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artistowlsnest · 2 years

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Put Myself in Control

@dukeceitweek

For Dukeceit week Wednesday prompt: Wild/Control

2,905 words

Summary: Deceit needed to make sure that everyone on his side of the Barrier stayed on his side of the barrier, but the Duke didn't want to cooperate. Maybe if he became friends with him - no, if he convinced the other side that they were friends. Yes, that would work.

Deceit did not stare at the perfectly innocuous looking door in the hallway just past the kitchen. He did not sit in the living room, no matter who else was there, just so that he could keep an eye on it, and on everyone else – the two other Sides that had come with him, and all the other Aspects that weren’t full Sides yet, and maybe never would be.

It was his job to keep control over them now, and keep them from crossing the Barrier.

He wasn’t the oldest there, but he was definitely the most mature. Deceit was thirteen (or a little younger, but close enough) and he knew everything.

He knew that Morality was stupid and too busy thinking about other people to think about what was best for Thomas. He knew that Logic was too wrapped up in thinking about stuff like school and the future to be overly concerned about all of the very big and important changes that had just happened.

He knew that…that the Prince had taken every scrap of idealistic naivete that Creativity had had with him in the split. He knew that when he looked at the Prince, he would see eyes that looked nothing at all like Creativity’s and yet were obviously still identical, and he knew that that made him feel a lot of complicated things, and that he did not like feeling those things, so it was better to avoid the Prince.

And he knew that it didn’t matter how he felt a lot of complicated feelings about the Barrier, because now it was there, and he didn’t have enough influence over Thomas to tear it down, and he wouldn’t do it even if he could.

(He may not agree with Morality on most things, but one thing they could agree on was that there were some things that Thomas didn’t need to know about himself. That Barrier was built from lies as much as it was from guilt and fear.)

So, now, he guarded it, more or less. The others probably couldn’t slip past it on their own, but he wanted to keep an eye on who was trying.

Fear – no, he was Anxiety now – wasn’t a security concern (he’d even helped put the Barrier up, whether he realized it or not). Deceit hadn’t even seen the oldest Side since the Barrier had come up, and knew that he was probably hiding in his room.

(Did Anxiety still count as the oldest side? That was one thing that Deceit admitted, at least to himself, that he didn’t know. Instinct had been the oldest, but then he’d become Fear, and now he was Anxiety. Did it even count? Deceit wasn’t sure, and he liked to debate it with himself now that he couldn’t debate it with Logic but if any of the others asked, he would have said no, just to be contrary to Anxiety, who said yes.)

The Aspects were somewhat more of a concern, but they didn’t even have enough influence to be full Sides, so Deceit would be able to stop them easily enough.

Which left him with his biggest challenge. And while the last Side wasn’t exactly competent, he made up for it in both enthusiasm and sheer unadulterated stubbornness.

And speak of the devil…

Deceit closed his eyes and let out a weary sigh when he heard another crash. “Duke, stop.”

The other Side bounced his way into the living room, without even the decency to pretend to look sheepish.

Looking at the Duke’s face elicited much of the same reaction that looking at the Prince’s did. A little different – rather than the Prince’s simperingly positive face, the Duke’s was usually screwed up in a grin that alternated between manic and cruel. It was a face that Deceit had seen only every now and then on Creativity, maybe a little more as the years went on, but it seemed to be the Duke’s normal. It was a face that reminded Deceit that he wouldn’t ever get to see Creativity again.

(And then he grabbed his grief by the neck and shoved it into his box of denial. Maybe it would suffocate and die before he had to deal with it.)

(This was a habit that he shared with Morality, he knew. He put that thought into the box of denial as well.)

“You can’t go through the barrier, Duke.”

“You can’t tell me what to do,” the Duke immediately replied.

Deceit resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose – whether changing their function impacted their age or not, Creativity had been the youngest side, and the two parts of him had been the most recent to change, so whichever way one looked at it, the Prince and the Duke were the babies of the Mindscape – and whenever he had to deal with them, Deceit was unfortunately inescapably aware of that fact.

He took a deep breath. It wasn’t the other Sides’ fault that he was just so much more mature than them. “I don’t need to tell you,” Deceit said. “I control the Barrier, and if I say that you can’t leave, then you can’t.”

It was only half a lie – Deceit hadn’t been the only one to make the Barrier, so he was pretty sure that he wasn’t the only one with control over it, but the Duke didn’t need to know that.

“Then let me,” the Duke said, his voice high and whiny and nasally. “I’m bored.”

Deceit was far too controlled to actually shudder at that, but he did have to suppress the urge – he still remembered the last time the Duke had said that; the living room still smelled faintly like fish.

“Go play in the Imagination then,” Deceit said. “Stop bothering me.”

He probably shouldn’t have said that last part, because the Duke never liked to do what he was told, and sure enough made a beeline for the couch, jumping up onto it and then jumping up and down on one of the cushions, bouncing Deceit along with him.

Deceit pushed one of his legs forward so that the Duke fell face-first onto the coffee table. It made a loud crash and he heard a crunch that sounded sickeningly like splintering bone. Deceit refused to feel bad – he’d seen the Duke get up completely unharmed from worse, and he’d been about to break the couch, and none of the Sides on this side of the Barrier could properly fix that sort of thing yet.

The Duke rolled to the side, grinning up at Deceit. His nose was crooked and bleeding, and his gums were bloody too. The wounds were only there because the Duke wanted them to be, Deceit knew, though the sight of all that blood did make him have to remind himself of that. “Are we fighting?” the Duke asked in an utterly delighted voice.

“No,” Deceit said as firmly as he could. “I want you to go to your room. Or the Imagination. Or literally anywhere that you’re not bothering me.”

“Like the other side?”

“No, that would be bothering me.”

“Ughhhh.” the Duke flopped dramatically onto the floor, his head landing against it with a crack. “You’re no fun.”

“My job isn’t to be fun.”

The Duke perked up. “No, that’s mine!”

“So why don’t you go have fun somewhere else?”

“’Cause you’re the only one here who doesn’t run away,” the Duke said, entirely casual.

And that…that gave Deceit a pause. “That can’t be true.”

The Duke shrugged against the floor. “Sure. Anger used to fight me but I kept winning so now he doesn’t want to fight anymore, and I told him I’d let him win and that just made him madder but he didn’t even fight me about it, and Procrastination is even more boring than you, and Anxiety’s a little scaredy-cat and always says dumb stuff like ‘that hurts people!’ Like, duh, yeah, that’s the point dummy –”

Deceit very nearly said that he could see why the others didn’t want to be around the Duke, but bit his tongue. If Deceit was smart (and he was always smart) then he could perhaps use this to get some measure of control over the other Side.

“Of course that's the point.”

“Exactly!” The Duke pointed at Deceit victoriously. “But he didn’t like that so he told me to get out of his room, and he’s scary when he wants to be, did you know? And that’s super cool, but then he sunk me out so I didn’t get to tell him so.”

“How rude of him.”

“Totally.” The Duke nodded rapidly at Deceit, his neck bones clicking in a way that made the latter wince. “So I want to go to the other side.”

Well if that was the only reason why…

Deceit scoffed. “Why would you even want to be on the other side? There’s nothing over there but a place that looks like this but brighter, and a bunch of stuck-up Sides. Just stupid old Morality, and Logic, and –”

Deceit paused. He’d been about to say your brother, but that wasn’t really accurate, was it – they weren’t brothers, they were Sides, and had only had a spare couple weeks together before the Barrier had been erected and from what Deceit knew they had spent most of it fighting, so he didn’t really think that they even saw each other as anything close to family. Still, they were closer in origin than any of the other Sides.

“Your counterpart,” he eventually decided on.

“Narrative foil,” the Duke suggested, which sounded even more like a big-kid word coming from the Duke’s mouth, and Deceit was begrudgingly impressed – then again, of course it would be the literary vocab word that he would know, wouldn’t it?

“Sure. Why would you even want to be around them? You have to know that they’ll run away from you faster than anyone here will.”

And the Duke paused at that, and Deceit felt a little hopeful for a moment, but the Duke shook his head. “Nah, they won’t run – not yet at least, I’d get some time before they do. I mean, Morality already does, but Logic’s kinda fun to annoy ’cause he still doesn’t know how to react and he gets mad about it, but it is kinda lame that I can’t really do anything that sticks to him.” The Duke propped his elbow on his knee and his chin on his hand. “Princey’s fun though. He’ll always fight me.”

“Don’t you want to be around people that you don’t have to fight?”

The Duke wavered again, just for a moment, but continued, “it’s fun though, we’re playing.”

“You are?”

“Yeah! He’s the good guy and I’m the bad guy, and I do lots of fun nasty stuff and he goes and stops me from doing it and we fight about it and then he kills me and I get to have a super cool death scene.” The Duke fidgeted with the hem of his tunic. His eyes were far away. “I even let Princey do a death scene sometimes, but I’d mortally wound him and let him die slow so he had time to do a dramatic monologue first. Those are more boring though so we didn’t do ’em a lot. He likes to win and I like to die in cool ways.”

Deceit…hadn’t realized how mutual their battles were. “I see.”

“And no one here wants to play with me like that,” the Duke muttered.

Deceit…hesitated for a moment, considering. He’d sparred with Creativity before – they’d both always been very dramatic Sides, and it had been fun, with lots of monologues and fancy flourishes.

But that was stage-fighting, nothing like the bloody mess that the Duke liked to leave. Deceit couldn’t die obviously, but he could get discorporated, or even just hurt, and he wasn’t quite good enough at lying to himself that the pain wasn’t that bad yet.

(But maybe he could practice at that…?)

Deceit stopped that thought in its tracks. No way was he letting the Duke try to attack him.

“Well,” he said, thinking quickly, “are there any other games you like to play?”

The Duke’s eyes lit up – not literally, thankfully. “Oh yeah! There’s laser tag and theater with swords and knuckle-sandwich patty-cake and charades to the death and knife monopoly!”

Deceit was beginning to see a trend. “Wow,” he said pleasantly. “Those do sound fun. I wonder though, is there anything…” he couldn’t say something that involved sitting quietly, couldn’t say something that didn’t involve danger, “else?” he said after a brief pause.

The Duke tilted his head to the side with a crack of bone. “Like what?”

“Like…” Deceit cast his mind around frantically. Something creative, maybe? “Drawing pictures?”

The Duke’s nose wrinkled a little. “Drawing?”

“Drawing – police sketches. Of murderers.”

That got the Duke’s attention, and he even seemed to give it more than two seconds of consecutive thought. “And we can make up stories about what they did and why…”

“And if the police will ever be able to catch them, and how,” Deceit continued, relaxing a little. He’d played pretend with Creativity many times before, he’d always been a good actor. This was…maybe a little more morbid, but Deceit maybe liked morbid better. “I’ll do that with you.”

The Duke scrambled to sit up straight, leaning forward on his hands as he looked up at Deceit with a wide-eyed trusting openness that almost made Deceit feel bad. “You will?”

“I will,” Deceit said, voice as generous as he felt. “So if you want to follow me Duke, or even lead the way –”

“Oh, don’t call me Duke,” the Duke interrupted.

Deceit’s eyebrow arched up before he could make his face stay blank. There was no way that the Duke had already changed his function now…was there? “What should I call you?” Deceit asked carefully.

“How about Dukey,” the Duke said cheerfully.

Deceit huffed out a sigh when he realized that the Duke wasn’t actually changing his function, then he frowned when he realized what the Duke was asking. “I’m not calling you that.”

“Like Dooky! That means poop.”

“I know what it means –”

“Or a doody, or doo-doo, or shit, or scat, or poopy, or diarrhea – did you know that diarrhea can make your butt explode?”

The Sides did not get paid. Deceit, somehow, still felt like he was not getting paid enough for this. “I’m pretty sure it can’t.”

“It totally can.”

“Sure, whatever. I’m still calling you Duke. I’ll put a ‘the’ in front of it, that’s the most you’re getting.”

The Duke blew a raspberry at him. “You’re a dooky.”

“Whatever.”

The Duke huffed. “Fine. If you won’t call me Dukey, you can call me by my name.”

Deceit paused. “…What?”

“My name,” the Duke said again, like that helped at all.

“We don’t have names,” Janus said, trying not to scowl at the Duke for being dumb. “We’re Sides, not people.”

“Well I wanted a name and so did Princey, so we gave ourselves some.” The Duke sounded very pleased with himself. “And my name is Remus.”

Remus…

Deceit always kept his face in a perfectly controlled mask, and right then was no exception; he was sure that the Duke wouldn’t be able to see any of the (many, and complicated) feelings that were playing out inside his chest.

“I see,” he said slowly. And the Duke – Remus? – was looking at him so eagerly, he couldn’t help but add, “it’s a good name. It suits you.”

Remus bounced to his feet and turned a few sloppy cartwheels across the living room floor, and when he stood up he was smiling, wild and gleeful. “I know, right!” he bounced on the balls of his feet. “Are you going to choose a name too?”

It was probably a very predictable question, but Deceit somehow still felt blindsided by it. “Huh?”

“You should, you totally should!”

It was…an interesting thought. He’d always been Deceit – well, maybe he’d been something else before Thomas learned words, and he technically was ‘Lies’ and just told everyone to call him Deceit once he learned that word because it sounded cooler…but a name of his own?

It was a thought. Something to keep in mind, maybe.

“…Well,” Deceit said slowly. “When – if – I come up with one…you’ll be the first to know.”

Remus’s smile was wild as ever, but it somehow seemed more genuinely happy than Deceit had seen him yet. And when it made Deceit want to smile too, his mask slipping and showing his fang in a rare real grin…he decided that he wouldn’t bother to suppress the action. Just this once.

Forming this thread of control over Remus would bring him one step closer to being able to control every part of this whole situation, which would let him actually be able to properly influence Thomas, and that was what was important. If the fact that Remus seemed…happy about being around Deceit made Deceit feel weirdly nice and warm, well, that was just a bonus.

And if while he worked on getting a metaphorical leash on the other Side, they ended up actually enjoying their time together…well. Remus wasn’t Creativity…but maybe he wasn’t all that bad.

Maybe. Just maybe.

#dukeceitweek2022 #janus sanders #ts janus #remus sanders #ts remus #Canon verse #kid sides #child sides #kid janus sanders #kid remus sanders #post creativity split #remus typical violence #could be read as ship if you squint

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satorusdiary · 10 months

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2:29 am; back in love ! - toji fushiguro

summary: ex bf! toji in your bed for the first time in months after the split up.

continuation from dilf!toji being your ex bf

pure fluff, that’s all.

ps. the pic above isn’t mine :)

Gojo sent 2:29 am

i’m worried for you, are you even home?

the constant buzzing coming from toji’s phone continues to annoy him, and his chances of sleeping. it was his mistake not silencing his phone before he drifted off with you in his arms.

yet how could he pull away from you when all he wanted to do was trap you with his warmth? it was impossible trying to get away from you.

he almost forgot how he was able to be away from you for so long. now that you are in his arms again, his heart has been soaring of excitement for so long in the past few hours.

he’s missed you so much.

his love for you has never stopped, nor has it stopped looking for you. his other half.

Toji sent 2:30 am

the fuck are you on?

the light is almost blinding, and the small squirms you make against his chest almost make his heart stop. he doesn’t want to wake you up, especially when you were already having trouble sleeping.

the bags under your eyes, and the dried tear stains under them as well had him concerned for you. all he wants to do is care for you.

Gojo sent 2:30 am

your car isn’t outside your house, and i know damn well u don’t park shit in ur garage.

Toji sent 2:32 am

that’s because i’m not home, ya dumbass

before his phone was attacked with multiple messages from his friend, he shuts off his phone and places it face down on the nightstand.

sleep is far from consuming his body now. his eyes stay looking outside the window, and into the dark starry sky. his thoughts weren’t all over the place, but had certain things to think about.

he’s gonna have to explain everything to you in the morning. then he is gonna have to pick up megumi from nanami’s home, go to work.. all that stuff.

he might consider taking the day off if it meant staying by your side.

a sudden movement snaps toji out of his thoughts, your arm that was around his bare torso slithers off, you rub your eyes while slightly whining.

“toji?..” you muttered, your head moving up to look at the wide awake man. you were still tired, but wide awake to know that toji wasn’t able to sleep.

his arm went under your— his hoodie that was over your body and rubbed your bare back. his warm hand easing you quickly with satisfaction.

“shh— shh. go back ‘ta sleep, sweetheart.” toji snuggles in closer to you, your head snuggling in deeper towards his broad chest.

“‘m sorry, pretty baby. didn’t mean ‘to wake you up.” he whispers, making sure to not wake you up more than you already were.

instead of complaining, you only hummed. whilst placing a kiss on his chest.

“‘ts okay. sleep with me, tojii.” you slurred. sleep was just about to take over your body, until he kissed your forehead sweetly.

“yeah, will do princess. sleep well, mkay?” it wasn’t really question, more of a concerned demand coming from him. none the less you nodded your head, with your eyes drooping closed.

“love you..” you started off, bringing one of your hands to caress his arm lovingly. the confession makes toji smile, snuggling into you more.

“i love you more baby.”

jujutsu kaisen masterlist

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