything. I want you to come with me so I can help you. I care about you. Let me help, please?”

It takes a painfully long moment for Remus to peek up at him and nod. Roman can’t stop the way his shoulders sag in relief and he sits up, patting Ollie’s arm as the Kraken burbles happily.

“You…you really wanna help?”

“Of course I wanna help you, Re, you’re my brother.”

“Okay.”

“Have Ollie take you over to the pool, okay? I’ll meet you there.”

“How are you gonna get there?”

“I have my ways.”

Remus grumbles and he sounds just enough like his normal self that Roman has to reach down and ruffle his hair, no matter how much Remus squawks about it. He climbs back off to the shore and watches Ollie sinks below the surface before he makes his way out to the ocean proper. Taking the charm from beneath his tunic, he closes his eyes and concentrates.

A screaming cry and the massive thudding of wings splits the wind.

Roman’s dragon lands just on the other side of the bluffs and he climbs on, taking off and soaring over the stormy sea. The dragon calls out over the waves and far beneath, he can see the shape of Ollie swimming through the depths. The clouds begin to part as they near the opposite coast, sun rays splitting the worst of the storm as the glowing trees appear on the horizon.

Roman’s dragon sets him down just on the edge of the shimmering pool. He pats its snout and it huffs, lying down on the sun-warmed grass and closing its eyes. As he walks toward the pool and begins to take off his boots, he spots Ollie’s shade moving through the inlet into the warmer water. He chuckles at the way the water vibrates with the Kraken’s pleased rumble.

Clad in just his boxers, he slips into the water and through the tangle of arms to draw Remus into the warmth. Remus immediately tuns and clings to him like a limpet, shivering from the temperature change.

“I know, I know,” Roman murmurs as he starts to work his hands patiently through the mass of tentacles, “just hold onto me. I can still kind of stand here, I’ve got you.”

”You gonna take care of me?”

“Yeah, Re, I’m gonna take care of you.”

He’s rewarded with a sleepy hum and Remus snuggles into him. “You’re the best.”

“No, you’re the best. The best baby brother anyone could ever ask for.”

“Am not.”

“Are too.”

Remus might mutter an am not back, but it’s muffled by his tired slump into Roman’s arms. Roman just chuckles. He’s sure it’ll come up again at some point.

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