Roman has ✨ emotions ✨ about it but if he ever does get his arc I imagine he'd be dramatic about the hair.
Yes all the "dark" sides have silver hair, and it grows faster for them (by Christmas Remus has it literally ankle length) Virgil is a little bit different because he doesn't really fit in with either side, but basically the more Thomas identifies with a side, the more they look like him, which is why Patton has his hair all the time, but the others don't, and why Roman has gold (because Thomas idolizes him "my hero") and why Logan has grown a new silver streak, and why his hair has started growing in faster. (Thomas distancing himself from Logan)
Virgil's eyebrows and eyelashes are white, but the eyebrows take dye better and mascara hides his lashes pretty well. The other's didn't even know his hair was white until Patton noticed the dye bleeding (because it bleeds anytime his hair gets even a little bit wet, hence the black clothes and towels and sheets) he looks albino, pretty much
Uhhh you said more things but I don't remember
nice! i dont know what else to say except i really like these!!!
one of my vtuber favs has white hair and i love drawing him with white eyelashes too so here's a lil gift bc i like it sm :D (quality's a bit meh cuz im having a bad art day but :D!!)
actually dk what hair style u imagine for him so i just put him in the usual that i give him
You are posted out by the Hollywood sign tonight, sitting under the frame where the W used to be. It got burnt to a crisp during last week’s big superhero fight. A hero died right where you’re sitting. The whole area’s been closed down until Hero Force can coordinate a recovery effort. Usually it’d be done by now but no one’s willing to touch it until the ash has been completely blown away.
It’s a rule that the world must stand still when a hero dies.
“How much?”
The voice comes from behind you. The lights that illuminate the Hollywood sign are down to hide as much of the scorch marks as possible. You wouldn’t be able to see anything even if you did turn around, so you don’t.
You put some chapstick on, the glide of the balm against your wind chapped lips grounding.
“I said,” the Hero says, voice tightening, “How. Much.”
There’s the sound of gravel crunching now. They’re wearing heavy boots and the scent of fresh blood grows stronger the closer they get. Their breathing is smooth and even which means it’s not their blood.
You put the cap back on your chapstick and tuck it into your leather jacket’s inner pocket. “I don’t take money.”
“Then what do you take?” The Hero rounds the Y and comes into your line of sight. The dark hides most of their features, but you can make out a glittering gold mask and the dull shine of drying blood on their chest plate. Their breathing may be even, but their stance isn’t. They sway in place, back and forth, back and forth. Their arms wrap around their stomach. “I’ve got land. A house. You can have it.”
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Anxiety | Virgil Sanders/Logic | Logan Sanders, Logic | Logan Sanders & Original Female Character(s)
Characters: Logic | Logan Sanders, Anxiety | Virgil Sanders, Original Female Characters
Additional Tags: Transphobia, Sleep Deprivation, Logan discusses sex very clinically, Making Out, Agenderfluid Anxiety | Virgil Sanders, Nobinary Anxiety | Virgil Sanders, Trans Man Logic | Logan Sanders, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Wizard Logic | Logan Sanders, we support gender affirming medical care in this house
Series: Part 19 of Metaphysical Determinism
Summary:
Or
Bluemount Southern University of Wizardry
Adaptability in Spellcasting as Buffer Against Natural Disaster: How Relying on Standardized Spells In Disaster Relief Reduces Response Efficiency and Effectiveness for Marginalized Species, Hybrids, Cursebearers, and Others, Whose Physiology Is Not Accounted For In The Standardized Versions
By Logan Leclair
Advisors: Professor Ilvi Axer, MW; Professor Yasrena Meltyl, MW
Hello Sanders Sides fandom, it's been a while. I need your help
you see, i remember i read this fanfic some years ago and it was my favorite, i thought i save it in my bookmarks on AO3 but i can't find it so i'm here trying to see if someone knows it and it's still around. So here's what i remember about it
We had Character Thomas that was an historian and he was doing a research on a painter (Roman) that had this close relationship with a man, both sending letter to each other. you know the whole "historian will call them best friends" but, for Thomas it was clear that they were more than that so he wanted to tell their story. To make this he goes to the home where Roman lived with his brother Remus and his partner (Deceit). And when Thomas was there and he started to put the story together the ghost of the people starting appearing (first remus and deceit and gradually the others)
Also the setting changed from the actual time to the past.
and well, basically is this, i remember more but i think this is the most relevant. I really hope someone there know what i'm talking about and i hope it is still there and if not i hope someone has a copy or something, i really loved it so much i wish i had it saved somewhere T^T
Something something Creativitwins trying to get over burnout by creating failed projects and bouncing ideas together. Edit: the facial hair layer didn't save so I fixed it.
warnings: mild body horror, violence and injury, misunderstandings, unhealthy mindsets, references to torture, abuse, gore, coping mechanisms, injury, and the movie mean girls, and cameo cliffhangers
---
“He. Had. What?” Janus’s voice was very level, each word slowly and distinctly enunciated, which was how you knew he was about to tear something methodically into little pieces and possibly even eat the pieces afterwards, like a bored preteen with a napkin.
“You heard me,” Remus replied with his hands tucked behind his head, because he was immune to being shredded, and Janus was too squeamish for actually committing to that sort of thing, anyhow. Plus, he was one of the few people in the city that got the privilege of knowing just how much of The Conductor’s carefully constructed nonchalant persona was covering up his squishy, petty, all-too-ethical center. “Whoever you’re on the trail of, they fucked Glowbug up bad.”
It wasn’t just about the scar, either. The clear and damning evidence of torture, a calculated and possessive torture to boot, was only the most obvious sign. The fact that it had taken them this long to notice it was embarrassing, but to be fair to Remus, he’d been preoccupied noticing a whole lot of the other signs.
The littler, less obtrusive ones, like the way he retired to his room at the same time every night, even though the Prince of Paranoia had eased up on his guard dog duties to the point that none of them would have blinked twice at Patton taking a midnight walk or grabbing a glass of water. The way he had quietly and discreetly taken over all the household chores that Janus loathed the most, and seemed almost uncomfortable at the idea of sitting down and relaxing with them on the rare days that they weren’t out in the city. The way he lived in an undecorated guest room in borrowed clothing and with not a single pair of civilian shoes to his name, like a prisoner, without a qualm.
Remus knew what it looked like when someone tried to make themself smaller in the hopes of avoiding bad attention. It had never worked for him– he was the type to drag the attention in regardless, revel in the looks and shouts even if they were full of hatred– but he’d seen it enough that it was easy to recognize the picture Patton painted with all these quiet habits.
What was harder to puzzle out was why.
Lightshow had been a solid, towering bastion of a villain, reciting his monologues and launching his attacks without hesitation. What array of memories could have been taken away to uncover Patton, like the soft, chewy core to a particularly sanctimonious-flavored Tootsie Pop?
… Or maybe, the real question was: what exactly had been done to Patton to force him into the role of Lightshow? And most importantly, who had done it, and how quickly could Remus get his hands on them?
“The previous incidents have been subtle. Without Lightshow’s presence as an indicator, I haven’t been able to narrow down when or where our opponent has been striking, not amidst all the other criminal activity that occurs daily,” Janus admitted as his expression darkened into something thunderous. “It wasn’t my highest priority, before. It most certainly will be now.”
Remus grinned in satisfaction, the edges of his mouth splitting further than humanly possible. Having the full force of Janus’s attention lock onto one goal was a surefire way to get a proper lead on this guy, and he was looking forward to hunting the fucker down.
Normally, he’d be too antsy to sit around while Janus did all his fancy info-gathering and investigating, but luckily he had the perfect task to occupy himself for the duration: retail therapy!
“I’ll leave all the boring stuff to you, Janabanana,” he announced with a sloppy salute. “And in the meantime, the rest of us will go shopping!”
Sure enough, that was enough to drag Janus’s attention away from the meticulous plotting he was about to sink into and get forever lost in, bog-style. His head snapped up to glare narrowly at Remus. “Not with my wallet, you won’t.”
“Don’t be so cold-blooded, snakeboy,” Remus shot back brightly, “it’s for a good cause. Glowbug needs a real wardrobe, as much as I’m sure you like seeing him in our pajamas.”
“You—!” Janus smacked Remus’s arm, ignoring the meaty thwack of it detaching and tumbling onto the floor between them. Truly, Remus’s genius comedic gags were wasted in this household.
“I’ll sue you for libel,” Janus finally managed, which meant he was flustered enough to resort to legalese, and thus Remus automatically won the banter. “Put those eyebrows away before I tell Virgil who ate the last of his special edition Halloween poptarts and he shaves them off in your sleep again.”
Remus obediently stopped wiggling his eyebrows.
After a brief pause to sigh extensively and pretend to massage away a headache he absolutely didn’t have, Janus conceded. “Clothes only. Do not bring back any more exotic animals or repossessed organ coolers, I cannot emphasize enough how troublesome the paperwork gets.”
“I don’t choose to find the kidneys, the kidneys find me,” Remus intoned solemnly, before snatching one of Janus’s wallets off his desk and hightailing it out of his bedroom. “No promises!”
Janus flicked his fingers, telekinetically hurling Remus’s abandoned arm out the door after him. “Bring home a box of my usual tea or I’ll change the locks while you’re out!”
“Don’t threaten me with a good time!” Remus called back over his shoulder, and then proceeded to skid directly into Virgil’s door at the end of the hall. The thud of impact was loud enough to rattle windows, because he was a professional.
When this move garnered no immediate results, he dragged his phone out of his pocket and spammed the group chat with the same extremely low quality gif from Mean Girls, about 37 times.
After a truly apathetic amount of time had passed, their resident emo pulled the door open, looking as ghoulish as ever. He glanced down at Remus, who was crumpled in a heap upon his doorstep, and then stepped over him to walk down the hall. “No.”
“Gasp!” Remus pointed his detached arm at Virgil in not-so-silent accusation. “Party foul! Nobody can deny the power of Regina George’s summons to shop!”
Virgil didn’t even turn to look. “You won’t catch me in pink on Wednesday, either.”
Patton, bless his little heart, had already poked his head out of his own doorway shortly after the original wall-shaking thump of impact, and now visibly brightened at the approach. “Oh, are you guys going shopping?”
There it was. As always, he assumed that any outdoor ventures were off-limits, because they’d never clarified that he wasn’t actually a prisoner in so many words. They hadn’t really thought that they’d needed to, that investigating the circumstances of his past and providing him a home in the present was enough to show him that he was someone they wanted to protect, not trap.
Even if his teammates, suspicious creatures that they were, were still watching out for some larger plot, it didn’t change the fact that Patton had wormed his way into their hearts like an alien parasite nestling into an astronaut’s chest cavity.
Besides, even if they had rescued a less charming and pun-oriented individual, they wouldn’t have sentenced them to indeterminate confinement in one of their safehouses. Patton was effectively a civilian at the moment, their shared history of superpowered murder matches set aside, and didn’t pose a threat to anything but the potted plant he kept overwatering. For civilians, there were official channels one could reach out to for aiding those suffering from superpower aftereffects, multiple organizations that would provide resources and housing to a victim of mind manipulation. This much should have been part of the general knowledge that Glowbug still had, but instead, he walked around like one wrong step would get him locked into a medieval torture device and slowly disemboweled.
Despite his cheerful demeanor, it was obvious that Patton always expected the worst, and even more concerningly, he seemed to accept it as his due without complaint or protest. Remus couldn’t even be irritated about the misunderstanding, because it had become abundantly clear that someone had used torture to rewire Glowbug’s brain into a minefield, and brains did what they had to survive when it came to that kind of thing.
Patton didn’t have to make himself small to survive anymore. Not here. The three of them just had to make sure he understood that, too.
Thus decided, Remus made meaningful eye contact with Virgil, attempting to convey his very subtle and lowkey plan: namely, to convince Patton of their affection and his permanence in their household by drowning him in material possessions.
Blissfully unaware of his own role in Remus’s machinations, Patton tilted his head slightly, blinking curiously. Really, who could resist that face?
As expected, Virgil folded like a soggy piece of bread in the face of their combined psychological pressure. “Alright, fine. But I’m driving.”
—
Virgil drove exceedingly carefully for someone with that strong of a death grip on the steering wheel, which meant that Remus had plenty of time and attention to dedicate to reassuring Patton that everything was fine.
Which was good, because Patton took a lot of reassuring. He’d practically had to be coaxed out of the apartment in the first place, and the whole drive there was filled with increasingly antsy questions.
By the time they reached the mall’s parking lot, Remus was half-convinced that he should have brought Janus along after all, if only so that Patton would finally be sure that they weren’t sneaking out under his nose.
“Are you sure—,” Glowbug started, and Remus began to wonder if picking him up and shaking him would help the words sink in faster.
“Relax,” Virgil finally cut in, grimacing as though even just the word tasted hypocritical in his mouth. “We’re going shopping for clothes so you don’t have to wear dusty hand-me-downs all the time.”
“You really don’t have to go to all this trouble,” Patton tried weakly. “I don’t have any money—,”
“Money, schmoney!” Remus flapped a hand casually. “We do this all the time, Deedee’s got us covered.”
“It’s part of the contract between us and the city. We have a monthly stipend for victim care,” Virgil elaborated, adjusting his hood around his shoulders as Remus gallantly opened the passenger-side door for Patton to climb out. “It would just go to waste if we didn’t use it for stuff like this.”
Patton stared at the mostly-vacant parking lot as though the ground was covered in poisonous vipers. “What if it’s not safe?”
Virgil turned to scan the parking lot as though the mall was going to come to life and eat them, because he was twitchy about questions like that. Remus knew exactly what sort of ‘unsafe’ circumstances Glowbug was worried about, and leaned down to meet his gaze.
“We’ll be right beside you,” he promised, grinning wholeheartedly. “There’s probably not a more secure place in the whole city than wedged between the two of us, no matter what kind of power someone’s packing.”
Remus had run the gamut of having unstable powers himself, he was more than familiar with the terror of not being able to trust in oneself. So, this was his promise: if Patton somehow snapped right back to the supervillain they used to battle so often, the two of them would make sure he couldn’t hurt any civilians.
Patton swallowed thickly, and Remus didn’t miss the way his hand twitched up to graze a spot just under his collarbones, as though seeking reassurance.
(He’d noticed the locket the previous night, though he wasn’t sure Patton had noticed him notice it. It certainly hadn’t come up before in any of the conversations they’d had about Patton’s missing memories, but Remus had picked up on several little motions like this, ones that seemed habitual and well-worn. Like he was brushing a hand over a treasured gift.
Remus hadn’t asked, not yet. But he had a feeling that once Patton was ready to go seeking out more answers about his past, that locket would be the first place to look.)
“Okay,” Patton managed after a few more moments. “Do I still get to keep the hand-me-downs? I’m pretty loon-y about those duck pajamas.”
“You bet my bottom you can!” Remus answered, extending an elbow for Patton to hold onto as they made their way to the main entrance.
“I don’t think a loon is a kind of duck,” Virgil contributed, because he was a hater.
“You’re probably right,” Patton said. “I guess when it comes to identifying birds… I ran outta duck.”
Remus cheered obnoxiously, and then course-corrected when Virgil started veering a little too close to the Hot Topic. “Let’s put a quack in our finances!”
“Or we could not do that,” Patton laughed nervously, but the longer they went without earning a second glance from the other patrons around them, the more he began to relax.
Remus was killing this whole ‘re-socializing your supervillain’ thing. He should write a book.
He let Virgil take over once they actually reached a department store, because his idea of fashionable and/or comfortable was often deeply contradictory to the general public’s, and they were trying to find clothes that Patton could wear outside without getting gawked at. So, not really Remus’s area of expertise.
After an extensive period of offering Patton different fabric types and then different types of tops and bottoms (of the clothing kind), and scrutinizing his reactions with the sort of focused intensity one might perform open heart surgery with, Virgil successfully narrowed their options down to a pretty solid selection of outfits. There was also a surplus of graphic tees, because Patton kept smiling at the jokes on them and then they mysteriously ended up stuffed in the shopping cart the moment he looked away.
Through a brief series of glances and hand motions usually used in the field, the two of them mutually decided that Virgil would go buy the clothes on his lonesome, thus ensuring Patton wouldn’t have to witness whatever ridiculous number Macy’s was charging for pants in this day and age.
While Virgil departed for the checkout, Remus steered Patton towards the furniture section with plenty of promises that it was only to take a little look-see, they weren’t going to buy anything else today, really!
(He wasn’t lying, of course. Furnishing Patton’s room would just have to be a tomorrow project. Hooray for technical truths!)
The trip had been going swimmingly, to the point that Glowbug was finally chattering on with his usual level of confidence, so Remus probably should have expected that it wouldn’t last.
As it was, he only had a heartbeat to notice the sudden reddish tinge to all the lights before the skylight above exploded into a billion razor-sharp glass shards.
Remus shoved Patton under the sturdiest-looking desk in reach with a yelp, and paid for his moment of inattention by getting nearly bowled over by the charge of a mechanical knight, all of its deceivingly delicate-looking plating painted a bright, firetruck red.
His brother always had had the worst sense of timing.
Remus twisted his body in half just in time to avoid being decapitated by a swing of the contruct’s gleaming broadsword, and retaliated by kicking it in the groin, hard enough to knock it into the perfume display across the aisle. Someone screamed shrilly nearby.
If you don’t piss off right now I’m telling mom about our eighth birthday party, Remus thought very intently in the general direction of the automatons descending dramatically through the ceiling. Absolutely nothing about the scene changed, which meant that twin telepathy really was a scam, and Remus wanted a refund.
“Stay put, Glowbug, Umbra will be here in a snap,” he promised, certain that Virgil had heard the cacophony and was on his way. “I need to go re-enact that one scene from the Old Testament, you know, the one with the rock. It’ll only take me a minute!”
Flashing Patton a thumbs up, he spun around and punched the head right off of another automaton, stomping on the chest of it until it caved in, utterly ruining the intricate latticework. It began to self-repair immediately, one of the bitchier enchantments Roman had managed to work into his craft, but Remus was quick enough to yank the glowing crystal out of its torso and return the construct to inert metal. He tucked the energy source into a pocket so Roman couldn’t salvage it from the remains later, just to add a little insult to injury.
(Roman had tried making them self-destruct when removed at one point, but that charming quirk had quickly been redacted after a battle where Remus had destroyed twenty-three constructs in one go by lobbing a freshly-removed energy crystal directly at the biggest group and starting a chain reaction. These days, his brother knew better than to offer grenade-adjacent opportunities on a platter.)
He heard Patton trying to say something to him, concern evident in his tone, but the words were drowned out by another nearby scream, and a quick once-over of the store showed that the place was being swarmed by medieval warriors and mythical beasts, all of them made from that shining red metal.
“Just hang on!” There wasn’t any time for conversation, not with this many civilians in imminent danger and no Janus at hand to help with evac. “I’ll be back in two shakes of a duck’s tail, Glowbug, I swear!”
Patton nodded from under the desk, face still crinkled with worry, and Remus checked one last time that there weren’t any other constructs nearby before he sprinted off, snatching the black cylindrical handle from his belt and flicking its switch as he went. The energy weapon buzzed into its usual form, a morning star made of neon green light, and he immediately swung it full force at the chimera lunging at him.
Remus bared his teeth in a grin, relishing the earsplitting crunch of mangled machinery, and pressed on towards the next opponent.
As he knew well, the quickest way to goad his brother out of hiding was to break a few of his toys.
A analogical fanfic where Virgil makes Logan a new puzzle.
The escape room had taken Virgil eleven days to build.
Logan had solved it in forty-seven minutes.
Virgil hadn't said anything about that. He'd watched Logan move through each station with that particular focused silence he got when something had genuinely engaged him—the slight forward lean, the way his fingers stilled instead of fidgeting, the small exhale through his nose that meant I see it—and Virgil had told himself that was enough. That was the point. Logan had been engaged. Logan had been happy.
He'd been telling himself that for six weeks, and he almost believed it.
The problem with designing a puzzle for someone significantly smarter than you was that you didn't know what you didn't know.
Virgil knew this about himself. He wasn't being self-deprecating, or not only being self-deprecating—it was a structural problem, a real one, the kind you couldn't willpower your way out of. He couldn't gauge the difficulty of a clue he'd invented because he already knew the answer. Every pathway through the room had felt satisfying to him while he was building it. Every cipher felt clever. Every misdirection felt earned. He'd stood in the middle of his own construction on day ten and thought: this is good, the way you think something is good right before someone proves that it isn't.
And then Logan had solved it in forty-seven minutes and said, with complete sincerity, Virgil, this was genuinely impressive, and Virgil had felt the compliment and the failure land at the same time, side by side, like they were roommates who'd stopped speaking.
The problem was that Logan was not a liar. Logan was constitutionally, structurally, sometimes inconveniently incapable of uncomplicated dishonesty, which meant genuinely impressive was not a mercy and not a kindness. It was true. It was exactly as true as forty-seven minutes, because both of them could be true at once: the thing could be impressive and also not be enough. The thing could be built with love and also fall short. Logan had meant every word and Virgil had failed anyway, and those two facts sat next to each other in his chest like a splinter he kept forgetting about until he moved wrong.
Now it was the third week of February and he was sitting cross-legged on his bedroom floor surrounded by index cards and a spreadsheet he'd printed out—he'd printed a spreadsheet, he'd used the printer, like a person who had their life together—and he'd crossed out fourteen different puzzle concepts in the last four days and started three different research spirals he'd abandoned when they got too ambitious and spent forty minutes last Tuesday reading about the Enigma machine before remembering that the Enigma machine had required a physical hardware component and he was one person who did not own a physical hardware component.
His handwriting on the rejected cards was getting more aggressive. He could track his mood through the afternoon by the pressure of his pen.
Too easy.
Way too easy.
Logan would do this in his sleep.
LITERALLY TOO EASY VIRGIL. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU. NEXT.
He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes until he saw static. The static was almost comfortable. The static didn't have seventeen crossed-out index cards.
The thing was—and this was the part he couldn't say out loud to anyone, the part he hadn't said out loud even to himself until recently—he needed this one to be good. Not good like nice effort. Not good like I can see you tried or the construction was impressive. Actually, structurally, technically, genuinely good. Good in a way Logan couldn't politely inflate. Good in a way that bypassed the particular mechanism Logan had—the one that took whatever was offered and decided quietly to be grateful for it, regardless of whether the thing deserved gratitude.
Because Logan didn't—
Logan didn't get things. Not the way other people got things. Roman got sonnets and standing ovations and meaningful reviews of his performances, got his name said with particular emphasis that meant you specifically. Patton got warm cookies left outside his door, got remembered fondness and easy physical affection from people who loved him and showed it constantly and obviously. But Logan got told things. Logan got informed. Logan got actually, that's an interesting point before the conversation moved on to something else, got Roman remembering to compliment his tie twice a month like he'd set a calendar reminder, got Patton hugging him at measured intervals that Patton probably thought were spontaneous and Logan almost certainly tracked without admitting he tracked them.
And Logan received all of it with a kind of careful gratitude that Virgil recognized. He recognized it because he'd practiced it himself, in mirrors, in conversations, in the three years before he'd started letting himself want things. The gratitude of someone who had learned not to expect much and had gotten good enough at it that it looked like contentment if you didn't know what you were looking for.
Virgil knew what he was looking for. He'd spent enough time looking.
He crumpled an index card. Threw it at the wall. Picked up another.
The first puzzle—the Christmas one—had started as something small. Smaller than small. He'd bought the newspaper on impulse, mostly because he'd panicked in the stationery aisle and it was the cheapest thing in arm's reach, and he'd carried it back to his room in a bag while his heart was doing the irregular thing it did when he'd made a commitment he couldn't take back. He was going to give Logan a newspaper. He was going to hand a person a newspaper and call it a gift and hope Logan's face did the polite thing and not the real thing.
And then he'd stayed up until three in the morning with a red pen, circling letters, building something out of nothing, because he couldn't do it. He couldn't hand Logan a newspaper. He couldn't watch Logan do the gracious thing. He'd circled letters until a message appeared, and then he'd written the message out and stared at it and thought: okay, but what does he do with the message? And then he'd been up until five.
The escape room had come later. Assembled in the space behind his bookshelf over eleven days of quiet construction while Logan was in the library wing, while everyone else was doing the things they did and Virgil was in his room learning what a Playfair cipher was. He'd looked up how substitution ciphers differed from transposition ciphers. He'd made a chart. He'd written a chart by hand about cipher systems, which was something that had happened, in reality, in the physical world. He'd written the math problem in the fourth chamber and checked it three times and then stayed awake worried he'd made an error and checked it a fourth time at two in the morning on a Thursday.
He'd done the research. He'd done all of it. He'd done it because the idea of Logan standing in a room he'd built and finding it wanting—not saying it was wanting, not complaining, just quietly adjusting his expectations downward the way he'd clearly already spent a long time adjusting them—was something Virgil couldn't make peace with. So he'd learned cipher systems. He'd checked his math four times. He'd built something by hand for eleven days and stood back and looked at it and thought: I hope it's enough. And then Logan had gone in, and Virgil had watched through a gap in the bookcase, and Logan's face—
Logan's face had done the thing. The real thing. The thing that happened when Logan was genuinely surprised by something, which was different from the thing he did when he was pleasantly startled and different again from the thing he did when he was amused. This was the focused, slightly-stunned look of someone who had expected a newspaper and had instead walked into a room that someone had spent eleven days building specifically for them, and Virgil had thought, okay, with a feeling in his chest he didn't have a better word for. Okay. That's what I'm supposed to do. That's the thing I can do for him.
He just needed to actually do it again. Better. With more of it. With something that cost Logan more than forty-seven minutes.
He picked up a fresh index card. Stared at it.
Multi-room? he wrote. Then: too ambitious, you are one person who does not have a construction crew.
He crossed that out.
Different cipher types layered—each solution feeds the next?
He stared at that one. Didn't cross it out immediately.
Cipher feeding into a spatial problem? Logical deduction component?
He circled the layered cipher idea. His pen hovered.
He didn't hear Logan come in, which meant Logan had been standing in the doorway for an indeterminate amount of time before Virgil looked up and saw him, which was embarrassing on several levels and also fairly typical of the way Logan moved through spaces he wasn't sure he was welcome in.
"Your door was open," Logan said, with the slightly cautious tone he used when he wasn't sure if his presence was an imposition. The tone that said: I can go.
"Yeah." Virgil looked at the spread of index cards and printouts around him, made a brief assessment of how much was readable from the door, and decided it didn't matter. Logan had probably already read most of it. "What's up?"
Logan's eyes moved across the floor with the particular quality of someone trying not to visibly inventory the situation. "Are those—" He stopped. The corner of his mouth did something careful. "Are you planning?"
"I'm catastrophizing with organizational aids."
"Mm." Logan was quiet for a moment. He read the card closest to the door—Virgil watched him do it—and his expression did the processing thing, the thing where something was happening behind his eyes and his face was just the controlled surface. "May I come in?"
Virgil gestured broadly at the room.
Logan stepped over a printout with precise, considerate footsteps and sat down on the edge of the bed, which put him close enough that Virgil could see him reading the index cards he hadn't yet crumpled. His hands were settled on his knees. His expression was doing the thing it did when he was processing something that required him to not have an expression—neutral in a way that was too deliberate to be natural.
The silence stretched. Outside, a cloud moved across the February light, and the room dimmed slightly and brightened again.
"You don't have to make another one," Logan said finally.
"I know."
"I mean that non-reproachfully. I want to be precise about that—I'm not suggesting I don't want one, I'm not applying any pressure, I simply—" Logan paused in the particular way he paused when he was revising mid-sentence. "I don't want you to be in distress on my behalf. That's contrary to the purpose."
Virgil looked at him. "That's not what the distress is about."
"No?"
"The distress is about me." He picked up the LITERALLY TOO EASY VIRGIL card and turned it over in his hands. "I want it to be actually hard. I want you to have to work for it. Not work like—not work like you worked through the first one." He stopped. Restarted. "You solved it in forty-seven minutes, Logan."
A pause.
"I'm aware of the time," Logan said.
"Is that—" Virgil set the card down. "Tell me honestly. In the context of escape rooms as a format. Is forty-seven minutes fast?"
Logan looked at the middle distance. This was a tell. Logan only looked at the middle distance when he was deciding how honest to be.
"The format is designed to be completed in sixty minutes by a group of three to five participants," he said finally. "With collaborative problem-solving distributed across multiple people. For a solo solver—"
"Logan."
"—the standard adjustment would suggest—"
"Logan."
A pause.
"Yes," Logan said. "Forty-seven minutes is fast."
The room was quiet for a moment.
"Okay," Virgil said.
"The construction was—"
"I know. I know what you said." He picked up the layered cipher card and put it back down. "I'm not—I'm not spiraling about it, I promise. I'm trying to fix it. I'm trying to understand what I did wrong so I can build something that you actually have to—" He stopped. His hands were doing the thing, the restless thing. He pressed his palm flat against the floor. "I want to give you something that takes something from you. That's all. I just don't know what that looks like yet."
Logan was quiet for a long moment. Long enough that Virgil looked up.
"You researched cipher systems," Logan said. "For the first one."
Virgil blinked. "What?"
"The Playfair variant in the second station. I recognized it because I've read about Playfair ciphers, but you—you wouldn't have encountered one incidentally. You had to look that up." He paused. "The math problem. In the third chamber. You wrote it out correctly. The structural logic held. You have consistently described mathematics as—and I'm quoting—'an act of hostility committed against the humanities.'"
"I stand by that characterization."
"And yet."
Virgil said nothing.
"You wrote the math problem correctly," Logan repeated. "Which means you didn't estimate or approximate or pull something from memory. You checked it. Probably multiple times."
"Four," Virgil said flatly. "Don't make it weird."
"I'm not—" Logan stopped. When he started again, his voice was doing the careful, measured thing it did when he was handling something he didn't want to drop. "You despise sustained effort."
"Bold of you."
"It's observational. You find meticulous work deeply aversive—you've said so, explicitly, on multiple occasions, in different contexts. You find it more aversive than most people because for you it coexists with the persistent suspicion that the effort will be insufficient anyway, which makes the whole enterprise feel both costly and futile simultaneously." He paused. "I'm not saying anything you haven't articulated to me. I'm simply—noting that you undertook it anyway."
"I know what I did," Virgil said.
"Eleven days."
"I know how long it took."
"Self-directed research into subjects you find tedious. Meticulous construction in a space you were keeping hidden. Mathematical verification repeated until you were confident it was correct." Logan's voice had gone very quiet. Not soft, exactly—Logan's voice didn't go soft—but something in the texture of it had changed, something that was usually armored and was now, fractionally, not. "Because you wanted me to have a problem worth solving."
The room was quiet.
Virgil was looking at the floor. There was a scuff on one of the index cards where he'd accidentally stepped on it earlier. He looked at that.
"Don't make it into a bigger thing than it is," he said.
"I'm not inflating it." A pause. "I want to be clear about that. I'm not—this isn't rhetorical generosity. I'm trying to tell you that I understand what it cost, and that the cost is—" Logan stopped. Started again, with the precise, careful quality of someone choosing each word individually. "More often than I would prefer to admit, I find myself uncertain whether I matter to people in any way that isn't functional."
Virgil looked up.
Logan's expression was level. Controlled. His hands were still on his knees with the particular deliberate stillness of someone who had made a decision and was keeping it. "I'm useful," he continued. "I'm accurate. I provide information and perspective and analysis that other people don't. That has value. I know it has value." He paused. "But useful and valued are not the same thing, and there are—there are days when I am not certain which one applies. Whether people would want me specifically, or whether they would want whatever function I perform and I happen to come with it."
Virgil didn't say anything. He didn't trust himself to say anything yet.
"The newspaper," Logan said. His voice had dropped slightly. "When you handed it to me—I thought. That's what I thought. I held it and I thought: he bought a newspaper. And I was already—" He stopped. Something in his face shifted, not much, just enough. Just slightly at the edges. "I was already deciding to be fine with it. I was already running the process. He thought of you. He made an effort to include you in something. That's sufficient. Be grateful for the gesture, it was well-intentioned." A pause. "I'm very practiced at that. Adjusting downward. Deciding things are enough."
"Yeah," Virgil said quietly. "I know."
"And then I found the circled letter." Logan's hands shifted slightly on his knees. "Just the first one. Before I understood what it was. I found the first circled letter and I looked at it and something in the calculation changed, and then I found the second one, and by the time I found enough of them to understand that there was a pattern—" He stopped.
Waited.
"I had to sit down," he said. "In the hallway. I had to sit down on the floor because—because it was a real thing. It was constructed. Someone had made something. Not purchased, not assembled from pre-existing components, not offered in a spirit of general goodwill. Sat down and built something specific. For me. Because they thought about what I would want and then made it." His voice was precise and even and underneath it was something that didn't have armor. "That had not—I don't think that had happened before. Not like that."
Virgil looked at him for a long moment.
He thought about Logan sitting on the floor in the hallway. Logan, who sat in chairs with deliberate upright posture, who considered cross-legged floors insufficiently ergonomic, sitting on the floor because his legs had done what legs did when they stopped cooperating. He thought about Logan running the process—it's sufficient, be grateful, adjust downward—and the process failing for once because the evidence didn't support the conclusion.
"I'm still going to make a better one," Virgil said.
Something shifted in Logan's expression. Barely. "I know."
"It's going to actually challenge you this time. Like—actually. I want it to take you at least three hours."
"That's a significant target."
"I know it's a significant target. That's why I have a spreadsheet." He gestured at the printout closest to Logan's foot. "I've been doing research. I've been reading about cryptographic layering and spatial logic puzzles and there's this thing called a meta-puzzle where multiple solutions combine to produce a final answer, and I think—I think if I can figure out how to build one of those without having a background in puzzle design or mathematics or anything useful—"
"A meta-puzzle," Logan said, and something in his voice had shifted into the register it went when he was genuinely interested in something. "You're designing toward convergent solutions."
"I don't know what that means but yes."
"Multiple puzzle strands that resolve independently but whose solutions must be synthesized to produce the final answer. The difficulty isn't in any individual element but in the synthesis step." He paused. "That's—that's significantly harder to design than a linear sequence."
"Yes," Virgil said. "I'm aware. That's the problem." He held up the index card with the layered cipher note. "This is the only idea I haven't crossed out."
Logan looked at it. His expression was doing the focused thing now, the one where something had caught his attention and he was running it through whatever process he ran things through. "If you layered cipher types such that each solution yields not a final answer but a component—a word, a number, a symbol—which must then be arranged or decoded in a secondary step—"
"That's what I was trying to figure out. But I don't know enough about cipher design to know if that's—if I can make all three solutions yield components that combine into something without it being obvious."
"What kind of final answer were you envisioning?"
Virgil looked at him. "I'm not—Logan, I'm not going to tell you what the answer is."
"Of course not. I meant—thematic category. Numeric, alphabetic, symbolic. The type of answer would affect cipher selection."
"Oh." He thought about it. "Alphabetic. A phrase."
Logan nodded slowly. He was looking at the middle distance again, but this time it didn't look like the honesty-calculation thing. It looked like the thing he did when his brain was running faster than conversation. "You'd want ciphers with different surface textures—something visual, something mathematical, something—spatial, perhaps. A grid element. So the experience of solving each one feels distinct even when the underlying logic is—"
"I'm writing this down," Virgil said, and grabbed a fresh index card.
"—is unified by the meta-structure. The solver doesn't realize they're collecting components until—" Logan stopped himself. Looked at Virgil. "I'm helping you design my own puzzle."
"Yeah, and I'm going to let you," Virgil said without looking up from the card. "Because I need to understand what kind of hard looks like and then I'm going to go off and actually do it myself and you're going to forget this conversation happened."
A pause.
"I'm not certain I can deliberately forget a conversation."
"Try harder."
"Virgil—"
"Logan." He finished writing, looked up. "I need your brain for like ten more minutes and then I need you to walk out of here and not think about it. Can you do that?"
Logan looked at him for a moment. The expression on his face was doing several things at once, and Virgil recognized the components because he'd gotten good at reading them: the processing thing, and underneath it something quieter, something that looked like—
"You're doing it again," Logan said.
Virgil blinked. "Doing what?"
"The thing where you—" Logan paused, finding the words with the deliberate precision he brought to things that mattered. "You require something from me, and you have a legitimate claim to require it, and you're apologizing for requiring it. You're framing it as an imposition. I need your brain for ten minutes, as though ten minutes of my attention is a finite resource you're drawing down."
"I mean—"
"You built an escape room," Logan said, and his voice was very quiet. "You researched cipher systems and checked your mathematics four times and spent eleven days constructing something behind your bookshelf because you wanted me to have a real problem to solve. You are designing a meta-puzzle from first principles without formal training because you want the next one to be better." He paused. "Asking me to describe what makes a cipher feel distinct is not an imposition. It is the smallest possible return on an investment I have no equivalent way to repay, and I would like—" His voice did the careful thing. "I would like you to ask me for things when you need them. I'm asking you to do that."
Virgil stared at him for a moment.
"You're so weird," he said finally.
"You built me an escape room."
"Yeah." He looked back down at the index card. "I did."
He could feel Logan looking at him. After a moment, he heard the quiet sound of Logan reaching into his jacket and producing the small book he kept there—Virgil didn't know how he always had a book, it was a Logan thing, it existed in the same category as the tie and the particular way he took notes—and the soft sound of pages turning.
"The visual cipher," Logan said, not looking up. "A pigpen variant tends to read as pleasingly unfamiliar even to people with cryptography knowledge. The grid structure is recognizable in retrospect but not immediately."
Virgil wrote that down.
"For the mathematical element, you'd want something that involves a genuine logical deduction rather than pure calculation. Calculation is fast. Deduction requires—it requires sitting with the problem. Backtracking. Forming and abandoning hypotheses."
"How do I build something like that."
"A constrained logic puzzle. Something with several possible valid-seeming solutions and a single actual valid solution derivable only by testing all of them."
"That sounds like it could take a while."
"That's rather the point, isn't it."
Virgil looked up.
Logan was looking at his book, or appeared to be looking at his book, but his expression had the quality of someone who knew they were being looked at and was choosing not to acknowledge it. The corner of his mouth was doing the fractional thing again.
"Three hours," Virgil said. "Minimum."
"I'll endeavor not to be insulted by anything less."
"I'm going to be so annoyed if you do it faster."
"Then design it harder."
"I am designing it harder, that's what the spreadsheet is for—"
"Then we're in agreement." Logan turned a page. "Take whatever time you need."
"Don't be—" Virgil pointed at him. "Don't be gracious about the timeline, I'll spiral."
"Fine. Hurry up. I want my puzzle." A pause, precisely timed. "The current pace of progress is somewhat lacking."
"Oh my god."
"Several weeks have elapsed—"
"I will put a decoy puzzle in it that leads to nothing and you will have to live with that."
"You would never. You'd lose sleep over it."
Virgil opened his mouth. Closed it. "I would lose sleep over it," he admitted, with deep resentment.
"I know," Logan said, in a tone that was not unkind.
Virgil looked at him for a moment. Then he looked back at his index cards—the ones crossed out, the ones that weren't, the ones that were almost becoming something—and uncapped his pen.
Outside, the February light was doing the low thing it did in the late afternoon, coming sideways through the curtains in the way that made the room look like a different kind of place. Virgil wrote something on a card. Read it. Didn't cross it out. Wrote something else.
Logan turned a page. Didn't leave.
The silence between them was the particular kind that didn't need filling—not the silence of two people who had run out of things to say but the silence of two people who had said the things and were now doing what came after. Virgil built. Logan read. Every so often one of them would say something: a question about cipher structure, an answer, a brief technical tangent that ended with Virgil writing something down and Logan pretending he hadn't just helped.
He had two uncrossed cards. Then three. Then four.
At some point Logan said, very quietly and apparently to his book: "The phrase. If you want it to mean something—"
"Logan."
"I'm simply noting—"
"I know what I'm doing," Virgil said. He was looking at a card. "I know what I want it to say."
A pause.
"Alright," Logan said.
The room was quiet.
Virgil wrote something on the card—not a cipher concept, not a structural element, but the thing itself, the core of it, the answer at the center of the thing he was building—and set it face-down on the floor next to him. It would stay there, face-down, until he needed it. Until he was building toward something specific.
Which was, he thought, the whole point. You had to know what you were building toward. You had to start with the answer and work backward, construct the path that led there, make each step cost something so the arrival meant something.
He picked up a fresh card.
It was going to take a while. It was going to cost him something.
Logan's thumb moved along the edge of a page, a small unconscious gesture, the kind people made when they were comfortable somewhere.
pixelskylines
andulkaphoto
jacobvanloon
kianamaiart
kaledo-art
theartofmadeline
vaporwave
gummygunk
