Virgil sacrifices his identity in order to protect the others. If they remember him, it will all be for nothing and they will die once again.
Based on from "down that desolate road" by delimeful. The quote is from Prologue, Part 2: Magically Binding Contract.
Another notable quote that adds to this from the same chapter is,
"The worst part was that he could still feel his room, just beyond the physical, ready to be called into existence on either side of the commons. All he had to do was pull, and it would settle into place, safe and protected and his, the perfect place to finally break down and let it out."
If I could draw, Virgil would be biting his hand to stifle his greif. I can't even draw eyes lol. If I rrally wanted it accurate to the scene there would also be blood on all the door handles but that is a bit much
down that desolate road reminds me so much of the poem nothing gold can stay. if you havent heard it here:
"Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay."
this is very cool, i love the mournful bittersweet feeling of the poem :) very DTDR energies
I can't get the scene out of my head where Patton says "I'm fine!" And the guiltly glancing towards Janus expecting him to summon the Repression Jar (whose funds are used to buy Remus effective immunity from the Swear Jar whenever its funniest) from Delimeful's Down That Desolate Road.
this one pivots from comedic to intense so quick, take care! also always remember that this is angst with a happy ending <3
warnings: arguing, defensive behavior, PTSD, tons of miscommunication and accidental harm this chapter, blood and injury, mild strangulation, dissociation, cliffhanger
-
Virgil should have known better.
Even worse: he had known better, and he’d done it anyway.
Leading Patton out of the forest was one thing, he’d been able to maintain his anonymity as a mysterious cloaked figure, and he wouldn’t have been able to leave the Side lost even if he’d wanted to.
After all, the longer Patton was left to wander around the woods, the more likely it was that a Shade would pop up to take advantage of the opportunity.
So he’d guided his best friend out of the forest without a single word, and watched him find his way back to the marked trails with a gut-churning mixture of relief and misery.
Just the sight of him had soothed some of the deep, simmering fears in Virgil’s chest. Nobody seemed to have changed too much, but that didn’t keep him from worrying. The encounter proved it was unfounded. Even without Anxiety’s presence, Patton was the same friendly face as always.
The interaction should have stopped there. He should have let it be enough.
He should have ignored the frequent detours Patton would make to that little clearing, or even warped the forest into something a little more blatantly menacing, something that would scare him off.
Instead, like an idiot, he’d sat himself in the crook of a tree at the edge of the clearing and watched Patton sunbathe and weave flower crowns, enjoying the familiarity of just quietly hanging out together in one place.
And then a Shade had nearly killed Patton, because they tracked Virgil’s paths just like Liv had said, and if he’d been the slightest bit slower—
But Patton had been fine, not a scratch on him, and Virgil should have vanished back into the forest to maintain his cover, maybe added an ominous threat for good measure. Except instead he’d had an embarrassing blubbering meltdown in Patton’s arms, because even not knowing who Virgil was, he’d tried to comfort him.
Patton’s hugs felt exactly as relieving as always. Even with the consequences bearing down on him, he couldn’t quite find it in himself to regret accepting them.
He’d known that Patton wasn’t the type to notice subterfuge or keep secrets, so he wasn’t surprised that their encounter had become common knowledge.
He was surprised that apparently the information was interesting enough to prompt the entire collection of idiots into trekking out to the clearing with Patton.
Surprised and horrified. He was supposed to be keeping a low profile from five measly people, and yet somehow every single one of them had turned up to poke their nose around in his business!
Patton was shuffling uncomfortably near his usual spot, casting guilty puppy-dog looks at the trees. Roman and Remus were tweaking the wildflower arrangements and coaxing some thorny weeds into borderline-sentience respectively. Janus was lounging on an embroidered picnic blanket, his body relaxed as though he wasn’t totally peering into the forest through his nearly-closed eyes.
Even Logan was there, scanning the forest’s treeline with an intent acuity that could only mean he was searching for something with his usual stubborn dedication.
Virgil stomped down the bit of him that was practically purring at having all of them in one place right in front of him, reminding himself that the combined forces of Thomas’s Sides was nothing to sneeze at, particularly if he wanted to get out of this situation with all his secrets intact.
(He wasn’t great at deception, not when Janus had hoarded that particular trait all to himself, but there were ways to work around that. There were far more important things at stake here than himself, after all. It didn’t matter that he hated lying, especially to them. What mattered was keeping them all safe.)
There was nothing to be pleased about, especially considering that this many Sides in one spot was almost guaranteed to lure some Shades out of the woodwork.
The mere thought made the glass shards of his function flex painfully, and Virgil took a deep breath. This was his fault, yeah, but his regret wouldn’t do anything to fix the situation, so he set it aside.
What he needed to focus on now was how to get rid of them.
Except, as Thomas himself would probably say, that was easier said than done.
Passing all his actions off as a villainous ploy would work on Roman and Remus, but probably not Logan or Janus. Negotiating a deal, such as information in exchange for them returning to the Commons ASAP, would be more appealing to Janus and Logan, but offensive to the twins that this realm actually answered to. Genuinely telling them they were in danger and asking them to leave (and leave well enough alone) would only work on Patton, and only if he thought Virgil was safe.
Virgil dragged a hand down his face. It was like that riddle about the fox and the hen and the sack of grain, except no matter what solution he tried, there would always be someone ready to tear his story to shreds.
If he ever got to talk to Thomas again, he was going to have a serious talk with him about curiosity and cats, with a new addendum to the saying to emphasize that unlike metaphorical satisfied cats, people die when they are killed.
… That settled it. He’d been spending too much time marinating in the subconscious instead of sleeping.
He would definitely address his near-delirium at some point, preferably after he dealt with the huge clusterfuck unfolding in front of him.
While he’d been freaking the hell out, the others seemed to have been deliberating, or maybe they’d just gotten tired of waiting, because now three of them were approaching the forest’s edge while the other two remained over at the picnic blanket.
They’d split the party. He should have known. This was what happened when Virgil wasn’t around to remind them about the basic rules of self preservation. They went full Scooby-Doo on his ass.
The approaching group was composed of Logan, Roman, and Patton, because of course it was. The three of them were wearing familiar expressions of curiosity, suspicion, and worry, ones that had appeared all-too-frequently whenever they’d had to deal with someone they only knew as Thomas’s Anxiety.
Virgil felt a little like he’d been flung back in time. Oh wait. He had.
Except this time, he didn’t even have the benefit of being part of Thomas. As far as they knew, he was a construct, an errant figment of Thomas’s imagination, about as real as a summoned puppy.
About as threatening as one, too, which was probably why Roman was entirely fine with two of the least battle-hardened Sides coming with him to face a total unknown. Even one of the Creativities was enough to handle most denizens of the Imagination, let alone two. Before, even Virgil himself would have been hard-pressed to imagine an enemy that could threaten five of Thomas’s Sides at once.
That was before. Now, imagining it was far too easy.
Enough that he had to blink away gory afterimages as they drew to a stop at the treeline.
“Um, V?” Patton asked, shifting to his tiptoes to peer through the foliage. “It’s Patton, from yesterday! Can we talk for a second?”
There was an uncomfortably long pause while Virgil tried to think of a plan and failed miserably.
“We know it’s you, Vendetta!” Roman added in his playacting voice, his air of impatience betrayed by the excited way he was bouncing on his heels. “Come out to face our interrogation, or face the consequences in our next duel instead!”
His preference was obvious. Half a field away, Janus visibly facepalmed.
“An interrogation implies that there’s a specific piece of information we’re searching for,” Logan mused. “Really, a better description of our current venture would be a general scientific inquiry.”
“Psh, yeah, if you want to sound lame,” Roman retorted with a frown.
“Don’t listen to him, dork! Yours sounds way creepier,” Remus hollered, giving him a nonreassuring thumbs up.
Okay, so despite splitting up, the others were still close enough to supervise. Virgil inhaled deeply, counting down in his head before releasing it. He just had to take this one step at a time.
He knew exactly how stubborn these dumbasses were. If he tried to leave or avoid them entirely, they would persist, even to the point of trespassing into Liv’s territory. The mere thought of them venturing down into those tunnels— No. He wasn’t getting out of this without some kind of conversation.
Thus, the first step was making sure it happened well outside Janus’s hearing range.
Virgil had to concentrate to warp the Imagination, but it wasn’t as hard as it used to be. Especially not here, since it was both a place he’d hung around often and a creepy gloomy nightmare forest that fit right in with his aesthetic.
In front of the three of them, the tree boughs bent and swayed into jagged arcs, illustrating a clear path forward. There may or may not have been ominous creaking noises involved.
“Oh, excellent, it’s an interactive murder forest,” Roman muttered, before puffing his chest out and drawing his sword. “Fear not, for I have traversed many extremely creepy landscapes, mostly courtesy of my brother.”
(At the sight of the horror movie forest shuffling around to let them in, Remus had lifted his fists and cheered raucously.)
Patton and Logan showed little hesitation in following Roman into the forest’s shade, though Virgil suspected they had very different reasons for their lack of fear.
He was relieved to see that Janus, at least, looked perturbed enough to climb to his feet. It wasn’t the instant bad-idea shutdown that Virgil would have enacted if he’d been with them as himself, but the other half of self preservation was keen enough to disapprove of the sudden detour.
He wasn’t keen enough to prevent the three from stepping into the passage, though, and the moment they were past the threshold, Virgil slammed the entryway shut.
Roman yelped and spun around, but Virgil had already warped the trees into a thorny wall of foliage that Maleficent herself would have been proud of. Janus would need a lesson or two before he could take up Virgil’s idiot-wrangling duties. Just like with herding cats, his first mistake was letting them out of arm's reach.
“We’ve been ambushed!” Roman cried. “With literal bushes!”
“I guess we’re not leafing that way,” Patton chuckled nervously.
“Inconvenient, but not insurmountable,” Logan commented, unperturbed as always by the macabre or frightening.
The path continued to bend itself into existence in front of them, and sure enough, it didn’t take long for them to decide to keep going rather than sink out or otherwise abandon their goal.
With Janus pacing agitatedly in front of the forest and Remus gleefully but ineffectively bashing at branches with his morning star, step one was officially complete.
Step two, step two… Uh. He hadn’t thought that far.
In his defense, this was literally not his job. He didn’t do the planning, he was the ‘poke holes in plan until it wasn’t as stupid and reckless’ guy!
(He was beginning to feel a little sorry for all the planners he’d done that to. Having good ideas was way harder than pointing out bad ones.)
Okay, focus. Villains isolated the heroes for a reason. It would be much easier to play the roles expected of him if he was catering to one-on-one audiences. They’d recount their experiences to the group, obviously, but with Roman’s tendency for exaggeration, Patton’s habit of rose-colored recollection, and Logan’s inclination to focus in on the details that he found interesting, they’d have a difficult time figuring out what was real and what was someone’s biased perception.
Princey was more likely to rush ahead than let someone wander off without him, so Virgil opened up a side path and let himself drift across open ground just long enough to be spotted. Roman took the bait like he was auditioning for the role of the first victim in a horror movie, and sealing the path after him rendered Logan and Patton unable to follow.
He spent a moment setting up the landscape to lead the pair in a dizzying series of turns to stall, and then stepped out behind his errant prince.
“Boo,” he said, because he had to take the stress relief where he could get it.
Roman whirled around with a shriek, his blade slicing through the air harmlessly. He glared petulantly at Virgil, who was admittedly smirking under the shadow of his hood. “Don’t do that, V for Vexing!”
“I wouldn’t be throwing around orders if I were you. After all, you’re the one in my territory,” he said, letting his voice tilt towards threatening.
Roman waved the statement off as though swatting a gnat. “This isn’t about our kingdoms, Vendetta, otherwise I would have dressed for the occasion.”
“Oh?” Virgil valiantly resisted the urge to make Barbie comparisons, though Roman would probably take it as a compliment. “What do you and your little friends want, then?”
He must have been leaning too hard into the menacing tone, because Roman stiffened the way he hadn’t at an implied threat to himself. “Don’t you dare hurt them,” he commanded, fingers tightening around his sword’s hilt.
“They’re fine,” Virgil assured him, and then tacked on a “for now” for good measure. “You and your merry band of irritants picked this fight, not me. I’m only interested in finding out why ‘scientific inquiries’ are being made about me.”
“You’ve become a bit of a hot topic between the Sides,” Roman answered, lowering his guard enough to prop a hand on his hip. “You should feel flattered! It’s not often that a denizen manages to intrigue so many of us at once.”
Virgil did not feel flattered. Virgil felt like screaming. Virgil was going to do so much bitching and moaning about his life later.
“My secrets are my own,” he managed to say, his scowl audible in his voice. “I don’t need or want nosy Sides poking into my business.”
Roman was nodding along with his words without paying them much attention at all, edging closer in an entirely unsubtle manner that Virgil still didn’t register as a threat until he was lunging.
A hand closed around his wrist. A half-second later, there was a mental poke at his existence.
If he’d been an actual construct, the prod would have earned Roman a peek at his ‘code’, the little bits that he was composed of. It would have been mildly uncomfortable at worst, and more likely, he wouldn’t have noticed it at all.
If he’d been in his standard state as a Side, it would have been a blatant and rude sensation, like someone jabbing their finger into your gut, but not actually harmful.
With the half-shattered state of his function, it was more like someone jabbing their finger into a gut wound.
Since he was self-preservation and didn’t react well to threats, it was like someone jabbing their finger into a gut wound that was also full of glass.
All the blood drained from Roman’s face as Virgil’s defensive aura snapped down on his mental probe like a bear trap, sending him an involuntary surge of fear that would lock his joints and send his heart racing, a screaming instinctual warning that he was totally screwed.
Virgil yanked himself away from Roman’s stiff grip, wrapping his arms around his chest as though he could physically hold himself together if he tried hard enough. He felt like a mortal injury had been carelessly jarred, a knife twisted in an already-bleeding wound.
He had to resist the impulse to immediately drop into the Subconscious to numb the pain, reminding himself that he wasn’t done here, and more importantly, that the others weren’t safe without him. He couldn’t lose time when they could be attacked at any moment.
“Don’t ever do that again,” he gritted out instead, hating the way terror looked on Roman’s face. “Get out of here.”
He twisted a path back to the clearing open, and sunk back into the forest instead of watching Roman flee.
No time to recuperate. He wanted them out of here before anyone else got hurt.
His chest was still pulsing with pain as he pushed through a few branches to stand in front of Logan and Patton, but he managed not to visibly stagger, which he was counting as a win.
“V!” Patton said, brow furrowed with concern.
“You must be– oh my. Are you alright?” Logan asked, stepping forward. He wasn’t reaching out, but Virgil shied away anyhow.
“Don’t touch me,” Virgil told him, managing to keep the worst of the bite from his voice. “Keep away from my territory and stay out of my business.”
He swept his hand at the trees to start opening a path back, intending to vanish back into the trees and sink away, but a glance at the way Patton’s expression crumpled was enough to weaken his resolve.
“It’s not safe,” he added in a softer tone.
“Because of the Shades,” Logan replied, adjusting his glasses. The motion did nothing to conceal the glint of interest in his gaze. “That’s why we’re here. If something dangerous has manifested here, it’s important that we know about it. For our safety and Thomas’s alike.”
“The Shades are my problem,” Virgil snapped back. “You shouldn’t get involved, not with them or me. I’m handling them.”
“Are you?” Logan asked. “We haven’t seen them before. You seem to be the only one who knows anything about them.”
We only started seeing them once you showed up, Virgil heard, and resisted the urge to snarl.
Patton stepped closer, and Virgil’s body shuddered back without his permission. It was stupid, it was Patton, who would never hurt him, but his brain had thought that about Roman, too, and look what had happened there–
Patton’s expression was going crumpled around the edges again, but he kept still, not pressing against the clear show of weakness. “Do you have to handle them alone?” he asked.
For a moment, Virgil hesitated– the others could help, he would mess up on his own, they were supposed to be a team– and then his gaze caught on a dark, spreading spot on Patton’s shirt. He blinked it away, grounded by the reminder.
“Yes,” he retorted vehemently. “So stop–,”
There was a distant crackling, like several branches being snapped in swift succession, and Virgil abruptly realized that the foreboding feeling in the back of his mind wasn’t just a memory.
He summoned his scythe and dove forward in one smooth movement, sliding past a pair of reflexive flinches to meet the Shade as it burst from the shadows, lifting the long handle of his scythe just in time to block its bite.
“Run.”
Virgil could only barely hear the thudding of feet past his heartbeat in his ears, but he didn’t have time to double check. Wrestling with a Shade was a losing game, and he could already see the sinuous body twisting itself a few new limbs, so he shoved back the mouth full of too-many too-sharp teeth and rolled free, following the momentum of the movement to drive his blade through a good chunk of the beast.
With a short yank, he swung the Shade in a brief arc and flung it past Logan into the trunk of a particularly thick tree.
Wait. Past Logan?
Virgil’s heart sank as he realized that only one of the two people he needed to protect had managed to bolt. Patton hadn’t hesitated at his directive, but Logan had never been one to blindly follow orders.
Maybe he couldn’t follow them. A quick glance showed that Logan seemed almost frozen, staring at the Shade with a bone-deep fear that looked out of place on the logical Side’s face.
The Shade that Virgil had just stupidly tossed between him and the way out.
He swore loudly and darted forward, slashing at the Shade again and again, giving it as little time as possible to recover.
It foiled all attempts to be corralled, oily limbs lashing out with sharp needle-like protrusions on every side, forcing Virgil to jump back or be pincushioned.
He didn’t realize that Logan had moved until he caught a glimpse of him from the corner of his eye, looking more composed but also far closer to the Shade than Virgil would ever want him.
“Back off!” he warned, swinging just in time to catch the beast’s next blow. “It’s dangerous!”
Logan was reaching out with one hand, a visualization technique they’d all used at one point or another to summon or unsummon something. He was making the same mistake as Roman, trying to unravel the Shade as though it was little more than a standard construct.
“No–!” Virgil tried, but the briefest contact was enough to send Logan stumbling back as though hit, and the Shade instantly tried to take advantage of the lapse.
‘Tried’ being the key word there.
Virgil jumped to meet the lunge, and the next few seconds were a frantic blur of skewering and slicing and finally the sensation of the substance under his blade turning to smoke. He dismissed his scythe and swiped the fragment on automatic, the motion barely completed before he was turning to face Logan’s crumpled form.
His eyes landed on red, and it felt like his chest was collapsing to bits.
Between one instant and the next, he was knelt at Logan’s side, meeting open eyes– still alive, not gone yet– before clasping both of his hands over the gaping gash in Logan’s throat and pressing down firmly.
“No no no no no, you can’t, you can’t,” he couldn’t tell whether his begging was in his head or out loud, couldn’t feel his face or his legs or any part of him except for his palms pressed against the injury, growing more stained by the second, trying to hold the lifeblood in through pure force of will.
Logan’s mouth was moving but no words made it out, only a wet, frothy sort of sound. His fingers tried weakly to pry at Virgil’s own, it had to be uncomfortable but he couldn’t let go, he couldn’t fail, he couldn’t watch it happen again, it would shatter him to bits.
There was a noise, loud even though it seemed to come from far away, and Virgil lifted his head with his teeth already bared, entirely prepared to shield Logan from another Shade with his own body, mission be damned.
It wasn’t another Shade.
It was the others.
They were stopped a few yards away, held back by all of Janus’s arms spread wide, staring at him with open horror on their faces.
Virgil’s mind felt like it was churning in slow motion. Why weren’t they helping? How could they just stand there? Didn’t they see what was at stake?
“V…?” Patton asked, voice trembling. “What are you doing?”
“What does it look like?” he hissed, but when he dragged his gaze back to his task, his hands were entirely clean.
There was no blood dripping out from beneath his palms, no ragged edge of flesh beneath his fingers, no horrible gasping breaths full of fluid.
Logan was conscious, staring at him with wide eyes, each of his inhales strained and hoarse, as though he was barely getting enough air in.
Because there were hands wrapped around his throat. Because Virgil was strangling him.
His hands flew up as though magnetically repelled, and he almost expected to see the slash reopen before his eyes, worse than before.
Instead, all he saw was splotchy red marks, the beginning of bruises forming in a ring around Logan’s neck.
Logan started coughing, his face scrunching in pain, and Virgil pushed unsteadily to his feet, backed up without looking away, something fracturing in his chest.
He’d done that. There hadn’t been any real danger, and then he’d become the danger.
The moment he was out of immediate striking range, the rest of them surged forward, crowding towards Logan like– like he’d just been viciously attacked.
If the others hadn’t showed up, would he have– would Logan be–?
Virgil stumbled further back into the shadows, already desperately grasping for the Subconscious.
Someone called out to him, but he was already gone.
I thought I'd read most of your stuff, but I just discovered yesterday that I hadn't read Down That Desolate Road yet, so I did and it's sooooooo good! I love it, just like the other stories of yours I've read! You're a wonderful writer! And I love reading and re-reading your stuff. It's amazing. Thank you!
i'm so glad you enjoyed it! :D DTDR is angstier than my usual fare but i have a lot of fun with it, and i love when people give it a chance. tysm, i hope it continues to entertain!
Logan was in the middle of trying to restructure the day’s schedule when Patton returned from the Imagination.
It had been a perfectly sustainable schedule yesterday, but seeing as Thomas had abruptly decided— against all good sense— to stay awake watching conspiracy videos into the early hours of the morning, rescheduling was in order.
Come daylight, Thomas had predictably slept right through four alarms and two of his planned tasks, and Logan was finding himself, admittedly, a bit vexed.
Luckily, the lack of external stimuli from Thomas’s end meant that his fellow Sides were behaving in a more sedate manner than usual, meaning that Logan could work in peace even in the often-frequented common area.
At the moment, Janus was reading silently on an armchair tucked into the corner of the room, and Roman was sitting at the kitchen table with his face buried in his arms, likely dozing off after the less-than-restful night. That left only three— no, two (he must have forgotten to count himself) other Sides unaccounted for, and hopefully they would stay absent until Logan finished one of the tools Thomas needed to get back on track.
As though to spite him personally, the distinct whirring sound of someone returning from the Imagination sounded from down the hall.
Logan resisted the urge to sigh heavily. He could already visualize any productivity the day could have held being washed down the metaphorical drain, all because Remus had decided he’d just had a creative breakthrough and needed to borrow Thomas’s brain for the rest of the day.
As such, he found himself pleasantly surprised when it was Patton who walked into the room instead.
Though normally he could be just as energetic and disruptive as Remus, Patton had been notably more tentative around him and Roman as of late, wary of overstepping after the explosive argument that had occured after the wedding.
Case in point: instead of opening with a cheerful greeting, Patton’s gaze flickered over each of the room’s occupants— almost certainly picking up on Janus’s relaxed pose and Roman’s exhaustion— before finally settling on Logan and offering a friendly wave.
“Patton,” Logan returned at a normal volume, because he had a sneaking suspicion that Roman had enabled the previous night’s conspiracy binge and wasn’t willing to enable his early afternoon nap. Roman appeared to be sleeping through their conversation regardless. “Welcome back.”
Patton’s smile grew warmer, but his voice was still at a low volume when he answered, “Thanks! Did anything interesting happen while I was gone?”
Logan narrowed his eyes at the disassembled schedule. “Unfortunately, nothing much has been happening at all today.” He eyed the array of tasks he was attempting to re-prioritize, and decided he could afford a slight pause in favor of conversation. “And you? What were you doing in the Imagination?”
“Oh!” Patton grinned, apparently delighted by the question. “I went to go relax and stay out of the way for a little bit, and I made a new friend!”
That seemed entirely plausible. The Imagination was full of constructs, and most of the more permanent ones in Roman’s domain were personable and more than willing to lend an ear. Also, Logan had once witnessed Patton befriend a toaster.
“And a new enemy, I think?”
There was a pause. From over Patton’s shoulder, Janus slowly looked up from his book with his eyebrows raised incredulously.
“Did you accidentally accept one of Roman’s quests again?” Logan asked, because how else had Patton possibly earned the ire of a construct during a relatively brief trip to the Imagination? He began scanning the other Side for injuries, knowing that many of Roman’s ambient quests took a more classic D&D battle sort of turn. “Why didn’t you simply sink out?”
“I’m fine!” Patton replied immediately, and then entirely gave away his lie by cringing and shooting a panicked glance in Janus’s direction.
There had been several occasions since the Mindscape had shifted that Patton had attempted to cover up his less pleasant feelings in front of others, only to immediately find a yellow-gloved hand shoving a jar labeled ‘Repression Jar’ under his nose.
It might not have been so effective if Janus hadn’t immediately started using these funds to buy Remus effective immunity from the swear jar whenever he thought it was funniest.
“I mean, it was pretty scary, but I didn’t get hurt, promise!” Patton corrected himself at Logan’s raised eyebrow. “My new friend helped me out!”
That was… extremely unusual. Roman didn’t leave frightening creations out where just anyone could trip over them, and his constructs were the type to stand by and be saved, not do the saving themselves. Remus’s domain had plenty of material that could scare anyone laying around, but his constructs weren’t likely to help a Side, especially without doing something particularly horrifying in the process.
Janus slowly closed his book entirely, looking far too intrigued about the situation. Logan was abruptly reminded that they’d gotten into two separate hour-long debates about the efficiency of different types of detective work.
Honestly, this was the problem with mysteries. Sometimes, learning more only made his curiosity amplify exponentially, and Logan really didn’t have time for all this. He cast a glance back towards where the partially revised schedule awaited him.
“Great news, fellow figments of Thomas’s imagination!” Remus waltzed into the room, hands dripping with some unidentifiable red substance. “I’ve had a creative breakthrough and I’m going to be stealing Thomas’s brain for the rest of the day, like a less fatal but just as gross version of those alien parasites from The Brain Eaters!”
“Absolutely not,” Roman said, apparently summoned from a dead sleep by his brother calling dibs.
Logan took a deep breath in through his nose, held it for a count of five, and then summoned his Sherlock Holmes hat from the depths of his meticulously-organized closet.
“Why don’t you start from the beginning, Patton?” he said, ignoring the twins’ bickering even as it began to devolve into a wrestling match. “How did you meet your new friend? Where, for that matter?”
Patton looked a little uncertain as Janus helpfully guided him to a seat on the couch. “Well, he helped me out when I got lost in the woods a little while back, and then again today when I was attacked. We normally hang out right at the edge of Roman’s territory!”
“Hang out…?” Janus murmured.
“You were attacked?” Roman spluttered from where he was contorted into a painful-looking headlock. “In my Realm? By who?”
“It was really more of a what,” Patton replied lightly, but his attempt at levity fell flat in the face of how he grew a little paler and shivered, as though the very thought of it was frightening. Logan felt the beginnings of alarm stirring.
“… A spider?” Janus asked, because they were all familiar with how poorly Patton handled that particular phobia.
Patton shivered. “No, thank goodness. It was more like… a shapeless faceless creature made entirely of shadows and sharp edges? It was really scary, I could barely even think when I saw it!”
As one, the rest of the room turned to Remus, who was currently winning the fight through the psychological warfare of making his bones crackle ominously every time Roman tried to twist his arm.
“What?” he asked, faux-pouting. “It wasn’t me. If I was going to unleash eldritch horrors on us all, there would be at least six in here by now.”
“I don’t think it was Remus’s either,” Patton added, his face crinkled into a pensive frown. “His creations can be scary, but they don’t attack me. Whatever this one was, it really wanted to hurt me. If V hadn’t been there…,”
“V?” four voices asked at once, in varying tones.
Logan, who had only been inquisitive, stared suspiciously at the sudden intent gleam in Janus’s eyes. The twins weren’t any better, exchanging a glance and nodding at each other.
“I’ll get the board?”
“And I’ll grab the pins!”
They darted away down separate halls, and Janus began clearing off a space on the table where it met the wall.
Patton, at least, seemed just as bewildered as him.
“What exactly is going on here?” Logan asked the only remaining person who seemed to have a clue.
Janus offered him a familiar sly smile. “Oh, just a little pet project of mine. You were so busy, I wouldn’t have bothered you with it. I know how intensive your deductive reasoning can be.”
Logan felt his eye twitch, and was genuinely contemplating starting their third hour-long debate on the topic when Remus rushed back in, carrying what looked like a wide, office-grade corkboard.
A corkboard covered in clusters of bright pins, photographs, and scribbled notes. All of which was linked by a mess of interweaving red string.
Logan abruptly realized just who was actually responsible for Thomas’s random craving for Buzzfeed conspiracy videos the previous evening. “You.”
Janus sat in the chair nearest to the board and casually rested his chin on top of his interlaced fingers, donning an extremely smug grin. “Me.”
“And us!” Remus cheered, plonking the conspiracy board down on the table with enough force to thoroughly rattle the assortment of evidence on it. Roman was a few steps behind, carrying a precarious stack of thumbtack containers and a few skeins of red yarn tucked under his arm.
Well. If his plans for the day were going to be so thoroughly derailed, at least it was in the pursuit of an investigation. Maybe Thomas would gain some keenness secondhand when Logan inevitably pieced together the answer to their current mystery. One could hope.
With one last narrow-eyed glance at Janus, he stepped forward to study the board’s current configuration.
Thankfully, there was some sense of coherence to it, even if there were a fair amount of strings that branched off and led to rambling notes and outlandish theories. The most notable element of the board’s subject caught his eye immediately.
“This is a denizen of the Imagination?” he asked, his brow pinching inwards in consternation. “Why not simply unravel it and study the basis of its creation?”
A few steps behind him, Patton made a muted sound.
“It’s not one of ours,” Roman explained, fingers flitting over the board as he readjusted the bits that had been jostled out of place. “The Dragonwitch made him, that’s why he’s so weird. She never keeps anything but low-level lackeys around, and definitely not ones that would help us.”
“Maybe he didn’t,” Janus suggested in a prompting manner. “I mean, we are assuming that Patton’s rescuer and your mystery denizen are the same person.”
Logan ran his fingers over the piece of paper with the personal information they’d compiled. It looked as though it had been pulled right from a typewriter, which was a nice touch.
“Does the description of this ‘Vendetta’ match your ‘V’, Patton?” he asked, gesturing to the sketch the twins had put together. The cloak was a fairly ominous wardrobe choice, but he was fairly sure that the scythe dripping blood was one of Remus’s more facetious additions.
Patton shuffled in place, his gaze fluttering from place to place on the board with clear uncertainty. “I mean, yeah, but he looked a lot nicer than that…”
Logan studied the haphazard timeline tacked to the bottom of the board. “The rest of you have encountered him as well, yes? Has he been aggressive towards any of you, at all?”
“I mean, we’ve certainly exchanged a few bouts of belligerent banter, but he seems to be keeping to the truce. He appears in our Realms occasionally, but we’ve never been able to catch him doing anything destructive, if we catch him at all.” Roman shrugged. “He’s far less combative than the Dragonwitch.”
“I think he’s the sneakier sort,” Remus offered, balancing a stray thumbtack on the tip of his finger. “Waiting in the shadows with a poisoned blade that’s got my name on it, just imagine it! Truly, a man after my own oozing, pulsing heart!”
He leaned back into a swoon that turned into a collapse as he displayed the traditional signs of Belladonna poisoning. Roman made a face at him, experiencing the universal disgust of siblings receiving TMI everywhere.
“If that is what he’s trying, he’s amateurish,” Janus added judgmentally. “He can’t lie to save his life, which would be useful for us, if he didn’t insist on bolting like a startled hare every time I’m around.”
“You specifically?” Logan asked, his mind immediately latching onto that detail. “Like he knows–?”
“Knows that I can sniff out a lie from a mile away?” Janus finished, his expression speculative as though he’d been asking himself the same thing for a while. “It certainly doesn’t seem that way. I know I can be intimidating, but he's more than willing to chit chat with the twins, and we all know that Remus, at least, is more overtly threatening than little old me.”
“Hey!” Roman protested, but Logan was already tuning out the resulting squabble, his mind sorting through the implications of Janus’s assertion, if it was true.
“If he does have knowledge about our skills or even our functions, the question becomes: how did he gain it?” he mused aloud. “The most obvious route is the Dragonwitch– she’s certainly picked up on things about us over the course of our shared history. Could she have told him?”
Remus snorted, swinging his legs up in an anatomically improbable manner and flipping himself back into a standing position. “DW doesn’t share. She never has. Grim Veeper seems to have an ‘overthrowing the tyrant’ plotline going on with her anyhow, so unless he interrotortured it out of her, odds are bad.”
“Provided, of course, he wasn’t lying about that, too,” Janus added unhelpfully. “Until I’ve heard it from the horse’s mouth, we can’t be sure.”
Logan blinked at him, his line of thinking disrupted. “There’s a horse involved?”
“It’s a saying! About looking at horse teeth!” Remus told him gleefully, the same way he’d once informed Logan that DILF was an acronym for a letter salutation that meant Dear Interesting and Lovable Friend. “Did you know that a finger is easier to bite through–,”
“Everyone knows about the carrot thing, Remus!” Roman groaned, apparently having heard this ‘fun’ fact several times before.
“Don’t we always say not to look gift horses in the mouth?” Patton interrupted a little desperately, wringing his hands. “If he helped me out, he can’t be that bad, right? We should– we could focus on the monsters, instead?”
Logan finished writing a note to google horse-related colloquialisms (and carrots?) and then shook his head. “If we want to know more about the monsters, it would be wise to talk to him anyways, seeing as he apparently knows them well enough to fight them. Regardless, Patton, we haven’t established his motive. For all we know, he could’ve been the one to summon those monsters in the first place, engineering a dangerous situation to gain your trust.”
“Does someone need a motive to want to help people?” Patton asked in a mumble, and then continued a little louder. “V is a kind person, and he’s shy. I don’t want you guys to be mean to him.”
“I’m not going to be mean,” Logan clarified, a little offended. “I’m simply going to ask him a few questions.”
“It’ll be fine, Padre!” Roman reassured, scribbling down an anatomically incorrect doodle of Logan and pinning it onto a blank space on the board. “Sherlock Bemoans over there couldn’t hurt a fly, we just want to see how Vendetta reacts. Besides, constructs usually enjoy getting the chance to develop their backstories and character arcs like this!”
Patton didn’t seem convinced, chewing on the corner of his lip indecisively, but for once, the majority of them were on the same side of an argument, and Logan knew his reasoning was sound. Character witnesses were important, but not nearly as important as direct testimony.
The sooner he met this mysterious Vendetta, the sooner he would uncover the truth behind all these oddities. Logan was certain of it.
