#neuroscientist!logan

[villlainarc]

All of These Stars (Will Guide Us Home)

Summary: Logan had a guardian angel. Okay. He could sort of work with that.

Angels were real. He could work with that a bit less, though he supposed it wasn’t entirely unreasonable.

His guardian angel was very pretty and absolutely fascinating—from an objective and scientific standpoint, of course. He knew that those two were indisputable facts, so he didn’t have a problem with that, he could accept that.

The fact that he had a guardian angel meant he needed help.

Oh, absolutely not. Logan couldn’t even pretend to work with that.

In which Logan finds himself stuck with a guardian angel and a strange feeling blossoming between them.

Pairing: Logince

Warnings: brief mention of not eating (though it isn’t intentional), swearing, it gets real sad before it gets happy again

Word Count: 11,504

Taglist (ask to be added!): @max-is-tired @raaindropps @kiribakuandcats @main-chive

Notes: for the sanders sides reverse bang, run by @sanderssidesfanfiction. as per the rules of the reverse bang, the art this is inspired by was done by none other than @2queer2deer and is here

and finally, many thanks to ren for offering to beta this after it got too long for me to catch everything myself and my brain gave up on me fjskskd

ao3

_________________________

Logan was a neuroscientist. He knew that a fight or flight response was triggered when the human brain was overwhelmed and stressed. He knew exactly how it dealt with information and that if need be, it would formulate more believable scenarios when the current one couldn’t be processed. He knew that when it came to sleep deprivation, intense hallucinations would only start after a full seventy-two hours of no sleep.

Logan was not overwhelmed. Logan’s mind had always processed things in the way it should have, and he was not prone to coming up with scenarios that had never happened. While it wasn’t as much sleep as would have been ideal—seeing as he had been consistently sleep deprived for the past week—Logan had still slept for a full seven and a half hours last night.

And that’s why, for the life of him, he could not figure out why there appeared to be an angel in the middle of his lab.

“Ah,” the angel said, turning around, completely oblivious to the fact that it (he?) was not supposed to exist. “You must be Logan.”

So. The angel knew his name. Logan found himself nodding blankly in response, trying to think up some sort of explanation for why there would be a fucking angel in his lab.

“Nice to meet you then, Logan. How are you?” the angel asked, still clueless about how utterly impossible its (his?) being here was. He (Logan had decided somewhere in the back of his mind that calling something humanoid “it” felt distinctly wrong) lifted himself onto one of the stainless steel tables littered about the lab, swinging his feet as he continued talking. “I’m Roman,” he added, almost as an afterthought.

Logan blinked. The angel—or Roman, as Logan supposed he should refer to him—was sitting on his lab table, and that’s about all Logan’s mind could process at the moment. Acting on the one thing that made sense to him, Logan took a step forward. “Get off my lab table.” After taking a breath and making a very conscious effort not to scream, he tacked on a clipped, “Please.”

“Oh! Sorry, yes. I’ll do that.” Roman pushed himself smoothly off the lab table, landing on the ground with barely a sound.

“Right,” Logan said under his breath. “Right,” he repeated, this time directed more at Roman than himself. “I’m going to have to wipe that down, and then you’re going to tell me exactly why you’re here, how you know who I am, whether or not you’re actually an angel, how your wings work, and then you’re going to get the fuck out of my lab.” With that, Logan felt perfectly secure in grabbing a clean cloth and a spray bottle of bleach before walking back to the offending lab table and wiping it down thoroughly.

“I think you’re going to have to repeat all those questions for me, one at a time, and at a far slower pace,” Roman said, hovering in the background once Logan had begun cleaning. “I caught exactly none of it.”

“Yes,” Logan agreed. “I apologize, I was rambling a bit. Give me one moment and I’ll be right with you.” With a final swipe of the cloth, Logan put away the cleaning supplies and pulled a notepad out of his lab coat. “Now,” he said, scrawling something across the page as he sat down, “please, have a seat in this chair right across from me and then answer this to start: why are you here?”

“Why, for you, of course! I’m your guardian angel, Logan, and it’s a pleasure to meet you.”

That raised a fair few more questions than it answered, but Logan wasn’t going to think too hard on that just yet. He finished noting what Roman had said and then moved on to his next question. “I had asked you how you knew who I was, but I think that question just answered itself, so I’m going to skip it.” Logan tapped his pen against the notepad for a moment, recalling what he’d said next. “Ah, and then I asked if you were actually an angel, which, again, I feel has been sufficiently explained. Now then, how do your wings work?”

“Like any wings would work, I suppose,” Roman said, ruffling his feathers a bit as he stretched them out to their full width. Logan winced as a few feathers fell to the floor, making a mental note to sweep them up as soon as he could. “I flap them, and they help me fly. What else would you like to know about them?”

“Hm, they do protrude from your back, correct? And you were born with them?”

“Yes, and yes, I— where are you going?” Logan had gotten up from his chair while Roman had been in the middle of speaking, poking about his lab for something.

“Just getting a pair of gloves. Please, don’t mind me. You can continue.”

“Oh, no, that’s alright. I was pretty much done. But may I ask why you’re looking for gloves?”

“Right,” Logan agreed with a quick nod. “I suppose I shouldn’t have assumed before going to get them, but… would you mind if I touched your wings? I’m curious as to how they feel.”

“Absolutely! Be my guest.”

“Thank you. Could I ask you a few more questions while I work?”

“Ask away, darling.”

“In that case—” Logan pulled the gloves over his hands with a snap, walking up behind Roman, “—I hope this isn’t too forward or uncouth, but what exactly does it mean to be an angel? On Earth, we have a multitude of myths and ideas about what they are, how they act, where they come from, what they do, and so on. What’s the truth?”

“Hm, I can’t really answer that. Since you’re a mortal, there are certain things I’m simply not allowed to tell you. But! I can say that every culture got at least a few aspects right. Every story holds a grain of truth, and the stories of angels are no different.” Roman paused, and Logan heard the first few hints of a frown enter his voice. “What are you doing back there, anyway? It tickles.”

“Me? Oh, I’m just looking for muscles or bones, I suppose, though anything interesting would do. I’m not sure. Do you happen to know what your wings are made of?”

“Um. Muscle, probably? And bone and feathers? I’m not sure, honestly. It’s not something that’s of particular importance, you know?”

“I see,” Logan said, still running his hands through Roman’s feathers. “They appear to be almost identical to bird wings, did you know that?”

“…No? Is that a good thing?”

“It means they were specifically designed for flight, likely longer flights as well. They’re more similar in structure to the wings of a bird of prey, though I suppose that would make sense, especially considering that the rest of you is humanoid and we too are a predatory species. So yes,” Logan concluded, clearing his throat awkwardly. “I’d say that is a good thing.”

Roman turned his head slightly, watching Logan pull off his gloves and put them carefully in a waste container with a curious look in his eyes. “Well, I’m glad.”

“Do you mind if I take a few of your feathers to study them?” Upon seeing Roman bristle a little at the thought, Logan added swiftly, “I was only referring to the ones that have fallen to the floor, I wouldn’t take them directly from your wings, not to worry.”

“I don’t see why not, then. You didn’t have to ask, you know.”

Logan shrugged. “It’s always better to ask about everything when working with human—or humanoid, in your case—test subjects.”

“Hm,” Roman replied, cocking his head to the side as Logan lifted a few feathers from the ground with a pair of tweezers before carefully sealing them in a plastic bag.

Once he’d done that though, Logan’s scientific curiosity immediately waned, leaving only a looming sense of panic because, as he’d somehow managed to forget, there was a fucking angel in his science lab and absolutely no protocol for handling such a situation. “I need to sit down,” he decided aloud.

“Good idea,” Roman hummed, getting out of his own chair and making his way around the lab. “This is where you work, huh?”

“Yes. Don’t touch a thing.” Logan’s words were purely instinctual, any rational thought he may have had vanishing rapidly.

“Noted,” Roman replied, making a show of folding his hands behind his back before peering into a microscope. “You’re a neuroscientist, right?”

“Shouldn’t you already know that? Being my ‘guardian angel’ and all,” Logan said, and he would have put finger quotes around the words “guardian angel” if his hands were not currently occupied with holding his head between them. Logically, Logan knew his sarcasm and disbelief stemmed from the fact that he was currently falling into denial but emotionally, Logan was very far from ready to acknowledge the fact that angels just might exist—no, scratch that—that they did exist.

“Oh, of course I knew that. I’m merely trying to make small talk. You seem a bit overwhelmed, that’s all.”

“This ‘small talk’ is only serving to make me more overwhelmed.”

“Ah. Would you prefer if I got straight to the core of your psychological issues and the reason you’ve been deemed worthy of being assigned a guardian angel?”

“…I’m going to have to say no to that. What would really help is you shutting the fuck up so I can think straight.”

“Jeez, I knew you weren’t good at making friends, but I didn’t—”

“So sorry, did you not hear when I asked for complete silence?”

“Right, right. Got it. Shutting up now.”

Logan let out a sigh at that, letting his head drop once more into his hands.

He had a guardian angel. Okay. He could sort of work with that.

Angels were real. He could work with that a bit less, though he supposed it wasn’t entirely unreasonable.

The angel was very pretty and absolutely fascinating—from an objective and scientific standpoint, of course. He knew that those were just indisputable facts, so he didn’t have a problem with that, he could accept that.

The fact that he had a guardian angel meant that he needed help.

Oh, absolutely not. Logan couldn’t even pretend to work with that.

Having come to a decision, he lifted his head from his hands. “You need to get out. Now.”

Roman blinked at him from his place behind a different microscope than the one he’d been near before. “I— what? Why?”

“I don’t need—nor do I want a guardian angel, so I’m asking you to leave. That’s all, I can assure you it’s not personal.”

“Logan, darling, I’m frankly offended that you would imply that I would just abandon you like that! Besides, I’m tied to you until further notice. I couldn’t leave you behind even if I wanted to—which, for the record, I don’t now and won’t ever.”

“Yes, well— figure something out. I am not entertaining this any longer. I apologize for the inconvenience, but you are of no use to me. Thank whoever’s in charge for thinking of me, and goodbye, Roman. It was nice meeting you.”

“…So, what do you not understand about the fact that I cannot physically leave? Because I thought that was pretty clear, but if you need me to, I can explain again.”

“I understood you perfectly fine,” Logan said, standing up and taking an unintentionally menacing step towards Roman. “I simply don’t care. I’d thank you kindly for leaving me alone. I don’t need your help.”

“Was that an invitation for me to list all the ways you do, in fact, need my help?”

“No, it really wasn’t, it was actually a very explicit invitation to leave me alone and get the fu—”

“So! First of all, you’re lonely.”

“That’s just wrong, plain and simple. I have Patton and I have Virgil, not to mention my family and—”

“Very true, but if you try to tell me they truly understand you, you’d be lying, no?”

Logan had nothing to say to that.

“Exactly. Secondly, your ambition and curiosity are the only things you’re living for. You have no proper sense of self and no confidence in who you are as a person.”

“I—”

“No, no, I’m not done yet. Thirdly, you still haven’t moved past the fact that your aspirations and curiosities have always been mocked and still don’t feel that you can speak your mind freely because you fear you’ll be belittled for your interests.”

“I think that’s more than enough, I get the idea—”

“And finally,” Roman said a bit louder, talking over Logan’s objections, “in your drive to prove the people from your past wrong, you’ve lost all trust in those closest to you. Not only are you lonely now, you still insist on keeping everyone at a distance so you will forever be lonely.”

Logan was silent.

“So, how did I do? Was I right?”

“Perhaps a few things you said were somewhat accurate, but that in no way means I need your help. Because I don’t.”

“Mm, my boss begs to differ, and so do I. Besides, you really don’t have a say in this. You’re stuck with me, I’m afraid.” Roman didn’t seem very troubled with this information, sending Logan a sparkling grin followed quickly by a wink.

“Well then. Let’s just say you do end up staying around. What exactly do you plan on doing that any good therapist couldn’t?”

“Well, for starters, I’m an angel, Logan. My angelic nature is a healing force all on its own. Secondly, a therapist couldn’t provide you with love now, could they? They wouldn’t be able to help you feel less lonely by being your friend, huh?”

“I don’t need—”

“You don’t need friends? Everyone needs friends, Logan. It’s human nature, I’m sure you know that.”

Logan sighed, running a hand absently through his hair. “Let’s say I ignore you. Would you eventually leave me alone?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Alright then, let’s just pretend I do accept your existence in my life. How am I supposed to explain who you are?”

“Oh, don’t worry about that, darling. I can handle the explanations, that was all a part of my training.”

“How comforting. Now, what happens if I’m never deemed ‘fixed?’ Do you just have to live with me until I die? Does that mean you’ve failed?”

“Okay, so let’s get one thing straight—”

“I don’t think you can do that. I’m gay.”

“Oh, I know, it’s just a figure of speech, but anyway, that wasn’t even the point. What I was going to say is that you aren’t being ‘fixed.’ You don’t need to be fixed, you need love and support. So I’m not here to fix you, I’m here to help you, and I won’t fail in that, Logan.”

“That’s a sweet sentiment I suppose, but that doesn’t eliminate the possibility of failure by any means.”

“Well then, it seems we have an opportunity here, now don’t we?”

“Do I want to know what that entails?”

“Quite possibly not, but you also don’t have a choice. Either way though, you need to learn how to trust people, right? Here’s your first chance. Trust that I won’t fail you, because that’s all you can really do in this case.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Hm, I don’t think that sounded much like you trusting me, somehow. Let’s try that again: I won’t fail you, Logan. Trust me.”

“I… will ignore the possibility that you might fail.”

Roman snorted. “That’s closer, at least. You’ll get there someday.”

“Well,” Logan said, clearing his throat. “Would you mind getting out of my lab while I work, at least? I’m afraid I won’t be able to concentrate with someone else in the room.”

“Even if that someone’s fabulously charming and winningly handsome?”

“I’m afraid so, and I’m so very sorry about that,” Logan said, not sounding very sorry at all.

“You don’t sound very sorry at all,” Roman pouted.

“Yes, well, I am and I’ve wasted enough time entertaining you. So if you don’t mind, I have work to do now.”

“Ooo, what are you doing toda—”

“No, nope, absolutely not, get out.” He herded Roman out the door, slamming it once he’d made it through. Leaning his head against it with a sigh, Logan made a futile attempt to collect his thoughts, knowing instinctively that no matter how hard he tried, he would be getting absolutely nothing of worth done today.

_________________________

For the next several weeks, Logan was constantly plagued by Roman’s continued existence.

The angel refused to leave him alone for more than fifteen minutes at a time, and Logan was certain he was going absolutely insane because of it. No matter how many locked doors he hid behind, Roman always managed to find a way through. Logan hypothesized that it was magic, but Roman vehemently denied that when asked.

“Me? Use magic? Why, of course not! It’s not allowed when I’m on Earth because I’m supposed to be ‘blending in,’ and I would never break a rule as important as that. I’m shocked and appalled that you’d accuse me of such a thing, my darling Logan.”

Logan didn’t believe that absolute bullshit for a second, but he could never prove anything to the contrary, even though he did spend nearly every waking moment with Roman. Even if he could never get Roman to stop talking. Even if he was overwhelmed with the constant onslaught of Roman Roman Roman—

At that point, Logan couldn’t remember what he had been trying to find out in the first place. As he spent more time around Roman’s constant chatter, he could feel himself physically losing brain cells; it was getting harder to think, harder to move, harder to calm his head, his heart, his breaths.

It was possible that he should have mentioned this to Roman, but Logan didn’t want to tell the angel any more than necessary, even though doing so would mean that he would leave him behind sooner. That wasn’t worth the vulnerability he would be showing, nothing was.

So he just had to… survive.

He could survive; he’d done so all his life, clearly. There was no reason at all for him to stop now.

Besides, he had a few hours of Roman-free time while he was at work, and that was enough to let him breathe properly. Though it was gradually becoming harder for him to concentrate long enough to find the correct train of thought to follow, his time spent at work as a neuroscientist was still far superior to any time spent around Roman.

At least, it had been before today. Because today, everything—everything—was going wrong.

First, it was his alarm being set to the wrong sound. Instead of waking him up with its usual serene tones that gradually increased in volume, it emitted a jarring series of beeps that physically hurt Logan when he heard them.

Then, it was his coffee being too cold, then too sweet, then being spilled over his counter. It hadn’t all been lost, but what was left in the thermos wasn’t enough to placate Logan as the right amount would have on any other day.

After the spilled coffee came the pout Roman gave him after he’d snapped at him for humming too loudly. After the pout came the imploring request to pretty please tell Roman what was wrong, after the request came another bout of waspish remarks, after the waspish remarks came another pout, and after the pout, Logan simply left.

Once he arrived at work, Logan was certain that his day was going to get better. It could only go up from the pit he’d fallen into, right?

Wrong. Logan’s day could—and would—get so much worse.

The first thing to go wrong at work was seeing his messy lab. He’d been tired when he’d left last night, leaving the clean up to his future self. This was proving to have been a terrible idea.

Cringing at the equipment strewn all over, Logan locked his bag away in a locker on the left wall and got to work cleaning.

That, at least, was calming.

What was decidedly not calming was having one of his coworkers burst through the door without so much as a knock. This was the second thing to go wrong after Logan had arrived at work, and the following conversation was the third.

“You aren’t busy, are you?”

“As a matter of fact, I—”

“Doesn’t matter. We need you to check out these scans right about… oh, now, but no pressure of course. I’ll be in room 312 whenever you’re done,” the man—whose name Logan couldn’t seem to remember for the life of him—interrupted with a tight smile. “Thanks,” he added as an afterthought, strolling out of the lab without even having the decency to close the door behind him.

The fourth thing to go wrong was the fact that Logan had to actually concentrate on doing something while there was still clutter all over the room, but he did manage to do so with only mild suffering.

Logan had just begun to grow hungry when the realization of the fifth thing to go wrong dawned on him. He’d forgotten to pack his lunch.

Fuck.

This wasn’t catastrophic, of course. He could always go somewhere to buy lunch, but it was while Logan was searching for his wallet that he remembered leaving it on the counter at home. While Logan would by no means starve without lunch, not having food to sustain him for the rest of the day would not bode well for anyone who needed to speak with him.

That was the sixth thing that went wrong.

The seventh thing to go wrong was Logan’s lightheadedness, a sudden reminder that he hadn’t had breakfast either, so consumed had he been with the spilled coffee and argument with Roman. This left him with two awful options. He could either wait until he got home to eat (which would have countless adverse effects on his physical health) or he could ask to borrow money from someone he worked with (which would have countless adverse effects on his mental health). There really was no winning for him.

But having to deal with the discomfort of asking for money seemed to Logan a lesser evil at that point than having to wait for several more hours before he’d be able to alleviate the gnawing pain in his stomach.

This was the eighth thing to go wrong, the ninth being the fact that the sandwich he’d been lent had been slathered with mayo and gone soggy because of it.

Logan’s day seemed to be looking up after lunch, though, as he had finally managed to finish cleaning up his lab by that point and was able to continue research into a different patient’s condition at a more leisurely pace than he’d had to think at that morning.

There was still so much that could go wrong, though, and it all did.

The tenth thing was a conversation with a coworker that stretched on for a small eternity, the eleventh a series of three brand new things he had to do at “his earliest convenience,” the twelfth a glass beaker that Logan had dropped shattering to pieces on the floor.

Logan left after he’d cleaned up that mess, not wanting to get to the thirteenth bad thing because although he was far from superstitious, the fact that he now knew angels existed was fucking with his mind in that regard.

Once he got home, he restarted the count of things that went wrong solely for his own sanity. Reaching a count of unfortunate incidents that was any higher than twenty things would make him want to scream, so when he saw Roman waiting for him on the couch as soon as he walked through the doorway, he considered that the first terrible thing to happen once he’d gotten home as opposed to the twenty-first terrible thing that had happened in total.

The second thing was the discovery that Roman had raided his refrigerator earlier that day and eaten the lunch he’d made for himself, the third that he found his house to be entirely void of Crofters jam. The fourth was the fact that peanut butter eaten alone made his mouth feel thick and dry, the fifth Roman’s proclamation that he’d told Logan so.

The sixth thing to go wrong once Logan got home was the fact that Roman would simply not stop singing, even after he’d mentioned that he was going to take a nap because it had been a long day so could he please be quiet for just thirty minutes? That was all he wanted, thirty blissful minutes of peace and quiet.

He didn’t even get five.

That was alright though, he decided, because he could read and block out any noise that happened to drift his way, obnoxious singing included.

The seventh tragedy occurred when Logan finished his book and had to return once again to reality and the angel that came with it. It was getting dark, and Logan should have gone to the kitchen to get food at that point. He hadn’t eaten much at all today, but going to the kitchen also meant having to deal with Roman and his loud voice and prying questions and— nope. Logan didn’t have enough mental energy left to handle that.

So instead, he decided to do what he always did when his problems proved to be too much for him. He ran away from them.

Specifically, he ran away to a field of wildflowers in the middle of nowhere with the most perfect view of the stars he’d ever seen.

While that was still running away, Logan tended to ignore that in favor of admiring the night sky.

Now, all he had to do was get out of the house without running into Roman. He would want to know where Logan was going and then he’d have to explain and then Roman would want to come with him and that could only end with Logan becoming even more frustrated with the world, so he opted to leave through his window.

He’d never tried to do that before, so he was pleasantly surprised when he made it out with only a slight stumble. Without the walls of his house closing in on him, Logan noted that he felt more at ease than he had all day. The night air also helped to calm him, and his entire demeanor had relaxed by the time he reached his field of wildflowers.

Letting out a sigh, Logan felt any remaining tension melt away as he sat down beneath the leaves of a willow tree. He leaned his head back against its trunk and allowed himself to simply trace the constellations above him with his eyes.

When he’d been far younger, more naive, and less concerned with making enough money to live comfortably, Logan had seriously considered becoming an astronomer. He’d also toyed with the thought of being an astrophysicist, but the idea of having to work with concepts that weren’t concrete or truly proven made him feel slightly panicked and had turned him off from that completely. Still though, he’d always found anything to do with planets, galaxies, stars, and anything in between to be utterly fascinating. He could have spent hours in the library reading about astronomers and their discoveries from centuries past, and while Logan wouldn’t ever be one to work solely in theoreticals, learning about those theories was almost more fascinating than the facts themselves. No matter what else was going on in his life at the time, he had always been able to turn to the stars in some form or another as a calming presence. They were the one constant that hadn’t managed to fade from his life, and Logan was incredibly grateful for it. He didn’t even want to think about a life lived without the stars for company.

That’s why this field of wildflowers meant so much to him; it wasn’t the place itself as much as it was what it allowed him to see. His surroundings were undoubtedly beautiful, but they paled in comparison to the sky above. And, sitting beneath the willow tree and looking up, up, up, Logan was perfectly content.

He would have stayed that way too were it not for the arrival of one The Blessed Roman, guardian angel.

“Logan? What are you doing all the way out here?”

Sighing, Logan avoided the question. “Did you follow me?”

“No! Well, kind of. That depends on what you mean by following. No, I didn’t see you leave and then decide to leave then as well. But yes, I did notice that you were being awfully quiet and decide to check on you before discovering that you were gone before using the bond between us to guide me here.”

“Wonderful, so I can never escape you.”

“No, you really can’t, I’m afraid.” Roman walked the rest of the way to the trunk of the willow tree, sitting down beside Logan and pressing his back up against it as well. “Now, why are you here?”

“I don’t want to talk about it, and I don’t want to talk to you. In fact, I would much prefer to be left alone.”

“Ah, you’re shutting down again. You don’t want to be vulnerable, so you’re pushing me away when I try to get you to open up. You definitely shouldn’t do that, especially considering that no matter how vulnerable you are, I am physically not able to hurt you in any way, shape, or form. I promise you can trust me.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Oh, that’s fine too! You can talk about anything, but please, Logan, just talk to me.”

“I— why?”

Roman shrugged. “Talking helps, sometimes. Just to have someone who’ll listen to you, you know?”

“I’ll try it, I suppose. But if I ask you to leave me alone again, please do so.”

“Of course, darling.”

“Alright. So.” Logan cleared his throat, not knowing how to continue. He looked up at the stars again, and his eyes lit up with the sudden brilliance of an idea. “Look at the sky, and see that star over there? The really bright one?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

“Its name is Rasalhague, which is derived from the Arabic phrase meaning ‘the head of the serpent collector.’ And since it’s the brightest star in the constellation Ophiuchus—a constellation depicting a man often believed to be the Greek god of medicine, Asclepius, with a serpent in his hands—the name is rather fitting. And the bright star below it? That’s Sabik. Its name also comes from Arabic, meaning ‘the preceding one,’ though this time there’s no fitting explanation as to why. If you connect those two stars with twenty-five others, the brightest ones being there, there, there, here, there, and there—” Logan pointed at a new star in the constellation with each word he spoke, “—then you have the full Ophiuchus constellation. And if you look just to the left of Sabik, you can see Serpens Cauda, which is the tail of the serpent Asclepius is holding. Now, below and slightly to the right of Rasalhague is Serpens Caput, the other half of the full Serpens constellation. If you translate their names from Latin, they mean exactly what they are supposed to depict: ‘snake tail’ and ‘snake head,’ respectively.”

“Oh! I remember those! If I’m not mistaken, I helped to create them.”

At that, Logan’s gaze snapped back down to Earth. “You did what?” he asked, voice breathy with awe.

“I’m an angel, Logan, of course I helped with the creation of the universe! I made quite a few stars, actually. I think you humans call the constellations they make up Corona Borealis and Corona Australis? The northern and southern crowns? There are a few others that don’t remember the names of, but if you look over there—” at this, Roman took Logan’s hand in his and moved it in a circle around a spot in the sky a little bit to the left of Ophiuchus and Serpens, “—that’s where most of my stars are.”

Breathless, Logan went quiet for a few moments, trying to remember which constellation those stars made up, if any. Then, without warning, he gasped. “Oh! Oh, your stars are near Microscopium and Telescopium, two of the six constellations Lacaille discovered and named after scientific instruments and navigational tools, all first documented in 1756. Lacaille was a French astronomer who also christened a fair amount of other modern constellations the same year, but my favorites are those six: Microscopium and Telescopium, of course, and Fornax, which is the chemist’s distillation furnace, Octans, the octant, Pyxis, the compass, and Circinus, the dividing compasses. You can’t see all of them right now since they’re in different places throughout the sky and some of them aren’t as bright nor as recognizable as, say, Ursa Major and Minor or Orion’s Belt, so even then they would be more difficult to see, but—” Logan stopped, seeming to catch himself. “Sorry. You probably didn’t want to hear about all that.”

“No!” The intensity in Roman’s voice caused Logan to turn towards him in confusion, a slight frown on his face. “I mean, of course I want to continue to hear you talk about constellations, so no, please don’t stop talking, please never assume I won’t want to hear what you have to say. It’s interesting, and I like hearing the joy in your voice.”

“Ah,” Logan said, his face coloring lightly. He cleared his throat again before continuing in a softer voice, “Thank you.”

“Of course, Logan. When you talk about stars or space or science or honestly, anything that makes you smile, it’s—no, you—are beautiful.”

“I’m just… lecturing, really, and there’s nothing special about that.” Logan rubbed awkwardly at the back of his neck. “Besides, you were the one who created the stars I was telling you about. Compared to that, I didn’t do anything at all.”

“On the contrary, I think your knowledge is far more than a simple ‘anything.’ When I formed those stars out of light and space dust, I never could have imagined them inspiring a smile—or anything else, for that matter—so gorgeous.”

Logan wanted to ask how Roman could have possibly believed that stars, some of the most beautiful creations in existence, wouldn’t result in something just as pretty.

Logan also wanted to completely ignore the fact that Roman thought the resulting pretty thing was his smile, fearing how flustered he’d become if Roman so much as alluded to that statement again. Eventually though, he settled on a response that didn’t encapsulate even half as much as he was feeling. “Thank you for creating them,” he said.

“If they’ve brought you even a fraction of the amount of happiness as they seem to have, it all will have been worth it.”

Logan felt himself blushing again, but he chose to pretend that his face was not a brilliant shade of red. “Yes, well—” he trailed off, finding himself unable to think of the right words to say.

Roman laughed, lightly setting his hand over Logan’s to pat it in a show of fond affection. “You’re adorable.” He grinned once more, shifting his grip so he was holding Logan’s hand properly before moving on to an entirely new subject. “Anyhow, are you feeling any better?”

“Actually? I think I am,” Logan said, making a valiant attempt to convince himself that his improved mood had nothing to do with the fact that Roman was so casually holding his hand.

“Soo… are you saying that I was right?”

“Oh, absolutely not. I would never.” Roman laughed again, and Logan found himself smiling at the sound. “But thank you.”

“Of course, Logan. That’s why I’m here.”

“I know it is, but… it’s nice to have someone pretend to care anyway.”

“I’m not pretending.”

“Aren’t you?”

“No, I’m not. I promise you, Logan, I will never pretend with you.”

“Oh.” There was an odd sort of warmth in Logan’s chest, and he wanted to hold onto the memory of it for the rest of his life. As he drowned in that wonderful feeling, he felt the rest of his day fade into nothing, completely insignificant in this current moment of peace. “Thank you,” he repeated.

“You’re welcome,” Roman replied, but it sounded like he meant something else too, something hidden just beneath his spoken words that Logan couldn’t quite pick up on.

With a soft sigh, Logan leaned closer and rested his head on Roman’s shoulder. “You know,” he began, “I should apologize for the way I treated you earlier today. It was uncalled for, and you didn’t deserve it. I took out my feelings on you when you didn’t really do anything but sing too loudly—which, to be fair, can be incredibly annoying, but I digress—so I’m sorry.”

“Um,” Roman said in a way that was very nearly a squeak as he looked down at Logan. “Thanks.” He swallowed, and his voice returned to normal when he spoke again. “Now that you mention it though, I should probably do less of that when you’re around. I didn’t realize it bothered you as much as it did, so I too apologize.”

“Thank you,” Logan said, a relieved smile spreading across his face. “And I’ll do my best to remind you in a less snappish way whenever it gets on my nerves.”

“That would be nice, yes,” Roman agreed, returning Logan’s smile with a soft one of his own. “Now, I don’t want to ruin the moment, but I am truly glad I got to talk to you tonight. I know it may not seem like a lot, but it’s a better start than I would have ever hoped for you. Forgive me if this sounds odd, but I’m incredibly proud of you for that.”

“You’re very pushy, it was going to happen eventually.” Logan let out a small laugh at Roman’s answering noise of offense before clarifying, “And it’s nice to talk to you. I like having someone who’ll listen to me.”

“More people should listen to you. You’re fascinating, Logan.”

Logan felt his face heat up and his heart flutter yet again. “I— hngk.” he turned to bury his face in Roman’s shoulder. “You aren’t so bad yourself, I suppose,” he replied eventually, once his face had cooled down just a bit and his heart had slowed to a slightly more normal pace.

Roman hummed his agreement, placing a light kiss on the top of Logan’s head—which, for the record, completely nullified any progress Logan’s face and heart had made in calming themselves—before saying, “It’s getting rather late, and you’ve had a long day. We should go home.”

“Hm, we should,” Logan agreed, making no effort to move.

Roman sighed. “If you want, I could carry you.”

“What?!” Unlike Roman’s almost-squeak, Logan’s was far more obvious. “No, no, that’s alright, there’s no need for you to carry me. It’s fine, it’s all fine,” he said, standing suddenly and brushing nonexistent dirt off his clothes.

“Let us be off then!” Roman declared, kindly ignoring Logan’s flustered state and offering out his arm with a flourish.

Logan placed his hand in the crook of it, a smile that didn’t read at all as love-struck back on his face. “What a perfect gentleman.”

_________________________

After their conversation beneath the willow tree, Logan’s days passed much more peacefully. Roman wasn’t as loud and overbearing, and Logan found that talking to him about anything and everything was just as easy as it had been that night. Their days were full of laughter and happiness, and Logan finally grew comfortable with the idea of living with a—with his—guardian angel.

Logan had also grown painfully aware of the lulls in conversation whenever Roman complimented him and he found himself at a complete loss for words or when he shot Roman an unexpected smile and the angel’s face turned a shade of red almost as bright as the sash he’d had on the day Logan had met him. He was certain it couldn’t have meant much, but those lulls still blinked out at him like a neon sign on a deserted street.

…Alright, so it was possible that he wasn’t so naïve as to think that the constant state of being flustered and the constant blushing and the constant heated eye contact and everything else that had been happening meant nothing. And it was possible that he was aware that this likely meant he harbored feelings for Roman and Roman for him, but that in no way meant that he had to acknowledge these feelings.

He very much did not want to waste a month of perfectly good friendship, so he would also very much pretend these feelings did not exist.

At least, this is what he would have done had he not walked into his room one day while Roman was stretching his wings.

It was only then that Logan had realized that he hadn’t seen Roman’s wings at all since the first day they’d met and in all honesty, had nearly forgotten about him. There were times when Roman seemed so human that Logan couldn’t believe that was not the case. When he saw Roman’s wings though, he was reminded sharply of the fact that Roman was an angel, through and through.

Roman was an angel, and he was falling.

Logan assumed that this was why Roman’s wings were going black at the tips, but he still figured clarifying would be prudent. “Roman?” he asked, knocking lightly on the door frame to alert the angel to his presence.

“Logan!” Roman exclaimed, spinning around and hiding his wings behind him as best he could in one rapid movement. “What— what are you doing here, my darling?”

Giving a sigh that was altogether too fond, Logan said, “This is my room, Roman. I’m in here because I forgot my glasses on the nightstand.”

“Oh,” Roman nodded, still trying to make his wings disappear behind his body. “Yeah, that makes sense. Uh, go ahead and, um. Get your glasses so you can see. Not! That there’s anything interesting to see here.” Roman flashed him a sparkling grin, hiding the layer of panic beneath it.

“Telling me that there isn’t ‘anything interesting to see here’ is only going to convince me of the opposite. Besides, I already saw your wings. Why are they turning black?”

“That? Oh, that’s nothing!”

Logan raised an eyebrow.

“…By ‘nothing,’ I of course mean nothing of importance! I tried dyeing my feathers and was checking to see how they looked. It’s not good, I know,” Roman said with a laugh, that impressively enough, barely sounded forced.

“Are you falling?” Logan asked, ignoring Roman’s explanation entirely.

“Am I— am I falling?” Roman scoffed. “Why on Earth would I be falling? There’s no reason for me to fall, is there?”

“Well, I don’t think I should know. I’m not the one who knows the rules and hierarchy of the angels. So, you tell me. What reason would there be for you—or angels in general, I suppose—to fall?”

“Ah. Angels fall when they do… something bad. You know. Bad things. Evil things.”

Logan raised an eyebrow again. “Such as?”

“Oooh, you know. Pride, sometimes. Or jealousy, sloth, lust, greed, gluttony, wrath, too much disrespect or insubordination, not doing their job, uh, consorting with the enemy, and other such wickedness. Just. General bad things, as I said.”

“So, have you been prideful?”

“Not any more than what’s healthy.”

“Jealous? Lazy? Lustful? Greedy, gluttonous, wrathful?”

“Nope.”

“And I know you haven’t been disrespectful and that you have been doing your job.”

“Mhm. See, Logan? No reason at all for me to fall.”

“What would you define ‘the enemy’ as?”

“What?”

“ ‘The enemy,’ ” Logan repeated. “As in, ‘consorting with the enemy.’ ”

“Oh! Some define it as any non-angelic entity, but most would agree that ‘the enemy’ is more along the lines of a beast from Hell or another demon of sorts. And I clearly haven’t been consorting with any demons, so—”

“Define ‘consorting’ for me in this context, will you?”

“Well, normally it would mean to closely associate yourself with someone, but, seeing as I am a guardian angel, that is sort of my job. I’m not consorting with you if that’s what you’re worried about. The only way I’d be able to properly consort with you would be if I developed some sort of bond with you outside of a normal guardian angel-mortal relationship. Which! I haven’t! I’m just helping you work through your issues, and if I just so happen to become closer to you while doing so, no one could fault me for that!”

“Roman, I hate to break it to you, but that sounds exactly like consorting with the enemy. If you’ll excuse me for pointing this out, I feel we have a relationship that is just a little bit different than a strictly professional one.”

“Okay, so maybe you’re right. But almost all good guardian angels become friends with their humans! I’m hardly the first one, and none of them have fallen.”

“Mm, I suppose that is true. Can you think of any other reason that you could be falling?”

“Well… there is this one thing? That might possibly be happening? But I sincerely doubt it is,” Roman said through blithe laughter.

“Do you admit that you are falling, then?”

“I— uh, no…?”

“That convinced me of precisely nothing, thank you.”

“You’re welcome!” Roman’s demeanor brightened immediately upon saying this, as though pretending that everything was fine would convince Logan that it was.

It didn’t work, clearly, as Logan asked not a moment later, “Now, what’s that thing that might possibly be happening?”

“That? Oh, nothing! Again, nothing at all of importance. I assure you I’m fine, Logan. I can take care of myself.”

“I have no doubt that you could. In theory, at least.” Logan couldn’t help the smile that spread over his face at Roman’s offended gasps, but he managed to continue through barely repressed laughter. “But right now, you are very much not taking care of yourself for whatever reason. Care to inform me what that’s about?”

“I mean, no. Is that an option?”

Logan sighed in fond exasperation. “I’m afraid not.”

“Well. It was worth a shot.”

“No, it really wasn’t.”

“You’re no fun. But! Nice talk, it was great to see you, Lo!”

“…What are you doing.”

“Uh, I’m going to finish getting ready for the day?”

“And are you just assuming that I forgot about the whole ’you’re falling’ thing?”

“…Yes.”

“That would be incorrect, then. Please Roman, just let me know what’s going on. It’s clear you’re hiding something, so what is it?”

Roman winced at the accusation, sitting down on the bed. “Is there anything I could say to convince you to stop prying?”

“No, nothing at all,” Logan replied, sitting down next to him.

“Then… it would be best to just say it, right? Not draw it out for too long?”

“Yes, that is what most people would prefer to do.”

“I fell in love with you, Logan.”

“You did.”

“I did.”

Logan wasn’t sure why he felt so shocked, in all honesty. He’d known that this was very likely to be true. He’d known that Roman was falling from the second he’d walked in the room, and he’d had his suspicions as to why he was a moment later. He was at a loss, then, as to why he would possibly be feeling tears on his cheeks.

“Are you… crying? Did I say something wrong?”

“No, I— no. You’re fine.” Logan turned away to wipe the wetness from his cheeks before looking back up at Roman. “I believe it’s just that you—essentially, you’re falling because of me, aren’t you?”

“Well, not exactly. This is still entirely my own doing, after all.”

“But it is because you fell in love with me that you’re falling, correct?”

“I mean kind of, but I promise you that this isn’t your fault, Logan.”

“Isn’t it?” he asked, wiping away the final traces of his sadness from beneath his eyes. “If I had—”

“What, been less easy to love? You aren’t easy to love, Logan, and that’s one of the infinite reasons I do love you. I had to do so much to be granted even a glimpse of who you are, and after I did… well, I can hardly fault you for being yourself.” Roman gave him a bittersweet smile. “It wasn’t any one thing that caused me to fall in love with you, it was everything that you are and were. I love you—not something that you said or did or anything else—and there’s nothing you could have done to change that. My fall isn’t your fault, Logan. I promise.”

Logan dutifully ignored the blush that began to cover his face. “Is there any way to stop an angel from falling?”

“I’m not sure. But frankly, Logan, I don’t mind falling one bit if it’s for you.”

“That’s incredibly sweet and all, but I am trying to figure out a way to save your soul here, so I’d appreciate any information you may have on hand.”

“Yes, right. I, uh, I’m sorry to say that there isn’t a way to save a fallen angel, darling. You can’t raise angels, so while I do appreciate the fact that you care for me, there’s nothing you can do.”

“You haven’t fallen though, have you?”

“No, the darkening wings just indicate that I’m going to, and I’m going to soon.”

“You haven’t fallen yet,” Logan repeated, giving Roman a pointed look.

“…Yes. That’s what I just said.”

Logan shook his head, deciding to fully explain what he was thinking himself. “So if you stop doing whatever is causing you to fall, halt the progression of black over the rest of your wings… you could still be saved. You are still an angel, so you can be saved. All you have to do is—”

“No. Absolutely not. Logan, I made you a promise, and I won’t break it. I won’t—”

“—leave me behind.”

“—leave you behind.”

“You have to. I want you to be able to remain an angel, to not fall, to be happy because I—”

“I can’t. I don’t care what happens to me as long as it means I still get to see you and spend time with you and as long as you’re happy because I—”

“—love you,” they finished in unison.

“And that’s why you have to leave.”

“And that’s why I can’t leave.”

“I love you,” they said again, perfectly in sync, the words meaning everything and not nearly enough all at once.

“I don’t want to lose you,” Logan whispered.

“So then you won’t,” Roman replied, voice just as quiet.

“But I— I know there’s no other choice.”

“There’s always another choice.”

“Not this time. No matter what you do, I lose you.”

“Logan—”

“You have to leave. You have to go back to— to heaven or whatever sort of paradise it is that you came from. At least this way, I’ll get to say goodbye.”

“Logan—”

“Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me there’s another way, and I’ll stop.” It was a question, a challenge, but most of all, it was a plea.

“I—” Roman took a quivering breath. “You’re right. You’re always right,” he said with a slightly watery laugh. “There’s no other way. You’re right.”

There was a tragic sort of irony in that. The one time he wished more than anything that he was wrong, Logan knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he wasn’t. “I’m sorry,” he said as he leaned forward, resting his head against Roman’s chest. “I’m sorry.”

“I am too.”

Logan looked up and placed a delicate kiss on Roman’s cheek. “Do you— are you alright with leaving now?”

“Now?”

“I know it’s sudden, but I— I don’t want to draw this out any longer than necessary, not while I know that you’ll be leaving soon enough anyway.”

“Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.”

Both Logan and Roman went silent for a moment, neither moving, neither wanting the world to continue hurtling towards the end of their time together. Finally though, Roman spoke.

“How about one more day?”

“One more day?”

“Mhm. Just… spend one more day together, and then I leave tonight. So we can part with a few more beautiful memories of each other to hold on to.”

“That sounds—” Logan had to pause, clearing his throat to banish the emotion from his voice. “That sounds nice.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Do you have a plan?”

“Oh, absolutely not.”

Logan laughed, happy to ignore the ticking countdown in the back of his head until later. “I figured I’d ask, but somehow, I didn’t think you would.”

“You know me too well, love.” Roman lightly kissed the top of Logan’s head before continuing, “Give me a few minutes, and I’ll be ready. You’re good just wandering around town for a while, right?”

“With you?” Logan smiled. “How could I not be?”

_________________________

Time has a funny way of passing sometimes. When you’re looking forward to something, it seems to crawl. When you’re doing something you enjoy, it can become negligible and easily forgotten. When you have nothing to gauge it by, Mondays become Thursdays and Thursdays become Sundays.

And of course, when you’re dreading something, the time before it passes in a blur.

Roman and Logan’s day passed in a blur.

They’d gone to all three bookshops within walking distance of Logan’s house and the ice cream shop situated beside the final one. There was an odd little museum near the edge of town, and they’d dropped by there too. They had brunch at a charming cafe and made up stories about the people that walked past the window, perused the aisles of several stores just so Roman could try on increasingly eccentric outfits for Logan’s amusement and bought nothing. At the dog park just off of Main Street, they’d stopped to laugh with each other at the antics of the puppies that rushed to and fro before strolling along the road towards a park of their own, lined with the most beautiful flowering trees. They stopped in bakeries and candy stores, coffee shops and out-of-the-way boutiques filled to the brim with various antiques and trinkets. Logan and Roman did all that and still would have sworn they couldn’t have spent any more than four hours together.

It was, of course, closer to eight and a half hours since they’d walked into the first bookshop to the moment the sun had almost fully set and their day was over.

Time can do that to you sometimes.

Similarly to the way time had felt earlier in the day, time after the sun had set passed in flashes, quick as lightning and just as bright. The walk to their willow tree should have taken at least fifteen minutes, but it felt as short as one shallow breath.

When they did reach the willow tree, they stood there for what felt like an eternity, lost in each other’s eyes before Roman broke the silence. “Dance with me,” he said.

And though Logan had never once danced in his life, he replied, “Of course.”

Beneath the moonlight that filtered through the willow tree’s branches, Roman twirled Logan to the beat of the silence around them. Neither pointed out the lack of music, and neither mentioned that Roman had only asked to dance to put off the inevitable.

It was only when their feet grew too tired to keep moving that they stopped and stood still. Logan looked up at Roman and the stars above him, wondering how he’d gotten so lucky as to find someone like his angel, even if it was only for a fraction of his life. Roman looked down at Logan and the silver light that gleamed in his dark eyes, pondering what he had done to deserve having so little time with the love of his life before everything was ripped away.

The whole world paused as they held each other, Logan’s arms twined around Roman’s neck and Roman’s wrapped around Logan’s waist. The air felt fragile, like everything—not just their hearts—would shatter into trillions of pieces once they spoke again.

Still, time continued stubbornly forward on its path towards the end of Roman’s life on Earth—his life with Logan—so the angel spoke despite the fact that he could practically hear how the world shattered around them.

“Logan,” he started, moving his hands from Logan’s waist to brush a lock of hair behind his ear and brush the beginnings of a tear from beneath his left eye. “Logan, there are no words I can say that will truly encapsulate all that I feel for you. There is nothing in this world that could explain all that you mean to me, and there is no way for me to express the euphoria in my heart at having gotten to know and love you. Everything you are and every bit that you’ve grown causes me to fall more in love with you as the seconds tick past, and every moment I find I love you more sets a new precedent for the amount of love I’m able to give. Meeting you is the best thing that has ever happened to me, and no matter what happens, I will never, ever forget you. I love you, Logan, more than all the stars in the sky.”

“Roman,” Logan began, wracking his brain for a way for him to say everything he wanted to. “Did you know that if you were trapped in a black hole and you peeked out, you’d see everything that had ever happened and will ever happen in that tiny patch of sky?” he asked, settling on what he knew how to do best: teach.

“This is because black holes are so dense that they distort time itself. The universe slows down and speeds up on a whim, and the passage of time means nothing at all. You could enter a black hole today, and if by some miracle you managed to escape, you’d emerge thousands of years into the future though to you, it would have felt to be mere minutes. This ‘time dilation,’ as it were, would allow you to look ahead of you and see everything that had fallen into the black hole before you and if you managed to turn around, you’d see everything that would fall in after. So, if by some miracle you had enough presence of mind to observe the world around you as you neared the event horizon, you would be able to see the entirety of what had happened in your small corner of the universe when you did. Everything would be moving so much faster than light itself that you’d be able to watch the whole evolution of the universe happen—from the Big Bang to the end of life as we know it—all at once, over and over again.

“But you know, I think if it were me in that black hole, looking out at the creation and destruction of the universe, the rise and fall, again and again, all I’d be able to think about was being here with you in this moment. I don’t care one bit about seeing the rest of the universe when I have something more precious to me than all the stars in the sky—when I have you.”

Roman’s jaw had dropped at some point while Logan had been speaking, awed by the love and eloquence in his words. “Beautiful,” he whispered as he brushed a hand over Logan’s cheek, unable to say anything else and unwilling to shatter the silence any further.

Then a breeze blew through their hair, and Logan and Roman were reminded abruptly that the rest of the world existed.

“You have to leave,” Logan said, and it was at once an order and a lament. He took one step back, and it was the most painful thing he’d ever done.

“I do,” Roman agreed, and it was at once an acknowledgment and a form of mourning. He unfurled his wings, and it hurt more than anything else he’d done in his immortal life. They opened fully, glowing a brilliant white against the darkness as he flapped them once, lifting off the ground. He flapped them a second time, and he was well into the air, barely close enough to reach out a hand and brush it against Logan’s face. “Goodbye, my darling. I love you.”

“I love you too.” Roman’s hand began to pull away, and before he knew what he was doing, Logan’s own hand shot out and grasped his wrist as he said with sudden intensity, “Wait.”

“Yes?”

“May I kiss you? Just once, just to remember you by.”

“I wish I could give you thousands of kisses, Logan. Of course you may have this one.”

With that, Roman floated down slightly, feet still a few inches off the ground as though he knew that if he landed he’d never leave. Placing a gentle hand on Logan’s cheek, he leaned towards him, preparing for a soft, sweet kiss.

Logan seemed to have other plans though, for he laid his hands on Roman’s face and dragged him closer, standing on his tiptoes to reach Roman’s lips and meet them in a kiss so passionate the flame burning between them could have set the whole world aflame.

Logan didn’t pull back for a long while, refusing to come up for air because he knew—he knew—that when he did, it would mean Roman’s goodbye would be permanent. But he was human and had to breathe eventually, so pull back he did. Even then, though, he still wouldn’t remove his hands from Roman’s face.

“I love you,” Logan said once more, resting his forehead against Roman’s.

“I love you too. Goodb—”

“Don’t say goodbye. Please. I don’t want to think about the fact that I— I won’t— I won’t ever be able to see you again. Just say I love you. Those can be—” Logan swallowed hard, but he continued holding Roman’s face in his hands as though it were a lifeline. “Those can be your last words to me. Better than goodbye, I think.”

“Okay,” Roman whispered, fluttering his wings gently as he gradually lifted himself farther and farther away from Logan. “I love you, Logan. I always will.” Roman didn’t wait for a response, wiping the tears glistening in his eyes away as he fluttered into the sky and vanished in a bright flash of light.

He was gone.

Logan took a breath, willing it to stay calm. It hitched anyway, and his voice came out similarly unsteady as he said to empty air, “I love you too, Roman. Always. Always, and more than all the stars in the sky.” If he really listened, Logan could almost imagine he heard those final words echoing back at him, falling from the sky the same way Roman almost had.

_________________________

Roman was falling.

He was falling, and his wings hadn’t turned black. He was falling, and he wasn’t screaming in pain. He was falling, and he was smiling.

He was falling, and Logan was staring at the sky in disbelief as he did.

Logan was a neuroscientist. He knew that a fight or flight response was triggered when the human brain was overwhelmed and stressed. He knew exactly how it dealt with information and that if need be, it would formulate more believable scenarios when the current one couldn’t be processed. He knew that when it came to sleep deprivation, intense hallucinations would only start after a full seventy-two hours of no sleep.

Logan was not overwhelmed. Logan’s mind had always processed things in the way it should have, and he was not prone to coming up with scenarios that had never happened. While it wasn’t as much sleep as would have been ideal—seeing as he had been consistently sleep deprived for the past week—Logan had still slept for a full seven and a half hours last night.

And that’s why, for the life of him, he could not figure out why Roman appeared to be falling from the sky.

Roman wasn’t supposed to be falling from the sky. Roman was supposed to be in heaven or whatever sort of paradise it was that he lived in because Logan’s heartbreak hadn’t been for nothing, because Roman leaving had meant something, because their dual sacrifice had ensured that he would be safe.

So why the fuck was he falling now?

And where were his wings? If he were falling, shouldn’t they be as dark and black as night?

Something was wrong. Logan didn’t know what, but something was wrong. He had to get to Roman.

Logan wasn’t normally one for running, but he did make sure to keep himself in shape. That, combined with the adrenaline coursing through his veins, caused him to arrive at the field of wildflowers in record time. As long as Logan’s sense of direction was sound, he was sure that Roman had, for whatever reason, appeared to be falling straight for their willow tree.

Panting, Logan slowed down as he scoured the ground for the place Roman had fallen.

“I’m up here, love.”

Logan looked up. “You’re on top of a willow tree.”

“Astute,” Roman agreed.

“Why are you on top of a willow tree?” Logan asked, refusing to ask the question he wanted the answer to most of all.

Roman shrugged. “It’s just where I fell. I didn’t have any control over that.”

“Right,” Logan said, only slightly distracted by the fact that Roman was currently leaping from branch to branch in an attempt to reach the ground. “So then,” he began, figuring that putting this off any longer didn’t make the least bit of sense, “why did you fall? And doesn’t falling usually entail becoming… you know.”

“A demon? Yeah, it normally does. But I’m a special case,” Roman grinned as he made one final jump and landed on solid ground.

“Yes, I’d say you very much are.” Ignoring Roman’s spluttering response as he continued to make his way towards the angel, Logan asked, “But in this particular scenario, how so?”

With an annoyed huff—presumably still directed at Logan’s previous comment—Roman replied, “I didn’t technically fall, not in the way you’d think of it, since I did nothing wrong. So I’m not a demon, but I’m also not an angel anymore.”

“So what are you, then?”

“Human.”

“Wh— How?”

“Easy,” Roman said, tucking a lock of Logan’s hair behind his ear the moment he drew near enough for Roman to do so. “You know how I fell in love with you? And you fell in love with me?”

Logan raised an eyebrow. “You think I could forget? It’s not as though that’s all I’ve been thinking about for the past several weeks.”

“Yes, well, my point is that angels are creatures of love, of course, so once my boss figured out why I came back, She decided that tearing me away from the love of my life went entirely against everything angels stood for.”

“And that… caused you to fall?”

“Not exactly. That caused Her to give me a choice: stay an immortal angel until the end of time, helping people as I always had or fall to Earth and become a human so I could still be with you.”

“And you chose to come back. You chose to be human. You chose—”

“You.”

“Me.”

“I wouldn’t dream of doing anything else, my darling.”

“Roman—” Logan stopped, suddenly finding himself unable to speak.

“Yes, love?”

Still lacking the words he needed, Logan instead took another step forward at the same time Roman did, and their lips met in the space between them for their second-ever kiss.

“I love you,” Roman said, voicing what Logan could have only hoped to.

For once, Logan was more action than words as he kissed Roman again. It was a promise—a promise to them both that their kisses would be just as numerous as the very stars Roman had helped to create, their love just as beautiful.

“More than all the stars in the sky,” Logan replied finally, lips still a hairsbreadth from Roman’s, voice barely a whisper.

“More than all the stars in the sky.”

_________________________

find other stuff i’ve written under #writings from the stars

[poisonedapples]

Logan deserves to have a doctorate in human aus. As a treat.

[the-lonely-bookeeper]

Uh oh another wiiiippppppppp

So, Post Apocalyptic au

Intrulogical cause that seems to be the only thing I think about lately.

Logans a zombie

Instead of being a full fledged zombie though, hes just undead , and the part of his brain that controls emotions is damaged

He is (was?) A neuroscientist, so he knows how to stay safe bc I say that's how it works

Remus was some sort of body horror professional, on the movie sets Roman acted on.

So when the outbreak first started Roman thought it was a prank and got separated from Remus with Virgil and their son Remy

So Remus is all alone, armed with his sub par cooking skills and the ability to identify who's a zombie and whose not cause they look normal, only with signs of decay here and there

Ask me abt this ples

1/2/3/4/5

[softestvirgil]

The Discovery of Fusion, Part 2

Part One

Summary:

Roman and Virgil find out what creativity looks like when they are together

Genre: Fusion

Rating: PG

Pairing(s): None

Warnings: Mentions of disturbing imagery with no descriptions

Let me know if there’s any more I should add!

It had been several months since the sides first discovered that they could fuse, and since the incident with Patton, Virgil was very hesitant to try it again. He would claim he wanted to, but whenever the time came that one of them wanted to try it, he always had an excuse as to why it wasn't the right time. The other sides all eventually grew tired of this and just decided to give him some space, as to not pressure him if he wasn't ready. Today he and Roman were not getting along whatsoever. "How could you tell him to do that?!" Virgil yelled at the fanciful side, to which he scoffed in response. "How was I supposed to know it would turn out that way, Lydia Deetz?" Virgil rolled his eyes. "I just can't believe you embarrassed us-him like that..." "Ugh... Logan! Patton! Anyone who can end this!" Thomas called out frustrated and the two aforementioned sides rose up in their respective spots. "What seems to be the issue, Thomas?" Logan asked quizzically. "Well..." Thomas began and Virgil took over. "He was on a date-" Roman jumped in. "That was going well all thanks to me!-" Virgil sneered at him and continued. "-But then someone decided to come on way too strong and-" "It scared him off..." Thomas finished dejectedly. "Aw well mistakes happen, and there is plenty of fish in the sea!" Patton exclaimed to which Logan nodded in agreement. "Yes and as the kids say..." Logan began before pulling out a vocab card. "Thank you, next." Roman applauded. "That's a good one, Logan." "I know, guys it's just... I really liked him." Thomas stated melancholically.

Virgil sighed. "Well next time, ignore him..." "I am the romantic side, Anxiety. How would ignoring me and listening to you do anything but cause a disaster?" Roman interrogated sassily. "Well for starters if he was listening to me he wouldn't have worn that..." Virgil responded and Thomas looked down at his shirt, then left the frame to retrieve a sweater that was sitting on his couch, and finally, put it on. "Maybe he has a point..." Thomas thought. "No! He's Anxiety! If you listened to him about this we would have stayed home and not even gone on the date in the first place! Thomas do you even hear yourself?!" Roman shouted. "Well... I hear you... and you are part of me so... yes?" Thomas replied, rather casually despite being yelled at seconds before. "None of this senseless bickering is getting us anywhere," Logan stated, then pointed at Virgil and Roman. "You two... cut it out," "But he-" "But I-" "I have an idea!" Interrupted Patton. "You guys should fuse!" He said, with a glint of excitement in his hazel eyes. "I don't-" Virgil began but was cut off by Patton once again. "I know you're scared because of how it went the first time, but what if this helps you guys figure out how to see from each other's point of view better? That's what the rest of us do and we barely fight anymore," "That last part is debatable, but Patton's not wrong," Logan stated. "All I'm saying is it couldn't hurt to try." Patton finished and looked at Virgil hopefully. "Only if you want to," Reminded Thomas, but he too had that same excitement in his face that Morality had. "What if I... I don't wanna..." Virgil trailed off and looked down at the floor for a moment in contemplation.

"Don't want to what?" Roman asked and Virgil's head snapped up. "I don't want to hurt you, okay?" He blurted and Roman smiled softly in response. "Ah, I'm sure it will... be fine, Virge," Roman reassured calmingly, and the anxious side met his gaze. "You sure?" Virgil asked, with both fear and admiration evident in his features. Roman smirked. "I am not! However, that is why we must do this! For how can we know things without doing the required research?" "So true," Added Logan proudly. "So, shall we?" Roman offered, and Virgil moved from his spot, into Roman's. "It's uh, been a while so how do we..." Virgil began but then Roman guided his hands to where they needed to be and proceeded to lead them in a gentle waltz. However since Virgil had two left feet, he kept tripping over Roman and that eventually caused the two sides to fall into a pile on the floor. After a moment of shock, they both began laughing heartily. Then they finally fused. The fusion continued laughing for a moment, and then they slowly stood up. "Woah... did it work?" They asked, then looked down at themselves. They were wearing Roman's usual clothes but the white was turned black and all the red was purple, there were also multiple patches of purple plaid scattered around it as there was on Virgil's hoodie. "Oh, em gee it did!" They exclaimed. "Oh boy," Logan chided with a worrisome expression. "Well, how do you feel?" Patton asked excitedly. "I feel, exceptional." They said and struck a pose. Their voice was deep, like Virgil's but had an overwhelmingly feminine tinge to it. "Well, you should! Rogil!" Patton remarked and was met with judgment from Logic. "What? I like giving the fusions names!" Patton defended himself.

Rogil's imagination was, intense to say the least. Each idea they imagined was more twisted and macabre than the last. At the same time, though, Virgil loved the feeling of being able to be creative, even if his influence was causing a Tim Burton-like effect on Roman.

Virgil once again did not want to stop. He felt Roman tugging, and he simply was not ready. He fought as hard as he could but it was no use.

In a flash, Rogil disappeared, with Virgil and Roman once again tumbling on to the floor in a pile. "Are you guys okay? Why'd you stop?" Patton asked worriedly. Virgil stood up. "I don't know..." "I un-fused us," Roman admitted guiltily. Patton quirked an eyebrow. "Why?" Roman sighed. "Well I was trying to imagine ideas, how I usually do, but they were all so... messy," "Messy in what way?" Wondered Logan. "Like..." Roman began. "...in a scary way," Virgil finished and looked away pensively. "Well that's not... good," Said Thomas. Patton was startled for a moment. "Oh! Thomas, I forgot you were here!" Thomas looked at Patton with bewilderment. "You are... literally part of me how did you... nevermind," He said and directed his attention to Virgil and Roman "Did it help at all in allowing you to see from each other's point of view?" "For me it did... at least I think so," Roman said and Virgil looked over at him. "Really?" "Well, when Patton said it was a lot before... that was eh, a bit of an understatement," Roman said and Virgil scoffed. "See? This is why I don't fuse! Right here!" Virgil yelled but then Roman spoke again. "You didn't let me finish, it is a lot... however, you shouldn't have to carry it all on your own, yet you do... and that is very... brave of you," Virgil sighed. "It's my job," "Well maybe if you'd allow us all to fuse with you more, we can learn how to make your fusions more stable and try to help carry some of the burdens for you," Patton said. "Maybe you're right... it still feels scary though especially after all of... that," Virgil remembered. "But it might feel less scary if you get used to it, like riding a bike!" Exclaimed Patton. "Yeah... I guess," Virgil said with a chuckle. Logan thought for a moment before speaking. "You do not have to engage in these fusion experiments if you do not wish to though, Anxiety. We can always try to solve these issues through other means. The brain works in very mysterious ways, ways of which many neuroscientists still don't understand. I am sure we can find other solutions rather than combining simply to see from each other's point of view. Perhaps, rather than that, we try to explain where we are coming from in a more in-depth way, and try to figuratively step into each other's shoes," "Wow, very good point, Logan," Said Thomas. "It's interesting how this is about you yet we all keep forgetting you're here," Roman said with a laugh. "Yeah, why is that?" Thomas wondered. "Well... you usually talk more, like way more... like... too much," Virgil pointed out. "Okay thanks guys, I've had enough for today!" Announced Thomas. "We're done? Cool," Virgil said before sinking out. "Wait- we weren't finished, ugh... another day perhaps!" Yelled Logan before he too sank out. "Hi," Patton said with a smile. 

Thomas smiled back. "Hi, are you gonna go or?"

"Oh! Yeah," Patton remembered and quickly sunk out.

Then, Thomas curled up on the couch and slept until two pm the next day. Figuring yourself out, took a lot of energy, apparently. 

[angelofberlin2000]

Photo: Emily Denniston/Vulture and photos courtesy of the studios 

Keanu Reeves has been a movie star for more than 30 years, but it seems like only recently that journalists and critics have come to acknowledge the significance of his onscreen achievements. He’s had hits throughout his career, ranging from teen comedies (Bill & Ted’s) to action franchises (The Matrix, John Wick), yet a large part of the press has always treated these successes as bizarre anomalies. And that’s because we as a society have never  been able to understand fully what Reeves does that makes his films so special.

In part, this disconnect is the lingering cultural memory of Reeves as Theodore Logan. No matter if he’s in Speed or Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Something’s Gotta Give, he still possesses the fresh-faced openness that was forever personified by Ted’s favorite expression: “Whoa!” That wide-eyed exclamation has been Reeves’s official trademark ever since, and its eternal adolescent naïveté has kept him from being properly judged on the merits of his work.

Some of that critical reassessment has been provided, quite eloquently, by Vulture’s own Angelica Jade Bastién, who has argued for Reeves’s greatness as an action star and his importance to The Matrix (and 21st-century blockbusters in general). Two of her observations are worth quoting in full, and they both have to do with how he has reshaped big-screen machismo. In 2017, she wrote, “What makes Reeves different from other action stars is this vulnerable, open relationship with the camera — it adds a through-line of loneliness that shapes all his greatest action-movie characters, from naïve hotshots like Johnny Utah to exuberant ‘chosen ones’ like Neo to weathered professionals like John Wick.” In the same piece, Bastién noted: “By and large, Hollywood action heroes revere a troubling brand of American masculinity that leaves no room for displays of authentic emotion. Throughout Reeves’s career, he has shied away from this. His characters are often led into new worlds by women of far greater skill and experience … There is a sincerity he brings to his characters that make them human, even when their prowess makes them seem nearly supernatural.”

In other words, the femininity of his beauty — not to mention his slightly odd cadence when delivering dialogue, as if he’s an alien still learning how Earthlings speak — has made him seem bizarre to audiences who have come to expect their leading men to act and carry themselves in a particular way. Critics have had a difficult time taking him seriously because it was never quite clear if what he was doing — or what was seemingly “missing” from his acting approach — was intentional or a failing.

This is not to say that Reeves hasn’t made mistakes. While putting together this ranking of his every film role, we noticed that there was an alarmingly copious number of duds — either because he chose bad material or the filmmakers didn’t quite know what to do with him. But as we prepare for the release of the third John Wick installment, it’s clear that his many memorable performances weren’t all just flukes. From Dangerous Liaisons to Man of Tai Chi — or River’s Edge to Knock Knock — he’s been on a journey to grow as an actor while not losing that elemental intimacy he has with the viewer. Below, we revisit those performances, from worst to best.

   45. Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

The nadir of the ’90s cyberpunk genre, and a movie so bad, with Reeves so stranded, that it’s actually a bit of a surprise the Wachowskis were able to forget about it and still cast him as Neo. Dumber than a box of rocks, it’s a movie about technology and the internet — based on a William Gibson story! — that seems to have been made by people who had never turned on a computer before. Seriously, watch this shit:

44. The Watcher (2000) This movie exists in many ways because of its stunt casting: James Spader as a dogged detective and Keanu as the serial killer obsessed with him. Wait, shouldn’t those roles be switched? Get it? There would come a time in his career when Keanu could have maybe handled this character, but here, still with his floppy Ted Logan hair, he just looks ridiculous. The hackneyed screenplay does him no favors, either. Disturbingly, Reeves claims that he was forced to do this movie because his assistant forged his signature on a contract. He received the fifth of his seven Razzie nominations for this film. (He has yet to win and hasn’t been nominated in 17 years. In fact, it’s another sign of how lame the Razzies are that he got a “Redeemer” award in 2015, as if he needed to “redeem” anything to those people.)

43. Sweet November (2001) It’s a testament to how cloying and clunky Sweet November is that its two leads (Reeves and Charlize Theron) are, today, the pinnacle of action-movie cool — thanks to the same filmmaker, Atomic Blonde and John Wick’s David Leitch — yet so inert and waxen here. This is a career low point for both actors, preying on their weak spots. Watching it now, you can see there’s an undeniable discomfort on their faces: If being a movie star means doing junk like this, what’s the point? They’d eventually figure it all out.

42. Chain Reaction (1996) As far as premises for thrillers go, this isn’t the worst idea: A team of scientists are wiped out — with their murder pinned on poor Keanu — because they’ve figured out how to transform water into fuel. (Hey, Science, it has been 23 years. Why haven’t you solved this yet?) Sadly, this turns into a by-the-numbers chase flick with Reeves as Richard Kimble, trying to prove his innocence while on the run. He hadn’t quite figured out how to give a project like this much oomph yet, so it just mostly lies around, making you wish you were watching The Fugitive instead.

41. 47 Ronin (2013) In 2013, Reeves made his directorial debut with a Hong Kong–style action film. We’ll get into that one later, because it’s a ton better than this jumbled mess, a mishmash of fantasy and swordplay that mostly just gives viewers a headache. Also: This has to be the worst wig of Keanu’s career, yes?

40. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993)

Gus Van Sant’s famously terrible adaptation of Tom Robbins’s novel never gets the tone even close to right, and all sorts of amazing actors are stranded and flailing around. Reeves gets some of the worst of it: Why cast one of the most famously chill actors on the planet and have him keep hyperventilating?

39. Replicas (2019) In the wake of John Wick’s success, Keanu has had the opportunity to sleepwalk through some lesser sci-fi actioners, and this one is particularly sleepy. The idea of a neuroscientist (Reeves) who tries to clone his family after they die in an accident could have been a Pet Sematary update, but the movie insists on an Evil Corporation plot that we’ve seen a million times before. John Wick has allowed Reeves to cash more random checks than he might have ten years ago. Here’s one of them.

38. Feeling Minnesota (1996) As far as we know, the only movie taken directly from a Soundgarden lyric — unless we’re missing a superhero named “Spoonman” — is this pseudo-romantic comedy that attempts to be cut from the Tarantino cloth but ends up making you think everyone onscreen desperately needs a haircut and a shave. Reeves can tap into that slacker vibe if asked to, but he requires much better material than this.

37. Little Buddha (1994)

To state the obvious, it would not fly today for Keanu Reeves to play Prince Siddhartha, a monk who would become the Buddha. But questions of cultural appropriation aside, you can understand what drew The Last Emperor director Bernardo Bertolucci to cast this supremely placid man as an iconic noble figure. Unfortunately, Little Buddha never rises above a well-meaning, simplistic depiction of the roots of a worldwide religion, and the effects have aged even more poorly. Nonetheless, Reeves is quite accomplished at being very still.

36. Much Ado About Nothing (1993) Quick anecdote: We saw this Kenneth Branagh adaptation of the Bard during its original theatrical run, and when Reeves’s villainous Don John came onscreen and declared, “I am not of many words,” the audience clapped sarcastically. That memory stuck because it encapsulates viewers’ inability in the early ’90s to see him as anything other than a dim SoCal kid. Unfortunately, his performance in Much Ado About Nothing doesn’t do much to prove his haters wrong. As an actor, he simply didn’t have the gravitas yet to pull off this fiendish role, and so this version is more radiant and alive when he’s not onscreen. It is probably just as well his character doesn’t have many words.

35. Bram Stoker��s Dracula (1992) GIFs are a cheap way to critique a performance. After all, acting is a complicated, arduous discipline that shouldn’t be reduced to easy laughs drawn from a few seconds of film played on a loop. Then again …

This really does sum up Reeves’s unsubstantial performance as Jonathan Harker, whose new client is definitely up to no good. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a wonder of old-school special effects and operatic passion — and it is also a movie in which Reeves seems wholly ill at ease, never quite latching onto the story’s macabre period vibe. We suspect if he could revisit this role now, he’d be far more commanding and engaged. But in 1992, he was still too much Ted and not enough anything else. And Reeves knew it: A couple years later, when asked to name his most difficult role to that point, he said, “My failure in Dracula. Totally. Completely. The accent wasn’t that bad, though.” Well …

34. The Neon Demon (2016)

One of the perks of being a superstar is that you can sometimes just phone in an amusing cameo in some bizarro art-house offering. How else to explain Reeves’s appearance in this stylish, empty, increasingly surreal psychological thriller from Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn? He plays Hank, a scumbag motel manager whose main job is to add some local color to this portrait of the cutthroat L.A. fashion scene. If you’ve been waiting to hear Keanu deliver skeezy lines like “Why, did she send you out for tampons, too?!” and “Real Lolita shit … real Lolita shit,” The Neon Demon is the film for you. He’s barely in it, and we wouldn’t blame him if he doesn’t even remember it.

33. The Lake House (2006) Reeves reunites with his Speed co-star for a movie that features a lot fewer out-of-control buses. In The Lake House, Sandra Bullock plays a doctor who owns a lake house with the strangest magical power: She can send and receive letters from the house’s owner from two years prior, a dashing architect (Reeves). This American remake of the South Korean drama Il Mare is romantic goo that’s relatively easy to resist, and its ruminations on fate, love, destiny, and luck are all pretty standard for the genre. As for those hoping to enjoy the actors’ rekindled chemistry, spoiler alert: They’re not onscreen that much together.

32. Henry’s Crime (2011) You have to be careful not to cast Reeves as too passive a character; he’s so naturally calm that if he just sits and reacts to everything, and never steps up, your movie never really gets going. That’s the case in this heist movie about an innocent man (Reeves) who goes to jail for a crime he didn’t commit and then plans a scam with an inmate he meets there (James Caan). The movie wants to be a little quirkier than it is, and Reeves never quite snaps to. The film just idles on the runway.

31. The Bad Batch (2017) Following her acclaimed A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour plops us in the middle of a desert hellscape in which a young woman (Suki Waterhouse) must battle to stay alive. The Bad Batch is less accomplished than A Girl, in large part because style outpaces substance — it’s a movie in which clever flourishes and indulgent choices rule all. Look no further than Reeves’s performance as the Dream, a cult leader who oversees the only semblance of civilization in this post-apocalyptic world. It’s less a character than an attitude, and Reeves struggles to make the shtick fly. He’s too goofy a villain for us to really feel the full measure of his monstrousness.

30. Hardball (2001)

Reeves isn’t the first guy you’d think of to head up a Bad News Bears–style inspirational sports movie, and he doesn’t pull it off, playing a gambler who becomes the coach of an inner-city baseball team and learns to love, or something. It’s as straightforward and predictable an underdog sports movie as you’ll find, and it serves as a reminder that Reeves’s specific set of skills can’t be applied to just any old generic leading-man role. The best part about the film? A 14-year-old Michael B. Jordan.

29. Street Kings (2008) Filmmaker David Ayer has made smart, tough L.A. thrillers like Training Day (which he wrote) and End of Watch (which he wrote and directed). Unfortunately, this effort with Reeves never stops being a mélange of cop-drama clichés, casting the actor as Ludlow, an LAPD detective who’s starting to lose his moral compass. This requires Reeves to be a hard-ass, which never feels particularly convincing. Street Kings is bland, forgettable pulp — Reeves doesn’t enliven it, getting buried along with the rest of a fine ensemble that includes Forest Whitaker, Hugh Laurie, and a pre-Captain America Chris Evans.

28. Constantine (2005) In post-Matrix mode, Reeves tries to launch another franchise in a DC Comics adaptation about a man who can see spirits on Earth and is doomed to atone for a suicide attempt by straddling the divide twixt Heaven and Hell. That’s not the worst idea, and at times Constantine looks terrific, but the movie doesn’t have enough wit or charm to play with Reeves’s persona the way the Wachowskis did.

27. The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) Reeves’s alienlike beauty and off-kilter line readings made him an obvious choice to play Klaatu, an extraterrestrial who assumes human form when he arrives on our planet. This remake of the 1950s sci-fi classic doesn’t have a particularly urgent reason to exist — its pro-environment message is timely but awkwardly fashioned atop an action-blockbuster template — and the actor alone can’t make this Day particularly memorable. Still, there are signs of the confident post-Matrix star he had become, which would be rewarded in a few years with John Wick.

26. Knock Knock (2015) Reeves flirts with Michael Douglas territory in this Eli Roth erotic thriller that’s not especially good but is interesting as an acting exercise. He plays Evan, a contented family man with the house to himself while his wife and kids are out of town. Conveniently, two beautiful young strangers (Ana de Armas, Lorenza Izzo) come by late one stormy night, inviting themselves in and quickly seducing him. Is this his wildest sexual fantasy come to life? Or something far more ominous? It’s fun to watch Reeves be a basic married suburban dude who slowly realizes that he’s entered Hell, but Knock Knock’s knowing trashiness only takes this cautionary tale so far.

25. The Devil’s Advocate (1997)

Very few people bought tickets in 1997 for The Devil’s Advocate to see Keanu Reeves: Hotshot Attorney. Obviously, this horror thriller’s chief appeal was witnessing Al Pacino go over the top as Satan himself, who just so happens to be a New York lawyer. Nonetheless, it’s Reeves’s Kevin Lomax who’s actually the film’s main character; recently moved to Manhattan with his wife (Reeves’s future Sweet November co-star, Charlize Theron), he’s the new hire at a prestigious law firm who only later learns what nefarious motives have brought him there. Reeves is forced to play the wunderkind who gets in over his head, and it’s not entirely convincing — and that goes double for his southern accent.

24. The Prince of Pennsylvania (1988) “You are like some stray dog I never should have fed.” That’s how Rupert’s older hippie pal, Carla (Amy Madigan), affectionately refers to him, and because this teen dropout is played by Keanu Reeves, you understand what she means. In this forgotten early chapter in Reeves’s career, Rupert and Carla decide to ditch their going-nowhere Rust Belt existence by taking his dad (Fred Ward) hostage and collecting a handsome ransom. The Prince of Pennsylvania is a thoroughly contrived and mediocre comedy, featuring Reeves with an incredibly unfortunate haircut. (Squint and he looks like the front man for the Red Hot Chili Peppers.) Still, you can see signs of the soulfulness and vulnerability he’d later harness in better projects. He’s very much a big puppy looking for a home.

23. The Last Time I Committed Suicide (1997) Every hip young ’90s actor had to get his Jack Kerouac on at some point, so it would seem churlish to deny Reeves his opportunity. He plays the best pal/drinking buddy of Thomas Jane’s Neal Cassady, and he looks like he’s enjoying doing the Kerouac pose. Other actors have done so more indulgently. And even though he’s heavier than he’s ever been in a movie, he looks great.

22. A Walk in the Clouds (1995) Keanu isn’t quite as bad in this as it seemed at the time. He’s miscast as a tortured war veteran who finds love by posing as the husband of a pregnant woman, but he doesn’t overdo it either: If someone’s not right for a part, you’d rather them not push it, and Keanu doesn’t. Plus, come on, this movie looks fantastic: Who doesn’t want to hang around these vineyards? Not necessarily worth a rewatch, but not the disaster many consider it.

21. The Replacements (2000) The other movie where Keanu Reeves plays a former quarterback, The Replacements is an adequate Sunday-afternoon-on-cable sports comedy. He plays Shane, the stereotypical next-big-thing whose career capsized after a disastrous bowl game — but fear not, because he’s going to get a second chance at gridiron glory once the pros go on strike and the greedy owners decide to hire scabs to replace them. Reeves has never been particularly great at playing regular guys — his talent is that he seems different, more special, than you or me — but he ably portrays a good man who’s had to live with disappointment. The Replacements pushes all the predictable buttons, but Reeves makes it a little more enjoyable than it would be otherwise.

20. Tune in Tomorrow (1990) A very minor but sporadically charming bauble about a radio soap-opera scriptwriter (Peter Falk) who begins chronicling an affair between a woman (Barbara Hershey) and her not-related-by-blood nephew on his show — and ultimately begins manipulating it. Tune in Tomorrow is light and silly and harmless, and Reeves shows up on time to set and looks extremely eager to impress. He blends into the background quietly, which is probably enough.

19. I Love You to Death (1990)

This Lawrence Kasdan comedy — the first film after an incredible four-picture run of Body Heat, The Big Chill, Silverado, and The Accidental Tourist — is mostly forgotten today, and for good reason: It’s a farce that mostly features actors screaming at each other and calling it “comedy.” But Reeves hits the right notes as a stoned hit man, and it’s amusing just to watch him share the screen with partner William Hurt. This could have been the world’s strangest comedy team!

18. Youngblood (1986)

This Rob Lowe hockey comedy is … well, a Rob Lowe hockey comedy, but we had to include it because a 21-year-old Reeves plays a dim-bulb, good-hearted hockey player with a French Canadian accent that’s so incredible that you really just have to see it. Imagine if this were the only role Keanu Reeves ever had? It’s sort of amazing. “AH-NEE-MAL!”

17. Destination Wedding (2018) An oddly curdled comedy about two wedding guests (Reeves and Winona Ryder) who have terrible attitudes about everything but end up bonding over their universal disdain for the planet and everyone on it. That sounds like a chore to watch, and at times it is, but the pairing of Reeves and Ryder has enough nostalgic Gen-X spark to it that you go along with them anyway. With almost any other actors you might run screaming away, but somehow, in spite of everything, you find them both likable.

16. Thumbsucker (2005)

The first film from 20th Century Women and Beginners’ Mike Mills, this mild but clever coming-of-age comedy adaptation of a Walter Kirn novel has Mills’s trademark good cheer and emotional honesty. Reeves plays the eponymous thumbsucker’s dentist — it’s funny to see Keanu play someone named “Dr. Perry Lyman” — who has the exact right attitude about both orthodontics and life. It’s a lived-in, funny performance, and a sign that Keanu, with the right director, could be a more than capable supporting character actor.

15. Something’s Gotta Give (2003) This Nancy Meyers romantic comedy was well timed in Reeves’s career. A month after the final Matrix film hit theaters, Something’s Gotta Give arrived, offering us a very different Keanu — not the intense, sci-fi action hero but rather a charming, low-key love interest who’s just the supporting player. He plays Julian Mercer, a doctor administering to shameless womanizer Harry Sanborn (Jack Nicholson), who’s dating a much younger woman (Amanda Peet), who just so happens to be the daughter of a celebrated playwright, Erica (Diane Keaton). We know who will eventually end up with whom in Something’s Gotta Give, but Reeves proves to be a great romantic foil, wooing Erica with a grown-up sexiness the actor didn’t possess in his younger years. We’re still not sure Meyers got the ending right: Erica should have stuck with him instead of Harry.

14. Man of Tai Chi (2013) This is the only movie that Reeves has directed, and what does it tell us about him? Well, it tells us he has watched a ton of Hong Kong action movies and always wanted to make one himself. And it’s pretty good! It’s technically proficient, it has a straightforward narrative, it has some excellent long-take action sequences (as we see in John Wick, Keanu isn’t a quick-cut guy; he likes to show his work), and it has a perfectly decent Keanu performance. We wouldn’t call him a visionary director by any stretch of the imagination. But we’d watch another one of these, definitely.

13. Dangerous Liaisons (1988)

Le Chevalier Raphael Danceny is merely a pawn in a cruel game being played by Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont, and so it makes some sense that the young man who played him, Keanu Reeves, is himself a little outclassed by the actors around him. This Oscar-winning drama is led by Glenn Close and John Malkovich, who have the wit and bite to give this 18th-century tale of thwarted love and bruised pride some real zest. By comparison, Danceny is practically a boy, unschooled in the art of manipulation, and Reeves provides the character with the appropriate youthful naïveté. He’s not a standout in Dangerous Liaisons, but he acquits himself well — especially near the end, when his blade fells Valmont, leaving him as one of the unlikely survivors in the film’s ruthless battle.

12. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009) In this incredible showcase for Robin Wright, who plays a woman navigating a constrictive, difficult life with more grace and intelligence than anyone realizes, Reeves shows up late in a role that he’s played before: the younger guy who’s the perfect fit for an older woman figuring herself out. He hits the right notes and never overstays his welcome. As a romantic lead, less is more for Reeves.

11. Parenthood (1989) If you were an uptight suburban dad, like Steve Martin is in Ron Howard’s ensemble comedy, your nightmare would be that your beloved daughter gets involved with a doofus like Tod. Nicely played by Keanu Reeves, the character is the embodiment of every slacker screwup who’s going to just stumble through life, knocking over everything and everyone in his path. But as it turns out, he’s a lot kinder and mature than at first glance. Released six months after Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Parenthood showed mainstream audiences a more grown-up Reeves, and he’s enormously appealing — never more so than when advising a young kid that it’s okay to masturbate: “I told him that’s what little dudes do.”

10. Permanent Record (1988) A very lovely and sad movie that’s nearly forgotten today, Permanent Record, directed by novelist Marisa Silver, features Reeves as the best friend of a teenager who commits suicide and, along with the rest of their friends, has to pick up the pieces. For all of Reeves’s trademark reserve, there is very little restraint here: His character is devastated, and Reeves, impressively, hits every note of that grief convincingly. You see this guy and you understand why everyone wanted to make him a star. This is a very different Reeves from now, but it’s not necessarily a worse one.

9. Point Break (1991)

Just as Reeves’s reputation has grown over time, so too has the reputation of this loopy, philosophical crime thriller. Do people love Point Break ironically now, enjoying its over-the-top depiction of men seeking a spiritual connection with the world around them? Or do they genuinely appreciate the seriousness that director Kathryn Bigelow brought to her study of lonely souls looking for that next big rush — whether through surfing or robbing banks? The power of Reeves’s performance is that it works both ways. If you want to snicker at his melodramatic turn, fine — but if you want to marvel at the rapport his Johnny Utah forms with Patrick Swayze (Bodhi), who only feels alive when he’s living life to the extreme, then Point Break has room for you on the bandwagon.

8. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991) Before there was Beavis and Butt-Head, before there was Wayne and Garth, there were these guys: two Valley bozos who loved to shred and goof off. As Theodore Logan, Keanu Reeves found the perfect vessel for his serene silliness, playing well off Alex Winter’s equally clueless Bill. But note that Bill and Ted aren’t jerks — watch Excellent Adventure now and you’ll be struck by how incredibly sunny its humor is. Later in his career, Reeves would show off a darker, more brooding side, but here in Excellent Adventure (and its less-great sequel Bogus Journey) he makes blissful stupidity endearing.

7. The Gift (2000) This Sam Raimi film, with a Billy Bob Thornton script inspired by his mother, fizzled at the box office, despite a top-shelf cast: It’s probably not even the first film called The Gift you think of when we bring it up. But, gotta say, Reeves is outstanding in it, playing an abusive husband and all-around sonuvabitch who, nevertheless, might be unfairly accused of murder, a fact only a psychic (Cate Blanchett) understands. Reeves is full-on trailer trash here, but he brings something new and unexpected to it: a sort of bewildered malevolence, as if he’s moved by forces outside of his control. More of this, please.

6. My Own Private Idaho (1991)

Gus Van Sant’s landmark drama is chiefly remembered for River Phoenix’s nakedly anguished performance as Mike, a spiritually adrift gay hustler. (Phoenix’s death two years after My Own Private Idaho’s release only makes the portrayal more heartbreaking.) But his performance doesn’t work without a doubles partner, which is where Reeves comes in. Playing Scott, a fellow hustler and Mike’s best friend, Reeves adeptly encapsulates the mind-set of a young man content to just float through life. Unlike Mike, he knows he has a fat inheritance in his future — and also unlike Mike, he’s not gay, unable to share his buddy’s romantic feelings. Phoenix deservedly earned most of the accolades, but Reeves is terrific as an unobtainable object of affection — inviting, enticing, but also unknowable.

5. Speed (1994)

Years later, we still contend that Speed is a stupid idea for a movie that, despite all logic (or maybe because of the utter insanity of its premise), ended up being a total hoot. What’s clear is that the film simply couldn’t have worked if Reeves hadn’t approached the story with straight-faced sincerity: His L.A. cop Jack Traven is a ramrod-serious lawman who is going to do whatever it takes to save those bus passengers. Part of the pleasure of Speed is how it constantly juxtaposes the life-or-death stakes with the high-concept inanity — Stay above 50 mph or the bus will explode! — and that internal tension is expressed wonderfully by Reeves, who invests so intently in the ludicrousness that the movie is equally thrilling and knowingly goofy. And it goes without saying that he has dynamite chemistry with Sandra Bullock. Strictly speaking, you probably shouldn’t flirt this much when you’re sitting on top of a bomb — but it’s awfully appealing when they get their happy ending.

4. River’s Edge (1987) This film’s casting director said she cast Reeves as one of the dead-end kids who learn about a murder and do nothing “because of the way he held his body … his shoes were untied, and what he was wearing looked like a young person growing into being a man.” This was very much who the early Reeves was, and River’s Edge might be his darkest film. His vacancy here is not Zen cool … it’s just vacant, intellectually, ethically, morally, emotionally. Only in that void could Reeves be this terrifying. This is definitely a performance, but it never feels like acting. His magnetism was almost mystical.

3. John Wick (2014), John Wick: Chapter Two (2017), and John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum (2019)

If they hadn’t killed his dog, none of this would have happened. Firmly part of the “middle-aged movie stars playing mournful badasses” subgenre that’s sprung up since Taken, the John Wick saga provides Reeves with an opportunity to be stripped-down but not serene. He’s a lethal assassin who swore to his dead wife that he’d put down his arms — but, lucky for us, he reneges on that promise after he’s pushed too far. Whereas in his previous hits there was something detached about Reeves, here’s he locked in in such a way that it’s both delightful and a little unnerving. The 2014 original was gleefully over-the-top already, and the sequels have only amped up the spectacle, but his genuine fury and weariness felt new, exciting, a revelation. Turns out Keanu Reeves is frighteningly convincing as a guy who can kill many, many people.

2. A Scanner Darkly (2006)

In hindsight, it seems odd that Keanu Reeves and Richard Linklater have only worked together once — their laid-back vibes would seemingly make them well suited for one another. But it makes sense that the one film they’ve made together is this Philip K. Dick adaptation, which utilizes interpolated rotoscoping to tell the story of a drug cop (Reeves) who’s hiding his own addiction while living in a nightmarish police state. That wavy, floating style of animation nicely complements A Scanner Darkly’s sense of jittery paranoia, but it also deftly mimics Reeves’s performance, which seems to be drifting along on its own wavelength. If in the Matrix films, he manages to defeat the dark forces, in this film they’re too powerful, leading to a pretty mournful finale.

1. The Matrix (1999), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), and The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

“They had written something that I had never seen, but in a way, something that I’d always hoped for — as an actor, as a fan of science fiction.” That’s how Reeves described the sensation of reading the screenplay for The Matrix, which had been dreamed up by two up-and-coming filmmakers, Lana and Lilly Wachowski. Five years after Speed, he found his next great project, which would become the defining role of his career. Neo is the missing link between Ted’s Zen-like stillness and John Wick’s lethal efficiency, giving us a hero’s journey for the 21st century that took from Luke Skywalker and anime with equal aplomb. Never before had the actor been such a formidable onscreen presence — deadly serious but still loose and limber. Even when the sequels succumbed to philosophical ramblings and overblown CGI, Reeves commanded the frame. We always knew that he seemed like a cool, left-of-center guy. The Matrix films gave him an opportunity to flex those muscles in a true blockbuster.

[collapsingintojupiter]

I had a dream

At least, I think it was a dream? Could've been a hallucination or straight-up vision from the universe itself for all I know tbh, sleep was not kind to me.

Anyways, so I found myself standing in Thomas Sanders' apartment. And Thomas was there and he looked at me and asked if I wanted to talk. I sort of tilted my head, and asked if I could speak to Logan.

He nodded. Nothing outwardly changed about him; but I could tell immediately by his demeanor that it was Logan. I told him that I admired him and wished I could be more like him. And I told him a lot of things; I told him how much I loved science and how I dreamed of becoming a neuroscientist one day, how much I'd loved Chemistry class and how I loved to read and learn about the world around me. I told him about how sometimes my thoughts raced and I couldn't stop them; I overthink too much and I'm so worried I won't be enough to be what I want to be. And Logan kinda looked at me and nodded and he told me to step back and calm down; he reminded me not to let cognitive distortions pull me too far away from reality and not to be so hard on myself. He was so calm, and it helped me calm down too.

I then asked if I could talk to Patton. He nodded, and suddenly he looked so gentle and kind, and I knew it was him. I told him that I appreciated him and people like him even if I don't understand them. I told him about my family and friends, how I struggle to get along with my family and make friends; I told him about how my emotions don't make any sense and I don't know what to do with them and that I wish I could be better than what I am. And he reminded me that I was loved and that people cared about me even if I couldn't see it, and he told me that even if my family didn't accept me he was there for me. His genuine kindness was so soothing, and he talked about puppies and flowers and sunsets and told me about how pretty the world was so that even if I couldn't find it myself; he could help me find it.

And I asked if I could talk to Roman. And in an instant, the white-and-red drama queen was there. He smiled at me and I told him that he amused me, that I loved his stories even if the old days of knights were gone; that his attitude was inspiring, even if I'll never understand it. And I showed him my stories and ideas and he looked so excited to see them and told me that they were great and he loved all of them; we talked about plots and characters, hopes and dreams. He told me that people would love my stories and I just had to go for it and take the risk sometimes, even if I was afraid of what peoples' reactions might be. He told me I was brave.

I was a little embarrassed; muttered a thank-you and then quietly asked if I could talk to Virgil.

And there he was. The dramatic demeanor completely dropped and I was staring at someone who looked about as lost and tired as I felt. I told him that I hadn't asked to talk to him last because I hated him; he looked dubious until I explained that I usually remembered the beginnings and ends of things best, and because he and Logan were my favorite Sides that was why I had chosen that order. He sort of smiled then and I told him that I related to him, and loved his character because I saw so much of myself in him. I shared with him my fears and worries over never being enough and becoming a failure and accidentally hurting those I care about and more; I told him about how my thoughts run away on me and everything feels chaotic and it's terrifying and just what if and he listened quietly to me the whole time. And when I stopped, he just nodded slowly, then looked at me and told me that I could make it. Not that I would, because nothing was certain and empty promises meant nothing, but that I could. I had it in me to do it.

And then the scene sort of faded but yeah, I think I just got a pep talk from Thomas and the Sides in my delirious exhaustion.

[nfl2sevensummits]

Patrick Sweeney: Fear Guru, Keynote Speaker, Author, and TEDx Speaker helping companies create a culture of courage, shares how he managed to go from overcoming an exhaustive work-over-everything mentality and being consumed by fear to aligning his life w

128: Patrick Sweeney: Fear Guru, Keynote Speaker, Author, and TEDx Speaker helping companies create a culture of courage, shares how he managed to go from overcoming an exhaustive work-over-everything mentality and being consumed by fear to aligning his life with balance, family, and courage.

Patrick Sweeney

Patrick Sweeney, who grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, and was diagnosed with leukemia. “I was born first generation Irish immigrants in Boston, blue-collar neighborhood. My parents didn’t go to college or anything like that. My dad is working three jobs. I had a really rough time growing up. But I had a bunch of trauma events as a child that planted this seed of terror in me.” In order to create an image to protect himself with when he was younger, Patrick trained for the Olympics for six years, coming in second in the Olympic trials, 10th in the world, rowed the World Cup for three years, and started three technology companies, raising over $50 million dollars. 

  On this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, we talk with Patrick Sweeney, Fear Guru, Keynote Speaker, Author, and TEDx Speaker who is helping companies create a culture of courage. Patrick discusses the importance of seeing what is on the other side of fear and embracing the things that we are depriving ourselves of. “I learned that if I was going to live life, I had to choose courage instead of succumbing to fear all the time.” 

  What You Will Learn:

  Patrick Sweeney discusses the book he has been writing about fear. “As I started to learn more about courage and that sort of thing, I’ve interviewed now over 36 neuroscientists over the past five years for this book Fear is Fuel, which is coming out in January (2020). And during that time, one thing that is clear to me is that we all have something I call a ‘fear frontier.’ So, before you are 10 or 12 years old, you have an event or a series of events that you have to create a defense mechanism to.”

  What was the root of all of his fear as he sees it? “I saw a plane crash when I was 7 years old and that planted that seed of terror inside me and so, two things happen when a traumatic event occurs. First, you create what is called a semantic memory, and those are just the facts. That gets written into your internal database. For me it was Delta, DC9, 100 people died, Logan Airport, rainy day, and that was it.” 

  “The second thing you get is the emotional memory. Death, dismemberment, I might have lost my parents. It could of been me. And at the same time too, I had a grandfather who felt that the way to make me stronger was to take his belt off and put me over the bed and beat me with it.” The way Patrick would respond to all of this was with a fear-based mechanism that prompted him to run away.

  Having a supportive wife, of 20 years now, and being a father has been a significant part of Patrick Sweeney’s stability and drive to fight his fears face-to-face. “Uniquely enough, I decided I was going to get over that fear of flying. So, I started taking flying lessons. I got to tell you. The first one, I think I peed four times before I made it out to the plane.” Patrick Sweeney actually fell in love with flying by the third or fourth lesson and got his private pilot license, his commercial license, and even started competing in aerobatics. 

  Patrick discusses the advice he learned about his fears of not constantly working. “You’ve got to embrace that little boy in you. When you do something like go out and play on the rock or go and play on the ski slope or whatever, you’ve got to let go of this fact that you feel guilty that you should be working.”

  Another Way to Live Life

  What was the common reaction when Patrick Sweeney decided to live a new way? “If you can imagine at that time, being a part of this whole high-tech community and venture community where your identity is an entrepreneur/venture CEO and people saying, ‘What are you talking about you are going to move to Europe?’ ‘What are you talking about you are going to start adventuring and start doing the summits and buy a bike? That is ridiculous.’” 

  Find More Fear

  If the common cliche is to get over our fears, why does Patrick Sweeney recommend that we find more fear? “We have to find more fear everyday. Scare ourselves everyday, and it doesn’t have to be jumping out of a plane. It can be getting up and making a toast at lunch because you are afraid of public speaking. It can be taking a cold shower because everyone says, ‘You can’t take a cold shower.’” Hear how you can jumpstart something good to happen in your life by working through fears during this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast with Patrick Sweeney. 

  Links to Additional Resources:

Patrick Sweeney: Linkedin Twitter Instagram

Patrick Sweeney’s Website: PJSweeney.com and TheFearGuru.com

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Check out this episode!

[timeywimeygalaxy]

The Ghost Of You {Chapter 2}

A/N: Chapter 2 ya’ll! and gotta say this got a lot darker than I anticipated it being xD so I’m sorry for that! also to note the way Roman says “Demon” is pretty much the way Shane says it here xD Dunno why it cracks me up and Deceit is mentioned in this chapter his name will be Dorian in this AU and throughout it, I hope you like this chapter!

Warning: descriptions of murder, Swearing, Deceit (mentioned), let me know if there is anything else!

Pairings: None....yet ;)

Words: 2530

Tag List: @accio-hufflepuff-power @just-an-anxious-ravenclaw-boy

Let me know if you would like to be tagged/untagged in future updates!

Ch1 Ch 2 Ch3 Ch 4

“C’mon Ro!” Virgil huffed as all three men scurried through the airport wheeling their suitcases behind them, after a 6-hour flight which included Roman freaking out upon seeing their plane number was 180 “Have you SEEN Final Destination?” Virgil was already anxious enough without that dork making him more so, luckily Logan had diffused the situation quickly by stating “no need to worry Roman the odds of dying in a plane crash are statistically one in eleven million” “That’s still one!” Roman shouted dramatically. Virgil rolled his eyes as he pulled his arm to the checkout desk.

All three of them were frazzled, after one taxi ride, a 6 hour flight with a stop in between that, now they were finally on the ground back in their hometown and boy did it feel good to be back on home soil again, stepping out the airport helped as the cool breeze hit their faces, chucking their suitcases into a rental car, Virgil got in the drivers seat slamming the door closed, he wanted to get to their Air BnB and at least have some time to recuperate before tonight.

Arriving at their rental place, they made their way inside and dumped their suitcases in their respective rooms, Virgil opened his and started laying out devices on his bed as Logan entered his room and leaned on the door frame looking at the objects that Virgil was picking up inquisitively.

“What’s all this?” he questioned as Virgil finished laying out all the objects.

“these,” he said as he closed his suitcase and kicked it under the bed “are our tools for tonight” Logan raised his eyebrow at him, “Enlighten me?” Virgil knew Logan hated not knowing things, so he gladly explained, feeling somewhat superior that he knew more about this subject than he did.

“So you got this thing” Virgil held up a square box device, pressed a button and red light turned on “it’s an EMF meter, measures electromagnetic fields within a certain radius, also measures temperature” Logan nodded completely focused soaking in all of this information like sponge he chucked it back on the bed after explaining its usage and picked up another black box it looked like a portable radio “and this is a spirit box, it sends out radio signals at a certain frequency and could allow us to talk to a spirit if need be” he chucked it back on the bed “and this here” he said picking up a small black box with a lens in “is what we call a camera” he spoke in a condensing tone grinning as Logan looked at him like he was already done “I know what a camera is Virgil” both men laughed softly as a comfortable silence fell between them, Virgil started packing everything into a rucksack, zipping it shut he then eyed up Logan suspiciously “anyway why do you care what equipment we use? Thought you didn’t believe in this stuff?”

As if bought back to reality by social interaction rather than soaking in knowledge, Logan blinked and understood the question, he went back to his composed usual state, “I don’t, simply put it is scientifically impossible for any entities to exist in this world, in a 2000 study,  a cognitive neuroscientist from laurentlan university in Canada used electromagnetic fields to stimulate the brain of a forty five year old man who’d reported previous spirits and with the magnetic fields, the researchers were able to conjure a similar apparitions that the man had seen years before” He finished looking rather pleased with himself as Virgil sighed.

“So, you just think that’s it, nothing happens after you die?” he asked sounding monotone.

“yes”  

“That’s depressing.” Virgil muttered out loud mainly to himself, he could see that Logan looked somewhat hurt by this comment, and he quickly tried to correct it “that’s not- I mean- just I guess try to keep an open mind like I said before?” Logan nodded “if need be then I will concede if we actually find substantial evidence” now it was time for Virgil to nod as he smiled at his nerdy friend thinking how much he really did care for both of them.

As they pulled into the driveway of the abandoned place, the street lamps illuminated the outside of it, at night time it makes the house appear much more sinister, all three got out the car and looked up at the house, Virgil felt uneasy slightly knowing what had happened 10 years ago now…wow had it really been that long? He shook himself out of his nostalgic thoughts and turned his friends “okay let’s get in and set stuff up, Logan you’re on the camera, I’ll do sound stuff and Roman you…do whatever you do best” Roman grinned, as they walked up to the door.

Virgil pushed it and it slowly creaked open, the boys turned their flashlights on as they entered and Virgil swore it had looked worse than when he was first there, yeah 10 years does that to a place but this looked a lot messier, the narrow kitchen looked like a bomb had hit it as all the pots, pans and whatever had been left there was no sprawled all over the kitchen floor and the cupboard doors lay open bare.

“Welcome to creepsville boys” Roman whispered as they went further down the hallway three flashlights moved around the open living room, as the sofa and still broken coffee table from all those years ago, only now it appeared more broken like someone had hit it with a sledge hammer bits of it lay splintered on the ground “be careful guys” Virgil announced as he manoeuvred around the wooden splinters and lay his rucksack on the couch he pulled a few folded pieces of paper from the rucksack and handed Logan the go pro camera with a stick that it screwed onto to make it less shaky.

Virgil looked around the dark room flashing the light in all areas, squinting in the darkness he had an extremely uneasy feeling that he felt like a pair of eyes were watching them, it was unbearably silent his breath hitched as Roman put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it reassuringly, this calmed him down a bit as he turned to Logan who looked ready enough wit the camera, he turned the sound on to record his voice, if they were filming here then they were going to need some kind of back story for the audience plus Roman and Logan needed to know what had happened before they started doing anything stupid…Roman mostly.

Virgil sat down on the couch as a bit of dust escaped it, he unfolded the paper and held it shakily in his hands looking up at the other two “time for a history lesson” he switched on the audio recorder and started reading to them from the paper.

“On November 2nd 1997 two friends moved into 494 skylar avenue, Thomas Sanders 29 and Patton Prairie 26,  both men were described as very friendly and all around nice people by their peers, their neighbours described them as “very nice boys, they were always looking out for each other and everyone in the neighbourhood said how kind and caring they were they both always had a smile on ther face” soon after moving in though they described witnessing paranormal activity to their families, such as lights dimming, scratching on the walls and sometimes they said they heard what sounded like growling-“

“Like a lion?” Roman snorted as Virgil glared at him adjusting the paper in his hand.

“More like a demon” he retorted, Roman laughed as he looked around the place “Demahn, Demahn!” He called out and snickered, “Dude stop it! Virgil snapped but was clearly suppressing a half laugh at Roman’s antics, “Look let me just get on with this okay, just stop…antagonizing it” he sighed returning to the paper, Roman pushed his hands into his pockets suppressing a giggle.

“After one night, in particular, Patton had told his mother that he felt an eerie presence next to there bed so she called them in a medium in to exorcise whatever the presence was, it was performed and for a while everything seemed fine, until on the afternoon on November 2nd, 1998 exactly one year after the men had moved in, three men were found brutally murdered-“

“Three? I thought there were two” Logan inquired

“yeah alright I’m getting to that!” Virgil huffed at him.

“Thomas, Patton and a third person were found dead by a friend who said they were meant to be meeting them that day, Patton was found with multiple stab wounds in his body whilst Thomas was eerily found lying next to him, it was described “as if he was trying to hug him”, having nearly the exact same wounds as his friend.

Roman and Logan shifted uncomfortably at this piece of information and Roman glanced around the living room suspiciously.

“upstairs in the bedroom a third body was found, he would later be identified as a friend of theirs Dorian Bennett, family have said that they had a bit of a rocky friendship but they still cared for each other, Dorian had been seen by neighbours hanging out with the two men quite frequently before they had been killed-“

“He did it!” Roman assumed

“And how have you come to this conclusion?” Logan remarked

“C’mon it’s obvious! They had a rocky friendship, he was seen hanging out with a lot more before they died, maybe an argument happened or something and he killed them, then himself! There you go I solved it!”

Virgil glared at him “you didn’t solve anything because he was found with his neck snapped” Virgil smirked at him with a knowing stare that he had proven Roman wrong who had shut up giving him a pouty look, he shook his head and continued.

“although neighbours, friends, and family were questioned about there deaths, with no DNA found at the scene of the crime and no leads as to what happened, no one knows what went down within that houses’ walls but ever since people have described seeing a man wearing glasses appearing in the kitchen, there’s been male laughter heard as well as screams, growling and banging on the walls, one person even said they heard someone singing Disney songs-“

Roman let out a high pitch wheeze “I-I’m sorry…just- imagine walking into the kitchen and you just hear a far away echo rendition of let it go, I mean man those ghosts have good taste!” Roman declared, Virgil glared at him as he opened his mouth to continue he was interrupted again.

“Okay we get it!, enough we get the picture man, two friends, Demahn!” Roman snickered again at his pronunciation of the word demon, “and mysterious deaths, shall we get started with what you wanted to do?”

Virgil thinks for a moment before setting the papers down “okay, you guys ready?”

“As we’ll ever be” Logan replied as he pressed the recording button the small go pro camera, everything is silent for a moment before Virgil speaks.

“Is there anyone here with us right now?” He asks nervously slightly pulling his hoodie tighter around himself, he held his breath.

Nothing.

Suddenly Roman piped up loudly making Virgil jump “C’mon demahn! Do something! If you want to hurt us bang on the walls!”

“DUDE! What the fuck are you doing!?” Virgil yelled in fear as Roman and Logan (to Virgil’s surprise) suppressed a laugh, Virgil raised his eyebrows at him as Logan composed himself once more “I apologize, Virgil,, but Roman does have a humorous way of looking at his situation, and whilst I may be biased with the whole ‘non believer’ aspect I can still appreciate that the… demahn-“ Roman was now howling with laughter as Logan was trying to suppress his in order to not make the camera shake, “That’s the spirit, Logan!”  Roman starting chortling again at his own pun, Virgil was now giving them both daggers “you’re both assholes” he declared “why did I even bring you here?” he asked himself as he rubbed his face in annoyance, exhaling a large breath, both of the men’s laughter was suddenly cut short as multiple loud bangs on the wall echoed throughout the house, it was so loud that, Virgil jumped and shuffled backwards closer to the other two and Roman let out a dramatic scream, whilst Logan on the other hand remained calm and collected “now you’ve done it” Virgil whispered towards the other two, “what did I tell you, don’t fuck with a demon!” he snapped at both of them “it was probably the wind, this house is very old therefore it will be in need of repair work” Logan replied coolly.

“wind is not that strong dude, and there’s no sign of a hurricane hitting here anytime soon!” Virgil hissed at him under his breath whilst trying to calm himself.

Subtle footsteps were heard from the kitchen as Virgil flicked his flashlight to where the sound was coming from, he grabbed Roman’s hand subconsciously as he breathed in and held for seven seconds before exhaling for eight, “you got that on film, right?” Virgil checked with Logan and he nodded, Virgil gestured to Roman with his arm pointing at something, but roman couldn’t understand what he was trying to say Virgil continued nodding “grab the fucking spirit box thing!”.

“Oh!” once Roman understood he ran over to the bag laying on the couch, took out the spirit box and handed it to Virgil who shakily turned it on, a loud static noise rang through the house as Roman covered his ears and all three of them winced at the sound cutting through the air “Oh Jesus Christ! Does it have to be that loud!” Roman whined over the noise as Virgil nodded as he looked around the room with his flashlight he bravely stepped forward and addressed the room “if there are any spirits with us tonight then please make yourself known, we’re sorry about what happened to you”

“i-cant-“ two syllables of a male voice seemed to cut through the static, Virgil looked to the other two who didn’t seem convinced “did you just-“ Roman shook his head “all I heard was gibberish that could be any radio channel” Virgil sighed exasperatedly at his friends scepticism as he changed the knob on the radio to a more easier channel to hear.

“Okay, is there anyone here? We have this box and you can talk to us through it”

Static.

Virgil sighed and ran a hand through his hair when another voice broke through the static

“Hello” all three men looked at each other in horror and it was clear that they had all heard the exact same thing, Roman and Logan moved closer to Virgil and listened intently to the box.

“Ca-Can you tell us your name?” Virgil asked it

The static on the box didn’t seem to change for a minute, they all glanced at each other holding their breaths until a distinct voice on the box echoed through the house.

“Thomas”

HOOO BOI! XD sorry for that cliffhanger folks! Hope you all liked the chapter though! chapter 3 should be soon! ^^ 

[henrysowel26]

Allen Institute opens new division to study brain behavior and circuits in mammals

Seattle’s Allen Institute has launched a new division called The Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics, which will explore how the brain executes complex actions like decision making, learning and memory. The new division will be led by neuroscientist Karel Svoboda. He will move to Seattle from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Virginia, where he is currently a senior group leader. “The Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics will focus on understanding how the brain, as a whole, solves problems to drive our behavior and ultimately to enable our survival in complex and ever-changing environments,” said Svoboda in… Read More from knowledge.website http://knowledge.website/communication/allen-institute-opens-new-division-to-study-brain-behavior-and-circuits-in-mammals

from Knowledge Website https://knowledgewebsite.tumblr.com/post/666977938450825216 from Gianna Jordan’s Blog https://giannajordan91.tumblr.com/post/666981410367766528 from Logan Eugene’s Blog https://loganeugene91.tumblr.com/post/666997153452982272 from Marilyn Jeremy’s Blog https://marilynjeremy91.tumblr.com/post/667004174849982464 from Vivian Butler’s Blog https://vivianbutler91.tumblr.com/post/667006678470918144 from Ellery Apple’s Blog https://elleryapple90.tumblr.com/post/667011371514347520 from Susan Anthony's Blog https://susananthony90.tumblr.com/post/667012682562600960

[the-lonely-bookeeper]

For the apocalipse au, does logan work on a cure in the lab he worked before the apocalypse or does he just uses the supermarket?? If it's in the lab why would he be in a supermarket? If it's in the market then how???? Also remus is an absolute mood, I, too, can't live without crackers lol

GASP! AN ASK!

So, like our situation, the virus started out as just a virus, and spread REAL quick. Weird thing was, instead of targeting your blood cells, or your lungs or you heart, it targeted your brain.

So a crap ton of people were reporting in with headaches and the need to go feral and get angry, and then they all started dying

Like not even 'oh I'm feeling sick oh I pass out oh im dead hours later' kinda stuff, they were dying in the walmart, in their cars while driving, just immediately, boom, gone.

Eventually someone figured out what was happening. So Logan, being a neuroscientist, was working on the cure beforehand, and accidentally contracted it at one point, possibly by his coworker having it and spreading it through the lab.

So he realizes he has it, and is kinda freaking out because he has a virus, how is he gonna get a Nobel prize and find love and maybe adopt a kid if hes dead?!?!?

But then he fudges up and whoops. Dies from something other than the virus in his lab.

But it's still in his head, so when he dies, it reanimates him, and he comes back to life with the logical part of his brain still intact, surrounded by the undead corpses of his coworkers

So he grabs all of his notes on it and hightailes it out of there, where he finds the Walmart and sets up camp there, trapping any zombie who wanders in and thinks hes human.

Logans been there for a bit, so half of his face has decayed

Hes pretty sure he had another eyeball before he died.

When Remus stumbles upon him, Logan decides to go with him because he is sure there isnt going to be another opportunity where he can be protected by a still-human and get to a better place than the supermarket to do tests.

1/2/3/4/5/6

Taglist:

@snek-snacc

[ask-crs-sides]

Patton can Thomas build you something for you to see better? I mean he did build something like Logan so It should be possible

Thomas shifted. “I’m afraid it’s not so simple. Patton’s inability to see comes from a brain injury, which means if I built something, it would have to be intact with the brain. I’m not a neuroscientist. I wouldn’t trust myself to build something of such magnitude.”

[tastydregs]

A Single Math Model Explains Many Mysteries of Vision

This is the great mystery of human vision: Vivid pictures of the world appear before our mind’s eye, yet the brain’s visual system receives very little information from the world itself. Much of what we “see” we conjure in our heads.

“A lot of the things you think you see you’re actually making up,” said Lai-Sang Young, a mathematician at New York University. “You don’t actually see them.”

Quanta Magazine

About

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research develop­ments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

Yet the brain must be doing a pretty good job of inventing the visual world, since we don’t routinely bump into doors. Unfortunately, studying anatomy alone doesn’t reveal how the brain makes these images up any more than staring at a car engine would allow you to decipher the laws of thermodynamics.

New research suggests mathematics is the key. For the past few years, Young has been engaged in an unlikely collaboration with her NYU colleagues Robert Shapley, a neuroscientist, and Logan Chariker, a mathematician. They’re creating a single mathematical model that unites years of biological experiments and explains how the brain produces elaborate visual reproductions of the world based on scant visual information.

“The job of the theorist, as I see it, is we take these facts and put them together in a coherent picture,” Young said. “Experimentalists can’t tell you what makes something work.”

Young and her collaborators have been building their model by incorporating one basic element of vision at a time. They’ve explained how neurons in the visual cortex interact to detect the edges of objects and changes in contrast, and now they’re working on explaining how the brain perceives the direction in which objects are moving.

Their work is the first of its kind. Previous efforts to model human vision made wishful assumptions about the architecture of the visual cortex. Young, Shapley, and Chariker’s work accepts the demanding, unintuitive biology of the visual cortex as is—and tries to explain how the phenomenon of vision is still possible.

“I think their model is an improvement in that it’s really founded on the real brain anatomy. They want a model that’s biologically correct or plausible,” said Alessandra Angelucci, a neuroscientist at the University of Utah.

Layers and Layers

There are some things we know for sure about vision.

The eye acts as a lens. It receives light from the outside world and projects a scale replica of our visual field onto the retina, which sits in the back of the eye. The retina is connected to the visual cortex, the part of the brain in the back of the head.

However, there’s very little connectivity between the retina and the visual cortex. For a visual area roughly one-quarter the size of a full moon, there are only about 10 nerve cells connecting the retina to the visual cortex. These cells make up the LGN, or lateral geniculate nucleus, the only pathway through which visual information travels from the outside world into the brain.

Not only are LGN cells scarce—they can’t do much either. LGN cells send a pulse to the visual cortex when they detect a change from dark to light, or vice versa, in their tiny section of the visual field. And that’s all. The lighted world bombards the retina with data, but all the brain has to go on is the meager signaling of a tiny collection of LGN cells. To see the world based on so little information is like trying to reconstruct Moby-Dick from notes on a napkin.

“You may think of the brain as taking a photograph of what you see in your visual field,” Young said. “But the brain doesn’t take a picture, the retina does, and the information passed from the retina to the visual cortex is sparse.”

But then the visual cortex goes to work. While the cortex and the retina are connected by relatively few neurons, the cortex itself is dense with nerve cells. For every 10 LGN neurons that snake back from the retina, there are 4,000 neurons in just the initial “input layer” of the visual cortex—and many more in the rest of it. This discrepancy suggests that the brain heavily processes the little visual data it does receive.

“The visual cortex has a mind of its own,” Shapley said.

For researchers like Young, Shapley, and Chariker, the challenge is deciphering what goes on in that mind.

Visual Loops

The neural anatomy of vision is provocative. Like a slight person lifting a massive weight, it calls out for an explanation: How does it do so much with so little?

Young, Shapley, and Chariker are not the first to try and answer that question with a mathematical model. But all previous efforts assumed that more information travels between the retina and the cortex — an assumption that would make the visual cortex’s response to stimuli easier to explain.

“People hadn’t taken seriously what the biology was saying in a computational model,” Shapley said.

Mathematicians have a long, successful history of modeling changing phenomena, from the movement of billiard balls to the evolution of space-time. These are examples of “dynamical systems”—systems that evolve over time according to fixed rules. Interactions between neurons firing in the brain are also an example of a dynamical system—albeit one that’s especially subtle and hard to pin down in a definable list of rules.

LGN cells send the cortex a train of electrical impulses one-tenth of a volt in magnitude and one millisecond in duration, setting off a cascade of neuron interactions. The rules that govern these interactions are “infinitely more complicated” than the rules that govern interactions in more familiar physical systems, Young said.

Individual neurons receive signals from hundreds of other neurons simultaneously. Some of these signals encourage the neuron to fire. Others restrain it. As a neuron receives electrical pulses from these excitatory and inhibitory neurons, the voltage across its membrane fluctuates. It only fires when that voltage (its “membrane potential”) exceeds a certain threshold. It’s nearly impossible to predict when that will happen.

“If you watch a single neuron’s membrane potential, it’s fluctuating wildly up and down,” Young said. “There’s no way to tell exactly when it’s going to fire.”

The situation is even more complicated than that. Those hundreds of neurons connected to your single neuron? Each of those is receiving signals from hundreds of other neurons. The visual cortex is a swirling play of feedback loop upon feedback loop.

“The problem with this thing is there are a lot of moving parts. That’s what makes it difficult,” Shapley said.

Earlier models of the visual cortex ignored this feature. They assumed that information flows just one way: from the front of the eye to the retina and into the cortex until voilà, vision appears at the end, as neat as a widget coming off a conveyor belt. These “feed forward” models were easier to create, but they ignored the plain implications of the anatomy of the cortex—which suggested “feedback” loops had to be a big part of the story.

“Feedback loops are really hard to deal with because the information keeps coming back and changes you, it keeps coming back and affecting you,” Young said. “This is something that almost no model deals with, and it’s everywhere in the brain.”

In their initial 2016 paper, Young, Shapley, and Chariker began to try and take these feedback loops seriously. Their model’s feedback loops introduced something like the butterfly effect: Small changes in the signal from the LGN were amplified as they ran through one feedback loop after another in a process known as “recurrent excitation” that resulted in large changes in the visual representation produced by the model in the end.

Young, Shapley, and Chariker demonstrated that their feedback-rich model was able to reproduce the orientation of edges in objects—from vertical to horizontal and everything in between—based on only slight changes in the weak LGN input coming into the model.

“[They showed] that you can generate all orientations in the visual world using just a few neurons connecting to other neurons,” Angelucci said.

Vision is much more than edge detection, though, and the 2016 paper was just a start. The next challenge was to incorporate additional elements of vision into their model without losing the one element they’d already figured out.

“If a model is doing something right, the same model should be able to do different things together,” Young said. “Your brain is still the same brain, yet you can do different things if I show you different circumstances.”

Swarms of Vision

In lab experiments, researchers present primates with simple visual stimuli — black-and-white patterns that vary in terms of contrast or the direction in which they enter the primates’ visual fields. Using electrodes hooked to the primates’ visual cortices, the researchers track the nerve pulses produced in response to the stimuli. A good model should replicate the same kinds of pulses when presented with the same stimuli.

“You know if you show [a primate] some picture, then this is how it reacts,” Young said. “From this information you try to reverse engineer what must be going on inside.”

In 2018, the three researchers published a second paper in which they demonstrated that the same model that can detect edges can also reproduce an overall pattern of pulse activity in the cortex known as the gamma rhythm. (It’s similar to what you see when swarms of fireflies flash in collective patterns.)

They have a third paper under review that explains how the visual cortex perceives changes in contrast. Their explanation involves a mechanism by which excitatory neurons reinforce each other’s activity, an effect like the gathering fervor in a dance party. It’s the type of ratcheting up that’s necessary if the visual cortex is going to create full images from sparse input data.

Currently Young, Shapley, and Chariker are working on adding directional sensitivity into their model—which would explain how the visual cortex reconstructs the direction in which objects are moving across your visual field. After that, they’ll start trying to explain how the visual cortex recognizes temporal patterns in visual stimuli. They hope to decipher, for example, why we can perceive the flashes in a blinking traffic light, but we don’t see the frame-by-frame action in a movie.

At that point, they’ll have a simple model for activity in just one of the six layers in the visual cortex—the layer where the brain roughs out the basic outlines of visual impression. Their work doesn’t address the remaining five layers, where more sophisticated visual processing goes on. It also doesn’t say anything about how the visual cortex distinguishes colors, which occurs through an entirely different and more difficult neural pathway.

“I think they still have a long way to go, though this is not to say they’re not doing a good job,” Angelucci said. “It’s complex and it takes time.”

While their model is far from uncovering the full mystery of vision, it is a step in the right direction—the first model to try and decipher vision in a biologically plausible way.

“People hand-waved about that point for a long time,” said Jonathan Victor, a neuroscientist at Cornell University. “Showing you can do it in a model that fits the biology is a real triumph.”

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

More Great WIRED Stories

[newyorktheater]

This month there are no Broadway openings, but ample glamour Off-Broadway. Freestyle Love Supreme, the improvisational hip-hop group that Lin-Manuel Miranda and Thomas Kail conceived  in collaboration with Anthony Veneziale while they were working on “In The Heights,” had its debut at Ars Nova in midtown in 2004. Fifteen years later, the group inaugurates Ars Nova’s new Greenwich House home in the Village..

Meanwhile, MCC launches its newly constructed theater on West 52nd Street this month with two new shows, including a musical by the creative team behind Spring Awakening.

Another new musical, at Second Stage, comes from the Next to Normal composer, starring Kate Baldwin.

Also this month, a much-defended Sondheim musical is being revived. (See a video of Sondheim below.)

Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Sturridge appear on the same bill in a pair of new plays, by Nick Payne and Simon Stephen respectively.

A new play at the Public Theter by Suzan-Lori Parks that features Daveed Diggs doesn’t start until March, so Diggs has time to appear as one of the “special and spontaneous guests” at Freestyle Love Supreme –  and he’s not the only Hamilton alum who’s promised. (See February 21st)

Below is a selective list of (no Broadway), Off-Broadway, Off-Off Broadway and festival offerings in February, organized chronologically by opening date, with each title linked to a relevant website. Color key of theaters: Broadway: Red. Off Broadway: Black, Blue, or Purple... Off Off Broadway: Green. Theater festival: Orange To look at the Spring season as a whole, check out my Off Broadway Spring 2019 preview guide and my Broadway 2018-2019 season guide

February 2

Queen (APAC) 

In this play by Madhuri Shekar, Sanam and Ariel are about to publish a career-defining paper about bees, after seven years of research, when Sanam stumbles upon an error that could cause catastrophic damage to their reputations, careers, and friendship. Now, both women are confronted with an impossible choice: look the other way and save the bees – or tell the truth and face the consequences?

The Glen (Theatre 54 at Shetler Studios)

Peter Hodges writes about the life of one Dale Olsen, from a private falsely accused of insubordination by an underhanded army major, through his affair with a possible spy in 1950s Berlin and back to his ultimate confrontation with his unforgiving mother and the secret she has hidden from him all his life. ”

February 6

The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Transport at Abrons) 

Created from the actual court transcripts of the 1968 trial of nine Catholic activists who burned draft files to protest the Vietnam War, this “radically re-imagined” production presented in partnership with the National Asian American Theatre Company (NAATCO) features an Asian-American cast.

February 8

Chinese Fringe Festival (La MaMa) 

Three plays presented in Chinese with English subtitles: The Dictionary of Soul by the Physical Guerillas; Two Dogs  by Meng Theatre Studio; and The Story of Xiaoyi Shanghai Huidiji Public Psychological Care Center

February 10

  Mies Julie and The Dance of Death (Classic Stage Company)

Two Strindberg plays are presented in repertory. Mies Julie adapted by Yael Farber resets Strindberg’s “Miss Julie,” to a farmhouse in the Karoo of South Africa on the evening of the annual Freedom Day celebration. The Dance of Death, offered in a new version by Conor McPherson, is Strindberg’s bleak examination of marriage and the social institutions governing it.

The Light (MCC Theater) 

A two-character play by Loy A. Webb about Rashad and Genesis on what should be one of the happiest days of their lives, but their joy quickly unravels when ground-shifting accusations from the past resurface

February 12

Neurology of the Soul (A.R.T./New York) 

Untitled Theater Company No. 61 (UTC61) presents a new play by Edward Einhorn examining the nexus between neuroscience, marketing, art, and love. Set at a neuromarketing firm, it follows a neuroscientist who is trying to scientifically define love for advertising purposes and his wife, an artist who is using her brain scans as the basis of video self-portraits.

The Shadow of a Gunman (Irish Rep) 

A new staging of Irish playwright Sean O’Casey’s 1923 drama about a young poet who gets pulled into the chaos of Irish War of Independence after a rumor spreads that he is an IRA assassin.

February 13

City of No Illusions (La MaMa) 

A dark comedy set inside a funeral home that has become a refuge for two asylum seekers. The newest work from seminal theater company Talking Band. written and directed by Obie winner Paul Zimet,

February 14

Sea Wall/A Life (Public Theater)

Tom Sturridge and Jake Gyllenhaal appear separately in a pair of plays, Sturridge in Simon Stephen’s “Sea Wall,” a monologue about love and the human need to know the unknowable, and Gyllenhaal in “A Life,” and Gyllenhaal in Nick Payne’s A Life, a meditation on how we say goodbye to those we love most.

Spaceman (Loading Dock at Wild Project)

A woman’s solo journey to Mars explores the depths of mankind’s last true frontiers: outer space and a grieving heart.

February 19

Merrily We Roll Along (Roundabout’s Laura Pels) 

Fiasco Theater reimagines Stephen Sondheim’s musical about a trio of showbiz friends who fall apart and come together over 20 years, going backwards in time.

By The Way Meet Vera Stark (Signature)

A revival of Lynn Nottage’s 2011 comedy about an African-American maid to an aging Hollywood who becomes a star herself – followed decades later by a panel discussing the impact that race had on her controversial career.

February 20

The Play That Goes Wrong (New World Stages)

The slapstick comedy that stars the set moves from Broadway to Off-Broadway

The Price of Thomas Scott (Mint on Theatre Row)

Elizabeth Baker’s 1913 comic drama about a businessman who is reluctant to sell his shop for conversion into a dance hall because of his objection to dancing.

February 21

Freestyle Love Supreme (Ars Nova at Greenwich House) 

Conceived by Thomas Kail, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Anthony Veneziale, this high-energy show is a blend of hip-hop, improvisational theater, music, and vocal stylings, all backed by live music from keyboards and beats. There will be “special and spontaneous guests” – including Lin-Manuel Miranda, James Monroe Iglehart, Christopher Jackson,  Daveed Diggs.

Steven Skybell as Tevya and Ensemble sing “Tradition” (“Traditsye” טראַדיציע)

Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish (Folksbiene at Stage 42)

This luscious production directed by Joel Grey moves Off-Broadway.

February 24

Hurricane Diane (New York Theatre Workshop)

In this play by Madeleine George directed by Leigh Silverman, Diane is a gardener who is actually the Greek god Dionysus, returning to the modern world to gather mortal followers and restore the Earth to its natural state.

February 25

Good Friday (The Flea) 

In this play by Kristiana Rae Colón, a ricochet of bullets disrupts a fierce and funny feminist debate. Assaulted at every turn, a group of millennial women must decide whether they are ready to put their bodies on the line for each other.

Boesman and Lena (Signature) 

In this revival of Athol Fugard’s 1969 play, the human need for kindness, hope and compassion is on display in the struggles of abusive Boesman and his long-suffering wife Lena, who encounter a stranger while wandering the South African wastelands. Stars Zainab Jah and Sahr Ngaujah

February 26

Alice By Heart (MCC Theater)

The creative team Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater (Spring Awakening) co-written and directed by Jessie Nelson (Waitress) presents a new take on Alice in Wonderland: In the rubble of the London Blitz of World War II, Alice Spencer’s budding teen life is turned upside down, and she and her dear friend Alfred are forced to take shelter in an underground tube station. When the ailing Alfred is quarantined, Alice encourages him to escape with her into their cherished book and journey down the rabbit hole to Wonderland.

February 28

Superhero (Second Stage) 

A musical, with music and lyrics by Tom Kitt (Next to Normal) and a book by John Logan (Red), about “a fractured family, the mysterious stranger in apartment 4-B, and an unexpected hero… Starring Kate Baldwin and Bryce Pinkham

February 2019 New York Theater Openings This month there are no Broadway openings, but ample glamour Off-Broadway. Freestyle Love Supreme, the improvisational hip-hop group that Lin-Manuel Miranda and Thomas Kail conceived  in collaboration with Anthony Veneziale while they were working on "In The Heights," had its debut at Ars Nova in midtown in 2004.

[cheddarjacked-blog]

The ship

It seems that everyone is living in their own virtual worlds and that no one is available to meet in the same moment. Utsav, our lead actor is in Melbourne, Andrew a supporting actor has gone overseas also and has left us somewhat in the lurch. Fortunately I have found a replacement. In future to avoid this problem I need to keep closer communication with actors and find the locations before we find the actors. If we had the locations first we could have jumped onto rehearsing and shooting as soon as we found the actors. As it played out we gathered up our actors and had a stagnation period of a three weeks where I spoke to them seldom which resulted in one of them disembarking from our ship.

I am currently thankful to Rogan for finding us the perfect location, I think it was under Logans suggestion, that we shoot our Neuralink scene in the Millennium institute. Only problem is that the days may not work. Our only days available for shooting are Mondays and Thursdays and even those are not optimal as I have to skip rehearsals. However Studio is more important and I’m very excited to see it to the end. Rogan took a while to come up with this location, I put him in charge of locations sometime ago. I did this because he is quite extroverted and has no trouble walking up to strangers and getting into the thick of it, however he has been slowed by his need to ask me at most turns if he’s doing it right. Asking me whether or not to call a person or not. In future I will be more explicit when I allocate roles and set up specific parameters that gives that person a guidebook to fall back on so I’m that I don’t get sucked into micromanaging.

Logan has made a very nice poster. I gave very little direction, only requesting it be somewhat retro and he’s delivered to that end. It’s simple and to the point. I’m glad that’s out of the way, it can be tightened over the next week and we can all concentrate on our statements while waiting for the shooting to recommence. Hopefully we shoot on Monday and Thursday, and edit on the weekend in between my play performances and rehearsals.

I’ve made some decent discoveries in accordance with our film technology. It seems that there are actually chatbots who have been built to simulate the deceased already [Matei 2017]. An AI company called Luka have developed a chatbot so brilliant that the deceased’s own mother gave it the seal of approval. Neuroscientists are already teaching AI how to get the correct pattern of synaptic connections between neurons in order to build pathways like our own. Giving a reward signal when the AI gets closer to a good performance and an error signal for a bad one. [GRAZIANO 2016] There is also the connectome project and the Human Brain project in Europe, that aim to completely map all of a human brain's neurons and their tasks. If this technology pulls through in our life time we may be able to reconstruct Emma’s and Roy’s any day off the week.

[1] Matei, A. (2017, January 27). New technology is forcing us to confront the ethics of bringing people back from the dead. Retrieved October 17, 2017, from https://qz.com/896207/death-technology-will-allow-grieving-people-to-bring-back-their-loved-ones-from-the-dead-digitally/

[2] Graziano, M. (2016, July 14). Why You Should Believe in the Digital Afterlife. Retrieved October 18, 2017, from https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/07/what-a-digital-afterlife-would-be-like/491105/