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“Roman!”
Virgil’s voice echoed through the mindscape, the dark tone thankfully overpowering the sound of Remus’s rancorous laughter long enough for Janus to easily sink the two of them out and back into his own room.
Remus collapsed in a fit of wheezing giggles onto the black carpeting, clutching his sides as his eyes bulged out of his head.
“Don’t forget to breathe.” Janus quipped, despite the very obvious smile on his own face.
Remus took a couple more minutes to calm his laughter, rolling back and forth on Janus’s floor as he caught his breath. “Did you see his face, JJ? Redder than a sliced carotid!” Remus descended into giggles again and Janus couldn’t contain the chuckle rising in his chest any longer.
“It certainly was a sight, wasn’t it?” Janus lowered himself to the floor, sitting beside Remus’s head as the other side stared up at the ceiling.
Remus grinned crookedly, rolling over and pressing his cheek against Janus’s thigh, squishing his face up in a rather adorable way. “You are a genius, putting all that glitter in there, JJ!”
Janus could feel his cheeks begin to warm. Turning his face so that Remus wouldn’t see the embarrassing pink on his cheeks, Janus replied. “A simple distraction. Virgil would never expect for you to make a glitter bomb over a slime bomb.” His yellow eye glanced down to meet Remus’s ever changing irises sparkling up at him like a 1990s anime character.
“Simple for you, Snakey! Now Roman is gonna get it and Emo will never know we got him!” Remus scooted himself closer, resting his head fully on Janus’s lap now.
Janus’s mouth felt dry, as though he had been bitten by a cottonmouth. “Your brother likely won’t even question facing Virgil’s wrath, it was a simple enough plan.” Janus looked down again to find his fingers carding through Remus’s unruly hair, gently untangling it as he went. Something squeezed painfully in his chest. When had this begun?
Remus snorted, a rather unattractive sound for anyone else that Janus realized with a start sounded adorable coming from the Duke. “We make a good team, JJ.”
And then, then, Remus smiled up at him with that wide, crooked grin that he managed to sport just perfectly, his eyes scrunching up at the corners, and reached out with fingers coated in chipped neon green nail polish. And stroked the scales along the side of Janus’s face. It seemed to be an absent-minded thing, as most things were when it came to Remus. The Duke didn’t even seem to realize what he had just done, he simply smiled that pleased little smile. Janus’s heart did graceless somersaults in his chest before falling down to the pit of his stomach as the realization hit him fast and hard.
Oh.
Oh, fuck it all.
----
Janus’s eyes were trained on the leather of his shoes as they paced across the black shag carpeting that Remus had been leaning against him so carelessly on just a few days ago.
Simply reimagining the scene was enough to make Janus’s face screwed up in distaste, even as a flurry of fluttering started in his gut. Janus clenched his gloved fists at his sides.
Since when had spending time with Remus gone from frustrating and irritating to… This?
Janus couldn’t even remember the in between period. As far back as he could remember Remus had always been some level of annoying. Perhaps… Perhaps that had never changed? Perhaps other feelings had just grown in alongside the usual annoyance and…
Janus shook his head and stopped his pacing.
It wasn’t that his newly discovered feelings were bad, per se. No, internalized denial would actually be better for the embodiment of Deceit than what was really happening. The real issue with having feelings for Remus was that Janus didn’t know how to deal with emotions of this kind at all.
As, well, Deceit, his first instinct was to act as though he had never realized these feelings in the first place. To simply continue interacting with Remus as he usually did until the emotions either subsided or rotted away as a secret.
However, as soon as that solution crossed his mind, so did the image of Remus’s face as he gently touched Janus’s scales, completely open and not even a bit disgusted, and Janus knew that lying would not be the way out of this situation. Which meant only one thing.
“I have a question.” Janus stated as he rose up gracefully in the shadowy corner of Patton’s room.
Virgil and Patton flew apart, as though they were two teenagers caught in the middle of a make out session rather than two fully grown men in a six month old relationship that had been caught merely holding hands.
Virgil hissed, and Janus did his best to not let his hackles raise at the noise. He reminded himself that it was simply Virgil’s involuntary fight or flight reflex, and not an indication of a burning hatred for Janus.
“Janus!” Patton’s face was flushed, and Janus suppressed the urge to roll his eyes. “I… I wasn’t expecting you.”
“Really? I sent my RSVP a week ahead of time…”
“What do you want, Janus?” Virgil’s voice was still harsh with the remnants of his adrenaline rush. Janus managed once again to not react physically, but this time, Patton nudged his boyfriend in the side, and Virgil corrected himself. “We were kinda busy.” He murmured in a softer tone, his cheeks red.
Janus wondered for a moment why exactly he had come here. Then, of course, he remembered how if he was back in his room right then, it was very likely that Remus would burst in at any moment, hair and eyes wild, his high pitched voice ringing in Janus’s ears at about a hundred words a second, and his stomach filled with fizzy bubbles.
“You said you had a question, kiddo?” Patton smiled reassuringly, tilting his head with a look of overwhelmingly patient understanding on his freckled face.
“I’m not your kiddo.” Janus responded reflexively, before quickly continuing. It wouldn’t do to discourage the very sides that he was coming to for advice. Even if it was his own reflexes, he wasn’t likely to get as much leeway as Virgil, even though he and the others happened to be on better terms as of late. “It is about… Remus.”
Patton’s smile wavered but only for a second. Janus wasn’t quite sure whether it was in response to the snipe about Patton’s fatherly actions, or the mention of Remus. Either way, Patton straightened himself up until he was sitting criss-cross-applesauce and patted the now empty space on the comforter before him, inviting Janus to sit.
Janus didn’t hesitate, stepping forward and climbing onto the bed.
“What about Remus, JJ?” Patton scooched over, and beside him, Virgil followed suit, though he looked a bit more put out about it. Bright pairs of eyes watched him from behind sparkling clean glasses and from underneath purple bangs.
Janus breathed deeply, knotting his gloved hands in his life. He knew that he had no reason to be so oddly nervous. Virgil and Patton certainly had no right to judge, not when they had taken such convoluted routes in their own romantic relationship. Besides, Patton was all about emotional vulnerability, and Virgil was all about pleasing Patton.
So, obviously, Janus straightened his back and decided to give the question a straight answer. “I do not believe that I have developed romantic feelings for him.”
Or, as straight an answer as the embodiment of Deceit could manage in such a time.
There was a moment of quiet. Janus was half sure that he could hear Roman singing two rooms waya in the dead silence.
Suddenly, the calm was broken by a high pitched squeal originating from the freckled side on the bed. Just before Janus was sure that Patton was about to pass out from a lack of oxygen, Virgil spoke.
“You what?” His eyes were wide, the dark semicircles of eyeshadows paired with his shell shocked expression really did make him look like a raccoon caught in the headlights of a speeding car. “You and- and Remus? Remus Sanders? Remus Creativity Sanders?”
Janus sent Virgil a withering glare. “No, a different Remus, of course.”
“I just- I never thought that you and Remus Sanders-”
Janus bristled, but before he got a chance to defend--himself? Remus?--Patton elbowed his boyfriend lightly in the ribs.
“What Virgil is saying is that this is great! Oh, you and Remus would be so cute together-” Patton’s eyes sparkled as he began to ramble and Janus pondered his words.
Cute. The word made his stomach twist in a way that wasn’t at all pleasant. Nothing that he and Remus had done could ever be considered cute. He and Remus would never be caught dead feeding each other cookie dough in the middle of the afternoon like Patton and Virgil did. Or cuddle in plain sight like Logan and Roman. Sure, the ideas on their own weren’t all that awful, but the connotations…
“Yes, yes,” Janus spoke up, interrupting Patton’s excited ramblings and stopping them in their tracks, “I simply wanted to ask how you believed that I should cure it.”
“...Cure it?” Patton asked, his head tilted and his eyes sparkling in question.
“Get rid of it, get over it, forget about it, the word choice doesn’t really matter, Patton, just-”
“Hey, snakeface, lose the tone.” Virgil growled. “Patton is just trying to help.”
Janus faltered. Virgil continued. “You aren’t looking for a cure, dude. You’re obviously gone on him.”
Janus opened his mouth, and closed it a few times. “How did you- I only told you three minutes ago, you cannot possibly know how I feel about-”
Patton piped up again, pulling on the sleeves of his cardigan. “It’s not super hard to see, Janus. You got all blushy when you started talking about him. And you were pretty defensive of him a second ago.” He shrugged. “You really like him, ki- Janus. That doesn’t just go away. You have to talk to him about it!”
“Or hide your feelings for forever until you burst all over him. He’d probably like something like that, to be honest.” Virgil commented, picking at his chipped nail polish.
Patton gently moved Virgil’s fingers apart and interlaced them with his own. “Or not that. You just have to be romantic, Jan! Get in touch with your feelings and confront him.” He turned back to the side that he was actually addressing. “I’m sure that he feels the same! You can do this!”
Janus eyed the two before him warily and tried not to think about just how transparent he was probably being right now. He thought about how Remus had looked at him--again, he couldn’t seem to stop thinking about it, about Remus’s pretty smile and his calloused fingers running along the scales on his cheekbone--and he bit the inside of his cheek. Inwardly, he sighed and swallowed the little bit of pride he had left after coming to Morality and Anxiety for advice on something.
“Tell me how.”
----
Janus’s gloves felt too tight.
Could gloves be too tight?
He tugged on the ends of them anyway, just to make sure. He glanced down at the bouquet of green mums in the gloved hand that he was readjusting. The flowers seemed almost garish against the backdrop of Remus’s door.
Flowers weren’t something that Janus had ever seen himself giving Remus. But, then again, that was the point, wasn’t it? Janus hadn’t gone to Patton and Virgil for them to tell him to just continue acting the way he always had. This was about… branching out. Showing his true feelings, and all of that other light side bullshit.
Janus was reaching out to rap against the door before he could stop himself.
A crash was heard from inside. Not unusual, for Remus’s room.
The door jolted open and Janus’s eyes snapped up just in time to meet the crazed grin of his creative counterpart.
“JD!”
Janus felt an easy, suave smile spread over his face. He bowed low with a sweep of his cape, momentarily hiding the flowers within it before revealing them with a flourish as he leaned back up. “Remus.” He purred, easily.
Though it was perfectly practiced and smooth, the action felt a bit… off, to Janus. This seemed much more like an action Janus would take when he was trying to butter up Remus’s brother, not something that he ever would have considered for the Duke, if left to his own devices.
It felt… inauthentic.
Apparently Remus seemed to agree, because the Duke snorted as he looked down at the bouquet. “What is this?”
“For you, your grace.” Janus pushed on, holding out the bundle of buds for Remus’s close inspection.
Remus froze at the title, looking up at Janus with an arched brow and a surprisingly serious look in his eyes. “Is this a joke, JJ?”
Janus’s stomach dropped, his smooth facade faltering a bit in his surprise. He quickly righted himself and put back on the mask, as if nothing had happened. “Whatever do you mean? Surely you must know that flowers, while a joke in comparison only to your own stunning beauty, are no farce.”
Remus gagged. Loudly. If he were anyone else, Janus would have winced at the crude noise. As it was, the break in this scene that they were playing was a welcome flash back to normalcy for the scaled side. “What are you on about? Seriously, Janus, drop the sarcasm, you’re freaking me out with how much you sound like my brother.”
The hand holding the bouquet dropped to Janus’s side, and his smile dropped. He made sure to replace it by a well crafted neutral expression, though, so as not to worry Remus. “Please. I do not sound like Prince pompous.”
“Yeah you do, snakey.”
“No I do not!”
“Yep! Very Princey-like. You’re practically becoming him. It’s probably the scariest thing I’ve ever seen, so stop it.” Remus opened his door more fully and leaned against the doorframe, crossing his arms over his chest.
Janus frowned and snapped his fingers, making the bouquet disappear. “Fine.” He rolled his eyes. He wasn’t really upset by Remus’s rejection, per se. Honestly (ugh), Janus didn’t see it as a rejection. Of course Remus didn’t want a bouquet of flowers, green or not. Remus didn’t like flowers. Janus wasn’t quite sure why he had ever even agreed to this method of confession (ugh).
“Great!” Remus’s manic smile returned, full force, his sharpened canines gleaming in the light of the hallway. The fluttering sensation in the pit of his stomach returned from earlier, reminding Janus exactly how enamoured he was with the side in front of him. “So, do you wanna see the spike pit I made to keep Roman out of my side of the Imagination?”
Grand, light side inspired gestures obviously weren’t going to work for Janus or Remus, but that didn’t mean that he was going to give up.
----
For the days following, Janus tried to take a less extravagant approach. A less Roman approach, based on how Remus had responded.
He decided that simple flirting would do to get his point across. At least, that was what Virgil had suggested during their little talk. Though he highly doubted that the anxious side could flirt, Janus had considered all of his options and decided that he could make it work. He would make it work.
“Remus, have you done something different with your hair today?”
“Nope! Same ol’ bacon grease as usual!”
“Loving the outfit, Remus. You look absolutely stunning.”
“JJ, you can just tell me when I have blood on my sash! I think it looks artsy!”
“Remus, how I’ve missed your company. Where were you today?”
“Out with Ro. Thought you’d want a quiet day.”
“Your smile is heart stopping, Remus.”
“Yeah I know! It’s the venom I coated my teeth with!”
“I adore your ass, Remus. So fit.”
“Jeez. Hit a man where it hurts, snakey.”
“Remus. I love your eyes. Seriously. Please allow me to stare into them for hours on end.”
“I’m not even looking at you, Jan! Are you on crack?”
“Remus. I find you very attractive.”
“I KNOW that I left my clothes in the common room! I’m going to get them right now!”
He couldn’t make it work.
No matter how direct or carefully crafted his words were, Janus could not seem to get the point across to Remus. It was as if their connection had just… disappeared as soon as Janus began to genuinely show interest. Usually, Remus was quite adept in telling when Janus was lying. In fact, being around Remus was one of the most comforting places that Janus could be when he was on a compulsive lying sprint. It had always been as if Remus could see right into his mind and understand exactly what he meant at all times.
Janus was beginning to figure out that it was one of the reasons that he had fallen in love with him.
And now, at the most inconvenient time ever, as Remus was wont to do, it seemed like this little superpower completely escaped the creative side. It drove Janus nearly out of his mind.
He had to admit that he quite loved that quality in Remus as well. The driving him up the wall quality. That bastard.
However, this left Janus with quite the quandary. He couldn’t just flirt and hope that Remus got it. Not honestly or dishonestly, it seemed. He also couldn’t carry out some grand confession like one of the light sides. He couldn’t seem to take any of Patton or Virgil’s advice, and he certainly wasn’t going to seek help from Remus’s brother and his obnoxious lover. Those two would probably spend all of his precious time bicker-flirting with one another anyway. It looked as if there would be no help at all coming from his and Remus’s lighter counterparts.
Janus sat up in his bed, suddenly. He made eye contact with his snake across the room.
What did it matter if none of the light sides’ ideas worked?
He didn’t even want a relationship like the light suckers had, did he? He was lying to himself.
Not about being in love with Remus. No, he was definitely, irrevocably in love with Remus. Just not how those pleasant sides did it.
He didn’t want to run his fingers through Remus’s hair and kiss him softly under the moonlight. He wanted to knock Remus upside his stupid head and maybe even make out after they pushed Logan down a flight of stairs.
Janus pushed himself to his feet. He grabbed his cape from where it rested over the back of his desk chair and slung it over his shoulders, fastening the clasp with one hand as he shouldered open his door and made a beeline for Remus’s room once again.
Thankfully, the hallway was deceptively short, only looking maddeningly long because of the mirrors that he, Virgil and Remus had placed when they were young teens. Janus approached Remus’s door and rapped on the wood three times in quick, clean succession.
The door swung open without hesitation this time, Remus’s grin bright and his eyes shining. Janus’s breath was momentarily stolen from his lungs. The butterflies from before--because that's what they were, weren’t they? No matter how much he belittled the light sides for how soft they were for each other, he was unbelievably soft for this man--returned, fluttering in the pit of his stomach. It didn’t matter how they showed their love. It didn’t make it any less true.
“Remus.”
“JJ!” Remus leaned against his doorframe with his hips jutting out in what was undoubtedly supposed to be a sexually enticing position.
“You smell filthy.” Janus supplied, barely bothering to look over Remus’s shoulders as something within his room shrieked in agony.
“Thank you!” Remus’s grin widened, if that was possible.
Janus decided to get right to the point. “Do you want to head over and set feral cats loose in Patton’s room, and then make out right in front of Roman’s doorway?”
Suddenly, Janus had an armful of duke. Remus’s legs wrapped around Janus’s waist as he caught him easily, accustomed to his idiot’s surprise attacks. Remus’s hands were grasping the back of Janus’s neck as he squealed.
“I thought you’d never ask, Jay!” And before Janus could even smile, Remus was leaning forward and running his tongue along his scales. Janus grimaced. His stomach butterflies cheered.