Remus looked around the room, seemingly unimpressed by all the grandeur. "What a waste. I can see why Thomas was so... disappointed in you."
The words were meant to hurt. If they were from anyone else, they would have. But the sweet irony only made Roman smile. "Disappointed in me? He gave you away."
Roman has never seen Remus' expression crumple before.
It's salt in the wound, for both of them. One was born to be cherished, and the other was born to be discarded.
The encounter happens right after Roman's latest brainstorming session with Logan goes sour. Thomas rejects almost every one of his proposals and leaves Roman feeling inept and desperate for approval.
Remus loiters in Roman's room hoping for some entertainment. After all, Roman reeks of disappointment and anger and he's always fun to annoy in this state.
He kicks at all of Roman's discarded ideas. They litter the floor now, most of them overflowing from the trash bin that Remus likes to pick through when Roman's away. He starts teasing him over his "pissy" mood, telling Roman he's definitely living up to his namesake, and it escalates from there.
Roman normally wouldn't rise to the bait, at least not with so much vitriol, but he's feeling particularly sore after Thomas and Logan's recent rejection of his contributions. He lashes out because he's afraid of being replaced, so he has to deny Remus' importance in order to uphold his own.
He regrets it the moment he says it, but Remus' jovial expression is already closing off to him and shuddering into something much darker and hurt. He scurries off before Roman can even get a word of apology out, and he spends the rest of the evening trying and failing to find him.
He goes into Remus' room as a last resort, but Remus is still in hiding, and when Remus hides, he will almost never be found unless he wants to be. He still has access to the random pockets of "nothingness" that lead to the Subconscious. It used to be his domain, after all. He knows it better than anyone else.
Roman resigns himself to checking all of the ceiling vents and closets for the rest of the afternoon, but right as he starts to leave Remus' room, he trips over one of his projects.
Because it is. He picks it up, resisting the urge to don gloves as he does so, inspects the object/idea from all angles and freezes.
This is Roman's idea, rewritten and remixed. It was one of the few unrefined project ideas he had scrapped before it could even be presented to Logan or Thomas.
He thought it had potential but he just couldn't get it to work for the life of him, there was always something missing.
And here it is, no longer a crumpled up ball of paper in Roman's trash can. It's been carefully unwrapped and tended to, not given up on the way Remus was, and tucked away in a random messy corner in Remus' disaster of a room, already halfway to refinement.
It's good, loathe as Roman is to admit it, it's not a solution he would have thought of in a million years but already he's buzzing with a hundred different ways to "yes-and" it and frantically pulling his own notebook and pen out to scribe as many of the ideas down as he can.
Remus returns to the safety of his own room after spending hours sulking in the sewers of the imagination, only to discover Roman on the dingy floor of REMUS' room of all places, motioning him over hurriedly to look over the new schematics of an idea that is now just as much Remus' as it is Roman's.
When the next brainstorming session comes around, they present it together.
