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greenninjagal-blog · 3 months

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Deja Vu pt 12

Hey, pretend it hasn't been eons since the last update!

If you’re new around here you can find the first chapter [here] or if you just want a refresher you can find the previous chapter [here!]

Summary: Remus is falling, and he's just now realizing that he's been falling for a lot longer than he thought he'd been.

Word Count: 10901

Read on Ao3 || Hero Worship Series || My General Writing Masterlist

The thing about freefalls is that there’s absolutely nothing freeing about it, but there’s a whole lot of falling.

Sometimes minutes, sometimes seconds, sometimes years and eons and eternities and blinks: sometimes Remus doesn’t realize he’s falling at all because his brain has mentally reset too many times and he forgot there was ever a feeling that was not falling and then the weightless, worriless feeling becomes its own type of prison because he can’t do anything but fall.

It doesn’t feel like falling though. It feels like floating, like if he closes his eyes he wouldn’t be moving at all, like he could breathe and float and enjoy the dose of overwhelming euphoria that comes from his brain trying to make sense of all the alarms going on inside of him. He’s stuck and he’s floating and time means nothing, and existence means nothing, and Remus Regis means nothing.

Here’s the other thing about freefalls: they don’t end softly.

The sidewalk outside a skyscraper in Detroit that he gave himself access to on a Tuesday afternoon at 3:46 pm, the water surface that tastes like cement when Remus’s foot misses a step on the bridge railing on a summer night so hot it feels like his skin is peeling off, the rocky bottom of the shallow end of the pool from the hotel balcony when Remus got too curious, too tempted, too alone, the windshield of an SUV at 3 AM.

There’s no cushion. No parachute. No hidden cartoon trampoline or careful hands wrapping around his waist to drag him back from the plunges that he’s taking bites out of like they’re all midnight secret pleasures.

Remus steps off that solid sturdy ledge and there is no other ending. There’s no way for him to say wait, no way for him to scream hang on, no way for Remus to think I didn’t mean to lose control like this, please let me take it back, please let me kiss Janus one more time, please let me try on Virgil’s sweatshirt just for a second, please let me see that Roman fucking does care just this once—

Remus would know.

They don’t end softly. But they do end.

But hey, maybe that was for the best. Remus had spent his whole childhood choosing who gets to live and die. He’d been selfish and arrogant and Roman Roman Roman and now the universe was telling him he used up all his good will: the headaches and nose bleeds were all warning signs to knock it off and instead Remus flipped a coin in the air and told Janus that he was going to see this through.

((Remus is twenty one and he knew kissing Janus was like letting go of the railing. Is it any surprise that there’s no soft ending to this either?))

Remus’s body had curled on instinct: wrapping himself around the kid— Logan’s kid brother, Remy— so that Remus would hit the ground first and maybe his body would break the fall for the kid so he didn’t die due to Roman’s shitty ass powers and poor Library structural upkeep and Remus’s own stupid part in all this.

He’s never jumped with someone else before. Never had something to hold close as the tattering, violent winds and the heavy iron chain of gravity, and the long, drawn out, endless, breathless space between his heart’s rapid fire beating and none at all, work in tandem to make his last moments the most memorable. But despite it all, Remus’s arms wrap around Remy’s head and the impulse to protectsavekeepalive consumes the last of his mind.

(He can’t be older than sixteen, maybe seventeen, he can’t be any more enamored with his older brother, he can’t be aware yet that all older brothers are shit and they stand at the top of staircases in houses that don’t feel like home and they say I don’t need you, Remus— )

The noise around them turns to static and Remus can’t hear Remy’s scream, but he can feel it in how Remy clings desperately like he hadn’t been fighting to get away like a wild animal less than thirty seconds before.

Remus braces for the floor, for the pain, for the end because he doesn’t have any type of control and there are no soft endings and he was an idiot for ever thinking he’d get to have anything soft in his--

R emu s wak es up thi nki ng abou t sh ards of gla ss in his spine, barbed and jagged and clinging to his insides, because his inner organs are much warmer than the cool night air and much more accepting than the windshield frame.

There’s blood in his mouth, cotton in his throat, a bursting, bulging headache behind his eyes. The rest of his body almost feels like nothing in comparison. His limbs are a distant memory, or maybe a dream? He can’t quite remember what it’s like to have them, even as his left arm wavers in the air over his head and limp and heavy and Remus shakes it just to see if his wrist will fly off and toss his hand into the fuzzy world around him.

He’s lying on the ground.

His spine is still intact by some miracle. His skull isn’t shattered and his brains aren’t spilling across the white porcelain tile floor he’s on. He doesn’t even think his ribs are fractured although they ache and whine with bruises that match every other part of his body. If it weren’t for the dizzy, distant feeling of needing to vomit up all his organs Remus would think he just fucking died and this was his shitty prize in the afterlife.

He blinks a few times trying to… trying to focus his mind on anything. The taste of saliva in his mouth, or the scent of coffee and Lysol hovering in the air, or the pins-and-needles feeling of his fingers twitching as if they had lost all blood circulation in the blank space where Remus’s brain refuses to make any connection as to what is going on, what had gone on, and what is going to happen now.

It’s like scratched DVD in a video player: his memory plays perfect scenes, Blue Ray edition of his tragic life, right up until the floor breaks— until his arms wrap around Remy— until he tries to brace them both for the impact— then there’s a jump-skip-scratch and Remus is staring at blurry, fuzzy drop ceiling tiles and the outline of fluorescent lights that do not belong in the public library that Remus spent all of the night prior memorizing the layout of.

There are desks, a couple dozen, all around him; a giant window, partially weeping condensation and the blinds slightly bent that colors the entire set in a gold-yellow filter; cement brick walls painted a truly inspiring shade of off-white and if Remus squints he can make out pencil sketches of dicks dusting over the closest wall. But the masterpiece that ties it all together is the shitty poster handing right over Remus’s head, staring down at him in some type of mockery.

You miss 100% of the chances you don’t take, it reads. There’s a hockey puck and a net and fine white print of a “Wayne Gretzky” that makes Remus want to claw his skin off.

Remus is twenty one and he’s staring at a shitty drop ceiling feeling like he’s seventeen again and one of Roman’s friends just laid him out in the five seconds the teacher turned her back after the bell rang to release them. Remus’s lungs hurt as he laughs because— because his head swivels around and the cloudy surroundings begin to piece themselves together, creeping out of the fog to say hello, hello, do you remember the worst years of your life, Remus? We remember you!

He is not in a library. He’s not in the library. Remus thinks he’d rather be dead in that library than lying on the floor in a high school classroom.

It’s not even a classroom he recognizes. But the suffocating feeling of his mother forcing his jaw open and the powdered pill taste overwhelms all the other sensations in his disconnected body. The memory of snipped comments from his teachers rings in his ears, living ghosts that Remus hadn’t been able to shed no matter how loudly he’d screamed and hadn’t been able to outrun no matter where he’d gone. His eyes are burning, but he’s certain that if he closes them he’ll wake up again as that same stupid seventeen year old that let Roman’s shitty friends ruin his life on the blind hope that Roman wouldn’t turn out like them too.

Remus had met people who said they peaked at high school, that college had broken their spirits and grinded their souls to dust, that life after schooling was lofty and uncertain whereas high school had been crafted with such rigid rules and a constant social struggle that surpassing expectations had been a breeze that they no longer could grapple with not having. Remus doesn’t know much about normal people, normal lives, normalness, but he remembers very vividly thinking of blood dripping off his lip onto the boys locker room bathroom tile and knowing that he’d met people whose cruelty peaked at high school too.

((Fourteen year old Remus had been excited for high school. Seventeen year old Remus had gripped the edge of a gas station sink debating which hurt worse: getting run over, or knowing that Roman had chosen those asshole high school friends who were going to kill him at a party Remus hadn’t been able to convince him not to go to over his own brother.))

The sterile silence breaks suddenly with a soft snore, and abruptly Remus is very aware that the reason he can’t move the right half of his body is because there’s someone on top of it.

There are no soft ends to freefalls, but Remus’s chin is pressed against the dark curls of Logan’s younger brother who is completely asleep on top of the other half of Remus as if they hadn’t ever been in danger at all. The kid is drooling, lips barely parted, salvia dripping out onto Remus's leather jacket. The fake bomb vest Remus had been wearing is completely crushed, the edges of the cardboard digging numbly into Remus’s ribcage as the kid just curls up on him like a human sized koala.

“What the fuck,” Remus rasps out.

The kid doesn’t stir. Remus uses his still strangely disconnected left hand to shove at the kid’s body, bapping his face just enough to wake him, but the kid’s face scrunches and he nudges his face deeper into Remus’s chest, perfectly content to continue using Remus’s like a giant awkward pillow.

“Kid. Kid. Damnit fuck— Remy.” Remus says. Then louder. “REMY! Fuck, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

He shoves the kid off his right arm in a slow painful movement that is not made easier by the fact that Remus can’t feel anything that had been pinned underneath the kid, but after all the shoving, Remy still just gratefully curls up on the floor as if he found that just as comfortable as a king sized bed in heaven itself, and lets out a drowsy mumble of syllables and goes back to snoring.

Remus’s head throbs distantly as he tries to put anything together, come to some reasonable conclusion, remember if this was some part of Janus’s plan that he cleverly forgot about. He shifts slowly trying to leverage himself into a sitting position and still Remy doesn’t make any move to wake up and start screaming.

There’s a tsunami of panic in the back of Remus’s mind, blocked behind a glass wall made of confusion, just so that Remus can wave to it casually, experiencing microdoses of jitters that usually would have put him into a frenzied state of needing to drive a car into a guard rail. He needs to get up, he needs to find Janus and Virgil, he needs to find out if they’re okay, if anyone is okay, he needs to figure out what the fuck miraculous thing happened to save them both and why Remy then decided to curl up on a known villain, who may or may not be the most wanted man in the country and take a fucking nap.

He needs to— he needs—

They’re both at the back of an empty classroom and had been awkwardly crumpled against the back wall. Several of the desks closest to them are spread in some sort of weird ass pattern which, at first glance, Remus had assumed all teachers who needed to be on pills much more than Remus ever needed to be liked to put their desks in, but at the second, more clear glance, all the desks at the front are lined up in exact rows facing a wall mounted white board with the words “Homework: pg 234, odd problems ONLY!!” printed on it in blue expo marker. In the back closer to where Remus is, the desks were tossed out in some chaotic, nearly artistic design, swirling inward.

But the more Remus looks at it, the more purpose everything has: almost as if someone or something had rolled a giant human-sized, bowling ball into only the third row of seats.

It’s another second before Remus notices that where the figurative bowling ball would have ended is exactly where he just woke up with Logan’s kid brother solidly asleep on his shoulder.

“Ah,” Remus says to an empty classroom. “Fuck.”

Remus isn’t a genius, but well. He can see the future and Janus can shapeshift into animals and Virgil can talk to targeted people on frequencies no one else can hear. There must have been a reason Logan and his brother were both at the FBE.

All of Remus’s bones crack as he stands up, even bones Remus hadn’t been sure he had anymore. His neck aches so dramatically that would have made Roman jealous of its performance and his ribs are certainly whining like a little bitch and the taste of blood in the back of his throat might be real or it might be a side effect of reenacting a swan dive off a hotel balcony in a thunderstorm this time with the supporting cast of a teenager who may or may not be able to teleport on command. The clock on the wall is covered up with a handmade poster stating that a watched clock doesn’t learn math and Remus thinks that he hates this teacher more than he hated any teacher he actually had.

He squats back next to Remy, watching him sleep for a long second, the subtle in….hale and ex….hale steadily unconcerned in all the ways contrary to most people when a sociopath is this close to them. He’s got all the marks of being Logan’s brother, to be honest: the same nose shape, same eye shape, the same hair color although there’s a distinct lack of gel in his hair compared to Logan’s over-saturation. He’s wearing a black, unzipped biker’s jacket, and skinny jeans with white T-shirt that reads “I’m SLEEPING” in Times New Roman Font, like a joke that someone had half heartedly put together and abandoned half way through.

Remus taps his fingers on his knee twice before he makes up his mind. “If you wake up now, I’m going to shove a calculator down your throat.”

And then he starts a quick process of checking the kid’s pockets for his phone. Jacket pockets, inside jacket pocket, jeans front and jeans back as quick and formal as a bouncer at a casino checking someone for bugs. Remy snores deeply, and his breaths even out again and Remus steps back a healthy distance, filled with a relief he’s not going to acknowledge, and holding a slick black iPhone with a kawaii coffee cup hand painted on the case.

It's one thing to be on the FBI’s most wanted list for super villainy. It’s another thing for him to be on the list for the combination of an empty classroom, a sleeping teenager, and Remus’s reputation for being unhinged.

((Seventeen year old Remus remembers a party that he begged Roman not to go to and twenty one year old Remus sucker punches him in the face so he will shut up and stop bringing those memories up.))

The lock screen is a picture of Remy and Logan standing in front of some model spaceship. Logan’s expression is uncharacteristically open and excited, as if he’s experiencing true joy in the face of a hunk of metal. He looks….normal. Human. As if Remus hadn’t watched him die, as if Remus hadn’t feared that smug smirk on his face, as if Remus hadn’t heard Logan use whatever his bullshit superpower was to utterly dismantle all of Remus’s part of the plan, start a gunfight that could have killed them all, and look fucking good while doing it.

Remus could play the logic game here: the back right pocket is where Remus found Remy's phone, so it's a 56.734% or whatever likely that the kid uses his right hand to unlock. But in all honesty Remus “Eeny-Meeny-Miny-Fuck-This”-ed it and chose the right hand.

The kid’s hand is limp and cold as ice. It startled Remus for a whole moment, sending cracks along that glass wall holding back his panic. It if weren’t for the obvious respiratory movements, Remus would have thought he was handling a four-day-old corpse in the middle of a winter snow storm.

But he presses Remy's thumb to the sensor (a very logical finger choice and not at all picked at Eeny-Meeny-Miny-Fuck This again) to unlock it. And then, once Remus has congratulated himself on his very exciting first time hacking the mainframe, he swipes away every. Single. One. Of the billions of notifications the kid has. Even as he's doing it the kid gets fourteen more, each bright and shiny and terrifying to someone who only gets notifications when his phone is almost out of battery.

Instagram reels being sent by four people, text messages from a group of people who don't know how to say everything they need to in one message and aren’t afraid of double-quadruple texting, TikTok videos alerts, gacha game reminders, six calendar notifications for today alone--

The home screen is a selfie of Remy in a big group of kids, all laughing and smiling and holding boba cups and peace signs in the middle of a cafe. It's a bright day in the photo, and several school backpacks shoved under the table as if all the kids had run to this cafe after school on a whim. Probably Remy’s based on how he’s in the middle of it all, looking rather smug for someone who’s personal space had been reduced to a negative.

"I bet you and Roman would get along fucking great," Remus says.

Remus still stares at it for a long minute longer, analyzing the various smiles and fending off the bitter gritty feeling in the back of his throat that comes from nowhere and everywhere all at once.

"Whatever," Remus says, clicking the call button.

Nearly a dozen suggested contacts pop up when Remus starts painstakingly typing Janus’s phone number, with someone having the same number until the very last digit. Remus's thumb hovers over the call button, his eyes flicking to the dutiful clock in the top left corner of the screen (already crowded by new notifications again).

Math has always been one of Remus's more average skills: his perception of time and his ability to count are probably superior to any living being on the planet, but a childhood plagued by the constant visions of the most important person in his life dying meant that his focus had never actually been on his classes. His report card read out half the alphabet, but he especially cheesed his way through his math classes, using a hand full of futures to copy the answers off tests of various studious kids around him, instead of actually learning how the fuck to solve a triangle.

((Remus had been seventeen when Mrs. Copperson had decided to start making him take the her pop quizzes and tests out in the hallways by himself on account that his psychiatrist mandated drugs made him a distraction in her class and Remus liked adding "uck" after the giant red F's she stamped on his papers.))

Still, it throws Remus for a loop, checking the time and then the date because at most he thought he managed to buy Janus twenty minutes of distractions so that he could download the FBE's records and upload a virus that Virgil made which had the defining features of being able to eat through the rest of the system like acid and leave the FBE and Janus’s mother with nothing. When Remus had woken up in the stillness of this classroom it felt like his entire body had been in stasis for eons; a crumpled ragdoll that didn't need bones, left forgotten in the back of a closet or a computer suddenly being booted up but the whole rest of the world didn’t exist anymore thanks to one apocalypse or another.

In fact, Remus thinks that he might have just woken up from the best sleep he's had since he was eight.

But despite the surge of energy, the distant rolling anxiety, the strange suffocating stillness of the atmosphere, and how deep of a sleep Remy is in, the time reads of less than seven minutes since Remus guessed he'd been in the library surrounded by gunshots, clinging to a railing, and facing Roman’s maybe-brainwashed ass.

Remus thinks he might have spent all of it just getting his fucking barring on the new surroundings and the sleeping child and not being dead and buried in a library he’d never stepped foot in before today.

Janus and Virgil probably hadn't even made it out of the library themselves yet, assuming the entire library hadn’t come down with them.

Remus closes out of the call screen, searching through Remy’s apps for a news app that he doesn’t have, before Remus caves and pulls out DuckDuckGo. The top stories are already flashing on the screen: six different news sites with live reporting videos of what is happening at the FBE center in Portland. Remus taps on one that has a frozen picture of Kidnapped Virgil’s panicking face as the thumbnail.

“—et Down! Everyone, get down!” The female reporter is yelling. Underneath her, the border headline of the new site spells out Karen Davenport: Reporter. LIVE ON SCENE. As if the background wasn’t already enough to show what was going on. The tinted glass windows of the library shatter over the frame, and the camera fumbles as the glittering shards dance through the air to the tune of gunfire.

“Are you getting this?!” The reporter yells, caught between fear and excitement. Her hair is frizzing, a strand of it stuck to her pink lipstick, as she crouches with the other reporters and civilians at the front of the crowd, ignoring the police and hired guards and common fucking sense trying to back them away. The camera doesn’t seem to know what to focus on, struggling to jostle between the reporter and chaos in front of them.

Several people rush out of the doors of the library, nearly tumbling down the staircase and into the crowd, screaming. Remus’s heart thunders as he looks at the glimpse of faces contorted in horror for the people he’d recognize or a flash of those blue-grey eyes that no other person in the world has.

“John, are you seeing this?!” the reporter repeats. “I’m here, live at the newly registered FBE headquarters in—”

The camera and the cameraman pitch to the side, disrupted by the chaotic crowd rightened only at the last second before it topples to the ground. Remus has to wonder how much the person behind the screen is being paid, and how they could possibly think it's enough. The bruises on Remus’s ribs ache distantly and his tongue remembers the taste of tear gas and blood and—

By the time the camera rightens again, Virgil is skidding on the platform at the top of the concrete stairs leading up to the front of the shuddering-but-still-standing library. His mask is down, hung around his throat, and displaying his fangs for the world to see. Janus tumbles into him, nearly knocking him down the flight, and his mouth moves in a WE CAN’T LEAVE HIM way although the crowd and the reporter are too loud for Remus to truly make it out.

Virgil grabs Janus by the shoulder, yanking him down several inches and a blast of Patton’s white, power stealing light explodes over their heads in a narrow miss that makes someone to the left of the report scream so loud it peaks the microphone.

“Where is The Prince?!” The reporter’s mic picks up from someone nearby as the camera zooms in on Janus and Virgil arguing. “He was just here!”

“—where it appears a super power aided fight has broken out with no sign of The Prince. Twenty minutes ago, the controversial twin brother of the Prince, previously identified as Remus Regis, armed with a hostage, charged into the building igniting what was sure to be a direct confrontation with The Prince. However, no new information could be captured by our cameras until moments ago when gunfire from inside the building signaled some type of gunfight breaking out. Sources have even suggested that the Mezzanine level inside the building has taken significant damage and gave way— HEY!”

Logan materializes from the side, ripping the microphone away from the reporter with all the finesse of someone who previously owned it. His black jacket is dusted grey with the dust from the collapsed level inside and there’s a scratch along his hand that’s bleeding bright red. Still he shoves the reporter back and brings the microphone up to his own mouth even though his gaze isn't on the Library or the camera.

“The Prince was inside,” he says to the crowd of people still pressed together at the barricade line. “He managed to move fast enough to save all of those underneath the collapse and barely sustained any injuries himself. Statistically—”

“Give that back!” The reporter says lunging at him.

The camera frame latches on to Janus and Virgil as the camera man probably tries to help his coworker get the microphone back. In those precious seconds, Janus’s head snaps over his shoulder and he shoves Virgil back, pushing him down the stairs and towards the crowd and sets himself in front like a human shield. There are too many voices picked up by the reporter's mic— the fight between her and Logan has it jostled in every direction and the confusion must have jostled the settings, but Remus feels his stomach sink all the same when the library doorways fill with those guards and their guns.

“GET DOWN!” Virgil’s voice booms in the area, echoing off the buildings like a scream in a cavern. The rest of the windows in the library and the surrounding buildings shatter at the sudden pressure, the screen of the camera fractures, but it still gives a decent view of Janus throwing off his stolen lab coat, and the acute tips of his wings slicing through his shirt.

Remus feels like he’s underwater. Like he’s stuck floating in space as his arteries burst from the low pressure. Like he’s watching another (and another and another and another and anoth—) future and he can’t change it despite the fact that it's not 3 AM and there’s no thunderstorm and he’s not falling.

Janus’s wings erupt from his back, flaring outwards and unfurling like yellow and black caution tape, covering the civilians behind him like a burning shield. Virgil grabs the nearest person, Logan, and yanks him and the reporter under the cover, under the protection of Janus, and Remus wants to scream at them to forget the people, to leave them, to run, but he can’t breathe around the sweltering terror that sweeps through the open area leaping from the phone screen right into Remus’s chest.

“—police would know better than to fire into the crowd—” Logan’s voice says desperately.

“Oh MY GOD!” The reporter screams.

The light seers into his eyes with crackling, horrific popping noise. It's like popcorn, or Pop Rocks, or the Pen Clicker Douchebag Olympics and all Remus can think of is the noise that the bones in the human bone make when bullets splinter.

The camera does not catch Janus’s face, and the microphone doesn’t catch his screams over everyone else’s, but his body jerks, his wings tremble, and blood sprays up into a mist over the crowd. Remus thinks he might be dying too, thinks that he might have stopped breathing, that he’s seen Janus die a million times and it should have stopped feeling like he’s being ripped open.

“JANUS!” Virgil’s (unmistakable, indisputable) voice yells, sharp and cracking like lightning, and the blowback over the microphones would break the eardrums of anyone listening with earbuds.

“— multiple people have been reported to have survived being shot that many times!” Logan’s voice tries.

The camera gets a single shot of Virgil’s eyes widening, of his mouth opening, of his hands reaching out to Janus as he drops, wings still flared out trying to protect people who were too stupid to leave, who won’t even thank him, who don’t know his coffee order or how he likes to organize his stacks of stolen dollar bills or what size oxfords he likes to wear.

And then Virgil looks up, at the top of the stairs, opens his mouth, and everything explodes away from him. The camera frame flings into the air, swirling around in a epileptic nightmare of colors before slamming into something and the frame goes completely black.

On the news app, holding a phone in both his hands Remus stares at the “[The video you are watching is experiencing some connection issues]” message with white knuckles, but the video stays cut off, the screen frozen and broken and dark and Remus is left drowning during what feels like the end of the world from the other side of the universe a million years after it's happened.

“H-ha,” Remus’s mouth twitches, a rumble clawing up his throat with fingers made of his stomach acids. He desperately covers his mouth with a hand, pressing the meat of his palm into his lips if only to keep the laughter from tumbling out into the air like a freefall because there’s no such thing as a soft end and Remus was stupid for ever thinking so.

He thinks for a moment, that he’s back on that staircase staring at Roman knowing that what he says next is going to be the wrong thing, that he’s on the ground at a mall blinking away visions of flame grilled corpses and words that Janus doesn’t mean, that he’s in a crowd staring at an empty stage seconds and seconds and seconds too late for someone who trusted him more than Remus ever deserved to be trusted.

(How can he always be too late?)

The ground is solid and sturdy under his feet, but Remus is falling anyway. Suspended in the middle of a jump he hadn’t meant to take, his stomach is swooping with the acceleration pressing up into his lungs until he can’t force them to accept any oxygen anymore and his limbs are tingling in that disconnected way that makes them seem like they belong to someone else, something else, somewhere else.

He had fallen asleep, fallen into a wonderful dream, fallen and kept falling and forgotten that the real world didn’t end softly. A scream creeps up Remus’s throat, inch by inch, wriggling and thrashing and tearing horribly against his lungs.

His fingers tremble over the phone, fumbling through the apps for the phone even though he knows what's going to happen, he knows what’s coming, he knows, he knows, he knows.

The buttons are not stiff. Remus’s knuckles are not bleeding and they don’t leave behind traces of his blood as he dials. There’s not a gritty feeling along his teeth and the bottom of his mouth from the Cliff Bar that he ate at a rest stop an entire lifetime ago. His knees tremble to the sound of the ringing, leaving him swaying in the too-long silences, in the bated breaths, in the calm before the hurricane that’s left him at the only survivor when he was supposed to be the only casualty.

The line is ringing and Remus is standing in a high school classroom, shaking apart even though he knows that Janus is not going to answer. The line is ringing and Remus is standing at a payphone knowing that his mother didn’t try half as hard for him as she did for Roman.

The line is ringing and Remus is listening to a generic voicemail and his fingers are canceling the call just to start it again because maybe this time he’ll pick up, maybe this time Janus will huff at him for not believing in him, maybe this time Janus will snap about Remus not following a plan, maybe this time Janus will pick up the phone.

Remus remembered leaving his own phone in his bag, stuffed inside a pair of socks that he stole from Janus the second week they’d been together. He knows he watched Janus leave his in his own bag, grinning as Virgil and him had been bickering about if pumpkins were a fruit or a vegetable. So he knows, he knows, that Janus doesn’t have his on him, that answering a phone call would be the least of his concerns after— five, six, seven— bullets landed in him, that no matter how many times Remus’s fingers dial out the number, Janus still isn’t going to miraculously answer and beg him to come home and call him the wrong name anyway.

He’s twenty one and Janus is not going to pick up the phone call.

He’s twenty one and he thinks he’s been falling for far too long. He’d gotten too used to the jolt of adrenaline and taste of the winds. He’d been treating his four-year fall like a never ending dream that he could live in forever, and now he was waking up with a start in his bed with all his muscles contracting and remembering that the real world is a fucking nightmare.

Remus could have call himself a free fall expert, with all the times that he’s tipped himself over the edge, with how many times he’s merged himself with the concrete sidewalks, with the number of times he’s seen the great THE END to his own story but this… this—

He’s been falling for so long he forgot he’d been falling at all.

“I need to go back,” Remus gasps out.

The idea latches on suddenly, and Remus is suffocating in it, trapped in a void that’s approaching absolute zero at rapid speed. The anxiety swelling around him crashes down like a guillotine’s blade, sharp and merciless in all the ways that Remus has always known the universe to be and forgot anyway.

His hands are shaking and his knees give out but it's fine because he landed next to Remy’s sleeping form. He reaches out and shakes the kid’s shoulder, hard enough to jolt his entire body.

“Kid, Remy. Wake up. You gotta take me back. I need to get back to him.”

Remy's head lulls to the side, his skin an icy cold compared to the burning in Remus's veins. There's no movement behind his eyelids, no sudden jolt that knocks him awake, no grimace of his face or swallowing as he drags himself back to consciousness.

“It’s time to wake up!” Remus says. “You have to take me back!”

Because if he can get back he can— he can— Janus was on the ground, they were shooting at him, Virgil was screaming and Remus can see the future and they need him. If he can get back Janus can tell him what he needs to do to save him and Remus will kiss him and tell him and tell him he’s stupid and he’s sorry he left him. If he can get back— He needs to get back, he has to get back because they need him and Remus pinches hard on Remy’s cheek, but even that doesn’t cause the teenager to flinch.

“I have to fix this. Take me Back! Take me Back There! TAKE ME FUCKING BACK THERE!”

Remus shakes him, and Remy’s head makes a dull thud as it bumps the ground with each shove. Remus barely notices; his brain is counting every second he spends here, scrambling to catch the passing breaths like they're grains of sand in an hourglass counting out Janus's life while Remy dreams so soft and peacefully.

“REMY!”

--There’s no bump or bruise or anything under the dark curls, and Remus doesn’t even have a memory of hitting anything on the way down, not even the fucking floor and so there shouldn’t be shit causing him to be this fucking out of it. Janus was dying and Remus was here with an idiot fucking teenager who was sleeping like they had all the fucking time in the Fucking World. If it weren’t for Logan, if it weren’t for Remy, if it weren’t for Remy’s fucking horrible power that Remus didn’t ask for him to use--

--There’s no bump or bruise or anything under the dark curls, and Remus knows too much about being splattered on the ground to think that they might have hit it like that, to think they might have died, to think that the bitchass kid in front of him is doing anything other than pretending like they have time to pretend to be asleep when Janus just took seven bullets for people who don’t love him and wouldn’t care if he was dea--

--There’s no bump or bruise or anything under the dark curls, and Remus took the brunt of whatever hit they did have, was ready to fucking die when Remy did whatever the fuck he had to get them out of there, wasn’t going to let Remy get hurt and he didn’t get hurt so Remus shouldn’t need to keep shaking him to get him to wake up because they need to get back to Janus who just got shot and shot and shot And Shot AND SHOT and Remus needs to fix it because Janus wasn’t supposed to die, he wasn’t supposed to be alone, Remus promised to stay, promised to help, why aren’t you waking up What is wrong with youwakeup,WakeUp WAKEUPWHATDOESITTAKETOWAKEYOUUPDOYOULIKETHIS?DOYOUTHINKITSFUNNY? STOPMESSINGAROUNDHE’SGOINGTODIEICAN’TFIXITICAN’TSTOPITWHATDIDIEVERDOTOYOU?--

Remus blinks his eyes, just barely manages to stop himself from ramming the kid's head into the porcelain tile floor again.

His hands are around Remy’s head, cupping his ears, and Remy’s limp body is impossibly still, barely breathing and the golden yellow light reflects off the poster over them creating a red hue over his pale skin.

There’s no blood.

Remus can’t breathe anyway. His hands are trembling, his fingers stiff and robotic and bending like metal spoons when he pries them off Remy’s uninjured head. The kid’s skull lulls to the side, a soft huff, another snore, and Remus thinks he’s losing his mind.

The cold silence of the classroom has the walls closing in around them, the cinder blocks exchanging knowing looks because even if Remy didn’t wake up, even if that future— those futures— didn’t happen, even if Remus backs away now and swears never to get near the kid again, the sticky feeling of brain matter on his hands won’t leave.

He can't be older than sixteen.

There’s something in Remus's throat that tastes like blood and feels like live bees and burns like tear gas and hot sauce. He scrambles away from the kid, slamming into a desk so hard that his ribs displace further than the desk does as he flees the room.

((He remembers running through halls like these once, remembers his nose feeling like it was broken when one of Roman’s friends grabbed his hair and slammed his face into his locker after the last bell, he remembers leaving his bag behind in his panic to get away, scrambling on nearly on his hands and knees with blood from his second broken nose trailing down his lip. He remembers the laughter of billions of students as he ran away, and he remembers Roman waiting impatiently at his car later, asking where he was, why he took so long, doesn’t he know that Roman has play practice at the community theater today? Why would you deliberately try to make me late? I’m not even going to ask what happened to your backpack. I should have just left you here, Re. Come on, Let’s go.))

He remembers blood on his hands and on his face and a hundred billion bathroom mirrors that show a person he doesn’t recognize and hasn’t recognized for a long time.

The posters on the walls are colorful smears and Remus wants to drag them down one by one and tear them apart as he runs. His shoes skid on the polished tile and he takes the corner so sharply he slams into the lockers and remembers the sound of a sleeping teenager’s cranium shattering under his fingers.

Remus hits the ground, panting, laughing, choking, crying until the world around him blurs. He’s suffocating on oxygen that tastes like tar, on breaths that congeal in his lungs like molasses, on gasps that harden like stone in his tightening rib cage. It burns worse than a fireball to the face, searing, smoldering, scorching his entire body.

And Remus— Remus can’t— he can’t get it to stop, every inhale throttles in his throat wheezing out through the hundreds of puncture holes in him that match every gunshot wound that Janus is currently dying out from, eons and realms and miseries away, because he believed in a promise that Remus had never been able to keep to anyone.

Stupid, idiot Remus.

Murderous, psychotic Remus.

Sick, sick, so fucking sick Remus.

Who kills— who killed— Roman. Remy. Who got Janus killed and dragged Virgil in this. His parents. Those people at school. Those people on the street. Everyone. All the time. Sick, stupid Remus.

Who can’t just fucking seem to kill himself and make it stick.

Fuck. Fucking Fuck.

He can’t breathe.

He’s aware of every oxygen atom fizzling in the air around him, laughing as he gasps for some type of stability, like he’s on the Mezzanine Level of a library that’s centuries away, feeling the floor crack under his feet and staring at a brother who doesn’t love him and probably never has. His throat is sandpaper and dried stucco and blood and every version of I love you that he never said to his father and when he blinks his eyes, the ghosts of every person he didn’t save, couldn’t save, hadn’t saved, are screaming around him because he can’t do anything right, he can’t save anyone, he’s a murderer and always has been and he’s been pretending this whole time that it was Roman’s fault, but it wasn’t, was it?

It’s just Remus. Sick, stupid Remus. Who should have died getting hit by a silver sedan going twenty over the speed limit instead of Roman.

It would have been better if he had. It would have been right. It would have been— It would have been—

Fuck. It would have been good.

Because if he hadn’t survived, Mom would have never known how to be disappointed, Dad would have never stopped coming home, his friends would have never turned into the monsters that he’d brought out in people. Janus never would have been attracted to a Casino where rumors of a person who never lost were and he never would have died a billion times for something as meaningless as money and Virgil never would have been dragged back into this fight kicking and screaming just to watch his best friend, his lover, his everything die in front of him.

Remus laughs, tears dripping off his chin into the polished floor, splattering over the shadowed silhouette of his reflection. He presses his forehead into the tile, squeezing his eyes closed because if he can’t see— if he can’t see it then— then— fucking then—

It would have been better if he hadn’t been born. All he’s done is ruin things and people and places. He’s brought out the worst pieces of people, like a magnet for every terrible thing that the people he loves are capable of doing: he’s stained through the family portrait and leaving black smears on everything he touches.

He’s seventeen again standing outside Roman’s room staring at a closed door and wondering why Mom didn’t come to break them apart, why Dad hasn’t been home for dinner in months, why the future he saw didn’t line up with what happened and why he can’t stop laughing and why he hurts and hurts and hurts and why Roman seems so certain that he’d be okay without Remus when Remus had given him everything there was to give of himself? Why is he the only one hurting? Why is he always the only one hurting?

He’s seventeen and he’s twenty one and he’s eight and he’s eleven minutes younger than Roman and he wishes that he’d just died instead of growing up.

Because— Because if he stares at his reflection and sees that kid, that stupid idiot sick little kid he’d wrap his hands around his throat and s-squeeeeeeeze just to put him out of his misery because it didn’t get better. Because it only hurts more. Because he wanted to be so right that he stopped listening and maybe those pills had made him better and—

Remus wheezes against the stranglehold on his own lungs, painful and grating and choking as his eyes fight against tears he didn’t give permission to leak out. There’s a person staring back at him in the polished white tile floor, and he looks like a boy who he once saw get run over by— fall off of— dropped a toaster in with— scissors— keys—

A hundred million deaths and Remus didn’t learn from any of them.

There’s a reflection of every person Remus didn’t want to become staring at him and then there’s not because there’s a purple blob covering right where his right eye would be.

Remus gasps for air, sucks in, gulps, and his fingers scrabble over the item: small, round, fits in his palm. His thumb grinds into the imprint on the flat side, his nail chipping along the irregular shape, the irregular grooves, the irregular scratches and gouges and furrows.

The color is plum purple with intersects of off-white eroded with wear until its nearly gray and Remus hysterically remembers bruises on his own skin, on his throat, on his ribs, on his shoulders, on his knuckles. He’s staring through burning eyes, through lava tears, through ashy eyelashes thick with slag and he’s thinking, a coin, a casino coin, a casino chip, a promise made between business partners in a hotel room of a place that housed a million deaths for both of them before Janus’s death had meant anything to him.

There’s a snake on the coin, jaw agape, with fangs on display inviting danger, courting risk, encouraging peril because it’s survived it all anyway. There’s gash across one of the unseeing eyes, notches in the scales, scrapes along the trimming edge from Remus’s special brand of stupid, idiot carelessness, but the dirt and grim has been cleaned from it by Virgil’s gentle, kind hands. There’s a coin in his palm that Janus once bet with, bet on, bet for.

Remus’s lungs ache and weep and Remus squeezes the coin to his chest, and breathes.

His chest shudders in rebellion too short, too quick, and Remus’s fingers ache from how they cling and hold and stay. He breathes, he breathes, he breathes. Even when it feels like he’s trying to move a mountain, even when it feels like he’s trying to climb his way to space, even when it feels like he’s trying to un-bury himself from the grave his family put him in at eight years old.

Remus is twenty one years old and he breathes.

When it stops feeling like he’s drowning after every breath, when the fireburningacidic sense pitters out like a resilient spark being snuffed along hot coals, Remus finds himself sitting against a row of olive green lockers. His head feels cotton stuffed all over again and he uses his sleeve to wipe his face numbly, only managing a wince when he tries to uncurl himself from the ball he coiled into. His spine creaks, twinges, complains and whines and Remus makes an awful noise when he straightens out and takes another look around himself.

Right. Hallway. Highschool. Right.

“Fuck,” Remus rasps.

The hall is empty, and Remus almost laughs at the passing thought of hundreds of students being in the building peeking out of the classroom to see a wanted supervillain having a breakdown in the corridor. He’d be the picture perfect symbol of “Reasons to Stay in School”, and he could almost hear the squeaky voice of a well-meaning, underpaid educator clicking their tongue and saying “And this is what will happen if you don’t clean up your act and focus on passing your classes. Do you want to be this type of embarrassment to yourself?”

Jokes on them, Remus thinks idly. He’d been an embarrassment to himself for so long he didn’t know how to be anything else. He was— is— a mess, the stain and splatter on a blank canvas that ruins it for the artist, the blemish in a glass that causes it to shatter at the slightest touch.

He’s also alone, and not falling, and holding a coin made of a thousand promises. He’s a mess and he’s Janus’s mess.

The thought sends a pain down his throat, an itch that only another round of sobs would satisfy. If he closes his eyes he can picture Janus sitting next to him dressed up in that suit he likes, yellow and gold and dangerous. He can picture those blue-grey eyes that only ever looked at him with kindness, and hear his haughty tone repeating that he does have a poker face thank you very much, and smell the cardamom scent that follows after him like a cloak. If he lets himself sink, he knows he’ll fall into that memory of Janus carding his hands through Remus’s hair, warm and gentle despite all the ways that Remus continued to fuck up.

But he can’t let himself. Remus shakes with his whole body, dislodging the warmth of the anamnesis.

He’s not sure where he is, or what he is, or who he is anymore. But he knows he can’t stay here. He knows he doesn’t want to stay here.

His list of other places to go is short— achingly, brutally short— but it's okay because Remus is not exactly in the mood to do a lot of thinking. He feels like someone came and stole all his skin while he wasn’t looking, like he’s raw and exposed for all the world to see and not in a fun way. The walls aren’t leering at him; they’re sharing side eyes with each other, snickering and whispering about Remus just loud enough for him to know they think he’s irrational and weird.

There’s a chill ghosting along his limbs that he hadn’t noticed before, something plucking at his skeleton, wrapping him in a cocoon of cold. He feels sluggish, and distantly hungry. The thrumming of his headache is back, pounding in his skull like a car alarm someone set off in a hit and run.

He drags himself back to his feet, hugging the lockers as his legs wobble and his vision blurs. It clears after he gives himself a frustrated tickticktick of a second.

He can’t go back to that Library. Remus’s mind creates the picture of it without prompting: the gaping broken structure marked off with caution tape and police officers and all private security; News reporters and cameras flashing because horror sells more than common sense; Roman. The frozen picture left of the news video has Remus’s lungs combusting. How many people got caught underneath? How many people got hurt when Remus managed to get out without more than bruises? There’s a body cooling at the top of a concrete staircase for everyone to see, a martyr made of love for strangers who never fucking deserved it.

If he goes back, walking on his own two feet, he’ll fall to his knees next to that body, and that fall will have so much collateral damage that Janus’s sacrifice would mean nothing.

He can’t go to Virgil’s apartment again. Remus knows that like he knows he can’t trust himself to drive a car without losing track of the speed limit. If he thinks too long about Virgil’s apartment, he’ll remember what Janus’s lips taste like, what level of softness Virgil’s clothes feel like, what warmth and safety and hope could be like, and the stability that is keeping Remus’s feet underneath him will give away. If he goes to Virgil’s apartment he’ll remember everything that could have been and he'll try to figure out he's supposed to do without....without.

And if then he’ll tumble off Virgil’s little balcony and the thing that crawls out from the splatter— because something will crawl out— will take a retribution in pieces from every person it sees after that.

((His bones are humming, rumbling, vibrating with the horrible horrible urge to go anyway.))

He can’t go back to the hotel room he shared with Janus just three days ago, before Roman had reappeared, before the world knew his name, before Janus was Janus and before Remus let himself admit that he wanted to be loved like loving him wasn’t a fucking nightmare that got people killed. For all Remus knew the organization of the parking lot, and the sounds of the city at night, he couldn’t remember the name of it as much as he could remember the taste of rain during a thunderstorm.

He breathes. Forcibly.

Remus is awake, jolted out of a dream he didn't know he'd been in and now he doesn't recognize his surroundings anymore and doesn't think he can fall back asleep ever again.

There's no Idahoan Mall. There's no stolen cars with seats reclined enough for Remus to throw his feet on the dash. There's no generic diner with waitresses that will scream over a kiss. There's no casino with sparkling chandeliers and smiling strangers waiting to be business partners.

That’s nothing new. Remus hasn’t had a stationary place to stay since he was seventeen. He slept in cars and in back alleys and hotel rooms he jimmied the lock to. He hitchhiked his way from the east side of the country to the west with nothing but a bag of two outfits and a pair of boots he stole.

Now he’s twenty one and doesn’t even have a bag.

Well. Remus blows out a breath. He doesn’t have his bag yet. The fragments of the plan are coming back to him, like broken puzzle pieces: Janus had drafted up the entire thing on the napkins on Virgil’s coffee table until Virgil had relented into giving him paper. For all that Virgil had been stubborn about not being involved, he’d been drawn into the planning phase like a comet falling into a blackhole, vetoing ideas left and right as a one man council and poking holes in others like he’d been possessed by a bored second grader left alone with a hole puncher and a stack of report cards.

Janus had picked out Linda Maddock the chocolatier and her daughter as his own way in (after several arguments over how to approach the situation: Janus had wanted to give the mother plausible deniability by not telling her at all, and Virgil’s voice had found a pitch that could make glass shatter), and negotiated Remus’s way in with an antsy vampire who didn’t like the idea of having all those eyes on him for such a long time (a whole five minutes). After about an hour of pointless back and forth, Remus had stepped in to personally promise that Virgil wouldn’t be the center of attention for more than thirty seconds; Remus would steal the show himself or he’ll brighten the ever present spotlight on Roman. Virgil had been soothed with promises of being labeled as a victim of a horrible kidnapping, and subsequently forgotten after he’d been “saved” just like all of Roman’s other damsels-in-distress.

“Alright, fine. Fine! Stop looking at me like that!” Virgil had said, chewing on his lip with his fangs. “You both have a way in. How are you idiots going to get back out? Other than in body bags after this blows up in your faces.”

They had a bunch of contingency plans for their exits. The first was if everything went according to plan and it meant that Janus would sneak his way out through the back entrance of the library and then welcome himself in from the outside through the front for the cameras to catch, swooping in to drag Remus out before anyone could figure out what happened. It incorporated time for Janus to throw a few misleading comments about where he’d been, and for him to flash a smile at the cameras, both of which Janus had insisted were non-negotiable points for himself and Remus had kissed him for it.

If Janus got found out and an alarm got pushed, he was to ditch the flashdrive entirely and get himself out by any means, Remus would leverage the bomb threat over Roman and the security until he got outside and then Janus would find him and fly them to safety. If Janus didn’t meet up with him again (meaning he got caught or injured enough that he couldn’t heal), Remus was supposed to use the crowd to get away, stealing what hats and other clothes he could until he was a few streets away and felt safe again. If no alarm went off but Janus wasn’t appearing for their escape, (meaning that something worse than being caught or injured was going on) then Remus was supposed to ditch entirely, use the crowd to escape, and let Virgil figure out what happened.

If Roman called Remus’s bluff immediately, the whole plan was to be ditched and both him and Janus were to leave by any means possible.

If Dragana Witchall appeared at any point, the whole plan was to be ditched and they’d escape by any means possible.

If aliens attacked—

Remus is pretty sure they had everything covered except for what to do when Logan steps forward and steals the whole show. Revealing the bombs were fake, incentivizing the gunfight with innocent civilians around, having Remus suddenly outnumbered and forcing Virgil out of hiding just to save his life…Remus hands shake thinking about freefalls.

In every version of the plan they said goodbye to Virgil at the library, never to see him again, but amidst the gunfire Remus had hesitated leaving him there and it had caused their escape opportunity to explode into fragments and bring the Mezzanine level down on their heads literally.

But also in every version of the plan, their place of residency to lay low after it all is a motel several counties away that Virgil drove to after he’d done the honors of tossing the molotov cocktail through the library window at nine thirty and checked into and left their bags at.

So. That’s where Remus’s best bet is to gather his unstable, unsteady, un-fucking-believable thoughts and figure out what to do next. The Motel. He can get Janus’s things. He can get his own things. He can figure out a plan to get Janus’s body back and he can bury it somewhere safe and gentle and and and—

He takes a step away from the lockers he’s leaning against and the batshit fucking insane amount of exhaustion yanks at his bones. As if someone amped up the gravity on earth and Remus was the only one to get the fucking memo, or maybe the one who fucking cared to notice all the hard work the universe was doing.

The thought nearly drags a laugh out of his abused strained lungs: wouldn’t that be grand? If the universe took gratitude that Remus was paying attention to it and decided to repay it with even the tiniest smidge of kindness? Wouldn’t it be amazing to wake up in a few seconds and realize his entire life was just one nightmare that never happened? Wouldn’t it be fucking fantastic if he could shed this reality the same way he shed every single one of his deaths?

The more he looks around the less the hallways mimic the ones that he’d grown up in: the brick pattern here is off-white and green and he grew up with gold and reds and blacks, the walkways are wider, polished and there’s no graffiti on any lockers that point out exactly who everyone had collectively decided didn’t belong. The lack of real color has him feeling off-balanced and the haze of weariness has his footsteps dragging like a dream he didn’t remember entering: there’s a taste in the air that reminds him inexplicably of being in the middle of a crowd and seeing flashes of white light wrap around him until there’s nothing left of the world he knew.

He only barely knows where he ran, barely realizes that he’s retracing his blurry fuzzing panicky paces until he’s nearly walking right by the only classroom with an open door.

Remy is still laying there, on the floor, unharmed and asleep, chest rhythmically lifting and falling with a deep unconsciousness. It feels like no time has passed, like all the time has passed, like the world is gone and they’re the only ones left, and at any second Remus will turn around and find a billion people behind him watching and waiting to prosecute him for the mistake he makes.

He hovers in the doorway, hands dragging along the fringe of his shorts, and fingers catching on his fishnets. His feet are waiting to walk away, to sing adios as he leaves the kid right there, to forget about the feeling of brain matter on his hands and the shine of blood on the off colored brick walls.

No one would have to know about a future that didn’t happen, and he could keep running away.

But Remus can’t help thinking of the snippets of blurred futures where Remy got shot in that library for the crime of being behind Remus when he dodged and how Logan screamed like the world was ending. Remus can’t help but think of a home screen of a boy surrounded by more people than Remus can count. Remus can’t help thinking that people would miss the kid in front of him more than they had ever missed Roman Regis’s weird younger brother.

“Okay,” Remus says to himself. “Okay.”

He’s not Janus. He’s not a shield to defend against attacks, throwing himself forward without a hesitation to take the brunt of something he won’t survive. He’s not and never has been, but if Janus were here he could never leave this kid to wake up alone after dying or near dying or almost dying or dying-but-not-this-time or not-dying-but-I-thought-I-was. Remus is not a comfort, but even he wouldn’t wish that feeling on anyone.

He shoves his way into the classroom before he can think anymore. The desks flinch apart with a little persuasion from Remus’s hands, jolting like they’re afraid of him, of what he did to Remy, of what he could do again. The small shrieks of noise pick and pluck at Remus’s resolve, until he’s moving on adrenaline and animal brained instinct only.

((There’s a phone on the ground, face down, with a coffee cup winking up at him, and Remus’s hands shake as they pick it up. It’s not covered in blood and his hands are not sticky and there’s a billion notifications dinging on the screen and not a single one talks about a murder that just happened on live TV to a man whose last act was trying to protect people.))

But he can’t think about that. He won’t think about that. He told himself not to think anymore, and so he doesn’t, not until he has Remy’s arm pulled over his shoulder and he’s dragging him towards the hallway again, and then after that, the only thing Remus is focusing on is getting them both to somewhere far, far away.

[Next Chapter]

#deja vu au #Remus sanders #Janus Sanders #Remy Sanders #Lets goooooo #sanders sides #demus #dukeceit #tw: panic attack #TW: temporary character death #Remy's existence is enough to get him into Situations(TM)#That Feral Type of Love That Makes You Commit Crimes

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greenninjagal-blog · 10 months

Text

Deja Vu pt 11

Alright! Let’s do this!

If you’re new around here you can find the first chapter [here] or if you just want a refresher you can find the previous chapter [here!]

Summary: Like most plans Remus and Janus’s have, this one starts off really great!

Word Count: 13351

Read on Ao3 || Hero Worship Series || My General Writing Masterlist

“I fucking hate you,” Virgil snarls under his breath, as Remus (lightly) shoves him in the direction he needs to walk. He’d given up kicking and screaming about seven blocks and ten subway stops ago, after Remus had (not lightly) acquainted a concerned citizen who had stopped them with his fist, but Remus thinks he might have still been (very not lightly) biting out of sheer spite , if it weren’t for the cute little face mask Remus shoved on his face before manhandling the reporter out of his own apartment.

“You and Janus can rot in fucking hell together, assholes!”

“I love when you talk dirty to me, honey,” Remus says to him, grinning with all his teeth on display, sharp and pointed and freshly brushed with Virgil’s own shitty Aquafresh toothpaste that tasted like every type of bad mint flavor put together as a brilliant new torture method. “Now keep quiet and be more scared.”

“I should have just fucking killed you, you motherfucking, insane— ”

Remus pinches him sharply in the side as a warning and his clever and completely accurate description yelps off into some even more creative swears.

Honestly, Remus would have loved to hear the rest of Virgil’s thoughts about him. It had been interesting to watch Virgil lose every ounce of his respect for Remus as Janus had started laying out the details of his plan; Interesting in the same way Remus thinks that watching someone perform an autopsy on his still-living body might be interesting, in the way that being buried alive in wet cement might be interesting, in the way that naming each piranha that takes a bite out of his limbs migh13t be interesting.

As far as plans that Janus had, this was shaping up to be one of Remus’s favorites already. The details were tedious and extensive, much more than Janus’s plans usually were, although with the way that Janus kept glancing at Remus throughout it Remus could understand why he was going so overboard with their timeline and plannings. The usual safety net they operated with (aka Remus’s fucked up power) was showing to have some decently large holes in it and those weren’t just put there with Roman’s shitty Probability scam.

Virgil’s face had gone from pale to deathly pale to walking corpse pale in the matter of minutes.

Apparently not only watching Remus nod along to Fun Ideas, but also listening to Remus contribute to what is Absolutely the Best Idea They Have Ever Had was where Virgil had drawn his line in the sand and refused to cross it. But that was okay.

Virgil’s role did not exactly include him needing to be cooperative with it. Which Janus had planned for. Because he was amazing and Remus was in love.

And while part of Remus (the same part that still loved Roman for no reason, the same part that urged him to call his mother no matter how much it would hurt, the same part that was very clearly sadistic and wanted him dead in the slowest most painful ways) was rejoicing at things going back to normal, the vast majority of his psyche that wasn’t already busy swooning over how normal Janus had looked waking up in the bed next to Remus, was mourning the loss of that good happy ending for him, Janus, and Virgil that had almost seemed possible for a whole, entire second.

Remus kinda hates himself for thinking it could have been a thing, for scanning through Janus’s face to wonder if he also felt like they had taken all the wrong turns and missed the exit to that future where Virgil stays with them, chooses them, believes that together they have something that’s worth all the scary parts for.

“Remus— Remus wait— please you don’t have to do this— ” Virgil starts again, barely more than a murmur over the crowd that is around the target building. He digs his heels into the ground, but Remus just drags him along, elbowing their way through the thickets of people that apparently have nowhere else better to be and nothing better to do than gawk. The cameras are flashing, reporters from all the local news stations and a few national ones talking over each other, poster wavers protesting and applauding just about everything that can be protested and applauded, and despite it all, no one stops Remus or Virgil.

No one even looks at them twice.

“Listen to me, dickhead! There’s still time to turn back and tell Janus he can— ”

Remus’s skin feels like it might be radioactive, like he’s glowing, burning, bristling and boiling all at once and there’s not a single person who knows it. The last time he was in a crowd, it nearly killed him without anyone ever knowing what sort of things he could do, what sort of liar Roman could be, what sort of tragedy had bleed from their veins onto a car hood at 3AM.

The noise vibrates through his soul, into his bones, into his blood and it prickles the back of his neck in the way that a baby bird might get right before it’s sucked into the jet engine turbine of an economy class passenger plane.

He grips Virgil’s shoulder tightly, like a tether, pushing him along so that if Remus gets swallowed, Virgil will be right there with him. For better or worse or Death.

“Oh my god!” Someone right next to them says, her camera inches from Remus’s face, sparkly nails glittering in the rare sun, right as he gets near the front of the line— because there’s a fucking line, jeez— elbowing at least six people who didn’t have the brains to not be outside right now. “You’re that guy! Oh my god, you’re— !”

Last time he was in a crowd, they didn’t know who Remus was. This time the crowd is going to learn how to mind their fucking manners.

“Hey Roman!” Remus yells, dragging Virgil right in front of himself. “KNOCK KNOCK, MOTHER FUCKER!”

He gets maybe a second to see Roman’s face, the way his eyes jerk up on instinct at the sound of his name, the way that his mask hides most of his expression but not enough because he sees Remus and his mouth open in a rounded ‘o’ shape and his hand shifts to his rapier handle and, and, and.

And then Remus is shoving his boot into Virgil’s back and kicking his hostage directly in Roman, and sending them both through the propped open doors of the grand, sparkling Public Library that the FBE had commandeered.

“This party looks boring,” Remus says loud and clear and maybe a little too excited for the flashing cameras and the screaming fans and the fight as he stands at the top of the flight of old granite stairs. “Don’t worry, I brought some toys to spice it up!”

The news reporters surge like a tidal wave, the citizens stir up in the whirlpool of noise and signs. The police were already on site, keeping the nice little barrier between the building and the crowd so that brave souls could walk up to greet their grand hero, but the police saw Remus go toe-to-toe with Roman and everyone remembers that it ended with Remus holding a gun to Roman’s begging face.

The fear that wafts off them tastes like tear gas and his own burnt flesh.

Behind him, further in the building was already a commotion as Virgil hit the ground limbs tangled in Roman’s, scrambling away the best he can when his arms are tied behind his back with a truly insulting amount of duct tape—Janus had found it in one of the drawers in Virgil’s kitchen while Remus had held him down with a great deal more delight than he should have had. The tumble probably left him with spotted bruises, maybe a sprained wrist, but it doesn’t matter much because the farther back he tosses himself with reckless abandon leaves him crashing into Zeal as well.

Patton Hart. The name sounds made up, bizarre and foreign in the way that Remus can’t explain so matter how long he spends staring at the high school picture online. He looks like someone, and also like no one; a combination of every friend that had chosen Roman over Remus and somehow that makes Remus feel absolutely nothing at all.

Patton melds out of the bookshelves and crowd like some concerned civilian and not someone who would commit war crimes if he was told not to think too much about it. Virgil lands almost completely in Patton’s arms, throwing all his weight into him, because he figured out about twelve hours ago that Remus is far more insane than the heathen who wears socks with sandals and shoots down innocent people during a riot.

Roman barely manages to roll back to his feet before Remus is strolling towards him grinning in a way that makes the handful of privately hired guards that were “helping” provide security to such a high profile location train their guns on him. They’re stationed strategically around the building, in more places than Janus had predicted: four along the back wall flagging the large stained glass windows, three at the check-in counters with the “doctors” two on either side of the main doors and another two on the mezzanine level above. It’s enough to make people think twice about causing trouble. There were probably more in the conference rooms where the actual testing was going on but those weren’t Remus’s concern.

They would have...other problems soon if they weren’t already facing them now.

Just like Janus said, none of these hired guards would dare start the fight themselves; not without Roman acting first, not without certainty that Remus would go down without a problem.

And considering how the last fight almost ended (back before Remus had even a theory of what Roman’s power was), if Remus had been in their boots he’d be scared too. He’d be terrified of what a monster a Sibyl could be, what types of things they could know about him, what types of futures they’d woven out of existence. The fear would clot in his arteries until he was unable to so much as twitch his finger to pull the trigger.

“HELP! SOMEONE, HELP!” Virgil screams, hints of his sonic power turning the air to static around them. “HE’S GOT A BOMB!”

Oh, yeah. And there’s that too.

((Remus is twenty one. He’s seen people shriek over thousands of dollars worth of casino coins spilling across a playing table, seen people scream over a flambeed corpse exploding out of a jewelry shop without warning, seen people screech over a body falling from a balcony onto a car windshield at 3AM, seen people panic in a riot started on a stage by a careless superhero; and still somehow the pitch of the yelling and chaos nearly catches him off guard, reaching a crescendo that even violins in a classical symphony in a stolen car in a future that Remus didn’t choose failed to top.))

Roman stutters in his steps, unsure and doubtful and Remus shimmies his hands into the air, clearly showing off the one empty hand and the other very much full hand, spreading his jacket open so that everyone can see the vest he put together late last night, between pressing kisses into Janus’s mouth just because he could.

“Ah, ah, ah,” he says loudly and proudly and completely unhinged in every way that everyone who ever knew him had expected him to turn out. His hands aren’t shaking but he thinks they should be absolutely quivering with the urge to ruin the surprise before anyone’s properly had time to be scared, before Roman’s had a chance to dig his own grave, before Remus has been able regret not kissing Janus one more time.

There’s a guard to his left, finger on the trigger, mouth in a firm line think, think, thinking.

Remus beams. “You aren’t going to like what happens if you take that shot. Even in your best dreams, Princey boy can only maybe save a few of you and even then the building is firewood. That’s the problem with old places like this.”

He can’t see their eyes from under their visors— these faceless, emotionless people who could be anyone and anything from Remus’s own mother to Kyle from that casino who never found out that Remus’s bites when he kisses— but the stiff lines of their mouths make it clear they at least aren’t as trigger happy as the police were during the riot. The emblem on their shoulders is strange and threatening and very much not a good sign according to Janus: the white lotus flower looks very out of place on the deep navy blue padding and creates an interesting dichotomy to their violent, deadly weapons. Remus stares them down with his best smile.

“But hey, I mean a 60:40 split ain’t bad!” he says. “There’s what, twenty people in here? That means about 12 people get out and the rest of us get to have an explosive end to all our days! A real bang! But of all the ways to go, I can tell you being blown up is pretty lame. Personal experience talking here: it’s over far too quickly for anyone to properly scream about it!”

“REMUS!”

There was a time when Remus was six-seven-eight years old and the sound of Roman yelling his name meant that it was going to be a good day. There was a time when Remus was nine-ten-eleven and believed Roman called his name from love, that it was them against the world, that when Remus had nothing he would still have the brother he refused to let leave him behind. There was a time when Remus was seventeen years old and Remus would have given anything for Roman to say his name the way he used to and all he got was “I don’t need you!”

This is none of those times and Remus feels the ache of the years apart like a physical pressure in the air. Roman is there— Remus’s neck cracks when he turns his head to look at his twin— looking just the same as he was a few days ago: like a cartoon character pulled into the real world with only one obnoxiously white outfit that makes him memorable and wounds that don’t stick past a few audience laughs. Topped with a red mask, red boots, red sash— red like the blood in both their veins that doesn’t have a single difference because they both have superpowers and Remus never should have been treated differently and Why is it so hard to just believe me for once?

There’s no hints of the wounds that Remus left on him: no bandages on his forehead from the gash that had bled over his eyes, no bruising from Remus’s shoe going into his cheek, no scratch marks or scuffs on his clothes to suggest that they had ever been in a fight. Almost as if Roman would tell him that the fight a million cameras caught and streamed nationwide had never happened at all and Remus was just sick.

“And if it isn’t the man of the hour!” Remus calls with enough bite that the room seems to chill. “Hiya, Ro! Can I just say, congratulations on day three of trending on Twitter! The number two spot isn’t bad; although you aren’t used to being number two, are you? I know I’m not used to being number one!”

“Are you insane?!” Roman snaps out. His hair is gelled today, although his quick tumble knocked a bit of it out of place, so he looks like Baby’s First Prom Night With A Girl Who Asked Him Out As A Joke That He Still Thinks Is Genuine. The white of his outfit is offensive on all levels, the red accents just enough of a shade off from blood red that Remus wants to fix it for him by actually making him bleed! The golden tip of his rapier is out and ready for a fight but even with the long range, Remus is hilariously out of reach.

Maybe if Remus had come in with a gun, with a sword, with a knife or a smoke grenade it would have been a good fight, a good chance to bash his head in again and figure out if he would feel bad about Roman dying after all.

But that’s the beauty of how Janus’s mind works isn’t it? He almost laughs.

“Didn’t we already cover this conversation, Roman?” He asks, grandly. “Come on, it's like you don’t know me at all!”

He sweeps his hands in the air, watching the way that Roman’s eyes track the remote in his hand with a focus and intensity that borders on panic. The ridiculous mask on his face might be enough to keep the public in the dark about his inner thoughts, but Remus could read Roman like a picture book: creased lips hiding the way he’s nearly biting his tongue to remind himself to keep a calm face, wrinkle between his eyes that point to him running through all the different way that he might be able to save the day heroically, a twitch of his hands that imply he’s still not very good at following directions.

At the very least Patton is keeping an eye on the crowd (twenty, Remus thinks, all with various powers or weapons and all nervous and unsure about how this is about to go and who are about to be tested in ways they have never been prepared for) that they have trapped in the building, keeping them calm with low toned orders of back up! and we’ll handle this! We’re professionals! Virgil seems all too happy to have someone else handle things: even with his hands still bound he has no problem melding back with the other hostages, still struggling at the duct tape, out of sight and out of mind. Roman doesn’t even flick his eyes over to check on any of them, as if he could magically make Remus forget anyone other than him exists through sheer force of a stare.

It feels ridiculously familiar, in the painful, stabbing way that everything that reminds him of their childhood feels painful. If he blinks at the wrong second, Remus will wake up and find himself on the school playground again after he told the wrong kid to stop running before he ends up slamming his head on the asphalt and that kid decided to take offense with Remus’s face for it.

Remus doesn’t remember the name of that kid anymore, or their hair color, the sound of their voice or the feel of their tiny stupid fist or what shards of his skull Remus had gotten to see. He remembers that Roman hadn’t been there when all the other kids had started backing up and watching with excitement that someone was finally, finally going to shut Remus up and none of the teachers stepped in until the fifth fist had landed.

He wonders if somewhere out there that kid without a name is maybe realizing that Remus wasn’t lying about seeing him die. He wonders if that kid would feel sorry about punching him until the teachers had to pry him off Remus. He wonders if Roman really did feel sorry about not stopping it like how he had said he felt when he was helping Remus press ice packs to his body afterwards.

He wonders if Roman remembers that day at all.

“Remus,” Roman says. “Give me the switch. Please.”

“So polite,” Remus croons.

“Remus, you don’t need to blow yourself up— ”

Remus laughs. “Oh this?” Remus says waving to his vest. “Nah, this was just for laughs. I had some Christmas lights around…You know! Reusing! I care a lot about the environment. My whole outfit is completely thrifted except for the parts that are not! But no, the real bombs are up there.”

It doesn’t take anyone more than a few seconds to see them once Remus has nudged their attention upwards: the handful of flashing blinking red lights littered across the grand opulent ceiling, at the junctions that would bring down the whole flaming ceiling on them all, clinically tested by Remus. Someone screams and its fucking music to Remus’s ears. The air buzzes with panic that just barely avoids setting off the charges with electrostatic-physics-pseudo-magic. Remus meets Virgil’s gaze head on, and nearly laughs at how Virgil leans back into Patton’s very capable, altar boy arms and desperately tries not to throw himself into an unfortunate panic attack that might get them all killed when his sonic waves interfere with the delicately placed devices.

“How…?” Roman says, flustered, red faced, and rightfully horrified.

“I know a guy, you might have met him, he goes by the name Basilisk. Tell me if this rings any bells but he can turn into literally any fucking animal, excuse my French. Public Library schematics are easily found online— bet you didn’t think that through when you chose this place to set up shop, right? And really who didn’t spend their formative teen years trying to build things that blow up? The only actual hard part of all this was tying the bombs to my sexy squirrel boyfriend so he could sneak in through the skylight.” Remus says, eyeing the nails on his free hand, tsk-ing at the chipped nail polish he hadn’t had time to fix while preparing everything for this moment.

Roman doesn’t really flinch, but the tip of his rapier inches upwards at the mention of Janus’s self-picked name, and his teeth grit together just barely short of a sneer that offends every part of Remus on a spiritual level.

“I was here last night— ”

“Yeah, you were dealing with the molotov cocktail that was thrown through the window over there at…. nine thirty-seven give or take a few seconds,” Remus jerks a thumb over to the window that had been shattered and boarded up by the time that anyone had actually woken up for the day. “Really, this is a public library, Bro. What will the public think when they hear you didn’t even have the firemen come check the building out last night? And that instead of closing it down for today, like it should have been after an event like that, you went ahead and gave me twenty three shiny little hostages! And then we wouldn’t be having this conversation and I wouldn’t be trying to find a reason not to…let go of this button.”

Behind him, Patton, or Zeal, or Whoever He Was, whispers something to Virgil and steadily lets go of him, only glancing back once to make sure that Virgil won’t drop to his knees and brain himself on the polished wooden floors. It's a close call from the light buzzing in the air that makes Remus think of TV static.

“Prince,” Zeal says warningly in a way that was probably meant to be a mumble but the staunch silence of the library crafted it into a local announcement. “There are people in the back conference rooms having their evaluations done.”

“Oh yeah!” Remus agrees, “Two individuals and a mother with her seven year old daughter. I can even speed up the process for you: Linda Maddock makes really great chocolates, her daughter is super sweet and I hope that the first person stupid enough to break her heart gets eaten by a panther considering her daughter can speak to animals. But honestly they freak me out, you know? I mean, a parent who cares about their child? I wouldn’t know what to do if that were me.”

Something flashes through Zeal’s face, short and fast and Remus thinks it might have been something like pity. Remus’s body aches from a riot that he almost didn’t survive, his eyes burn from tear gas that had been avoidable, his tongue itches with all the things he wants to tell Patton Hart to do with his pity.

“That information is confidential,” Roman says in a hard voice. “How did you know— ?”

“I know a lot of things! In case it wasn’t clear before, I can see the fucking future,” Remus says. Roman shifts a foot forward, and Remus holds up the mechanism again in case his ridiculously short minded brain forgot what exactly Remus was holding over all their heads. Literally. “Though, you’ve got everyone so fucking sure they really are still back there. Where did you get your magical power scientists from, Roman? Where are their licenses? I’ve seen drug dealers with better certifications than these guys and that’s after I hacked the FBE records to find out who would be hosting these registration interviews.”

Remus chances a glance toward Virgil, who seems to freeze like a twenty year old Remus in an eighteen wheeler's headlights. One of the other civilians must have crept over as a silent bequest of Zeal because they were working at trying to quietly undo the duct tape now.

“I hope you get shot,” Virgil hisses, although from the lack of reactions from everyone around him Remus guesses that it was a display of Virgil’s frankly impressive sound control. A special secret message for Remus and Remus alone.

Remus winks at him and turns back to Roman. “How do you know they didn’t shuffle each of those people off into a big white van out back? How do you know those people who trusted you aren’t screaming your name right now? How do you know any of them are coming back through those doors, Roman?”

Someone is crying. Remus would feel bad, if only he hadn’t grown up being told his tears were pointless and changed nothing and didn’t make anyone feel better. His fingers ache, pinpricks of pain that feel exactly like needles being methodically slid into each of his digits.

For a moment, he thinks about just opening his hand, letting go of the remote, and watching Roman’s face go from defensive to horrified to scared-out-of-his-mind. Something to pay back for the years and years and years of terror he inflicted on Remus. An end, The End and Remus wouldn’t ever have to worry about figuring out his own emotions about a brainwashed, dumbass brother.

“Nothing is going to happen,” Roman says, very heroically. “Nothing like that is— is that what you think I’m doing here?! Kidnapping people?! You rigged the building with bombs because you think I’m kidnapping people?!”

He sounds like Remus suggested he play an extra in a Broadway musical instead of the lead. He sounds like he doesn’t think Remus is actually dangerous. He sounds like he did right before he told Remus that nothing bad was going to happen at that party four years ago.

He sounds like he still thinks Remus doesn’t have a power. So sure, so certain, so indigent.

“What is it about his face that makes you people trust that?” Remus asks. “Do you even hear him? Roman, do I need to spell it out? Big Shadow Government. Preppy Dancing Monkey. A list with the names and addresses of everyone who has an ability and what it is.”

“For getting resources to those that might need it!” Roman says.

“Oh yeah, definitely not so certain people might go missing in the middle of the night. Do you also fall for Nigerian Prince phone call schemes, too? What’s your social security number?”

“What do you want, Remus,” Roman says, dangerously, less like a question and more like demanding permission to punch him in the face. Less like the actor Remus had spent seventeen years building up and more like the person who had thrown it all back in his face. Less like this façade he’d convinced everyone else is real, and more like who Remus knew he was underneath.

“Prince,” Zeal, Patton, whoever, says softly, warningly, nervously. It almost sounds like “please don’t do something stupid” and “when do I start getting paid for being your babysitter Roman?” and “why do you always get to be the center of attention when I’m just as morally unethical?”

“Stay back,” Roman tells him, with all the authority of a man who doesn’t believe a black hole would be able to kill him and Remus definitely wants to see what he would do.

“What I want,” Remus bites out, “is for you to be dead in a ditch, so disfigured that no one recognizes you and no one will remember you. But seeing as you’ve been on international TV parading around bullshit and dumbassery, I’m settling for you being dead and everyone hating you as much as I do.”

As if waiting for the right moment, the civilian helping Virgil finally manages to break through the duct tape and free him. Remus tenses his shoulders, bending his knees just so that if Virgil takes a flying lunge at him Remus can maybe dodge before his head is slammed through the polished wooden floor for all this.

But in the end Virgil just glowers at him like they hadn’t just spent three days together, practically roommates except that Remus has never paid rent before in his life and is not about to start. He looks pale and sweaty but otherwise content to slip further and further away from Remus, from the stage he’d built, from the spotlight that Remus is certain will burn them all one day (maybe even today). It really was a shame finding out that he had opinions on Self Preservation and feared Death like it was something he could avoid forever if he never did anything slightly upsetting; Remus would have loved to see what other things that voice of his could do.

But then the civilian who was helping Virgil stands up again and Remus thinks that maybe it would have been better if Virgil had knocked him into his next life.

"Oh," Remus says, because he can’t forget a death even if he tries; it doesn’t matter who it is, when it is, where it is, Remus remembers, remembers, remembers when no one else will.

Sharp angels, pale skin, jet black hair tousled by the short sudden panic of the crowd when Remus had made his entrance but Remus only remembers all of that highlighted by humid rain and street lights of a road that he had never walked before. The man’s eyes are bright and blue and narrowed in suspicion through thick lenses with a finger print on them and Remus memorized the sound of construction workers, the feel of a weightless free fall, and the taste of a name he's never spoken.

Maybe it’s destiny, if Remus believed in something as benevolent as that. He squeezes the deadman's switch so hard he almost thinks he crushes it.

"Ain’t this interesting!” He says. “A dead man walking! Future corpse! How’s your life going, Logan?”

The other people shy away from Remus's sudden target, but Logan merely tips his head to the side without an ounce of fear towards the situation he’s currently in. There's less than ten feet between them, the ceiling rigged with all sorts of flashing lights that he and Janus spent a decent amount of time orchestrating; there's no reason he shouldn't be afraid, there’s no reason that he should know that he dies somewhere else some time else, there’s no reason that Remus should like that.

Unafraid people do unexpected things. Unafraid people think they know everything. Unafraid people tell Remus he can’t see the future and then ruin his life a million times over because they don’t know what it’s like to feel blood between their fingers and realize that every death is preventable if Remus kills himself enough for it and somehow that makes his life worth less than theirs.

"Is there something you need from me?" Logan asks neutrally. "Or rather any of us here. I believe that if you have drama to work out with... whatever The Prince is to you, then you have no need to keep any of the rest of us from our daily lives. This whole thing is already ridiculous without you wasting our time."

And Remus does believe it’s ridiculous and that he’s wasting their time. That’s the whole point of this; dragging each second out as far as he can take it and milking their attention for as much exposure time as he can. He wants this attention, he wants to be seen, he wants Roman to see him and there’s something about Logan’s gaze that doesn’t sit right with Remus so he--

--blinks.

"In fact," Logan continues, quite confident for someone who might not survive to see the sun again. "This entire thing will be resolved if you put down the weapon and try talking for once."

Remus, who had talked before, who had screamed, who had begged and cried and argued before, sings, "Oh, I sincerely doubt that."

Logan's eyes dart to the side glancing at the other hostages just for a second and the boy he's with, the young man with a Starbucks cup who's name Remus never learned shakes his head subtly. Logan clicks his tongue in something akin to disappointment or distaste, and sets his gaze back on Remus.

"I will try again then," Logan says, standing straighter, shoulders squared and spine far stronger than Roman’s had ever been. "Based on your previous actions and reactions, you don't have any actual motivation or urge to hurt anyone other than The Prince, and perhaps Zeal, although I doubt that as well. So you will step away from us and you will avoid hurting civilians in your endeavors to continue... this charade you have set up here. In fact, you will cease your performance because you do not believe it has any purpose in helping your ultimate cause of The Prince’s death."

Remus blinks, almost about to laugh, almost about to ask what Logan thinks this is going to accomplish, almost about to go back to Roman and Zeal and The Plan when his grip loosens and the remote falls into the empty air so much like a body tumbling down a manhole that Remus can do nothing but stare at it and wonder what the fuck just happened.

Logan smiles at him, smugly, condescendingly, pompously, and that’s the last thing Remus sees before Roman is hurtling into him like a freight train.--

--blinks.

“In fact—”

“Stop,” Remus, who had talked before, who had screamed, who had begged and cried and argued before, blurts out like his ribs didn’t nearly snap from the force of a blow that never happened. “What the fuck was that?”

Logan's eyes dart to the side glancing at the other hostages just for a second and the boy he's with, the young man with a Starbucks cup who's name Remus never learned looks just as bewildered as everyone else.

“I see,” Logan says slowly, a smile creeping across his face like a scythe glinting in the moonlight. “So it did work. Fascinating. This entire thing will be resolved if you put down the weapon and try talking for once.”

“No,” Remus says.

Logan’s eyes narrow. He takes a step forward like he doesn’t even notice Patton or Roman telling him to stop. His back straightens, and he towers and the people behind him inhale sharply and stare at him as if he’s lost his mind. “You’re angry. You’re angry and you don’t think anything will change no matter what you do. It won’t, not like this. Not even you believe this will actually change anything about how The Prince sees you. So you will step away from us and you will avoid hurting civilians in your endeavors to continue.”

“Logan,” the kid warns.

“In fact, you will cease your performance because you do not believe it has any purpose in helping your ultimate cause of The Prince’s death," Logan continues so certain, so convinced, so unchangeable.

Remus’s grip loosens and the remote falls into the empty air so much like a body tumbling down a manhole that Remus can do nothing but lunge for it again and brace for Roman diving into him like a wrecking ball.--

--shifts his weight to the side, favoring the ribs that aren’t broken, the leg that isn’t sprained, the arm that doesn’t feel dislocated. “You changed the script that time,” Remus says more to himself than to Logan. “Why did you change the script?”

“In fact— Pardon?” Logan says cut off from what he was saying.

“Your power,” Remus says, ignoring Roman’s claims for his attention. “Phrase activated? You changed the script but not all of it. Why didn’t you change all of it?”

Logan seems to realize something, his chin shifting slightly, and his voice raising. He straightens his back and steps forward and the people behind him shift behind him like Logan’s flimsy little body will protect them from a bomb. “You don’t think you can win this without your power. No one in this room thinks you can win this without your power. Zeal and The Prince will attack right now because they are heroes and they can beat you.”

Remus’s mouth opens, but before he can make a sound, Roman is slamming into him, toppling them both to the ground and the remote skids out from Remus’s hand. --

--jerks reflectively from the impact that doesn’t happen.

”In fact— ”

“What’s your power?” Remus interrupts. “Voice activated? No, bitch, eyes on me. What is your stupid ass power?”

There are a billion seconds between them, a gazillion decisions to be made and Remus’s throat feels as dry as a polar desert. Each breath pricks at his skin, yanking at the invisible seams holding him together in a future that Remus isn’t going to live through and Logan steps forward like he feels it too.

Logan’s too sharp, too keen, too knowing eyes dart back to Remus quick and lethal and evaluating. “...I don’t think I should tell you that.”

“Remus!” Roman says from miles and eons and dimensions away. “Your issue is with me!”

“Not anymore,” Remus says and nearly laughs because he knew there were going to be problems in this plan, he knew there were going to be mistakes and consequences and Remus wasn’t going to be able to rely on anyone to help but staring at Logan feels like staring at an exploding sun that’s collateral damage is so vast there’s no one left to acknowledge it.

Remus swore he wouldn’t die, Remus swore he wouldn’t use this power stupidly but Logan’s eyes are narrowing. When Logan’s mouth opens it feels like he’s talking to every version of Remus that has ever died, every version of Remus that wanted to live, every version of Remus that stood in a gas station bathroom clutching the grimy sink and staring at himself in a mirror with a giddy grin left over from being run over that first time.

“How many times are you going to go through this, Remus?”--

--grins with all his teeth.

”In fact— ” Logan continues and then he doesn’t because Remus is lunging the distance between them without warning. He slams his fist into Logan’s face, knuckles scraping against Logan’s perfect teeth, shoving all those perfect words back into his mouth. He hears the wind go out of the room, the sudden stillness of shock, and the buzz of panic and click of seventeen triggers being pulled.

“Did I say you could talk?” Remus snarls, and that’s the last thing he says before his inner organs all explode at the same time from a dozen dimestore guard’s guns.

He does not hear Roman scream his name. But then again… he’s not hearing anything anymore.--

--immediately knows that Logan has fucked up Janus’s plan to high hell.

"I'm wasting your time? What do you have to do so urgently, Logan?” Remus asks like his ribs didn’t nearly snap from the force of a blow that never happened, his lungs aren’t punctured with bullet wounds that tore through his body like paper, like his nose isn’t suddenly stuffed up with more blood than the rest of his corpse. “Die?”

“Remus!” Roman snarls. “Your issue is with me! Leave everyone else out of it!”

Logan frowns, eyes narrowed and lips pinched into a mostly straight line that reminds Remus of the polished lid of a coffin right before it’s lowered into the ground. The bees in his guts swarm up to his ribs, flitting between his lungs until he has to focus to breathe regularly and not scream.

“Do you know you die from falling down an open manhole?” Remus asks, ignoring Roman entirely. “Completely avoidable! If only you or your brother were paying slightly more attention!”

Said brother (younger, stupider, better) freezes at the comment, eyes hidden behind those aviator glasses that reflect Remus’s own silhouette right back at him. His iced coffee is clutched in his hand, still half full, with ice cubes clinking together silently compared to the rumbling tension in the room.

Roman’s signature is not on it. Remus isn’t sure why that makes him want to fucking laugh.

“You die, nerd,” he says. “No do overs. No take backs. No— ”

“I didn’t,” Logan cuts in.

“You will.”

“You are misunderstanding,” Logan says loudly, taking a step forward in the way that makes several other people whimper and scoot back behind him like a shield they could trust to protect them and Remus clenches the deadman’s switch in his hand tighter.

“Logan,” his brother hisses. “You can’t talk away a bomb!”

But Logan doesn’t even look back. He’s nearly Remus’s height, with the edges of his black trench coat sweeping around his calves when his slightly scuffed formal shoes, and Remus doesn’t exactly feel like a frog on a dissection table but it’s a near and very interesting thing and he thinks that Janus would either fall hopelessly in love with Logan or put his claws through Logan’s lungs with no in-between.

“I did not die,” Logan says, slowly and pointedly like the teachers who thought that because Remus claimed to see the future that meant he was stupid because he didn’t see their pop quizzes coming enough to study for them. “Although I’m unsure how your power works, when we ran into each other previously you granted me the vision of my death. Yesterday, the event played nearly the same as what I had seen: I had taken off my glasses to clean them from the rain and the second before I had fallen, I caught myself. I was able to circumnavigate the manhole.”

There’s a beat where Remus is certain that the entire world freezes: the space of air that rings between the tick and the tock, the breath before a scream, the white nothingness that comes after Zeal hits him with his power.

There’s part of a scoff deep in his chest that trembles like an earthquake that only Remus can feel.

“It was like Deja Vu,” Logan says, simply, clinically.

--”I didn’t say anything about rain. I didn’t say anything about you taking off your glasses. I didn’t say anything— ”--

--”Did you feel your death? Did your brother? Did he cry? What’s his name?”--

--”How did you see that? What did you do that hundreds of other people have never been able to do? Why did you get to live?!”--

--”What the hell makes you so FUCKING special?”--

--”THIS IS MY POWER! WHY DON’T I GET TO CONTROL WHO SEES THE FUTURE?!”--

There’s pressure in the back of Remus’s throat and it tastes like rainwater when he swallows. He instinctively drags his free hand under his nose, barely acknowledging the lack of real blood before he acknowledges the fury bubbling in his soul.

Logan stands in front of him, unbothered by his own death, untouched by the fear that people liked to look at Remus with, unchanged by the fact that he knows Remus has a power and what kind of bullshit is that?! Why of all the people, of all the times, of all the futures, why is it Logan who believes him? Why is it Logan who could see it?

((Remus is twenty one, but for a blink he feels like he’s thirteen again cornered in the boys locker room after gym with the other boys pressing him to tell them if one of the girls will say yes if they ask her out, and how does he know, is he sure, where’s your proof, Remus? Come on there’s gotta be something, I think you’re holding out on us, maybe this is jog your memory— ))

Remus’s laughter sounds like getting hit by a bullet train. “Deja Vu! Ha! Good one! Okay, nerd! You seem decently smart. Riddle me this: why did you choose to spend the rest of your life? At the FBE? You dragged your brother all the way out here, too?”

Logan’s expression flickers further towards annoyance. “All persons with extraordinary abilities are required by law— ”

“Blah, blah, blah,” Remus says. “If all the other kids were jumping off the bridge would you jump too? Here’s a hint: water from a 25 foot drop can still feel like concrete if you do it right enough.”

“Don’t you mean ‘wrong enough’?” Zeal asks, looking queasy.

“Do I look like the type of person who means ‘wrong enough’, bitch?” Remus says. “Oh come on, Pattie! You saw me in that crowd! I was less than a foot from you and I died three times in ways that were directly your fucking fault.”

“Remus!” Roman cries again, stepping forward even as his precious sidekick pales further.

“I believe we have entertained this far long enough,” Logan cuts in. He takes another step forward, gently pressing his glasses back up his nose, and Remus wants to know if he smells like rainwater and concrete. His voice is an orchestra that catches everyone’s attention, including Roman’s, and for someone who is not a hero parading around on TV and taking autographs, Logan looks perfectly in his element. “This entire thing will be resolved if you put down the weapon and try talking for once.”

“You’re right!” Remus says, twitching his nose as he feels the pressure of a nosebleed already starting to form. The right side of his body aches from the collision course Roman seems to be itching to throw them into, but he forces his muscles to tense and not give it away to anyone. “I am wasting your time. I’m wasting everyone’s time, aren’t I, Logan? Let’s stop with the pleasantries! You want me to talk so much, then I’ll talk! Congratulations, everyone! Welcome to the trial!” Remus announces, as loudly as he can. His voice dances off the aching antique building making him impossible to mishear, much less ignore.

“You’ve been selected for jury duty and you don’t get to opt out. And Logan, you just got promoted to the fucking chairman! So take a step back and shut the fuck up.”

Zeal takes an audible breath, drawing Remus’s attention like a snap. “I think we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot here! Remus, if you have a power, we can get it documented right here! It will be official for everyone to see. All you have to do is hand over the remote and let us deactivate the bombs and get these people out of here. I promise.”

He offers out a hand gently to Remus as if he were a wild animal that just needed the healing power of God to fix whatever was wrong with him. Remus thinks about biting into his hand, chomping down until Zeal is screaming, until the bones shatter, until Remus is tasting blood that isn’t his own.

“Hard pass,” Remus says. “I can print out a certificate of Fucked Up-ness at Staples.”

“Where is, uhm, Basilisk?” Zeal says, undeterred, and Remus remembers that expression from when a taser latched into his spine and killed him, from when he was looking at a wind maker and stole their power, from when he looked at Janus and raised his hand and Janus dropped like a brick. “He— or they— seemed to be more… uhm…”

Remus’s jaw pinches. “I don’t have him GPS tagged. Why? Do you think he’s a better conversationalist than me? I think I’m offended, Altar Boy. Almost enough to just....”

He twitches his wrist and both Roman and Zeal jerk forward with twin looks of panic on their faces. That’s only aborted when Remus yanks the remote back and raises an eyebrow at both of them.

Logan purses his lips and checks his watch as if he has an appointment he’s going to be late for.

“Just kidding,” Remus says, cheerily. “If we did that, then no one would have time to hate you as much as I do!”

Roman’s eyes flicker green, little lights that remind Remus of all the Christmases where Roman got everything on his wishlist and Remus got a new pair of shoes. The sight of it makes Remus’s teeth hurt, makes his stomach roll, makes the acrimony in his chest grow like a tumor that hasn’t figured out if it's going to kill Remus yet.

Roman puffs his chest. “If this is about me then let everyone else leave!”

“But it’s not!” Remus smiles. “It’s not about you, Roman. Despite how every other thing in our lives has turned out, not everything is about you, specifically!”

Roman grits his teeth, "Really?" He waves his arms around. "Because it feels a lot like it’s all about me right now! It’s time to end this Remus! Give me the remote, and we can get you help. See a specialist— "

"Been there! Done that!" Remus says. "Or did you forget how many meds my specialists would put me on no matter how many times I told them it wasn’t like that? Did you forget how Mom would grab my hair, yank my head back, and force pill after pill after pill into my mouth before school? How she'd stick her fingers in my mouth to make sure I didn't hide them under my tongue, because she didn’t trust me? How she called the school to assign a teacher to watch me when we got to the building to make sure I didn't head straight to the restrooms to throw it all back up? Because surely that was the only reason I wasn’t getting better."

There’s a silence in the room that Remus wasn’t expecting. A stiffness that swallows the entire Library that makes the books and the shelves and the aching, ancient walls seem like they’re suddenly listening to Remus too.

"What?" Zeal whispers.

"Is he telling the truth?" Logan asks Roman, and probably for the first time looks like he isn’t trying to storm back out the doors.

"That’s like...that's gotta be illegal," Virgil adds. "So illegal. Oh my god, I'm gonna throw up."

((“Do you really think that you can keep your brother talking about himself for that long? Surely even he runs out of things he likes about himself,” Janus had asked a million years ago and a few hours ago and five seconds ago, while holding the fourth rough draft of their plan in his hands. And Remus had nearly snorted that last of Virgil’s tin roof sundae ice cream out his nose.

“I’m not going to be talking about him,” Remus, who was confident, who was in love, who knew Roman more than he knew himself, who was twenty one and stupid and so tired of hurting, says. “I’m going to be talking about me.”))

“Where were you, Roman?” Remus asks just to push, push, pushhhhh. “How could my life have been a living nightmare for every single day and you didn't notice at all? I was begging for someone to save me!”

The crowd shifts and mumbles and Remus can feel their apprehension rising like a hot air balloon in the middle of the library. Roman can probably feel it too.

“You didn’t— I wasn’t— ” Roman stutters like he’s looking for someone to break into the conversation and call out the line he forgot was in the script.

Remus just stares at him, a smile plastered to his face like a mask when everything underneath it felt he was being boiled alive. Brainwashed or not, someone else holding the strings or not, eleven minutes between them or not, this tastes like relief.

"Oh yeah?" Roman snarls, and just like that the hero persona finally evaporates, folding and twisting and warping Roman into someone completely different and very familiar and I’m sorry they like me more than you! Maybe if you weren’t such a freak you would have been invited too!

"Where were you, Remus? You want to pretend to be the victim here? Want to act like you've never done anything wrong? Where were you when I was drowning under Mom’s expectations of a perfect son? Where were you when every single mistake I made was turned into a world ending event by her? Where were you when my power lashed out and got Dad killed?!"

"Getting run over on I-90 probably," Remus says. "Guess it depends on when he died. I could have been dropping toasters in the bathtub in a hotel in South Dakota or screwing up parkour in Chicago, too."

"Is everything a joke to you?"

"Do I look like I’m laughing?" Remus laughs. "Why should I be sad about the death of the man who couldn't look me in the eyes for our ninth birthday?"

Because Remus had been nine years old and only eleven minutes younger and Roman had gotten to choose the cake flavor for them because Remus had seen Dad trip off the ladder when pulling their presents out from the hiding place in the attic and hadn't been able to stop crying all day. Because Remus had been nine years old and only eleven minutes younger and he’d heard Dad read Roman a bedtime story in his bedroom and then listened to the steps pass right by Remus’s room. Because he’d been nine years old and after that first diagnosis from his psychiatrist, after the first round of pills that hadn’t worked, after that first time that they hadn’t listened to him, their dad had disappeared out of Remus’s life.

As quiet as a ghost.

((Remus didn’t know he was dead, dead, dead and in the ground. Gone and never coming back. Burned to ashes and scattered into the wind. Six feet under in a cemetery that Remus will never visit. Some part of him (the part that remembers bedtime stories read in silly voices, forehead kisses and hair ruffles, and hugs so big that Remus could disappear into them and forget about seeing blood on bumpers of silver sedans) howls.))

“Really, Roman,” Remus says, when Roman looks like he doesn’t know what to do with that information anymore than Remus knows what to do with it. His voice doesn’t shake, his throat doesn’t burn, and his hand doesn’t let go of the remote just to reach forward and strangle Roman to death, but Virgil is staring at him and Remus knows he’s not completely fooling everyone. “If you want to throw the victim card back and forth we can, but you aren’t going to win. You don’t get it. Whatever happened, whatever bad thing occurred you always fucking had someone who cared about you. You had Mom. You had teachers. Doctors. Friends. Other students. Do you know what I had?”

((A snowglobe. An eighteen wheeler. A toaster. A noose, scissors, keys, a freefall—))

“An incorrect diagnosis,” Remus says. “That wrecked my entire life.”

“It’s not incorrect!” Roman snaps. “You—!"

“Even if it wasn’t! Even if I couldn’t see the future, do you still think any of the way you treated me for my entire fucking life was fair? That it was fine? That it was good and role model worthy and you deserve to be looked up to?!” Remus yells, his voice echoing in the cavernous hall, maybe shaking, maybe cracking. “Do you?!”

Roman takes a step back and Remus takes a step forward.

"I was eight years old, Roman!" Remus yells, "I saw my brother die! I was scared and I was asking for help in the only way I knew how to!"

"You were making it up for attention! Just like you’ve always done! Just like you're doing here! Now!" Roman says hotly, eyes burning, burning, burning. "You haven’t changed a bit, Remus!"

“He’s going to get everyone blown up,” Virgil strangles out.

Patton seems to be of the same opinion from how he calls out Romans name, barely more than a begging whimper of a catholic school child desperately trying to convince someone to avoid hell by just… not being gay.

Roman doesn’t spare him a look, and Remus soaks up the attention like a sponge. If Remus was capable of being embarrassed he thinks he might be embarrassed at how delightfully his lungs fill up when Roman is glaring at him like nothing else in the world matters.

But hey, if Roman wants to dig a grave, who is Remus to stop him this time? Or all the times before this? All the times that never happened?

Who is Remus to shy away from all the things that Roman had grown into long before seventeen year old Remus had left him behind?

“Did it ever occur to you that I hadn’t been?” Remus asks, because if he has enough air to breathe he has enough air to twist his own words into a noose to hang himself. “Did you ever wonder if maybe you weren’t so special, Roman? Did you ever think I was worth the air I breathe?”

Roman doesn’t answer. Roman doesn’t answer and it feels like an answer all by itself. Remus’s freefall is ending in a collision, his thundering heart is exploding in his chest, his soul is finally finding that rest in the suddenly overwhelming static silence around them.

“I thought the world of you,” Remus says and he means it. “Some hero you turned out to be.”

He twists his wrist, shaking the remote between them.

“Okay, this is ridiculous!” Logan finally snaps out and Remus knows enough about wearing out people’s patience to know he reached the end of Logan’s. “Why are we even entertaining any of this?!”

Logan shoves a pointed finger at Roman and Remus. “You! And you! Both need therapy! Not to be jumping around like… like sophomoric imbeciles content to utterly disrupt the rest of our lives because of your puerile communication skills! Remus, I am sorry that your childhood was terrible, but it is not my job to facilitate or placate your uncouth attempts to find closure for the undoubtedly distressing attacks made against you by ignoramuses in your life. This entire farce is the exact reason why he is so confident in his ridiculously shallow minded insistence that you have no empathy, and you are smart enough to know that, which leads me to the conclusion that you are just wasting my personal time while you stall for Basilisk to finish whatever activity he’s been executing in the back area of this Library! And one! More! Thing!”

Remus’s mouth opens, a hundred billion futures rolling off his tongue, tripping on his molars, jumbling around in his throat all in the blink of an eye, in the pause of a breath, in the space between heart beats and still Remus isn’t fast enough to stop Logan from talking.

“—the bombs aren’t even real!” Logan yells furiously. “They are just flickering Christmas lights wrapped around probably empty boxes held together with duct tape!”

The entire globe seems to stop, and Remus can feel the jolt under his feet. Every noise seems to funnel directly out of existence before it can manifest. Remus’s lips ache from his grin, but there’s not a single part of him that is smiling.

“Why would you do that, Logan,” Remus says. “You ruined the surprise.”

“What?” Roman echoes. “They’re fake?”

“I never said they were real,” Remus says, with a shrug, shifting his weight back. “I never even said I had a bomb! Everyone really is just willing to believe the worst things about me. Honestly I think I’m offended! Seriously! What have I ever done to make all these very wonderful hostages believe I’m capable of building a bomb, much less a dozen of them? And then get them into this building without anyone noticing at all? Shame on you! And Jannie, I’m running out of topics to go through so if at any moment you'd like to finish up before Igetmybrainssplattered—"

Remus lunges to the side, just in time to avoid Roman’s lunge with his rapier, and then the deafening boom of gunfire hits the air he would have been if he were slightly slower. The glass doors crack and shatter and the screams start up again bouncing off the walls like thousands of firecracker filled pinballs.

“Hey PitPat!” Remus says, “Catch!”

Patton’s eyes widen and he panics for a whole second, with the wispy white light flicking out like the world’s most disappointing trick candles. Remus doesn’t give him time to figure out the rest, flicking the remote in his hand into the air, to give sweet, sweet relief to his cramped wrist.

Patton lunges forward rolling on the ground and Remus doesn’t wait to see if he actually caught it in his illogical distress. He grabs Roman’s rapier wrist and twists around him before the next round of bullets can find a target, shoving Roman’s hand in between his shoulder blades, in a way that he knows hurts.

“You’re brainwashed,” Remus snarls right into Roman ear.

“And you’re fucking insane!” Roman yells right back. The world floods green and R--

--oman’s center of gravity drops as he curls forward, throwing Remus back into the line of fire, head over heels and several thousand curses on his tongue. The edge of the rapier scrapes the side of his neck, hot and blood and someone is screaming his name, harsh and violent and gratingly hopelessly worried. The vest takes two shots like fucking swords slamming into his already struggling lungs and Remus looks up just in time to see the next one inches from his fa--

--oman’s center of gravity drops as he curls forward, throwing Remus’s body over him like he weighs absolutely nothing and means even less to him. He twists his neck to side, barely avoiding the blade edge and someone screams his name like a prayer, like a call to a god that is not listening, like a beg to Roman to think for once in his fucking life. Remus’s lungs take two punches to them, and leaves him g-g-gasping for air where there is none. He spits out a curse right before that last bullet drives right through his jaw and everything around him explodes--

--emus lets go of Roman before he can leverage Remus into the air. His body rolls to the side, avoiding the bullets that send the crowds both outside and inside into a panicking screeching riot.

“REMY!” Logan screams and now he doesn’t sound anything like the bold character who talked his way into getting Remus murdered.

Remus’s ankle catches on the floor tripping him into the polished hard wood so hard his teeth crack and his mouth blooms with blood, blood, blood. Bullets slam into his back, his shoulder blade, his spine tearing through the padding, and Remus catches sight of black combat boots in a forgotten iced coffee mixed with something far too scarlet to be anything but blood--

--emus lets go of Roman before he can leverage Remus into the air, and then he shoves him forward with all the strength that he can manage. The bullets freeze, terrified of hitting their own superhero, and Remus watches as Roman stumbles directly into Virgil’s arms, watches the way that Roman gathers his balance, his mouth curls into a grim thank you, as he shifts to turn back to Remus because like usual he’s not looking at the right mouth because Remus hates Roman but there’s someone who hates him more right there--

--emus throws himself away from Roman with enough force that Roman goes stumbling directly into the line of fire that had previously been marked as Remus’s. The bullets freeze in the air, too worried, terrified, petrified at the idea of tearing through Roman’s precious paper skin. Remus chokes on his blood, spitting it out of his mouth before it causes him to vomit, his head riiiiiinging with the sounds of gunshots and screams from futures that aren’t going to happen and ones that are.

Roman stumbles into Virgil, his rapier nearly tumbling to the ground from his twisted wrist. Virgil’s eyes widen, the whites gleaming in the artificial light. Remus feels the seconds grind to halt; everything happening so fast that his brain-mind-thoughts are moving hundreds of times faster than the events around them, than how rapidly his own body can move, than how quickly anyone else can seem to comprehend what is going to happen.

“It’s time to pick a side!” Remus yells, taking steps back. “Aren’t you tired of hiding? Of being alone?”

“It’s over Remus!” Roman shouts, eyes glowing green, green, green.

There’s an inhale.

Virgil has startling brown eyes, with speckles of purple in them.

Exhale.

“Aren’t you tired of being scared of Death?” Remus asks.

“You’re the worst,” Virgil says clear as day, voice vibrating through the air like a sword slashing away all the other sound, his body moving as fluidly as air.

Roman has half a second, a fourth of a second, an eighth of a second to turn back at the sudden noise distortion— it’s not even enough to recognize how Virgil’s fingers hooked his mask and dragged it down and how his tongue rolls wetly over his thin lips before they open and—

Remus only has half of a second, a fourth of a second, and eighth of a second, to dive the fuck out of the way before the static air slams Roman at him like a brick wall. A catapult of Red and White and Regis flings over his shoulder and Remus can’t stop himself from gawking at Roman slams into a shelf of books and topples it.

“Great!” Virgil yells, “They’re going to revoke my library card now!”

But all Remus can do is laugh.

The nearest hired guard turns their gun towards Virgil and Virgil swears on Remus’s mother, as he throws up his arms like that would defend against a bullet to his face.

But before they can pull the trigger, another man appears from the back halls where the conference rooms were, wearing a doctor’s lab coat and glasses with graying out hair and charges recklessly right in between the guard and Virgil. The man is screaming something that Remus can’t quite make out with all the static noise in the air but from the way that man points behind him and Remus can’t help the grin on his face.

The guard hesitates for a moment looking where the doctor points and well…that’s all the time that Dr. Janus Witchall needs before he’s driving his knee into the man’s gut, just under his chest protector. The gun falls from the man’s hands and Janus spins and kicks him in the head like some type of martial artist master in a lab coat and Remus is swooning.

“Apologies, darling,” Janus says, scales dancing along his cheeks, as he pulls off the wire rimmed glasses and tosses them carelessly over his shoulder. His hair swoops back to the blond he prefers, and it’s like looking at a sophisticated version of Janus that had been forced to go to Med School instead of being forced to kill his only friend. “I hope I didn’t keep you waiting for too long.”

“Basilisk!” Zeal yells, sounding wounded, sounding hurt, sounding betrayed. “What did you— ”

Janus smiles sweetly. “Relax, Patton. I left your doctors with some very lovely headaches. Please don’t blame Mrs. Maddock too much; her daughter thought it was really funny when I told her I wanted to play a prank on her mom. Poor woman fainted the moment I grew a tail.”

Remus actually had the strong suspicion that it was less of the woman fainting and more of her sitting quietly as Janus knocked out the doctor and stole his clothes, considering she hated the whole FBE registration requirement with all of her heart and when Janus had visited her with about $30,000 in cash asking to dress up as her daughter, the woman had pushed the backpack away and said he could do it for free if he made sure to punch Roman in the face. Remus would even bet real money that the woman had calmly discussed tea flavors with Janus as he tied her up to make it look like she’d been caught by surprise.

Remus didn’t respect a lot of people, but Linda Maddock was probably one of his new favorite people.

Remus laughs bubbling like blood flavored champagne in his chest. “I was worried you were going to miss the party!”

Janus cartwheels over himself, driving his heel into the face of a hired gunman so hard the visor shatters and the man screams despite the No Talking sign right next to them. Even in the form of a forty seven year old, he moves with all the grace and fluidity of his regular self. “Why do all your parties involve you covered in blood?”

“I think it’s really sexy of me to still be breathing right now!”

“Can the two of you flirt some other time?!” Virgil snarls ducking under a table and clamping his headphones to his head as Zeal’s power misses him by inches. “Son of a bitch!”

The remaining glass windows shatter at his exclamation, knocking several more gunmen to the ground away from him but Virgil very much looks like he didn’t even notice them approaching. He squeezes his eyes close, gritting his teeth, and curls up like he jumped on a live grenade.

“Just fucking get out of here already!”

Janus meets Remus’s eyes, gaze calculating with a question that Remus has already answered again and again and again.

“Come now, Dearest,” Janus says without needing to look at Virgil. “You chose us, didn’t you? Why would we leave without you?”

“Fuck you!”

“Asshole!” Roman explodes out of the pile of books that Virgil acquainted his stupid perfect face with. Remus laughs, dodging forward out of the way of Roman’s recovery rapier slash by inches, centimeters, breaths.

Roman presses forward, blocking Remus out of his escape with that stupid sword of his, nearly nicking Remus’s fishnets, and Remus grabs a book from a shelf and throws it at his face before sliding around the aisle. Several of the civilians had launched this way when the gunfire had started and Remus didn’t, doesn’t, won't have a plan but he reaches out and is grabbing the first person he sees and yanking them in front of him as a barrier between him and Roman.

“You wouldn’t hurt a civilian!” Remus says facing Roman, gripping the kid— ah fuck it was the kid form Logan’s futures, the one with the glasses and the ice coffee, the one that wanted Roman’s signature in a future that Remus hadn’t realized didn’t happen until it was too late.

The kid— Remy? Remy— was just tall enough to be annoying, with Remus’s hold on his throat from behind causing the kid’s spine to bend awkwardly at an angle that did not do either of them any favors. But even with him struggling like a fish on a hook, and Remus’s heart pounding like a drum at how Roman blocked him off from joining up with Janus and Virgil to get the fuck out of here.

Roman pants, snarling but doesn’t attack. “You dishonorable— ”

“Sorry, I wasn’t afforded a childhood that allowed me to have honor,” Remus says dragging Remy and himself back another several steps, and ignoring the sound of something crunching under his boot.

Remy, Logan’s brother, swears and claws at Remus’s arm.

“Shut up and work with me if you don’t want to die,” Remus growls under his breath.

“Bitch!” The boy spat out. “Those were my favorite glasses!”

To their left, a guard flings through the air and crashes through the elegant stained glass windows and into the crowd outside. Roman throws his arms up to protect himself from the onslaught of sound vibrations and books tumbling off the shelves.

Remus spits blood out of his mouth and grabs the collar of Remy’s jacket and hoists him through the nearest door away from Roman. He shoves the kid forward and yanks the door closed behind them, swirling around to find something to block it with. Except that, Remus’s lungs scream when he recognizes the bland concrete stairwell that must lead up to the mezzanine level, and that his hostage had already scrambled up the first half flight while Remus was wasting his time.

Remus takes the stairs two at a time, ignoring the way that the fight rings and echoes in the confines around him. He scoops up Remy again, catching him before the fist can land in his face and tripping the kid before he can get any good contact with Remus’s shins.

“Didn’t anyone ever teach you how to actually fight?” Remus asks.

“Girl, I’m too cute to be involved in fights!” the kid says. “Let go, man! Logan will— ”

Remus kicks open the door to the mezzanine floor, ducking out of the way of several stray bullets before he drags Remy out with him. He feels like the air is shattering, like gravity is working from every direction to tear his limbs apart, like every single one of the bullets that whizzed by had actually exploded through his rib cage.

Remus had only glanced at the mezzanine floor when he had been looking at the floor plans, plotting where he and Janus could place the fake bombs while everyone was concerned about the little fire up front. When he had come inside the library there had been two guards up on the level watching with a critical eye but the cavernous layout of the main entrance made the “bombs” still too far away to make out.

Virgil’s sound vibrations had knocked one of them to the floor so hard he’d been knocked out, and Remus didn’t see the other one, though he kept Remy pinned in front of him as he checked the shelves with a quick look and then analyzed the fight down below.

The drop is close to twenty feet, and Remus has jumped, skipped, fallen, danced off higher, but his stomach churns at the sight.

Remus swears under his breath, “This is not where I want to be.”

The blood in the back of his throat tastes like death, like his esophagus had suddenly decided to go through emergency surgery, like his stomach acids had suddenly gotten formed a union and were rebelling against working conditions. He could jump, leave Remy right up here for Roman to console, he could jump and roll and only shatter his leg into a billion ways. He could fall and break his neck, he could spring and belly flop and hope that Janus could move fast enough to catch him.

Janus flips, swinging a tail around behind him to knock two different attackers in their throats. He might be able to grow wings if Remus tested his adrenaline enough, but Janus moving so fast would…. well…Virgil is back-to-back with him, hands raised and every projectile shot towards him slams to a stop and drops to the ground as if there was an invisible wall in front of him. If Janus chose to save Remus, Virgil’s back wouldn’t be protected.

“LOGAN!” Remy screams from Remus’s arms and from the awkward angle behind the receptionist desk Logan’s face pops up in distress.

Janus yells something to Zeal, but it's Logan’s cadence that answers back.

“Yo, Banshee!” Remus yells ducking as the bookshelf holding Eastern European history books explodes under gunfire. “Flood the building with white noise!”

“What?!” Virgil screams. “Do I look like a white noise machine to you?!”

“Logan’s power is voice-fucking-activated!” Remus yells back, hauling Remy up when he trips on the threadbare carpet. “Shut him up before he says something worthwhile!”

Virgil doesn’t respond but it doesn’t matter much because Remus’s ears are ringing and he can hear the door behind them slam open with Roman’s signature heroic entrance and Remus is out of time.

“There’s nowhere to go, Remus!” Roman yells.

Remus shouldn’t look. Remus shouldn’t look. Remus shouldn’t look anywhere but at Janus who is so far down below yelling out something about a plan, but at Virgil who is nodding to him, but at his own future because he promised himself he’d stop dying when he didn’t need to and if he dies than everything about this was just wasted time.

But then in front of him, miles away and only twenty feet at the same time, Roman is screaming his name from across the ocean of wood floors, furious and angry and green eyes alight and--

--And Roman is standing there in the kitchen, winded, out of breath, his lips on the cusp of a smile that Remus hasn’t seen ever directed at him since they were eight years old and didn’t know about five words or silver sedans or how alone sharing a room could feel. He looks happy, lovely, free; like who he would have been, if Remus hadn’t loved him with all that he was. The sunlight pouring in from between the curtain windows paints him like a golden angel, like a god blessed hero, like something more than Roman Regis.

It matches the blood stain on this chest.--

-- and that green light washes over the mezzanine level diving right into the ancient, antique wood boards with all the grace of a pretty ineffective light show, and Remus has his mouth open to stall for more time, any more time, any time he can get before he has to admit he failed.

The entire building shakes from the sound vibrations Virgil is sending off, and Remus is holding a child hostage in front of him and there are no kitchens here and Roman probably deserves it if he was going to be shot dead suddenly and Remus’s skin is breaking out in goosebumps and his throat is sore and he thinks that all the screaming in the world will probably never reach Roman if nothing else today had.

“D-don’t come closer, Roman!”

But Roman is looking at the ground with a wide eyed, panicked expression. “Wait, Remus— !”

Remus’s foot slides back the last step.The railing is digging into his back, the kid is clawing at his already injured arm and Remus feels the cracking before he hears it.

There’s a rumble under Remus’s shoes that he almost believes is his brain misunderstanding gravity for a moment, that the combined weight of him and the are muddling with his ability to stand on his own two legs, that maybe he’s more injured than he really knew, bleeding from a place he hadn’t realized because he’s so used to the unwavering high of losing all the blood inside of him. But then the vibrations race through Remus’s entire body enough to make him stumble and almost lose his grip on the boy’s jacket. And the poppoppoping and tingtingting of the gunfire around them is drowned out completely by the aching, brittle snap, snap, snapping.

“Oh fuck,” Remus grounds out just as the railing and the ancient wooden floors splinter under his and the kid’s combined weight and Remus plunges into a freefall that tastes like a thunderstorm at 3AM.

[Next Chapter]

#deja vu au #remus sanders #janus sanders #logan sanders #virgil sanders #patton sanders #romans sanders #Sanders Sides #remy sanders #Janus's plan wasn't actually that great but Remus is in love #What the fuck is Logan's superpower?#Janus: i need you to stall for time #Remus: trauma dump got it!#Roman out here with the What about me!? defense #love that for him #Patton and Logan and Virgil are so very tired #Demus #anxceit

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