traitor deimos au
being secretly an aahw operative, demos is one of the highest ranking technician that they have. and pretty much being a liar to status quo, he's far more sadistic then regular deimos.
deimos seeks the auditor's approval above all else, so he does whatever he thinks will make him value him above the other agents, trying to work his way up the social latter in the workplace. so him and auditor devised a plan because auditor wanted to take doc down by infiltrating. i think deimos basically put himself into a situation where he seemed like just a lone survivor in trouble, and sanford helped him out and the two just kinda...clicked.
sanford basically just saw deimos as being clever, funny, naive, kinda stupid, and could use a buddy. exactly the facade deimos wanted him to fall for. basically deimos using his ability to just seem like a dumbass to lower everyone's guard so that his true motives lay undetected. (i mean he is a dumbass but he's really using it to his advantage)
funnily enough i think hank would be the only one who's kind of 'suspicious' of deimos because deimos seems like he's trying way too hard to be his friend, and doc just thinks that's just hank being overly cautious. cause it would be really funny if hank of all people actually has a really good judge of character
deimos realizes pretty early on that his 'in' the group, the key to fitting in, was sanford. he realized sanford actually liked him as a friend and he used that to his advantage to come across as more of just a Regular Quirky Funny Guy, Not Secretly A Thread Of The Auditor.
but his downfall is that even despite playing 4d chess with them, he's still deimos and still has a heart at the end of the day so he actually really liked sanford back and thinks of him as a friend too but he's also lying to him which started making him feel guilty and start kinda repressing those feelings. i can imagine deimos communicating with auditor via some kind of special comm that he designed and telling him things are going well but auditor can kinda sense the doubt in his voice and is like "keep in mind who you belong to." it's just that deimos has been separated from the agency and auditor for so long he never really realized what having a normal friendship would be like and it's... kinda nice. really nice, actually.
i think it sets up an interesting weight of 'will he/won't he' whether or not deimos actually goes through with full on betraying s.q, giving back into his loyalty to the auditor or his friendship with sanford. thank you this has been my oneshot manga
