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delimeful · 2 years

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down that desolate road (6)

Part 6: String Theory

warnings: slight dehumanization, arguing, logan hubris hours

Logan was in the middle of trying to restructure the day’s schedule when Patton returned from the Imagination.

It had been a perfectly sustainable schedule yesterday, but seeing as Thomas had abruptly decided— against all good sense— to stay awake watching conspiracy videos into the early hours of the morning, rescheduling was in order.

Come daylight, Thomas had predictably slept right through four alarms and two of his planned tasks, and Logan was finding himself, admittedly, a bit vexed.

Luckily, the lack of external stimuli from Thomas’s end meant that his fellow Sides were behaving in a more sedate manner than usual, meaning that Logan could work in peace even in the often-frequented common area.

At the moment, Janus was reading silently on an armchair tucked into the corner of the room, and Roman was sitting at the kitchen table with his face buried in his arms, likely dozing off after the less-than-restful night. That left only three— no, two (he must have forgotten to count himself) other Sides unaccounted for, and hopefully they would stay absent until Logan finished one of the tools Thomas needed to get back on track.

As though to spite him personally, the distinct whirring sound of someone returning from the Imagination sounded from down the hall.

Logan resisted the urge to sigh heavily. He could already visualize any productivity the day could have held being washed down the metaphorical drain, all because Remus had decided he’d just had a creative breakthrough and needed to borrow Thomas’s brain for the rest of the day.

As such, he found himself pleasantly surprised when it was Patton who walked into the room instead.

Though normally he could be just as energetic and disruptive as Remus, Patton had been notably more tentative around him and Roman as of late, wary of overstepping after the explosive argument that had occured after the wedding.

Case in point: instead of opening with a cheerful greeting, Patton’s gaze flickered over each of the room’s occupants— almost certainly picking up on Janus’s relaxed pose and Roman’s exhaustion— before finally settling on Logan and offering a friendly wave.

“Patton,” Logan returned at a normal volume, because he had a sneaking suspicion that Roman had enabled the previous night’s conspiracy binge and wasn’t willing to enable his early afternoon nap. Roman appeared to be sleeping through their conversation regardless. “Welcome back.”

Patton’s smile grew warmer, but his voice was still at a low volume when he answered, “Thanks! Did anything interesting happen while I was gone?”

Logan narrowed his eyes at the disassembled schedule. “Unfortunately, nothing much has been happening at all today.” He eyed the array of tasks he was attempting to re-prioritize, and decided he could afford a slight pause in favor of conversation. “And you? What were you doing in the Imagination?”

“Oh!” Patton grinned, apparently delighted by the question. “I went to go relax and stay out of the way for a little bit, and I made a new friend!”

That seemed entirely plausible. The Imagination was full of constructs, and most of the more permanent ones in Roman’s domain were personable and more than willing to lend an ear. Also, Logan had once witnessed Patton befriend a toaster.

“And a new enemy, I think?”

There was a pause. From over Patton’s shoulder, Janus slowly looked up from his book with his eyebrows raised incredulously.

“Did you accidentally accept one of Roman’s quests again?” Logan asked, because how else had Patton possibly earned the ire of a construct during a relatively brief trip to the Imagination? He began scanning the other Side for injuries, knowing that many of Roman’s ambient quests took a more classic D&D battle sort of turn. “Why didn’t you simply sink out?”

“I’m fine!” Patton replied immediately, and then entirely gave away his lie by cringing and shooting a panicked glance in Janus’s direction.

There had been several occasions since the Mindscape had shifted that Patton had attempted to cover up his less pleasant feelings in front of others, only to immediately find a yellow-gloved hand shoving a jar labeled ‘Repression Jar’ under his nose.

It might not have been so effective if Janus hadn’t immediately started using these funds to buy Remus effective immunity from the swear jar whenever he thought it was funniest.

“I mean, it was pretty scary, but I didn’t get hurt, promise!” Patton corrected himself at Logan’s raised eyebrow. “My new friend helped me out!”

That was… extremely unusual. Roman didn’t leave frightening creations out where just anyone could trip over them, and his constructs were the type to stand by and be saved, not do the saving themselves. Remus’s domain had plenty of material that could scare anyone laying around, but his constructs weren’t likely to help a Side, especially without doing something particularly horrifying in the process.

Janus slowly closed his book entirely, looking far too intrigued about the situation. Logan was abruptly reminded that they’d gotten into two separate hour-long debates about the efficiency of different types of detective work.

Honestly, this was the problem with mysteries. Sometimes, learning more only made his curiosity amplify exponentially, and Logan really didn’t have time for all this. He cast a glance back towards where the partially revised schedule awaited him.

“Great news, fellow figments of Thomas’s imagination!” Remus waltzed into the room, hands dripping with some unidentifiable red substance. “I’ve had a creative breakthrough and I’m going to be stealing Thomas’s brain for the rest of the day, like a less fatal but just as gross version of those alien parasites from The Brain Eaters!”

“Absolutely not,” Roman said, apparently summoned from a dead sleep by his brother calling dibs.

Logan took a deep breath in through his nose, held it for a count of five, and then summoned his Sherlock Holmes hat from the depths of his meticulously-organized closet.

“Why don’t you start from the beginning, Patton?” he said, ignoring the twins’ bickering even as it began to devolve into a wrestling match. “How did you meet your new friend? Where, for that matter?”

Patton looked a little uncertain as Janus helpfully guided him to a seat on the couch. “Well, he helped me out when I got lost in the woods a little while back, and then again today when I was attacked. We normally hang out right at the edge of Roman’s territory!”

“Hang out…?” Janus murmured.

“You were attacked?” Roman spluttered from where he was contorted into a painful-looking headlock. “In my Realm? By who?”

“It was really more of a what,” Patton replied lightly, but his attempt at levity fell flat in the face of how he grew a little paler and shivered, as though the very thought of it was frightening. Logan felt the beginnings of alarm stirring.

“… A spider?” Janus asked, because they were all familiar with how poorly Patton handled that particular phobia.

Patton shivered. “No, thank goodness. It was more like… a shapeless faceless creature made entirely of shadows and sharp edges? It was really scary, I could barely even think when I saw it!”

As one, the rest of the room turned to Remus, who was currently winning the fight through the psychological warfare of making his bones crackle ominously every time Roman tried to twist his arm.

“What?” he asked, faux-pouting. “It wasn’t me. If I was going to unleash eldritch horrors on us all, there would be at least six in here by now.”

“I don’t think it was Remus’s either,” Patton added, his face crinkled into a pensive frown. “His creations can be scary, but they don’t attack me. Whatever this one was, it really wanted to hurt me. If V hadn’t been there…,”

“V?” four voices asked at once, in varying tones.

Logan, who had only been inquisitive, stared suspiciously at the sudden intent gleam in Janus’s eyes. The twins weren’t any better, exchanging a glance and nodding at each other.

“I’ll get the board?”

“And I’ll grab the pins!”

They darted away down separate halls, and Janus began clearing off a space on the table where it met the wall.

Patton, at least, seemed just as bewildered as him.

“What exactly is going on here?” Logan asked the only remaining person who seemed to have a clue.

Janus offered him a familiar sly smile. “Oh, just a little pet project of mine. You were so busy, I wouldn’t have bothered you with it. I know how intensive your deductive reasoning can be.”

Logan felt his eye twitch, and was genuinely contemplating starting their third hour-long debate on the topic when Remus rushed back in, carrying what looked like a wide, office-grade corkboard.

A corkboard covered in clusters of bright pins, photographs, and scribbled notes. All of which was linked by a mess of interweaving red string.

Logan abruptly realized just who was actually responsible for Thomas’s random craving for Buzzfeed conspiracy videos the previous evening. “You.”

Janus sat in the chair nearest to the board and casually rested his chin on top of his interlaced fingers, donning an extremely smug grin. “Me.”

“And us!” Remus cheered, plonking the conspiracy board down on the table with enough force to thoroughly rattle the assortment of evidence on it. Roman was a few steps behind, carrying a precarious stack of thumbtack containers and a few skeins of red yarn tucked under his arm.

Well. If his plans for the day were going to be so thoroughly derailed, at least it was in the pursuit of an investigation. Maybe Thomas would gain some keenness secondhand when Logan inevitably pieced together the answer to their current mystery. One could hope.

With one last narrow-eyed glance at Janus, he stepped forward to study the board’s current configuration.

Thankfully, there was some sense of coherence to it, even if there were a fair amount of strings that branched off and led to rambling notes and outlandish theories. The most notable element of the board’s subject caught his eye immediately.

“This is a denizen of the Imagination?” he asked, his brow pinching inwards in consternation. “Why not simply unravel it and study the basis of its creation?”

A few steps behind him, Patton made a muted sound.

“It’s not one of ours,” Roman explained, fingers flitting over the board as he readjusted the bits that had been jostled out of place. “The Dragonwitch made him, that’s why he’s so weird. She never keeps anything but low-level lackeys around, and definitely not ones that would help us.”

“Maybe he didn’t,” Janus suggested in a prompting manner. “I mean, we are assuming that Patton’s rescuer and your mystery denizen are the same person.”

Logan ran his fingers over the piece of paper with the personal information they’d compiled. It looked as though it had been pulled right from a typewriter, which was a nice touch.

“Does the description of this ‘Vendetta’ match your ‘V’, Patton?” he asked, gesturing to the sketch the twins had put together. The cloak was a fairly ominous wardrobe choice, but he was fairly sure that the scythe dripping blood was one of Remus’s more facetious additions.

Patton shuffled in place, his gaze fluttering from place to place on the board with clear uncertainty. “I mean, yeah, but he looked a lot nicer than that…”

Logan studied the haphazard timeline tacked to the bottom of the board. “The rest of you have encountered him as well, yes? Has he been aggressive towards any of you, at all?”

“I mean, we’ve certainly exchanged a few bouts of belligerent banter, but he seems to be keeping to the truce. He appears in our Realms occasionally, but we’ve never been able to catch him doing anything destructive, if we catch him at all.” Roman shrugged. “He’s far less combative than the Dragonwitch.”

“I think he’s the sneakier sort,” Remus offered, balancing a stray thumbtack on the tip of his finger. “Waiting in the shadows with a poisoned blade that’s got my name on it, just imagine it! Truly, a man after my own oozing, pulsing heart!”

He leaned back into a swoon that turned into a collapse as he displayed the traditional signs of Belladonna poisoning. Roman made a face at him, experiencing the universal disgust of siblings receiving TMI everywhere.

“If that is what he’s trying, he’s amateurish,” Janus added judgmentally. “He can’t lie to save his life, which would be useful for us, if he didn’t insist on bolting like a startled hare every time I’m around.”

“You specifically?” Logan asked, his mind immediately latching onto that detail. “Like he knows–?”

“Knows that I can sniff out a lie from a mile away?” Janus finished, his expression speculative as though he’d been asking himself the same thing for a while. “It certainly doesn’t seem that way. I know I can be intimidating, but he's more than willing to chit chat with the twins, and we all know that Remus, at least, is more overtly threatening than little old me.”

“Hey!” Roman protested, but Logan was already tuning out the resulting squabble, his mind sorting through the implications of Janus’s assertion, if it was true.

“If he does have knowledge about our skills or even our functions, the question becomes: how did he gain it?” he mused aloud. “The most obvious route is the Dragonwitch– she’s certainly picked up on things about us over the course of our shared history. Could she have told him?”

Remus snorted, swinging his legs up in an anatomically improbable manner and flipping himself back into a standing position. “DW doesn’t share. She never has. Grim Veeper seems to have an ‘overthrowing the tyrant’ plotline going on with her anyhow, so unless he interrotortured it out of her, odds are bad.”

“Provided, of course, he wasn’t lying about that, too,” Janus added unhelpfully. “Until I’ve heard it from the horse’s mouth, we can’t be sure.”

Logan blinked at him, his line of thinking disrupted. “There’s a horse involved?”

“It’s a saying! About looking at horse teeth!” Remus told him gleefully, the same way he’d once informed Logan that DILF was an acronym for a letter salutation that meant Dear Interesting and Lovable Friend. “Did you know that a finger is easier to bite through–,”

“Everyone knows about the carrot thing, Remus!” Roman groaned, apparently having heard this ‘fun’ fact several times before.

“Don’t we always say not to look gift horses in the mouth?” Patton interrupted a little desperately, wringing his hands. “If he helped me out, he can’t be that bad, right? We should– we could focus on the monsters, instead?”

Logan finished writing a note to google horse-related colloquialisms (and carrots?) and then shook his head. “If we want to know more about the monsters, it would be wise to talk to him anyways, seeing as he apparently knows them well enough to fight them. Regardless, Patton, we haven’t established his motive. For all we know, he could’ve been the one to summon those monsters in the first place, engineering a dangerous situation to gain your trust.”

“Does someone need a motive to want to help people?” Patton asked in a mumble, and then continued a little louder. “V is a kind person, and he’s shy. I don’t want you guys to be mean to him.”

“I’m not going to be mean,” Logan clarified, a little offended. “I’m simply going to ask him a few questions.”

“It’ll be fine, Padre!” Roman reassured, scribbling down an anatomically incorrect doodle of Logan and pinning it onto a blank space on the board. “Sherlock Bemoans over there couldn’t hurt a fly, we just want to see how Vendetta reacts. Besides, constructs usually enjoy getting the chance to develop their backstories and character arcs like this!”

Patton didn’t seem convinced, chewing on the corner of his lip indecisively, but for once, the majority of them were on the same side of an argument, and Logan knew his reasoning was sound. Character witnesses were important, but not nearly as important as direct testimony.

The sooner he met this mysterious Vendetta, the sooner he would uncover the truth behind all these oddities. Logan was certain of it.

#sanders sides fic #sanders sides #ts logan #ts janus #ts roman #ts patton #ts remus #a lime chapter without virgil in it but they spend the whole time talking about him so does it really count? thinking emoji #down that desolate road #dtdr #my writing #writing #BTHB

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