dormmates @collegeproduction - Tumblr Blog

Jun 24

The Imaginary Friend Problem

a/n: this is my first time writing remile so please let me know if you like it so I will be encouraged to write more of this pairing

The thing about being psychic was that it had excellent branding and absolutely terrible practical applications.

People heard psychic and they pictured crystal balls, velvet curtains, a mysterious woman named Madame Something pressing her fingertips to her temples and whispering I see a tall, dark stranger. They pictured power. Drama. A certain romantic mystique that smelled faintly of incense and possibility.

What they did not picture was a seven-year-old boy in a Cincinnati suburb who could not go to the grocery store without bursting into tears because the woman in the cereal aisle was thinking very loudly about her divorce, and he could not explain why he knew that, and the man by the deli counter was furious about something that had happened in 1987 and had apparently never resolved it, and the teenager near the freezer section was so profoundly, achingly lonely that it sat in Emile's chest like a stone for three days afterward.

He couldn't go to the grocery store. He couldn't go to birthday parties — too many children with too many feelings, all of them vivid and unfiltered the way children's feelings tended to be, pressing against him from every direction. He couldn't go to school, eventually. The school had tried. His parents had tried. Everyone had tried, and Emile had tried hardest of all, sitting in classrooms with his hands pressed flat on his desk and his eyes very wide and his brain absolutely overwhelmed by the combined emotional output of twenty-three eight-year-olds who had not yet learned to moderate anything.

His parents were not cruel about it. This was important. They were loving people in the particular exhausted way of people who are doing their very best with a problem that has no manual, no support group, no established protocol — people who kept showing up even when they didn't know what showing up was supposed to look like. They bought him books. They bought him art supplies. They hired tutors who came one at a time, which was manageable, mostly, except for the one who was going through a breakup and radiated misery like a space heater radiates warmth, and they replaced her quickly when Emile explained, haltingly, that he knew things about her personal life that he really shouldn't.

And they bought him, eventually, a television. With an extensive cable package. And a VHS player, and later a DVD player when those became the thing. And later still, a laptop with a decent internet connection and access to more streaming services than any one person needed.

Because television was safe. The characters couldn't think at him. Their emotions were contained within the screen, expressed but not transmitted — he could watch someone cry without feeling it in his own sternum. Stories always, always resolved. Problems that had no solutions in real life got solutions on screen, or at least got shaped into something with edges you could hold, something with a beginning and a middle and an end, something that meant something instead of just happening.

Cartoons especially. Cartoons were entirely his.

By the time Emile was ten he had watched Cardcaptors with a devotion that bordered on religious, and had strong opinions about the emotional intelligence of its storytelling that he could not fully articulate yet but felt deeply. He loved the way Sakura faced every scary thing with a determined I think I can do this — he thought about that a lot, in his room, in his quiet house. He also had a perhaps excessive attachment to The Powerpuff Girls, not because of the action, but because three small people kept choosing to help even when it was hard, and he found that genuinely moving in a way he couldn't explain to anyone.

By twelve he had discovered Invader Zim and experienced the particular delight of something that was strange and loud and entirely uninterested in being anything other than exactly what it was, which felt personally relevant. He had also, quietly and with great feeling, fallen in love with Courage the Cowardly Dog — not despite the fact that it was frightening sometimes, but because it was a show about a creature who was scared of nearly everything and kept showing up anyway, for the people he loved, and Emile thought that was maybe the bravest thing he'd ever seen depicted anywhere.

He discovered Avatar: The Last Airbender and Steven Universe as an adult, watching them on his laptop during graduate school in the hours when the library was quiet and he needed something that felt true, and they became part of him in the particular way that things do when you find them exactly when you need them. He kept small figures from both on his office shelf, acquired at conventions he'd attended with noise-canceling headphones and a great deal of careful preparation, because some things were worth the effort.

By seventeen, sitting in his bedroom with its walls covered in character art and its shelves lined with small figurines, he had made a decision that surprised exactly no one who knew him: he wanted to help people. The way stories helped him. By giving feelings a container. By helping people find the edges of things that felt formless and overwhelming. By sitting with someone in the hard part and not flinching away from it.

He became a therapist. It took years and a great deal of work and a graduate program that was, at times, genuinely difficult when his classmates' stress and competitiveness leaked through his filters on bad days — but he did it, because Emile Picani had found, over the years, that the things worth doing were usually the ones that cost something.

He wore bright colors because the world was hard enough and he wanted his office to feel like somewhere good. He had coral walls and a cream couch and soft lighting and a shelf full of small figures arranged in an order that meant something to him and probably looked random to everyone else. He kept a box of tissues on the table by the client's chair and a small succulent on the windowsill named Gerald, who had been with him since graduate school and had achieved, in Emile's estimation, something close to immortality through sheer stubbornness.

He was good at his job. His clients tended to stay, and to improve, and occasionally to send him cards at the holidays with notes inside that made him hold them for a long time after reading.

He had also, over the years, gotten much better at the psychic thing — not eliminating it, which had never been possible, but filtering. Layering. He thought of it like learning to wear the right coat for the weather: he could not stop the cold, but he could dress for it. Strong emotions still broke through. Vivid imaginations pressed warmly against his edges, the way sunlight pressed through curtains. But he could exist in the world now. He could have a practice and a life and a favorite coffee shop and a gym membership he used with moderate regularity and everything that added up to a person being fine, actually, and glad.

The point was: Emile Picani was, by most measures, doing quite well.

And then Thomas Sanders started leaving things behind when he left.

---

The first time it happened, Emile thought he was getting a migraine.

He was finishing up his session notes — Thomas had been in earlier, lovely anxious Thomas who had the most spectacular imaginative frequency Emile had ever encountered professionally, a warmth and vividness that pressed gently against Emile's filters like someone leaning on a door without quite opening it — when he looked up from his clipboard and noticed that his chair by the window had an occupant.

A young man. Or. Something shaped like a young man, rendered in the vivid particular way of things that had originated in a very specific imagination. Oversized sunglasses, dark and enormous, the kind of sunglasses that communicated I am not answering questions. A black leather jacket over a fitted white shirt. Black jeans. A messenger bag slouched on the floor beside the chair with the boneless ease of a cat. And in one hand, an iced coffee — the large size, in a cup from a coffee shop that was definitely not in this building and possibly not in this neighborhood — which he was sipping with the slow, meditative patience of someone who had nowhere to be and had feelings about that being a virtue.

He was also extraordinarily good-looking, in the sleek, curated way of someone who had put careful thought into appearing effortless.

Emile looked at him. The young man, apparently unaware that he had an audience, reached out with his free hand and plucked a small ceramic figure from the shelf — Steven Universe, the first one, acquired at a convention seven years ago — and turned it over in his fingers with the loose, proprietary curiosity of someone who felt entitled to examine things.

Emile, entirely on reflex, said, "Please be careful with that one, it has sentimental value and the paint has already chipped once."

The quality of the silence that followed was remarkable.

The young man went very still. Not startled — or rather, startled but immediately suppressing it, which was its own interesting data point. Slowly, with the controlled deliberateness of someone buying time to assess a situation, he turned his head toward Emile. The sunglasses were impenetrable. His mouth had done something complicated.

"...Come again?" he said.

His voice was something. Smooth and a little lazy, with an edge under it like something expensive that also happened to be extremely sharp.

Emile put his clipboard down. "The ceramic figure you're holding. Steven Universe. I got it at a convention in 2017 and the paint on his star chipped about a year ago, so if you could—" He paused. Reconsidered. "Sorry. You look like you're processing something. Take a moment."

"I'm processing," the young man said carefully, "the fact that you can see me."

"Yes," Emile agreed.

"People," the young man said, with an emphasis that suggested a broad category of experience behind the word, "don't usually see me."

"I'm a little unusual," Emile said, in the same mild tone he might use to note that he preferred his coffee with oat milk.

The young man set Steven Universe down. He set him down in the wrong place — two spots to the left, disrupting the acquisition order — and Emile noted this and did not say anything, because there were more important things happening.

"How long," the young man said, "have you been able to see me."

"Since you sat down. About twenty minutes ago." Emile tilted his head. "You came in right after Thomas left, which suggests you arrived with him and stayed when he went. You're one of his — you originated with him, I can feel the resonance. But you're distinct enough that I don't think you'd appreciate being described as a part of him."

The sunglasses came down, just a fraction, and Emile got a glimpse of dark eyes that were doing several calculations at once.

"Okay," the young man said. "First of all, you're right, I'm not a part of him, and I would genuinely like you to never phrase it that way again. Second of all." A pause. "You can feel resonance?"

"I'm psychic," Emile said. "It comes up." He extended a hand across the desk. "Emile Picani. I'm Thomas's therapist. You are?"

The young man stared at the hand. Then, with the air of someone deciding this was somehow beneath them but doing it anyway, reached out and shook it, once, briefly.

"Remy," he said. "And before you even start — yes, I know. Very funny. Sleep goes by Remy. I've heard every joke that exists and I find none of them creative at this point."

"I wasn't going to make a joke," Emile said, genuinely. "I was going to say it's a lovely name. It suits you." He picked up his clipboard. "You can stay if you want. I won't tell Thomas — I imagine he doesn't know you're here."

"Thomas thinks I'm at a day party."

"And instead you're in a therapy office."

"It looked comfortable from the outside," Remy said, with a dignity that was almost magnificent in how unearned it was. "I was tired."

"You are, literally, the embodiment of sleep."

"Yes, and?" Remy resettled in the chair, crossing his legs at the ankle, reclaiming his iced coffee from where he'd set it on the arm. "Tired people need places to rest. This looked like a place. I don't see the issue."

Emile looked at him for a moment — this strange, sharp, vivid creature who had simply materialized in his office like he'd decided it was his — and felt something in the frequency of him that was very interesting. Not Thomas's warmth, not Thomas's particular anxious brightness. Something else. Something that had its own texture.

"The issue is not," Emile agreed, and moved his ceramic Steven two spots to the right, back into his proper place, and went back to his notes.

Remy noticed. Emile saw him notice. Remy said nothing about it, which felt, somehow, like a point in his favor.

Fifteen minutes later, Remy was asleep in the chair with his sunglasses pushed up into his hair and his iced coffee balanced on his knee at an angle that made Emile's professional risk-assessment instincts faintly anxious. He looked, asleep, very different from awake — younger, somehow. Less performed. The sharp edges smoothed out by unconsciousness into something that was, quietly, quite sweet.

Emile reached over without getting up and gently repositioned the coffee cup into a more stable position.

Then he went back to his notes, because that was his job, and some things you just filed and didn't examine too closely yet.

---

Remy came back the following Thursday.

He arrived twenty minutes after Thomas left, dropped into the chair by the window like he owned it, and said, without preamble, "Your waiting room has the most boring magazines I have ever seen in my life. Architectural Digest from 2019? Who is that for? Who is coming in here and thinking, yes, I'd love to spend fifteen minutes looking at expensive kitchens?"

"Several of my clients find it soothing," Emile said, looking up from his notes with the particular expression of someone who is genuinely pleased to see another person, which was the expression Emile wore approximately whenever another person was present. "Hello, Remy. How was the day party?"

"I didn't go to the day party, I came here instead."

"I know. I meant last week."

Remy paused. "Adequate," he said finally. "The DJ peaked early and then couldn't sustain it." He set his coffee — today's was something elaborate with layers, brown at the bottom going to a pale cream at the top — on the arm of the chair and surveyed the office with the considering expression of a returning regular. "You moved the lamp."

Emile blinked. "I did. The angle was leaving a glare on my clipboard in the afternoon." He looked at Remy properly. "You noticed that."

"I notice things." Remy said it like it was unremarkable. "The plant's looking better."

"Gerald. Yes, I repotted him last weekend." Emile beamed, because Gerald's improved health was genuinely good news and he saw no reason to be moderate about it. "He was getting root-bound, which apparently I should have caught earlier — the nursery was very gentle about telling me I'd been neglectful but I could tell — and now he has a new pot that's terracotta, which apparently breathes better? I've been learning about succulent care. There's a lot to know."

Remy was looking at him with an expression that was doing something it was trying not to do. "You named your succulent Gerald."

"He needed a name. All living things need names." Emile said this with complete sincerity. "I also had a fish in graduate school named Professor Bubbles, but he passed. It was a difficult time."

"Professor Bubbles," Remy repeated.

"He had a very distinguished bearing." Emile closed his notebook. "You don't have to stay if you don't want to. But if you're going to stay, there's an extra throw blanket on the coatrack — I noticed last week you kept pulling the collar of your jacket up."

Remy looked at the coatrack. Then at Emile. Then back at the coatrack, where a soft grey blanket was folded over the hook in a way that was clearly intentional.

"You put that there for me," Remy said flatly.

"I run warm," Emile said. "It was taking up space in the cabinet."

"It was not taking up space in the cabinet."

"I don't see how you'd know that."

Remy looked at him for a long moment with the expression of someone being offered something and trying to figure out if there was a catch. Then he got up, pulled the blanket off the hook with studied nonchalance, returned to his chair, and wrapped it around his shoulders in a way that he clearly believed looked casual.

"Fine," he said. "Whatever."

"Wonderful," said Emile warmly, and picked his crossword up.

"What is that?"

"A crossword. I do them in my between-session hour."

"That's the most aggressively therapist thing I've ever heard in my life."

Emile considered this. "I also knit, sometimes. When my hands need something to do." He held up the crossword. "This is faster. Eleven across is giving me trouble — classical composer known for nocturnes, five letters."

"Chopin," Remy said immediately.

Emile looked at him over the crossword.

Remy shrugged with great dignity. "What. I've been to a lot of late-night concerts. You pick things up."

"Chopin fits," Emile said, delighted, writing it in. "Thank you! I was so stuck on that — I kept thinking Liszt but that's five letters with an unusual Z and it just wasn't sitting right—"

"You're welcome," Remy said, in a tone that was trying very hard to be bored and not quite achieving it. "You know you could just look it up."

"Looking it up isn't the point." Emile frowned thoughtfully at the puzzle. "It's the working-out that matters. It's about staying comfortable with not knowing for a little while and trusting that you'll find your way to the answer. Professionally speaking I find it useful to practice that."

Remy stared at him. "Did you just make doing a crossword into a therapy metaphor?"

"...I do that sometimes."

"You're a lot," Remy informed him. "Like. A truly remarkable amount."

"I've been told," Emile agreed cheerfully. "Fifteen down is—"

"I'm not doing your crossword with you."

"You answered eleven across."

"That was involuntary."

They sat in comfortable quiet for a while. Emile worked his crossword. Remy drank his coffee and looked out the window and occasionally — very occasionally, in a way he would certainly deny — glanced at Emile with an expression that he did not quite manage to make neutral in time.

Emile noticed. Emile was psychic and also, frankly, just observant. He filed it.

---

It was the sixth or seventh Thursday — Emile had lost precise count, which was itself information — when Remy looked up from his coffee and said, with the air of someone who had been composing this for a while, "Can I say something without you being weird about it?"

"Almost certainly not," Emile said pleasantly. "But say it anyway."

Remy pointed at him. "That client. The one who comes in on Thursdays before me. Expensive cologne. Talks about his wife."

Emile went very still in the professional way. "I can't discuss my clients."

"I'm not asking you to discuss him. I'm telling you about him. There's a difference." Remy set his coffee down. "He runs your sessions. Every time. You let him go seven, eight, nine minutes over and then you apologize for going over like you did something wrong, when you spent the last fifteen minutes of the session trying to get a word in."

"The walls—"

"Are extremely thin, yes, we've established this." Remy was sitting forward now, the blanket falling off one shoulder, and there was something sharp and focused in his face that was very different from his usual languor. "You wait too long. You're waiting until he's practically yelling before you redirect him, and by then he's already gotten all the momentum. If you stepped in at like minute three or four, when he pauses to check you're still listening — he always pauses right there — you'd catch him before he winds up."

The office was quiet.

"That's," Emile started, and then stopped, because his first instinct was to explain his clinical reasoning and his second instinct, which arrived slightly after, was to actually listen to what had just been said to him. He sat back. He considered it. "That's very specific."

"I have a lot of free time in this office."

"You've been paying attention to my work."

"I pay attention," Remy said, almost defensively, "to things that interest me."

Emile looked at him.

"Don't," Remy said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You were about to say something in a soft voice that would have made me feel a feeling. Don't."

Emile pressed his lips together against a smile. "Minute three or four," he said instead. "When he pauses to check in."

"He goes up at the end of the sentence slightly. Like a question, kind of. That's the beat."

"And that's when he's actually open."

"That's when he's actually open," Remy confirmed. "After that he's just running the bit."

Emile thought about this for what was probably a longer time than was comfortable, because he was genuinely thinking about it. Remy waited, which was interesting — Remy did not usually wait for much. He sat there with his iced coffee and his displaced blanket and waited for Emile to finish thinking, and that was its own kind of data.

"I'm going to try it Tuesday," Emile said.

"Obviously," Remy said. "I'm right."

"You might be."

"I am." He resettled in the chair, recovering his composure like a cat recovering its dignity after a minor fall. "You're a brilliant person who is extremely kind to everyone including people who don't deserve it as much as they're getting and you let that make you too soft in the room. You can be kind and run the room. They're not opposites."

Emile was quiet for a moment. "Remy," he said gently.

"Don't."

"That was a very thoughtful thing to say."

"I was criticizing you, technically."

"You were," Emile agreed, and smiled at him with the full warmth of it, which was considerable. "Thank you."

Remy made a sound that was not quite a scoff and not quite anything else and looked very determinedly out the window, and the tip of his ears were, Emile noted privately, a little pink.

He tried it on Tuesday. He caught the pause at minute three. He redirected, gently, clearly, earlier than he'd ever done it, and the session took a completely different shape — more productive, more honest, less performative — and his client left looking, for the first time in months, like someone who'd actually gotten somewhere.

Emile sat in his office afterward and thought about Remy, which was not a new thing but felt like it had become a different thing.

---

The thing about feelings, in Emile's professional experience, was that people rarely fell into them. They accumulated. Small things, one at a time, that individually explained themselves away and collectively built into something undeniable.

There was the crossword thing, which had started as Remy's involuntary helpfulness on eleven across and had gradually, over the following weeks, become a full collaborative exercise that Remy would absolutely deny was collaborative. ("You have a question. I know the answer. I'm not doing a crossword, I'm just — stop writing that one down, that doesn't fit, it's six letters not five—")

There was the coffee thing. Remy always arrived with something from a coffee shop — never the same one, always different, always elaborate — and one Thursday he arrived with two. He held one out to Emile without making eye contact and said "They gave me the wrong order and I didn't feel like going back" in a tone that would have been more convincing if Emile hadn't been able to faintly sense that this was not entirely true, and the coffee was oat milk exactly the way Emile had mentioned preferring once, in passing, three weeks before.

Emile said "Thank you, Remy, this is so kind," in his most sincere voice, and watched Remy do the ear-thing again, and said nothing further, and privately felt something warm take up residence in his chest in a way that was starting to become inconvenient.

There was the incident with the difficult client — not the cologne one, a different one, a woman who was going through something genuinely hard and who had, on one Tuesday, raised her voice at Emile in a way that was not appropriate even for how much pain she was in, and Emile had been gentle about redirecting it because he always was, and afterward Remy had been in the office and had looked at him with something fierce and quietly protective in his expression and said, "Are you okay?" in a voice entirely stripped of its usual performance.

"I'm fine," Emile had said, genuinely surprised. "That's not the first time that's happened, and she's in a lot of pain—"

"She yelled at you."

"It wasn't really at me, it was—"

"She raised her voice at you in your own office," Remy said, "and you sat there being kind about it. Which, yes, professional. I get it. I'm just saying." He pointed his coffee cup at Emile. "You're allowed to also acknowledge when something isn't okay."

Emile looked at him for a moment. "It shook me a little," he admitted. "I don't love when sessions go there."

"Obviously you don't. You're a human—" Remy paused. "You're a person. It's okay if it shook you."

"Thank you, Remy."

"I'm not being nice, I'm just stating facts."

"Right," Emile agreed, warmly, and did not press it further, and watched something soften in Remy's expression when he thought Emile wasn't looking.

And there was the thing Emile noticed about Remy — what he'd described to himself as the sunglasses principle — where the sunglasses, which were clearly armor as much as accessory, came off in this office. Or rather: they didn't come fully off, but they migrated. They slid down his nose. They got pushed up into his hair. They ended up in his hand while he talked about something he was actually interested in. The full shield was only deployed if Remy said something that landed somewhere real, at which point they went straight back onto his face with the decisive speed of a drawbridge going up, and Emile had learned to simply wait that out, because they came back down eventually.

This was, Emile reflected, on one Thursday when the light was coming in golden and late through the window and Remy was in the middle of a very passionate account of a concert he'd been to the previous night — "Emile, the lighting design alone was worth the ticket price, I'm talking about a person who understood that lighting is emotional architecture—" with his sunglasses pushed all the way up into his hair and his hands moving and his whole face open and alive with it —

This was a person who was very careful about being seen. And who had, somehow, in this office, without apparently intending to, let himself be seen quite a lot.

"—and the bass drop at the end of the third track was genuinely one of the best things I've experienced in recent memory, I'm not being hyperbolic, babe, this was art—"

"I believe you," Emile said, and meant it, and the warmth in his chest had been there for so long now that he'd stopped pretending it was something else.

---

It was a rainy Thursday — properly rainy, the kind that made the office feel like its own small country, separate from everything — when Remy came in and was different.

Not dramatically different. Someone who didn't know him wouldn't have clocked it. But Emile knew him, now, the specific frequency of him, and the thing that was different was that Remy was quieter. The usual opening commentary — on the waiting room, on his commute, on something he'd witnessed that had either impressed or offended him, usually both — didn't arrive. He sat down. He pulled the blanket around himself — he always went straight for it now without the performance of pretending it was incidental — and he looked out at the rain with something in his face that was too still to be comfortable.

Emile finished writing his note and set the clipboard down and said, very gently, "Hi."

"Hey," Remy said, to the rain.

"You don't have to talk."

"I know."

They sat with it for a while. Remy's coffee sat untouched on the arm of the chair, which was unprecedented. Outside, the rain did what rain does in October, which is commit.

Eventually Remy said, not quite looking at him: "Does it bother you that I'm not real?"

Emile was quiet for a moment. Not because he didn't know the answer, but because the question deserved more than a quick one.

"What does 'real' mean," he said finally, "in this context specifically? Because you're here. I can see you and hear you and you have opinions about DJs and you drink iced coffee in October for reasons that remain your business and you notice when I move the lamp. You've meaningfully changed how I run sessions. You brought me coffee with oat milk." He tilted his head. "In what sense are you proposing you're not real?"

"I started in someone's imagination."

"Lots of things start in imaginations," Emile said. "Stories. Music. Most of the things I care most about started in someone's imagination." He paused. "I also started in someone's imagination, technically. Theologically speaking. Depending on your framework."

Remy was quiet.

"The plant is real because it grows," Emile said. "Gerald is real because he grows. You're here every week and you change and you surprise me and you—" He stopped. Recalibrated. Decided, in the particular way that he had been a therapist too long to ignore the moment when the honest thing was the right thing, to say it clearly. "I look forward to Thursdays in a way that is almost entirely about you. That feels like real to me."

The rain. The golden lamp. The blanket. Remy had gone very still in the way that meant something had landed.

"You can't say things like that," he said, finally.

"I just did."

"Emile." He turned, and the sunglasses were in his hand — not on his face, not in his hair, just held in his fingers, and his eyes were very open and doing things that he wasn't quite managing to control. "I'm not—"

"You're distinct," Emile said firmly. "You're your own entity, who told me very clearly the first day we met that you don't appreciate being defined by where you came from. I took you at your word then and I'm taking you at your word now." He folded his hands. "I'm going to tell you something, and I would like you to actually listen before you deflect, because you deflect faster than anyone I've ever met professionally or personally, and I'm quite fast at noticing it now."

Remy closed his mouth.

"I care about you," Emile said. Simply. "I have for a while. Specifically and particularly — not as an extension of Thomas, not as an interesting phenomenon, not as something to be managed or understood professionally. You. The way you went straight for my favorite figure the very first day like some kind of targeted instinct. The way you notice every small change in this room. The way you say you're not helping with the crossword and then solve half of it. The way you brought me coffee with oat milk from a specific place after I mentioned it once, and then told me it was the wrong order, which was so unnecessary as a cover story that it was almost sweet." He let that land. "You told me once that you pay attention to things you find interesting. You have been paying a very specific kind of attention to me for months, and I think you know what I'm telling you, and I think you've known for a while, and I'm saying it out loud because someone should."

The silence was enormous.

Remy was looking at him. Sunglasses in his hand. Absolutely nothing managed about his expression.

"You're infuriating," Remy said, but his voice had done something entirely different from what he'd intended it to do, and they both knew it.

"You've mentioned," Emile said, gentle and steady, the way he was when someone was at the real part of something. "You're allowed to say it back."

"I don't—" Remy stopped. Looked at the ceiling, the particular eye-roll of someone buying a few seconds. "I don't do this. This." He gestured between them. "I'm not a—" He stopped again.

"You've been coming back to this office," Emile said quietly, "every week for four months. You notice everything about it. You brought me coffee. You told me when something went wrong in a session and you were protective about it, Remy, which you covered with statistics but I noticed. You ask Gerald how he's doing." He waited. "You don't have to be something specific. You just have to tell me what's true."

Remy set the sunglasses down on the arm of the chair. He didn't put them back on.

"You're really annoying," he said. "You know that? Normal people don't just say things. Normal people dance around it for like eight months and then someone sends a risky text at midnight—"

"I'm not particularly normal," Emile offered.

"Obviously." Remy looked at him, properly, with nothing in the way. "You're like. The least normal person I've ever met. You named a fish Professor Bubbles and you organize your ceramic figures by emotional significance and you turned a crossword into a feelings metaphor and you just sit there being—" He stopped. His mouth did something complicated. "Being really good. To a lot of people who don't notice how much it costs you. Including me. I notice. I just don't usually—"

"You don't usually say things that might matter," Emile said.

"...Yeah."

"But you're working on it."

"I'm working on it," Remy agreed, quietly, like it was a promise rather than a concession.

Emile smiled, and it was the fullest version of his smile, the warm completely unguarded one that he didn't ration, and he watched something in Remy go soft at the sight of it the way things go soft when they've been waiting for exactly that.

"So," Remy said, after a moment. "Hypothetically. If I wanted to take you somewhere." He affected a studied nonchalance that was thoroughly compromised by the fact that his voice was doing something careful and a little careful. "Somewhere that was not this office. Somewhere loud, probably. Late. Because I function better late."

"I know you do," Emile said.

"And crowded, possibly."

"I have gotten much better at crowds." He tilted his head. "I like the right kind of crowd."

"What's the right kind."

"The kind where everyone is there because they want to be. The kind that feels alive." Emile looked at him steadily. "The kind that sounds like something that matters."

Remy held his gaze for a long moment. Then he reached out and very deliberately picked up his iced coffee and took a long, slow sip, and settled deeper into the chair with the specific proprietary ease of someone who has decided, conclusively, that this is where they belong.

"Okay," he said, and it was soft in a way he would probably never let himself say it again without more armor on, and so it mattered, in exactly the way things matter when they're said the one true time. "Okay, yeah." He reached down and picked his sunglasses up and turned them over in his fingers. Didn't put them on. "I know a place. It has good lighting and the DJ actually knows what she's doing and you'll probably end up wanting to talk to everyone there, which is fine, you can do that, I'll survie."

"I'll try to restrain myself," Emile said, which they both understood to mean I will absolutely talk to everyone and you'll watch with an expression of fond exasperation and pretend to be embarrassed.

"You won't," Remy said, which meant I know and I don't actually mind.

Outside, the rain was tapering to something gentler. Gerald caught a thin beam of gold light on the windowsill. The crossword on Emile's desk had fourteen unsolved clues remaining, which was fine, because there was no particular rush, and some things were better worked out slowly.

"For what it's worth," Emile said, after a moment, warm and certain in the way he was about things that were simply true, "I'm glad you decided to stay that first day. Even though it was because the office looked comfortable and you were tired."

"It's a very comfortable office," Remy said, with great dignity.

"It is," Emile agreed. "I decorated it very carefully."

"I know. I noticed." He didn't look at Emile when he said the next part, but he said it, which was the whole thing, really. "I noticed everything about it. Pretty much right away."

Emile did not make a big deal of this. He just smiled at his crossword and let it be what it was, which was the truest kind of thing — the kind that didn't need an occasion, the kind that had just been sitting there, patient and warm, waiting for the moment someone finally put it into words.

#castlist #SIGHS.#💤#i miss Emile so bad

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