Work Text:
Remus didn’t like his job. Hard to enjoy doing something when no one seems to appreciate your efforts. Or in his particular case, when the moral side of the person you’re both part of constantly berrates your ideas for being too disturbing or dark or icky. Logan never seemed to have an opinion one way or the other, and just told the two of them to stop arguing because otherwise nothing productive would ever get done.
Maybe that was why Logan got to pick Thomas’ job.
Remus couldn’t necessarily say he disliked the idea of Thomas being a science teacher. Well, it sounded boring and very uninspiring, but science could be neat. You know, sometimes. Learning how to create a chemical explosion sounded interesting. Or figuring out the best way to create a nuclear weapon. Or learning the most efficient way to murder someone so you could get away with it. But Patton always scolded him when he brought up any of those ideas, or studying anything along those lines. The compromise Patton and Logan had eventually reached (that hadn’t involved Remus’ input at all) was teaching.
Logan had been thrilled when the decision was finally made, going on for hours in an excited voice about what grade levels to teach (they had eventually decided on middle school), what the subject matters would be (other than the required material, of course), and what posters to put up (Patton had gotten to help with that, as they both wanted posters with a bunch of dad jokes). Remus had been forced to sit in the back and listen as they both went over it, feeling about the most bored he’d ever been.
Things got a little better once they actually made it through school and started teaching. Patton liked the kids, and Logan liked the science involved and the prospect of teaching in general. Remus… liked the lunch break, he supposed. He got slightly more freedom to daydream then, as long as the subject matter was… okay with Patton.
It’s not like he’d thought teaching would be amazing and had ended up severely disappointed. He had always known it would be like this. This is what you get when your morality is the most boring side on the face of the planet. But he had hoped for… something. Some hand in the way the lessons were taught or some kind of way to make things just a little bit fun. For as much as Patton and Thomas both adored the kids, Thomas didn’t exactly light up a room, and they didn’t seem too excited to learn when all Thomas was doing was going over a slideshow of the information needed for the test. Remus spent most of the school day sulking in the corner and wishing he could be seen by the kids so he could talk about his morningstar.
“I’m just saying!” Remus protested one day at dinner. “Wouldn’t it be cool if—”
“Remus, the whole reason we went into teaching was to make sure Thomas could do something safe,” Patton said.
“Actually, that was only part of the reason,” Logan said, with a pointed smile. “The other reason is that science is something that Thomas is greatly interested in and that he and I love to teach.”
“Yeah, and all the kids seem thrilled to learn,” Remus muttered, picking at his food.
“What was that?” Patton asked. “Remus, do we need to talk about—”
“What’s there to talk about? Everything is perfect, isn’t it?” Remus said, shoving his chair back and standing up from the table. “Now while I would love to stay here and have everything explained to me like I’m a toddler, again, there are much more fascinating things to do. I’m going to go murder all of the students in Thomas’ class.”
“REMUS!” Patton exclaimed.
“In the imagination, Moralittle shit, get off my dick,” Remus snapped, shoving the chair over as he stormed out and ignoring the cries of surprise and Patton’s muttering of “What is with him today?” as he headed towards the imagination.
Murdering 25 children was fun in its own way, and there were always new experiments he could try, but with only a renewing of students once a year, and getting more inspiration being difficult due to being so restrained, it could get old quickly.
Remus soon found himself laying on his back in what was left of his side of the imagination— currently it was a blank void covered in dead children. He was planning on laying there long into the morning when he felt a sudden tug from Logan and appeared flat on his back in the logical side’s bedroom.
“Remus, it is far too early to go to sleep,” Logan said, narrowing his eyes slightly in irritation. He sighed. “I know we may have upset you at dinner, and I apologize.”
Remus blew a raspberry at Logan and casually tossed a throwing star into his nose.
Logan sighed and pulled it out. “Remus, we really don’t have time for anything like this,” he said, clearly getting more ticked off. “We need to change the lesson plans for after the break, some of the students are struggling and we need to adjust.”
Remus resisted the urge to groan and slam his head into the ground. For the one chance he actually got to make something, lesson planning was exceedingly dull. Especially since Patton shot down all of his ideas to spice things up a little bit.
Logan seemed to get that Remus was unenthused. “Remus,” he said. “I know you may not love this part of your job, but—”
“Fine!” Remus groaned, throwing his hands up. “I’ll start a stupid lesson plan tomorrow.”
“You should start tonight—”
Remus ripped his ears off and sunk back down into his own room before Logan could reply.
…
“The average depth of the ocean is about 12,000 feet,” Thomas continued, as Remus debated drawing a dick on his desk to see if the kids could see it. “But that’s far from how deep it can actually go. The deepest fish discovered is the mariana snailfish.”
A girl’s hand shot up, Remus was pretty sure her name was Jessica. “Isn’t that a deep sea fish? I’ve heard about those, they’re really cool.”
“Cool how?” the girl next to her, Sarah, asked.
Remus perked up a little. “Hey, tell them about angler fish mating,” he said. Thomas gave him half a glance.
“Well, angler fish fuse together when they mate,” he said, and Remus did a double take, because had Thomas actually listened to him? That hardly ever happened.
“Really?” Jackson asked, scooting forward. “Can we see?”
“We should really finish this powerpoint first—”
“Oh, come on, he asked!” Remus exclaimed.
Thomas sighed, and whether it was directed at Remus or the boy in the front he wasn’t sure, but he closed the powerpoint and went to YouTube. They found a video with a woman explaining the first footage of angler fish mating, and Thomas clicked on that.
“Woah, that is cool!” Riley in the back said, sitting up. A couple other kids followed suit, and by the time the video ended, the whole class was paying attention. (Well, it was probably just to put off getting back to the powerpoint and getting assigned homework, but Remus would take what he could get.)
“So what other kind of deep sea fish are there?” James asked.
“You said the mariana snailfish was the deepest one found, what do they look like?”
“How many do we know about? How many more do you think there are?”
“Okay, that’s enough,” Thomas said, holding up his hands. “We still have actual material to go over. Maybe we can talk about deep sea fish more tomorrow.”
“Oh come on!” Remus groaned, leaning back in his seat. “That’s more questions than they ask in a year!”
“Remus,” Patton said warningly.
Remus huffed and leaned back in his chair, brief moment of reprieve over. “It’s not like deep sea fish aren’t sciencey, I even stuck to Logan’s dumb theme.”
“We’re talking about oceans as a whole today, we can’t spend the whole time on one subject. We might be able to squeeze in a day about deep sea fish near the holidays,” Logan offered.
“Forget it, the moment’s gone,” Remus grumbled.
Logan chuckled a little. “Must you be so dramatic, Remus?”
“I’m going back to the mindscape,” Remus said in lieu of a response. “Call me if you need me, it’ll probably be the apocalypse or something, but whatever.”
“Use the time to work on a lesson plan!” Logan called.
Remus appeared in his room with a sigh, and grabbed one of his falling-apart notebooks from their pile on the floor. He collapsed back onto the pile of dirty clothes on his bed and opened to a blank page, and then proceeded to stare at it for what felt like hours.
“Lesson planning is dumb,” Remus announced to the empty room. “I’m going to hang out with my brother.”