a/n: please don't judge me for the concept of this, I was delirious and sleep deprived when I wrote the first copy and tried to make it better when I was fully awake because I didn't want to waste the time that I don't remember spending
The lights went out at 11:47 PM.
Janus knew the exact time because he'd been watching the clock on the far wall — not out of anxiety, he would have insisted, if anyone had been watching him watch it. Just habit. Just the way he'd always oriented himself in rooms, cataloguing exits and light sources and the precise location of anything that might become relevant. The clock had been relevant. The clock had been there, and then the power had failed and taken the clock with it and taken everything else, and now there was only the dark.
Black. Absolute. The kind that didn't resolve into shapes after your eyes adjusted, because there was nothing to adjust to.
The mindscape had no backup generator. It had Thomas, and Thomas was asleep, and whatever he was dreaming had apparently not allocated any light to the common areas. The windows held nothing. The usual ambient glow from the hallway — the warm, sourceless illumination that the mindscape maintained the way a theatre maintains its ghost light — was simply gone.
Janus stood in the center of the room and did not move.
This was a reasonable response. Moving in complete darkness without knowing the precise coordinates of every piece of furniture was statistically inadvisable. He was being careful. He was being measured and strategic and entirely in control of himself, which was why his breathing had gone shallow in a very deliberate, purposeful way that had nothing at all to do with the fact that the darkness pressed against his skin like a hand held flat against his face.
He was not afraid of the dark.
He had a complicated, longstanding, and deeply private relationship with the dark, which was different.
"Janus?"
Remus's voice came from his left — the chaise, almost certainly, where he'd been sprawled forty-five degrees past horizontal not ten minutes ago, consuming something that had smelled aggressively of both artificial lime and the particular sulfurous note Janus had learned to associate with Remus's more experimental culinary choices. Janus had not asked. The policy of not asking had served him well.
"I'm fine," Janus said.
The words came out even. He was proud of them.
A silence followed. Not a normal Remus silence — those lasted approximately as long as a sneeze, being deployed mainly as punctuation rather than actual pause. This one stretched. Considered.
"You sound like you're not breathing."
"I'm breathing."
"You sound like you're making decisions about breathing. Like every inhale is a separate vote."
Janus said nothing. The dark said nothing back, which was the problem with the dark — it never offered you anything to push against, just absorbed and absorbed and gave back nothing, not even an echo, not even the shape of your own hands in front of your face—
"Jan."
"I said I'm fine, Remus."
"Yeah, I heard you." Another pause. "You only go full two syllables when you're annoyed at me."
"I'm always annoyed at you."
"You go fond annoyed at me normally. Right now you went clipped. That's different."
Janus closed his eyes, which accomplished nothing except to make the darkness feel like a choice rather than an imposition, which was marginally better. He heard Remus shifting on the chaise — the familiar creak of it, the protest of old upholstery — and then the soft sound of bare feet finding the floor. Moving toward him. Janus tracked him by sound, by the slight displacement of air, by the fact that he had spent enough time in rooms with Remus to know, approximately, where he was at any given moment.
"You don't need to—" Janus started.
"I'm not doing anything," Remus said agreeably. Which was usually a precursor to doing something.
A sharp inhale, deliberate and preparatory.
Then: pop.
One knuckle. Clean and percussive, the sound of a small thing releasing its tension.
Pop. Pop.
The second hand, working through each joint with the systematic thoroughness Remus applied to very few things — Janus had a private theory that Remus was capable of extraordinary focus when the subject interested him enough, and that the subjects were simply unusual. His own anatomy, apparently, qualified.
"Remus," Janus said, with precision. "What are you doing."
"Something useful, maybe. Hang on."
Pop. Pop. Pop.
Janus felt his own shoulders climb toward his ears on reflex. He had always found that particular sound viscerally unpleasant — not the knuckles, exactly, but the neck, which was—
Remus rolled his neck. One slow, circular motion, and then the crack that followed was enormous and resonant and Janus made a small, involuntary sound of objection.
"Please—"
"Almost," Remus said, with the serenity of a man who had made peace with all consequences.
He bent forward slightly. Rolled his spine — one long, deliberate movement from his lower back upward, vertebra by vertebra — and the crack that followed was architectural, the sound of a building finding its foundations, and Janus's whole body sympathetically tightened and then—
Light.
It started so faint that Janus thought he'd imagined it. A suggestion. A rumor of green-gold that seemed to live somewhere under the surface of Remus's skin, visible at the knuckles first, where the concentration was highest — each joint a small, distinct point of luminescence, like a hand full of fireflies that had decided to stay.
And then it spread.
Up his forearms. Along the pronounced lines of his tendons, the glow following the architecture of him the way water follows the lowest path — not flooding, just finding. His spine lit from the inside, visible through his thin shirt as a line of pale gold. His neck traced light upward toward his jaw, and his jaw was illuminated now, the angular line of it, the curl of his mouth that had already found its way into a grin.
Remus glowed.
He glowed in the specific spectrum of a fresh chemical light — the green-gold of a cracked glow stick, something synthesized and alive, the color of something that had been waiting in the dark for a reason to shine. And he took up enough of the room to push the darkness back to the edges, where it belonged — not eliminated, not banished, but managed. Held at bay by the fact of him. The furniture reappeared in soft outline. The bookshelves. The ceiling. The floor announced itself under Janus's feet.
Janus breathed.
He did it quietly, without announcement. Just a full breath, the kind that went all the way down, filling the spaces that the darkness had been sitting in. He hadn't realized how compressed he'd gotten until the compression released.
Remus was watching him.
Not with the gleeful, acquisitive intensity he turned on things that interested him the way a magpie is interested in chrome — not cataloguing Janus, not studying him like a specimen pinned to a board. Watching him the way Remus watched things he was careful with, which was a shorter list than people assumed and which Janus had found himself on without entirely understanding how it had happened.
"You drank the solution," Janus said.
"The phenyl oxalate ester thing? Yeah, like two weeks ago." Remus turned his hands over, examining his own knuckles with evident satisfaction. "I wanted to test whether the luminescent compound would metabolize normally or if being imaginary would — it stores in the joints, by the way. The hydrogen peroxide reaction is sustained because we don't process things the way a real body would. It just sits there and waits."
"You stored bioluminescent chemicals in your connective tissue."
"I stored them in my soul, technically, because that's what we are, and right now my soul is doing something incredibly—"
"Remus."
"—useful, I was going to say."
Janus looked at him. At the green-gold lines of him, the way the light had settled into the architecture of his face and made it — not unfamiliar, not transformed, just more legible. Like a document held up to a lamp.
"How long does it last?"
"Couldn't say. Normal glow sticks go for about twelve hours after activation, but I'm not normal in any medically relevant sense, so." He spread his fingers wide, all ten knuckles shining. "Maybe till morning. Maybe forever. Wouldn't that be something."
"It would be something," Janus agreed, which was not a complete sentence in the way he'd intended it to be. He'd meant to append a second clause. Something dry, something that reestablished the appropriate distance between thank you and what you just did undoes me slightly. The second clause didn't come.
Remus's grin softened at the edges. The glow did too, or seemed to — warmer, somehow, less chemical and more something else.
"You were doing the statue thing," Remus said, not accusatorially. Just observationally.
"I was standing still."
"You were standing still the way a person stands still when they're trying very hard not to let anyone know something is wrong." He tilted his head. "I've seen you stand still for tactical reasons and I've seen you stand still for other reasons, and those are different stills."
Janus said, after a moment: "I don't enjoy the dark."
It was the truest sentence he was willing to give, stripped of context and history and the specific reasons, which were not Remus's to have. Or — they could be, he supposed, which was a different problem entirely. The question of what Remus was allowed to have had become increasingly complicated over the course of the past year and Janus had not resolved it to his own satisfaction.
"I know," Remus said.
"You knew."
"I know lots of things. I just don't always say them because then you'd realize I was paying attention and you'd have to do something about it." He said it lightly, but it landed with weight, the way Remus's observations always landed — wearing the costume of a joke because the truth was less likely to get him defensive if it arrived in character.
Janus looked at him for a long moment.
He looked at the green-gold lines of him, the way the light traced the shape he'd memorized in other contexts — across a table during planning sessions that ran too long, across a shared pillow in the specific darkness of a room where neither of them was performing anything for anyone, across all the unremarkable geometries of a life that had accumulated between them without Janus noticing it accumulate until the sum was already too large to ignore.
He looked at the easy, undemanding way Remus stood in his own glow. Not presenting it. Not asking to be thanked for it. Just offering it the way he offered most things — with his whole body, no hesitation, no invoice to be paid.
Janus found, as he periodically found, that the true sentence was also the most structurally inconvenient one.
He could say: the light is adequate. He could say: thank you, that was practical. He could say: I suppose I should acknowledge this, in the tone that converted meaning into transaction, which was the tone he used when he needed to handle something genuine with tongs so it didn't burn him.
He crossed the room.
Remus tracked him with his eyes, curious and bright and still smiling that softened smile — and Janus took his face in both hands and kissed him.
Not quickly. Not as punctuation, not as shorthand or strategic redirection. With the deliberateness of someone who had made a decision and was committing to it before the part of himself that managed risk assessments could file an objection. He kissed him the way he did very few things: completely. No exits held open. No distance maintained.
Remus made a small, surprised sound — not unwilling, just surprised, the way Remus was sometimes surprised when Janus chose sincerity over management — and then his hands found Janus's waist and the glow flared briefly, or perhaps Janus's perception of it did, and Remus kissed him back with the uncomplicated enthusiasm he brought to everything he loved.
When Janus finally stepped back, both of them had gone slightly breathless, and Remus's expression was luminous in ways that had nothing to do with chemistry.
"Okay," Remus said.
"Okay," Janus agreed.
"That was—"
"Don't."
"I'm just saying—"
"I know what you're saying and I'm asking you not to say it."
Remus's grin returned, fully formed, delighted. "You kissed me like I'd personally invented photons."
"I kissed you because you were talking and I wanted you to stop."
"We were not talking. There was a whole weighted silence before you—"
"The silence was talking."
"That's the most romantic thing you've ever said."
"That is a damning indictment of my romantic communication."
"It's great, I love it, say more things like that—" Remus caught his hand before Janus could step back further, not gripping, just holding, the way he'd learned to hold — loosely enough that leaving was always an available option, firmly enough that leaving required a choice. "Hey. You okay?"
Janus looked at their hands. Remus's knuckles still glowing, each one a small sun. His own hand, the scaled side, the yellow, resting in it like it had always belonged there, which it hadn't always been able to do and now sometimes did and Janus had not yet found a way to make that fact feel like something he could hold without flinching.
"I'm fine," he said. Different from before. The same words but — different.
Remus heard the difference. Janus could see him hear it.
"Come sit with me."
"I don't need to sit, I'm—"
"Jan." Not pleading. Not performing. Just: Jan. The short version that Remus had started using sometime in the past year and that Janus had never corrected because correcting it would have required admitting he'd noticed, which would have required admitting it meant something. "Come sit with me. The dark's still at the edges and you're still doing the breathing thing."
"I corrected the breathing."
"You're monitoring the breathing, which is adjacent." He tugged, gently, once. "Come on. I'll be a lamp. It's my thing now. I've decided."
Janus allowed himself to be led to the chaise with approximately forty percent less protest than he might have managed in front of an audience. Remus dropped onto it with his customary total disregard for the upholstery's history and architectural future, and rearranged himself against the back of it, and extended an arm in a gesture so expectant it had lapped back around into something almost endearing.
Janus looked at the arm.
"Just to be clear," he said, "this is a temporary—"
"Completely," Remus agreed.
"—purely practical arrangement, given that the light source—"
"Absolutely practical."
"—and I retain the right to leave at any point—"
"Obviously."
"—and you will not make a production of this."
Remus mimed locking his mouth with a key, then appeared to reconsider, then mimed swallowing the key, then pointed at him with a glowing finger as if to say handled.
Janus sat.
Remus reorganized them both with the cheerful, architectural certainty of someone who had decided how this was going to go and had correctly assessed that negotiating the specifics would take longer than simply enacting them. An arm around Janus's shoulders. Janus's back against Remus's chest. The glow surrounding them both, emanating from every joint, warm in a way that temperature didn't explain — the room held its green-gold and the darkness stayed at the margins where it had been assigned.
Janus was rigid.
He was aware of being rigid. He was aware of each individual point of contact between his back and Remus's chest and the arm across his shoulders and the particular warmth of Remus's chin eventually coming to rest against the top of his head — which was presumptuous, which Janus absolutely did not close his eyes briefly in response to, which was fine.
Forty seconds.
Fifty.
Stage by stage, in the way Remus had apparently been observant enough to map — the shoulders, first, the manufactured tension releasing muscle by muscle down his spine. Then the hands, which had been held too still in his lap, and which now settled with one against his own knee and one, without meaningful authorization, against Remus's.
"There you go," Remus said, very quietly.
"Don't," Janus said.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You were about to say something intolerable."
"I was going to say there you go and that's it, I swear."
"You said it like — significantly."
"I can't help how I say things. My mouth has opinions." A beat. "You went soft."
"I relaxed. It's a physiological—"
"You went soft," Remus said again, simply, "and you're warm and you smell good and I just want to say one thing."
Janus tensed fractionally. "Remus—"
"One thing. That's all." He didn't move, didn't shift, didn't turn it into anything larger than itself. "I'm glad I drank the weird glowing stuff."
Janus was quiet for a moment.
"That is an incredibly low bar for gladness."
"I'm a simple man with simple joys."
"You are the least simple entity in the mindscape."
"I'm simple about this. About you." Another beat. "That's allowed."
Janus looked at the room — the soft-lit outlines of it, the furniture restored to visibility by the glow of the man behind him, the edges of the dark held back like a tide at its turning. He looked at Remus's hand on his shoulder, the knuckles luminous, each one a point of light the size of a moon if you chose to look at it that way, which Janus was apparently choosing to do.
He thought about what it meant.
He turned the question over the way he turned everything over — examining it, looking for the structural weaknesses, finding the places where it could be taken apart and laid flat so that it didn't require him to hold it whole. But it wouldn't flatten. It kept reassembling itself. Remus hearing his breathing change in the dark. Remus knowing, having known, having filed it away not as ammunition but as information about how to help him. Remus drinking a bioluminescent compound two weeks ago for reasons that had seemed, at the time, to be purely Remus — purely about the experiment, the impulse, the glorious disregard for convention — and then carrying it in his joints like a contingency plan he'd never mentioned.
Janus thought: you planned this. Not consciously, perhaps, but in the way Remus planned things — sideways, obliquely, without calling it a plan because calling it a plan made it visible and visible things could be commented on. He had carried light in his body and waited, and when the darkness came for Janus he had cracked himself open to give it to him.
The true sentence arrived, as it always did, quietly and at the worst possible time.
This is what it means to be loved by someone who pays attention to the things you don't say.
Janus did not say this out loud. He said it at Remus, internally, with the full conviction of it, and then he turned his face slightly and pressed his mouth to the underside of Remus's jaw — not a kiss, exactly, just a placement, just the fact of it — and felt Remus's arm tighten in a single, reflexive response before going easy again.
"Janus," Remus said.
"You may not make a production of this," Janus said into his jaw.
"I'm not." He paused. "Are you okay?"
"I am." A beat. "I am, actually."
"Good." Another pause, softer. "The dark still bad?"
Janus looked at the room — at the green-gold edges of it, the lit outlines of everything, the reliable geometry of a space that Remus was making inhabitable by the simple fact of existing in it and glowing.
"Less so," he said.
Remus made a satisfied sound that he was clearly trying to keep at a reasonable volume.
"You're very smug," Janus said.
"I'm allowed to be smug about solving a problem."
"You didn't solve anything, you—"
"I cracked my back and you kissed me and now you're lying on me in the dark and none of that was happening ten minutes ago, so." He pressed his mouth briefly to the top of Janus's head. "Solved."
"Your metrics are catastrophically broad."
"My metrics are results-based."
"You are intolerable."
"You're literally touching me right now."
Janus was, in fact, still touching him — the hand on Remus's knee had not moved, and the other had, in the past several minutes, migrated to a position that could only be described as settled. He considered moving it. He considered it at length. He left it where it was.
"This doesn't mean anything," Janus said.
"Okay."
"I simply find the heat regulation beneficial."
"Completely understandable."
"And the light source is practical."
"Totally practical."
"And I—" He stopped. Started again, quieter: "I don't do this with people who don't matter."
Remus was very still.
"Yeah," he said, after a moment. Carefully. "I know."
"Good." Janus shifted his position by half an inch — not away, just a minor adjustment toward some more precise configuration of comfort that he located and then settled into. "See that you remember it."
"I will," Remus said. "I'll write it down. Janus doesn't cuddle people who don't matter. I'll put it on the fridge."
"If you put anything on the fridge I will find it and destroy it."
"I'll make copies."
"I will find and destroy the copies."
"I'll laminate them."
"Remus."
"I'm just saying, lamination is a deterrent—" He was grinning. Janus could hear it, didn't need to see it, had mapped the cadence of Remus's grin in the dark well before tonight. "I'll put it in my will."
"You're a facet of an abstract creative entity, you don't have a will."
"I'll make one. I, Remus, being of unhinged mind, bequeath to the mindscape the knowledge that Janus held my hand in the dark on purpose—"
"I am not holding your hand, my hand is resting—"
"—and said I mattered, and it was the best thing—"
"I said you don't do this with people who don't—" Janus stopped. Retraced the sentence. Found the exact location where he had, in fact, inadvertently said the precise thing. Closed his eyes. "Remus."
"Yeah?"
A long pause. The glow held steady. Outside, Thomas slept on.
"Don't," Janus said. Quietly. "Just — let it be."
He felt Remus absorb this. Felt him choose — he could feel Remus choosing, always could, the brief stillness before he decided which version of himself to give you — and then the arm around Janus's shoulders shifted into something more settled, more permanent-feeling, and Remus put his chin back on top of Janus's head and said nothing.
Let it be.
The darkness held its position at the edges. The glow held its position everywhere else. Janus tracked it in his peripheral vision, the light moving with Remus's slow breathing — not fluctuating, just alive, doing what light does, which is show you where you are.
He knew where he was.
He was on a chaise in the mindscape with a glowing idiot's arm around him and the darkness at a manageable distance and a hand that had migrated from a knee to something closer to a held hand, and he knew, precisely, where he was. Had known for longer than he'd said. Would not say it now — not all of it, not the full sentence, not the architecture of what Remus meant to him laid out in the open where either of them would have to look at it directly.
But Remus had made his joints into lanterns. Had stored light in himself in case Janus needed it, had cracked himself open in the dark without being asked, and Janus had kissed him and meant it and let himself be held afterward and called him a person who mattered, and some sentences didn't need to be spoken to be said.
"You're going to crack something else," Janus said, eventually, into the quiet.
"Probably not, I did my whole spine already."
"Probably not is not the same as definitely not."
"I'd say I'm at like a twenty percent chance. Maybe thirty."
"That's an enormous margin."
"I'm an enormous-margin kind of guy." He paused. "Does it bother you? The cracking?"
"It makes an objectively unpleasant sound."
"But does it bother you."
Janus considered lying. Found he didn't want to. "No," he said. "Not the way it—" He stopped. "Not tonight."
Remus seemed to understand what that meant, which he usually did, because he paid attention to the things Janus didn't say, which was the whole problem and also the whole solution.
"Okay," Remus said.
"Okay," Janus said.
The glow held.
He didn't sleep — Janus rarely slept in front of people, which required a vulnerability he hadn't managed to make routine — but he rested, which was the version of the same thing that he could allow himself. He rested with his eyes almost closed against the green-gold light and Remus's breathing steady at his back and the darkness contained at the edges of the room.
Somewhere around two in the morning, Remus said: "If I fall asleep will you stay."
It wasn't a demand. Wasn't even really a question, the way he'd phrased it — no rising intonation, no performance of hoping. Just: if I fall asleep will you stay. The honest version.
Janus looked at the room. At the darkness. At the glow.
"I'll consider it," he said.
Remus made a sound that was mostly breath. "That means yes."
"It means I'm considering it."
"It means yes and you want a few minutes to decide to decide."
Janus said nothing for a while.
Then: "Go to sleep, Remus."
Remus went to sleep. Not quickly — it was never quick, the way he settled, always a few minutes of residual motion, small adjustments, the body accounting for itself — but eventually the breathing changed and the arm around Janus's shoulders went heavier and he was simply asleep, as uncomplicated as everything else he did.
Janus looked at the room.
He looked at the green-gold of it, the glow persisting even in sleep because Remus's body had been persuaded to carry it and did not stop carrying it on his behalf. The darkness stayed at its margins. The furniture held its outlines. The clock, somewhere behind him, had presumably resumed its counting, but Janus didn't look for it.
He stayed.
He stayed for reasons he was not going to articulate, even privately, because some admissions required a specific quality of darkness to feel survivable, and right now there wasn't enough dark in the room for that.
Maybe tomorrow.
Maybe in a room without glow-in-the-dark knuckles and an arm that had decided to keep him.
Dukeceit is sooooo childhood friends that know everything about each other and were destined to be together (remembers that soulmates are unrealistic and a harmful thing to push) but it took hard work to get there
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