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Virgil stared at the ceiling. His eyes had long since adjusted to the darkness and with the little bit of light coming in from the window, he could easily make out the popcorn ceiling. He’d been tracing pictures in the random design for hours now. It was almost like finding constellations in the stars, but a lot less fun. He’d spent a lot of nights in the last summer learning new constellations both official ones from Logan and not official ones from Patton who was doing his best to annoy Logan. It had been nice. It had been really, really nice.
Everything was really nice with them.
So, what the hell was wrong with him?
No seriously, what was wrong with him? Why did his mind keep… keep telling him to do something stupid?
He didn’t deserve them if he was going to think about things like that. Maybe that was the point though: he didn’t deserve them. So, maybe he should just let them know now before they couldn’t give him back as easily. Because, the truth was Virgil had kind of been faking it the entire time he’d been with them. He’d been as good an obedient as he could be most of the time. He still fell short a lot of the time. He still struggled in school even with all of their help and he didn’t help around the house as much as he probably should. He was lazy and stubborn and freaked out over nothing sometimes. He’d even fought with Logan a few times, especially in the past couple of months. In fact, this drive seemed to be coming from the same place as those fights, but instead of making him want to fight someone it made him want to…
He sat up in bed. The stuffed racoon on his nightstand was staring at him with disapproval and he almost laid back down to stare at the ceiling for the next few hours until he had to wake up for school. Instead, he picked Shadow up and looked him in the eyes. “Don’t judge me,” he said. Shadow just stared back at him. He was judging Virgil. Virgil’s fingers came up to fiddle with the black mask over Shadow’s eyes.
Bad. Bad idea. No.
Virgil slipped out of bed. He placed Shadow back on the nightstand, but on his stomach so he couldn’t see what Virgil was about to do.
There was a black mask hidden in Virgil’s sock drawer for emergencies. Kind of like the one Patton had put on the night Virgil had first come here. It was simple and black, but of better quality than any mask he’d worn before. He grabbed the mask and then found dark jeans and a dark purple hoodie to change into. He turned to the door.
Now, the thing about Virgil was, he knew how to sneak out of a house in the middle of the night. He was very, very good at it. If sneaking out of places was something one could go to college for, Virgil could easily get a PhD. He knew all of the tricks: a decoy in bed, shadows to muffle footsteps, wearing different shoes so no one noticed your normal ones were gone, make sure your door is in the same position as it was when you went to sleep (preferably closed), go out an abnormal exit like a backdoor or a second story window into a tree. All of these things he could easily do, and they would make his exodus and absence from the house all but undetectable.
He did none of these things. In fact, he might have let his footsteps touch down just a little harder than normal on the staircase. He possibly hadn’t quieted Missy as quickly as he could have when she caught him downstairs. He may have even let the front door slam shut behind him far louder than normal. Why did he do these things? He wasn’t quite sure. He was sure Emile would have an annoyingly uncomfortable answer for him when he asked next Tuesday.
For now, though, he just wandered into the night in a mask and hood with no real destination or goal on his mind.
Logan woke with a start at the sound of a bang from downstairs. A moment later, Patton was also stirring and blinking over at him. “Wha- was that?” he slurred.
“Not sure,” Logan answered. He pressed a soft kiss to his lips. “Stay here for a minute.”
Patton nodded, sitting up in bed and rubbing the sleep from his eyes as Logan got out of bed. He stepped into the hall and closed his bedroom door behind him before taking off toward the stairs. Virgil’s door was open, he noted. It wasn’t a particularly odd thing as sometimes he liked to have Missy sleep with him and would leave the door open for her, but he thought he remembered that it had been closed when he and Patton went to bed.
He continued down the stairs and found Missy at the foot of them. She already seemed to be a bit stirred up, but not like a stranger had woken her. Strange. Perhaps Virgil had needed a drink or a midnight snack and dropped something to make the bang. Yet, he couldn’t hear any sounds of his son or anything else in the house. He turned on the lights and squinted around the living room. Virgil’s shoes were missing from their normal place by the door.
Oh. That was. Not ideal.
“Patton!” he called up the steps. “Get dressed!”
“Why?” Patton called back as Logan turned to job up the steps.
He glanced into Virgil’s room to confirm and yep, no son. “Virgil seems to have,” run away, “gone on a small excursion.”
“What?” Patton said and Logan could hear him scrambling to get dressed faster as he approached the bedroom. Running away had always been an acknowledged possibility with Virgil. After all, he was a foster child who had been in an abusive situation before this and tended to get overwhelmed. Yet, they had mostly figured the risk was over since Virgil had been living with them for almost a year. Why was this just coming out now when they were almost all the way through the adoption process?
That question would have to wait as the more concerning one was where Virgil had gone. Logan grabbed a jacket out of his closet before putting it on over his nightclothes.
“Can you sense where he went?” Patton asked.
Right. Right, that was something Logan could do. He closed his eyes and reached out with his powers to search for him. “Yes,” he replied. “He’s not far.
“Great,” Patton said sounding relieved. “Good.” He paused. “Why?”
“I don’t know Patton. We’ll have to ask him.”
Patton nodded and they hurried down the steps and into Patton car.
It was short work to find him, first because Logan could reach out and feeling him and second because he really hadn’t gone far. They found him seated on the roof of a small shop only a few blocks away with his legs hanging off the side. He was wearing a mask and a hoodie, but the hood had already been shoved down.
Once, he’d made sure no one else was around, Logan flew himself and Patton up to the roof. Virgil didn’t react to their appearance even as they each took a seat on either side of him.
“So,” Logan said after a few moments. “What’s this?” Virgil shrugged and looked down at his feet. Logan met Patton’s eyes over the top of his head.
Patton reached for him. First it was just a hand on his shoulder, but when he didn’t flinch or try to shake it off, he gently grabbed the boy’s chin and titled it up so he could get a better look at his face, or at least the part that wasn’t covered by a mask. He studied him for a few seconds before he asked, “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” Virgil said.
Patton considered this for a moment. “Is this about the adoption?” he asked.
“No!” Virgil said immediately, and Logan could recognize by now the pitch to his voice that said he was scared.
“Oh, honey,” Patton said softly, his free hand coming up to stroke through his hair. “Don’t be worried. It’s not at risk of going away. You can want something and still have weird feelings about it.”
Virgil bit his lip.
“Come on, kiddo,” Patton said. He let go of his chin then. “Tell me what’s going on in that head of yours.”
“I just,” he started. “Everything is a lot. It’s so confusing and I don’t know how to… or even what to do. I don’t know if I even can. I just…”
“What do you mean?” Patton asked with a frown. “What are you trying to do? Is this about school or…?”
“No,” Virgil said. “It’s… I mean. You’re adopting me.” Patton nodded. “And that’s great. You two are so great…”
“But?” Patton asked.
“But I don’t know if I deserve it,” he said quietly. Patton opened his mouth to argue with that incredibly incorrect statement, but Virgil cut him off before he could. “I mean, I want to. I want to deserve it. I want to be what you want and deserve, but I don’t know if I can be. I still struggle in school even with all of your help, and I can’t do anything useful like sports. Most kids in my grade are in, like, 5 extracurriculars because they’re getting ready for scholarship applications for college, and I’m not even sure if I’ll be able to get into a college with my grade point average. What if I can’t? You’re a doctor,” he said and turned to Logan, “and you’re a professor. How disappointing and embarrassing would it be if your kid couldn’t even get into college? I just… I can’t do anything and that’s a problem because you deserve so much more from me. Why do you even want me? What do you even get out of fostering me let alone adopting me?”
There was a pinched look on Patton’s face as he looked at him and in the long moment of silence that followed that statement, Logan thought he’d have to step in to try to fumble through patching up that wound. He thought it might just strike too close to home, but Patton seemed to pull himself together. He set his hand on the boy’s knee and waited until he was sure he had his complete attention. “You are not an investment Virgil,” he said. “Please don’t think that’s what you are to us.”
“But…”
“No,” Patton interrupted, voice firm. “We don’t care about any of that. We never will. We just care about you.”
“See,” Virgil said. “You say that, but…”
“You can believe us, Virgil,” Logan said. “Truly, it saddens both of us that you feel that way. We understand that your past has informed that perception, but that is not how relationships should work.”
“It’s not,” Patton agreed. “I know it’s sometimes hard to see it that way. I know that believing that we don’t want anything out of our relationship is a hard thing to learn, but we mean it and it might take a while, but I hope you see how much we mean it someday.”
There was a pause as Virgil seemed to struggle with what to say. “Sorry,” he finally settled on, his default for when he didn’t know how to respond. It always hurt when he did that.
“Don’t be sorry sweetie. I get it,” Patton said. Then after a moment. “I really do.”
He paused, something on his tongue and Virgil looked up at him curiously. One of Patton’s hands twitched and then slid about halfway around Virgil’s back. Logan’s own hand stretched forward to meet it.
“My parents weren’t the best people. I felt how I think you probably do right now for a lot of my life. Most of my childhood and early adulthood was me trying to be what they wanted me to be, but it was never enough. And the more I did what they asked, the bigger my debt to them seemed to get.”
His eyes became a bit distant and his voice changed. “You should get good grades in high school because we spent all that time and money raising you and you owe it to us not to be stupid. You should go to the college we chose because we helped you get good grades in high school and we deserve a child who got the right kind of education. You have to go to medical school because we invested so much in your college education and you can’t waste it on something stupid. It just never ended. It felt like I was always in debt to them. I didn’t even want to be a doctor.”
Logan squeezed his hand and he blinked, looking back at Virgil.
“I didn’t want to be a doctor,” he repeated. “I’m content now where I’m at. I’m very happy. I like my job, and I’ve helped a lot of people. But I do sometimes wonder what may have happened if I’d had a choice. I don’t even know what I would have chosen. Maybe I would have not had as much of an impact on the world as I did as a doctor. Maybe I would have had more of one. I’ll never get to know and that’s really sad. I don’t want that for you.” Patton’s hand which was not currently being held by Logan touched Virgil’s cheek. “I don’t want to be them for you or anyone. We don’t do things for you because we want you to owe us or to pay us back somehow. Never. You could put that hood back up and go rob another bank like you did a year ago and, while I certainly wouldn’t be happy about it, it wouldn’t make me regret adopting you or providing for you or helping you with your homework. Because I don’t expect anything from any of that. I just want you to be happy and have a chance for you to be whatever it is you want to be. You’re not an investment to me. You’re a person. And you’re my kid. We’re going to adopt you and I am not going to be my parents. Okay?”
Virgil nodded shakily. “Okay,” he agreed. “Yeah.”
“Good.” Patton released him and he looked down again, kicking his legs a bit.
“I’m not going to rob a bank,” he mumbled.
“I know, Virgil.”
“Can I…” he said hesitantly, “ask what happened with your parents?”
“I told them I didn’t want to do what they said anymore. They told me they’d invested too much time and money into me for me to refuse them. I told them no and that I never wanted to hear from them again. They said I couldn’t do that since they were my parents. I told them I was gay and if they could ever get over that since I was their son, then they could feel free to contact me. I haven’t heard from them since.”
Virgil thought about that for a moment. “Good.”
Patton snorted out a laugh.
“I concur,” Logan agreed. “Especially because I met them.”
Patton gave him a fond smile and then turned back to Virgil. He opened his arms for a hug and Virgil folded himself into them easily. Logan watched for a moment, full of fondness for the both of them before one of Patton’s hands grabbed the front of his jacket to drag him into the hug. He willingly wrapped his arms around the both of them.
The hug lasted for almost a minute before Patton pulled back to squint at Virgil. “Also…” his eyes flashed to Logan looking for a bit of support. Logan gave a soft nod. “You’re grounded.”
Logan held his breath waiting for the response to that. Virgil grimaced. “Yeah… that’s probably fair,” he said lightly. Patton pulled him back into another hug.