Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Hey Virgil, do you want some?” With a start, Virgil looked up.

They were all sequestered in the living room. He was laying on the floor, Spotify on while scrolling through Tumblr.  Logan and Roman were both on the couch, each typing on their own laptop while occasionally throwing sentences each other's way. What they were typing, Virgil wasn’t sure, but they weren’t arguing and both were relaxed into the couch, so at least he didn’t have to worry about them arguing. Patton, who had previously been working on his knitting near Logan, had crawled across the floor closer to Virgil and Roman.  He held up a stick of gum.

“It’s bubblegum flavored!” Virgil then noticed that Roman, Logan, and Patton were all chewing.  Virgil looked at Patton, smiling and holding out the stick, and couldn’t help but to see a grinning Remus holding out a stick of gum saying “I promise it’s not the electrifying kind this time.”

“And what atrocious flavor are you trying to get into my mouth this time, you rat?” Virgil deadpanned, ignoring the snickering Janus on the couch. Orange sat closer to Remus along the couch, ignoring everyone in favor of staring at whatever on his laptop.

“It’s bubblegum!” Remus said, staring at him and chewing. “So just take it, spider boy.”

“He’s not lying, it is bubblegum flavored.” Janus looked at them over his embroidery.

Virgil looked at the two of them and then the stick, then back at the two of them with narrowed eyes. They looked back, Remus with a mischievous grin and Janus with an innocent and therefore suspicious face.  The gum did not look back thankfully, or Virgil would have yelled at Remus for giving food working eyes again.

“I’m gonna fucking regret this.” Virgil muttered, but slowly reached over to take the stick. Orange’s judgmental silence was deafening, but he steadfastly refused to look up from his laptop.

Virgil unwrapped it and stared at the pink colored stick.

Fuck it, he thought, and popped it into his mouth and chewed.

“Bleugh!” He spat out the gum almost as quickly as he popped it in, and Remus burst into laughter.  Janus snickered into the cloth in his embroidery hoop.  Orange, the traitor, gave a small smirk that Virgil very much doubted was due to whatever was on his screen.

“What the hell was that?!” He said with a vague hand flail.

“Bubblegum flavor!” Remus said with a little delighted wiggle.  He gladly showed Virgil the ball of pink gum on his tongue before chewing it again. Virgil was not amused.

“That was not bubblegum!” Virgil then heard a little pop! , and turned his head up to look at Janus, who was now blatantly chewing the gum that had no doubt been in his mouth the whole time.

Remus cackled again at the look on Virgil’s face. Janus looked down and said, “Why Virgil, Remus would never lie to you! It IS bubblegum flavored, with a slight hint of durian.” Virgil just looked at him, face full of “slight-hint-my-ass”, and Janus couldn’t hold back his smirk. It then occurred to him that Janus was still chewing the gum.  The nastily flavored gum.

“How are you still chewing that?” Virgil said disbelievingly.

“My dear Anxiety, since you don’t like durian, that does mean none of us like it.” A pop! sounded to accent the end of the sentence, and Virgil froze for a second before slowly looking over at Orange, who was now full on smirking and chewing as he steadfastly looked at his laptop.

“That’s it, I’m leaving.” Virgil said, not even bothering to stand up.

“Goodbye Virgil. Let’s never meet again.”

“Dibs on Virgil’s room! I wonder what will happen if I set the cobwebs on fire!”

“...”

Virgil grumpily flopped back into a laying down position, irritation all over his face, refusing to let the laughter in his chest get out, even if they all already knew it was there.

“Virgil? Virgil? Vir-”

“-gil, are you okay?” Virgil blinked, and it was Patton’s sweet face looking at him now, this time in concern.  Virgil looked around to see Logan peering at him over the laptop frowning, and felt a nudge on Virgil’s arm from Roman’s foot, no doubt having nudged him several times before.

“Virgil, are you alright?” Logan asked next.

“I’m… I’m fine,” Virgil said, blinking.

“You kinda zoned out there, Jack Smellington.” Roman’s foot nudged his arm again, softer this time, less calling his attention and more hey there emo, you okay?

“I just remember something I have to do later.” Virgil said, pulling his hoodie up.  He didn’t miss the others exchanging disbelieving glances.

“You sure you’re okay kiddo?  It’s fine if you’re not.” Patton patted Virgil’s leg with his hand, the other hand holding the gum now bracing him on the floor.

“I’m fine Pat.”

Virgil knew the others weren’t convinced, but thankfully, they let it go.

“If you’re sure.”

“I am.”

Virgil reached for his headphones as the others slowly returned to their activities.

“Oh, Virgil!” He paused, looking back at Patton. 

“Do you want some gum? You didn’t answer.”

Virgil gave a smile he hoped wasn’t as tight as it felt.

“No thanks Pat.”

Chapter Text

Patton pulled out the batch of chocolate chip cookies and pouted at the puffed up smaller cookies that didn’t match the larger spread out cookies in his head.  He placed the tray on the stove and threw off his oven mitts.  Quickly snatching a cookie from the tray and throwing it on a plate (not a good idea, it nearly slid off), he grabbed a fork and butterknife from the drying rack. He cut a tiny triangle from the cookie, ignored the steam coming off it, and threw it in his mouth.  He nearly spit it out again, rushing over to the fridge and sloping some milk into a glass and tossing it back. No longer about to burn his mouth, Patton hung his head in amused exasperation at himself.

That’s what I get for being impatient, he thought, knowing he would do the same thing all over again. Tis a fool who doesn’t learn from his mistakes, and double the fool for he who doesn’t use the lesson. He giggled at the fancy sound of his own thoughts, and went to cut another triangle of cookie to actually try it this time. It still required a bit of a HSHGHSGH, but at least it tasted good. He sighed at the puffy, not chewy cookies that didn’t look like the video at all.

Is it the baking soda? Oh but they used that too, the only thing that was different was the sugar. But we already have light brown sugar, surely white and brown sugar wouldn’t make that much of a difference.

He used a towel to pick up the rest of the still hot cookies and put them in the nearly full cookie jar.  He couldn’t ask Roman for another cookie jar; Roman wouldn’t mind making it but Logan would start scolding Patton for making so many cookies two jars couldn’t hold them. While normally Patton would good heartedly joke back with Logan about how they absolutely should have a third cookie jar, he wasn’t in the mood to defend his stress baking. But he wasn’t done baking yet, so…

What should he make?

Something that you didn’t need to cut, something that was more of a snack but didn’t need a container to hold it…

Muffins! But what kind?

His mind, unbidden, thought of yesterday and Virgil’s face as he returned to the mindscape and took off immediately for his room. Patton shook his head and resolved not to think about it ( you know repression isn’t healthy Logan’s voice whispered). Instead, he decided on chocolate muffins, the first of which he would bring to Virgil.

He took out the freshly washed dishes and measuring tools, rubbing down the tools needed for the dry ingredients with a paper towel. As he began measuring out ingredients and adding them to the wet ingredients and dry ingredients bowls, his mind drifted to yesterday again. This time, Logan’s voice in his ear again, he let it wander.

Remus had scared him, hurting Roman like that. Roman had ended up with little more than a bump on his head ( “Doesn’t Remus affect you much more than Logan? How are you not hurt more? You were on the floor for 40 minutes!” “It was just a knock on the head, in this context it was more slapsticky than anything. There was a light curse to keep me out of commission so I wouldn’t interrupt his introduction. Annoying, but clever,”) but the violence, even if normal rules didn’t apply to them, was upsetting. And that he and Virgil have been hurting Thomas by putting too much pressure on him about those thoughts did not help him feel better. Though it was definitely necessary to know.

Remus showing up was a surprise, and not a welcome one.  Virgil hadn’t seemed phased beyond a “wtf are you doing here” face, and it was here Patton hesitated.  Virgil was a very private person in some ways, and he didn’t like to talk about his past with the Dark Sides very much. Patton could see the effect on him, the way sometimes they could be talking or spending time together and he’d zone out, lost in the past and a complicated mix of nostalgic feelings would gather in Patton’s chest.  Only last week, he had zoned out when Patton offered him a stick of gum and fell into a bittersweet cocktail of fondness and melancholy and anger. What had his life with the Dark Sides been like? In the real world, it was harder to feel everyone’s emotions, but Patton was sure he had felt some sort of lurch from Virgil the moment he’d laid eyes on Remus. He couldn’t said what the feeling was, only that it was there.

The first time Deceit showed up though, the anger was strong enough for Patton to identify it, the sadness soft enough for Patton to not be sure he was imagining it. All the other times, it was difficult to pin down what the emotions were, and Patton had other things to focus on.

He missed them, Patton knew. Virgil desperately missed the Dark Sides, and the fact that they had been showing up so much had to be hard on him.

He tuned back in to realize that the muffins would be done in about five minutes, and went about putting the now cleaned if not fully dry dishes down and getting the pretty muffin display Roman had made and a plate for Virgil’s muffin.

The timer dinged. Patton poured a glass of milk. The muffins were on the display. Patton sneaked a bit from the muffin for himself. It was hot, but good. Virgil would like it, hopefully. He bustled out of the kitchen, muffin and milk in hand.

Chapter Text

Janus sat on the couch. He eyed the rip in the cushion next to him and made a mental note to entice Remus to fix it with a promise to add a tally mark to the “making things neat and orderly” row on the reward chart, which, despite it dangling by a thread, still managed to hang crooked on the fridge.

The ticking of the clock was audible, a messed up twang that was off in rhythm, a soft noise that kept going despite the clock nearly falling apart. Janus couldn’t imagine it any other way.

His embroidery laid still in his hands. He stared at the pegs on the wall across. Perhaps a coat rack would be more elegant, but the pegs struck a fond note in his heart that Janus refused to admit was there. The pegs still had their function labels; they had placed them there before they had chosen their names. The colors, green orange yellow purple, blurred together. Janus blinked and they were clear again. The wall surrounding the pegs had children’s scribbles all around, and Janus found himself staring at a crayon spider web in the corner of the peg rack.

Spider webbing still turned up wherever he was; it was everywhere, like the edible glitter that Remus carelessly tossed about. Once, Janus had opened a box to search for some old notes of his. Instead, he had found the heated blanket given to him several years ago and an old photo album, both topped off with loose threads of fake spider webs. He had just sat there, notes not given a second thought, tracing the words “for snek bitch”, sewn into the corner of the blanket in real spider silk, for hours.

The sound of an explosion from Remus’s room broke his train of thought, and he looked down to see what he had been working on. The letters “Vir”, r half finished, greeted him, and Janus considered the incomplete word, considered the cloth and the thread and the coloring he had carefully chosen before-

Janus tossed the cloth, hoop and all, into the unfinished projects bin and swept off to Remus’s room to check that his innards weren’t all over the room again.

Chapter Text

Roman hated the wire mesh of chicken coops. They seemed so restrictive, and normally he would ask any farmers he visited to remove them or replace them. There were plenty of caging spells that the local mages could do instead that were typically more reliable anyway.

Apparently this time it wasn’t so simple.

“We’re too close to Kinmotsu Forest,” the farmer explained apologetically. 

This forest was the divider between Roman’s and the Duke’s halves of the Imagination. A neutral ground that was simultaneously the most difficult area to control and easiest area to manipulate. The figments on both sides of the Imagination knew to fear the forest. Other than the few well worn paths that were dangerous on their own, only Sides could safely pass through, and even then it was no easy task. The exact border line in the center of the forest was connected to the Subconscious, as were the edges of the imagination, and to approach either were incredibly dangerous to Sides, let alone figments. All this to say, letting the chickens even a little into this forest was very unpreferable to the denizens of this village.

The farmer continued to explain the reasons he was unable to exchange the wire mesh for other dividers. Roman half listened, fingers nearly trailing over the wire except for the fact that his hand was hovering over the fence instead. Despite the warmth of the afternoon sun around him, coldness seemed to radiate from the metal.

“-our Highness?” The farmer said, and Roman started, the sounds of screaming fading from his ears and fingers accidentally brushing against the warm metal. The feeling of the metal stuck to his skin even after he jolted it away from the fence.

“What was that?” Roman asked, ignoring the sensation of blood trickling down from the holes in his skin over the mesh shaped bruises as he screamed because he was bad and needed to be locked away away away so he couldn’t hurt Thomas so he couldn’t leak his badness into him except there went his blood anyway infecting the landscape of his mind but didn’t he deserve to talk to Thomas to be acknowledged as a part of himself and a part of himself and a part of them and he sobbed and screamed out Roman’s name hating him and loving him and wanting to complete the raw jagged pieces of himself-

Roman came back to himself with a sick feeling in his stomach and the urge to hurt himself, to drag a knife slowly up his arm and watch it infect the landscape of his mind but-

“-and the smallest sized spell wouldn’t be small enough, and I can’t afford a custom sized spell-”

“Nevermind,” Roman snapped, internally wincing as the farmer flinched. “I’ll pay for it.” Roman snapped his fingers and his coin bag fell into his palm. He reached into the bag to pull out another smaller bag of coins and shoved it into the farmer’s hands. He ignored the words of gratitude as he walked to his horse, untied her, and swung onto her back. He nodded curtly at the farmer and, pulling on the reins, faced away from the forest away from the wire mesh and rode back to his castle (without a look back at the trail of blood following him that wasn’t there at all).

Chapter Text

He could feel his lungs filling with water. Lying face down in a river sure was a bitch sometimes.

But, Remus thought as he looked around at the hair flowing around him, this view was cool.

The hair he grew out on a whim as soon as he entered the Imagination swirled around him like tentacles, even though the river’s current was steadily moving down past him. He blinked the gritty mud out of his eyes to better look at the light and shadow shift across the streams of hair, pretty and peaceful and-

Remus shook himself to jolt himself out of the trace the hair put him in. He didn’t deserve pretty. Wait no. He was bored. Time to get up.

Remus sat up, hair wet and heavy around him. So he tied it up, arms twisting through motions both familiar and not (he had done this a thousand times before but Thomas never had long hair to tie). Sitting there, the river twisting around him and his ponytail now dry and swaying behind him, Remus sat and thought.

Janus was mad, mad enough to let Remus go ham on Thomas. It was cute that Janus thought he could control him of all sides, but it was a tedious balance of letting himself listen to Janus and falling into his function.

He wished he could be Creativity more. Intrusive Thoughts was his purview, but Creativity was his real domain, and it would be nice to just let loose, throw some paint around and call it art. Let his endless words tumble from his mouth and let the pieces scatter and collide like falling building blocks in the jenga tower that he just destroyed to create all over again. And that stack would always collapse wouldn’t it, with no steadying hand to guide into beautiful castles and gothic mansions and he could feel the distant guiding words of a story that wasn’t there. The side of himself that he was missing.

He missed Virgil. Remus wanted to swing his detached head into Virgil’s arms and laugh as he got thrown right out in disgust. He wanted to rip Virgil apart and stuff the pieces of him all around, an eye here a toe there a warm beating heart with him forever. He wanted to curl around him on the couch and watch Buzzfeed Unsolved until 3 in the morning and wake up to the blanket that smelled of snake wrapped gently around them and hear the distant singing of passion or screams of rage and weren’t they the same thing?

Remus's ponytail slapped against his back, wet again, and so he grabbed it and yanked it off his head. The hair fell and settled on the river, mashed up and flattened into pieces of paper. Remus picked up a fish, pulled out a bone filled with ink, and began to write.

Virgil-

Chapter Text

When Thomas was a child, he loved candy.

That’s not to say that he didn’t currently love candy, just that he really loved it when he was a child. Like he could stuff his mouth all day. Not that he was allowed to, just that- well really he still loved candy that much, but now he’s an adult so he wouldn’t- well he would just-

You get the point.

Thomas loved candy, and of course this reflected onto his sides, even if he hadn’t known of them yet.

Kindness adored the warmth of milk chocolate, the thick feeling and sweetness. It reminded him of home and family and joy.

Smartness loved candies like nerds and smarties. The reasons were twofold: the name and the taste. Even though logically the name of the candy meant nothing, Smartness couldn’t help but feel smart when he ate them, the pride in his function shining through.

Artsy would mix and match the candy he ate, often eating them in combination. The other sides didn’t see the appeal very much, but Artsy enjoyed the combinations, silly and strange and sometimes sensical. He had a tendency to split himself in two, more and more often as he got older, and his candy preferences split with him. Ideas savored the sour tang of gummy worms, sending little shivers up his spine as he imagined eating real worms for a brief second. Story liked white chocolate, simple and structured and a happy ending to a meal or snack.

Scared liked candy corn, but only the good ones. Most people didn’t really like it, thought it was boring or bad, but Scared thought it was nice, simple and sweet and people shouldn’t hate it as much as they did. Plus, it was The Halloween Candy, and Halloween was scary but it was also fun and spooky in the best way.

Lying liked dark chocolate, in a way a representation of himself. To a child, chocolate promised tasty sweetness, so the bitterness of dark chocolate was a betrayal, a deception. How fitting. He of course loathed milk chocolate, its sweet nature living up to its promised warmth (and of course the truth could never coexist with a lie). But if he snuck some of the Kindness’s milk chocolate into his pile, it was no one’s business but his own.

- - -

It had been years, Patton thought as he looked at the chocolate in his hand. Small wrapped pieces of milk and white and dark chocolate from the random bag he found in the back of a kitchen cupboard. He remembered Lying picking out the dark chocolate when they had mixed bags like this and that somehow, one piece of milk chocolate always ended up in his pile. He remembered how Kindness’s own face would scrunch up when he ate a dark chocolate by accident and Artsy or Ideas and Story would laugh and offer their own candy to chase away the taste. He remembered Scared giving him a piece of candy corn, because Kindness liked to look at the colors, and Smartness scolding them all on the unhealthy amounts of sugar but still accepting the milk chocolate when offered and giving some of his Nerds in return.

Even when they had started drifting apart, they had sent candy back and forth. But that petered out over the years, and now Patton can’t remember the last time he and Deceit had exchanged candy, the last time Roman scrunched up his nose eating a sour gummy worm before immediately taking another, the last time Virgil shyly passed him a piece of candy corn while Logan watched them, exasperated with the sugar consumption but still eating his own Smarties and Nerds.

He considered the chocolates in his hand. Did he really want to restart an old tradition? Connect with the other sides of Thomas again, through chocolate exchanges of all things?

Virgil wasn’t the only one who missed the Dark Sides.

Decision made, Patton looked up. He had wrapping paper to find.

Chapter Text

Virgil stared at the note, Remus’s handwriting switching on each word like he couldn’t decide what to convey, that it was an impulse or that it was a prank or that this was actually…

He wasn’t sure, is the point.

Call me. Write me. Tezt me, Sanp me. 

The paper was surprisingly clean, only a few suspicious stains curtaining the edges of the paper. There was a little doodle of Virgil writing on a piece of paper. Virgil blinked; doodle Virgil was now choking himself. Blink. Doodle Virgil was lighting the paper on fire.

Virgil looked at the doodle, struck by of memories of nights he and Remus were young and stayed up late doodling together, surrounded by crayons that would sprout legs and run away from his hands, Remus cackling while Virgil yelled while Janus blinked sleepily next to the heater while Orange threw paper into the fireplace…

Virgil blinked. Doodle Virgil was doing things to his phone that real Virgil wished he hadn’t seen.

He moved to his desk, settling in the chair with a creak. Unsure of what to do, if he wanted to respond, he reached out for a pencil anyway, fingertips just brushing it when he heard a knock on the door.

“Virgil?”

Patton.

“You hungry? I brought some muffins.”