alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.
we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)
please rb for larger sample size!
Question 1/3
What is your age, and do you feel AI is a net positive or net negative in our lives today?
fun fact that I learned from my ultrasound tech: in ultrasound equipment and in X-rays, blood does not generally show up on the scans.
While you may see shadows on images that are cast by bone in ultrasounds, and the bones and other soft tissues will show up in x-rays, blood has a similar density to all the soft tissues surrounding those organs and bones. On ultrasound it will show up as large patches of black inside of blood vessels, while in X-rays, it often won't show up at all.
Now. Thinking about Iron Lung. The ocean itself does show up as black, which does confirm that its made of blood. With a camera as powerful as that equipped on the burner subs, you're also getting a much larger area as well, and you're not seeing walls (in-game, at least), until you're directly in front of them, and even those have some dark patches.
In the movie, the walls do not have dark patches, marking them as solid. They also mentioned the sea-floor shifting. You know what shows up consistently on the camera, no matter what Simon takes a picture of?
the sea floor. You know what shows up on xrays at that point?
I reblogged her late last year and my 2024 has been very satisfying work-wise and (secure enough to not stress out) money-wise so far. Money Snake is wise and good.
Markiplier: *makes a movie to be a trailblazer for the indie scene*
People: *love it* *hype it* *help it make millions of dollars* *respects the creator's wishes for spoilers/leaks* *hypes each other up for its release and subsequent merch/cosplay/etc*
Glitch: *tries to make an indie movie for the animation scene*
People: *cancel creator* *shits on Glitch* *movie leaks* *spoilers everywhere* *trashing creative choices* *pissing on the release discrepancy between theaters and Youtube* *constantly critiquing creative choices*
I know I’ve not posted myself as of a few weeks ago, and my partner and I are still in a bit of a process, but I promise the wait is almost over.
Hopefully I will be able to come back with a couple of projects, but there are some that are still WIPs (because it’s me, duh), so I hope you all may be able to remain patient with me on that.
Oh, yeah. And one other thing I’ve been meaning to ask.
What happens when everything you know suddenly doesn’t make any sense? How do you take that?
The mindscape had a sound when things were going wrong.
Not a loud sound. Not dramatic. Just a low, constant hum beneath everything, the way a building sounds when its HVAC is working too hard — present in the absence of other noise, noticeable only when you'd learned to listen for it. Virgil had lived inside that sound for years before anyone noticed he existed, and he knew its register the way you know the specific creak of a floorboard in a house you've lived in long enough.
He was hearing it again.
The difference was that this time it wasn't coming from him.
It started in small increments, the way most things did.
A Tuesday morning. Thomas was spiraling the gentle, circling way — not a crisis, more a slow centrifuge of undone tasks and mounting obligations and the particular guilt of someone who knows what they should be doing and can't make themselves start. His laptop was open. His feet were tucked beneath him on the couch. His eyes had the glazed, soft focus of someone who had been staring at the same paragraph for twenty minutes without reading a word.
Logan appeared first. He always appeared first in situations of logistical distress; it was something Virgil had noticed early and quietly catalogued as one of Logan's most characteristic features — this reflexive orientation toward a problem, the way he arrived like a hand already extended before you'd thought to ask for help. He had his whiteboard. He had neat, bullet-pointed items in dark blue marker. He had the slightly elevated posture that meant he'd already done the mental work and was ready to walk someone through it.
"Thomas," he said, and his voice had the clean, precise quality of someone trying to be a lifeline. "I've organized your pending tasks by urgency and estimated completion time. If we begin the audition preparation now, we can build in a review period before Thursday and still leave space for —"
"Oh, buddy." Patton materialized from the direction of the kitchen, and he had that quality he always had — warm and immediate and filling the room the way heat fills a cold space, displacing everything else without intending to. He was carrying a mug of something that smelled like chocolate, and his eyes were soft with the particular brand of gentle concern that was Patton's most natural expression. "I don't know if a list is quite what Thomas needs right now. Sometimes you have to let yourself feel overwhelmed before you can start fixing things, you know? The feelings are important."
"They are," Logan said, carefully. "I'm not suggesting Thomas suppress his feelings. I'm suggesting that the cognitive load of unstructured anxiety is frequently higher than —"
"Lo." Roman arrived from the other direction with the unconscious ease of someone who had never once considered that a room might not want him in it — which was, Virgil thought sometimes, both Roman's greatest gift and his most significant blind spot. He dropped onto the arm of the couch and turned the full warmth of his attention on Thomas. "Right now our brave creator needs to feel what he feels. You can't put a timetable on the creative soul."
"I wasn't —" Logan paused. Reoriented. "I wasn't attempting to schedule his emotional experience. I was scheduling the tasks that are causing the emotional experience, which is a different —"
"We've got it, Lo." Patton's voice was gentle in the way that felt like a hand on your arm steering you slightly to the side. Not unkind. Just redirecting. "Take a breath. We'll come find you when we're ready for the planning stuff, okay?"
The whiteboard disappeared.
Logan nodded, once, with the precise professionalism of someone filing an objection they know won't be addressed. He took a half-step back into the indeterminate space Sides occupied when they weren't the focus, and his expression did the thing — Virgil had been watching for it, had learned to read it like a weather system — the deliberate smoothing, the careful reorganization of feeling into something that could be stored rather than displayed. He folded his hands behind his back.
"Of course," he said. "I'll be in the library."
No one watched him go.
Virgil, standing in the hallway doorway with his hoodie pulled up and his arms crossed, watched the space Logan had vacated and felt something hot and specific ignite just below his sternum. It wasn't anger, exactly. It was more like the feeling of recognizing something, the way you recognize a pattern in a piece of music you've heard before in a different key.
He knew that exit. He knew the shape of it.
He waited forty-three minutes — he counted, because he knew if he followed immediately he'd do it wrong, he'd come in too hot, and Logan didn't respond well to too hot — before he went to find him.
The library was three floors up and smelled like old paper and the particular dryness of well-kept books. Logan was at the far table, which was his table, the one with the lamp that cast good reading light and the chair with the slightly higher back that meant Logan could sit with the precise upright posture he defaulted to when he was thinking seriously. He had three books open in front of him. He wasn't reading any of them.
He was staring at the middle distance with the specific quality of someone who is very carefully not doing something — not feeling, not reacting, not following the thread that if pulled would unravel whatever composure he was holding together. The pen in his hand wasn't moving.
Virgil dropped into the chair beside him instead of across.
Across felt like a deposition. Beside felt like us, and right now more than anything else he wanted Logan to feel the us of it.
"Hey," he said.
"Hello, Virgil." The voice was even. Functional.
"You okay?"
A pause. "I'm fine."
Virgil let that sit in the air between them for a moment, acknowledging it and not believing it. "How's the nothing-reading going?"
Logan's mouth did a small, unwilling thing that wasn't quite a smile. "The nothing-reading," he said, "is going extremely well. I've accomplished a significant quantity of it."
"Impressive." Virgil leaned back in the chair and looked at the ceiling. The library ceiling was high and vaulted and had the kind of elaborate plasterwork that Logan had probably specified when he'd designed his section of the mindscape, all clean geometric detail. "You want to tell me what's actually going on, or are we doing the thing where you're fine until you're definitely not fine and then it takes another forty minutes for you to admit there was ever anything happening?"
"That is," Logan said, "an uncharitable characterization of my emotional processing."
"It's an accurate characterization."
"...it's an accurate characterization," Logan conceded, with the particular dignity of someone who has decided honesty is more important than winning. He set the pen down carefully, parallel to the edge of the book. "They weren't wrong," he said. "Patton wasn't wrong. Thomas did need to process the anxiety before he could engage productively with solutions. That is a well-documented —"
"Logan."
"—aspect of —"
"Logan." Gently.
A long pause. The lamp hummed.
"I had a very thorough plan," Logan said, quietly. "I'd worked it out before I came upstairs. I knew what needed to happen and in what order, and I knew if we started at two o'clock we would have enough time to —" He stopped. "It doesn't matter."
"It matters," Virgil said. "It matters to me."
Something in Logan's expression shifted — just for a moment, just enough to be visible — the particular flicker of someone who has been told their thing matters and is surprised by the relief it produces. Then it was filed away again, catalogued, stored.
"It was a good plan," Logan said.
"I know it was," Virgil said. "Your plans are always good."
"Then why —" Logan stopped himself. His jaw did the small tightening thing. "Never mind."
"Why don't they listen," Virgil said, and it wasn't a question, and Logan looked at him with something that was very close to being undone before he caught it.
"They do listen," Logan said, carefully. "When the context is appropriate."
"When you're agreeing with someone who was already going to be heard," Virgil said.
Silence.
Logan looked at the books in front of him for a long time.
"That is," he said finally, with quiet precision, "a more accurate characterization."
Virgil nodded. He didn't push, didn't elaborate, didn't move to fix it — just let Logan have the acknowledgment, the simple fact of it sitting between them, real and uncontested. It was something he'd learned slowly and with effort: that sometimes what Logan needed wasn't a solution. Sometimes Logan needed the specific experience of not having to convince someone that the problem was real.
They sat together in the lamplight for a while. Virgil listened to the sound of the mindscape and thought about how the hum had gotten slightly louder, and kept the thought to himself.
For now.
---
Janus came to Virgil on a Thursday morning, which was almost insultingly casual of him.
He appeared in the hallway outside Virgil's room with his hands folded and his expression arranged in the particular studied pleasantness he used when he wanted to look like he wasn't doing anything in particular. Half of his face was the smooth yellow of his natural appearance; the other half had taken on a sort of deliberately neutral blankness that meant he was paying close attention and didn't want Virgil to know it.
"I'm not interested," Virgil said, without looking up from his phone.
"I haven't said anything yet."
"You don't have to. You have a coming to say a thing face."
Janus settled against the opposite wall with the ease of someone who has all the time in the world and is not going to be hurried by someone else's rudeness. "I've simply been observing," he said, in the tone that meant he'd been doing considerably more than observing, "that Logan has been having a difficult time lately."
Virgil's thumbs stopped moving.
"He's fine," he said.
"Mm." Janus's tone was mild, agreeable, entirely unconvinced. "He's been dismissed four times this week in situations where his input was materially relevant to the outcome. On two of those occasions, the decision that was ultimately made would have been improved by the analysis he was attempting to provide. He knows this. He hasn't said so." A pause. "He never says so."
"He doesn't need to say so," Virgil said. "I know it."
"Yes," Janus said. "You know it. And yet it keeps happening."
Virgil put his phone down. "What do you want, Janus?"
Janus tilted his head with the birdlike quality that Virgil had always found deeply irritating. "I want," he said, pleasantly, "for Thomas to function optimally. Logan is central to that. An underutilized, undervalued logic function produces predictable long-term outcomes, and none of them are particularly good for Thomas." He paused. "He is undervalued, Virgil. That's not a manipulation. That's simply a fact."
"Don't," Virgil said.
"He has a standing invitation," Janus continued, as if Virgil hadn't spoken, because Janus had spent centuries perfecting the art of hearing what he wanted to hear and disregarding the rest. "From both Remus and myself. Somewhere that the data gets used. Somewhere that he doesn't have to fight for the floor."
"He's not going anywhere," Virgil said. His voice came out harder than he intended. "Stay away from him."
Janus looked at him for a long, considering moment. Something in his expression went very briefly, very genuinely serious — not the performed sincerity he deployed for effect, but the actual thing, which was rarer and more unsettling.
"You can't protect him by keeping him small," Janus said quietly. "He's already been made small by everyone else. If you love him, Virgil — and I think you do, genuinely, in your particular prickly way — you might consider what it would mean to fight for him instead of simply hovering over him."
He left before Virgil could answer.
Which was, Virgil thought furiously, exactly the kind of thing Janus would do.
He told Logan that evening. He didn't want to — there was a version of him that wanted to handle it quietly, stand between Logan and the whole situation and make it not-Logan's-problem. But that version of him was the same version that had spent too many years deciding what was safe for everyone else without asking, and he was trying to be better than that, and so he sat beside Logan in the library and told him the truth.
Logan listened without interrupting, which was both very Logan and very difficult to read. When Virgil finished, the quiet stretched for long enough that Virgil started to worry about it.
"I see," Logan said finally.
"You can't go over there," Virgil said, and heard immediately how it sounded, and pushed through it anyway because the stakes were too high for him to be graceful. "I know how it feels, Lo. I know what they're offering and I know it feels like being seen, but Janus's version of seeing you is —"
"I haven't said I'm going anywhere." Logan's voice was patient in the way that suggested patience was an active choice he was making rather than a natural state.
"I know. I'm saying it preemptively."
"You say that quite a lot lately." A pause. "Things preemptively."
"Because if I wait until after it's —"
"Virgil." The patience in Logan's voice had a particular quality now, careful and faintly strained. "I am aware of what Janus is. I have always been aware of what Janus is. I'm not — I'm not susceptible to flattery. I'm susceptible to —" He stopped. Looked at his hands. "I'm susceptible to being useful. That's different."
"I know," Virgil said. "That's what scares me."
Something passed across Logan's face. "You think they'd use that."
"I think Janus is very good at making people feel necessary," Virgil said. "That's exactly what he does. He finds the specific thing you're hungry for and he offers it, and it's real, that's what makes it work, it's genuinely real in the moment, and then you've signed onto something that has nothing to do with what you thought you were agreeing to." He leaned forward. "I've been there, Lo. Not in the same way, but I know the shape of it."
Logan was quiet for a long time.
"I said I'd think about it," he said eventually.
"About what?"
"Janus left a note." Logan said it to the table. "This afternoon. While you were with Thomas. He made an argument about — Thomas's long-term wellbeing. About the data I have that isn't being used. He said it exists whether or not anyone consults it." A pause. "He was correct."
"Logan —"
"I said I would think about it." Logan looked up. His eyes were very steady. "Virgil. I can handle a conversation."
"I know you can."
"Do you?" The question was quiet. Not combative. Genuinely asking.
Virgil opened his mouth. Closed it. The honest answer was sitting in his chest, inconvenient and true: I know you can handle a conversation, I'm not sure I can handle watching you have it. He swallowed it.
"Yes," he said, and they both knew it was partially true, and neither of them pushed on it.
What Virgil didn't acknowledge, because it was easier not to, was that Janus had been right about one thing.
He wasn't fighting for Logan. He was fighting around him.
He started showing up at meetings he didn't need to attend. He started steering conversations — subtle redirects, small interruptions, the way you'd adjust the course of water running in a direction you didn't want. When Patton started a gentle lo, maybe later, Virgil was there with a actually, Thomas, what Logan was saying about the risk factors is worth hearing — and it worked, sometimes, they'd look at Logan for a moment, they'd listen for a moment — but he was talking over Logan's silence to make them hear Logan, and somewhere in the architecture of that was a fundamental problem he didn't let himself examine closely.
Logan noticed. Of course Logan noticed.
"You don't have to do that," Logan said one night, after Virgil had spent an entire Thomas-session positioning himself between Logan and the room's tendency to redirect.
"Do what?"
"The —" Logan made a gesture that encompassed the last hour. "The management. The navigating. I can —"
"I know you can," Virgil said. "I just —"
"You just want to make sure it goes right."
"I just —" Virgil stopped. "I don't want them to keep doing this to you."
"Then perhaps," Logan said, carefully, "the person to address that with is them."
A pause.
"Not," Logan continued, with the precision of someone who has thought this through and is delivering it with deliberate gentleness, "the person to manage the interactions around me as if I'm a variable in an equation you're trying to solve."
Virgil looked at him.
"I don't —" He heard the defensiveness in his own voice and pressed through it. "That's not what I'm doing."
Logan looked at him with patient, accurate eyes.
"...I don't want it to be what I'm doing," Virgil said.
"I know," Logan said. "I know you don't."
They stood in the uncomfortable truth of that for a moment.
"I just —" Virgil pulled his sleeves down. "I was where you are. I know what comes next if nothing changes. I was in the dark side for years, Logan, I know what that's like, I know what it does to you, and I look at you and I see —"
"You see yourself," Logan said quietly.
"I see someone I love being made to feel like they don't fit," Virgil said, rougher than he meant to, "and I can't — I can't just —"
"Virgil." Logan's voice was very gentle. "I hear you. I do. But you watching me experience something is not the same as you experiencing it yourself, and the solution to your fear of what might happen to me cannot be —" He paused, searching for the precise word. "Cannot be restructuring every interaction I have. That's not protecting me. That's —"
He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't have to.
Virgil felt the shape of what he wasn't saying and sat with it, quietly terrible.
"Yeah," he said. "Okay. You're right."
He tried to stop. He genuinely tried.
He was, at best, imperfect at it.
---
The meeting that broke it happened on a gray Tuesday afternoon.
Thomas had a real decision in front of him, the kind that required actual weighing rather than emotional processing — a career opportunity had materialized, specific and time-sensitive, and it required him to assess practical reality against creative risk, financial stability against long-term growth, short-term fear against long-term regret. The kind of decision that was, structurally, exactly what a logic function existed for.
Logan had spent four hours preparing.
Virgil knew because he'd been in the library while Logan worked — not intrusively, just present, sitting in the chair beside Logan's table and reading his own book while Logan spread papers and charts across the surface and occasionally talked through a calculation out loud. It was one of their things: Virgil's presence, quiet and consistent, as Logan worked through something complex. Logan thought better when someone was nearby, even though he would die before calling it company — he called it ambient presence and Virgil called it company and Logan gave him the look that meant he was right but wasn't going to say so.
The spreadsheet was good. Virgil had looked at it over Logan's shoulder. Three scenarios, probabilistic outcomes, a sensitivity analysis that had made Virgil's eyes cross slightly but that Logan had walked him through until it made sense. It was thorough and it was precise and it was exactly what Thomas needed to make an informed choice.
They went upstairs together.
Thomas was in the living room with the particular restless quality of someone circling a decision they hadn't made yet, moving between the couch and the window and back, wearing a path in the carpet that didn't exist but felt like it should.
Logan opened his mouth.
Roman got there first.
"Thomas," he said, with the particular expansive energy that Roman brought to big moments, the kind of energy that could fill a room without effort. "This is the question at the heart of everything — are you the kind of person who seizes the moment or are you the kind who waits for the perfect wave? Because I think we all know what kind of person you are, and I think that matters more than any projection —"
"That framing has merit," Logan said carefully, "as a values clarification exercise, but the financial implications of the two scenarios aren't equivalent, and before Thomas makes a decision on the basis of identity, it would be useful to understand what each choice actually —"
"Lo, I think Roman might be onto something really important here," Patton said, and his voice had the warm, earnest quality that it always had, the kind that was difficult to argue with because it came from genuine care. "This really is a values question. What does Thomas want? What does he believe? Those aren't things that show up on a spreadsheet."
"The values question and the practical question are not mutually exclusive," Logan said, and there was something in his voice — a slight elevation, the careful tension of someone holding something in. "I have a spreadsheet that takes both into account. I've mapped out three scenarios that account for different risk tolerances, which means the final decision still rests on Thomas's values, but he'd be making it with full information rather than —"
"Thomas," Roman said, turning the full warmth of his princely attention on their creator, and Logan stopped mid-sentence because Roman was talking now and the room was listening to Roman now. "What does your gut say? Right now. What does it tell you?"
"My gut says I'm absolutely terrified," Thomas said, with the helpless laugh of someone who knows exactly what his gut is saying and is hoping someone will translate it.
"That's Virgil's domain," Patton said fondly.
"Sure," Virgil said, from the corner, and he meant to stop there, he genuinely meant to, but Logan was standing in the middle of the room holding a metaphorical spreadsheet that represented four hours of work and nobody had looked at it, and Virgil's mouth kept moving. "But also, Logan has an actual framework for evaluating the fear versus the risk, and maybe we should —"
"The fear is data," Logan said, and his voice was still measured, still professional, still the carefully modulated register he used when he was being patient with a room that wasn't giving him a lot of reasons to be patient. "It tells us where the stakes are. Virgil is right that it's worth taking seriously. But fear isn't the only data available, and there are three other data points that are equally relevant to —" He paused. Let it go. Tried again. "I have a complete analysis. It takes approximately eight minutes to walk through. If Thomas has eight minutes —"
"We'll look at it later, bud," Patton said, with the gentle certainty of someone who believes this completely.
Logan's whiteboard appeared.
It was the visual component of the spreadsheet, the simplified version — Logan had prepared it because the full spreadsheet was sometimes too dense for a verbal walkthrough, he'd learned to translate it, he'd done that work explicitly because the feedback in the past had been that he was too technical, too inaccessible, so he'd made himself accessible, he'd done the translation work, and the whiteboard had color-coding and clean labels and a structure that was, Virgil thought, legitimately easy to follow.
"Scenario A," Logan said, with the steady voice of someone trying one more time because trying one more time was what you did, "shows that if Thomas takes the opportunity now, the projected outcomes over a twelve-month period include —"
"Lo," Roman said, and he was already turning back to Thomas, already done with this fork in the conversation, "I think what would actually help Thomas right now is to talk through the creative implications, not the numbers. What's the story? What's the possibility? That's what's going to get him unstuck."
"The story," Logan said, and there was a precision to each word that Virgil recognized, the careful placement of someone trying to stay controlled, "is in the data. The possibility is mapped in the scenarios. I've already done the creative analysis. It's in scenario C. If you'd look at —"
"Lo." Patton's voice, gently.
The whiteboard disappeared.
And then — from the direction of the hallway, uninvited and perfectly timed in the way that Janus's interventions were always perfectly timed — his voice came drifting through like smoke finding a gap under a door: "You always have the data, Logan. You always will. The question is simply where the data gets to matter."
Virgil crossed the room so fast he barely registered doing it.
He put himself between Logan and the hallway, and he turned, and he said, low and furious and burning with three weeks of accumulated helpless watching: "Don't. Don't. You don't get to swoop in every single time they do this — you've been waiting, haven't you, you've been waiting for exactly this moment and you don't get to —"
"Virgil —" Logan's voice, from behind him.
"No," Virgil said, and he turned, and his expression was too much, he could feel it, too much intensity too close, but he couldn't find the dial. "No, he doesn't get to use this, he doesn't get to make it seem like he's the answer — every time, Logan, every time something goes wrong in this room he's right there with his — you can't, you can't let him keep doing this, you have to see what he's doing —"
"Virgil." Logan's voice was quiet.
"—because you're good, you're worth so much more than what he's offering, and I can't — I won't just stand here and watch him —"
"Virgil."
Cracked.
Just slightly. Just through the very surface of it. But it cracked.
Virgil stopped.
The room stopped.
And Logan — who kept a cool head, who filed and smoothed and reorganized, who had said I'm functional more times than Virgil could count, who had been patient and professional and excellent through thirty consecutive days of being redirected and dismissed and talked over and managed — Logan was standing in the middle of the room with his hands loose at his sides and his expression unguarded in a way Virgil had only seen three times in all the years he'd known him, and all three of those times something had broken, and this was going to be the fourth.
---
"I don't know," Logan said, "what else to do."
His voice was very even. Very quiet. The precision of it was still there — it was always there, it was Logan, the precision was structural — but it was the precision of load-bearing walls after an earthquake: still standing, barely, and you could see the fractures.
Nobody moved.
Thomas was turned around on the couch, fully present in the way he sometimes wasn't. Patton's hand had stopped mid-gesture. Roman, who had been about to say something, wasn't.
Logan looked at the room and the room looked back at him, and he seemed to be making a decision — the same kind of decision Virgil had watched him make a hundred times at his library table, the weighing, the calculating — except that this one was about whether to keep carrying this alone, and the calculation had just changed.
"I have tried," Logan said, and his voice was still level but it had the quality of something that had been held under water and is now being allowed, very slowly, to surface, "being more organized. I've tried being more patient. I've tried being more emotionally accessible. I've tried — I learned, I actually learned, how to validate feelings before introducing data, because the feedback was that I was too rigid, too cold, too purely rational. I restructured how I communicate. I started acknowledging emotional context. I started — I learned to be vulnerable in these conversations, which does not come naturally to me, and I did it because I thought it would help. I thought if I showed them I understood why feelings mattered, they would start to consider that logic matters too." He paused. The silence held. "And they do consider it. When it's convenient. When it supports a conclusion that was already emotionally compelling. I get listened to when I'm agreeing with someone who was already going to be heard."
Thomas made a small, involuntary sound.
"I've tried simpler language. I've tried longer explanations and shorter ones. I've tried visual aids." The whiteboard flickered into existence briefly, ghost-like, and then disappeared. "I've tried asking questions instead of stating conclusions because the feedback was that I was too didactic. I've tried everything I can identify, and I cannot —" His voice broke, very slightly, on the word, the clean fracture of something that has been under too much pressure for too long. He controlled it back, and that control was the saddest part of it, that even now the instinct was to contain it. "I cannot locate the variable that would change the outcome."
"Logan," Patton said, very quietly, and his voice had no gentle redirect in it, just his name, just the ache of it.
"And now," Logan said, and he looked at Virgil, and Virgil felt the look like a physical thing, "you are here. Every time I turn around. Standing between me and the rest of the room. Answering for me when I've been interrupted. Steering conversations so that I get a moment of being heard that I didn't ask for and didn't earn through my own —" He stopped. His throat moved. "I know it comes from care. I know you. I know that you love me and you're frightened and that your fear is —" he paused, choosing carefully, "not without basis. But you are also not listening to me. You are managing me. You are making decisions about what's safe for me without asking what I've decided. You are placing yourself between me and the things you've decided I need to be protected from, and in doing so you are —" He met Virgil's eyes, and the steadiness of his gaze was devastating. "You are also not listening."
Virgil's chest felt like it had been hollowed out.
"Janus offers to listen," Logan said, and his voice had gone very quiet. "Remus offers to listen. They have agendas — I'm not naive, I'm aware they have agendas — but the offer is genuine in form even if not in substance, and when you spend enough time not being heard, the form of the thing starts to matter." He looked around the room. Thomas. Roman. Patton. Virgil. "I am so exhausted," he said, and it was the simplest thing he'd said and the most devastating for its simplicity. "I'm exhausted from being managed by people who love me and dismissed by people who don't think about me and recruited by people who want to use me. And in none of those three situations is anyone asking what I think. No one is asking what I want. No one is asking whether I'm alright."
He let that sit.
"I have tried everything I know how to do," he said, with the quiet finality of someone arriving at the end of a very long road. "I have been patient and flexible and adaptable and good at this, and I don't know what else there is to try, and I am so —" The voice broke again, and this time he let it break, and the sound of it — the small, controlled fracture of someone who never lets this happen — made Roman look away and Patton press his hand over his mouth. "I am so tired of the sound of my own voice in a room that isn't listening."
Silence.
Not the comfortable kind.
Logan gathered himself with the quiet efficiency of someone who has said what needed to be said and has nothing left to add. He picked up the whiteboard from where it had appeared on the table and tucked it under his arm with deliberate care, like he was collecting something precious.
"I'm going to the library," he said.
His footsteps were even and measured across the room. The door opened and closed with a small, final sound.
---
Nobody moved for a long time.
The living room had the particular quality of a space where something irrevocable has happened — not a catastrophe, but a reckoning. The kind of moment that, afterward, you refer to as before and after.
Thomas was staring at the space where Logan had been with an expression Virgil recognized: the face of someone being shown something they'd known and hadn't let themselves know.
"I do that," Patton said, very quietly. He wasn't looking at anyone. His hands were folded in his lap. "The later, buddy. I do it all the time. I think I'm —" He stopped. "I think I'm so focused on making sure everyone feels okay emotionally that I — when Logan does the logic thing I kind of just... wait for it to be over. Like it's an obstacle instead of a — instead of Logan helping."
"I don't think his feedback matters unless it's complicating a creative decision I've already made," Roman said, low, and the admission came with none of his usual performance. He was looking at the floor. "I think when he agrees with me I remember he's smart, and when he disagrees with me I think he doesn't understand the creative dimension of things. That's — that's not a good pattern."
"I've been doing the same thing," Thomas said. "I think I've been thinking of him as the — the voice that slows things down. Like a pause button. I didn't think about the fact that the pause button has feelings about being a pause button."
Nobody laughed at that. It was too precisely accurate to be funny.
Virgil was still standing where Logan had left him in the middle of the room. He became aware, slowly, that his hands were shaking slightly — not from anything dramatic, just from the accumulated pressure of the last three weeks, the held breath of it finally releasing.
"I have to go," he said.
"Virgil —" Thomas started.
"Not — I'm not leaving. I just have to go to Logan." He turned toward the door. "The rest of this — you should all talk. That's important and you should actually talk about it without me there to manage it. But Logan —" He pushed the door open. "I need to go to Logan."
The library was quiet in the particular way it got late in the day, the afternoon light changing angle and the room going slightly gold. Logan was at his table. He wasn't pretending to read this time. He was sitting very still with his hands flat on the cover of a closed book, looking at them, and his posture had the quality of someone who has spent all their composure and is now just existing inside the absence of it.
Virgil stood in the doorway for a moment.
He had the impulse to say something immediately — to fix, to address, to get the apology out so the air would clear. He recognized the impulse and sat down instead, crossing the room and pulling the chair beside Logan's table and just — being there. Present. Not doing anything with the presence yet. Just making it available.
Logan didn't look at him.
The library breathed around them. Somewhere in the shelves, something shifted softly — the mindscape adjusting, accommodating, the way it did.
"I meant all of it," Logan said, eventually, to his hands.
"I know," Virgil said.
"I wasn't — I want you to know I wasn't performing. I wasn't making a point. I was just —" A pause. "I was simply at the end of what I had."
"I know," Virgil said again. "I could see it. I've been watching you get there for weeks."
"And you —" Logan stopped.
"And I made it worse," Virgil said. "Yeah. I know." He leaned his elbows on the table, not crowding, just close. "I've been sitting with that since you walked out. I thought I was — I kept telling myself I was fighting for you. And I was doing something, and it wasn't fighting for you. It was fighting for my own — it was fighting for the outcome I wanted without asking if it was the outcome you wanted. It was me being scared and calling it protection."
Logan was quiet.
"I was so scared of losing you," Virgil said, and his voice came out rough and honest, "that I turned myself into another version of the problem. I was talking over you in a different direction. I was managing you because I didn't trust you to manage it yourself, which is — that's —" He exhaled. "That's not what I think of you. It's not what I actually believe. I know you're the most capable person in this mindscape. I know you can handle Janus and Roman and Patton and Thomas and all of it. I just got scared, and when I get scared I start trying to control things, and I aimed that at you, and you deserved so much better than that."
Logan looked at him.
His expression was doing something complicated — the careful, precise unpacking of something that had been stored for too long, the way you open a box you've kept sealed and the air inside is different from the air outside.
"You're the first one," Logan said, quietly, "who ever pulled toward me. Before the acknowledgment. When I was still — when I was still the rigid one. The condescending one. You were already —" He stopped. His throat moved. "You saw something worth pulling toward before anyone had decided I was worth the effort of changing direction for."
"You were always worth it," Virgil said, simple and absolute.
Logan looked at him for a long moment, and something in him — in the careful, organized architecture of him — shifted slightly. Not collapsed. Shifted, the way a building shifts in high wind, finding a new equilibrium.
"I'm not going to them," Logan said quietly. "I want you to know that I considered it. I want to be honest about that. The offer was — it was easier than it should have been to consider. Because they were offering the thing that was missing and the thing that was missing was real." He looked at Virgil steadily. "But Janus doesn't want me. He wants the function of me. And that's — I've spent too long being only a function to accept a new context that treats me the same way."
Virgil breathed out slowly. Something in his chest that had been knotted for three weeks loosened a single turn.
"Okay," he said.
"That doesn't mean," Logan continued, carefully, "that what I said upstairs isn't true. It doesn't mean I'm — fixed. It doesn't mean the problem is resolved."
"No," Virgil agreed. "The problem is not resolved."
"You're going to have to trust me," Logan said. "To handle it. With them. I need to be the one who —" He searched for the right shape of the sentence. "I need to be the one who addresses it. Not you addressing it on my behalf. Not you managing the room. Me."
"I know." Virgil looked at the table between them. "I'll be there. But differently. I'll be — present differently. Less between and more beside."
Logan considered that. Accepted it with a small nod.
"And," Virgil said, and his voice dropped slightly, "I need you to tell me when it's bad. I've been reading you for weeks and I got so caught up in the reading that I forgot to ask. So tell me. Even when you're functional. Especially when you're functional."
Logan looked at him.
"I don't always know how," he said, and the honesty of it was very quiet and very large.
"Yeah," Virgil said. "Neither do I. We can be bad at it together."
Something shifted in Logan's face — the slow, reluctant arrival of something that was almost a smile, the kind you get when you've been trying very hard not to feel something and then someone says the exact right wrong thing at the right moment.
"That," Logan said, "is a remarkably low bar."
"I'm a remarkably low-bar kind of guy."
"You are the exact opposite of a low-bar kind of guy. You have extensive standards and you surveil their fulfillment constantly."
"For everything except the emotional communication stuff."
"...for everything except the emotional communication stuff," Logan conceded.
The almost-smile landed. Small and real and carefully his.
Virgil leaned back in the chair and felt the knot in his chest loosen another turn. Not all the way. Nothing was resolved — Thomas and Patton and Roman were upstairs somewhere having what was hopefully a genuine reckoning with themselves, and Janus was somewhere patient and waiting, and Logan was still exhausted, and none of this would be fixed by one honest conversation in the library.
But Logan was here.
Logan was staying.
And Logan was looking at him with the particular expression he reserved for a small number of things — Virgil knew this expression, had memorized it — the expression of someone who is being accurately witnessed, who has not had to prove the thing that needed proving, who has been allowed to simply be without anyone asking them to be otherwise.
"I have you," Virgil said, quietly. "Not — not on you. With you. I have you with me, if that's—"
"Yes," Logan said. Not hesitant. Just quiet and certain. "That's what I want."
They stayed in the library as the light changed and went gold and began to dim, and Virgil didn't talk to fill the space and Logan didn't perform composure to protect himself from the space, and the hum in the mindscape dropped a half-register, and it wasn't gone, but it was less than it had been.
For now, Virgil thought, that was enough.
Upstairs, Thomas looked at Patton and Roman and said, very quietly: "We need to do better. I think we've needed to for a long time."
Roman was quiet for a moment. Then: "I know what I have to do. I'm just — not entirely sure how to do it."
"That's a start," Patton said. He was looking at his hands. "I think that's the honest start."
And in the walls of the mindscape, Janus heard the quiet and was patient. He folded his hands. He waited.
He was exceptionally good at waiting.
But Logan was in the library with the one person who had pulled toward him before anyone decided he was worth the effort.
hi I just reblogged on of your w359 and phm posts and I was wondering, are you on ao3 or do you only post here?
Uhhhh hi? Lol I wasn't expecting a meme I made at 3AM to breach containment and spawn a fic like it did. I technically have an Ao3 but I abandoned it after writer's block hit me like a motherfucker, so just here rn. I'm mainly a SaSi lurker, this just sorta happened lol.
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