Smoke and Mirrors - Greenninjagal (2024)

Chapter 1: Actor, Artist, Arsonist

Chapter Text

“I’m just saying — ” Remus says, almost sounding excited at this new revelation of his, “ — the next step would definitely be an apartment building! Think about it, Roman!”

“ I am thinking about it,” Roman says, tiredly. “I don’t want to be thinking about it, but I am.”

“So many people live there, you know? There’s, what, sixty units in your building, right? At least twenty of them have got to be families with little brats, then old people with their pets, other college students with friends over. On a Friday like today there’s got to be, like, over two hundred people. And then you have the narrow staircases, which Grandma and Grandpop can’t get down in a timely manner, and I bet with all the mold in the walls — ”

“Remus,” Roman says, tilting his phone so that the microphone clearly picks up on how incredibly not-amused he is with the conversation.

“...the elevator is basically already on its last legs. Remember how it shook when I jumped in it last time?”

Roman remembers it really well actually, probably better than Remus, since Roman actually has a healthy dose of self preservation. Remus had just been finishing laughing his nasally, crackling chortle when the elevator doors opened again finally on Roman’s floor, and the sight of the bruising on Roman’s face when he saw him again was enough to set him off periodically throughout the rest of his three hour stay.

Still, Roman knows that Remus has a point. Not that he’s going to admit it before he’s actually in a casket, because Remus would never let him live it down.

Roman side steps out of the way of a cyclist who seems to think the whole sidewalk belongs to them, and readjusts the strap of his bag on his shoulder that is currently cutting off the circulation to his fingertips. The city isn’t entirely busy, nor the weather too terrible, but Roman is regretting choosing to do the hike back to his apartment building. His knockoff vans are hella cute today, but they were not made for long distance walking, and there’s a rock in his left one that he hasn’t managed to get out no matter how many times he’s stopped to take it off and shake.

“I’m just saying,” Remus repeats, “ If I were — ”

“I hate to be the voice of reason here,” Roman says, “but you are not a serial arsonist , Remus!”

“I could be. You don’t know everything I do in my free time.”

“You don’t have time to be an arsonist. Between all your comic deadlines and the various licenses you have accrued, you don’t spend enough time on this plane of Earth in order to have set fire to anything other than your toaster,” Roman rolls his eyes. “And that’s only when you remember to eat, Rem.”

Remus blows a raspberry back at him directly into the receiver so that Roman can hear exactly how wet it is and cringe away from it.

Remus had a talent for getting himself into trouble and trying new things that skirted the edge of legality, but he’d given up fires back when they were tweens. Whoever or whatever was doing it now seemed to be doing it with much more intention: a rental car in a half full parking garage, an abandoned warehouse in the industrial area already set to be demolished, a newly built, still for-sale two-story house in the suburbs (casualty: one, injured six). The most recent event had been two days ago when a department store nearly exploded right as it was closing, killing two employees, three customers, and a firefighter and injuring far more. The fires were slowly getting bigger and gaining more traction, as if gearing up for a grand finale and the news hadn’t been taking it easy.

The police and the FBI were apparently hot-on-the-case and the tip number line was almost engraved into Roman’s retinas from how it was plastered all over the place, begging for Cyra City civilians to stay aware, keep a close eye on things, and report anything that seemed suspicious.

So far no actual details about the whole thing had been made public (on the very valid worry of copycats), but the lack of information had left people far more options to gossip about it. So far Roman’s physical chemistry class was split between it being a handful of rowdy teenagers “rebelling” and it being a serial murderer winding up for an enmasse attack that would go down in history along with the “greats”. Most of the stores had started selling mini fire extinguishers in the checkout lines and Roman’s mom had called last week to see if he had already bought himself one, and Roman wasn’t embarrassed until he answered yes.

But Remus already knows all that, and had texted him a string of mocking emojis until Roman had asked if he should sell it.

It’s currently sitting in his apartment next to his bed, in easy access if he spontaneously catches fire while sleeping. ((His last hook up had called him prepared, and well… Roman had been eager to show the guy just how prepared he was.))

Luckily, his beloved apartment building is around the corner and he can feel his second wind coming at even the thought of taking his shoes off and collapsing face first into his bed. He starts patting through his pockets for his keys, stalling his walk behind two older women in jogging outfits, and switches his phone to his other hand so he can check through his bag frustratedly. He’s found at least three chapsticks he thought he lost months ago, and his extra hairbrush, and about twenty seven receipts (one of which has the number of the cute barista and he makes a mental note to put that in his phone later). There’s a crumpled flier for some niche religious group that that Roman accepted partially because the guy handing them out looked a bit desperate for interaction, but mostly because they were outside of the boutique Roman likes, blocking the entrance. He tosses that one in the nearby trash can as he walks by.

Roman pins his phone between his cheek and his shoulder, using both hands to sift through his bag. His brain tumbles through the previous conversation trying to remember what they were talking about.

“Did you eat today?”

“ Huh ?” Remus says, which is a Remusian for ‘ What day is it?’ “ Hey, how many people do you think I could murder and get away with?”

“Remus.”

“Probably like fifteen right? At least to start. Once I figured out how to do it. Gasoline and a lighter and I could probably get a full apartment building — ”

“Honestly, going from no murder, to a few murders, to about a hundred is an insane jump. Even for you.”

“Well it wouldn’t be a full hundred. At least a few people would get out, right? Unless I barricaded the front doors, or like… chain-and-padlock-ed it closed.”

“The point still stands that— and I can’t believe you’re making me argue this— you didn’t set those fires and you aren’t going to set them in the future!”

Remus makes a disagreeable tone and Roman smiles graciously at the women nearby who probably just overheard that whole conversation and might call the police on him for it later. Lovely. He turns away quickly leaning into his phone.

“In fact, right now I bet I can guess exactly what you are doing!” Roman continues. “Sitting in your drawing chair, with both your computer monitors on. The left one has the sketches for the next page of your comic, half lined, and the right one has the character sheets for Anton and Pryce and the Dragon Witch. Your drawing pad is in front of you, and you’re spinning your pen in your hand aimlessly while we talk, and everything is the same way it was this morning.”

“You forgot the part where there’s a super hot stripper giving me a blowj*b right now,” Remus says with the tell-tale clack of him putting down his digital art pen, which is as good as him admitting to it all. Roman pauses just enough to roll his eyes so hard he’s certain that Remus gets the vibe from his own apartment.

“Damnit,” he huffs, checking his pockets again. “Why can’t I find anything today?”

“Are you still looking for that compact mirror?”

“Keys, now,” Roman says. “But I swear I had that mirror this morning when I left the apartment. I was late because I was cleaning it!”

Or well. Because he was trying to put on makeup via guesswork, but he didn’t need Remus knowing that was the real reason.

“You know you could have made the jump with the right angle at the windows in your fancy science school, right? No one would even have noticed. All too busy being boring lame losers with no life, just like you.”

“I don’t like traveling without another mirror.”

“Um, hello? Phone screen!”

“I’m not going to leave my phone behin— found it!”

“The mirror?”

“My keys,” Roman twists his keychain around his hand, and waves at the other college students loitering at the corner before he heads towards the entrance to his apartment building. “Look, Remus—”

“ Yeah, yeah, homework, physics, blah blah blah, you’re not getting laid, blah blah — ”

“Between the two of us, who walked in on the other in the middle of—”

“Between the two of us who forgot to return my copy of 2005′s Just Like Heaven and made me come get it myself?”

"You didn’t even like it!"

"I don’t like you either," Remus says. "And jeez for someone who looks exactly like me there are some startling f*cking differences. Like length — ”

“Tony didn’t have a problem with it.”

“I thought his name was Kyle?”

Roman frowns, pulling his key out of the door and catching it with his knee, thinking that night over. “No. He was definitely a Tony. His hair was… you know, Tony hair!”

“The fact that you had to rely on his hair is sad,” Remus states. “You get how that’s sad, right?”

“I’m hanging up—”

“Wait, wait! Just… you’re sure that…you’re not going to, like… burnaliveinafire?”

Roman blinks, and swallows back the ridiculous amount of softness that appeared out of nowhere, and hits like a sucker punch right through his ribcage in a way that is so very Remus.

“I’m not going to burn alive in a fire,” Roman says.

“… promise to jump over the second anything looks sketchy."

"There's, like, nine other apartment buildings and two hotels within walking distance! And like ten others around this district in the city!" Roman says, just short of whining because inside the building there are people who recognize him and he does not need them thinking all he does is whine and complain. At least the air conditioning in the lobby is running, offering relief from the horrible ten minute walk he was forced to endure. He does not get how normal people do this, all the time, every day!

"Fourteen, actually. I looked it up this morning and I don’t need your fancy math degree to know that’s a one in twenty-five chance. That’s a non-zero percentage," Remus counters, with that mocking tone that borders on awe because even after all this time he can’t imagine how Roman had gone from center stage to knee deep in calculus problems, willingly. He’d only made the mistake of asking Roman once, and since then both of them pretend that Roman had always dreamed of solving differentials.

“It will take hours to find something that’s close to your apartment,” Roman says instead.

“At least you’ll be alive,” Remus says.

“Fine, fine….are you still wearing those dog tags?”

Remus makes an affirmative noise and Roman sighs. They had been polished relics of their childhood: something their parents had insisted that they have at all times for emergencies and that Roman and Remus had complained about endlessly. They hadn’t been allowed phones until they were nearly twelve years old because every argument of “we need it for emergencies” was countered by “you have necklaces that allow you to travel miles in a handful of inches”.

"And don’t use the elevators at all,” Remus adds. “I’m serious about this. They’re deathtraps in a fire. I’ll come over there and hide all your mascara.”

"Yeah, yeah," Roman stifles a yawn. "And if something happens, meet at that ugly gas station at the state border between us, don’t tell anyone where we are going, and don’t accept any rides from strangers."

"Don’t make me sound like Mom."

"Nag me a little less."

"Bitch."

"Dick."

"Dork."

"Geek."

"Loser."

"Dumbass," Roman says, far more affectionately than he meant it to come out as, and so he clears his throat quickly and he heads towards the elevator. “I’m hanging up now. Remember to eat something and I’ll see you in two days.”

“Two days? What’s.... ah, f*ck me,” Remus says. There’s a loud creak of leather and Roman imagines Remus throwing all his weight back in his chair and staring at the ceiling as if he’s personally challenging fate itself. He breathes out heavily in a way that ironically mirrors how Roman’s own bones feel at the realization.

“Another year,” he says.

((He does not ask if Roman ever thinks it will get easier to bear. Roman does not answer him that no it probably won’t ever. It doesn’t make either of them feel better. ))

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Roman says, forcibly shoving away the deary aura that descended on them as easily as he could. If he takes a breath and swallows away the lump in his throat he could pretend that they were talking about visiting each other for a birthday celebration.

He might not ever get to be an actor, but he’d always had a passion for acting. Is it any wonder? When he’s playing a part, he can shed the skin of a no-named nobody from somewhere so remote no one thinks it's a real place, and he can be someone with a name standing on center stage.

Roman breathes out so heavily that he almost misses Remus’s quick response.

“I already attempted to swan dive off the roof into a spoon today,” his twin says, flippantly. “Bruised my eye and split my lip and probably broke my collar bone.”

“Wait, what—”

“Later, Prince Charmless.”

“Remus, you did what?!”

But by then he’s talking to the end call screen on his phone, staring into the picture of the flaming dumpster that he used as a profile picture for his idiot brother, with his heart racing. Logically, he knows that Remus is joking.

Probably.

Uh, maybe?

Roman suddenly remembers a lot of leaping off the backyard shed until Dad came out screaming at them red in the face with worry, followed by tag games that ended with a leap through a window wrong and three hours worth of sitting still to get the glass shards pulled out of his arms, and then racing through the upstairs hall to jump the stair railing into the strategically placed hand mirror to make it to school on time.

In all honesty, Roman bets that Remus did try it, as part of a morning routine that their parents hadn’t been able to beg out of him. One would think the first time the jagged edges of a break had shredded his skin, Remus would have learned to be more careful, but somehow it seemed that Remus had fallen in love with webbed cracks in his mirror.

Roman sighs, placing his phone into his pocket. And then he presses the elevator button and leans against the wall next to the panel to take off his shoe and look for that stupid rock again.

His keys jangle in his other hand, annoyingly loud in the otherwise still entrance alcove. It’s times like these that he can appreciate that most of his neighbors dislike the other people in the building and therefore make extra effort to not be caught outside.

The only person Roman really ever has to worry about is the guy on the third floor who he thinks might be a weed dealer and is constantly hinting at giving Roman a first time discount. Great guy, really! He just always manages to catch Roman right next to a reflective surface. It’s pure coincidence that he hasn’t noticed yet.

The elevator dings and the doors roll open with a gentle rumble that does not betray any of the unreliability of its innerworkings. Every other week it’s out of order and Roman’s pretty sure at least 80% of the building has complained to the owners about it, but the solutions never last more than another few days.

Roman doesn’t even usually take the elevator! But the walk was long, and he lives on the top floor, and serial arsonists aren’t going to set fire to his apartment building in the two minutes it will take to get to his floor.

It’s fine.

Roman slides on his shoe and hobbles into the elevator, breathing in the musty stench that smells like it’s coming from the corpses that might be buried under the building. Part of Roman entertains the idea that ghosts haunt only the elevator, sadly floating around and gaining their small enjoyments from watching people get stuck in between floors when it inevitably breaks.

Roman hasn’t done anything to annoy the spirits recently, at least to his knowledge, so he should be okay.

He leans back against the railing just in case though.

It takes another long moment for the elevators to start closing again; definitely long enough that Roman gets the impression that he shouldn’t have gotten on at all. The longer it stays open the more likely it is for someone else to suddenly show up and want to get on as well. There are only about three things Roman can think of that are worse than being in an enclosed space, with a stranger, while his compact mirror is MIA.

Last time something like that happened, the other person got agitated enough that Roman had seriously thought they were going to attack him. Roman knows he’s unsettling to be around; it’s not simple to catch what is off about him at first, but most human brains can pick up that something is distinctly wrong. Knowing something’s wrong with a situation, but not being sure what and being trapped in a small compartment without a sure way to defend yourself? Yeah that’s a recipe for disaster.

Across the alcove, the door to the stairwell opens just in time for Roman’s heart to leap right into his throat: his brain screaming that oh hey! People to join you inside your small box that Remus just told you not to get into! Even when it wouldn’t make any sense to go down the stairs just to take the elevator back up.

There’s three of them, all dressed in the very uniform pest control jumpsuits that make Roman’s insides shrivel slightly. He’d been meticulous about keeping his apartment clean and if he saw a single co*ckroach, Roman would be turning into the next arsonist, no other incitations required.

They’re all carrying various equipment items: a thick duffle back with the pest control logo (an ant ironically burning under a magnifying glass), a bulky backpack that nearly doesn’t fit through the doorway, and a thick leather briefcase that seems out of place. The first guy is saying something in a language Roman doesn’t recognize, with a smile on his face that is very charming, despite him being at least a decade older than Roman, as he holds the door open for the others. The second rolls her eyes, tugging the brim of her hat lower over her head.

The third has a scar from running from the middle of his left cheek all the way down his face to his neck in a way that barely seems more than a few months healed. When he makes direct eye contact with Roman, the man’s thin lips twisting into a grin, like he knows how fast Roman’s heart is beating at the sight of him. He waves and Roman catches sight of a cheap industrial bike lock in his other hand.

Please please please, don’t suddenly realize that needs to go back upstairs, please don’t get in here, pleasedonotcomecloser —

But in the end the doors close fitfully, locking out that man and his smile and his friends, and Roman sags against the railing. He presses a hand to his chest trying to regulate his panicked heartbeat back to something manageable and sustainable.

Say what you will about Remus, but he knows best how to make Roman paranoid for the rest of the day.

The gears shudder, and the mechanical whirl of the elevator fills the whole area as it begins its ascent. Roman pulls out his phone again, swiping through the notifications that he accrued during the walk. A few responses to his Snap Chats streaks, three emails (two junk and one from a classmate asking about studying together for the test, which would be great, if Roman hadn’t already turned her down twice), a reminder to play one of his mindless phone games, and something must have happened in the group chat he has on instagram with a few other Math majors. Roman double taps the notification and swipes in his passcode (it’s an R, it’s always been an R. Remus has been able to hack into his phone since they were eleven, but Roman is horribly, secretly afraid that if he changes it now, he’ll forget it by tomorrow).

The elevator shudders.

And somewhere, distantly, Roman thinks he smells smoke.

Chapter 2: Vistage, Victim, Volition

Chapter Text

“Please don’t,” Roman says to all the gods that are out there. “Please, Remus will never let me live this down.”

And because the gods like to laugh at Roman specifically, that is the moment when the fire alarms start shrieking on all the floors and the elevator jolts to an emergency stop in between the fourth and fifth floors, red lights blaring and alarms so loud that Roman feels his brain start to vibrate.

His bag drops off his shoulder immediately, his hand flying around to the pocket that he keeps his mirror in before remembering that it’s not there. He hisses out a breath between his teeth and looks at the doors: they didn’t open at all, which means that if he’s going to get out that way he’s going to need to do it by brute force. He doesn’t think that anyone on these floors is going to be willing to stop to help pry them open, if they even open all the way.

Oh, yeah, he can definitely smell smoke now. He's not sure if he wants to open the door anymore.

“Damnit!” Roman says, looking around the elevator, before his eyes land on the metal railing. Or more specifically, the reflection of the red light bouncing off the metal. “This is a bad idea.”

The elevator shakes.

“Such a bad idea,” Roman repeats, but that doesn’t stop him licking his hand quickly and rubbing down the railing quickly and sloppily until he’s certain that there’s no fingerprints, smears, or streaks on the surface. He pauses for a breath, two, three, and times the flashing light.

His fingers weave around the handle of his bag again, and then—one, two, now!— he launches his entire body into the railing.

There's always a split second: a brief blink where Roman thinks Oh, it's not going to work, no matter how many times Roman does it, no matter how many times he checks the angles, no matter what calculations he runs in his mind. There’s a breath where Roman closes his eyes on instinct and remembers being six years old running wildly at the hallway mirror, only to find the glare from the sunlight had turned it from a passage into a solid wall and he was on the ground with a concussion. His faith and confidence wavers, the fear sapping his strength away, the edges of panic creeping in to make his stomach church, so close to having butterflies before a performance on stage that he can almost convince himself that’s what’s going on—

But then his hand slides through the reflective surface, his arm, his torso, head and legs.

And then Roman’s lungs fill up with relief so sweet, he doesn’t even feel the chill of the Mirror Realm at all.

((Remus and Roman could never agree on the name. Remus wanted something dark and horrifying, like The Abyss of Death or The Void of Mystery or Do you think that we can die in here, Roman? Do you think anyone would find our bodies? Maybe this is where all those missing kids on TV end up—And Roman eventually ended up crying so hard that their parents took control of the argument and declared it a very boring “Mirror Realm”.))

It’s… dark. Like always, although Roman can see perfectly fine, though some unexplainable power; the source of light coming from wherever the chill in the air comes from. There’s not much to see: it's so big and cold and sempiternal, like a dark labyrinth he could wander through for eons and never find the sun in. There are all manners of objects resting around made of wispy silver shapes, the gossamer ghosts of reflective objects and materials arranged without rhyme or reason like the world’s strangest hoarder’s dimension.

Truthfully, the objects moved around by themselves when neither Roman nor Remus were there. Roman had found pocket watches from down the street inches away from the hand mirror in his mother’s vanity. He’d been late to school twice when his locker mirror had disappeared from where he liked to keep it with all the stuff from his room, and had gotten lost thrice when his bedroom wall mirror deposited him only around car mirrors belonging to the highway out of town. Spoons, pens, metal tumbler Yeti cups piled around the area without a signal to ownership, decorative mirrors gave glimpses into lives of dozens of people in the city that Roman would never know the names of, pocket change rained from the empty abyssal sky and plopped into the strange ebony lake that made up the floor without a single sound.

Or at least, they had called it a floor. It hadn’t ever occurred to them that it wouldn’t be one: despite the ripples that rolled away from their careful steps throughout the years, never once had they been able to see into the darkness below them, nor had their own steps faltered from anything other than a completely flat surface. Remus took one of Dad’s hammers to it when they were six, and no matter how they hit it, the head of the hammer had sailed straight through the surface and Roman had scraped his knuckles after attempting a few too many times and getting his hand caught between the handle and the floor.

Then they had found out the hard way that the floor didn’t bother with things that weren’t directly part of Roman or Remus. The two of them could walk on the surface of it, but Remus lost his entire backpack when he tossed it at the kraken shaped metal paperweight leading to his room and it didn’t naturally sail through into the real world. It didn’t matter how light the item was, or how buoyant it was in regular water, or if it was actually a living breathing person and Roman had only let go for a second—

((Sometimes if Roman isn’t thinking, he’ll catch a glint of color in the corner of his eyes: the small pastel blue kids glasses of a boy who would never need them again, still floating under the hyaline surface. Forever out of reach, forever a reminder, forever a symbol of three boys who didn’t know better, left there for whoever comes after them, if there’s anyone who does.))

Roman spins around in the reticent world, searching the nearby items for something familiar. He doesn’t see much; certainly not anything that he knows is part of his own apartment. There’s faint noise coming from a lot of the objects, like thousands of radios playing all at once at a low volume to gather the worst cacophony of music the universe could think of. Part of Roman appreciates that: the realm would be much more creepy if it were just silent all the time, with the aura of something terrible waiting in the nothingness to drag him away forever. More than once, Remus had gotten a kick out of sneaking around and surprising Roman when his back was turned.

There’s white flashing lights from a few things and the echoes of an alarm blaring in tandem that tell him these things are from his apartment building. Someone’s bathroom mirror, someone’s vanity mirror, silver pieces of jewelry resting on a dresser, silverware from a table, a window showing the nearby building because the sunlight hit just right.

There’s a copy of Remus’s dog tags a foot away, hovering in the air as if to make sure Roman sees them. They glow with the faint sight of Remus’s computer screen, warped fuzzy visions of him sifting boredly through Tumblr instead of drawing, the hum of the rap music Remus likes bumbling through them.

Roman reaches out for them.

There’s the sound of coughing right behind him and Roman freezes.

Of course it’s not someone actually right behind him, but Roman whips around, eyeing the mountain of motley miscellany.

There’s smoke in these mirrors, bubbling up, a searing grey fog darkening like the night even though Roman just walked home in the early afternoon heat. There’s flames in even more of them, blistering and blustering with more oranges and reds and all of Autumn. With the clamorous alarm ringing through each of them, Roman almost misses the weak and wheezy wet of the cough somewhere in the mix.

Roman hesitates.

Then he carefully turns around and shifts through a few of the objects, careful not to touch anything that might lead to him putting his hand into some unsuspecting party's sterling silver sink faucet right in the middle of doing after lunch dishes, without recognizing there’s an active, real fire going on, or worse—puts his hand directly into the searing flames for the stupid prize of third degree burns that Remus will be ruthless in teasing him about.

The sound of coughing gets louder as Roman scatters objects through the Mirror Realm. Roman’s bag drags against the floor as he kneels over the sharp, phantasmal shattered remains of a pair of Webster glasses that he pinpoints the loudest version of the raspy breath comes from.

He can barely make out the bundled body of someone on the floor in an apartment, curled just out of the range of the lens shards. Blazing tongues of fire dance around them, eating up the walls and showering flecks of ash into the air around them. They’re bleeding from a gash in their head, a faint smearing of blood down their face that leaves their eyes dazed and squinting as if they couldn't remember what fire was and was curiously trying to figure it out via telepathy. They're reaching for something out lens view, but after another moment the coughing takes over and they slump into the hardwood flooring gasping.

Roman hands shake. "Come on. Come on. Somebody's got to know you're there."

A friend. A brother. A parent.

The alarms ring from dozens of other mirrors, bouncing around and echoing, and Roman's heart pounds in throat as he stares at the stranger. Seconds tick by and they aren’t moving and there’s too much fire around them and Roman is going to watch them die.

Roman breathes in and curses all manner of Remus related things. In the scattered reflections around him there’s nothing that belongs to his apartment so that mini fire extinguisher was going to be utterly useless; but that’s fine! Totally fine! Roman tears off his bag, wrapping the strap around his wrist so it doesn't go tumbling into the waters under him as all things are prone to do when Roman is no longer holding them, then he yanks his shirt up over his mouth and nose and thinks hero and bravery in spades and always gets the happy endings.

Then Roman charges through the surface of the glasses.

Immediately the heat soars around him, like tossing his entire body into a preheated oven, and then trying to remember what dish he was baking. The air burns when he inhales, itching and scratching against his lymph nodes no matter how tightly Roman presses his shirt to his face. The flames had eaten most of the immediate surroundings, climbing up the walls and dusting ashes into Roman’s hair as they tried to curiously devour the stucco ceiling.

But it’s okay! Roman is calm and collected: he’s the last knight standing against the dragon that’s burning down the village; he’s the general warrior commanding his men on the battlefield; he’s the hero of the story where everything works out and he’ll come up with a clever solution at the climax that will salvage the situation at the last second when all hope is almost lost.

If Roman squints he might be able to make out how the apartment is a strange inverse of his own, kitchen on the wrong side, a series of doors on the left side of the hall instead of the right, the living room window facing the skyline city to the east instead of the west. There’s no furniture, or furnishings; just an empty shell of a home that had been filled with demonic fire and from Hell. In the back of Roman’s mind he logs that they must be on the top floor, probably, one of unsold apartments opposite of his own that Roman had gotten used to seeing empty and quiet since the last neighbors had moved out and the landlord had jacked up the price.

Roman coughs dryly, as he kneels next to the stranger on the ground, his bag hitting the ground heavily next to their head.

“HEY!” He calls over the crackling of fire. “HEY! CAN YOU HEAR ME?”

They wheeze, but otherwise don’t respond. Roman strings along some form of curses as the flames circle them and then he reaches out and turns the person over.

They’re smartly dressed, navy blue button up with a silver tie and black slacks, and have the type of trustable face that could get even the stingiest of wallets to open up with minimal effort, and no, Roman wasn’t going to take the time to be jealous about it. If Roman has to guess they were probably some retailer who took on the job of filling the apartments and was doing a nice casual look over the locations for sale before they tried to sell it to people. They probably got startled by the alarms or the actual fire, and hit their head.

They make some sort of groaning noise, but other than that their head lulls back to the ground away from Roman entirely.

“Cool, Cool,” Roman says. “This is fine.”

He tries not to breathe too deeply when he hoists up the person with all of his strength. They’re heavier than they look; the outfit was covering up a decent set of muscles that Roman apologies for roughly feeling up. He slings one of the arms over his shoulder, holding it in place with his left hand while the other hooks around his new best friend's ribs and tries not to think about how roughly his heavy bag swings in the void as he does.

Hot air billows into his face and the smoke throttles Roman’s vision, while he tries to balance with the new found weight on him. His backpack tumbles off out of his hand, and unfortunately Roman can’t risk bending back down to pick it up. His collection of pins smiles up at him and regretfully Roman utters a goodbye to them: the promo pin for Remus’s webcomic, his three pride pins, the merch from his favorite youtuber, the free school logo pin.

The person on his shoulder coughs again, heaving for breath, and Roman drags them towards… well not the f*cking door anymore. He can’t even see the hallway that leads to the front door anymore, and he trusts the currently-on-fire floor even less than that. But it’s okay! It’s chill!

Roman is completely cool under pressure and not at all wishing that he’d just stayed out on the country farm with his parents.

“I wasn’t made for a farm life. That’s why I went to school in the city!” Roman hisses, dragging the unconscious body with him to the windows and the fire escape (please, let there be a fire escape, Roman can’t remember if there’s a fire escape on this side of the building). “Do you know how bored you have to be to make-up soap operas about your mother’s chickens?! Very bored!”

The floor aches beneath his feet and the heat radiates in the air searing the first layer of skin off of his entire body at the same time. The window is cracked from the heat, spider webs racing through it like bladed fingers, but when Roman frantically tries the switch, it’s jammed closed. Hazy quality of the air makes it hard to see, although from the touch it feels like some idiot painted it and the window frame closed. Roman might be able to punch through it, but there’s no metal frame outside: no fire escape, no way to escape.

And well, Roman is a physics major, but he doesn’t need a fancy piece of paper to figure out how far the trajectory of his blood is going to be from his body if they do a somersault out the window onto solid concrete down below.

“f*ck f*ck f*ck f*ck—”

Out the window two different fire trucks screech to a stop in front of the area into the road blocking traffic and tiny people leap from them towards the building pointing and running. From the sixth floor they look like ants, colorful ants, but there’s not a single civilian among them running from the building to the ambulances. Roman doesn’t know what that means: maybe there’s not anyone in the building right now, or maybe there was a pile up in the stairwell or something else. He doesn’t exactly have the time to worry about it when something in the far rooms starts Pop crackling like stereo static.

The clouds bloat around the outside, dark and dangerous and Roman coughs so hard that he nearly stumbles and drops his companion. Each of his pants comes out shorter and more painful. He’s pretty sure he’s leaving bruises on his companion, but he doubts it will matter because they’re both going to die here.

The fire creeps closer, and Roman pulls them both back from it.

There’s one way they could go. Roman’s phone is suddenly heavy in his back pocket, and Roman feels very much like he’s seven years old again, listening to Remus try to describe the Mirror Realm to Patton: the cold dread of fear is clawing up his spine, frigid and dangerous and knowing.

Something bad is going to happen.

Roman lets go of his companion’s arm and pulls his phone out of his back pocket. He drops it to the ground, face up at their feet, and the black screen immediately flickers with the fire's reflections and the pale blank face of his unconscious compatriot. It would be a rather interesting picture, Roman thinks. Remus could agree it would look like some insanely cool horror movie poster considering it all appears as a body floating in the air without help.

His mom would kill him after all her and Dad gave up for them to have normal lives, if they knew what he was currently doing. But Roman could never leave someone in trouble. Not when he could basically walk through walls and there were people whose lives were in the balance.

He hadn’t been able to save Patton (too far away, too late, too distracted), but if he could stop anyone else from dying, he owed it to Patton to do it.

((He’s not seven years old. He’s not shh-ing Remus’s giggles as they sneak a mirror out of the house. He’s not linking his fingers in with his best friend’s holding tightly and excitedly. He’s not seven years old and the stranger he’s holding is not Patton and—))

Roman closes his eyes and steps forward into where his reflection would have been, if he had ever had one.

Immediately, the feeling of burning recedes and Roman falls into the embrace of the winter air. The Mirror Realm’s darkness is a stark contrast to the bright lights and chaos of the real world and Roman tugs his companion the rest of the way through it into relative safety here.

His lungs heave for air and Roman drinks in the frosted oxygen like it’s water. He stumbles a few feet into the abyssal plain, nearly dropping his companion when the floor refuses to take any of their weight and Roman precariously tries not to drop them entirely into the nothingness. He’s never been the type that visits the gym for anything more than asking to borrow the bathroom, and Roman is beginning to think that maybe he should have tried a bit harder.

The objects in the area have mixed around again, shifted and changed some of them floating like particularly interesting art pieces. A lot of them have fire in them.

Remus’s dog tags are gone.

Roman watches a nearby ghostly tumbler warp out of shape and disappear from the realm all together. There’s something haunting about it: about knowing that it will never come back, that it's one more cut off escape route even though Roman had never intended to use it. He’s sure that a therapist would have a field day with that type of metaphor.

“Come on, come on, come on,” Roman says. The crackle of fire blazes all around them, so loud that the noise sings in Roman’s mind. Everywhere he turns there’s more flames, more objects disappearing, and Roman drags his companion deeper into the maze of items looking for something, anything that will get them out of here before Roman’s aching arms give out.

His companion groans loudly, blurrily squinting at their surroundings, and Roman remembers that pair of broken glasses that he used to get into the empty apartment. Between a blurred eyesight and the head wound, Roman’s chest flares with a hope that maybe this lovely companion of his won’t even remember this, or will write it off as a trick of the mind and Roman can go back to being a normal college student who never—

Their gaze latches on to Roman’s face and he has about a millisecond to think oh f*ck, before the stranger’s eyes widen with latent panic and they lurch out of Roman’s grip with everything they have.

((Roman is six years old suddenly. He’s six years old and laughing with Remus, giggling a giddy way that only sharing a secret can cause. He’s six years old and he’s holding his best friend’s left hand tightly, with their matching handmade friendship bracelets rubbing against each other and Remus is tugging them into the Mirror Realm. He’s six years old, and Patton’s first step meets pure water instead of a floor and Roman’s grip slips and Patton’s head goes under—))

Roman lunges after them, skidding across the floor on his stomach and just barely managing to catch the stranger’s wrist. They let out a reflective scream, an army of bubbles exploding out from their mouth as Roman struggles to hold their whole weight with just his hand. Roman isn’t sure what curses he comes up with, but the sheer desperation, the sheer panic, the sheer terror of losing his grip gives him some sort of miracle strength to haul his companion’s torso over the floor level.

They cling to whatever bit of Roman they can reach, as if Roman is a buoy in the middle of the ocean until they’re twisted into some sort of a parody of a hug that Roman can’t even spare the brain cells to be embarrassed about; in another situation, another world and universe where he’s pressed this close to someone else, he’d be missing a shirt and they’d be lying in Roman’s wonderful, not-on-fire bed.

“Ribs,” Roman yelps. “Ow f*ck!”

“Wh-wha—” The person coughs, spitting out the black water over Roman’s face.

“Don’t let go,” Roman says, although he doesn’t really trust him to listen. Roman stretches out for the nearest item that doesn’t have any flames. He doesn’t even know what it is, not really, but the moment he touches it and shoves his hand through gravity shifts and he and his companion are tumbling through it.

He lets out a pathetic wheeze when he hits the ground, and his companion slams into his stomach fully. Dizzy with adrenaline, Roman barely can barely recognize the graffiti tag on the alley right by the dumpsters for his apartment, the dirt and scuffed blue and red too warbled to actually spell out anything in a language that Roman speaks.

He gasps for breath again, tasting the acrid burn of smoke in the air as his shirt slides down from his face. His head is ringing, the last pieces of his calmness sliding away with each inhale.

He did it. He did it.

Roman thinks he’s going to throw up. His limbs feel like they’re made of pudding, topped with whipped cream and a cherry for good measure. His companion, the stranger with terrifying blue eyes, gives another cough, spitting out black water even now. Roman forces his body to move, shoving his companion off of him and then manhandling them up, despite a handful of rasped weak protests. They don’t immediately elbow Roman in the face which is about the only thing Roman can bring himself to call a win.

A crumpled soda can skids away from him as they move and Roman mentally thanks whatever teenager couldn’t have been bothered enough to throw it away properly.

“Come on,” Roman says, slinging the stranger over his shoulder. Despite the fact that they’d been under water, nearly surprise-drowned, they’re dry to the bone by some magical property of climbing through a reflection into the real world again. The black water drips from their lips, blending in with the navy of their shirt and staining the silver of their tie, and the blood from their forehead trails along the curve of their cheekbones.

In the wrong light, they look like they have freckles and blond curls.

Roman swallows down the wash of grief that tastes like smoke and cinders and summertime lemonade. He shakes his head, once, twice, thrice, trying to wipe away the streaks of Patton that are dragging through his memory.

He drags his companion around the corner of the building, where everything’s already been blocked off by police cars and two fire trucks. The sirens are wailing into the air, and a crowded perimeter is growing with people from other buildings suddenly finding reasons to be outside, to have their phones out watching the sky. Roman almost wants to scream, but he shoves it down. There’s an ambulance close to the alley, with several paramedics shouting to each other, assigning jobs of what to do, and Roman summons every bit of confidence he has as he drags himself and his companion towards them.

“Hey!” Roman yells, his voice straining. The paramedics whip around to look at them and Roman can barely keep himself steady enough to speak. He forces himself to slow down, just a second, like he’s on a stage again and running lines: that’s right, it's just lines and he’s just a college student and a good samaritan and a concerned, in-over-his-head do-gooder.

“Hey! I found him in the stairwell! I think he hit his head!” Roman calls, eyes welding up with tears that’s only partially for show. “Please help him! You can help him, right?”

His veins are pumping with adrenaline and his heart is beating right in his throat so loudly he can’t even hear what the medic says to him. His legs can’t seem to carry his balance anymore, struggling just to stand when Roman needs to use them to move. One of the paramedics takes the weight of the man off of Roman’s shoulder and Roman’s thin strand of composure threatens to crack under the tsunami of relief.

Another paramedic is talking to him, he thinks, saying something important, saying something important that Roman should be listening to, saying something important that Roman should be responding to.

Instead he glances over their shoulders at the building, gasps and points in fear. Both of them swivel around, and Roman sprints around the side of the ambulance. The road gravel skids under his feet and he lunges for the left side mirror.

Then Roman is tumbling into the mirror realm again, and he doesn’t dare glance back to see if the paramedics saw him disappear into thin air.

He dodges forward nine steps and jumps through the shiny side door of a parked KIA, stumbling over the landing into a street busy with people who don’t know there’s an apartment building on fire. He coughs into his elbow, unsure if the smoke inhalation is making it hard to breathe or if it's hysteria.

He speed-walks as fast as he can towards the more densely populated area, shoving between a couple that’s idly strolling too slow, and nearly tripping over the uneven sidewalk. There’s the shopping district this way, with dozens of cafes and Roman barely has to think before he’s gliding through the narrow walk between the couple of tables, hand sneaking out to pinch a phone off the table of a mother distracted by a kid who is crying next to her.

He’d feel bad later. When his stomach isn’t in his throat and his hands aren’t shaking and his whole body doesn’t feel like he’s one second from floating off the f*cking ground into the sky.

Roman’s fingers feel thick and cumbersome as he tries to type numbers and walk. There’s laughter in his head that sounds like it's coming from over his shoulder and it belongs to a boy who’s been dead for longer than more years than he’d been alive for.

“Office of Destruction, Remus Regal speaking,” Remus says, answering between mouthfuls of something that crunches horribly into the speaker.

“Remus. It’s me.”

“Roman? You’re starting to act like an obsessed fan,” Remus answers. “Really, it’s not a good look on you, Ro. I’m only into clingy girlfriends when they’re yandere. Did you lose your phone, too? I can’t believe I’m—was that a siren?”

“Yeah, hey,” Roman says, checking behind him to make sure no one is following. He’s far enough away that no one would think he’s from the scene, if they noticed him at all. Most of the pedestrians had noticed the billowing smoke peaking over the other buildings and everyone was sharing shocked conversations and pointing while Roman rushed by. But of course another firetruck chose that moment to come barrelling down the road, sirens blaring and direction set towards the street Roman had been on minutes ago. “Hey, uh…. Don’t turn on the news.”

He dodges around two ladies with Yorkshire Terriers in purple matching sweaters, and tries not to think about how those dogs might be smelling smoke on him. He’s barely aware of the clattering of noise from Remus’s side, which sounds like ceramic mugs hitting the ground, charging cords being ripped from devices, and Remus laughing in cool disbelief.

“Holy sh*t!” Remus yells, and faintly Roman can hear the emergency broadcast noise of the news station. “Is that actually—”

“Yep!” Roman says. “Yes, it was!”

“Why didn’t you come here?! Holy sh*t, are you burned? Burn-ing? Are you dying?”

“Shut up, I’m fine! And I was going to jump to you! But then there was a guy left in an apartment on my floor,” Roman grits out. “I couldn’t just leave him there! He was going to die! There’s no way that any firefighter was going to make it up there in time! But then when I got there I couldn’t get us out of the apartment.”

“Wait, you took someone else into the Mirror Realm?” Remus almost sounds impressed, as if he wasn’t also haunted by blue eyes and dimples and a pair of glasses that are forever encased in a sea they can’t reach.

“I thought they were completely unconscious, until we were actually in there and they suddenly launched themself away from me. Nearly went entirely under the water until I caught them again, and hauled them back out. They clearly saw me.”

“Did you kill them?”

“NO!” Roman snaps out maybe a little too loudly and a little too hysterically. “I left them with the on-site paramedics. Maybe they’ll think it was a fever dream! Or- Or they’ll think I’m a guardian angel! I look like an angel, right? Like Michael? Or Raphael? Leonardo? Dantatello? Wait… are those turtles?”

“Goddamn,” Remus says distantly. Roman wonders what he’s seeing on the TV. The news reporter is too garbled for him to make out over Remus’s breathing, but he thinks it's that blond haired woman with the pearl earrings whose voice is always too perky for the morning newscast. “How much fire did you say was in the apartment?”

“What?” Roman says back, “I don’t know! It was a fire, Remus! I was worried about the ceiling caving in.”

Remus is quiet for a long moment.

“What,” Roman says, because he’d had twenty two years to learn that Remus-produced silences were the most dangerous silences to grace this plane of existence. “What are you thinking about?”

“You aren’t going to like it.”

“There’s nothing you can say that can make me feel any worse right now. I had just bought this shirt! Now it has blood in it and is singed! It can’t be saved! And I don’t even have another shirt because my closet is charcoal now. Along with the rest of all my possessions and my hopes and my dreams!”

Roman ducks into an alley between two shops on the main street where Roman never previously would have ever dared to walk, even if he did have his compact mirror on him. His lungs rasp and wrestle with the urge to cough but when he tucks his face into his arm the scent of smoke and ashes burns his nostrils.

“You live on the top floor right? And that’s where you found the guy?” Remus says like he hasn’t been to Roman’s apartment every three days since Roman moved away. Roman desperately wants to reach through Remus’s computer screen and strangle him for the vagueness that is not helping with the towering panic. He’s staring so hard at the stained bricks across from himself that he nearly misses Remus’s next comment entirely.

“Ro...they said witnesses saw the fire first in a top floor unit. I think you might have saved the life of the arsonist.”

Chapter 3: Faker, Fraud, Fugitive

Chapter Text

The first thing Roman does after hanging up the phone is toss it in a nearby trash can. It’s cluttered with half empty fast food drinks cups and napkins, a few scraps of newspapers, and the used paper trays from food trucks a street over, but with Roman’s swift movement the phone plummets through the barriers and lands with a heavy, conclusive thunk somewhere far away from where anyone will find it, much less bother go looking for it.

He cringes slightly at the memory of the distracted mother that he’d swiped it from, but that version of guilt is barely a blip compared to Remus’s last ringing words. The static quality of his twin’s voice scratches at the inside of Roman’s brain, bleeding over what Roman is sure was a very important conversation that followed.

“I think you might have saved the life of the arsonist.”

Roman’s hands are shaking. The more he thinks about it, the worse the feeling in his guilt gets: the arsonist that had been scaring the entire city for weeks, unbridled, unchecked, unstoppable. It’d been so bad that he’d gotten calls from both his brother and his mother checking on him, with undercurrents of a silent plea for him to take a break from the city. How many other people had been weathering the tentative begging of their relatives? How many other people had been nervously watching the skies, worried about going outside because even places like the public mall had been subjected to attacks?

Roman should have just turned away. He should have just grabbed Remus’s dog tags when he was staring at them. He should have just ignored that stupid urge to play hero and only watched out for himself.

The two-story buildings just outside the city limits had had a casualty of one, and the mall had killed at least six; when Roman closes his eyes he can see the new banner playing across the TV, detailing strangers that Roman is never going to meet. And now the blood on the killer’s hands had smeared onto Roman’s when he had hauled them back up from the waters in the Mirror Realm instead of letting them drown.

Just the memory of those phantom hands clinging to him with desperation makes Roman want to tear off his flannel and shove it too into the next trash can he sees. Is that how those people had lunged desperately for refuge from the flames that had burned them alive? Roman should have pushed them off and let them sink into the abyssal waves where they never would have been able to hurt anyone ever again.

Except even as Roman thinks it, he knows he never would have been able to do it. Even if he’d magically gone back in time, and knew the moment he heard the coughing that the person he’d find making it would be the same one that started the fire, Roman knows he wouldn’t have been able to leave them there to die, or taken them into the Mirror Realm just to let them go.

Maybe a better person would have been able to. Maybe someone who really was a hero and not Roman who could only pretend it.

Roman brushes down his shirt, as if he could wipe away the soot and cinders from the fire again. It was pure luck that he’d been wearing his red and black flannel, with his black V neck today, and that the worst of the soot had been taken in by the darker colors. His van’s weren’t so lucky: the checkered rainbow was still visible but the white he’d been so careful to keep dirt free had taken on a dusty brown hue. Most people wouldn’t think too much about it if they saw him, but Roman’s closest other pair was currently two streets away being eaten by a fire.

“Mom is going to kill me,” he mutters to himself.

She would probably do something worse, actually, like pull him into a hug and ask him if he’s okay, and say she’s not upset at him, I’m just happy you’re alive. Roman always got a pinching ache in his chest when she talked like that, like Roman isn’t capable of living his own life safely and she didn’t expect him to be able to in the first place, like Roman was always going to come back to their country farm in the middle of nowhere and go back to being no one and nothing.

He loved her, and his dad as well. They hadn’t been put off by the fact that Remus and him didn’t have reflections even though there was no prior history of anything of the sort in their family. They’d simply accepted it as a part of who the twins were. Like a quirky birthmark or an interesting mole: sometimes the twins disappeared for hours into another dimension and then came back sometimes with bruises or scratches from broken mirrors or smudged surfaces. They’d treated Roman and Remus as though all of it was normal, if not just something they should keep quiet.

Even after Patton…even after that had happened. They’d never yelled at Roman or Remus for telling him about something that had been a closely guarded secret, never punished them for breaking the rules or for nearly getting Patton killed, never so much as raised their voice when he and Remus had to be dragged back from panicked episodes when so much as looking at a mirror sent them spiraling into those horrible memories months after the fact. His parents had been right to tell them not to tell anyone about the Mirror Realm, but they hadn’t said a single ‘I told you so’ even a decade later.

He loved them. Roman couldn’t really imagine a life without them.

He’d promised to call home twice a week when he was first moving out, but it wasn’t until the second week of college that the insistent messages from his mother reminding him to call her had started to feel like a shackle, holding him back. He’d made up lies about homework to avoid calling them, or to cut a call short before they could ask him to come home for the weekend (“To help your father fix the roof,” or “figure out why that fence gate latch wasn’t working again,” or one of the other dozen physical labor themed excuses she’d come up with).

They just missed him. His mothers chickens could quell a lot of the empty-nest syndrome, but Roman doubted they could cause half as much trouble as Roman and Remus could when they lived back there. He suspected that she missed having to break up their petty fights and through only minor faults of her own, she’d never understood why Roman wanted to go off to a big fancy college and get a degree and a job and live.

And as Roman stands on the street corner waiting for the crosswalk, he’s starting to wonder if she wasn’t right to have argued against him and Remus leaving.

After all, what had Roman done, but live in a dream world for the past year three years? Has any of this really qualified as living? Did he really think that he could have survived on the dredges of being known by his peers, of being remembered fondly by a professor? He’d poured his heart and soul into being good at his academics and those friendships but now that his apartment is on fire, he was wondering if anyone would even remember him in a few days.

((He wanted them to. He wanted them to so badly. But when he’s declared a casualty of the arsonists, without even a picture to air on the Saturday morning news, who would waste time thinking about him? Or worse: when he’s a declared an accomplice to the arsonists, who's going to bother remembering him as the kid in Physics II who built an infinity mirror for extra credit?))

He takes a deep breath and tries not to think about smoke or heat or how much he desperately wants a bottle of water. Here he is, the great hero Roman Regal: houseless, penniless, phoneless, with only the clothes on his back that smell faintly of smoke and a stupid rock in his shoe again. He doesn’t even have his wallet! So no ID, no school badge, no cash, or credit card, or even that promotional free ice cream punch card he’d had filled out and was saving for a celebratory dessert next week.

Not that he could have even used it if he had had it with him. All three of the servers there have been subject of Roman’s flirtations and two of them had given him their numbers (the other gave extra scoops of ice cream free of charge) and if the police came asking about him with just a verbal description, they would have a decent amount to talk about.

The TV in the window of the home security store on the corner is playing the news. Roman shoves through the crowd of strangers all watching the broadcast of flames taller than Roman is eating the top floors of an apartment building Roman wishes he knew a little less well. The news reporter lets out a yelp when something inside the building crashes and the bucking vacuum of heat is strong enough to knock her forward a step.

He needs to get out of this city.

The rest of his conversation with Remus comes back in scattered pieces, like bubbles popping in his memory: Remus was going to meet him at the Gas Station they’d picked out years ago, and all Roman had to do was get his emergency bag and meet him there. After that they would drive halfway home and they ditch Remus’s car and use the Mirror Realm to get back home entirely.

Of course Roman could probably use the Mirror Realm to get all the way back home. He could take a quick dive to the side and catch the angle on the side of the Subaru parked in the bicycle lane in a movement so swift that anyone who saw it would blink several times and figure they imagined it entirely. But then he would be standing amidst the unorganized mess of every reflective object that exists in the real world; with the extensive experimenting they’ve done Remus and Roman both agreed that most things in the Mirror Realm tend to hover around other things that are in the same place in the real world.

Which means that since Roman is three states away from his parents house, he’s also more or less three states away from a mirror that will drop him in his parents kitchen, unless he gets extremely lucky.

Roman remembers the vision of his brother’s dog tags hanging in the air, right in front of him when he’d escaped from the elevator: tauntingly suspended for the blink that he’d been in there, as if their existence had merely been there just for Roman’s hindsight to gripe about. Despite Roman’s extensive attempts at practicing telekinesis all throughout his childhood (and an embarrassing amount of time in his adulthood too), he’d never been able to call an object to himself in the Mirror Realm. It had always seemed like a thing he should have been able to do, but no amount of groveling or hand waving or soul searching had unlocked that bit of spiritual enlightenment.

f*ck, he needs to get out of the city. Spiritual enlightenment, ugh. If Remus heard that he even thought that he’d have a field day.

While it’s possible to walk three states through the Mirror Realm, Roman would rather spend it curled up in the passenger seat of their dad’s pick up truck that Remus has been driving since he was seventeen. It sounded like Remus pitied him enough to even let him pick out the music for the car ride. Which is maybe the only bright side of it all: Roman already had a premade spotify playlist called “My Life Is Over And I’m Going To Cry About It”, and it had some bops on it that would make it worth handing over his account password to his twin brother.

Okay, breathe.

Or at least he tries to. It feels as though there’s a clock in his chest that’s tick, tick, ticking away, and every second decreases Roman’s chances of escaping this city. Roman isn’t being chased; he can’t even imagine that the paramedics would be able to give a decent description of him as a person of interest for the police and there’s not a camera in the world that capture even a pixelated blur of him, but he feels as though he’s being surrounded and herded all the same.

He’s not in danger! But his heart is beating in his throat and every other swallow tastes like ash.

The people on the street around him are blurry smears of colors and sounds, all of it funneling away as Roman weaves through the crowded streets; he barely realizes he’s running until he hits the next block corner and he nearly bowls over a clump of pedestrians talking on the sidewalk.

The urge to laugh twists around his lungs, a horrible terrible feeling that tastes like his own stomach acids. His palm comes up to cover his mouth, to force him to breathe through his nose, to stop him from vomiting in the middle of the street for everyone to be horrified by.

He stumbles forward and someone coming around the corner slams into him, nearly knocking both of them over.

“Oh f*ck!” They say, split between looking at Roman and looking over their shoulder. For a second Roman sees dark coffee brown eyes, darkened with exhaustion, before the person’s aviators are slid back over their face, leaving Roman staring at the abundance of people moving behind him. “Sorry about that, girl— hey, you gucci?”

The cars on the street across from him rocket by, flashes of colors and the scent of rubber and the honking of horns that sounds like it’s coming from all around him. Roman digs his nails into his palm and forces his lungs to open, his brain to clear, his mind to reset.

“I think you might have saved the life of the arsonist.”

No, not right now. Roman breathes. There’s the scent of cigarette smoke in the air, and the whiffs of cooking meat and pretzels and sauces from the vendor's down the street. There’s the clamoring of people talking on cellphones, the barking of dogs, the rumbling of cars, and the pounding of a musical beat that rides the undercurrent of it all like the heartbeat of Cyra City itself. Roman breathes and he thinks Cyra City and college student and late for a meet up with friends.

And when he opens his eyes his shoulders are untense again. The flush across his face is from both embarrassment at oversleeping and needing to make his train in time so that he can get to the diner across town in time to meet his group of friends. He’s got a favorite TV show he wants to talk to them about, he’s putting off homework to see them, he’s ready to accept all the jokes they have about him being late—

Roman slips into character.

“Yeah, man,” Roman says to the person who ran into him. He rubs the back of his neck, with a crooked sheepish smile. “Hey, do you know the fastest way to Carmen’s? I overslept and I’m going to be late.”

They huff a laugh, readjusting their silver holographic jacket to sit better on their shoulders and Roman tries not to glance too obviously at the splashes of reflected color of the people moving around them that should have been blocked by his own figure.

“Babes, I ain’t even sure what state I’m in these days,” they say, then glance behind themselves again. “Oh sh*t, I gotta run. Bye, girl.”

And then they’re dodging down the road that Roman had come from, disappearing into the swarm of colors and, for a second, the framing of the buildings and the darkening smoke and the stranger’s back makes the entire world feel like a surreal painting that’s only been made surreal by the fact the artist forgot to add something. Or the world downloaded a texture wrong, or the developers skipped over binding shadows to the movement of assets, or the focus character left the scene and this section of the map no longer matters to the player.

Or, simply, Roman missed something incredibly important that just happened amidst the bustling, buzzing, busy mobs of people and he has no idea what it might have been.

The light at the corner turns red, and the crosswalk signal flickers on. Roman gives himself a shake, and turns away from the scene behind him. He’s a student late for a meet up with his friends at a diner across town.

The closest subway station also happens to be three blocks down the road. Roman can make it in five minutes if he speed walks, which is far less suspicious than if he found a mirror to use to sneak in. Most people wouldn’t notice Roman disappearing off this street or appearing on the subway platform, but it only takes one person looking at the wrong moment for someone to start screaming.

Years and years of his mother whispering over his shoulder, reminding him not to draw attention to himself, not to get caught in the spotlight, not to let anyone know about how different he is or the government will hear and come drag him away… Roman’s already tested his luck half a dozen times today and he needs to stop before it gives out.

If it hasn’t already.

***

Roman likes the subway station at the corner of East and 7th street even less than he likes his entire current situation, and it’s not a narrow contest.

The subway in general is a place that Roman honestly tries to avoid: the foot traffic is dense enough that he starts to feel claustrophobic even when there’s no one in his personal space. Every inch of the public transport system has the same aura as being caught in the stairwell with the weed dealer who always catches him at the wrong time, or being in an elevator that breaks down on whim and leaves him in a trapped space with someone else. Roman’s internal clock starts running the moment his foot passes through the last disheveled entrance and the creeping paranoia cloaks him until he can’t sit still, much less stay on the train for the whole ride. The concrete ceiling hangs overhead heavy and dark as if just waiting for the right moment to crack and drop down on him; the noise of each train is so loud it shakes the foundations of the city and rains dust on the patrons as punishment for using public transport; there’s a chilled breeze that lingers through the air like ghosts breathing on Roman’s coffin.

So yeah. It’s great. Swell. Fantastic.

He hesitates outside the entrance, hugging the outer copper fence wall as a flood of people swarm around him. There’s only two flights of thirteen steps to get to the subway level— concrete lined with worn black slip tracks— but he has to talk himself into it before he can even attempt the first step. The sun at his back watches him with a glaring eye, the faintest wisps of smoke peeking around the high rises in the business district.

He has to wriggle his way behind an arguing couple with a stroller blocking the path and a toddler crying at the top of his petite lungs in a way that Roman also wants to do. The cries ring off the concrete tunnels around them with a haunting tone as though it’s a wail from something not quite human, that’s attempting to lure prey to itself.

What a lovely thought.

Roman gives himself a shake, swallowing the jittery feeling of needing to turn around and run until he reaches a country he doesn’t speak the language of. There’s a certain scent in the air that’s nearly palpable— creosote with an underlying hint of damp ozone— that makes each breath thick with effort, but Roman is grateful for it. As long as he focuses on the taste of breathing, his mind won’t have too much trouble putting one foot in front of the other like a totally functional, normal person.

He’d placed his emergency bag in the subway station public lockers for the fact that they received so many visitors that it would have been hard to track one person to them. He’d gone down the checklist his parents had made for both him and Remus: dense population with a revolving series of new faces, minimal security system, easy exits and consequently easy entrances. It helped that there was a grimy feel to just about everything in all the stations— the card scanners, the benches, the seats— Roman didn’t even want to stay there, and he doubted that normal people wanted to hang around the dark and dingy platforms if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.

But Roman walks himself around the corner into the bowels of the station and nearly stops dead in his tracks.

There’s a police guard in an unflattering reflective yellow at the terminals talking to the station attendant.

He didn’t think he’d ever seen a police guard at any of the subway stops. Cyra City just wasn’t the place where the police ever took days to monitor the commuter traffic, but Roman supposes hysterically that if arsonists were running around and attempting to raise their kill count, an underground subway with heavy traffic might be a place of interest. He must not have even gotten the news about the apartment building yet.

Between the other conversations, the rumbling of the subway down the tracks, and the wailing child, Roman can’t hear what the police officer and the terminal attendant are conversing about. It could be the weather, it could be about their families, it could be about the string of arsonists attacks and which of the dozens of people here might be involved and hey, doesn’t that guy in the college jacket look strange walking in here without a bag or wallet?

The attendant has a drag to his movements: sluggish from boredom and inactivity, dark eyes with bags under them and unshaved stubble. There’s a pack of cigarettes in his uniform front pocket that he keeps brushing a hand over as if making sure they’re still there. Whatever the police officer said had him rolling his eyes.

“Hey, buddy, are you lost?” the officer asks.

Roman swallows back the nerves like swallowing a bucket of live bees. He takes a second (possibly a second too long) to steel his resolve. The officer is nearly in pristine condition, fresh off the line of Cyra City’s finest. Fitted and ironed uniform, hand on his utility belt, clean shaven and buzz cut and kind eyes— he looks like someone who would have cried over the 1997 Airbud movie climax.

And there, on his ring finger, barely noticeable in the awful lighting of the underground, is a thin tan line with no sign of the corresponding ring. And Roman knows exactly what to say.

Sheepish country boy, he thinks. Earnest to a fault and having a bad day.

“No, sir,” Roman says, voice pitching an octave higher, an octave sweeter and more innocent. “I rented a locker here to stash my bag while I visited my girl… my ex-girlfriend, sir! But she, uhm, she left in the middle of our date and I had to pick up the bill so I don’t have enough to cover the turnstile bill. I have some extra bills in my locker and I have the key right here—”

Roman turns out his empty pocket, and feels his cheeks flush slightly. “Oh no. I-I have the rented locker receipt I think— oh fudge…”

He pats around his pockets, in hopeless desperation before looking back at the two men. “Uhm, the cameras— the cameras might have seen me walk through here earlier—”

The officer and the attendant share a look, both of them cringing with sympathy. The officer even goes as far as to rub his ring finger and Roman lets his lip quiver just to valiantly blink back tears.

“You should know that it's against Cyra City policies to let anyone hop the turnstiles,” the attendant says sternly but after a moment of deliberation, he nods and jerks his head to the side to motion Roman through. Roman gasps in excitement, wavering over the terminal before hopping it, nearly tripping and face planting if not for the officer steadying him.

“Oh thank you, sirs!” Roman says. “I don’t know what I would have done!”

“You aren’t the first,” the attendant says, balefully. “Come on. Point out the locker you rented. I’ve got a master key and we’ll get you home.”

Roman nods with the same gratefulness he thinks that country boys that have mirror reflections would have. The officer hums under his breath and wanders a little to the left to let the attendant and Roman head across the wide open underground cavern towards the lockers.

Roman rubs the fake tears from his eyes, feels a bit like shoving his arms and shoulders into a too-small jacket. The taste on his lips is watermelon lemonade and the gait is the same pace as someone who wore light up sneakers in case someone else was scared of the dark.

((Sweet country boy, Roman calls the persona, the character, the illusion. He could have just called him Patton Hart.))

Roman forces his breath out of his pained chest. The attendant doesn’t seem to notice, too busy flicking through a ring of keys. Of course all of this has to happen days before the anniversary of Patton’s death. He can hold up a facade, but underneath it, Roman is picking shards of glass out of his stomach in penance for borrowing the likeness of a boy Roman didn’t even say goodbye to.

If Patton were still alive… would he still be their friend? Roman likes to think that Patton would have insisted on staying friends no matter what. That they would have ended up at the same school together and Patton would have even been able to convince Remus to join them in getting an actual degree (because Patton had always been the only person who could get Remus to do anything he didn’t initially want to do). Patton would be right by his side with something comforting and optimistic to say and Roman wouldn’t be afraid of anything or anyone.

((Patton, with water still dripping down his face from his hair, still shaking from the icy cold depths he’d fallen in, still clinging to Roman’s hand with the weakest smile stretched across his blue tinged lips, “I knew you’d both save me.”))

The lockers aren’t too far away from the turnstiles and the attendant's booth; Roman can still see the officer out of the corner of his eye boredly watching the crowd ebb and flow, waiting, probably with a healthy dose of can you believe that kid’s bad luck?

A family of tourists approach the man from the far side, with a map spread wide in front of them and are pointing at various locations in the city and talking in another language. Roman can’t imagine why anyone would want to come to Cyra City, when places like New York and Hollywood exist, but he turns back to his own task at hand.

The lockers look as though they were picked up from an amusem*nt park in the middle of the night without a permit or permission and relocated to the underground station. The coloration was a horrible eye sore of an orange that turned a burnt umber near the bottom from a lack of proper care. The flickering artificial lights don’t help the situation, and neither does the long rows of scrapes along them that looked like a bear attack had occurred in the center of the city apparently. Someone had carved initials in a heart a few, someone else had bought a master lock to add security to their possessions, and still someone else had tagged a series of twelve lockers with horrible graffiti that Roman couldn’t even read. Sharpie writings, unidentifiable liquid residue, various stickers, tape from posters that have already been removed…

Even the floor under his feet is sticky with what Roman hopes is someone’s soda. Each of his steps riiiiiiiips up from the cement floor as he drags his eyes over the locker faces. There are a few dingy flyers that look as though they’d been shoved in all the lockers and most people had littered rather than carry them to the closest trash can. The attendant sighs at the sight of them.

“f*cking pest control company,” he grumbles. “Don’t they have easier places to advertise?” Then he motions to the locker display. “Alright kid, which one is yours?”

The locker he’s looking for is the bland one in the middle of the row, second from the top. The numbers had been scratched off with wear and tear, but Roman thinks it might have been something in the 200 range. Remus had picked it with all the fanfare of someone throwing darts at a board while blindfolded. Roman had grimaced his way through inspecting the public locker, complaining under his breath when Remus had been picking through the other open ones and commenting on the interesting stains in them.

But the next issue of Remus’s webcomic had gone up with a strangely detailed scene of the characters finding a severed head in a similar series of public lockers and his readers had gone nuts over it, for some reason. Roman didn’t see the appeal, but even now there will be new readers posting online about those scenes, those frames, and Remus’s uses of colors and angles and settings.

There are no severed heads in these lockers. Or at least Roman hopes there isn’t. It doesn’t smell like there is, but that could just be because the station attendant smells so strongly of cigarette smoke that no other smells are possible to discern.

In a perfect world, Roman would have had the key to his emergency bag on himself, he would have slipped it from his pocket and put it in the key hole and tutted at all the public defacing these poor lockers had to go through and been reassured in the fact that he would never stoop so low.

In a perfect world though, Roman Regal would not need an emergency bag because his apartment would not have caught fire and he would not have lost his school bag to the bowels of an arsonists’ attack when he went about saving the arsonist. Ha.

The attendant makes short work of the lock.

The door swings open with a light screech that makes Roman cringe deep in his soul. At first glance, Roman’s locker is bare, as though someone had taken the key for fun and lost it when the game was no longer entertaining.

“W-what?” Roman intones, trying to shove himself closer to the locker to see just how empty it is. “B-but…”

“Oh, damnit,” the attendant says.

There’s four metal walls with a thin layer of grime coating the shelf. A copy of the same flyer sprinkled on the ground is sitting in the middle innocently advertising FIRE!ants: Exterminators and Pest Control. But other than that the entire thing appears embarrassingly, heartbreakingly empty.

“We’ve been trying to catch those robbers,” The attendant says awkwardly. “Sorry, kid. I hadn’t seen anyone come by here for a bit… Do you want to file an incident report? If there were anything expensive in there we can get a report out to the pawn shops to be on the lookout…”

Roman blinks fast and hard, biting on his lip and shaking his head instead of answering. “N-no sir. It was just a book and some extra cash from my Ma.”

The attendant sighs wearily. “Sorry, kid. Look, I’ll get you a temp metrocard for a one time use so you can get home. That sound, alright? No need to cry. You stay right here and I’ll be right back after loading it up. We’ll get you home.”

Roman nods and continues staring at the empty shelf even as the attendant takes a few steps back. Roman waits until he’s a few more feet out back hastily to Roman as he heads to his booth to prepare a card for him and he can see the officer typing things into his phone to help the family at the turnstiles figure out what they’re looking for, before he lets out the breath he’d been holding.

The idea had come the first time Roman had seen a magician put a rabbit into a box and make it disappear when they were still kids: side by side with Patton in his living room, kicking his feet in the air as they watched the dated commercial and Remus colored in the coloring books Patton’s parents had given them. Patton had been so delighted about the event, lighting up brightly and grinning with his whole face immediately insisting that he wanted to try that too! Come on guys!! It’ll be fun!

Roman remembers the day well. Too well.

Remus had broken a light blue crayon in his hand and Roman had to fake suddenly feeling sick and Patton had called him on his lie and three days later Patton had been dead in a car accident.

His high school physics class had a lab experiment that was based on mirrors (that Roman was so conveniently sick for) but he’d spent the day in his dorm studying how mirrors worked for normal people: focal points, focal lengths, refractions, reflections. He’d practiced on a prototype version on the porch of the farm house and showed it off to the chickens while Remus wrestled with Dad’s Great Pyrenees, affectionately named Butterball, in the front yard. Even with the few minutes of painful remembrance, Remus had begrudgingly been impressed when he couldn't get the mirror to show even a shadow when he shoved tossed Butterball’s wet tennis ball in the locker callously and all 140 pounds of Butterball decided to follow it.

The first night in Cyra City hadn’t felt like some big accomplishment when Roman fit the pieces together,

Remus had been a huge help angling the mirror from the Mirror Realm sticking his hands in to hold it in place while Roman made the adjustments the best he could when any contact with it put his hand directly into Remus’s abdomen. An hour of work had gone into making the locker appear empty for any civil servant doing a sweep or thief looking for a quick buck.

Now though. Roman reaches down and slides off his van and then snaps his shoe into the locker. There’s a dull thud when his shoe knocks the mirror out of place and reveals the laughably small backpack it was hiding. Roman retrieves his shoe and slides it back on his foot, flexing his foot to make sure that he didn’t like...forget how to put a shoe on.

He’s certain that any number of the strangers passing by who saw that would be thinking about it for several more minutes, but Roman’s heart jackrabbits in his chest and he refuses to turn around and risk making eye contact. He crowds the lockers and tries not to think about how many other people with questionably personal hygiene habits might have done something similar.

Despite being an emergency bag, Roman sprang for one of the cuter bags. He picked it out from Walmart himself, after much deliberation and Remus’s half a dozen threats to cut holes in the soles of his socks. It took him about twenty minutes to decide on the one with the factory stitched design of a butterfly on the side, another twenty to figure out how to put all of his emergency things in it: his extra license, his extra passport, a new social security card, a nice and neat two hundred dollars in cash made of tens and fives. Roman’s own flare for necessity reared its head as he’d packed and he’s eternally grateful to Roman of two years ago who also added a burner phone, hair dye, sunglasses and a pocket makeup kit with a mirror.

The burner phone is pretty pathetic looking in his hand. It’s one of those flip phones that comes with actual buttons and the text message capability is about the same process as long distance morse code but Roman’s throat is nearly throttled with the bits of relief clawing up it. He swings the bag over his shoulder, as he powers it on, and watches the loading screen wake with about seven whole pixels of animation.

If worse came to worst, Roman could probably sell this thing for extra cash at an antique store who would all marvel at such an ancient contraption.

But first things first: getting the f*ck out of here. Roman is knocking the locker door closed and painstakingly dialing Remus’s number again, when a voice calls from behind him.

“Hey, kid,” The officer says, with an edge to his tone. Roman hadn’t heard him approach, and hadn’t noticed him leave the turnstiles at all. He shoves his bag behind himself on the off chance that if the man hadn’t seen it before he wouldn’t now. But based on the tone, Roman’s nearly certain that he got caught.

Roman’s eyes dart over to the exit beyond that officer, but the attendant is on the phone hunched over slightly as if he was trying not to be seen by Roman at all and the officer makes a sharp noise to get Roman looking back at him.

“Yes sir?” Roman says, slipping back into his cheerful country boy persona. “I didn’t mean to cause a problem. Look I can pay for the card now--”

The officer’s hand doesn’t move from his baton.

“Yeah, kid, could you tell me where you were before coming here?”

Roman stomach drops, but he forces himself to stay calm. His mind is whirling so fast that he barely even hears himself rattling off the name of the dinner a street over. Why was the officer asking him that? His grip tightens on his bag straps. Thievery he could understand: no officer or attendant is going to admit a sob story got them duped, so the best they have on him is stealing from lockers— and even that isn’t true because it's Roman’s rented locker. If they really went looking in the transaction history records, they would find his receipt.

“Uhm, Carmen’s? I think that was the name,” Roman says slowly. “It’s a diner?”

“Sure,” The officer says, kindly but not kind. Like when Mom was being polite because there was company currently, but when they left, he would be in so much trouble, he would be lucky to make it his fifties un-grounded.

Except that this is not his mother and Roman highly doubts the police officer in front of him is interested in just sending him to his room.

“Listen kid, I’m going to need you to come with me.”

Stall. It's the only thing he can think. Stall, until he can think of some way to get out of this with his possessions intact and his secret still safe and preferably no one looking for him. Stall until the officer realizes he’s got the wrong guy, or until the attendant comes back and asks why the man is acting so weird suddenly, or until the crushing weight of the city over their heads caves in and kills them all and Remus has to come dig through the rubble to get his corpse just to laugh at it.

“Huh?” Roman hears himself saying, faintly, “Did I do something wrong?”

Out of the corner of his eyes can see other patrons of the subway system slowing to a stop talking and pointing at them, a gathering crowd that would absolutely notice if he disappeared suddenly into nothingness. Too many witnesses watching for too long for them to not be able to put together a decent drawing for a sketch artist: if that gets out, along with the story, there’s no way that a shadowy government agency wouldn’t make him Entity of Immense Interest #1.

But he could make it back to the surface if he did a full sprint. Ducking the officer’s grab would be the only real challenge: the attendant was too far and too slow to be able to catch him before he vaulted the turnstile and the crowd wasn’t so thick that he couldn’t shove his way through with the power of sheer desperation. He could take the stairs at three at a time and make it to the crowds and the distractions. If anyone pursued him up there he could turn the corner and launch into any one of the billions of windows and anyone chasing after him would think that they blinked at the wrong time and he hooked a hard turn.

He just had to get past the officer first. And that means getting the guy to lower his guard.

What was it about the persona that the guy had liked? What was it that had hooked him into believing sweet, innocent, harmless country boy?

Roman lets his bottom lip quiver, rounding his eyes into something wider and wetter. “I swear I paid for the locker, sir! I was so excited to meet my girlfriend again I must have misplaced the receipt!”

“I’m sure you did, buddy,” the officer says, doubt coloring his tone. He loosens a bit, softness, slightly. “This is likely a misunderstanding, alright? We’re going to take a trip to the station and get this all sorted out. Then we’ll—”

From the street level a handful of officers dressed in full gear arrive, tromping down the stairs and shoving the civilians out of the way as they head towards the turnstiles. The attendant stands from his station, wobbling on his rolling stool to get their attention, before pointing at Roman.

Roman thinks, very elegantly and very passionately, ‘f*ck’.

The kind officer reaches out to grab Roman and Roman whips his bag around, drilling it directly into the man’s throat with all the force he can manage.

“Sorry!” Roman yells over the officer’s horrible gasping choke. It’s not enough to cause him to fall over, barely enough to force him to stumble; if it hadn’t been for him believing Roman’s persona, Roman doubts he could have surprised the officer at all. But he doesn’t have time to swallow the lick of salty guilt that knowledge gives him: he dives to the left, under the man’s arm and launches himself down towards the train platforms and he feels a hand scrape along his shoulder, falling away when it can’t get a good enough grip to haul him backwards.

An alarm blares over the intercom garbled and blurred and with just enough humanity to sound like the attendant speaking into the mic, even though it's clear that no one can understand him. Several people stop to try to hear it, but the screeching breaks of the subway arriving at the platform below drowns out the noise entirely. Roman scrambles around the thickets of people, weaving between gabs of strangers, without even having the breath to apologize for knocking someone’s bag clear out of their hands.

The escalator is packed but Roman vaults over the side and skids down the railing— just like he used to do to the banister in his parents’ farmhouse— until he’s at a decent height to jump the last little bit. He lands in a messy heap that his ankle absolutely abhors and his phone skids out of his hand when he tries to prevent himself from needing sudden dental work.

Several people around him let out startled yelps. Roman scrambles to catch his phone again, but some distressed businessman kicks it backwards on accident. It slides across the stone flooring before slamming into the side of the awaiting train. Roman’s momentum carries him directly into the train as well, but even then he’s too slow to do anything but watch in slow motion as his phone drops into the gap between the platform and the sleek exterior.

“f*ck!” Roman says, ignoring the startled woman on the other side of the window.

A police officer leans over the half wall from the upper platform, ordering Roman to stop in the same breath he tells the civilians to get off the escalator. The Cyra City citizens yelp and struggle to make way for the seven officers in tactical gear trying to force their way through the crowd and the noise reverberates off the cavernous walls until the oxygen molecules in the air are vibrating. The warning lights under Roman’s feet flash several times, and the mechanical voice whirls out a standard, “Please step back, doors closing, please step ba—”

Roman has no thoughts at all. He’s sure if he was having thoughts, he’d be doing something very different. No innocent person runs away from the police. Whatever they’re chasing him for-- and it can’t be about the f*cking locker anymore, it can’t be about the fire because no one would have been able to connect him to it so quickly, it can’t be about anything because Roman is a normal college student and the police aren’t supposed to arrest people minding their own business! The worst crime he’s done has been being an obligatory good f*cking person-- whatever they’re so desperate to get him in cuffs for, is not something Roman thinks he’s willing to bet his freedom on.

His blood is singing with the need to leave, to escape, to run. He’s the rat in a lab maze who saw for a moment the open door and managed to wriggle out of the scientist’s hands. He’s innocent, he’s normal, he’s fine—

He’s five years old and sitting on his father’s lap hearing the words “I don’t mean to scare you boys but…” for the first time.

The doors slide closed with just a second to spare: the closest officer slams into the glass yelling at Roman to stay still and stop resisting arrest and open these doors again. His hands pound on the doors even as the train begins to move and Roman’s heart beats in his throat as though it's attempting to climb out of his body.

The other passengers are all wooden, stiff dolls staring at Roman. There’s a teenager right next to him staring unabashedly, ignoring the Tik Tok video on their phone. Hesitantly they raise a fist.

“f*ck the Police?” they ask.

Roman numbly hits his fist against theirs.

Being on the subway is remarkably worse than being in an elevator. Roman’s skin feels like it's crawling with bugs, and not just because every eyeball in a hundred mile radius is on him. Roman doesn’t get stage fright, but he’s starting to hyperventilate at the large rounded windows of the train, zooming through the underground maze of darkness and blips of emergency lights. The people closest to each of the windows are duplicated in the darkness, a perfect reflection except for the fact that Roman doesn’t appear in them at all and the guy across from him almost looks like he realizes it.

“Breaking News—” A recorded voice says in the unnerving silence of the train car. The owner of the Iphone frantically tries to quiet it but the volume only increases with her flurry of movements. “— Police have released this preliminary sketch of a person of interest involved in the recent fires. The public is warned that this person may be dangerous and please do not approach if you see him. The number below is the Cyra City Fire Department Hotline—”

A guy stands up from his seat, grabbing the standing pole to balance himself as he stares down Roman. “Is that you? Are you the freak setting those fires?”

“What?” Roman says. “No way!”

But the guy flips around his phone and the police sketch is nearly identical to Roman’s face and the curls in his hair. Roman snatches the phone to get a better look at it and nearly wants to vomit at the details: the angle of his cheekbones, the creases by his lips, the fringes of his hair that’s nearly a touch too long. Roman’s picture can’t be taken but he’s staring at a stylized sketch portrait of himself as though he’d posed for an art class in between yanking that man out of the fire and running to the subway station.

It shouldn’t have been possible, Roman thinks. To get a picture this accurate to himself, to get it done so fast, to have his broadcasted all over the internet—

He didn’t set those fires.

The screeeeeeeech of the brakes rattles the entire train car, with noise and vibrations that Roman feels directly in his bones. The subway jerks to an emergency stop and Roman stumbles into the doors as the lights inside the cabin flash warningly. He clings to the handle to steady himself even as half the riders let out alarmed wails. There’s an announcement that rumbles on the intercom asking all the passengers to remain calm, but Roman can’t focus on it when the guy in front of him suddenly takes a swing at him.

Roman ducks, just barely avoiding knuckles to his face, and his mouth spits out some inane series of syllables that he couldn’t have been forced to repeat with a gun to his head. Someone else’s hand grabs onto his flannel collar and yanks him to the side. Roman rears back, throwing all of his weight to break the hold and duck another series of blurry grips. Someone's elbow appears out of the mob and catches his gut and Roman tastes his insides and desperately regrets it. He stumbles back against the doors, hand scrambling behind for the emergency lock on the doors.

It won’t give, his fingers slip off the handle and someone’s book bag slams against the door inches from his head. Roman hisses out a panicked curse, dropping the phone in his other hand and yanking with both his arms.

The sealant hisses like a snake as it disengages.

Someone grabs Roman’s shirt collar, snarling so viscerally that spit flicks onto Roman’s cheek, ew, f*ck, ew, ew, ew, but he kicks them hard and scrambles back to the doors. His fingers barely find any purchase in the crevice, but he yanks the little bit that he can find and forces the doors open.

The subway lights pour into the train tunnel, and Roman jumps down into the gravel blindly, his bag slamming heavily against his back and his head narrowly missing colliding with the wall. He’s not claustrophobic, but from the echoes of screams and yells that ricochet like daggers off the menacing bulwark, he thinks he might learn to be.

Roman doesn’t wait to see if anyone has the guts to follow him down. He tears into the murky light, following along the cramped hollow of space between the train cars and the tunnel outerwall and ignoring the stinging pain in his palm as the shotcrete tears through the first few layers of his skin. If he gets out of this one alive, he thinks he’ll go back to the hospital and track down the arsonist he pulled from the fire and kill him, himself.

Each piece of gravel pierces through the soles of Roman’s vans. He can’t see where he’s going, barely managing to track where the tunnel goes thanks to the combined efforts of the emergency tunnel lights and the other subway cars. From behind him the police officers' flashlights look like flashing concert lights to the world’s worst performance ever and their voices are a riot mob coming to gently, politely, request a refund for their tickets.

He rounds the front of the train and nearly trips as the abyss of darkness opens in front of him, the cones of the headlines peering into the nothingness like dual lighthouses. Roman hesitates for a long, horrible moment: what the f*ck is he doing? What the f*ck does he think this will do?

His chest heaves and he’s staring into the darkness, watching the three rails abandon reality. The crackle and hum of the electric rail nearly drowns out the shouts from behind him and if he keeps going he doesn’t know where it will take him. What line is he on? There could be a station in a five minute walk or a thirty minute sprint. The tunnel could curve without him knowing and he could trip into that electric rail and die before he realized he fell. Is running blindly into the unknown really a f*cking smarter idea than throwing his arms up and falling to his knees and letting himself get arrested?

He didn’t do the crime! They physically can’t prove he did the crime because he didn’t do it!

But if they could find a perfect sketch of his face— one he knows doesn’t exist, one that can’t have been computer generated or caught on film, one that wasn’t supposed to be possible to have— what other evidence could they manifest? If he gets arrested here, will he find himself on trial arguing against a video of someone looking just like him setting a fire?

He could let himself be arrested and then escape through a mirror, disappear like a magic trick and leave the entire city in a panicked paranoia, forever waiting for his return. Forever having his name and face stained into the roots of the city, a hand on the pulse of the place that he’d only ever loved, remembered for all the wrong reasons.

Or he could run head first into the darkness and hope that by the time he finds his way out again, the real arsonist from the comforts of the paramedics on scene will have confessed they were acting alone, and that the man in the sketch was just a good samaritan who convinced them to change their ways, and Roman would be herald a hero instead of a fugitive running around the subway offshoots.

He hopes that Remus will forgive him for being late.

Chapter 4: Hitman, Handler, Hacker

Chapter Text

“Sir? Sir, can you hear me?”

There’s a woman kneeling over him with dark brown eyes, short dark hair, and pacific asian features and Logan Ackroyd is halfway to palm striking her jaw before he can stop himself.

She’s fast, or perhaps Logan is too slow: at the moment before the bottom ridge of his palm is to connect with her jaw, she is scrambling back, yelping in a high pitch noise that’s lost in the ringing noise of sirens around them and Logan’s hand meets only air. He loses sight of her in the next second, his vision blots and this thoughts blurr like static as blood rushes through his head, and when it clears zero point three four seconds later, she’s raising her hands in surrender, and Logan’s lungs are attempting to expel what feels like glass from his visceral pleura.

His head is pounding, and his memory is cotton stuffed in a way that does not bode well for his well-being. His chest shudders with each cough, shaking his entire body despite his usual precise control over each of his limbs. There’s a pinching in his throat, in his lungs, in his ribs that leaves him with a faint impression that he’d been drowning, but the woman with the iconic emergency services badge on her shoulder has soot on her arms. There’s an oxygen mask on his face, giving him a swell of relieving oxygen everytime he inhales and despite the relief it brings Logan’s thick fingers need to remove it before he chokes and dies.

“Hey! Hi, sir,” she says, hands in clear view, as though Logan were likely to strike again since he missed the first time. “Please, hold on a moment. I’m a medic with the Cyra City Emergency Paramedics—”

She goes on to say more but it’s swallowed up in the thundering white noise around them. She’s a civilian. Logan is surrounded by civilians.

He tears the oxygen mask off his face, and gasps for breath in the smoky air around them. His esophagus burns and for a moment Logan is certain he’s in a fire, he’s burning alive, he’s dying. The entire world past the distance he could reach is made of a series of impressionist blobs, mottled, dappled lights and colors and voices that stab into his brain as he tries to remember what had happened.

Another close call, Logan thinks, rationally, reasonably, logically. He can smell the fire in the air that matches the darkening sky. They can’t have made it that far from the building, he couldn’t have lost consciousness for more than a few minutes, and Logan hopes desperately that it's not a concussion.

A concussion at this point would be the death of him. It would be the death of the civilians around him. It would be the death of the entire country.

“O-okay,” the paramedic says. “Okay, let’s put the oxygen mask back on you, okay sir?”

Civilian.

The paramedic talks in a comforting tone as she guides him into sitting in a way that doesn’t aggravate every part of his body, which is a task far too monumental for either of them. There’s nine bruises on his back, creeping around his spine and his left side, a knife wound in his calf, burns on his forearms, cracked ribs, and he wouldn’t be particularly astonished by a broken finger or sprained ankle. The mask itches on his face, obstructing his view in the most frustrating way; he can’t check their surroundings fast enough with the plastic attached to him and the nausea swimming in his stomach when he turns his head too quickly keeps distracting him.

Logically, rationally. Logan thinks.

“Sir, can you tell me your name?” the woman hovering over him asks. Logan painfully crushes the urge to laugh out of his chest, out of his mind, as painfully as breaking one of his own bones, although that might be in part because his head contusion is heavily impacting his ability to stay rational.

“Lenard,” he rasps out, dizzily. “Lenard Smith.”

He doesn’t think he had that ID on himself last week when this whole mess started. He’d been carrying London Stone and Lester Sylvester— the former because he liked the personality of London and the latter because Virgil had to entertain himself when he could. Lenard Smith is an emergency name, one that he hadn’t told anyone he had and one that Logan is certain couldn’t be tracked back to his real self.

At best, Janus might ping it as a possibility when he scours through the list of victims both dead and alive for this fire, but Logan doubts he’ll buy into it very deeply. He doesn’t have the time to pour into every single name that he saw in the news; he might make Virgil do it and Virgil would gripe and complain that he’s not some personal slave you asshole, if you’re going to be suspicious of everyone, then do it by yourself! This is why I worked a-f*cking-lone!

Which means that for now, Lenard Smith would be secure. Surely, if Logan’s own partner couldn’t recognize him, their enemies wouldn’t be able to either. He could… he could take a moment…to breathe.

“I’m going to ask you to hold this for me,” the paramedic says, pressing the gauze to his head to staunch the bleeding. He hisses out at the biting pain, and she makes soothing noises at him.

“It’s going to be okay, Mr. Smith,” she says, “You’re doing really good.”

As though Logan is a dog that needs reassurance, or a young child that needs constant verbal affirmations. He grits his teeth and tries not to seethe too obviously as the woman does her job checking him over for wounds that he can barely think to explain at this point. The only decent part of it is that she’s focused on his forehead, the wound bleeding down the side of his face, and she’s likely to miss self-stitching that Logan did on his leg two days ago.

Each of his thoughts are punctuated by a throbbing that disrupts every attempt to recall what had happened, and her tone—while satisfactory for someone handling a terrified noncombatant—figuratively grates against his meninges, worse than if she had just driven her forceps into his skull.

He hates dealing with civilians. Part of the reason why he chose this type of work was the fact that he was supposed to have limited contact with noncombatants, and even less time for small talk and pleasantries that only served to mask one’s true intentions for the sake of a societal norm. He is a weapon. He is a tool. He’d crafted himself into an armament that could be pointed at an enemy and once he started moving the enemy did not bother with asking him his opinion on the latest celebrity-athlete performances.

In that way, Janus had been a perfect match for him: a man who loved to weave verbal traps and exhaust performative social cues for the sake of getting what he desired. He had some innate talent for talking, like most people did— as if he’d been handed a textbook on communication when he was still too young to sit up by himself and had learned how everyone else in the world was expected to act along with his finer motor functions—but Janus Ekans had nurtured his skill into a force of nature. He smiled and the whole world seemed to do his bidding, reporters hung off each of his syrupy sweet words and police officers tripped over themselves to complete his orders. He snapped his fingers and obstacles such as security clearance levels or authorizations disappeared as though they had never existed.

So Logan handled the guns, and Janus handled the people.

Not to say that Janus didn’t know his way around a gun; Logan had watched him in the shooting range hitting perfect targets on all major joints on a human, but when Logan had asked about him becoming a field agent himself, the latter had theatrically faked a heart attack and claimed that he’d never be able to handle the broken nails.

Janus—Logan muses distractedly as the questions from the paramedic become repetitive and numbing—had probably several broken nails now, and likely a broken finger although none of it all would have been his own. There would be a startling sudden lack of un-hospitalized agents in his immediate vicinity, as the possessive rage he had always denied having boiled over with each report he received that was not Logan’s own. Janus would be the first to take returning shots and would call it karma with the same tone he’d use to draw a confession from a criminal with a bluff.

Assuming, of course, Janus wasn’t the one that had ordered Logan’s death in the first place.

Cyra City had been, of all the places that Logan had been all over the world, rather unimpressive. It appeared as something out of a quaint movie: large city with spiraling skyscrapers belonging to various conglomerates, congested traffic aided by the poorly designed light patterns, cyclists that ignored street signs and motorcyclists that ignored street laws, endless waves of pedestrians that wore city culture like badges and eyed suspiciously anyone who didn’t seem to fit, an average college filled to brim with average students that would then file away into average day jobs and have average lives. Perhaps the most notable part of it was that it had an active subway system and a faulty security system, and Logan had been abusing both since this mission had gone… awry.

He’d decided quite early that he wasn’t motivated to add the city to places he’d revisit, although with a sudden bout of hysteria, Logan realizes that he can’t remember if he’d made that decision before or after he’d realized that the city had employed officers at the subway hubs to prevent his constant faire hopping.

He had wanted to grab the man and shake him, that first time; he’d wanted to scream ‘I am attempting to help this city! I am not your enemy! Stop making my job as difficult as possible!’

But Logan had not. At best, he might have been arrested on charges of drunken belligerence, sentenced to one night in holding, and the police could have dealt with their building being the new target of the infamous arsonist. Assuming that Logan survived that attack, as he had all five others thus far, the media would become a war mongering monster that would whip the public into a bloodlusting frenzy. Cyra City would turn into a warzone overnight, and Logan could not think of a worse report to have to write.

“—guy’s just gone!” Someone else calls, jolting Logan out of the daze he hadn’t realized he’d fallen into.

There’s another paramedic coming around the side of the ambulance in a light jog: brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, clean shaven, blue eyes, and a pierced left ear. Their uniform matches the woman hovering to Logan’s side, just the right shade for it to be legitimate, and the shoe treads were standard issued. Both of them wore name badges and their body language read as people who were deeply familiar with one another—not that Anamorphosis couldn’t have infiltrated the EMTs years back, but Logan could hardly retain his sanity while assuming that every person he came across was part of a terrorist group.

So, logically, rationally, Logan forces himself to unfold his fingertips from his bottom knuckles and stretch them out as the new paramedic catches his breath to their right.

“What?” the woman says, pausing from checking Logan’s eyes with a pen light. “He was just there!”

“I don’t know! I checked all the way to the corner, but there was no sign of him. It was like he teleported or something.”

Logan’s mouth is dry, the oxygen is suddenly blisteringly hot and unwelcomed in his lungs. His back straightens at the words, aggravating half of his bruises, and the paramedic hums out a rushed apology because she mistakes his tension for a pain reaction to her action.

“Sorry, sorry, Mr. Smith,” the woman says, kindly as to not startle him and Logan does not scoff. She looks at him with a soft expression, melted, and uncomfortably close to pity that Logan does not want or need or appreciate. “Do you remember the person who helped you? Do you know who they are?”

Logan’s eyes close for a moment dredging up the memories from the haze in his mind. Rationally, reasonably, logically: removing the emotions of it all so that he could just pick out the facts of what happened and what the paramedics needed to know, what Lenard Smith would know.

He remembers, rationally, logically, a voice with a soothing cadence, melliferous, and something about….chickens on a farm. He remembers the blistering heat vanishing around him, the roaring crackling fire hushing to a whisper, the unswept dusted floor that was meant to be his final resting place being dragged away by ungracious hands and the suffocating air replaced by a chill so cold that Logan felt he’d been given a dose of adrenaline.

He remembers a man his age or a year younger, clean shaven, carefully styled brown hair, and a red-gold-black flannel, holding him up entirely, looking at him with hazeline eyes framed with thick eyelashes and a gallivant, half-co*cked smile, as though they were a comedian in the middle of telling a joke that was already going wrong, or a new-to-fame celebrity who hadn’t expected to be recognized on the street. Logan remembers hands that were warm and strong, carrying him to an unknown place, for unknown reasons.

Logan remembers, rationally, scrambling to break free, to escape, before the stranger could stop him. Logan remembers, logically, falling to the obsidian marble floor and then, illogically, falling through it.

Logan remembers, quite distinctly, being underwater, thrashing, and drowning, despite him knowing how to swim almost since he could walk. Logan knew how to fight underwater with his legs tied; how was it possible that he recalled so vividly being unable to even tread against the crushing liquid around him? His mouth had filled with a metallic taste, like unfiltered tap water from lead pipes, his broken ribs had screamed when he tried to inhale, like an electrical current blazing through his entire chest cavity, and his vision had gone black no matter which way he’d turned, as though he’d been blinded by whatever chemical had turned solid floors into liquid prisons. He remembers, with a flood of panic, breathing in nothing but water.

Logan jolts, sucking in a painful breath through his oxygen mask and feeling his lung scrap against the bone fragments of his ribs. He’s dry, he remembers, logically, rationally, reasonably: he’s bone dry, and his clothes are scorched from the near miss, and there’s blood trailing down his cheek from the wound on his forehead and he could not have nearly drowned in the middle of a burning building.

The paramedics are both looking at him when Logan opens his eyes again. The woman’s face is sympathetic and kind and worried, blobs and creases of genuine emotion on her features that Logan completely rationally despises with what little energy he has left.

“I never saw him,” Logan rasps—because of smoke inhalation, not because of drowning. Whoever he imagined…must have been nothing more than his amygdala overcompensated for the fear of death to craft a vivid memory of a situation he might have been able to control.

The paramedics exchange professional words with each other, describing what to do about the missing man, and Logan breathes out and attempts to not black out.

He made it out of the fire. He should not have made it out. He knows that: his body is clearly in no position to have hauled himself out of the building, and his memory has enough gaps for Logan to know to be skeptical of his own self.

Teleported. Logan watches several other globule-shaped victims of the fire get herded through the line of firefighters and to the paramedics. The woman checking over him is suddenly busy helping others as well, directing others with orders, and communicating designated safe spots for levels of injuries. The jejune solicitude dissipates from her form to make room for the steadfast leader and Logan holds the gauze to his forehead and recites the Roman alphabet backwards.

Teleportation could refer to many things, Logan reminds himself. The man could have ducked around an alley, the paramedic could have blinked at the wrong moment, someone else could have walked the corner; every infinitesimal probability could have aligned to create the auspicious disappearance that could have looked like “teleportation”. There were other, rational explanations for what could have occurred. The man who had carried him out of the fire did not have to have been linked to Anamorphosis.

But Logan has not survived this long from ignoring coincidences.

The flashing lights leave Logan with a sharp pain in behind his eyes. He can’t see much, although he can extrapolate a decent amount based on common sense: they’re outside the apartment building that Logan had ducked into during the few moments he was certain he’d escaped from the eyes of the people who’d been tracking him through the city. He remembered seeing the disinteresting red bricked edifice and being extremely underwhelmed by it, only to see the haggard insides and discover a new level of despondency. He’d thought that with the dozens of other buildings on the street, the constant swells and retreats of faces, and easy access to transportation from here he might have been able to hoodwink his pursuers completely, and give himself enough time to figure out how to contact headquarters through a secured channel, that would guarantee whoever picked up would be a friend instead of a foe-in-disguise.

But instead Logan is squinting up at the troubled sky, thick with billowing smoke and the taste of ashes. His lungs rasp, the air grating against his esophagus. The red rectangular blur that was the apartment building swarms with oranges and grays and black, mingled and mixed into quickly shifting smears that forced him to look away from.

He focused on his unoccupied hand instead: counting the scrapes on his knuckles and the flickers of burns where embers from the ceiling had kissed his skin and the uniform clipping of his nails until he got to his right ring finger where it had gotten chipped on something or other in the past week. Two years ago he’d caught a knife in the thenar of his hand and although his gloves had taken much of the blow, there was still a pale thin scar that wrapped around the muscle.

It would be unfair to say he lost his gloves: Logan had taken them off and folded them nicely to fit into the pocket of the bag he’d ripped the tag off of in the changing room of the mall, but he’d underestimated how much time he’d before his pursuers caught up. The changing rooms only had a single ventilation system through which Logan had less than two minutes to crawl through for his escape from the burning building. In a choice between the briefcase and his mission bag, he’d chosen the former and subsequently his mission clothes, his armor, his glasses, and his gloves, the last of his food rations, money, and his communicator had been casualties.

And now, the navy polo he’d managed to escape with smelled so strongly of smoke and iron it was making his own eyes water. Logan does the mental math with the utmost frustration: he’d gone through more outfits these past two weeks than he had in the five previous years combined.

“The good news is that these sorts of wounds bleed a lot more than they are dangerous, Mr. Smith.” The paramedic returns, gently, carefully, watching Logan’s hands for another startled outburst. “But you might have lost a bit more blood than is safe, okay? Let’s get you headed to the hospital. They’re going to want to check you for a concussion. Do you remember your blood type?”

Logan gives an appropriate non-answer because he decides capriciously that Lenard Smith has never even had a paper cut. Lenard Smith has never skinned his knees and he’s never been bruised, and he does not have a two inch deep knife wound in his calf and he’s not biting back several curses when his vision metaphorically swims and the paramedic helping him on the gurney helps him move by placing her hand on seven of the nine bruises along his spine. Lenard Smith doesn’t even know what color blood is, Logan decides, bitingly bitter and vehement.

“I’m coming with,” another voice says.

Logan feels the stretcher shake as someone else joins them in the back of the ambulance. He can just barely make them out: the liquorice black uniforms that he’s come to recognize well throughout this figurative nightmare of a city, the splotches of dazzling gold that match the badges both on their right chest and shoulder and the nameplate, the high-waisted duty belts of tools that Logan was deeply enviously of. The throbbing in Logan’s head increases and he considers for a moment, asking the paramedic for a dose of ketamine.

Unfortunately, the woman is busy eyeing the rookie police officer with a critical gaze.

“We cannot allow—” she says.

“We think he might know the arsonist,” the police officer says, flashing her a harried, stressed smile. His badge glitters in the flashing lights of the ambulance as he holds it up for her to scrutinize. “It’s imperative that we question him as soon as possible, and provide some security to him! He’s the first decent lead we’ve had in this case since it started!”

The paramedic jolts, an ineffable series of emotions flickering on her face, that Logan has no hope of describing without being able to see the distinct details.

“The man who dropped him off—” she stutters, “—was the arsonist? But—but he was just…”

Yes. He was just.

The profound significance of that information goes unnoticed by either party, despite it being the exact words that the paramedic utters. The throbbing in Logan’s forehead increases tenfold and he stares for a long second at the metal ceiling of the ambulance. The voices of the paramedic and the officer keep cutting each other off, simultaneously too loud and too quiet, and the officer’s hand rests on his belt ever so nonchalantly.

Just, indeed.

Logan sighs out through his mouth, fogging the plastic respiration system, before he raises the oxygen mask enough to speak clearly. Immediately both of them turn back to him, the paramedic fussing, and the officer suspicious.

“Let him in,” Logan says.

The paramedic stalls for another moment, glaring between the two of them, before relenting. Logan breathes in and out, in and out, in and out and does not think about the plethora of vacation days he’s about to be owed.

“Do not get in the way,” The paramedic says warningly to the officer, as she pulls the doors closed and waves to the driver to begin their journey. Logan lets out a low sibilant noise as the carriage rocks and begins the frantic drive towards one of the eleven hospitals in the city. Once they reach a cruising speed, the jostling diminishes but the bruises along his body do not quiet as easily.

The paramedic reaches for one of the carefully packed areas but Logan’s eyes stay watching the police officer as he sits in the uncomfortable corner seat, fumbling through his pockets for a miniature notebook and a pen.

The paramedic wraps a blood pressure monitor cuff over his upper arm and instructs him to breathe as regularly as he can. Her stethoscope is bright pink and she handles it with ease as she presses the chilled diaphragm disk to Logan’s wrist.

The police officer finally finds a pen. When he looks up again and sees Logan watching him, he replies with a demure, bashful smile, “Mr. Smith, I’ll be brief about this.”

“I’m certain you will,” Logan says.

The paramedic hushes him, gently and Logan nods to show he heard her. His head throbs from the simple motion, and the pain induced nausea brings the taste of his stomach acids creeping up his throat.

The officer shuffles around in his seat to get more comfortable before starting. “We’ve already gotten multiple eye witness reports about what the man looked like, but did he say anything to you?”

It’s not necessarily a horrible question.

Logan lets his eyes close briefly, sucking in the deepest breath of oxygen that he can get from the machine. The paramedic frowns, calling his name softly and asking him to open his eyes again. Logan feels the gurney jump under him, as the ambulance hits a bump, the clinking of the excess holster straps as they sway with the motion, and if Logan focuses hard enough he might be able to sense the Earth’s rotation and the very nature of the gravity that keeps the planet from spinning out of orbit.

“Mr. Smith?” The officer says. “Did he say anything to you?”

“No,” Logan breathes out. He reaches up and removes his oxygen mask, and tossing it over his head despite the paramedics disapproving frown. The air burns with antiseptics, clean and steric to the point of stasis. The cuff tightens around his upper arm.

“Nothing at all?” The officer presses. “Anything about where he was going?”

Logan tilts his head and glances at the paramedic. Her soft brown irises are hickory in the artificial lights. “Do you have zip ties?”

She hums distractedly, releasing the air from the pressure cuff and pulling one of the ear tips from her ears. “I’m sorry what was that—?”

“Move.”

There’s barely a second for the confusion to flit across her face, her pink lips forming the very beginnings of an ‘o’ shape, before Logan is yanking her by the shirt collar and behind him into the cabinet-counter combination, and driving his left heel into the wrist of the officer lunging at him.

The knife in his hand snaps into the open air and clatters into the ambulance door behind them, before tumbling to the floor out of reach. Logan swears to himself, his calf spasms and his sprained-possibly broken ankle ignites in fiery pain. His vision blurs, and by the time it clears again the officer is lunging at him again.

The paramedic screams, but Logan is slightly more distracted with the second nine inch tactical knife wedged into the cushion two centimeters from his cheek. The ambulance lurches and Logan catalogs the driver trying to ask what happened, but his primary focus is purely on making sure the officer can’t get his blade free again.

He’s at a disadvantage—several disadvantages—with the officer having gravity’s favor and Logan concussed, injured, dehydrated, sleep deprived, and starving, but its transparent that at least the rookie part of his facade wasn’t a lie: he’s too eager, not practiced enough, focused on brute strength over technique. Logan’s back is burning, every movement sends hundreds of pain notifications through his nerves and not even the adrenaline can drown them all out.

In the corner of his eye he catches sight of the paramedic scrambling up.

“Stay down!” Logan orders her.

The gurney head cushion tears with a horrible noise as the fake police officer attempts to reclaim the serrated blade and sever Logan’s carotid artery. Up close the blurry features of the police officer are far more clear and Logan’s head spins trying to remember which of the previous five close calls this man had been part of: freckles and long lashes and a mole on his ear and the smell of gasoline and a lighter and a car air freshener.

He drives his right arm up sharply, catching the man in the jaw once, twice, before the man reacts to it with a violent sneer. The pressure cuff on his arm swings wildly narrowly missing smacking Logan with the bulb. The ambulance swerves, and Logan’s next strike times right with the cylindrical force by mere happenstance: the man’s head snaps back violently and his grip on the knife loosens.

Logan deflects his entire forearm over both their heads. The crushing weight of the other man slams into Logan’s body, but it's too late: Logan got his left leg over the man’s right shoulder, and the man is sinking into the choke before he likely even realizes that he was trapped. Logan’s right ankle hooks under his left knee and he tightens, squeezing, with the ruthless mechanicalness that his instructor trained into him for years.

Logan’s lungs scream, his head throbs, his vision swirls and he squeezes the throat of the thirty ninth man to attempt to kill him this week alone.

The body struggles for a second more, desperate fingers clawing at Logan’s face, reaching for a weak point Logan knows better than to give him, leaving thundering pulsations in Logan’s muscles. The dry gasping is only barely audible over Logan’s own roaring blood. The attacker’s hand thumps weakly against Logan’s neck, manicured nails claw at his thigh as if he could break Logan’s hold with just a few torpid attacks.

Logan finally loosens the hold, and the body drops off the edge of the gurney with an uninspired finality. Logan’s own limbs suddenly feel as though they belong to someone else, going limp and slumping back against the cushions as the adrenaline runs its course through him. The paramedic in the back with him is staring with her mouth open, pressed against the wall of the ambulance in horror. He sways as the ambulance rumbling movement comes to stop off the side of the road finally.

The silence is ringing in his ears, humming as a familiar song that he thinks he might recall Janus nagging Virgil to turn off on one of their previous missions. If he listens just a bit more he might be able to name it… something like…. something…. would Logan Ackroyd even know this type of music? He can’t remember.

The paramedic is saying something to him. Her eyes are more of a burnt umber now, and the traces of that frustrating sympathy are absent, leaving something honest in its wake.

“My blood type… is O… negative,” Logan says.

And that is the last thing he remembers.

***

Regaining consciousness is a quaint experience.

Logan isn’t often deeply perplexed by mundane attributes of the human body, but with the past two weeks that he’s had, he allows that something as simple as waking up can be surprising. He’d been forcing his body to act on the barest of substances: two hour naps were exchanged for twelve hours of intense focus and physical activity, a few moderate sips of water needed to last him a day, and half a sandwich eaten in the aisles of a grocery store while the employees were busy needed to make it two. He was functioning, but barely, and with the burns and bruises and head injury, Logan could recognize that he was either extremely lucky, or—in Virgil’s very tasteful words— extremely f*cked.

The room is blurry when he opens his eyes, and he stares at the far wall for several long seconds, observing the darkly muted colors, sterile white noise, and faint antiseptic scent.

He’s in a hospital, of course. It doesn’t take many logical jumps to recognize the location, although he hasn’t spent much time in a public hospital before. Seeing as hospitals are required to document all injuries that they treat, and Logan’s existence is an esoteric secret, he’s in the habit of avoiding hospitals entirely. TSS has their own medical facilities which are—at Janus’s demand— always prepared to look Logan over after a mission even if Logan did not even have to draw his gun. Janus has received 73% of Logan’s mission reports while impatiently standing at the end of his medical cot.

The thought almost physically hurts to think. There’s a sharp pain in his chest imagining Janus standing at the edge of his vision now: hazy and half blurred with the shadows, his sharp eyes cataloging Logan’s pathetic physical state, his arms folded with elegant nonchalance, authoritative and important and informing Logan that he may go back to sleep now that his part of this is done.

But Janus is not here to say all the things that Logan irrationally wants to hear. There’s no Janus to deal with the civilians, no Virgil to watch the cameras and tell him where to go, no TSS to supply him with resources. It’s just Logan.

Just as it’s been since the moment that the first gunshot had gone off in that underground lab.

By now, everyone will have figured out what happened. TSS prides itself on being an intelligence agency, but if Logan had posed the situation as a theoretical to a noncombatant he met on the street, even they would be able to correctly derive what had occurred.

Someone had turned traitor.

The very thought makes Logan’s chest ache fiercely. The people that he’d gone on the mission with hadn’t been his friends, but they had been united by a common goal. Logan had known their call signs, known their faces, known their specialties, known what type of lives they had chosen to walk away from.

He knows the temperature of their blood now, too, when they were bleeding out in an old subway tunnel, delirious from the pain as Logan tried his best to patch them up with the dental floss and kids’ bandaids he could shoplift in an emergency. He knows their last words because miracles are a thing of imagination and Logan should have known better than to pray to a god that has never once listened to him.

Someone had turned traitor, and the worst part was that Logan couldn’t even be sure that it had been someone not on his original mission team. Anamorphosis had proven itself time and time again to be the type of group that could replace any member; their idea of a greater power had driven four members to suicide over capture, and dozens others to shoot down their own teammates, kill hostages, blow up their own buildings with themselves in it. If it had been one of Logan’s own teammates who had been the traitor they might have calmly, delicately led them into death without caring about their sacrifice and Logan would never know.

Logan could mourn the same person who had jeopardized the safety of the entire world and never be any of the wiser.

Or it could have been someone far removed from the frontlines: someone like Janus who grew up speaking lies and then turned it into a personality. It wasn’t hard to imagine Janus sipping wine out of his stemless wine glasses with an amused smile as he watched seven agents get shot apart in an ambush he set for them. Logan had seen him laugh at interrogation recordings and treat himself to videos of new recruit first combat trainings like they were guilty pleasures he just couldn’t stop himself from indulging in.

He’d always been a glutton for the suffering of others.

But even when Logan had stolen fifteen minute naps around this miserable city, he’d been nearly certain that Janus couldn’t turn on Logan like that.

Surely, if Janus intended to have Logan killed he would have wanted it to be by his own hand. Surely, for someone as prideful as him, Janus would have wanted Logan to know it was him behind it. Surely, if Janus had betrayed them, their last interaction would have been more suspicious than Janus complaining about Virgil’s diet of Ramen and grape soda.

It had occurred to Logan, right as he’d escaped the burning newly built residential home, that his insistence on Janus’s innocence might have been because Logan himself is emotionally compromised and needs to be removed from the mission.

Slowly, mechanically, Logan makes himself begin moving. He drags himself into a sitting position, wary of the aches and creaks of his body that are dulled thanks to the IVs in both his arms. He’s been changed into a thin hospital gown and his clothes are nowhere in sight either because someone took pity and burned them, the police collected them for evidence, or simply because a nurse took them to wash. He’s not sure what he hopes happened to them; each option brings a headache’s worth of consequences that Logan doesn’t have time for right now. They at least left him in a set of hospital underwear under his gown.

His ribs ache, but they’re bandaged, supposedly by the careful hands of the same paramedic who watched him strangle a police officer—real or fake— to unconsciousness. The burns on his arms are treated as well, and the self stitching for his leg replaced by a practiced medical hand. The motley bruises across his limbs have the likeness of a Jackson Pollux painting, but besides the brace on his ankle, and the unavoidable cracked ribs, nothing looks to be completely broken. The wound on his head throbs annoyingly, but the gauze and wrap and what feels like three stitches seem to have reduced the imminent danger to an inconvenience: perhaps more frustratingly is that the paramedic was right when she said that his head wound looked more dangerous than it actually was.

He makes short work of the disconnecting his IVs, carefully hissing out from the pain and putting pressure on the exit wounds until he believes that his blood has clotted enough for him to start on the other arm. He likely did not have nearly enough fluids in him still for an official doctor’s discharge, but it was likely that if Anamorphosis learned of their officers' lack of murdering Logan, they would track him to the hospital.

Somehow Logan doubted that any one of Cyra City’s hospitals were ready for an arsonist attack. It was a miracle one hadn’t already been attempted.

Unless, of course, no one knew where he was. Logan pauses in stretching out his cold limbs, testing his weight balance as he glances towards the door and ignoring the blood rush as he re-acclimates to his own body. Although the darkness of the room defines the light hour, there’s faint light peeking under the doorway, broken by two solid bars that, as Logan watches, shift every so slightly, and are accompanied by the deep sigh of someone bored and attempting to not doze off.

Hospital security. A private room, in a private corner of the hospital likely. Logan might almost be able to hypothesize what occurred after his unfortunate unconsciousness: both paramedics argued over what to do with him and the newly acquired unconscious body of a police officer who definitely, undeniably attempted murder; they agreed to take them both to the hospital; they checked Logan in under a different name that Anamorphosis had yet to track down with all the onslaught of other victims from their numerous arson attacks; and now they had either called the FBI to deal with Logan or they were going to request his story themselves and decide how to handle it as best a civilian can.

Logan has no intention of allowing either of those things. The less anyone knew, the less danger they were in.

This has the unfortunate side effect of Logan needing to figure out what to do now.

The side table in the room has a series of items on it, and with a jolt Logan recognizes that they are the few possessions he’d acquired and had on himself prior to the his unconsciousness: a lock pick set crafted from paperclips he stole out of a local department store, a handful of coins that he swiped from the bottom of a wishing fountain, and, to his surprise, a pocket mirror.

He has vague memories of having picked it up: the memory is hazy from adrenaline and exhaustion, but when he had picked out an apartment in that building and knocked loudly to test if anyone had been home, before setting about picking the lock. It had been on the table right next to the door, as if the owner had put it down to pick something else up and then forgot about it as they were rushing out the door. Logan had pocketed it as part of a process of rebuilding a toolkit he could utilize against the Anamorphosis agents after him.

He hadn’t looked at it closely back then—barely cataloging the rose bulge that created a 3D effect—but now in the moonlight he can also make out the inscription around the border reading out ‘Better than dog tags, right?’ He assumes it must be some type of inside joke between the owner and whoever gifted it to them, but by now the owner would have considered it lost to the fire and Logan was free to use it as he pleased.

Satisfactory.

Logan places the compact mirror back on the table without opening it and stretches his fingers. Then he heads for the door.

The security officer at the door is privately hired by the hospital, and has either been accustomed to ennui or particularly bad at their job. Logan has them unconscious and dragged into his room before the man is even aware that the door behind him opened. Unfortunately, the man’s clothes and shoes are a size too small for Logan; the last thing Logan needs is to be distracted by restrictive clothing.

He lets out a sigh, and relieves the officer of their baton and adjustable belt. He resigns to the fact that he will have to deal with this embarrassing hospital gown for a bit longer and fills the belt with his meager possessions, before making his way into the halls again.

If Logan were one for figurative language, he’d comment that the silence in the hospital is oppressive: his bare feet on the frigid tile floor sound far too loud, and the stillness of the night is unnerving, as though Logan is the last human on Earth, despite the fact that he logically knows the contrary.

The only good thing about it is that Logan was certain to hear any approaching parties before they heard him.

His vision is utterly unhelpful on all fronts of deciding the floor map of the building, he has to be within arms length to make out the ceiling signs and or the wall numbers, much less the cameras. He makes the decision to be fast and quiet over being retrospectively unseen. He doesn’t breathe out fully until he finally peaks around the corner and sees a reception desk. It’s empty, luckily, but the door to the worker’s room is cracked and Logan slides inside and shuts the door behind him.

The row of lockers are all uniform with the same muted blue color that the walls of the hospital had. The nameplates are a single letter, followed by a last name, which is unhelpful for Logan identifying the males that had a higher percentage chance of containing clothes that would fit him. They are, however, only locked with bicycle locks, and Logan merely needs a handful of moments to crack through five of them with his skills.

The first two are women with smaller waists than his, the third is empty of everything, the fourth contains clothes too big—Logan pulls out the extra scrubs, but moves on to the next which seems to be the best of all the lockers: scrubs in his size, a doctor's coat, and a pair of running shoes with a folded pair of active wear socks tucked in them. Logan makes short work of changing into the new outfit.

He tests the borrowed shoes on the tiled floor a few times, memorizing the soft squeaks of the soles when his weight shifts around. After a precious few seconds, he straightens again and creeps in a circle through the locker room, footsteps silent and ghostly and a sliver of pride worms through Logan’s bones. It was always rewarding to know that the skills he rarely called upon were still up to par.

He returns the excess items to their locations and his hospital gown into the empty locker that was less likely to be checked and resets the locks so that a cursory glance would not recognize anything out of place. When he’s satisfied he skulks towards the door again and exits into the unoccupied reception again.

The floor nurse fortunately is still busy with her duties so Logan allows himself to glance out the large bay windows. He’s at least a few floors up, which means that his choices to exit are either the elevators or the stairwell.

The positioning of the elevators is right in front of the reception desk on this floor, which likely meant the other floors were the same. If the calling the elevator to his floor didn’t alert someone to his interloping, than exiting one in front of the front reception where there was required to be a nurse at all hours definitely would. Logan could likely bluff enough medical terms to act as a doctor, but it was not something he wanted to do as a first plan.

Stairs then.

Logan hovers a second more after he makes the decision, looking out at the night, and feeling as though he is forgetting something very obvious. There’s a cold breath against his neck, and a feeling of something being wrong, erroneous, dangerous that settles in his gut as a metaphoric weight. He’s certain suddenly that he missed something important, but he can’t imagine what it was.

The trepidation follows him into the stairwell until he forcibly calms himself down again and focuses on his task of leaving the hospital. He makes it down two floors before the door above him opens and immediately fills the silence with the reverberation of someone on the phone. Logan scoots the last three steps and hugs the first floor exit door to quietly open it. The woman on the phone, in the middle of a sharp argument, is loud enough to cover up the sound of Logan opening the door on the floor below.

He catches it before it can fully close behind him, hovering in the doorway, stranded between the hallway adjacent to the reception desk and the stairwell now overlooked by an already upset individual. He was still one floor up at least and although His leg was feeling better, Logan did not like his chances of jumping unscathed from a patient’s room window. He still had other options….as soon as he defined what they were.

There are two nurses at the reception desk; an older woman in pastel purple pants and a flower print with graying hair pulled into several braids, and a young woman in maroon scrubs with a cat print leaning against the desk tiredly. Both of their attentions are focused on the small desk TV in the corner, flashing with lights although the sound is silent. Logan would have thought it were a computer if it weren’t for the blurry shape.

He can’t make out exactly what has their attention completely focused, but he doubts it would remain an ample distraction for long. He’s about to move when the younger—a nurse aid perhaps?— begins speaking.

“I just can’t believe it,” the nurse aid says. “That guy?”

The older woman hums deeply, wizened and sage. “Did ya know ‘im?”

“I mean… kinda?” the girl says. “We had College English together last term. He was just… so normal, I guess. He loved Shakespeare, you know? Like, in the way that it's usually cringe to love something. He was so passionate about it that it was hard to even make a joke about it; I remember being surprised that he didn’t take any theater classes or have anything to do with the student actors. He always sounded like he was made for the stage.”

She trails off for a moment thoughtfully. Logan presses his back against the door just in case her eyes roam in his direction. It wouldn’t do much, but Logan could still hear the voice in the stairwell so there was no other place to go but deeper into the wings of the hospital.

“Though I guess he was alone a lot. Like… like he was around people, but he wasn’t… I don’t know. He always looked like he was holding himself at a distance. He was weird about being in photos, as though he couldn’t handle the idea of there being a record of him online. I remember this one time, Tanya was fawning over him and tried to snap a picture of him while he was at the library reading, but he must have seen it and dodged out of the way. She couldn’t believe it when she went to send the photo to us and it was just a picture of the bookshelf.”

The older nurse hums. “Well, honey, maybe it's for the best. Imagine what could’a happened to her if she’d gone and gotten involved with a dangerous man like ‘im!”

“Involved?” The nurse aid laughs, pitchy and grating Logan's headache. “Oh please. Anyone who ever laid eyes on him knew that Roman Regal was gay! Tanya didn’t stand a chance and she knew it. She just liked looking, you know?”

Logan privately does not know what she could possibly mean, but the older nurse makes several aggrandized noises of agreement. The woman sighs in a put upon way, patting her thighs and bringing herself to stand up from the chair, as the new broadcast blinks to familiar colors of a commercial for a Pest Control Company that Logan has seen all over Cyra City.

“Looks like Mrs. Faustina is paging us again,” she says.

“Faustina?” The nurse aids. “You mean the, like, luckiest woman ever? Did you know that she was legally dead three times already? I’m, like, totally certain that her husband is trying to kill her at this point. I’ll excuse the car crash and the dog attack as freak of nature things, but the bowling ball was definitely not an accident….”

The two women move in the opposite direction heading towards the west wing with their backs to him, the younger woman continuing on with her retelling of the unfortunate happenings to the hospice resident with embellished hand motions and a lowered voice to not bother the other inpatients. Logan darts around the corner to the reception desk, and ducks under it before either of them can turn around and catch sight of him in his bright white doctor’s coat.

He breathes out finally when the voices fade off, and he realizes that he’s right next to the muted TV: the commercial segments must have finished because the signature late night news station for Cyra City was parading across the screen and the obnoxious burgundy suit of the night time news anchor that Logan was near certain everyone in this city liked to make jokes about appeared. The corner of the screen switches to a recording of the apartment fire earlier, taken from up high—likely a helicopter or a drone. The new anchor talks silently about the details of the events, most of which are probably decently far off from the actual occurrence.

Logan’s met several of the police officers in this city and he doubts that they or the fire investigations teams have the brains to recognize the absurd pattern in locations or match it to anyone. Logan is about to turn away from it when the picture switches over to a police sketch of a man.

Logan is the first person to observe that witness testimonies can be faulty; the human mind is prone to fabricate memories to fill in blanks when the hippocampus did not deign to store the minute details, but the vague things he knows about the man who saved him—the quick, confusing snapshots he was able to retain amidst the flames, smoke, and water—the soft jaw line, clean shaven, dark eyes alight with verve, and wavy hair that slipped over his forehead, as he carried Logan—those things line up with the police sketch on the TV remarkably accurately.

It feels profound, for a reason that Logan cannot identify as though staring at the face of the man on TV should not have been a pleasure he ever received. It causes a strange bitter taste weld up in the back of his mouth, and the apprehension from before to metaphorically rest on his shoulders akin to a blanket being draped over him.

What is it exactly that is wrong with the man? What exactly is triggering Logan’s….panicked reaction. The banner scrolls across the bottom of the screen, bright white text against the blue background.

Roman Regal. Arsonist at Large. Do Not Approach. FBI Hotline number….

Logan remembers a voice, calm and soothing, like a radio host for a podcast he’d forgotten about. He remembers being unable to get up. He remembers being meant to die and then hands carrying him out.

He remembers being in an ambulance, and the Anamorphosis agent sent to kill him did not ask Logan about himself or TSS at all.

“Newton,” Logan hisses out, pinching the bridge of his nose, to keep the throbbing at bay.

He’d missed it. Of course he missed it; two weeks of Anamorphosis chasing him with feral mania, lighting fires through Cyra City with no care to the residents, trying to get back that briefcase that Logan had been told to protect with his life, and Logan had logically assumed that this had just been another case of them catching up to him.

The apartment he’d chosen to hide in, Disney-character furnished but otherwise minimal and unimpressive, the apartment that he had declared safe enough to steal a nap in—Logan had ditched his pursuers in the city, and had the excellent fortune to dive head first into a secondary mission that Anamorphosis was carrying out.

The apartment owner had been on Anamorphosis watchlist already, the team that ambushed Logan had been after this… Roman character instead, and hadn’t had a clear enough picture of him to have known that Logan wasn’t him.

And after Logan had lost the fight, the man had appeared—possibly guilt motivated—and saved Logan using the same technique of walking through walls that high level Anamorphosis agents had.

If this man possessed the ability that Anamorphosis gave its best agents, then he should have been an agent as well. And yet, he’d saved Logan directly against the wishes of the people that employed him. Was it possible that this Roman character was a rogue agent? A defector?

Anamorphosis is not kind to its agents. It wouldn’t be completely outrageous for someone to have decided dying for the cult-like terrorist group was a notion they weren’t willing to complete. Logan could imagine it with a frankly unimpressed ease: someone who had joined for the thrill, rose in the ranks, rose in the prestige, rose in admirement, just to find out that they would always be just a number statistic to the mysterious leaders.

Was it possible that for as long as TSS had been clawing to get answers Logan had met someone who could actually give them?

Was it possible then, that the mission Logan had failed— the mission that his team had died for, that he’d been betrayed in, that had tested each and every ounce of Logan’s skills and abilities and luck, might be reclaimable after all?

Logan remembers how his body had frozen at the sight of the vials dumping out of the briefcase. He remembers knowing at that moment that everything had been over, that TSS had lost and Anamorphosis was going to get away with their plans again and this time the cost would be entire nations falling.

Roman—if Roman was even his real name—had run because being previously affiliated with Anamorphosis was enough to make TSS distrust him and likely lock him away for the rest of his life, because an enemy of their enemy was not quite an ally and even Logan knew there were lines he wouldn’t cross that Janus would flounce over, because if Roman hadn’t sprinted as soon as he had Anamorphosis would have gotten their hands on him again and he’d likely seen every horrible thing that an amoral agency like that would do to a traitor.

And now Anamorphosis had taken control of the news and framed the story as him being the Arsonist. The city was about to become a battle royal, and the regular citizens were going to become bloodthirsty the moment they saw him; a reckless, catastrophic smoking tactic that would cause so much collateral damage that TSS would be at their wits end trying to clean it up. If Logan hadn’t seen the man, been saved by him, or realized what was actually going on TSS would never even know the truth of the matter.

Logan rubs his eyes and curses to himself.

If Virgil were here, he could ask him to track all the cameras in the area to find where the man went. If Janus were here he could wave his badge and flash his smile and get the story reframed as Roman being a valuable witness to the fires. If Logan could trust anyone, finding Roman before the citizens did would be the easiest mission of his life and Logan could leave this horrible awful average city.

But it’s just him. And all Logan knew was the possible places that an undercover agent might run to avoid capture, but considering Anamorphosis had been finding him again, and again, and again, it was possible that Logan didn’t even know that!

The elevator across from reception dings, and Logan jolts into action, diving back under the desk. His ribs immediately protect, screeching at the sudden too sharp breaths and hunched position, and he grits his teeth hard and violently to keep from making a noise.

He hears the doors quietly rumble open and the humming of someone extremely bored, and Logan mentally tracks their steps as they head down the hall, before he finally lets out a pathetic gasp and wraps his arm over the offending bones.

There’s a mini fridge under the desk that should not be there. Small metal, with a clear door to show the ten bottles of water being chilled and what looks like someone’s leftovers. It hits Logan like a physical force suddenly: a brush of terrified panic that’s strong enough to override the pain in his chest from his ribs and the weeping from his calf. Cold sweat breaks out on his back, his hands grow clammy and his eyes can’t seem to leave the absolutely clean and clear glass window of the fridge.

Distantly the elevator doors roll closed and the person strolls off entirely and the TV switches to a weather forecast and Logan is staring at the reflection of the reception desk’s rolling chair.

A chair that is behind him.

A chair that should not be seen because Logan is in front of it.

Logan’s fingers fumble for the belt pocket where he left the pocket mirror. The cold metal is real and solid but when Logan stares at the cleaned glass surface there’s nothing there. It’s as though he doesn’t exist at all, even though he knows that’s not true—he incapacitated that guard that was outside his room, he’s interacted with a handful of doors—He can’t remember if he saw his reflection while walking through the halls, his vision was too blurry to make out reflective surfaces at a distance and he… did he see it in the glass window several floors up? In any of the windows as he fled down the stairwell?

Logan doesn’t think he did.

He sways, dizzy, and disorientated, and nauseous, and with very little input from Logan himself, his body tumbles to the side, slumping against the fridge door.

And then into it.

Chapter 5: Runaway, Rescuer, Regrettable Reunions

Chapter Text

If someone didn’t absolutely need to be in the subway tunnels, Roman would not advise going into them.

He never considered himself a scaredy cat. Roman actually went as far as to say that he was pretty brave most days: having Remus for a brother meant that his life was filled with jump scares and pranks and if Roman didn’t keel over dead of a heart attack when Remus dropped a live, rabid raccoon into his car while he was driving home from school in eleventh grade, then he figured there weren’t many things that could actually scare him silly anymore.

But there’s something about the oppressive darkness around him in the subway tunnels that makes cold sweat drip down Roman’s back. He plunged into it in a crazed frenzy, but he’d been wholly unprepared for how…thick it felt. Like a blanket wrapping around him, syrupy stagnant air presses on him from all sides, nearly dense enough to feel like stumbling into a brick wall with every step.

Not to mention the scent.

After the whole…everything with Patton, Roman and Remus and their parents moved out to the countryside; a nice place where the general age of people in town is past retirement, and the ground was so flat that staring out at the horizon for too long would make Roman acutely aware of Earth spinning. His mother adopted a flock of chickens to keep her company and his father took care of cows and Roman had asked Remus nineteen times on the drive to Cyra City if he thought that the city kids would be able to smell farm on him.

Roman is no stranger to foul scents. Cow manure was far from a pleasant smell, and Remus ate his deodorant instead of applying it for at least three years. He’s been in a boy’s locker room before, and then the boys bathroom too; he’s met up with acquaintances for school projects that have pigs, and he dealt with Remus’s dog Butterball getting sprayed by a skunk once when Remus was sick out of his mind with spring allergies.

But the tunnel’s air tastes rancid and foul, as though something died in the off shoots and no one could have been bothered to clean it up. He clamps a hand over his mouth trying to remember the smell of his hand lotion, but all he gets is ash and smoke and that rotting stench. It’s all around him: no matter where he turns or what he does, he’s in the tunnels and his bones will remain here too long after his flesh has fallen off them.

His lungs heave for oxygen, and he leans against the wall desperately trying not to think about what else he might be leaning against.

He’s not sure at what point he stopped hearing the sounds of pursuit. He’s not even sure how long he’s been running through the darkness. His mental clock went spinning out of control when he decided to leave his brain on the metro train; he could have been running through the tunnels for five minutes or five hours and he only just now has managed to get a grip on himself. The pulsing adrenaline feels like someone setting off fireworks under his skin every time he manages to get his heartbeat to a resting rate and the slightest sound is liable to ignite him into another frenzy.

For someone who never finished the mile in under thirteen minutes, Roman thinks that he’s covered most of the city in his plight by now. His entire body certainly feels like it. Imagine! All it would have taken his gym teachers to properly motivate him would have been to set an angry, irrational mob on him! He could have been a track star! A Marathoner! An Olympic gold medalist in the 100 meter Run or Die race!

Logically, Roman thinks he must have found a service tunnel; he crossed between walls at some point, catching his breath only when he nearly face-planted into the electrified rail in the next tunnel over. He past by some graffiti art, the blinking service lights had let out startled flickers when he tore under them, half of his brain melted out of his ears when a metro train whipped through a nearby tunnel and the screech of the wheels against the tracks had herald lizard people’s first oncoming army attack.

He’s hysterical and exhausted and wants to cry a little bit.

For as bad as Roman thought that having to return home and hear his mother’s fussing would be, he’s decided this is much, much worse.

The dark shadows swirl around him, some sibilant noises echoing around him like whispers he can’t make out. He’s being cornered; he’s being surrounded; he’s in the middle of a crowd and all alone at the same time. If Roman closes his eyes, it wouldn’t feel all that much different from being in the Mirror Realm, but the bitter taste in his mouth, the thumping of his heart in his throat, the gasping strangled breathes in his lungs are too erratic: he can’t even pretend to calm himself, can’t think of a person who could be calm in this situation.

What hero could stare down his own calumny? Which character from his plays could laugh in the face of the public trying to kill him? Who does Roman think he is to call upon that bravery when he already ran away?

How did they get such a clear sketch of him?

Roman heaves a cough, shaking as his knees creak and bend and send him sliding down the wall, like some sort of gelatinous slug entity. His breaths are sharp and violent but he forces himself to take one, hold until he thinks his entire body is going to pop like a balloon, and then exhale. And then take another, hold, and exhale. And again. And again.

Until he almost pantomimes someone who is not breaking down in a subway tunnel, lost and alone and quite literally on his own against the world.

He wipes his sleeve over his cheeks, brushing away the tears and snot and probably making an unholy mess out of his mascara. The sudden thought— of his make up, of how he was late to classes this morning because he just had to spend time applying his stupid mascara, of how he just bought a new eye shadow palette and it was already ruined because of an arson attack he’d been framed for— is suddenly hilarious.

He almost wants to turn around and run back to the police.

“It couldn’t have been me, officers!” He’d say, “I just dropped thirty-five dollars on a Thomas Sanders eye shadow palette! As a broke college student, how could I justify buying one of those just to blow it up?”

And the totally reasonable, completely understanding police officers would nod in agreement and tell the public that Roman was free from all charges, wrongfully accused, and they were going to give him fifty million dollars and pay for a vacation to Tahiti that he deserves.

His laugh, miserable and wet and not-at-all flattering, bounces off the concrete walls, and rebounds off the metal pipes back at him in the most mocking way ever. Roman gives his eyes another rub, and presses his head to his knees.

There’s no light here, wherever here is. He’s deep in the maze-like system, and even when he picks through his frenzied thoughts he can’t remember actually seeing another emergency underground light for a while, fumbling, stumbling, and tripping through the stygian emptiness, because obviously Roman hadn’t stretched his luck enough. It was a miracle he hadn’t broken his legs, much less wandered his way into an oncoming train.

Wherever he ended up it must not be part of the active metro routes: something, something, remodeling—Roman remembers reading about it in the college newspaper months ago, mentioned as an anecdote in relation to some important Cyra City person whom Roman no longer even remembers the name of, that was involved in upgrading the infrastructure of the city. The city design had changed to accommodate an influx of people in the late 90s or whatever, and Roman must have literally blindly stumbled into the parts that had been abandoned or forgotten about or simply out of use.

They smelled like they hadn’t been touched since the 90s at least.

Weakly, Roman shrugs his bag off his shoulders and pats around until he finds the zipper amidst the butterfly embroidery. His fingers dig through his possessions with little comprehension of what exactly he has; his meticulous organization was just as useless as Remus had laughed it would be, back when he’d been making it. His running knocked everything out of place and it takes Roman several seconds of feeling out the smooth, xenomorphic plastic in his hand for him to realize it's the really cute pair of sunglasses he’d packed.

He can hear Remus’s mocking laughter in his head, and Roman’s horrified to find that he would give just one of his lungs to have Remus right by his side right now. Remus who’d never been scared of anything, who would find some bad joke to say to get Roman laughing, who would—despite vehemently protesting it— be the responsible twin so that Roman could be the miserable, moping one. Remus would call him stupid and dumb and a baby bitch, but he’d stay right by his side and think of some way to get out of this horrible mess with Roman’s social life intact.

Rummaging more and Roman digs through the bottom of his bag until he finds the thin cylindrical item he’s looking for.

“But soft,” Roman whispers, twisting the end of his penlight. “What light through yonder window breaks?”

The white light glow is nearly blinding in the absolute darkness and Roman hisses as he spins the pen around so it's not pointing directly at his face anymore. The beads of flash on the back of his eyelids take a few blinks to clear his vision.

“It is the east,” Roman sniffles, swirling it through the air. “And Juilet is the Sun.”

The light is hardly the strongest thing ever. In fact Roman’s pretty sure the pen was one of those cheap ones that are given out as table favors at job fairs. If he squints he can almost make out the ridiculous ant logo for the pest control company that had been giving them out. The fickle blink of his pen light was barely enough to make out his hand, much less lead the way through the winding tunnels, but Roman can’t bring himself to put it away again. Partially because it had been a pain to blindly fumble through his bag, and mostly because Roman doesn’t want to forget what light looked like on the off chance that he’d stumble his way into an alternate dimension where light didn’t exist naturally and there was no way to get back.

He drags his bag back in front of him and goes through what items he does have, now that he can see them.

His passport, driver’s license, and social security card are all still there, thank Ian McKellen.

Roman remembers the arguments that he and his parents had about driver’s licenses. They’d never had a problem with him and Remus learning to drive—they could travel across the farm in a matter of seconds but carrying anything larger than a backpack was impossible, especially when it came to repairing the fences or restocking the barn before the winter—but official licenses had a photo aspect that Roman and Remus couldn’t provide. Mom had been stoutly convinced that it was far easier and safer for them to just never get an official license, and Roman had been crushed by the idea of never being able to hold a stupid piece of plastic.

Remus had gone on a warpath after that, downloading and testing dozens of softwares to create the most realistic recreation of Roman and himself that he could. He fiddled for weeks on it, and then paid the cousin of a friend of a guy they knew from class to get a passable fake license, and presented it to Roman for his seventeenth birthday, like Roman hadn’t just gotten him another dumb sketchbook.

Roman rolls a thumb over the picture of his own face or at least what looks close enough to him. The person staring at the camera looks like a version of Remus who never got it in his head to let a mustache grow out, who never paid someone twenty bucks at lunch to pierce his ears and went to third block with blood dripping down his neck, who never found that leather jacket in a good will bin and decided that was the only type of love he would ever need for the rest of his life. The person in his driver’s license is supposedly Roman, but to Roman they’re just another stranger he’s never met.

He sticks his penlight in his mouth to check the edges for damages along the edges of the card, and then flicks through the pages of his passport as well and declares them still fit for use. He tucks his roll of bills right next to them. The hair dye, thankfully, hadn’t exploded from the rough care, which is both a great thing and an awful thing: for one, Roman hated the idea of being raven haired. For another, the last thing anyone who’d ever met him would expect was him to go with a dark dreary gothic color. Roman should have gotten a red, or a gold, or even just grabbed bleach. The police would never have expected their suspect to have dyed their hair rainbow, right?

His small makeup palette is intact too, with the mirror being dusted with the silt remains of his now broken blush brick, but otherwise unharmed. Roman breathes out a bit of tension he hadn’t known he was holding on to.

This at least was an entrance to the Mirror Realm.

And he’d never had to worry about anything or anyone catching him in the Mirror Realm. That was a place that only him and Remus could reach—their secret, their safety. Not even their parents could reach them there.

The blush powder did however pose a slight problem he’d have to work around or suck up about: traveling through dirtied surfaces has the same drawbacks as cannonballing into the shallow end of the pool. He’ll survive it, yeah, but Roman will be walking away with something bruised-broken-bleeding.

Remus was a frequent testimony to this throughout all of Roman’s childhood with him. Roman doesn’t actually remember more than eight days where Remus remained injury free, between his roughhousing with his dog, Butterball, his reckless inciting of every person able to drop kick him in the a thirty mile radius, and his constant refusal to keep any of his reflective items clean. He’s a walking hazard that needs to come with court.

And he would be great to have right here, right now.

Remus is likely at the Gas Station by now, wondering how bad Roman f*cked up that he was late to his own pity party. He probably hadn’t checked the news at all, Cyra City or elsewhere, but he probably had called Roman’s burner phone a dozen times and then gave up and started calling the phone Roman had stolen from that poor woman to call him after the fire. Remus was probably annoyed as all hell at him, close to storming through the Mirror Realm and searching for Roman himself, just to strangle him for wasting Remus’s precious Tumblr Doom Scrolling time.

Roman, tilts his head back trying to breathe in to calm his nerves again, but the awful stench gets into his mouth instead. After a bout of coughing—which Roman would doubly not suggest ever doing in the creepy abandoned dark and threatening tunnels under the city, because the noise goes nowhere but directly back at him like a crowd chortling while he chokes—he gives himself a shake and places the mirror down next to himself so he can focus on finishing his inventorying and then get out of here.

Unfortunately, it looks like his blind attempts to figure out what his sunglasses were before he had any light put his thumb prints all over the lens, and now that he had enough light to make a mirror out of them, the smears of his fingers were just as dangerous as the blush on his actual mirror, and the tint might actually make it worse. If Roman was a bit more science oriented he probably would have put together a half decent experiment for how tint affects his powers, but as it stands, Roman had to drag himself through every single one of his chemistry classes and his notes were always a mess because he used to read plays under his desk when the teacher’s back was turned.

Roman huffs out a sigh, and hooks the glasses on the collar of his shirt. He can wear them later once he gets out of the tunnels and has to hide his face from people who might recognize him on the streets. If he’s fast he’ll be able to snag one of those surgical masks from a grocery store and then he could look like some type of celebrity on the down low.

His pocket sewing kit broke open so the dozens of needles and threads are scattered in the bottom of his bag, but it's more of a pain to clean those up than to just throw the rest of his things on top of them. His emergency granola bar is crushed and broken up Nature Valley style which makes it even less appealing than eating one of the rocks at his feet.

He’s tossing it back into his bag when there’s the sound of skittering down the tunnel.

“Oh f*ck no,” Roman says, jumping to his feet. His voice echoes back at him, shouting and mocking on an emotional level that makes Roman’s skin break out in cold sweat all over again. He rips the penlight from his mouth and wields it like a sword to his left and right to block whatever creature is in the tunnels with him.

Rats? Rats maybe Roman could handle, okay? One or three, yeah sure fine! He’ll give them a large berth and walk around. But if its a dozen or more, and Roman stumbled into their territory, and is now going to die by rat rabies or something worse, Roman wants a f*cking refund on his life. He hadn’t done anything awful recently to warrant his life being turned into this circus and whatever God or fate or destiny decided this was how Roman Regal died, is going to catch Roman’s ghostly f*cking hands.

His pen light wobbles in the air, and Roman keeps a vigilant eye on the shadows, on the hundred percent real chance that a demon is going to leap out at him. He bends down slowly and mechanically tapping around for his mirror and his bag without having to glance away from his surroundings.

His breath is way too loud: he swears he can hear someone else in pauses between each of his rapid inhales and exhales but no matter what he does he can’t pinpoint what direction the undertone is coming from. It doesn’t help that the horrible rotten scent is lumbering through the tunnels like an invisible gelatinous entity, filling up all the available space. His lungs are shuddering trying to fend off the suffocating smell, weeping desperately for the strawberry shortcake hand wash that Roman had in his apartment bathroom.

The zipper of his bag gets stuck halfway because it’s a cheap WalMart bag and it’s Roman’s fault for thinking anything less than ten bucks would be durable enough to withstand literally anything. Roman should have been surprised to find it hadn’t come with an expiration date based on the factory stitching alone; he should have been surprised when he removed the mirror in his locker and his bag hadn’t already disintegrated into a pile of fabric with a QR code for rating his experience!

Roman gives up on the zipper and instead slides his arms through the straps back so that he can go now, right now, please and thanks. His death grip on his penlight causes the crummy plastic exterior to creak, and the light flickers warningly, like Roman isn’t about to start sobbing. He quickly flicks open the pocket makeup kit, struggling to get the lip to pop open—why did he close it? Is Roman stupid?— when his other hand is occupied.

Something is walking, something is coming, the shadows are moving around him, and Roman is going to scream. He shoves the pen in his mouth and tears apart the clasp and the pen light drops from his mouth while he’s distracted.

It clatters into the gravel ground a few inches away from his foot, and decides now is the best time to try a gymnastics routine: it bounces through the rocky floor, ricocheting off every single edge it can find. Roman lunges after it with more terror than he could have brought himself to name, if he could have had a thought that wasn’t a variation of f*ck damnit please no f*ck no no no no—

He snatches it up from the tracks halfway across the tunnel in the middle of the tracks like the hero in a western saving the damsel tied to the tracks. Roman’s heart thunders in his throat, full throttle, waiting for the subway sirens to blare and the lights to blind him and for his body to be introduced to the underside of the engines.

But no train comes. The only noise in the oppressive darkness is Roman’s own breathing. And then there’s not even that because the other side of the tunnel is in clear view suddenly, and Roman is staring at— he’s—There’s—

For a moment, Roman can’t even fathom what he’s looking at.

Something on the other side of the tracks, as big as a duffle bag at least, hunched over, leaning against the wall. The whifty white light makes it hard to make out actual colors, beyond black and off-white, maybe tan? Roman takes another step, and the eye watering scent slams into him like a physical force, as heavy as getting tackled by Butterball without warning, or hit by a bus, or run over by a subway.

Roman is standing there staring at the malformed, distorted, mangled whatever-it-is and then—and then—

And then it clicks.

These tunnels smell like something died in them because something actually did.

Roman grips his shirt over his mouth, although the taste is in his mouth. His pathetic pen light jerks violently as he traces over the slumped body out of horrified compulsion. Their skin had turned a greenish color and mottled and torn open in places thanks to the bloat; the clothes were dark but the fabric had begun to mold over and there were some type of insect wriggling around, under, inside; the gravel rock area around them was damp from unidentifiable liquids dark and light and horrible, horrible, horrible. Arms, or what used to be them, were folded gently over their sternum, as if the person had decided to sit down with their arms crossed and never got up again; their head is bowed forward, sleeping, as if they could sleep through their own decomposition.

Whoever this person had been, they no longer resembled them anymore. They didn’t resemble anyone anymore. Roman almost didn’t think they were a person: just something vaguely humanoid in shape wearing boots and clothes and decaying and dead.

He’s breathing in the decaying flakes of a dead person, he’s been breathing in—

Roman stumbles back, his pen light slipping from his numb fingers as he does. He can’t tear his eyes away from the body, the corpse, the husk. He’s stepping back, and tripping over the railing and falling and and and—

Out. Roman decides succinctly. He needs to get out. Right now. Before whatever killed this person, kills him too.

He doesn’t want to die down here, alone. He doesn’t want to die at all.

Remus is waiting for him. Remus is— Remus—

Fascinated, Roman gasps with shuddering lungs. Recklessly fearless, collecting references because he’s going to use this in a comic panel sometime soon, he knows it, don’t be such a baby, when are we ever going to get another chance to see something this cool again? Look at these little blowflies doing their jobs! Aren’t they so f*cking smart?! We die and these little bastards make us useful by turning our dumb corpses food and shelter! Let’s take some home with us!

That’s right. Roman reigns himself in: that’s right. He can almost hear Remus’s voice blundering and bouncing and joyfully buoyant, can almost see through the hazy darkness Remus’s form creeping closer to the dead body, taking pictures with his phone without care of the fact that it might be disrespectful or defiling. He’s not afraid of death; he’s not afraid of anything.

Remus’s hands wouldn’t shake when he picks up his penlight, and his breath wouldn’t catch when he looks away from the body, and the scent wouldn’t make his eyes water, and he wouldn’t mentally beg for his brother to be here because Remus would know Roman wouldn’t find this cool at all. Roman breathes through his shirt, blinking back tears and the swelling nausea, and carefully loosens his death grip on his makeup mirror.

He’s not afraid of anything. He’s not afraid of anything.

He places the mirror on the ground at his feet, and holds his penlight up over it to make sure the bulb of white appears in the reflection. The smears of blush dust on the surface look like mold, moving, growing, populating, but Remus is not scared of anything, so Roman takes a step forward and falls.

Once, when Roman was twelve, he’d been listening to music with earbuds and Butterball had come running up from behind him thinking he was Remus, and knocked him straight down the stairs. He remembers nothing of it actually: space and ow and space and pain and ow and then he was staring up at the ceiling with half his body on the last step still, the world spinning in circles, and his earbuds still playing ABBA on the ground next to him.

That’s what it’s like again, laying in the Mirror Realm.

He sits up slowly, grunting through the pain and swearing about how Remus must have been dropped as a child if he does this whenever he f*cking feels like it. He must have dropped his penlight because he can see the weak light blinking goodbye under his feet, sinking, sinking, sinking away. Around him the flickers of other metallic surfaces rest as a graveyard of forgotten items: tumblers, laptops, cans, windows, water bottles all forming a maze around him. Several train cars from a subway train are majestically suspended in the air over several stories over his head, like the giant dinosaur skeletons in the lobby of museums.

His make up kit mirror isn’t among them—not that he thought it would be, because there was a certain amount of light required to make a reflective surface. If a tree falls in a forest style, if there’s no light around the glass-metal sheet-plastic-whatever no longer provides a portal to the Mirror Realm. One of the first things he invested in when he got his own money was cloth coverings for his mirrors so Remus would stop popping in whenever he felt like it.

Roman can hear the buzzing of conversations around him now, snippets of things that blur around him, whispers and yells and laughs that cut through the eerie empty deathly silence he left behind. He winces as he stretches out the bruises along his body, as sporadic as a Jackson Pollux painting, and scouts the area for an idea of what now.

Remus. Actual Remus, not the memory of him that Roman can feel slipping through his fingers despite how desperately he clings to the idea of his grin. Actual Remus at the actual Gas Station that he’s actually late to meet with.

He has his emergency bag now, which means that he has everything he could possibly need to meet up with his brother, even if it took about—Roman gets a flash of a wall clock in one of the decorative mirrors— four hours to get it.

“Now would be a great time to have Remus’s dog tags,” Roman says weakly, like his mouth doesn’t taste like his stomach acids, like his voice isn’t raspy from the strain of not screaming, like he not half certain he’ll turn around and The Dead Corpse will sink its teeth into his neck.

His voice trails off, his attempted hopeful tone falling flat in the wasteland around himself. The objects hold and hover in their places, and Roman didn’t expect that suddenly Remus’s tags would appear right in front of him, but he still feels jipped that they don’t.

Walking then. Roman wants to cry a little. He’s going to walk to the same Gas Station that marked the halfway point on their trip to Cyra City the first time. Why did he let Remus talk him into using that place at their waypoint?

He’s not even sure where in the city he is anymore, much less how to orient himself so that he was facing the right cardinal direction to make it to the Gas Station.

He’s going to have to make a stop in the city. He’s going to have to go back out there, figure out where he is, and where he needs to go, and get something to drink because he feels like he’s going to faint. He feels sick to his stomach. He feels like he’s going to lose his mind.

He feels and would like to not.

The bruises along his chest and guts ache as he walks aimlessly peering at the flashing collection of portals around him, searching for somewhere to cross over, with an arbitrary list of requirements he can’t quite decide on. Somewhere where no one is going to see him, somewhere where he isn’t going to get shanked, somewhere where he can navigate from, somewhere where he can—

There. Roman recognizes that logo. The pizza place that he sees kids in the dorms get deliveries from. It’ll be in the commercial area, and Roman can—

And then, just like that he’s back in Cyra City.

The city nightlife is stunning: headlights, club lights, cell phones, night photography. Music is playing from everywhere and nowhere, drifting through the alleys and streets like curious wanderers observing an art gallery. There’s a karaoke night going on at the bar on this street, a live band in the coffee shop, the movie theater is vomiting people into the sidewalks, and there’s a game of night basketball going on in the park with a crowd going nuts. Someone is yelling, someone is laughing, someone is crying; it’s so loud for a moment, so vibrant and vivid and vigorous that Roman is dizzy from whiplash.

Roman stands in the shadows of the alley, trying to catch his breath, or any breath at all. He’s off balanced, wrong footed, and suffering a ridiculous version of stage fright that has him frozen to the wings like a single street light will burn him to a crisp. The inside of his nostrils are singed with the scent from the tunnels, as if the corpse had followed him through the Mirror Realm, bony decaying fingers clinging to Roman’s ankles demanding to know why Roman got to leave the underground but they couldn’t. The back of his throat pulses and his stomach lurches and Roman doubles over trying not to lose whatever he had for lunch—he can’t even remember if he had lunch.

There are people here, some drunk, some sober, some exhausted, some wired. There are people here who are alive, and pulsing and living lives that Roman will never know. There’s an arsonist somewhere out there that Roman helped save, and there’s a news story somewhere being written about how Roman likes to watch fires engulf entire buildings.

Cyra City. Breathe.

Grad student, Roman thinks, tearing his sunglasses off his collar. Longest week of his life, exhausted, not paid enough, idiot professors, idiot kids.

And then he forces his legs to move.

For the record, wearing sunglasses at night is far harder than Corey Hart had him believe. At no point does it feel like he’s seeing through any type of deception: he barely feels like he’s seeing anything at all. His head is down, his fingers hooked on his bag straps, his vision and there-lack-of takes him directly into a streetlight and a tree in the same ten steps and he knows someone watched it happen, because it’s the city and someone is always watching. The pizza shop is swelling with people, the doors propped open to make it easier for customers to come and go and Roman weaves his way through it with his heart beating in his throat so large that he can’t even mumble apologies to the drunk guys he needles out of the way.

He doubts he looks like his picture on the news right now—or at least he assumes that there’s not an Instagram filter for someone having spent the day running around the subway offshoots and finding a corpse. But it feels ridiculous to assume that he wouldn’t be recognized soon. Roman takes a peek up at the street signs, trying to gage by nightlife vibes of where a shop might be.

Stealing is bad. Roman would like it known he knows it’s bad— his parents did an excellent job of teaching him to be a proper young abnormality who would never dare consider robbing someone, and not just because getting caught would be a direct pipeline to getting donated to a secret government lab—but considering he’s face is nearly plastered on every street corner and not for a reason he would like it to be, he allows himself just this.

Roman had fives and tens in his bag, but it's for an emergency. The he’s-getting-robbed-on-the-street emergency; the he-needs-to-buy-a-new-ID emergency; the he-needs-to-buy-a-hotel-room-for-the-week-without-letting-it-get-traced-back-to-him. Comparatively, needing a snack is like…not something he can afford to waste his cash on. The fact that its unserialized numbers on small bills makes it more attractive to be exchanged with another human than to be left on the counter at a store, or handed to an exhausted cashier. It’s hush money, the word bribe nearly scrawled on his bills right under the In God We Trust.

Stealing is bad. Roman will feel bad about it later, though.

He checks around himself, watching for people watching before he slides into the front window of the shop, and then takes another step through the Mirror Realm to one of Anti-shoplifting mirrors that are inside the shop.

Dropping down from the convex mirror at the end of the cereal aisle is about as graceful as a four year old dropping off the monkey bars; Roman thinks he manages to cry slightly less when he climbs back up to his feet, but he still wishes that his mom were here to tell him he’ll be okay. Privately in the darkness of the store, Roman massages his wrist from his awkward landing, and tries not to think how a nice little corner store like this does not deserve to have its inventory stolen.

Cheap brands, alright? Roman’s been a broke college student for the past three years, rocking that college education and playing TA for the calc courses on Tuesdays and Thursdays and tutoring in the library on Mondays and Wednesdays; he’s had weeks where the only thing he ate was instant ramen of various flavors twice a day. Roman’s made cheap seem chic, and really he just needs enough to get himself through the next two hours.

Two hours. Gas Station. Remus. Cheap Brands. Go.

Roman tiptoes down the aisle, each of his steps uncertain and cautious because the last thing Roman wants is to activate some secret alarm—do stores like these have alarms? Roman could imagine that with his luck he found the one and only store in the city that had a laser grid between the aisles for some freak reason. He’s half convinced that at any second someone is going to come flying in from the backdoor shouting and screaming about intruders, police sirens and police officers chasing him the exact way they had cornered him on to the metro. But it stays quiet, and Roman stays alone.

He lets out a long slow breath. He’s fine. Totally fine. Cheap brands.

Granola bars are an easy bet and they’re right in front of him. Roman hasn’t had a granola bar since he was still in grade school, and packing his lunch in the morning was too much of a hassle so he dumped nine chocolate chip granola bars in instead, and survived off that for the rest of the day. He’ll grab the granola bars and a bottle of water and go.

Or at least that’s what he’s doing when a hand grabs the collar of his flannel and yanks him back. Roman swears as he lands into the other shelving unit nearly hard enough to make it shudder. His granola bars scatter across the floor and three boxes of Frosted Flakes tumble off the shelf where his bag hits it. His glasses swing off his face, at his feet painfully out of reach.

“I was gonna pay!” Roman yelps, then squints as he recognizes the person in front of him. “Tony?!”

Because, yeah, that’s Roman’s last hook up standing right there. The cute guy from his Political Sciences class that declined to show any interest in Roman again after Remus burst in on them in the middle of undressing each other for a stupid reclamation of his stupid romance movie that he doesn’t even like. The ambient light from the drink coolers down the aisle make it hard to pick out exact features but Roman had gotten to know him intimately: dark hair, long eye lashes, soft jaw, and an absolutely stunning ass—not that Roman can see his ass right now, through black padded tactical cargo pants.

“What are you wearing?” Roman asks.

“Pants—I’m sorry, did you just call me Tony?” Tony asks, blinking as if he’d been trying to say something else but couldn’t help himself from getting side tracked.

“Yeah? Why wouldn’t I call you Tony?”

“That—that’s not my name.”

Roman frowns. “What? No! You have Tony hair! You know, the—it’s like just how you have it right now!”

“My name is Kasey!”

“No, that doesn’t sound right.”

Evidently, Tony doesn’t care all that much. He winds back and throws a punch directly at Roman’s face, and Roman just barely manages to catch the blow in his forearm instead.

Or at least he thinks he does: Roman blinks and he’s slamming against the shelving unit behind him and his arm is throbbing like a motherf*cker. He feels like his lungs are going to explode from the force of the blow alone, his thoughts scatter a dropped glass and suddenly all Roman is seeing is Tony’s other arm coming at him again.

Roman’s hand wraps around a box of cereal and drags it in front of him for a shield. He just barely manages to hold back a scream when Tony’s fist punches right through the cardboard, through the cereal bag and out the other side spilling Cinnamon Toast Crunch onto the floor.

“What the f*ck,” Roman shouts.

And Roman’s brain very helpfully screams MOVE!

Roman throws his entire weight forward, shoving Tony away from himself and scrambling towards the end of the aisle.

“I’m sorry!” Roman calls over his shoulder. “I can call you Kasey if you want!”

Tony stalks towards him, unhurried, and the shadows peel away from him as he gets closer to the lights: it's not just the pants, he’s wearing full tactical gear. Padded chest protector, skin tight under armor that clings to the same arms that Roman ogled over for a full week before Tony-Kasey suddenly grinned at him with a brilliant mischief and asked if Roman wanted to get drinks sometime. He’s got those boots that could break spines with one stomp and he crushes Roman's glasses into a thousand fragments as he stalks forward.

There’s a gun— Roman realizes, mouth dry and terror clinging to the base of his spine— on his hip, like Kasey-Tony is some knock off police officer without a badge or registration or legal permission for possession.

“Kasey…?”

“Stop running, Roman,” Kasey-Tony says, with the same smile he’d had when he leaned in at the club and asked if they could go back to Roman’s that night.

“Nope!” Roman yelps. “Nope. That—that sounds like a bad idea.”

Kasey-Tony laughs. “I was hoping you would say that.”

Roman does not need anyone else’s advice to know that is bad. That right there is villain lines: Roman’s lived with Remus for most of his life and he knows exactly the creepy ass lines that villains say before they do villain things, and the fact that this is happening to him feels like some type of hallucination.

Like he breathed in death mold from the corpse under the city and now he’s experiencing an acid trip so strong he doesn’t notice his body being decomposed inside out. He’s still in those tunnels right now, he’s laying in the abandoned tracks dying and one day someone will find his bones and assume him and the other corpse were friends.

Kasey-Tony draws his gun and Roman dives around the aisle because what the f*ck else is he supposed to do.

The shelf in front of him blows up with bags of chips exploding out of their places, and several gunshots littering the space Roman was going to be in. He swears bracing himself when a bag of pretzels assaults him and he stumbles back from the aisle. His vans skid on waxy tiled floor and if Roman’s ears were ringing he swears he might be able to hear Kasey-Tony laughing like this is funny.

He’s lurching to the side as one of the shadows lunges out at him—a person? Where did another person come from?— as he avoids another shot. He just barely scrambles around a mobile hanging rack of fruit, before he’s shoving it into the oncoming stranger wearing the same COD cosplay but moving too fast for Roman to make out any defining characteristics.

He’s too slow for the other person that appears behind him, throwing a punch to his jaw right as he turns into it and knocking him nearly clean off his feet. His vision spaces, the stars erupting right on the back of his eyelids, the Rupture happening right in his brain. The pain doesn’t even have time to clock in because in the next second the new person is hauling him back and slamming him into the front counter.

The register blinks awake when Roman slams against the keyboard, dousing them both in a brilliant white light, and Roman claws at the fist crushing his throat. His lungs wheeze for air and Roman’s hand scrambles across the counter, knocking things to the ground violently. His fingers wrap around a mini portable fan and he slams it upwards into the person’s face once, twice, thrice until his grip loosens and they fall backward.

Roman rolls moving more out of blind panic than instinct but something stabs into the wooden countertop right where he’d been. He flings himself with desperate abandon back towards the aisles and vaults over the display for apples, his foot catching on the last few and sending him to the ground just in time for another bullet to tear through the air over him, blazing hot and horrifying. His bag slumps against his back and Roman’s eyes squeeze closed remembering the gruesome body and wondering if that’s what he’s going to look like in a few minutes.

Someone is yelling, someone else is laughing; Roman can see more shadows moving and spinning and warping as people move around the store. Roman could have sworn it was empty—no he knows it was empty when he stepped in—how did they get in here? Why were they here?

An apple just a few inches over his head bursts into pulp and juice and Roman tries not to scream.

His limbs feel locked up, too scared to move, too scared to stay. Painfully paralyzed by the understanding that he has no clue what is going on and that he should have just stayed in the farmhouse with his parents instead of trying his hand at having a f*cking life.

He needs to leave, he needs to get out, he needs—

There! The drink aisle with those stupid mirror walls on the side that leaves the optical illusion that there’s a billion more cartons of milk in an extra pocket dimension. It’s less than five feet away through open air with nothing to hide behind and nothing to block with. Apple juice drips down Roman’s forehead and Roman counts the infinities between the gunshots. His palm rolls over one of the apples and Roman is not thinking at all.

He throws the apple over the stand towards where Kasey-Tony might be, distract, distract, distract, please distract him and launches himself towards the mirror.

Another bullet rips through the space under his arm.

The world is blurry, too loud, thundering and silent all at once. The glass shatters in slow motion: Roman’s heart beats as the cracks spread, his lungs scream as the first pieces burst out of their place, his mouth is gaping in horror as gravity grabs hold of the fragments and tears each and every piece out of reach and crushes them into fine threads like snow falling off a roof, slow-slow-slow-slowwwwwww and then allatonce.

Roman’s watching it happen for an eternity and yet his hand slices through the air and he punches his entire fist into the rusted metal bars instead of the mirror. He’s standing in the middle of the aisle, exposed as if he was standing on center stage with the spotlight beaming down on him. His head is ringing and he’s half convinced that there was a bullet that slammed into him too, because he can’t—he can’t—

There’s three more people at the opposite end of the aisle crowding in, Kasey-Tony behind him, and the man that Roman hit with the fan is stumbling to his side as if there wasn’t blood dripping down his entire face.

He’s surrounded and they have guns and Roman thinks that shooting the mirror was not a lucky accident.

“What now?” Kasey-Tony asks, cheerful and kind and confident as if he’d just been indulging Roman’s tangent but never thought it would go anywhere.

Roman’s arms creep slowly up, raising as placating as he can. His mouth is dry, and any words he can think to say taste like ash and mold in the back of his throat. His limbs are pulsating, and adrenaline feels like co*ke and mentos trapped inside his bones. There’s a countdown clock somewhere in the back of his mind, whispering minutes that he has left, seconds that he has left, breaths, do you have your last words picked out?

Roman doesn’t know.

“We can talk about this,” Roman says. “Talk it out, right? I’m sorry I didn’t get your name right. I kinda guessed you hated me from the way that you ghosted me afterwards but if I did something to offend you, we can talk this out! You didn’t need to have your friends dress up as Helldivers and track me down—”

Kasey-Tony laughs again and Roman is starting to wonder if he was always a prick or if Roman caused a mental break in him somehow. “Oh my god. You still think this about our hook up.”

Roman’s going to scream. He’s going to scream and he’s going to cry and it's going to be really ugly, but before he can get that far something slams into him from behind and Roman hits the ground so hard he nearly bites through his tongue.

He thinks for a stupid moment that he just got tackled by Butterball; that he’s going to open his eyes and be laid out in the fields behind the farmhouse with Remus cackling over the newest trick he taught his dog, but when he scrambles out from the heavyweight on top of him the blue and pink lights show a human body: specifically one of Kasey-Tony’s friends, who is no longer moving.

Roman’s head snaps up just in time to see another body go flying into the shelving unit knocking the entire thing over. Gunfire explodes through the tiny shop, ear splitting and atom splitting and defending. Lights flash and flicker and scream all around him and Roman can barely make out someone else tearing through the people that Kasey-Tony brought with him, barely slowing enough to appear like a human rather than f*cking Mothman.

If Roman were smart, if Roman were clever, if Roman were every bit the protagonist in every book and play he’d read, Roman would have clawed his way down the aisle now that Kasey-Tony is distracted, elbow up into his face the same way he was told not to do in his highschool flag football unit maybe for good measure; he would have vaulted the tipped over stand of impulse buys and dove head first into the clear reflections in the large glass windows and escaped.

But instead every one of his limbs locks into place, cemented with some horrible combination of terror and relief as the drink aisle spotlights frame the fight in front of him. He’s watching a stage play from the front row, and the actors skipped from using props to using real weapons; he’s the audience, the bystander, the accomplice— he didn’t set those fires, but he’s witnessing something worse right in front of him and he’s doing nothing about it.

Then suddenly. It’s silent again.

There’s half a dozen bodies on the floor and the tiny shop is a mess of ruined inventory. There’s a man in the middle of it all, with his back to Roman, holding a knife in one hand and a gun in the other.

Part of his lizard brain is screaming that if he doesn’t make a noise, doesn’t twitch, doesn’t breathe the man will not see him and continue his rampage somewhere else.

But, evidently, that’s not remotely true.

The man, the same one from the fire, the real arsonist, stands up from the mass of bodies he just created, uncaring of the blood splattered across his cheek or the slice in his arm that’s bleeding sluggishly down to his palm. He’s wearing a medical coat, like a doctor that just got off a shift of sawing human limbs off, splashes of blood paint his teal scrubs in polarizing colors. One of the body groans and the owner shifts weakly, but the man only glowers at Roman instead, as if the rest of the world had disappeared into dystopia and they were the only two survivors in a story where there can only be one hero.

"I am far past having any sort of patience," he says, clearly, pausing between his breaths to enunciate with all the pure hatred he can muster. "So I am only going to ask this once: what exactly did you do to me?!"

"Huh?" Roman says. But even as the word trips out of his lips, Roman knows what he’s talking about. The man takes another step forward, the barrel of his gun shaking despite his composure, but Roman can’t even pretend to be looking at it anymore.

The lights from the drink selection washes them in neon blue and pink, and on a normal night the lights would entice a bypasser to come closer, look inside, see what drinks are sold here. Roman sees each of the newly deformed bottles of fruit smoothies and juices clearly defined in the pellucid glass windows to their left like two exactly the same armies at attention on either side of them, unbroken and undisturbed by the presence of either of them in the middle.

"Why,” the man demands, “do I not have a reflection anymore?!"

Chapter 6: Trespasser, Trust, Team Up

Chapter Text

Logan catches his breath, and catches it again, and catches it a third time when the first two times result in a failure that causes his ribs to pulsate.

Standing in the…new dimension is a strange experience. Logan nearly sways on his feet from the force of the Dejavu that sweeps through him, and his first step forward is followed by two backwards and he nearly falls right back through the…glass door of the…mini fridge he used… to travel between dimensions.

Because he is in a new dimension. Literal uncharted territory. Literal liminal space. Literal tertium quid.

His head is pounding again and the phantom scents of smoke and ash are swirling through the stagnant air. It’s both dark and not, silent and filled with a cacophony of noises, completely alien and familiar in the most soul wrenching way. A whirlwind of emotions floods through him and Logan doesn’t know why he suddenly started crying, but he’s frantically trying to rub his eyes anyway.

He doesn’t belong here. He knows that. He doesn’t belong here and he has to go back where he came. If he doesn’t he’ll be trapped here, if he doesn’t they will find him, if he doesn’t they’ll tear him away from his family and his friends and he will never see the sun again, don’t you want to see the sun again? Do you even remember what it looks like now?

Someone is speaking to him, a soft voice layered with exhaustion, but Logan doesn’t see anyone amidst the strange unreality around him. By the time he realizes he should have been listening, by the time it occurs to him that he is under some type of mental distortion, the voice is barely whispering, and certainly is lost under the rumble of a dozen other indistinguishable noises.

“Who’s there?” Logan calls. “Identify yourself!”

“....safe….” The voice says. “....Keep them….”

“Who?” Logan says.

But there’s no answer at all.

Logan is alone. He pants out, releasing his guard, and allowing himself to rub away the needless tears obscuring his vision. He doesn’t have time for this. He doesn’t have time to be emotionally compromised; these emotions surging through him cannot possibly be anyone else’s, but he cannot imagine they’re his either. Logan has not trained himself to be a defeatist; he is stubborn and unyielding and spiteful.

The metaphorical tidal wave of emotions washes through him, tearing at the unsteady bearings he’s anchored himself with. The hopelessness claws through him, the exhaustion, the why am I still fighting? And Logan bites down on his tongue and digs in his nails and grounds himself in the moment: the burning pain in his calf from his stitching, the claw marks on his thigh, the shifting of his ribs, the pinch in his ankle, the pounding in his head.

Why does it feel as though he is drowning?

Logan has been drowned before—a car crash that couldn’t be avoided on a bridge that sent him into the river—and he does not appreciate the reminder. The person who had dragged themselves out of the mud and water was not the same one who’d gone into it and Logan had swore to himself he wouldn’t go back, wouldn’t regret it, wouldn’t let the ties he’d had before be bindings for his actions in the future.

The chilled air feels like the icy water on his skin, with the consistency of a liquid when he tries to breathe in. The darkness is similar enough to being completely under water in the middle of a winter night, with no sign of which way was up, which way was the right way, which way he should go to escape the excruciating pressure on his weak ribs.

He stumbles forward, trying to regain his composure and fend the tendrils of memories. He half expects when he looks down at the clear onyx floor, there will be a younger version of himself staring back, the version that had gripped the steering wheel and gritted his teeth and hadn’t said goodbye or I love you or I’m sorry.

But there’s nothing there. Simply darkness, simply ripples of nothingness, simply a yawning abyss that could hold any number of horrible monstrosities that Anamorphosis was working on. Logan is standing, impossibly, unimaginably, nonsensically, in the space between spaces.

Logan breathes.

Logan is not entirely a man of science, but he’s not not one at the same time. He can talk his way through a discussion of rocket science and he knows what chemicals should not be mixed together unless he needs an immediate application of mustard gas. He enjoys reading up on the latest news about what NASA is up to and supports the environment enough to get frustrated over global warming. But he’s standing in an interstice, breathing in air that should not exist because the entire area where he currently exists should not exist.

Mathematically, it should not be possible: Logan learned how to measure area and perimeter and estimate how much of something could fit in an offending space in elementary school long before he’d ever even thought of the applications of such knowledge or used them as frequently as he did in his line of work. There was no room for the gaping expanse that Logan was staring at and no metaphysical explanation for how Logan managed to get himself there.

This—Logan realizes with a sickly mounting horror that quickly and efficiently silences every other emotion—is not something that he wants to have to write in a report.

He fell through the door to the mini fridge in a hospital after noticing that his reflection had ceased to appear. It’s ridiculous, it’s insane, it sounds like a lie and not even a half decent one; how could Logan expect that Janus would take him seriously about this when he can’t even take it seriously? Janus would have him examined for a mental break, and his credibility as an agent will be tarnished, if not completely demolished. He’s received praise for his laconic reports, but just the attempt to theorize how an intermediary space such as this has been concealed for so long will have him going through four pages.

Around him resides a strange collection of materials: floating floor tiles, windows, metal frames to IV holders and wheelchairs, TV screens, bottles, trays, bedpans, and empty artwork frames. The colors are muted, faded, and the edges on each item appear smeared or blurry. Logan mulls over a metaphor that might aptly describe how physical objects appear as specters of themselves without a future TSS genius quipping that Logan only thought that because he did not have his glasses on.

He is alone with these items, and Logan hesitates for another moment, listening to the susurration coming from each object. Some present a louder noise than others: one of the windows carries the same sharp voice he remembers from the stairwell and the conversation continues to be as bitter and aggravated as Logan had heard it. A white noise machine hums through a plastic cup, and a symphony of snores echoes from mirrors and clock faces and even a large poster. There’s a calm conversation going on through the screen of a TV and when Logan inches forward, cautious but curious, he sees the same nurse aid in the maroon scrubs talking to a bedridden woman in a hospital room as clearly as though he were in the room.

The woman in the bed jerks at the sight of him there, gasping and pointing and the nurse aid whips around just as Logan reels backwards, and out of frame.

Unfortunately right behind him is an IV pole that Logan hisses out a curse when his elbow goes right through it and knocks into the side of the bed . His ulnar nerve slams against his humerus and the burning sensation races through his arm in the most unhelpful way. The octogenarian startles awake, and Logan yanks himself back into the new dimension before they are aware of what exactly woke them.

It was not teleportation. Anamorphosis did not provide its agents with teleportation.

Logan rubs his elbow carefully considering the objects around him. Each item was a doorway, an entrance to any number of places without having to deal with any type of security, without leaving behind any sort of clue. He was standing in an inconceivable corridor, able to listen in to any private conversation he chose, watch any interaction he stumbled upon.

It wasn’t all that different from having access to a hidden passage. It was just…larger. Vastly, unfathomably larger. And known only to a select few, most of whom would see Logan dead before they’d question where he achieved his power from.

The pain trails out of his arm and he flexes his fingers and rotates his wrist.

This was how Roman Regal was able to evacuate him from the burning apartments so quickly. Logan had only caught a glimpse of this dimension, he recalls, before he’d been thrust under…. Under the floor. It had been liquid, it had been cold, it had been in his lungs and drowning him and he’d clung to Roman in that moment, desperate, and Roman had been unable to fall through.

And now circ*mstances have changed. Logan was able to stand, and even when his weight shifts around or he takes gratuitous steps wary of both his ankle and calf, the floor does not so much as ripple under him, sturdy as stone, dark as obsidian. If he hadn’t known the contrary, he could have assumed he was standing on an untapped, undiscovered plain of black agate.

In a way, this made some things simpler: it was not instantaneous and it was not just anywhere that Anamorphosis decided to infiltrate and not anything or anyone could arbitrarily meander though. TSS could develop countermeasures against this power far easier than they could against an immediate teleportation to any place. Fighting against their agents could be predicted and attacks could be blocked and dodged by being aware of reflective surfaces. And—Logan hesitates here, despite himself—if TSS could figure out how to endow their own agents with this power, purposely, the way that Anamorphosis has, then the risk factor of surveillance or detainment on possible threats could be reduced to a near negligible number.

A pair of dog tags hover in the air to his left, shining with what looks like the inside of an indiscriminate gas station. Logan frowns at it as the inside shifts—the owner of them must be wearing them around their neck as they shop. But why would those appear here particularly? As far as Logan could tell, everything that was in his immediate vicinity was inside the hospital or belonging to it in some way.

Was there not a proximity organization? Was it not based on the locations of items in the other dimensions?

How did Anamorphosis reliably move around here if the arrangement of items in relation to their surroundings changed?

Logan keeps his head on a swivel, as he walks through the labyrinth of items. He can almost pinpoint exactly where the borders of the hospital lie: the mounds of medical things trail off and suddenly there are cars and litter and metal infrastructures. The wide windows that Cyra City seemed to love almost shape store fronts, if Logan tilts his head at the right angle he can mentally map out what building should be there, and if he wanders closer to the items he can see the civilians passing by the front enjoying the nightlife as though there were not a threat of another arsonist’s attack lingering in the air or perhaps in spite of it.

There’s a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye, and Logan reacts on instinct.

He crouches next to the car, watching over the hood, as a stranger strolls nonchalantly through the clearing in the distance. Or perhaps that is not quite accurate; Logan observes them stumble over their own feet, and then throw their head back to stare at the nonexistent ceiling and groan so loudly that Logan can hear it from fifty meters away.

Facial features are a hopeless endeavor, as are any identifying marks. Logan has to squint to make out the subtle differences between them and the surroundings: for some reason they have the same wispy appearance of the items around them that create portals, as though they covered themselves in reflective surfaces for some reason. Perhaps Anamorphosis is trying something new, running an experiment where they couldn’t be interrupted?

They sway for another moment, carrying the body language that displays an exhaustion that Logan knows all too well—someone who is desperately wishing for a bed to the point where they cannot keep a guard up anymore. If Logan can find a way to creep closer, he has no doubt that he can get the drop on them, and then he’d be able to get actual answers out of them.

Logan’s weight shifts to his toes, blocking out the immediate pain signals his ankle sends along his nerves, already gaging the distance to the next car to dodge behind. The human eye is attracted to movement so he will have to time it right and be fast, which thankfully Logan is proficient at, even injured.

He’s about to propel himself forward when there’s a startling loud gunshot slicing through air, sharp and lethal and Logan jolts back under cover the same way he’s done in training more times than he can reasonably attempt to count. The car hub next to him rings with a woman’s drunken laughter and Logan’s eyes dart through the mess to find what semi-automatic pistol fired that shot.

“Ah, f*ck that noise,” the Anamorphosis agent says, and then bafflingly they spin on their heel and bolt in the opposite direction, disappearing into the mazework before Logan can even stand up. He breathes out a harsh hiss as he squints after the blur. Even if he ran after them now he likely would not catch them by surprise.

So his other options would be to move towards the gunfire or to go back to the world he knows and attempt to figure out how to contact a guaranteed ally in TSS. Logan deliberates between the two plans quickly, before acknowledging the latter is effectively moot. He needs information about Anamorphosis’s movements and their current goals and to get to Roman Regal before them; if he cannot get that information would it matter if he could talk to someone he could trust? At best, it would be admitting this mission was a failure and Anamorphosis had managed to kill his team and keep their plans secret yet again.

Logan’s lungs constrict, pressing against his sore aching ribs. Part of him almost wants to quit: the same part that sat in the subway tunnels next to the corpse of the last of his team after they’d breathed their last and cried, the same part that watched the vials of Ghost shatter on the apartment floor while he was pinned down, the same part that folded immediately to the mental distortion that came with entering this dimension. A part of him wanted to turn his back on everything that had happened these past two weeks and walk away.

But the more prominent part of Logan was much more angry at having had to go through these past two weeks in the first place. As such, he refused to leave the mission uncompleted, he refused to even admit to having failed it. He was going to use the unexpected turn of fate and he was going to use it to destroy every single branch of Anamorphosis he could find.

So he shoves himself away from the car hub and towards the gunfire and where likely Anamorphosis carrying out one of their plans. After all, who else is able to access this world?

***

Roman Regal looks, in Logan’s kindest terms, to be having the worst day of his life.

There is a warm, fond feeling in Logan’s chest at the sight of it: a softened kinship for the fact that he appears to be just as harried and out of his depths as Logan has been. Logan is not the type to enjoy another man’s misery, but he allows this for himself just this once. After all, Logan’s never joined up with a terrorist cell whose goal has been world domination without concern for the toll of lives it would take; if Logan’s past two weeks had to be this bad, then it's only fair that the ex-terrorist also appears to be miserable.

There’s a bruise forming on the underside of his jaw, and several on his arms that don’t appear to be from an identifiable weapon or with logical intent: small pinpricks of broken blood vessels all over his arms as though he’d been caught in a hail storm in the few hours they had been separated. His mascara is running, smudged and smeared tastelessly, and his flannel is presenting an indeterminate number of stains. He stares up at Logan with bright wide eyes, and his jaw agape, and Logan wonders if hadn’t heard Logan speak at all.

“Oh f*ckkkkkkkkkk,” Roman says. “Oh that’s bad. That’s… uh… not supposed to happen.”

“I’ve gathered,” Logan says wryly. “Start by informing me how it happened.”

Roman blows a breath out of his mouth, shaking his head in disbelief and Logan has a sinking suspicion long before Roman actually figures out what words he is trying to say.

“ How,” he says, “would I know that?”

Logan’s grip tightens on his new gun—a competition glock that is not standard issue for Anamorphosis, meaning that the man he took it from likely paid out of pocket for the upgraded reliability and accuracy.

“You had a reflection before. I know you did,” Roman continues. “And when we were in the Mirror Realm you couldn’t interact with anything—you used me as a buoy! B-but, you must have—can you move through the Mirror Realm freely?”

“The what?” Logan asks.

Roman waves his hands towards the glass windows to their left, where the reflections of the drinks hold steady. The creeping trepidation in the back of Logan’s head needles through his headache consistently.

“Mirror Realm.”

“Is that what Anamorphosis calls it?”

“Anthropomorphic what now?”

Logan stares at him, searching through his features for the upward flick of his lips, the crinkle by his eyes, the narrowing of his brow—for all the signs that he is joking, or that he somehow found the moment that Logan is pointing a gun at his chest to be a perfect time to joke. He must know that Logan is TSS and that any logical TSS agent would kill him, whether he saved their life or not. He must know that Logan would pull the trigger.

But Roman Regal stares back at him with nothing but distress and distrust and fear so clear on his face that Logan nearly recoils. His stolen gun feels too dangerous, awkward and wrong in his hands, and he wonders if this is a tactic . If Anamorphosis could train their agents to be sleeper agents willing to die for their cause then they wouldn’t have any trouble training them to act like this.

Because the only other option… the only other scenario would be that…

“You’re a non combatant. ”

Roman blinks. “Uh, yeah? I think. What’s a non combatant? Is it code for someone you should not kill? Because not dying sounds really sweet right now. Amazing, actually. Incredible. I love not dying and I love not being killed even more! Pleasedon’tkillme.”

Logan is in Hell.

Logan finally did something awful enough that he’s in Hell for all eternity. He never actually made it out of the underground labs, he died right there with half of his team, and his punishment for trying to save the world is now being trapped in this sisyphean nightmare scenario where everything he tries to accomplish is immediately undermined by characteristics out of his control.

Non combatant.

“Are… you okay?” Roman Regal, a barely functional civilian , asks, and Logan thinks that he can afford to lose one bullet if it means fourteen seconds of satisfaction in this acherontic existence by putting one in this farcical man’s head.

His team of specially trained, talented, and honest people were led into a kill box like lambs to a slaughter; TSS has a mole somewhere, somehow that makes reporting, sharing, or trusting information akin to shooting oneself in the foot; Logan lost the package of the vials that contained Ghost, their one lead on how exactly Anamorphosis is circumnavigating airtight security personal and video; and now Logan’s last bit of hope is figuratively smoking like kindling on a pyre and asking him if he’s alright.

As such, Logan does not deign to give Roman a verbal response.

He forcefully reapplies the safety on his new gun and forces himself to take a breath. There is a cut on his arm that burns when he lowers his arm but he ignores it as he takes stock of the rest of himself and the situation. He does not have a proper holster for it, but the man groaning at his feet does and Logan makes short work of liberating it.

“Uh…A-are they…?” Roman asks.

“Dead?” Logan infers. “No. The last thing this city needs to wake up to is news of a serial killer in addition to a serial arsonist.”

Logan can feel a headache brewing at just the idea of it: undoubtedly killing some of these agents would have solved many of his problems, but Logan does unfortunately harbor a sentiment for life. Even absolute cretins such as those who’ve aligned themselves with Anamorphosis deserve to have their crimes judged by a jury and their punishments determined to fit the extent of their crimes.

Logan does not afford any time to deliberating what could possibly push someone to choose the dissolution of society — that is the sole privilege of people like Janus and his guileful smiles. What he does know is that death is a punishment that can only be administered once and absolutely; when he holds a gun in his hand, he is the weapon of TSS, but senseless killing is not the goal. The line between a serial killer and an agent is a thin one. Logan doesn’t enjoy the mental games that come with justifying murder even though the thought crosses his mind often.

Even if he could force away the guilt and learn to live with the betrayal of his own morals, he wouldn’t be able to wave away the bodies left in his wake. The loss of his TSS badge was truly one of the worst inconveniences he’d faced these past few days. Of course, Logan hadn’t needed to utilize the authority of his position back when he had it, but now that he’d been forced to leave it behind, Logan could think of a hundred plans that could improve his situation with it.

He checks the magazine for the pistol on one of the men, then adds it to the collection in his stolen coat’s pocket. Flipping over the man takes slightly more time but he finds the standard issued pocket knife and takes that too.

His watch blinks the time at him and Logan hisses a breath between his lips. Seven more bodies and Logan estimates five more minutes until Anamorphosis will expect a check in, and likely less until the police arrive even if the first call hadn’t come in until the gunfire had stopped. Logan needs to be at least a block away by then.

“Come help me.”

“I'm good,” Roman says, taking a step back. “Real good actually. I should leave this to you, the obvious professional — ”

“I do not have time for your antics,” Logan says. “Grab that man, go through his pockets and remove any weapons, toss them in your bag and move to the next one.”

Roman waffles.

“Now!”

Roman moves.

Logan lets out a breath dangerously close to a sigh that itches his ribs painfully. The constant bending over and standing and fighting is agitating them, Logan knows, but he doesn’t have the time to deal with them. He checks through the pockets of the nearest agent, counting bullets in the magazines before taking the full ones and sliding them into the pockets of his stolen belt until he’s out of space. He debates filling the doctor’s coat pockets too, but the added weight near his knees will distract him at best, trip him up at worse.

“Uhm,” Roman says. “What…what should I do with this?”

He’s holding a gun as far away from his person as he can get it, as though it were a repulsive clothing article that he was horrified to have to touch with his bare skin. Logan acknowledges the part of him that wants to strangle him, and promptly ignores it for the sake of his own sanity.

“Put it in your bag.”

“I don’t want a gun in my bag!” Roman says. “What if it goes off!?”

Logan grinds his teeth together. “Give me your bag then.”

“No! It’s mine! I bought it!”

Logan glares at him, but Roman’s fingers hook around the shoulder straps of the glitzy bag possessively, and his lip curls into a defensive pout. He is a soldier ready to die on the hill of a tacky bag he likely bought at a department store for a bargained price.

Logan’s head throbs so hard he can nearly feel a vein popping. “How are you not dead already?”

He is not expecting an answer, because it’s very obvious that the question is not rhetorical but Roman’s body language shifts into an offensive stance. His expression shifts through several emotions, disgustingly unguarded, as if he’d never heard of a poker face before, much less invested time in learning to keep one.

“Because I’m cute and not an asshole and don’t set apartments on fire!” He cries. “I’m not taking insults from an arsonist! I don’t care how you stole my mirror walking ability! ”

“I’m not an arsonist. We can discuss the fine details of how you gave me this ability later,” Logan says, and dives into searching the pockets of the man he had mentally allotted to Roman. He tears the magazine out of another glock and places the weapon on the nearby shelf.

Roman is not satisfied by that answer. Logan watches him out of the corner of his eyes as he tenses with his whole body, eyes squeezing shut and murmuring several curses back to back to back before he places the gun on the shelf. At this angle it’s incredibly apparent that he doesn't have a reflection and made no move to pretend he did: not even his shadow appears in the glass refraction, as though he did not exist at all.

“How has no one ever noticed anything off about you?” Logan asks before he can stop himself. It’s so obvious, glaring, and unnerving and unsettling. A voice Logan cannot hear is screaming for him to run and hide, and if it’s even half as potent as it is for non combatants, Logan cannot imagine how Roman managed to stay off of TSS’s radar for so long.

Roman glances at him and then behind himself to the glass and purses his lips in understanding.

“Alright, James Bond,” Roman says. “How often do you go looking for other people’s reflections?”

“Constantly,” Logan says, frowning. “Situational awareness saves more lives when it is a habit rather than a skill. Also my name is Logan. If you must refer to me, use that.”

Roman stares at him for another moment. “I… I don’t know how to talk to you.”

“You don’t need to talk to me,” Logan says. “You just need to listen and follow my directions.”

“I don’t even know who you are!”

Which is as illogical a statement as the rest of the things he’s said. It’s as though some entity beyond Logan’s comprehension shoved every exemption to the rules of common sense into the body of a college student and then released him into the world. Logan’s teeth were grinding together to stave off the aneurysm he was certain was going to be in his future, right along with a shallow grave.

“I am Logan Ackroyd,” He grits out. “I am a member of the Threat Surveillance and Strategies covert operations teams.”

“Am I supposed to know what that is?!”

“The Good Guys!”

That seems to surprise him even more, for some ridiculous reason. As though despite saving Logan’s life from the fire, he’d decided that Logan was a morally repugnant person who delighted in human suffering and spent his hours thinking of new ways to inflict pain on those around him. Honestly, Logan can’t help but think that if that was the attitude that Roman had, he’d get along considerably with Virgil and possibly even Janus.

“We’re going,” Logan says. “Now.”

“I am— I am not going anywhere with you, man! My life was perfectly f*cking normal before I saved you from that fire! I was normal! I—I’m not getting sucked into this smoke and mirror, spy versus spy movie! I’m meant for romantic comedies or Hallmark Christmas movies exclusively, and I won’t be taking any other parts at this time!”

“Ignoring the fact that you don’t even show up on a video,” Logan snarls, “You were already a target of Anamorphosis prior to our unfortunate meeting.”

“W-what?”

“Discussion, later .”

“Absolutely not,” Roman squeaks. “No! We talk about that right now! Why am I a target ?! That sounds bad!”

“I’m certain you are smart enough to figure it out,” Logan says, throwing down the last unconscious Anamorphosis agent harder than he means to. He stands up and Roman is already on guard, the agitation leaking out of him immediately when he realizes that Logan’s gait covers half the space between them in half a second.

“Whoa! Okay stop! Stop!” Roman blurts out, palms out and taking measured steps back from Logan as though he thinks he’d make it to the door if he had a head start. Logan is willing to agree with that, if only because Logan’s ribs haven’t stopped screaming since that one Anamorphosis agent jammed their elbow under his guard. If Logan were in top shape, he’d already have Roman on the ground, in handcuffs. “Twenty questions! Okay? We play a quick game of twenty questions and get to know each other before I go anywhere with you!”

“I am not—”

“Four!” Roman amends. “Four questions! That’s all I want!”

Logan narrows his eyes. “Two.”

“Three.”

“Two.”

Roman wavers, hissing through his teeth as he debates the offer. Logan can imagine that he has a surplus of information that he would like to know about Logan, where he came from, what the actual situation is, but he is also a liability. If for whatever reason Anamorphosis does get their hands on him—which would require Logan being dead already or close to it—Logan would rather he not have any information worth torturing him about.

“Deal,” Roman says finally. Then immediately, “Have you ever killed anyone?”

“Yes.”

Roman stutters, frozen as though he hadn’t expected such an easy and obvious admission and now didn’t know what to do with the answer. Logan feels a blood vessel in his head throbbing; why ask the question if he didn’t expect to receive an honest answer?

“Okay,” Roman says. “Alright, okay. You’ve killed people. Alright.”

“Next question.”

“I swear in the name of Lin-Manuel Miranda,” Roman says, “You need to stop. Give me time to think!”

“Time is a luxury,” Logan informs him. “You and I do not have it. Think faster.”

“What’s your favorite color?”

“What?”

“What?!” Roman demands, childishly indigent.

Logan narrows his eyes. “Navy.”

“What? There’s no way you actually like navy blue,” Roman says. “No one likes navy blue!”

“Get into the glass before I throw you in it.”

There’s a stalemate, for a long moment. Logan believes that Roman might honestly make him throw him, as if the abundance of stalling tactics weren’t enough to lead him to the assumption that Roman was not willing to go willingly with him. Another physical altercation would be frustrating, but Logan does not have another choice, as demonstrated by the police sirens whirling into existence just a few blocks away.

Roman frowns, huffing, and reaches over to grab a bottled smoothie drink from the stand before waving to Logan sarcastically and tipping into where his reflection should be.

It’s discerning to watch: Roman’s entire body goes through the glass without a sound, without a warning, without an exit. He’s there one moment and then gone and if Logan had blinked he would have missed it entirely. The moonlight and streetlights catch on the glass pane as Logan approaches it and very faintly he spies the echo mirage of the other man, in the other dimension. He looked like a discoloration on the glass, a trick of the light at the wrong angle, a supernatural entity haunting the realm of the living. Roman gives him a co*cky grin and his transparent form opens his arms as if to ask what now, secret agent?

The sound of sirens crescendos and Logan follows through the glass just as the first police car arrives on the scene.

This time the other dimension is startlingly quiet: even though he braced himself, there’s no torrent of frenzied emotions, and no voices calling out to him. It's simply the strange otherworldly buzzing and unnatural cold chill, and Logan wonders privately if something had broken.

Roman, meanwhile, backs up several more steps, scanning him up and down. At the short distance, Logan can make out the wary glint in his brown eyes, as though he didn’t quite believe Logan had received this power and now was being shown irrefutable evidence.

“This is so f*cked,” he reiterates. “No one else should have this power.”

Despite himself, the words drag a curiosity out of Logan. His head tilts. “Why do you believe that?”

“Oh I don’t know, maybe because this is a power I was born with and never seen anyone else have?” Roman says. “Just a thought. But, like, what do I know!”

“There’s a lilt to your tone that suggests this is something you’ve thought about a lot.”

“Sarcasm,” Roman says. “They ever teach you that, Logan Superspy?”

“Ackroyd,” Logan corrects, and moves to start walking. He doesn’t choose a direction as much as is guided by the maze of items around them, and Roman lingers after him, hovering and watching each of his steps as though he expects the floor to give out at any moment. “You were born with this ability?”

“Where else would I have gotten it?”

“Anamorphosis.”

“And that is…?”

Logan tries not to be as irritated as he is, he really does. “In the starkest of terms, if TSS is the Good Guys, Anamorphosis is the Bad Guys. A self funded terrorist colony with branches around the world that’s mission has been to take over the world. TSS has been fending them off for decades, but within the last twenty years something has shifted in their approaches that made them more difficult to locate and disrupt. And in the last two years, suddenly their agents are able to infiltrate anywhere and have stopped appearing on security cameras.”

“That’s….” Roman trails off painfully. “I’m going to be sick.”

“Don’t.”

“You said I was a target,” Roman says. “You said they were targeting me.”

Logan narrows his gaze to the other man. “We need to move.”

“That means…they...they’ve been watching me,” Roman says, sounding absolutely horrified by the revelation. Logan wishes he had the patience to handle this with more tact, but the truth is that the longer he stalls on this, the more likely Anamorphosis is to send another team to track them down.

Every second they spend here catering to the dramatic distress of the man in front of them is more time for Anamorphosis to be planning their next step or setting their next trap. Logan has been dodging in and out of their clutches for the past week and he’s grown extremely tired of it. Now with the additional need of taking care of an apparent civilian who’s just found themselves a target of the same group but with none of Logan’s training or preparation, each second will undoubtedly cost them blood in the future.

“Yes,” Logan relents. “I imagine they have for a while. Move.”

“How?” Roman says, hopelessly, even as Logan takes his arm and physically drags him away from the small grocery. “ Why ? I’m just— I’m—”

“Able to walk through walls?” Logan finishes. “Or perhaps you’re thinking of the part where you don’t show up on cameras. If you burn your fingerprints you would be the greatest resource for breaking and entering—”

“A physics major!” he cries, digging his heels into the floor. “And a law abiding citizen!”

Despite himself, Logan pauses to glance back at the other man. The combination of the drink aisle lights and the moonlight create a particularly inspired scene: Roman truly appears aggrieved by the implications of other applications for his innate ability, as though he’d never considered using it in an untoward way. His free hand is threaded through his hair, tugging on the ends and breaking it from the styled mold Logan vaguely remembers he’d had back when they first met; his clothes are rumpled and there are barely noticeable singes through the pattern on his flannel; his frame is drooping from the sudden day of being pursued unexpectedly.

“I’m not some criminal!” Roman says. “I-I’m just normal! I grew up on a farm! I go to college! I don’t even have a speeding ticket!”

“You know how to drive?” Logan asks, surprised. “With your ability, I would assume it would be redundant—”

Roman gives him a withering glare that Logan interprets as him having brought up a point that the other wasn’t enthused about.

“The point, pointedexter,” Roman snarls out, “Is that for my whole entire life I’ve been normal! I’ve done everything like a normal person who doesn’t have awesome amazing powers does things! I’ve never broken into anywhere, never stolen anything, I’ve never even spied on anyone! I never told anyone about these powers and I did everything to keep people from finding out! If I had known that none of that would have even mattered in the end, then I wouldn’t have— I would have….I would have….”

He stops himself suddenly and Logan witnesses several microexpressions flicker across his features before he reaches a hand up and pinches the bridge of his nose. He breathes out a chant of do-re-me-fa-so-la-ti in what Logan realizes is a peculiar attempt to calm himself down.

When he opens his eyes again, he appears to have warded off the worst of his breakdown.

“Fine. Fine . It doesn’t matter anyway,” he says. “Just….How did they even find me?!”

“I assume that someone from their organization saw you by chance,” Logan says. “And reported to their superior. Anamorphosis is very efficient in their communication and even TSS isn’t sure how many people are part of their organization. Likely they observed you for a few days, determined that the first report wasn’t a mistake, then they broke into your apartment and found traces of your DNA to test to insure your ability is the ability they are looking for and then once they observed the makeup of your DNA—”

The rest of Logan’s comment was cut off by a high pitched noise that could have been mistaken for laughter. Roman eyes shift back to the grocery store windows and he covers his mouth like he’s going to be physically sick.

“Nope! Don’t worry, teach! There was no breaking and entering!”

“Pardon?”

“I invited them in!” Roman says, grandly. “I gave them all the samples they could have wanted.”

“ What ?”

“I should have been a priest ,” he says, covering his face. “I should have been a monk. No! A Nun ! A nun surrounded by women and absolutely no temptations of the flesh because I devoted my entire being to…whatever it is that Catholics believe in. Is it guilt? Do they believe in guilt? sh*t, Remus will have a field day with this. I’m never going to live this down.”

Logan’s mind is spinning as Roman runs through the pointless dramatic tirade filled with meaningless babble. He’s content to let Roman get it out of his system as long as he resolves to continue walking away from the grocery so they can remove themselves from the scene before any one of the numerous groups after both of them catches up, but the sound of the name gives Logan another pause.

“Remus? Who is Remus?”

“My…” Roman stops as if just now remembering something and his pallor turns a deathly pale. “Oh f*ck . You said they have my DNA? sh*t. They definitely would have seen the markers of me having a twin. If they can’t find me anymore, they might just go for Remus.”

Chapter 7: Gadabout, Gunman, Ghost

Chapter Text

The Gas Station had been Remus’s idea. Partially a joke, partially wanting to finish their checklist of things so Roman would stop being so naggy about it: they had stopped to refuel their father’s old pickup truck and switch drivers in The Middle Of Nowhere(™) and Remus was filled with a maniac energy that had his hands trembling with the urge to do something. Roman was checking to see that none of his college-bound stuff had tumbled off behind them during the ride (as if Remus would have let him not know about that utterly hilarious situation) and Remus had gone inside to pay for gas. He’d picked up two bottles of Mountain Dew for them, tripped over his boot laces, and landed face first into the grimey, checkered red and attempted-to-be-white-but-were-actually-yellow tiles.

His first thought was that the next chapter of his comic should have a scene with a gas station in it and a single frame of blood splatter across these exact tiles.

His second thought was oh f*ck sh*t bloody puppy skulls— because he'd slammed straight into the Mirror Realm, stumbled another step, and then fell back through another floating tile and slammed into the Icee machine in the exact other part of the store.

The attendant hadn’t even looked up from their phone. “Three dollars fifty seven cents for a large.”

Walking back out to Roman with three Icees, two Mountain Dews, a snickers bar, the gas tab, and a bloody nose had never been so exciting. Roman had been up in arms about the whole thing, panicking in that paranoid way of his that their parents had force fed them both since they were four years old and realized that not having a reflection was not a normal thing. But he warmed up to it slowly, spending the rest of the drive discussing pros and cons outloud with himself like the most boring, most pointless monologue ever to grace the theater.

Remus just had to let him figure it out himself, nodding along at certain points, add appropriate swear words in when Roman trailed off, and boom! The Gas Station was their secret rendezvous spot.

Remus wonders often if Roman even knew how easy it is to get him to do certain things. Roman liked to pretend to be a model student, a perfect son, an upstanding citizen, but underneath it all, in a way that was painfully obvious to Remus, there was a brewing hurricane.

It had only taken one conversation with him about his dreams of being an actor to get him to look into a college in the city. It had made him far happier to be out of the country farmhouse and away from the chickens, than dodging community theater picture days with a sudden head cold ever could have. Their biweekly phone calls were littered with Roman’s laughter, sprinkled with the passive comments about the new people he met or the new thing he learned in class or the something weird that happened in the city.

He’d rather get run over by a bus than admit to anyone that he cares. Roman’s stupid ass doe eyes are the actual f*cking worst. Remus cannot stand seeing him miserably moping around the house, staring out the windows like a Victorian lady who just lost her child to smallpox, breaking into that not-quite-tears after every conversation. Remus would do unspeakable things to make sure Roman never made that stupid heartbroken sighing noise again.

Horrible, unspeakable things like leaving his dog behind at their parent’s house so he could move out to an animal-free apartment close to the city so that Roman wouldn’t be eight hours away and alone. Horrible, unspeakable things like fencing phone calls from their parents every other day, chatting with Mom for an hour because she panicked the moment Roman didn’t pick up the phone when she called him regardless of the fact that he was in class. Horrible, unspeakable things like waiting at a Gas Station for four hours loitering like the world’s stupidest robber casing a target waiting for Roman’s stupid ass to finally show up, damnit Roman how long does it take to pick up your stupid bag from a Subway locker?

Because he’d been okay with the anonymity of an internet connection, but Roman had been cursed with dreams of being known.

Roman said he craved the stage and being popular and showing off his skills. He said he wanted to see his name in the glittering lights and to move people to tears with the passion in his voice. He said that it would be enough to have his name printed on a thesis paper or called out at a graduation.

Remus wonders if Roman recognizes his own face as the reference that Remus uses every time he draws a character who is lying.

It’s painfully obvious to Remus that Roman doesn’t want a goddamn spotlight on him; he just wants one single genuine connection with another person. Remus knows that their parents are not perfect—whose parents are?—but the day he realized that their rules and worries were going to crush Roman to death was the day that Remus thought he finally understood why people become serial killers.

One person should have been allowed. One person who wasn’t Remus or them; Roman should have been allowed to have a best friend or a teacher or someone. The secret that they shared was Roman’s f*cking leash, that he twisted around himself like a noose on his nice long walk outside.

He’s got a string of heartbreaks behind him from the absolute pyrrhic devotion to closing himself off to trusting someone else. He’s got hookups now, one night stands, some guy who’s name is not Tony but Roman is so desperate for a connection he’ll depend on a hairstyle over allowing himself to take it slow. The yearning that aches inside him is like a blackhole and Remus doesn’t know if anything is going to be enough to fill it, but damn if it doesn’t make a nice visual for the next villain in his comic.

Remus thinks that maybe he’d understand a bit better if he felt any of that; that he’d be able to help Roman cope a bit better, lend him a shoulder or an ear or a kidney or a lung—whatever he needs if Remus wasn’t so f*cking uninterested.

He’s got a pretty comfortable life: cushy freelance artist with a popular webcomic to his name, a merch store and a patreon that brings in funds to pay for his loft apartment, computer setup, and all the black licorice that the store down the street can afford to sell to him, a backdoor entrance into literally any place he could think of all with the power of a bathroom sink mirror that came with the place.

Remus is okay with this. He likes it like this. He’ll live his entire life freaking out about deadlines for this art comic and overworking himself to the point where if he were a business owner with himself as an employee the unions would have his head on a pike and one day he’ll die and he’s come to terms with it!

The worst problem he gets is that itchy, itchy, itch down his spine that drags his feet into the Mirror Realm poking around at the other places he could go but probably shouldn’t: he perused down the alley of decorative mirrors with a bucket of popcorn to listen to the entertainment of the families around the block, the hardships of the couples that visit the divorce lawyers nine streets over, the gossip from the hairdressers from the cuttery nestled in the same plaza as the 24hr gym and the bar with $2 margaritas on Tuesdays. Once—and he’d never tell Roman about this—his next-door neighbors had to leave for a weekend funeral out of state and Remus just… sat in their living room for an hour lying on the rug and staring at the ceiling wondering what their lives were like.

He’s a bit of a creep, watching people live their normal lives like that, collecting stories that don’t belong to him and he has no right to know. It’s a secret dirty pleasure that he doesn’t ever f*cking tell Roman about because Roman would absolutely not be cool about it.

((It’s not like he watches people in the bathroom, or while they’re changing, or if things start approaching the rated R section of making out. He’s a freak, but not that type.))

It's just…he can stand in the middle of it all, feeling every flicker of a story brushing against his skin. He wants to know all the characters, all the side stories, all the inside jokes, and important memories, and, and, and…

Remus isn’t sure what it is. He just wants to know. And if he keeps thinking too hard about why he wants to know then he might have to confront something a bit too ugly about the life he’s built up around himself, and what the differences are between him and Roman. So Remus draws, he creates, he listens, and he plays pretend to the best of his ability.

Roman might have a hurricane under his skin, but Remus’s insides were blown apart by a Yellowstone supervolcano eruption when he was six years old and Patton Hart f*cking died and Remus learned about it two months after the funeral.

Remus checks the clock in the corner of his screen again, watching the minute tick past the official four-hour-and-ten-minute mark of Roman being late for his own pity party. Remus hadn’t exactly been on time either: showing up a lazy ten minutes after their agreed upon time, with a bag of cheap romance books for Roman to read on the car ride instead of sulk. But Roman was the type of people pleasing anxiety nightmare that showed up early or not at all without any in between. Remus kept checking his phone for one of Roman’s copy-pasted impersonal “sorry I flaked” messages that he sends to every ex he’s in the middle of making and he’s not sure exactly what's going to make him madder: receiving one, or the fact he’s going to have to find a piece of road kill to bury two feet over Roman’s dead body so the police don’t find him when Remus is done with him.

He expected that Roman would be moping, maybe drowning himself in cheap Tasty-Cake snack donuts that the place sold in three count packs. He expected that Roman would burst into tears at the sight of Remus, because Remus’s presence meant that everything with the fire had actually happened. Remus had even prepared himself to have to haggle for his god-given right to an Icee.

But now Roman’s gone and upstaged his plans by not showing the f*ck up. Remus checks the timer on the corner of his tablet and frowns at the digital numbers. He had Roman’s burner phone number saved in his phone—the same way that Roman had Remus’s emergency burner phone number in his—under a fake name, but it had gone straight to voicemail each time he’d stepped out to see where his dipsh*t of a brother had gone off to. He’d even gone as far as to call back the number that Roman had originally called him from, but after the longest wait of his life the robotic voicemail of a Cindy Buchman had informed him to leave his name and number and purpose for calling.

“My brother stole your phone,” Remus told it. “And now this bitch isn’t even answering my calls. Can you believe it?”

He’s sure that Cindy will appreciate the fact that they’re having the worst time post-thievery.

Remus spins his stylus in his hand glancing across the gas station aisles. He’d already drunk through his Icee and chewed his way through two different bags of sour gummy worms. He was almost getting to the point where a bottle of water was sounding more appealing than a Monster mixed with a Five Hour Energy, and the Gas Station attendant was starting to get annoyed by his existence.

Although, Remus supposes that would have required the kid to not already be an avid hater of people in general.

Customer service was a type of torture that Remus wouldn’t wish on anyone: he was half convinced that it was against geneva convention and America was just willfully ignoring that silly tidbit in the name of the great god of capitalism. In the short time he’d been there one customer bought nine bottles of Arizona Ice Tea and then complained that there weren’t any more in the fridge, a teenager tried to buy cigarettes with a laughably fake ID, a woman dumped the tip jar into her purse while making eye contact, a guy paid his full gas tab exclusively in quarters and pennies, and the radio station had played the same pop no matter what station it got switched to. The kid running the register seems to be intimately aware that they were being tortured, and it turned them into a feral, rabid type of creature that was going to bite the next person who came in the building.

“Are you going to buy something?” The kid sneers as they clean off the coffee dispenser with a sanitation rag, with their head tilted so their bangs don’t completely cover them from the dreaded sun or block their view of the coffee stains that another customer left thirty minutes ago.

“Still deciding,” Remus says, despite the fact that they’ve been having this same conversation almost verbatim for the past four hours.

“Between what?” the kid demands impatiently, as they drag the bucket of water back behind the counter with themselves. “There’s four types of chips, dipsh*t. They’re all sh*tty so just buy one and get out already!”

“And deprive you of my depraved company?” Remus says.

“I’m calling the police.”

Remus swallows the snicker in his throat as he drops his tablet on the counter and shows off the sketch he made of the kid while he was waiting.

The kid's eyes blow wide open and they forget for a moment that they’d been trying really hard to get Remus to leave the store. They scramble over to the counter, dropping their rag with a plop into the water, and teetering on the raggedy stool until it almost slips from under them. They cart their dyed black bangs back from their eyes so they can properly see the details that Remus threw in for the hell of it and Remus considers the operation a complete success.

“This is—this-—” the kid says, and then glances up at Remus and remembers to be a hateful little sh*t. “It's cool. Could be better. If you made them a vampire. And covered in blood.”

Remus spins his pen once and then taps on the overlaying layer he'd been working on.

“HOLY sh*t!” the kid yells. “Ho-how did you—?”

“You wear an Eat The Reich patch on your jacket and you expect me not to draw you as a vampire decimating nazis? f*ck that noise,” Remus says.

The kid whips around to spot their jacket hanging dejectedly on the hook, crumpled and abandoned and dispirited in a way that Remus realizes belatedly probably means that normal people cant see the patch, smothered between ‘Bite Me’, ‘Mothman enthusiast’, and ‘Cryptids, Not Crypto’ patches. Whatever. It’s not like the kid’s going to know that.

Remus can see it because he can see everything. Or mostly everything; in a place like this where nearly every surface is some type of mirror Remus is aware of even the things going on behind him. It’s like having eyes in the back of his head, like being some type of monster that hides under kid’s beds, like creeping in the shadows and rotating his neck 180 degrees and smiling with teeth too pointed and eyes too wide and limbs too long. The condensation on the refrigerated doors makes it a little blurry, and the slimy wax build up on the floors makes the colors distorted, but those are easy enough to interpret when he’s had about four hours to do nothing else.

Wherever there’s a reflection in the room, Remus can see through it. Which means that he always knows how to get the best scene angle for every panel he draws even if he has to draw it nineteen times to figure out where all the nitty gritty foreshadowing details are.

Remus is, of course, a huge fan of every piece of the scrappy jigsaw that makes up the kid: from the dyed black hair, to the silver snake bites, to the thick dark eyeliner, and the foundation that almost actually hides all of the blush on the kid’s face. They wear their personality like a weapon, a shield, a challenge. Remus had seen them when he walked in and his fingers had started itch, itch, itching to capture all the sharp, jagged edges and poisonous protrusions. Remus tilts his head and the colors jump out at him: deep purples and blues for the shadows, reds for the blood, bright yellow for the dangerous inhuman stare that promised to incinerate if anyone got too close….

“Wait,” the kid says and tugs Remus's tablet closer. “Hang on, I know that signature! You're like… oh f*ck…uhm…Are you really the artist of Hero Complex?”

The kid cringes as if they hadn’t meant to actually say it out loud, and now greatly hated the fact that they existed. They huddle back over the side of the counter, trying to put space between them in case Remus tries some bullsh*t like asking what the hell Hero Complex is or pouncing on the offered weakness with all the viciousness of someone who likes to see kids cry. Their phone appears in their fingers, twisting anxiously with freshly applied red nail polish, looking anywhere but at Remus, because eye contact is gross and dumb and stupid.

“You a hater?” Remus asks.

“I just… I thought you'd look…you know, different,” the kid stutters. “Like…like…”

“Someone boring?” Remus suggests.

It very much is not what the kid meant, but they nod fervently anyway, latching to the words with the same desperation of a man drowning at sea clinging to a piece of debris. It’s kinda adorable, but mostly annoying; Remus liked them a bit more when they weren’t in awe and scared of pissing Remus off, like Remus of all people was going to try to call his manager and complain that they weren’t reverent enough about Remus’s lame ass.

The front doors jingle when someone walks in—Remus glances towards them on the off chance that his brother was sulking so hard that he didn’t even throw open the doors and loudly proclaim that his life was over—but it’s just some blond guy in a rumpled suit, who looks to be at wits end from his billions of board meetings or maybe his fiance ran off and fell in love with a farm boy in Christmastreeville with the power of Hallmark. Remus’s eyes flick to the gas pumps, checking to see that his father’s truck is still there despite there being little to no actual business. Since the evening rush, Remus has been able to count the number of customers on one hand while holding his stylus.

At the pump diagonally from the regular parking space where their father’s pick up has been chilling, is an awaiting black big van—The A-Team style with a nice black wrap without the red stripes. The night lights from the overhead canopy give it a really nice sheen, and Remus has little doubt that if he took a running start he could dive right though it into the Mirror Realm without even feeling the barrier between the worlds or whatever it is.

There’s someone else in the passenger seat, door propped open, but the angles aren’t good for getting any vision on them. Remus clicks his tongue and turns back to the kid, who snuck their phone out to take a picture of the screen like Remus would snap at them for wanting a copy.

“Are you one of the little sh*ts that have been retracing my art and pretending it’s their own?” Remus asks, taking his tablet back and saving the canvas. Title he gives it is already being used by something else apparently so he drops a “2” at the end of it and calls it a day.

The kid shakes their head bewildered. “People have been doing that?”

“Yeah,” Remus says, with a shrug. “So as long as you haven’t been doing that, there’s no need to keep up the bashful act, kid. Go on, tell me to f*ck myself again!”

“I didn’t say that,” the kid says quickly.

Remus reaches behind him to grab a bag of chips to toss on the counter.

“Ew,” the kid says. “No, I’m not ringing that up. Get another type.”

“What happened to the customer is always right?”

“You’re a f*cking dipsh*t if you think Salt and Vinegar are actually good.”

“Salt and Vinegar are the best chips.”

“You’re a basic bitch and I hope you get canceled,” the kid says viscerally.

Remus grins, tucking his tablet under his arm to pull out his wallet although he used all his small bills. He’s already decided that he’s going to make Roman pay him back later, especially since Roman decided to wallow instead of show the f*ck up. Who cares if his apartment is a smoldering ruin? His dumb bitch ass can still fork over twenty bucks in fives and ones for snacks.

Then there’s the tell tale click of a safety being switched off and Remus’s mouth tastes like battery acid.

It throws him for a moment: the subtle noise breaking up the monotonous buzzing of the artificial lights overhead, and he’s thinking what could that have been? The kid in front of him goes stock still and pale and terrified and Remus has half of a joke spinning in his mind, on the tip of his tongue, inching into the air right as his eyes shift to the remarkably clean glass window locking away the cigarettes.

“What the f*ck, man?” Remus asks. “You’re robbing a gas station?”

The customer who wandered his way looking like unnamed intern number six, is holding a gun with steady confident hands, that he pulled from the gun holster that Remus hadn’t even thought to check for. He’s too calm, too tranquil and Remus almost makes the mistake of thinking that this is part of a movie; there’s no real danger here, except that there absolutely is and if Remus’s shifts his weight just a little too much he’s going to get to feel what a bullet to the back of the skull is like.

“Why don’t you have a reflection?” The gunman asks clinically.

Remus almost laughs. He tastes the inside of his mouth for a second, letting the silence simmer as he watches the other man through the side angle of the fridge door. The condensation is f*cking brutual, but the guy’s profile is boring as all f*ck with no openings and no weakenesses.

He’s never been as good as Roman at angles and estimates and numbers, but he does know scene placements. If he were to take the reflection as a background for a really sh*tty comic frame he needed to add himself to, he’d be just a foot in front of the gunman: not close enough to spin-knock the gun from their hand, and too close for Remus to hope they might not hit something vital if he makes a quick sidestep to the light reflection in the next tiled floor piece.

“That’s a third date question, Maverick,” Remus says.

“Make it a first date one.”

Remus’s grin sharpens. His eyes refocus on the highschooler in front of him who has the unfortunate luck of being in the line of fire if Remus so much as twitches. “Hey, kid, you should go handle that new shipment of inventory that just came in. I saw how much they sent today, so it might take a while, right? That was always my least favorite part of retail jobs.”

The kid hesitates glancing over Remus’s shoulder to the gunman, probably remembering all the bullsh*t things their manager told them about what to do if a robber ever came for the till, or maybe they’re thinking about how there’s no inventory back there but Remus gave them an excuse to get out of danger anyway, or maybe they’re not thinking at all the same way that Remus absolutely would not be in their shoes. Remus’s hands itch with the urge to move them from where he’s holding his wallet and pulling out a twenty and he doesn’t know if that will trigger the gunman’s hand.

The gunman nods to the kid and says a simple clipped, “Go.”

And with that the kid is sprinting towards the opening and the back of the store through the EMPLOYEE ONLY door. The buzzing of the artificial lights blots out the rest of the noise, like an army of bees getting ready for war right over their heads, and there’s no mercy left for a peace talk. He’s thrummmming with stupid ideas, so many stupid ideas, and it's not until an eternity later that Remus hears the faint secondary thud of the back exit door closing, announcing that the kid made it out of the building entirely.

Remus lets out the breath in his chest and immediately misses the pinching in his lungs that made it so damn easy to focus on. Now all he can think is about that gun, about that bullet, about how his brain matter could appear splattering over the counter, in a gooey, globule spray.

Now all he can think is that he wants to know what it will look like.

“Now,” the gunman says, resettling, shoulders back, at ease, in control. “Answer my question.”

Remus pinches his twenty between his fingers, feeling the little tears in the paper make its way down. “You got a license to carry that, Hans Gruber?”

“Will it matter much to you when you’re dead?”

Remus wants to smirk. He wants to smile. He wants to laugh. His fingers are itching and he’s staring at the scene from a million different points of view and his vision is swimming in colors. His tablet digs into his own side, thrumming with the need to be used, to capture this moment, to set the story up right. He’s on the edge of his own seat to see where this goes.

“Are you going to shoot me if I turn around to face you?” Remus says, and his voice is quivering, like he’s some type of f*cking addict. “I’d like to flip you the bird as my last action and it's hard to do behind my back.”

“I have no intention of shooting you somewhere that will kill you.”

“Coward.”

That seems to throw the gunman for a second, and Remus relishes in the miniscule shift of their jaw as they consider Remus’s words and what they could possibly mean. Remus’s fingers twitch as he lets go of his cash and closes his wallet, leaving it on the front counter as if this was something he were doing every day.

“Turn around.”

Remus does, holding in a snicker at the back of his throat that could also be vomit making its way up. He moves languidly, shifting deftly to catch his tablet from under his arm, and roll it into his right hand so he wasn’t in danger of dropping it every second.

Without the color distortion of the reflection, the gunman looks…hot. Remus grew up having to explain to Roman every inch of his outward appearance because Roman was a neat freak with a fear of dirt, but the man in front of him is another monster entirely. His black slacks are ironed to crisp lines, his oxfords polished to the point where Remus clocks them as a possible escape if things get really f*cking weird in the next few seconds, his pale yellow button up has the sleeves rolled up to his elbow in perfectly even portioned rolls. His hands are covered with black biking gloves that don’t seem to have seen a day of wear-and-tear, and his hair is gelled back with only three strands of soft blond locks breaking the rigid line up.

There’s a black tattoo on his left forearm— the scales of a snake wrapped around his ulna and radius with the only dash of color being its poisonous yellow eyes. He looks like a walking caution tape, like a warning sign on before a cliff edge, like violence and danger and Remus would love to discuss aposematism with him.

“You’d look prettier if you smiled,” Remus says.

“You’d stand better if I don’t receive a reason to shoot your kneecaps,” he responds undeterred. “I’ll make this easy for you. Tell me where you got Ghost.”

“Got what?” Remus says. “Is it like milk? Got Milk? I didn’t even know they still used that slogan.”

“I’m not in the mood for jokes.”

“Buddy, there is a distinct f*cking lack of mothers being mentioned for the type of jokes I like to tell,” Remus says. “And butts. And dicks. And—”

The barrel of the gun rises from Remus’s chest to his forehead and it’s a much more effective way of shutting him up than all the times that Roman strangled him when they were kids. Remus’s eyes lock into the shaft, drawn to it like a black hole and unable to look away even if he wanted to. He’s never seen a gun from this angle and even all his reference pictures don’t quite manage to carry the weight of the weapon, the aura of it, the smell and sight and taste—.

“What happened to not shooting me anywhere that could kill me,” Remus says.

“It was conditional on you cooperating,” the man says. “Where did you get Ghost?”

“I don’t know what the f*ck you’re talking about.”

“You expect me to believe that you naturally don’t have a reflection?”

Remus freezes for a second, a vague idea floating in his head that immediately makes him sick to his stomach. He’s always been good at jumping to the worst case scenario even when he doesn’t mean to— his mind spinning endlessly with suggestions of horrible things that could be happening at that very moment or already happened or will be happening soon. Half the times he pops over to Roman’s place it's just to reassure his own brain that Roman didn’t get kidnapped in the middle of the night by shady government personnel, or burn alive in that fire hazard of an apartment that he insisted on signing into.

But from the way the man in front of him is talking, it sounds like this Ghost drug thing almost… almost….

“The doc says I don’t eat enough veggies,” Remus says carefully, his fingers curling on the edge of his tablet. “It’s an unfortunate side effect. Got a problem with it?”

“Many,” the man says. “Move. We’re going for a drive.”

“You don’t need to get me to a hotel to get a piece of this. Forty bucks and I’ll let you bend me over this counter right now and you can have all the security cam footage you want afterwards.”

“Anyone who’s taken Ghost doesn’t show up in video footage.”

“I told you it was veggies.”

“So you say,” the man says, simpering like a f*cking villain, who’s going through evil monologue withdrawal. Remus would love to do this all night; really he would. The back and forth is refreshing, for someone who really only talks to his twin brother, his parents, the grocer at the snack shack down the corner, and telemarketer scams. The gun—lethal, violent, stark, and pointed at his head—is the nice little knot that keeps Remus in the moment, painfully agonizingly real.

He’s pinned in place, framed and hung by the narrative; the panel has him awkwardly and uncomfortably in the center frame like a middle schooler’s cringe first attempt to imitate a big name comic before they realize how much work goes into character placement and scenery and plot and f*cking word counts.

Remus is not an idle watcher here, not the bystander, not the detached author. He’s standing in Roman’s place, trying to remember Roman’s lines, but all he can think is that it’s wrong, wrong, wrong. He’s not supposed to be part of the story, just the outsider watching in.

“I’m actually really busy right now,” Remus says slowly, as the icy feeling grips his spine better than sneaking into anyone’s apartment while they’re on a vacation. His fingers thread through the invisible carpet and his heart is hammering with adrenaline and it's wrong but Remus can’t stop. “I’m supposed to meet someone right here, and getting kidnapped makes that kinda hard. But if you leave your name and number, I’ll let you know when I’m free for a booty call.”

“You seem to think you have an option.”

“You seem to think that I don’t.”

The man’s mouth opens to respond and Remus’s heart is in his throat and he’s side stepping directly into the grimey yellow tile he’d been so good at avoiding for the past four hours. He’s swooping, falling, dropping, and rolling forward: he’s standing the Mirror Realm and then he’s swinging with his tablet—swing batter batter— because less than a foot in front of him is the glass door of the drink fridge that is at the man’s side and Remus loves cheap shots.

The gunman hits the ground biting a swear when he realizes that Remus is suddenly beside him like some sort of near instant teleportation. Remus plants himself casually on unsteady legs on the red tile just a few inches off from another light reflection, coughing out blood from his newly broken nose, and feels his stomach lurch like he’s standing on the edge of a cliff.

“How…?” the man says, swinging his gun up to point it at Remus again, although his eyes dart around them searching for something or someone else. Remus grapples with the blood rushing out of his nose and swears as the scarlet drops drip between his fingers and straight through the tiles like some type of sh*tty CGI. “What the f*ck.”

“Veggies,” Remus repeats nasally and absolutely f*cked. He folds his tablet to his side, careful of the screen. “Now, what the f*ck is this about some drug that makes people not show up on camera? Explain it to me like I’m not involved because I’m not, motherf*cker.”

The man holds his gaze for a burning second and Remus thinks he’s going to pull the trigger, he thinks that if Remus were writing the scene he’d absolutely pull the trigger, he thinks that if this were the story, it would end here with Remus’s art tablet hitting the ground and shattering and the audience would attempt to discuss what f*cking stupid ass metaphor Remus was trying to get across in the comment section.

But instead Remus blinks and his feet are flying out from under him. His tablet flings out of his hands and Remus slams face first into the tile and then into the Mirror Realm and he thinks it feels a lot like jumping into the shallow end of the pool and meeting the concrete gods.

He staggers several steps in the sudden darkness, coughing up blood and spitting it on the ground at his feet, while the dizziness fades. His untied boot strings trip him up and then Remus is spilling out of the Icee machine.

Remus laughs and he’s starting to feel like the Gas Station was actually not a good f*cking place for a rendezvous. He grabs the counter to hold himself up while his lungs try to remember how to inhale again, and his stomach tries to figure out if it's evacuating or staying inside his body.

The gunman’s shoes are polished and they click-clack when he creeps around the backside of the check-out counter to get him in the sights of the gun again. He seems so serene, so put together; Remus’s mouth tastes like iron and blue raspberry and the gunman doesn’t have a scratch on him.

“Who are you waiting to meet?” The gunman asks, holding causally to Remus’s 200 dollar art tablet like a hostage.

“Your mom,” Remus says, spitting another round of blood into the tiles while tilting his head back to stop the f*cking bleeding—or is it supposed to be forward? “God f*ck! Damnit!”

“My patience is wearing thin.”

“Doesn’t sound like my f*cking problem, asshole! If my tablet is broken, you owe me a new one.”

“If you don’t want to find out how it feels to have each of your bones systematically broken, I’d suggest answering. How did you get Ghost? Who is your representative in Anamorphosis? What exactly did you do to Logan Ackroyd?”

Remus is ready to snap out a response, but a flicker of light catches his attention through the clear glass windows.

“Hey buddy, any of your friends drive one of those armored police vehicles? Like SWAT on TV?” Remus asks.

“What?” The gunman says. “No. Answer my qu—”

Remus is moving before the man can finish speaking, kicking off the counter and lunging towards him, and almost before Remus can finish thinking anything through the gun fires just under Remus’s arm, missing him completely as Remus’s arms wrap around his chest and tackle into to the ground, and just barely half a millisecond before an actual armored police truck crashes through the front of the Gas Station and runs over the space both of them had been standing in right before Remus dove into the Mirror Realm.

It’s like a dodging an out-of-control eighteen wheeler by a hair’s breadth, like a door being slammed right as he walks through, like a piano falling on the sidewalk inches in behind him: Remus can feels the churning wind mince the space he’d been a blink before, steaming hot and blisteringly dangerous, and Remus’s laughter is explosive in nature.

Remus’s arms are around the gunman’s chest, keeping him from slipping away entirely, but he very obviously got dunked based on his gasping, spitting, and spluttering like a teacher in a Dunk Me booth who thought that they were the students’ favorite and had just realized what a horribly mistake they’d made. Remus gleefully enacts the revenge fantasy he’s sure at least a dozen people have prayed to happen: he twists and rolls them, putting the man under water one more time before he drags him through the ghostly apparition of the van he’d arrived in.

The real world is a cacophony of sound, heat rippling through the air like physical punches and Remus takes each of them like a newbie boxer that didn’t learn to dodge. He’s laughing so hard he can’t breathe and the flick-of-a-switch temperature change is causing a whole ass tornado to brew inside his lungs.

There’s another guy there, staring open mouthed and gobstopped at the front entrance of the Gas Station, too stunned to speak, who whirls around with their laptop in the air like they’re going to swing it when the gunman hits the ground and Remus rolls out beside them.

“W-what—” the gunman gasps, shaking and shivering like they’d been violated instead of saved from a fiery bloody death. “—Did you just f*cking do?!”

“That’s what your mom said after I pleased her last night!” Remus crows, peeling himself off the concrete. His art tablet is on the ground next to him, blinking sleepily at the chaos, and Remus scoops it up, checking the functions and only breathing out when he’s certain that the save and undo buttons still work.

“Who the f*ck—?” the new guy whispers. “What the actual f*ck.”

The front of the Gas Station is wrecked, glass still dancing in the air, the fluorescent lights shattered and exposed and the front door frames bent out of shape. The stands inside must have exploded, the inventory that Remus had spent so long befriending suddenly upended when the truck came into the store to pay for gas. The blocky shape of the vehicle fills the entire front, awkward and juxtaposed, like someone jammed the wrong piece into the puzzle in front of them, and gasoline and coolant are pouring out of the inside in a very dangerous waterfall.

It looks exactly like how Remus imagined it would look, and also not.

“That’s going to catch on fire!” Remus says.

“Who was driving that?” the man with the laptop asks, sounding very much like someone who is afraid of death. “Jesus Christ, are they dead? They’ve gotta be dead after that, right?”

“Only one way to find out! Hold this!” Remus shoves his art tablet into the guy's hands.

His intention is to dart forward and check on the driver, all hero-like since his usual protagonist of a brother isn’t here to do it. It's not his style and he’s not dressed the part, and breathing is a bitch of an action, but Remus believes in karma; when he gets into a car crash horribly, bloodily, grotesquely, he hopes that some brave soul comes to dig him out.

But there’s a half second when Remus is shoving his art tablet away that the glare from the overhead lights catches on the screen, and forms a mirror and Remus is suddenly able to see the man in complete black riot gear aiming a gun at them from behind.

“Ah, f*ck,” Remus manages.

He tackles the guy to the ground, and air shreds where they’d both been standing. The guy lets out a strangled yell and Remus’s entire body weight crushes the rest of the air out of his lungs. For a blink Remus is on the farm, he’s tackling Butterball to the ground, he’s hearing Mom yell at him to be careful, and Roman swears about the grass stains he’s putting in his clothes. For a blink, the air tastes like the clean country air and then that blink is over and Remus is dragging himself and his new best friend around the back of their van.

The van peppers with violent hail, tearing apart the beautiful paint job. Paint chips and metal fragments spray back at them, around them, through them. Remus gasps for air and swallows down his own blood instead.

A hand grabs his arm and yanks him behind the gas terminal, and the joyful music from the advertisem*nt playing glitches out as three bullets execute the paid actors. The world around him is a cacophony of noises, a dissonant discord, a resonating ruckus and it’s so loud that Remus can’t f*cking see. Everything is so much; everywhere is too much.

“Hey!” snaps the gunman—Remus’s gunman, the semi okay one that talked first shot second, the one with the blond hair and intense need to ask questions Remus can’t f*cking answer. Remus blinks the dizzying visions of being shot out of his mind’s eye, trying not to vomit. His entire body is shaking, wriggling, buzzing: as if he just woken up thinking he was falling off a hotel balcony. “Are you shot?”

Remus gags on his own blood. His head is pounding suddenly as if his pony tail has been tied too tight for too long, and his fingers cling dig into the bruise on his upper arm. His collarbone screams and there’s nothing funny about all of this but Remus’s grin is carved on to his face.

“Delightful,” the gunman says. “Virgil, stop cowering and move!”

The man he arrived with—pale button up, beanie, headphones and computer—is hunkered just away from them, curled into a ball behind the hubcap of their van with their laptop and Remus’s art tablet over their head, screaming something absolutely vile. The van rocks behind him, with the force of the ammunition.

“This was not part of my f*cking contract!” he yells. “I don’t care what the f*ck you say!”

The gunman pulls himself behind the pump again as one of the bullets blows a hole right through the metal sheet denoting the pump number inchest from his face. He doesn’t look bothered by the idea that his own skull could have been blasted apart; Remus gulps down greedy breaths as he calmly reloads his gun clicking his tongue as if he’s going have to go send an intern to make a coffee and copies run.

“Temporary Truce?” Remus asks.

“Attempt to avoid getting shot,” the gunman says, firing three times without even looking at Remus.

“Bitch!” Remus dives around the gas pump right before the returning fire peppers the stand. He covers his head on instinct, but when he opens his mouth to scream all that comes out in laughter.

The shadows shift under his feet and Remus grabs the squeegee from the wash bucket, swinging it upwards in the same motion. He can’t hear a thing, but the man attempting to sneak up on him gets clocked right in the face so hard the plastic handle snaps right in his hand. The riot gear takes the brunt of the hit, but Remus slams the shattered edge into the gap of their armor under their arm.

Remus is almost upset he doesn’t have a reflection; he can’t imagine the bloodied smile on his face is anything other than wickedly awesome. He kicks the man in the groin with his steel toed boots, and the body hits the ground, with a high pitched noise that only dogs can hear.

To his side Remus’s temporary ally finds his own melee fight with another person in their tactical uniform who wretches arm upwards and takes out the canopy light. The sparks shower down on them, like a meteor shower, like falling stars, like Dinosaur Extinction two-point-f*cking-oh. Remus watches as his ally turns into the attack, driving his elbow underneath his attacker’s jaw and up into the soft flesh that couldn’t be blocked by their mask. They tear their gun free from the loosened grip and then—Remus blinks, his ally’s trigger finger twitches, the gun is pressed right to the attacker’s throat— bang.

Like a dance that he’s done a dozen times before.

The body hits the ground and Remus blood is cold in his veins, frozen and glacial and everything not-funny is suddenly a lot less funny.

Blood leaks out of the still corpse, dark and murky and Remus doesn’t know their name or who they are or what their story was and now he never will.

“Move!” Remus’s ally yells, and fires just over Remus’s shoulder.

Remus jerks at the voice, at the order, at the direction. There’s another one of those guys staggering back, but their padded vest took most of the brunt of the impact. Remus dives out from their reach, rolling to his knees, ignoring the way that his knees scrape and smear on the ground because the artful tears in his jeans are no longer just artful.

Remus spins, slamming his heel into their ankle bone. The person in the suit growls.

“That didn’t do it for you?” Remus asks, backing up with his hands in a placating gesture. “Okay we can try something else; tell me your other kinks!”

Except that Remus doesn’t need to worry about it in another moment: the sparks from the broken fluorescent lights in the gas station shop burst again and this time they land directly into the gasoline puddle dripping out from the discarded truck. Remus sees it from the view of a hundred glass shards, and it’s blinding. His vision whites out, sparkling, bright, and burning to his retinas. Remus dives for cover behind the pillar of the canopy, right as the entire world explodes.

The force tears by either side of Remus like race cars, followed by a heat so hot that Remus can feel the singes disintegrating the bare skin on his knees and neck and face. He curls tightly, on himself and watches the bodies of the two men who attacked him fling across the parking lot into the deserted road outside the realm of reach of the overhead lights like windchimes snapping off their connectors.

Empty static stings the inside of Remus’s head. Everything sounds underwater or far away, like the panels of his comic are too far away from each other, stretching across the blank pages of nothingness that Remus forgot to plan out. For an endless series of seconds nothing exists, much less Remus, and there’s just the heat and the horror and the lack of oxygen.

Then the sound slams back into place, popping like firecrackers on the day after the Fourth of July, and Remus shakes the nausea from his head.

He can see the guy with his art tablet and the computer, crouching around the front of the car he’d arrived in, peeking the side frantically looking for other attackers in the brilliant light. Remus’s ally is still firing his gun at someone out of Remus’s vision, as though he hadn’t even noticed the gas station shop was now a blazing bonfire. This is just another Tuesday to him, just another evening after classes, just another board meeting and HOA meet up and coffee date and—

The gunman’s rapid fire stops suddenly, leaving an ugly silence in its wake. Remus almost thinks that he got hit, that time slowed and Remus will hear his body in the ground any second now, that Remus is about to be utterly horribly f*cked six ways to Sunday. But when he checks his surroundings the gunman is untouched, his expression cold and closed off, but alive and healthy focused entirely on what’s across from him at Remus’s back.

“Drop your gun,” a voice demands. “Or TSS will get to report another civilian casualty.”

Remus freezes at the sight of the cashier being used as a goodman meat shield. It’s almost laughable: their lithe form is all jagged edges and bones and violent kicking and it’s barely enough to cover the grown ass adult holding them in place with their forearm and the muzzle of their handgun pressed to the side of the kid’s temple. It’s like a dumb joke, too stupid to even laugh at; why bother with such an uninvolved kid?

The fire rages behind them, eating through the store frame at an alarming rate, searching greedily for the cleaning chemicals. The smoke is brown and black and purple but all Remus can focus on is the awkward silhouettes hugging the center frame.

Their eyes—the gas station attendant’s— are bright, bright blue: cobalt and azure and topaz. The contrast is paint worthy: the blue matching the shades of orange behind them perfectly, and Remus’s fingers itch, itch, itch with ideas on how to capture this moment, all of these moments, into the perfect composition. Remus’s head pounds, and for a half second he’s thinking about frame placement, about character designs, about his goddamned art career, instead of the terrified panicking kid in front of him.

The attacker’s trigger finger twitches and the kid lets out a whimper that does not sound like it belongs to the same kid who told Remus his taste in chips was trash and Remus wants to vomit.

“Let them go,” Remus’s ally orders.

The man grins, mockingly, smug, and proud. “Or what? You’ll shoot me through them?”

“I don’t know, man,” Remus says, staring into those blue eyes like he’s looking at a blue-ringed octopus curling around an unsuspecting crab. “That's a rabid retail employee. There aren’t any managers out here to keep them in check.”

Remus’s ally glances at him with a sneer, likely telling him to shut up, but Remus hardly notices because he’s watching the gas station attendant register his words. There’s a second—a whole second longer than Remus can imagine— but then their eyes sharpen and their mouth opens and they remember that they’ve been waiting for permission to bite someone.

The kid sinks their canines into the meaty forearm biting down like a feral raccoon. The man holding them howls and tries to jerk away and Remus’s ally nails the man in the head with another bullet.

The kid careens to the side when the entire human holding them morphs into a stack of funny looking cinder block weights. They fall to the ground, unlocking their jaw from the muscle, and blinking in a stunned daze as though they weren’t sure what came over them at all. Remus’s ally darts forward towards them, with something that looks almost human on his face.

But before Remus can catch his breath, someone else tackles him from the other side and slams him into the gas pump again. His head rings as fingers tear into his hair and then bash his cheek into the button for diesel once, twice, thrice— before lifting and throwing him clear across the empty lot, with some sort of superhuman strength that doesn’t quite compute to Remus’s brain.

He swears as his leather jacket skids across the concrete, probably tearing. His dog tags slap him in his face cold against the burning bruises that he’s definitely got. He scrambles back to his feet, trying to wipe away the blood from his nose so he can attempt to breathe in without drowning in his own bodily fluids.

“Mother-f*cker,” he spits. “What’s your deal, buddy? Daddy didn’t hug you enough?”

There’s something different about this person: Remus can’t quite place it immediately. They look just like the other guys, part of the same team that came out of f*cking no where, same prestigious polished riot gear that had never seen a fight before this one. Bulging pockets, padding and faceless visor. There’s a logo on their left chest pocket but Remus can’t figure out what it’s supposed to be in the constantly shifting lighting.

This one isn’t holding a gun or even has a holster. There’s no knife in their hands, almost as if they were banking on a boxing match, and based on the fact that they had about a hundred pounds in muscle on Remus, and wearing glimmering brass knuckles, Remus has a suspicion that his dental records are not going to be helpful enough to identify his body.

“Somehow I bet you don’t get any bitches,” Remus says. “Here’s a tip: lose the face mask. It makes you look like a tool. Ladies aren’t into that!”

Remus ducks the swing and the force alone would have taken his head clear off his neck. He staggers out of the reach of the grab, bolts around the next row of pumps.

“No hablo español, bitch? Come on, give me something to work with here!” Remus says, peeking the left and dodging right. The wind burns his skin, the crackling fire drowning out the man’s steps to the point where Remus nearly slams face first into them even though he can see them.

“But you know what? Doesn’t matter! The longer I stare into you’re eyes the more certain I am that you know what the f*ck is wrong with Cyra City right now. Hey, sexy, does the name Roman Regal mean anything to you?”

The man’s body language doesn’t so much as twitch at the name, but Remus gets the feeling that he knows something anyway. There’s a static in the air, in Remus’s mind, in his bones: he feels hollow and heavy at the same time, and the disgusting taste of worry coats the inside of his mouth like a film.

The punch is fast, and Remus is not expecting how fast exactly; it clips the side of his face and he goes down into the ground, hard enough to see the stars that the smoke should have been blotting out. The other guy towers over him, a couple dozen stories tall and unmoveable and every attempt to make a joke gets drowned by the blood in Remus’s mouth.

“Finally,” the f*cker says, mechanical through the mask and impersonal, as he grabs Remus by the throat. His fingers are iron and they dig into Remus’s larynx like individual stakes. “I’ve caught one of you Plagues Upon The Earth!”

“Close—” Remus gasps, clawing at the forearm guard. “—my stage name… is actually… Chastity Belle!”

He sweeps his heel upwards and slams it into the guy's face as hard as he can. The glass visor shatters under the force of his kick, his heel digging into flesh with a satisfying thwump. His lungs burn from the smoke and his grin is searing hot as his attacker stumbles backwards clutching at their face, and Remus goes limp as he tumbles back to the floor.

Remus wheezes for air, and each oxygen molecule tastes like blue raspberry and his own stomach acids and blood. His head is ringing and there are burned out black spots in his vision but when he looks up, the f*cker is clawing the broken pieces of their glass screen from their eyes.

There’s something unholy in their tone, something that Remus put there, something that bleeds. Remus is staring at eyes that hate him, eyes made of umber and the flames that burned it, eyes that smolder and smoke and combust all on their own. Remus is staring at those eyes and he is remembering being six years old, clutching his best friend’s hand, telling him that the spider is gone, it's not on him anymore, no Pat, I didn’t kill it, I put it in the bushes I promise, no one got hurt!

He remembers glaring over Patton’s sobbing shoulder and he remembers fiery burning eyes alight with venomous laughter.

A name— sh*t, Remus remembers a hundred names of fictional characters, but he’s staring into the eyes of Patton Hart’s sad*stic f*ck of an older brother and he can’t think of anything other than how it felt to have Patton clinging to him sixteen years ago.

He feels like he’s six all over again and wants to punt this dipsh*t into the sun.

“What the f*ck are you doing here?” Remus asks.

“Putting an end to your devilish schemes!”

“God damn,” Remus says, “Praise Jesus, I didn’t even know I had devilish schemes! Do you know you sound f*cking stupid right now? Plague of the earth, devilish schemes; what cult did you join and do they take critiques?”

“Shut up and die!”

That does not sound like something that Remus has proficiency in nor a willingness to try. The next punch aims for his neck and Remus throws himself back, cursing when he hits against the last row of pumps and Patton’s brother prevents him from darting around the side. The brass knuckles crash right through the screen advertisem*nt and the cheerful voice chokes in the middle of asking them to insert their card.

“Did you skip leg day?” Remus blurts out.

Patton’s brother grabs him by the throat again and throws him back across the gas station. Remus skids across the concrete and glass shards too small to be Mirror Realm portals and debris and leaves a grisly bloody smear in his wake. He struggles to get up again, but there are so many pain signals coming from all over him that just standing sends his vision into a dizzying spiral.

Clay. Remus remembers because the cracks in the concrete are spelling out cursive words to him, with the drips of his blood accenting each. Clayton Hart.

In the summer, when Patton’s parents got them popsicles to eat in the dying sunlight for the last hours before they had to go inside, Clay always took the orange ones and would eat them so fast that he’d get a brain freeze and then get mad when Roman and Remus laughed at him for it. He remembers how Clay would shove Patton around, accidentally knocking his popsicles from his hands and then stomping on it with his light up sneakers. He remembers when that didn’t make Patton cry enough so Clay switched it to picking up the half melting chunks of whatever flavor arctic blue was and he shoved them down Patton’s shirt.

Clayton Hart who everyone told them would grow out of his pranking stage, who was just jealous that Patton spent so much time with them, who was just a boy being boys with them.

Remus staggers back, almost tripping over the guy with the computer. He’s just a short few inches from the van, and Remus is thinking that he should have run at the very beginning. Clay twists his wrists as he stalks forward, adjusting his brass knuckles again.

“I will save my brother,” Clay snarls.

“What the absolute f*ck are you on?!” Remus yells. “Patton is dead!”

Because Patton has been dead for sixteen years and Remus has been mourning him for every moment of it. Because it had been Remus’s idea to show him the Mirror Realm, to cheer him up after finding him sobbing in their special hideout in the partial woods behind their houses. Because Remus had told Patton that they would see him tomorrow and then he turned out to be a liar because he woke up and he was already packed into the car and across the state border being told they were moving.

Because there’s an obituary folded in Remus’s chest pocket as close to his heart as he can get it.

“I’m going to fix him,” Clay swears. “No matter what you do to him, I’ll fix it and bring my brother back!”

Remus swears the blood loss is getting to him. The world is flickering with red and yellows and oranges that look like popsicles being crushed under a pair of sketchers. His neck is throbbing, bobbing, pulsing and every syllable grates through his trachea like a toddler trying to force the square block into the triangle hole. He’s the protagonist in the middle of everything, and he’s audience watching from a hundred broken glass reflections; he’s standing in the Hart’s backyard and he’s standing in front of a Gas Station that’s on fire; he’s twenty two years old and he’s six staring at his best friend, wanna know a secret?

The shadows warp beside him and Remus just barely resists a flinch when his ally appears holding his gun at Clay, with the gas station attendant tucked behind him safely. His calm expression is tinted with an anger that suggests he’s about to take pleasure in the lethal actions he’s going to apply next. The snake tattoo on his forearm swirls in the lighting, curling tightly, and the realistic eyes peirce into Remus like knives.

“That’s enough!” he says. “Surrender now!”

Clay laughs, as though that was a joke.

“Count your days, Remus,” Clay says. “I’ll kill you and your brother even if it's the last thing I do!”

“Why—?!” Remus yells but it gets swallowed by the delayed secondary explosion of the Gas Station shop. He braces himself against the violent heat, swearing as the oxygen is ripped from his lungs. The bursts of debris whip by him and he hears someone scream, but why the time he looks up again Clay is gone.

The space where he was is empty, and there’s no sign that he was thrown free, or—better yet—instantly vaporized. Remus wheels around trying to catch a glimpse of that absolute f*cking nutcase, but even in all of the hundreds of viewpoints there’s nothing but flames and fire and ash.

“Maybe he…” the kid asks, barely audible over the crackling fire, “…left?”

Before Remus can react, another body comes flying out of the side view mirror and barrels into him. Remus slams into the ground much harder than all the other times, his vision exploding in white starbursts when his back and spine crumples over the curb, soda-can-in-a-wood-chipper style.

“Mother f*ck—!” Remus shouts, instinctively shoving his hand into the soft fleshy throat of his attacker as hard as he can. When the figure jerks back reflectively Remus plants his boot into their sternum and launches them away. His hands scramble for a weapon on the abandoned asphalt grounds, tearing his palms raw for a chunk of a rock he raises to throw.

The figure coughs violently on the ground, gripping their throat where Remus’s knuckles dug in. Remus thinks he hears his temporary ally moving behind him, seconds too slow and unaware of the attacker, but all Remus can see is the silhouette against the burning remains of the Gas Station.

“What the f*ck is wrong with you?!” They rasp, glaring at Remus with the type of fury that Remus recognizes instantly.

Something buzzes under his skin like live bees and he’s only partially sure that if he looks at his veins he’ll see them moving all on their own. Bubbles fizz in his throat, crackling against the back of his teeth until it claws its way out of his throat, and the rock tumbles from his fingers back to the asphalt behind him.

“Hey Ro,” Remus gasps, with relief so strong he sways where he’s sitting. “You’re late, dipsh*t.”

Chapter 8: Notoriety, Noteworthy, Negotiation

Chapter Text

“So you’re not an arsonist?” Remus asks skeptically and Roman considers just decking him. There’s already another bandage on his twin’s face, a professional grade reset of his nose done by Logan, who seemed to be in possession of dozens of skills across more fields than Roman could name. Rebreaking his twin’s nose after Logan’s hard work would be a waste of their supplies, but he thinks that the sound of Remus’s nose cracking a second time would be well worth it.

Logan stands in front of them, several inches taller even “at rest”. Remus doesn’t seem intimidated by that, his curls yanked back into his frizzy bun so that the mania in his eyes shines through when looks up at him. There’s some type of palpable tension hissing between them that makes the hairs on the back of Roman’s neck stand on edge; as though he shouldn’t look away because at any moment one of them will go for the killing blow.

But the seconds drag on and the only movement is Remus swinging the keys to their father’s pickup around his finger millimeters away from smacking Logan with it.

“No,” Logan says.

He’d found a pair of webster glasses in a bag in the front seat of the van that his…friends? Teammates? Had been driving. They’re identical to the ones Roman saw in the apartment fire: the pair that Roman had used to get into the apartment to save Logan and subsequently crushed and broke. At the time, Roman hadn’t considered them all that much, and even after their rushed meeting, he hadn’t thought of the glasses as being much more than a convenient prop, super-secret-agent-with-a-million-disguises style. But with them on Logan looked much more focused and distinguished; Roman hadn’t realized how much Logan had been squinting until he’d put them on and blinked twice, before humming a satisfactory noise as though he was a computer that finished downloading an update.

“I find fire to be a very ineffective and quixotic method of destruction,” Logan continues with just a hint of loathing. “Costly, insecure, and… hm, flashy, for a lack of a better term. It draws too much attention to one’s actions and leads to unpredictable outcomes and harms many innocent people in the process— will you desist!”

Logan’s hand snaps out, snatching the keys out of the air, letting the band of Remus’s lanyard wrap around his palm, and then yanking. Remus nearly stumbles forward at the action, eyes widening a fraction, before he lets go lest he be dragged into punching distance. Logan huffs and bundles the keys professionally before shoving them in Roman’s direction, and Roman would be lying if he said he wasn’t touched that Logan trusted him not to swing them just the same way as Remus had been.

However, the lack of keys didn’t exactly deter Remus’s… whatever he’s doing. Instead he taps his foot rapidly, leans in close, and hums low in the back of his throat as he deliberates Logan’s answer with all the authority of a thesis council.

The spy meets his gaze head on, unhindered, undeterred, but doesn’t say anything more, settling for an irate neutral expression that Roman was beginning to think was just his resting face. Without the jingling of the keys the tense air hums with the background noise: the last of the crackling gasoline fire behind put out, the indistinguishable voices of the firefighters, reporters, and police talking to one another past the safety perimeter, and the rumbling of traffic as every other car in the backed up line slowly rolls by, rubbernecking to wonder at the carnage.

The advil Roman downed doesn’t feel like nearly enough to combat the exhaustive headache brewing behind his eyes.

“I’m going to make a character after you and introduce them to the plot just to kill them off in the climax to give the protagonist a push,” Remus decides, then shoves his other hand in Logan’s face. “Name’s Remus Regal. Hurt my brother and I’ll cut you into more pieces than there are items in the Mirror Realm.”

“Remus!” Roman says.

“Just being friendly!”

Roman grits his teeth, and squeezes his eyes closed until he sees a shape that hasn’t yet been discovered in the back of his eyelids. He imagines his bed. He imagines his comforter, his soft silk sheets and his mountain of Disney pillows. He imagines being asleep. Wouldn’t that be great?

Roman isn’t entirely sure why he’s not, to be honest. Everything had been moving so fast, and now suddenly someone hit the brakes and Roman’s left halfway through the metaphoric windshield.

He and Logan had managed to rush through the Mirror Realm— Roman guiding Logan with all the patience he could muster because Logan got hung up on every f*cking thing. Roman wasn’t exactly sure how many times he’d had to say “It just is” in response to a brilliantly ill timed question about why the Mirror Realm is the way it is, but it was north of ten and did not help with the brewing panic in Roman’s gut about Remus’s well being.

They’d heard evidence of the fight before they found the Gas Station, and Roman had seen the explosion through the rearview mirror of their Dad’s Pickup and dove through without having a single thought at all.

Despite the bodies, and the situation, and the gasoline fire, Remus had mostly superficial wounds, except where he didn’t. Roman felt like he couldn’t catch his breath, as he demanded to look him over and Remus physically shoved Roman’s face away from him the same way he’d shoved Butterball away when the dog was getting in the way and Remus needed him to not.

And then.

“Holy sh*t, Lo,” the man with the computer had said from behind them. “How are you still alive?”

It hadn’t sounded like someone who was happy. So Roman whipped around to check on the others and found Logan was holding a gun towards the man with blond hair, and the man with blond hair was pointing one right back. With less than two feet between them there wasn’t room for either of them to miss if they decided to pull the trigger, and Roman had seen Logan take down eight people without breaking a sweat, but a creeping doubt suddenly wormed its way down Roman’s spine.

If Logan got shot, if Logan died here, what did it mean for them? What did it mean about the apparent terrorist group that has it out for both him and Remus? What did anything mean about anything?

Roman was eyeing the shattered glass around them, looking for a piece big enough for both him and Remus, but long torturous moments of nothing happening had apparently solidified something for both Logan and his friend. Logan lowered his gun and the other had said something about draw times, before turning around and heading towards the approaching police and fire trucks.

“Oh, we’re just gonna pretend it didn’t happen,” the guy with the computer said and Roman was thankful that at least one person here was sane. “Alright. Cool. f*ckers.”

And then he curled up into the van, and proceeded to pretend nothing had happened and he didn’t know any of them.

So with nothing better to do, Roman had introduced his brother to Logan and tried not to think about how much it felt like introducing his boyfriend to his parents. The sour taste in his mouth wouldn’t go away even after all of them had gotten water bottles supplied from an emergency stash in the car that Logan’s…people were driving, and Roman had down his with vigor.

Twenty minutes had been spent watching Janus finesse the police and fire crew that had appeared on the scene following billowing smog, while Logan performed medical miracles on Remus and Remus did his best to be a nuisance. Roman hadn’t quite believed Logan when he said that he worked for a government secret branch with a lot of sway, but the blond man had flashed one badge and declared Remus and Roman unimportant, innocent witnesses to the entire thing rather than the partial perpetrators of it, and the police had nodded and relayed that to the first reporters.

Roman likes to think that if he had a phone, he’d already have a news report alert on it letting him know that he wasn’t a wanted criminal anymore. He likes to think that he could crawl back into Cyra City proper and show up for his next physics class and that Professor Jericho would even give him an extension on the homework considering he was a wanted fugitive for half a day and his apartment burned down.

He likes to think that nothing changed and he could go back to play-pretending a normal person's life.

“How much longer is he attempting to be?” Logan says glaring across the way at his friend’s back just as the other gives a theatrical wave of a hand. He clicks his tongue, checking his watch and his expression is decidedly neutral-annoyed.

“You know how he is,” the man in the van says with an equally displeased tone, before he places his headphones over his ears and focuses back on his screen. “Always has to make it a spectacle.”

Logan huffs impatiently.

“What does it matter? You got somewhere to be, Not-Arsonist?” Remus asks.

“Yes,” Logan says succinctly. “And both of you as well.”

“Ah right,” Remus draws out. “I’ve read this webcomic before. You’re the nice kind hearted government super agent that’s going to put the two of us in a nice little box for safekeeping. Except then safekeeping is never going to end and by the time we realize that we’re about to be lab rats for your government, there’ll be no escape. Boring. I think I’ll pass.”

Logan’s glare intensifies in a way that Roman hadn’t been sure it could: something about the sneer on his face spoke to already having the last of his patience worn through, but Remus’s specialty was finding nerves to dance. Logan doesn’t bother with a response to him—which is probably the only correct response—and instead stalks towards where his friend is talking to several police officers, with one hand on the shoulder of an exhausted teenager in a shock blanket.

Roman had briefly caught sight of Remus waving to them, and they’d done a shaky thumbs up in response, but now they looked fully out of it, in a way that Roman desperately wishes he could be as well.

“I’m going to run!” Remus calls to Logan’s retreating figure. But then when Logan doesn’t even turn to look at him, he proceeds to lean back against the truck and blow out a long breath as if he’d finished an exhaustive Olympics training regime for the sport of Being A Functioning Human.

“Alright, good he’s gone. We can talk now,” Remus says.

“We could talk in front of Logan, too,” Roman points out.

Remus frowns at the scenery around them instead of at Roman and mouths ‘Logan’ with a distaste that Roman didn’t think Remus was capable of, because Remus doesn’t have a distaste for anything. In the smoky moonlight Roman can make out the darkened edges of the bruising on his throat, and if he closes his eyes when his twin speaks he can make out the curling rasps of his tone. And yet Remus doesn’t seem the least bit impacted by any of what happened.

The Gas Station behind them is in flames, Remus was attacked, he almost died, and Remus is still holding his drawing tablet as if he’s going to start a Patreon Draw My Life Livestream. Roman’s stomach churns and he thinks he smells the interior of those subway tunnels again and for a second when Remus moves too slowly his skin has a leathery shine to it.

The nameless corpse under Cyra City shares no characteristics with Remus at all, but somehow his shadow looks exactly like it.

“You’re at first base with the government agents now?” Remus says finally.

Roman twists the lanyard around his fingers, tracing the frayed edges with the pad of his thumb. “Logan doesn’t want us dead. Is that where first base is now?”

“Maybe.”

“Look—” Roman starts and then stops because why the f*ck is he trying to defend himself to Remus? “You know what? No, Logan is a… Well, he’s not a bad guy! He’s a little weird and obviously has seen better days and pointed a gun at me, but I think I would too if arsonists were following me around!”

Because, yeah, Roman had gotten the briefest, bare bones explanation of what was going on. Logan was more averse to talking than several mimes that Roman had met, but Roman managed to tear enough scraps of information to put together somewhat of how the two of them had ended up in an apartment fire together.

Remus, as usual, steamrolls right by that part for the minor details.

“He pointed a gun at you?!”

Roman waves a hand towards the fiery remains of the Gas Station behind them and Remus stoutly refuses to acknowledge it at all. One of the cars in the line at the main road honks its horn impatiently at whoever is too busy watching the fire to drive forward. Remus’s fingers stretch and curl and his scraped knuckles sluggishly bleed through their fresh scabs.

“Look, we need to talk about Pat,” Roman says, giving up on the previous conversation. “Patton. Hart. From Bakersville.”

As if Remus wouldn’t know who he meant. Remus’s body is stock still, statuesque, silent, and dangerous. His gaze snaps away from the wild underbrush to flick over Roman’s face, looking for something that Roman can’t begin to imagine Remus wants to see right now. There's a scintilla of mania in his expression, glistening in his eyes with the reflections of the fire, popping like fireworks through the sanity in the way that Remus always has when Patton’s name gets spoken out loud.

As if Remus staked a possessive claim on the name of the boy they loved and left behind and lost.

“Logan and I discovered that—”

“I know,” Remus says over him. “I also found that one out. I thought I was hallucinating though. All these f*cking years? He’s gonna hate us.”

Roman frowns. “Wait… what? What do you think you know about Patton?”

Remus stares at him. “What do you think you know about Patton?”

Roman hesitates another long moment. “I think we gave him the ability to access the Mirror Realm before he died. Something about dragging him into there must have… altered him. He definitely had a reflection when we brought him back home the same way that Logan still had one when I dropped him off with the paramedics, but we didn’t see Patton after that day. He might have woken up the day after without one.”

Remus laughs sharply. Both his hands go up to tug at his pony tail sharply, picking at his hair tie like he’s tying off a noose.

“Remus,” Roman says again. “What do you know about Patton?”

Remus holds onto his thoughts for another long pause, grappling with words the same way he’d grapple with Butterball on the front lawn. His expression twists and warps and somersaults through emotions so fast that Roman nearly gets sick all over again just watching him.

“He’s not dead!” Remus blurts out.

The words rip through the air, socking Roman in the chest right where the largest of his collection of bruises was and Roman jerks back. “What? No. We saw his obituary.”

“Did we?” Remus asks. “Or did we get a copy of an online news article about the accident from Mom and Dad when we were six?”

Roman thinks he’s going to be sick.

“They wouldn’t,” Roman says. “They wouldn’t have lied about that.”

“Moved in the middle of the night,” Remus lists. “We wouldn’t stop asking to send things to him, to go visit him, and we knew the way back technically. We could have figured it out. They needed a reason for us not to want to return back there.”

“No.”

“Did you ever go visit his parents?” Remus presses. “Did you ever even consider it?”

“Who told you that he wasn’t dead?” Roman counters. “Did you see him?”

Remus hesitates then, spinning his stylus just to have something to do with his hands. “You remember Clay?”

Roman blinks long and slow. “You mean Pat’s older brother? The dickwad that used to break Pat’s toys and hold him underwater at the pool?”

Actually what Roman remembers most about Clay is that one time in the summer when he, Remus, and Patton were playing in at the playground: Roman as the valiant prince, Remus as the evil wizard, and Patton as the knight that was supposed to protect them both (somehow), and while they were in the middle of a dramatic fight with dragons, Clay had come over, smiled amicably, and asked Patton to come look at what he got.

And then Clay shoved a quarter-sized spider down Patton’s shirt.

“How are you supposed to protect anyone, Pity Patty?” Clay had laughed when Patton screamed. “You can’t even protect yourself!”

Roman remembers the sounds of Patton’s screams that day, the sound of Clay’s sh*tty laugh and the way he looked strolling away while Patton was sobbing on the ground with Remus and Roman trying to reassure him the spider was gone, and his skin was arachnid free and no that wasn’t just a silly joke, Pat, we need to tell your Mom.

He remembers Patton weakly brushing away his own tears, and saying that he didn’t want to get Clay in trouble and he remembers meeting Remus’s gaze and knowing both of them were thinking about being trouble for Clay next time they saw him.

If Roman hadn’t been so sure that Patton’s death was a freak accident, he could have been convinced with little to no actual effort on anyone else’s part, that Clay had had a hand in Patton’s unalivement. And now, Remus was staring at him with that serious, pained expression and telling him that Patton wasn’t even dead.

“Yeah,” Remus says. His hand vague motions to his bruised throat. “Clay’s still a little bitch, if you’re wondering.”

Understatement, Roman thinks. The plastic water bottle in his hands creaks as his grip tightens, and his eyes trace the hand shaped blobs of darkening skin. Remus wouldn’t mistake someone like that, someone from their history, someone who had been that close to him and hurting him. Clayton Hart had been there, and he’d tried killing Remus for no reason.

Roman sucks in a deep breath. “You saw him. He was part of the people attacking us… okay. Okay, but he…He told you Pat was still alive? He could have been lying. He’s… it's not like he was the kindest person in the world. He could have been saying whatever he could to get you distracted!”

“He wasn’t.”

“He could have!”

“Are you even listening to me?”

“It’s been sixteen years!”

“I know!” Remus snarls. “I know, Roman, you motherf*cking dipsh*t! I’ve been grieving for him too! You weren’t the only one who lost a friend! Clay tried to kill me and as he was doing it he was saying some f*cked up thing about fixing Pat, like we’d gave him some type of lethal STD all those years ago and only our blood would make a cure!”

Roman’s mouth is dry. He thinks he wants to throw up, he thinks he wants to look away, he thinks and thinks and thinks and Remus is so certain. How can he be so certain? “You would believe Mom and Dad lied to us before you would believe that Clayton Hart did?”

Remus taps on his tablet. “Yeah,” he says. “I guess I would.”

The stifling smoky air bristles itches across his face. Roman threads the lanyard of keys through his fingers again and again and again. Mom and Dad didn’t have a reason to lie to them; they knew so little about what happened to Clay after the move that Roman couldn’t imagine he had a reason to tell the truth. The exhaustion from his day is settling in his bones like a weight and Remus’s stare is not making it easier to breathe.

They’d always been united when it came to Patton. They’d always been each other’s shoulder to cry on when it came to his death day anniversary. It was the one thing they could share without tearing each other to shreds.

And now the only thing he and Remus can agree on is that someone, at sometime, had lied to them about their best friend.

Remus looks away first. “You don’t believe me.”

“I’m….” Roman struggles. “I need evidence.”

“Well, we have a pretty simple way to get that don’t we?” Remus says, nastily.

Roman stares at him until he motions with his drawing tablet towards the van. From the angle he’s at, he can see the other guy—the one with the computer whom Logan hadn’t even bothered to introduce. He’s balanced precariously on the seat, knees pressed against the seat in front of him, head bobbing to music as his eyes zip back and forth over the screen, and his teeth chewing on his bottom lip.

“Hacker,” Remus sings.

“No,” Roman says. “Absolutely not.”

“Bat your eyes at him.”

“It won’t work!”

“Smile.”

“Remus!”

Remus’s face reads trust me, I know what I’m doing, and Roman did not make it all the way through high school chemistry class by trusting that expression. But the plethora of noises Roman makes telling him to abort are immediately taken as a challenge.

“HEY!” Remus raps against the outside of the van, and the poor guy inside yelps, nearly tossing his computer as he falls off the chair and dislodges his headphones from his ears. Remus grins with all his teeth. “Faker, pause on the League for a moment—”

“What is your f*ck problem?” The guy hisses out, sitting up straight again, and steading his laptop, so that the screen is not in their line of vision, which is absolutely fine: Roman does not want to know maybe-secret-government secrets even if Remus’s mouth is opening to ask about them. Roman elbows Remus out of the way before he offends the guy even more.

First day of school, Roman thinks, despite himself. Just moved to the area, wants to be friends.

He smiles, bright and cheerful and the guy’s shoulders twitch with tension, his fingers picking at the earmuff of his headphones.

“Hi,” Roman says, pretending he didn’t see the obvious signs of distress on the guy’s face. “I’m Roman. This is my twin Remus. I don’t think we got your name.”

The guy narrows his eyes at them. “Virgil.”

“Virgil! A classic,” Roman compliments. “Dante’s inferno?”

“Author of the Aenid,” Virgil says, sharply. “My parents met in a Latin class. What do you want?”

“We—” Roman ignores Remus needling his side, “—were wondering what it is that you do for… uh… the government.”

Virgil lets out a breathy sigh, long and slow, as if he’s forcefully resetting his heart rate. He turns back in his seat to his computer, returning to typing as though Roman hadn’t flashed his best charming smile or asked anything of him.

Remus mouths something that Roman can’t quite understand as he leans against the side of the van with his arms crossed. Roman knows his brother enough to know that it was insulting and he should probably be spluttering about it, but he settles for shooting him a glare and kicking his shoe.

“Agent Ekans likes the term… I think he calls it “Asset Appropriation”,” Virgil says, finally, pausing in his typing with one hand to emphasize the phrase with finger quotation marks and without looking at them. “I am the Asset Appropriator.”

“So you’re a thief!” Remus says excitedly, leaning forward to see him again. “Computer thief! What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever stolen?”

Roman smacks him but there’s the ghost of a smile on Virgil’s face and his eyes shift to Remus for a good half second at the question.

“Before Agent Ekans caught me, I made a fortune off of stealing campaign funds, blackmailing, and framing politicians for unsavory acts. You know Cassius McMan?”

Roman blinks in surprise at the name. He did vaguely recognize the politician that announced an intention to run for president and then subsequently—nearly over night—had his entire reputation torn apart by reporters who found letters about him planning to systematically endorse a genocide in another country. Despite the man’s claims that the evidence was fabricated, the news wouldn’t let it go and every attempt for the man to campaign ended in disaster until he dropped entirely from the running. As far as Roman knew, the man had crawled into a decent size hole in an unknown location to die.

Virgil’s eyes are sharp and his smirk is vicious.

“You did that?” Roman says.

“I gave him a thirty day warning about it,” Virgil says easily. “He thought I was bluffing.”

Remus whistles. “I almost voted for him!”

“Yeah well,” Virgil clicks his tongue. “I didn’t have to fabricate too much for that. He really was planning on trying to get the country involved in a war. Felt good to see my work on the 5 o’clock news though. Sucks that I barely got to see any of it before Agent Ekans was kicking down my door. Dick.”

Through the familiarity by which Virgil refers to the mysterious Agent Ekans, Roman can surmise that must be the name of the blond man who all but ignored the rest of them. He did seem to have some sort of complex about him, something similar to Logan’s I-know-better-than-you but more… You’ll-regret-not-befriending-me. Logan, at least, would consider how many people would die if he pressed a button; Agent Ekans moved in such a way Roman felt like he’d press the button just to see if it worked multiple times.

Virgil, who’s so high strung that he spooked with a knock on the van door, did not seem like a good companion to someone like him.

“So you got caught by him, and now you work for him?” Roman asks.

Virgil gives a short, ceremonial laugh. “Ha. Work for. That’s a good one.”

He erases a line of code for whatever he’s doing and huffs out a breath, raising a hand to adjust the earmuff of his bulky headphones. In the harsh light of his screen his chipped nail polish shifts colors from black to purple to grey.

“Look, level with me, do you need something from me?” Virgil asks. “Agent Ekans is going to be extremely annoying if I don’t get this done before he comes back.”

“Can you look something up?” Roman says.

Virgil’s eyes flick to him, deep and dark and suspicious. “Depends. What is it?”

“Patton Hart,” Remus and Roman say together.

Virgil chews on the inside of his cheek for a moment, then he leans back to glance through the windshield at Janus. He taps a finger on his headphones three more times as he debates it and then turns back to them with a resigned look. He opens another tab.

“Give me a date of birth and a location to start.”

Remus pumps his fist.

Watching Virgil work is…interesting. Roman thinks for a moment that it’s like watching Remus design a background for his comic: he types fast and flicks through tabs quicker, he reads, hums, copies, pastes, checks links, doubles back, new tab, new webpage—nothing looks like it means anything as he does it but slowly a pattern emerges and Roman almost wants to gasp in awe at it.

Virgil leans back and at once Roman understands he finished the summary report on the kid who’s been haunting them for years.

It took five minutes. Only five minutes.

“Died six years old,” Virgil says, impersonal and boredly.

“How?” Remus says.

“Got a few mixed reports. Parents posted online that it was a car crash. Couldn’t find an incident report though. Local newspaper said it was an accident. Looked into the hospitals and they have him checked into the ER and similarly discharged a few hours later, but the digital medical report is missing as if it was never registered. There’s a headstone in the cemetery where the kid grew up but parent’s finances don’t look like they bought a coffin or had any real funeral expenses. Actually….oh, something about this is really f*cked.”

“How f*cked?” Roman asks.

Virgil glances up at them both. “How do you know this kid again?”

They both stare at him.

Virgil obviously debates pressing the question, but then decides it must not matter that much. Roman doesn’t quite untense his shoulders— because that would require that he not feel like vomiting— but he does welcome the tiny breeze of relief from not being forced to admit it all.

“Look, I’m no analyst,” Virgil says, closing out all the tabs. Patton’s beaming kindergarten photo blinks out of existence and something in Roman cracks in a way that it should very much not. “Their bank accounts show someone is paying a monthly sum over two thousand to them, which started the day before the reported death and it only stopped this month. It should have been paid like four hours ago but nothing came through. It looks, to me, like someone did a cover up here, and the contract only finished recently. Likely the parents sold the kid and didn’t want anyone to go looking too closely for him. Happens. Sorry the world sucks ass—”

“There’s no way!” Remus blurts out, loud enough that even Roman flinches and steps back from him.

He’s trembling, Roman realizes a moment later. His hands which are normally twiddling, fidgeting, twitching with the need to do something, are curled into brick fists on the edges of his drawing tablet, his knuckles white. Roman remembers how chipped and broken his nails are and can't help but think he might be driving them into the screen with how tightly he’s restraining himself. With a jerk, he looks up into his twin’s face and sees the same six-year-old who’d been told halfway across the state that they weren’t going to school that day, and instead they were moving.

“Look,” Virgil says, with a hint of irritation in his tone and the start of a lecture that will make Roman vomit.

“No,” Remus cuts him off. “This isn’t some sh*tty Wattpad Fanfiction where his parents sold him to One Direction! They were hella Catholic— death-before-divorce, Sunday is the lord’s day, you’re born into a guilt trip and you’re going to burn in Hell— There’s no f*cking way that they would have been able to justify selling their son and faking his death!”

Virgil rolls his tongue over the back of his teeth and the traces of him humoring them leak right out of his body as if they’d never been there. Painfully, he looks a lot more like Logan and the blond guy now: stoic and bored and so used to—too used to— bad things like this.

He’s looking at Remus the same way that Logan looked at Roman when Roman had been trying to figure out how his last hook up had turned out to be a part of a terrorist agency that had just been looking to get their hands on his DNA. Like Remus and Roman are being difficult by trying to imagine that there’s another way for all of this to make sense.

Patton Hart is dead. Virgil said it himself. Checking this stuff is his job.

But it took five minutes and Virgil even said something was getting covered up and Remus isn’t wrong when he says that there’s no way that Patton’s ultra religious parents would have just…accepted money in exchange for their precious son.

“The obit,” Remus says tensely. “You went through all the obits online right? The Bakersburg Times has been online since before we were born. They should have had a copy online.”

Virgil’s eyes narrow. “Where is this going?”

Remus pries his fingers off his drawing tablet and rips the chest pocket of his leather jacket open, and drags out a beaten and worn piece of paper. “Did you see this paper exactly?”

Roman jolts at the sight of the obituary clipping in Remus’s hand. The gray and black photo of Patton from his sixth birthday party beams back at him, cake icing on his cherub cheeks, and sparkling angelic eyes revealing the sugar high he’d been on all day. The picture is so happy, so loving, so excited that it makes the words underneath feel emotionless and cruel, with great sorrow to announce, car crash, will be missed.

Virgil snorts, reaching out to feel the paper, rubbing the ink right over Patton’s neck. “What is this? Printer paper? Who wrote this? It’s wordy as all hell…Wait, wait, are you trying to tell me you think that this is real? No way. There’s way too much detail about the way that the crash happened! And right here… there were no funeral services. Why write about fake funeral services that didn’t happen? The font’s the wrong type for The Bakersburg Times, the size is wrong too, the picture has an added border and—” Virgil holds his thumbs up on either side of the paper like he’s going to rip it in half, but when Remus jerks it back, he rolls his eyes. “—chill. Look, it's not properly centered. No newspaper would allow that format to go through to printing or posting online.

“This is all wrong. Take it from someone who reads obits all the time: whoever wrote this wasn’t writing this piece as a memory to your friend. The sole purpose of this was to make whoever read it convinced that your friend died.” Virgil shrugs and leans back again. He frowns after another second, “And…where did you get this?”

Roman’s mouth is filled with sawdust. He’s staring at Remus and Remus is looking back at him and the sugary sweet picture of Patton in his hands suddenly is bitterly acrid. Roman feels faint, like the world is spinning out of control and Roman’s the only one who’s noticing. Despite Remus having been right—Mom and Dad lied, they lied to them about Patton, they lied and Roman believed them— Remus doesn’t look vindicated.

He looks sick.

“I’m impressed!” A voice says from behind them, condescending and patronizing in a way that makes Roman physically jerk away. “If you had time to make friends, you must have finished scrubbing the footage for me, haven’t you, Virgil dearest?”

Despite his pomp and flash, the blond man had been utterly silent creeping up behind them, walking in that same eerie soft footed pattern that Logan had. It takes Roman a breath to calm himself from the fight-or-flight that the tone immediately activates in him: Roman’s been looked down on by many people in his life especially in when he dabbled in theater and competed for main roles or when other college students learned he was from Hicksville, Farmtown, but something about the way that Logan’s acquaintance speaks makes the inside of Roman’s guts feel like tar.

Virgil swears under his breath, shoving the clipping back at them, as he yanks his laptop back to a comfortable position. The little bit of personality that had unknowingly shown through his concealer immediately buries itself again, as he hunches his shoulders like a child who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

Roman remembers suddenly that Virgil had bitterly said Agent Ekans is going to be extremely annoying if I don’t get this done before he comes back.

“You know this isn’t my f*cking expertise, right?” Virgil says. “It’s going to take some time. Sir.”

“Ah but you were chatting so casually, I thought you must have been looking for other work to do,” the blond man says, eyeing his nails boredly. It looks like even being out of a school building for a whole fourteen hours now, Roman managed to get someone in trouble with the teacher.

“Get back to work, Virgil,” the man says. “Unless you’d like to revisit the terms of your contract.”

Virgil dives into his work again, miserably compliant.

The man eyes Roman up and down and then does the same to Remus. Normally Roman would be flattered, but something about his gaze feels more like a razorblade tracing his form, searching for a weakness to dig into without a care for even pretending to have mercy. The hair on the back of Roman’s neck prickles, and even Remus straightens and half shuffles so he’s in front of Virgil.

The man clicks his tongue. In a fluid movement he pulls out a wallet, and flicks it open.

“Agent Janus Ekans,” he says, with the same sort of politeness that live grenades tended to have. “I’m from TSS. Threat Surveillance and Strategies. My job is making sure civilians such as yourself don’t know about my people and live long happy lives completely oblivious to world ending events.”

Roman, despite himself, is amazed. The badge—complete with a very official looking photo of Janus from two years back, his name, and a string of numbers that Roman wouldn’t know what to do with even if he could remember them—shines in the moonlight, as if polished and worshiped daily. Shield shaped, with a wings-spread eagle overlay, an american flag in its talons, and navy blue lettering spelling out Janus’s job as a supervisor. The words Threat Surveillance and Strategies suddenly seem like weighty organization, instead of just words Logan said back when he was trying to decide if shooting Roman was the correct move or not.

“Can I lick it?” Remus asks.

Janus snaps his badge closed and pockets it again, thin lips in a thin smile that matches his thinning patience.

“Where’s Logan?” Roman asks, glancing around for the spy.

“Classified.”

“Is that shorthand for you don’t know?”

“It’s shorthand for Classified. Filed under the term Classified. To be referred to by Classified.” Janus says. “Now that your superfluous questions are out of the way, let’s discuss what your future looks like.”

Roman might not be able to identify one of these evil guys that are trying to kill him on sight, but damn him if he doesn’t immediately know that this is some type of verbal trap laced with impaling spikes and lava.

“I’d like Logan here for this,” Roman says.

Janus simpers. “I’m sure you would.”

Despite the way the words sound, Roman has the sneaking suspicion that talking to him is not going to be like talking to Logan. Roman’s brief conversations with the spy were like pulling teeth, but Roman is almost certain that talking to Janus is about to be like getting a root canal done.

“Alright!” Remus says boldly fearless. “I’ll play! Our future involves my brother and I peacing the f*ck out of here, seeing as you people brought the ninja super soldiers to us. You can provide us with three hundred in cash, and a cell phone and we’ll be on our merry way, and you can get back to sucking your own dick.”

Roman is very aware of how quiet it is: that Virgil’s hands have frozen on the keys, and he’s not looking at them but they are the sole focus of his attention, either in shock that Remus had the audacity to say that with a straight face or horror that Janus is going to finish the job that Clay started. The air simmers, boils, and bubbles until Roman’s almost certain one of them is going to spontaneously catch on fire, but the idea of moving away would require Roman’s legs functioning.

Then after an eternity, Janus laughs. Soft and enchanting and just a bit on the theatrical side, as though he’d practiced his smile and tone and happiness in the mirror before showing it to them and was expecting to be complimented on how genuine he made a fake emotion seem. Roman, an actor at heart, can’t tell if he’s real or fake and it makes him feel trapped in a way that conversations have never made him feel.

“Oh dear, please forgive me!” Janus says. “I think I just heard you state that you expect me to allow you and your brother— both of whom have magical powers and are being hunted for to the same extent as the Fountain of Youth was— to go off on your own!”

“Well, I sure would like to know how you plan on stopping us,” Remus says, and Roman wants to cover his mouth and drag him away. “If you shoot my kneecaps you’ll have to carry me wherever you want me to go, dickface!”

“Sounds pleasant,” Janus responds. “Would you like your left or your right first?”

“Can we please not joke about that?” Roman asks.

“Who’s joking?” Remus says at the same time as Janus, and grins delightedly with Janus’s lip curls.

“Now, to clarify, because the two of you don’t seem to have quite cottoned on to the situation,” Janus continues, “Your rights as American citizens are null and void. I am not the police, I do not have to offer any explanation to you, there is no limit on the amount of time I can have you detained for, I do not have to provide any necessities to you including but not limited to: food, water, shelter, clothes—”

“You want to take my clothes?” Remus cuts in, reaching for his belt and loosening the buckle. “If you insist! But just so you know I usually charge fifty bucks up front for this type of roleplaying!”

Janus’s gun tears from his holster and directs itself right in between Remus’s eyes, steady and certain and level. Roman’s entire body freezes rigidly, staring at the barrel of the weapon inches from his twin’s face, inches from Remus’s nose, inches from and won’t miss even if Janus’s finger slips accidentally.

Roman is back in a grocery store. Roman is crouched next to a stand of apples. Roman is staring at the blank space where a mirror had been and smelling corpses that don’t have names.

“Make another movement and I will put you down like a dog,” Janus says clinically. “I do not require both of you to answer my questions. Do you understand?”

Remus’s mouth quirks upwards. “Feeling threatened, Dr. Facilier?”

“I said, Do You Understand?”

“He understands!” Roman says. “Christ, he f*cking understands! What is wrong with you?!”

Janus doesn’t even look at him. “I’d like to hear him say it himself.”

Remus’s tongue rolls in his mouth, peeking out just to wet his lips and Roman thinks he’s going to implode watching his twin stall for time against something that can and will kill him instantly. He wants to play chicken with a man who just explained away an entire gas station, with a wave of his hand; if he could do that, would it even take a spoken word to have Remus’s body ignored, buried, covered up?

There’s a body in a subway tunnel that looks nothing like Remus at all, but Roman’s heart is thudding in his throat, strangling all the words he wants to say.

“I understand,” Remus says finally.

“Excellent.” Janus makes no move to lower his gun. “As I was saying. You are now under the care and protection of TSS. Your wants are trivial at best so I suggest you leave them in the flaming ruins of this Gas Station. When I give an order you will follow it to the letter to the best of your ability. If you chose not to, attempt not to, or go directly against my order, we can revisit the previous conversation, also known as the Minimum Twin Requirement.”

“Hey dickf*ck, talking over the phone is not going to cut it for the conversation we need to have with our parents.”

“Then you won’t be having it.”

“Yeah, sure, cool,” Remus says. “Anyway, Ro, if you’ve got the keys, let’s just f*cking go already. Unless of course, you want to bring Regina George home to meet the parents.”

Remus pauses after his own statement and Roman absolutely gets a horrible feeling in his gut when he doesn’t snicker at his own joke. Instead, his twin chews on the not-really-a-suggestion, as if he’s actually considering putting Secret Agent Janus Ekans in the same room with their mother and her chickens.

“Remus,” Roman says.

“What?” Remus asks. “It would be funny!”

“The fastest way is through the Mirror Realm,” Roman says. “And as fun as a piggy back ride sounds, I’m pretty sure both of them would bite as a warning about physical contact!”

Janus’s face reads very blatantly that Roman is not far off. Just from the way he holds himself, Roman can imagine that having to depend on any of them—Logan included— would be too demeaning for him to stomach; if one of them didn’t drop him, Janus would likely jump off their backs into the Mirror Realm ocean-floor-mesophase-thing.

“What if….” Roman says but Remus already knows what he’s going to say and is shaking his head. Roman grimaces. “One of us can go with Logan as our escort and the other can stay here?”

“That won’t be happening, either,” Janus says.

Remus scoffs. “Again, why are you getting an opinion on what either of us do? First, you’re not my dom so stop trying to order me around, and second, this control freak nature is a huge red flag! It's probably why you don’t get laid, actually! Have you thought of that? I need a f*cking safeword around you. What do you think about ‘Mango’?”

Virgil laughs, and then tries to stifle himself by asphyxiation when Janus whips around to face him.

“What?” Virgil says. “My contract says nothing about finding things funny.”

The withering glare sent towards him makes him hunch over, like they’d just started acting in a commercial for weed killer and Virgil was a particularly innocent purple dandelion. Remus bristles, his shoulders shifting like he was going to tackle Janus right then and there and show him the type of moves he learned from wrestling a Great Pyrenees that vastly outweighed and overpowered him on the daily.

Roman isn’t sure that it would hold up against a bullet, and definitely doesn’t want to find out what Remus sounds like when he’s wheezing through an extra hole in his abdomen.

“I believe that’s enough,” Logan says and Roman nearly weeps in relief. Logan steps out of the side view mirror of the truck and Virgil’s eyes grow wide watching his movements—awkward and unbalanced like a newborn fawn trying to stand for the first time— with a dropped jaw. Logan steadies himself on the solid floor again, and adjusts the cuffs of the new gloves he must have changed into.

Actually everything he’s wearing is new: gone are the scrubs and doctor’s coat and sneakers and even the compartment belt; instead he’s chosen a very flattering set of black combat attire, boots with thick soles and steel toes, reinforced padding around his knees and thighs, a new belt with a gun holster on his left side, and a knife holster on his right, a kevlar chest piece over and undershirt that hugs his…very apparent biceps that Roman is now very aware of. So aware of.

Remus nudges him hard under his ribs where someone definitely got a hit in before and Roman yelps out a swear.

“Wonderful. The other one I wanted to talk to,” Janus says primly, ignoring Remus and Roman as though they’re no longer interesting or important. Roman thinks he should be insulted, but mostly he’s just aware that the gun in Janus’s hands has drifted away from Remus’s head and back towards its holster.

“I informed you that I was securing the perimeter,” Logan says.

“You took Ghost?”

Logan clicks his tongue. “Of course not. Who do you take me for?”

“A man who has been out of contact for two weeks and now has appeared to have magical superpowers that only our enemies have had. Are you telling me one of Dumb-and-Dumber has bequeathed them to you?”

“I theorized it is a side effect of having been introduced to the…” Logan squints with a displeased expression, almost as though he’s reading aloud a section from a textbook and had to physically force himself to relay the next part, “Mirror Realm, as they call it.”

The hair on the back of Roman’s neck prickles. The unease in the air stiffles each of Roman’s inhales until even Virgil looks up from his computer to see if he needs to evacuate the area as fast as possible.

Remus spins his stylus around his fingers again, silently persistent in the movement, but he’s just as engrossed in the conversation as Roman and Virgil are. There’s a certain stillness to his body that Roman understands instinctively: like a predator watching his prey, Remus’s eyes flick between Logan and Janus and the empty space between them, waiting for the wrong thing to be said.

Janus has a smile on his face that would be pleasant if anyone else were wearing it.

“Mirror Realm. That’s clever,” he says because he absolutely does not think it’s clever. “Assuming you’re telling the truth, just being in there is not enough. I was in there, but I still have my frankly gorgeous looks and charming smile and camera personality.”

“Perhaps it has a delayed reaction,” Logan says.

“Or that this Mirror Realm is not a trigger and you are lying to me.”

“Or I am not lying and you are insistent on believing the worst of everyone around you.”

“Are you compromised, Logan?”

“Why are you asking a question that has no correct answer? Ask me if I’ve had more than four hours of sleep in the past two days if you want to know my mental well being.”

“Yes or No.”

“No.”

“Is it possible—,” Roman cuts in, fully completely prepared for the way that Janus’s glare cuts through the air when he turns to look at him, “—that you’re both wrong? Not talking about being compromised or whatever edgy bullsh*t both of you are on. But in terms of this power that Logan now has: maybe Logan got it because it has to deal with the amount of time you spent exposed. I had to carry him for at least a few minutes, which is not an easy task because he’s just a wall of muscle!”

Remus makes a face at him, wiggling his eyebrows in a way that makes Roman want to throw the rest of his water bottle at him.

“An extended period of time in another dimension,” Logan muses. “The power transferred through…what? The respiratory system? Would that truly be enough?”

“Does it qualify as another dimension?” Roman says. “I always just called it an extension of our own.”

Logan tilts his head in thought. “Explain.”

“Dimension is just a clarification of the minimum number of coordinates needed to define a point,” Roman says. “We live in a three dimensional world; the fourth dimension is time and we’ve already observed that there’s no noticeable time variation. Fifth dimension would be stemmed from time at the right angle: imagining like copies of this moment—”

“—Where we would observe copies of ourselves, entertaining the very same conversation,” Logan finishes in agreement. “I had forgotten you mentioned you were a physics major. I suppose it makes sense that you would spend a lot of time thinking about this.”

“Do you even hear yourself right now?! Both of you!?” Janus explodes. “You were fundamentally changed at a molecular level! Logan, you’re not even human anymore! And you’re focused on debating if it's another dimension or not?!”

Logan blinks, and even Roman cringes slightly at the viciousness coming from the other man. Janus stares at them, shaking with an anger so visceral that there’s almost actual steam wafting off him. His eyes, sharp and cold and lethal, pin them both in place, but for just a second Roman can see the slight wash of desperation underneath. An actor portraying a role as if he could use the persona as a meat shield to protect himself from a horrible truth.

Janus stares at Logan as if he’s pleading with him to take it all back without daring to say a word.

“Janus,” Logan says, confused. “I’m still me.”

“Are you?”

Logan doesn’t seem to have an answer to that. Roman doesn’t think he can breathe, afraid a single inhale will draw Janus’s ire back to him and Janus will decide that a revenge can be had through the man that absolutely only tried to help, and ended up f*cking up Logan’s life instead. Janus could be well on his way to joining them: losing his humanity and becoming something other. Roman and Remus had lived an entire life like this, but for someone who flashed their smile with as much confidence as Janus did….would he be able to stomach the sudden lack of attention?

He was everything Roman had dreamed of being: pretty, bold, confident, charming. It was apparent from the amount of time he’d spent with the newscrews that the cameras loved him and he knew it. The reporters had hung off his every word, the police officers listening to each order without hesitation. How could Janus survive losing all of that?

((How could Roman survive seeing him lose all of that?))

“Not to break up the drama,” Remus says. “But I don’t think breathing in the Mirror Realm is enough to make you as cool as us.”

“He’s got a point,” Virgil agrees, quiet and then louder when no one immediately bites at him for speaking, although Janus seems to be glaring lasers at his throat. “If breathing it in were enough, Anamorphosis would be creating armies every hour. But since you guys are still able to fend them off, there’s gotta be another component to making…ghostified soldiers? Is that what we’re calling them?”

“Enemy combatants,” Janus says snippity.

Virgil rolls his eyes. “Whatever. Who cares. Point is, either Anamorphosis is making a billion of them and they’re dying within the hour, which means Logan’s f*cked, or there’s something about what happened with Logan that didn’t happen with Agent Ekans.”

Both Logan and Janus’s expressions sour like they’re sucking on salt crusted lemons and not because they wanted to be.

“So we’re back to square one,” Roman says. “How did we transfer the powers between us? What causes the powers? And….how did this Metamorphosis group get them?”

“And guess f*cking what,” Remus crows victoriously. “There are two people who likely know all those answers, and my brother and I have to go talk to them anyway!”

Logan raises an eyebrow. “Your parents, I assume? You believe that they know more than they told you?”

“Only way to find out is to f*cking talk to them,” Remus says. “The more time we spend debating this, the more time your bad guys have to set up a royal f*ckening for all of us. So how about this? Logan, Ro, and I go question our parents, and you two try to figure out what the bad guys' next move is. And then we’ll meet back up and figure out what the hell to do to f*ck them sideways with a corkscrew right up their asses and find our maybe-not-dead friend. Sound good? Great, glad you agree. Man, that was a lot less hard than you were acting like it was Jannie boy.”

It does not sound good actually. Janus is about to have an aneurysm just from hearing Remus speak, but Remus is already straightening his jacket and heading towards their father’s pick truck like he didn’t even need to bother with anyone else’s opinion. Roman half expects him to draw his gun and shoot out Remus’s kneecaps right then and there, boom and boom, and then dragging Remus back to the van uncaring of the twin streaks of blood that would trail after him for his trouble.

Virgil’s lips are in a straight line, pursed and unlikely to voice any deterrent and risk getting caught in the line of fire between Janus and Remus. But Logan is tilting his head consideringly. The exhaustion clinging to his limbs shadows his long blinks, but as Roman watches he comes to a personal decision and straightens himself, shedding all expression besides the business professional one.

“We’ve been behind Anamorphosis all this time because of a lack of information,” Logan says, likely to assuage Janus’s fury. “This could be a lead enough to put us ahead of them for once.”

“Or it could be a waste of time and resources and an unnecessary division of our forces,” Janus hisses.

“We might not get another chance if we do not go now,” Logan counters.

Janus closes his eyes, and tilts his head back as though he’s praying to a god. Roman would believe it, if all of his interactions with the guy hadn’t already confirmed that Janus was allergic to being under someone else’s authority. It’s another tense second, before he exhales slightly and waves a hand in dismissal to both him and Logan.

“Go,” he says. “I expect all three of you back in eight hours on the dot. I don’t care if you have to learn necromancy to raise one of you from the dead for it.”

“Great,” Roman says, raising the lanyard with the keys to their father’s truck. “I guess I’ll drive, then.”